The real changes have occurred in consciousness, in lifestyle, in the labour force, in consciousness about work, in consciousness about violence against women, about sexuality, about recognising different kinds of families. There has been an extraordinary shift in consciousness in what is historically a very short period of time. When it’s your life it seems like a damned long period of time and you think, ‘Let’s get on with this. I’ve only got one life here, I’d like to see a little progress.’ (In S. Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 1997)
In addition, visible changes were not always easy to interpret as progressive. The increase in numbers of women working did not seem to have appreciably helped women’s lot; in the 1980s feminists became much more aware of how motherhood affected women’s role in the economy. Statistics showed that women were simply not reaching the same levels as men, and the difficulties of combining childcare and work seemed almost insurmountable. There was no real evidence that childcare would become a political priority. So, throughout the 1980s, most feminists insisted that the changes were superficial. Women, they pointed out, continued to earn on average only 75 per cent of the male salary. Career women met a ‘glass ceiling’ in their professions and corporate cultures. Increased career opportunities, without a redefinition of men’s role in the home, looked like a double burden for women rather than a liberation.
Some of the improvements in female visibility were also double-edged. Feminists often disagreed about whether a female icon like Madonna, pushing at the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ sexual behaviour for women, made them more powerful or exploitable. Sexual liberation seemed to have jumped out of feminists’ hands and become a much more problematic force, sometimes even producing hardcore pornography and films of grotesque violence against women. In 1984, Dressed to Kill coincided with the activities of the Yorkshire Ripper in the North of England, suggesting that whatever gains feminism might have been making on equal opportunities, expectations and cultural representation, misogyny was still rampant. And cultural representations aside, women’s interests were still poorly represented in politics and law; women and girls still could expect hostility and even defeat when bringing charges of harassment, rape, domestic violence or child abuse. Superficially at least, not much had changed since Germaine Greer had provocatively declared that all men hate women.
Certainly, what these phenomena seemed to require was a greater depth in the understanding of both overt and covert oppression. Women were clearly constrained by more than overt discrimination; they were also constrained by deep prejudices and their own internalizing of negative attitudes. Policies to challenge these would help women achieve equality.
So although formal equality was coming within reach, there was no retreat from an analysis of male power. Rather, this was the period when it was extended into more personal areas such as domestic violence, pornography, rape and sexual harassment as work. These were all seen as areas of women’s ‘oppression’ which had previously been invisible and had to be pulled into the light of day. Like domestic violence, they had been hidden through shame, or, like sexual harassment, rendered invisible because they were accepted as a natural part of relations between the sexes. Aspects of taken-for-granted male behaviour came under scrutiny: sexist attitudes towards women as inferior or available to be used by men; domestic violence where men felt they had a right to chastize and control their wives; rape where men sometimes claimed that they knew better than the women involved what their victims had wanted; or sexual harassment where a man might use sexualized behaviour or language to degrade or humiliate a woman. These seemed to embody the deeper obstacles to achieving total equality, rooted in assumptions about masculinity and femininity.
This was not inventing problems where there were none. Women were drawn to feminism not only because of issues like pay differentials but also because it made sense of bad experiences in their personal lives where they had been restricted, belittled or even brutalized by traditional assumptions about masculine behaviour. Feminism insisted that the analysis of male power, originally mobilized to tackle overt discrimination at work and in the family, was relevant to these deeper areas; these activities expressed the contempt and hostility which was directed towards women because of their inferior status. Power, they said, was working at the points of most intimate connection between the sexes, and in the 1980s most feminists agreed.
Natasha Walter in her book The New Feminism (1998) suggests that present-day feminism should ignore this former preoccupation with challenging masculine and feminine stereotypes and concentrate instead on the ‘material inequalities’. But she is ignoring important insights. Oppression based on the expression and exercise of conventional notions of masculinity in sexual relations is not only more subtle and deeper than the overt discrimination practised in the job market, it is often more damaging and demoralizing. Eating disorders, for example, are rampant among girls because of the emphasis placed on women’s sexual desirability defined in terms of her conformity to the prevailing body ideal. Disregard for the contribution a woman makes in the home and as a mother can lead to her being badly exploited and treated with contempt. Assumptions about what is ‘normal’ in sexual relations can lead to instances of harassment and justifications for the use of force and fear. All show the deep way in which personal, emotional and sexual interactions can be an expression of the hostility and contempt directed towards women in an unequal culture.
These are important insights still not fully integrated into perceptions of society, but the politics which flowed from some of these concerns were often highly problematic. The most forceful of these were the anti-sexist, anti-harassment and positive discrimination campaigns in the 1980s. These were about legislating around the perceived relationships of power and oppression. If there had been problems before with applying civil rights rhetoric to the situation between men and women, they certainly got a whole lot worse when applied to these more nebulous areas. Even before drastic changes in sex roles, there were problems with converting perceptions about male power into actual campaigns about personal sexual behaviour and attitudes.
The personal may be political but should the political involve itself with the personal? In the intimate connections between men and women, where attitudes and behaviour are more relevant than economic and legal status, oppression and discrimination become much more difficult to prove. Away from obvious economic and legal discriminations based on gender, the intimate connections between men and women are more muddied by individual differences and lifestyle, by emotional agendas. Prescriptions for appropriate behaviour become difficult in this context. Not all relationships are built on the same chemistry and anyway there is the question of how much the ‘feminine’ draws out its masculine counterpart. As Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander pointed out in the New Statesman (1980): ‘The ropes which bind women are the hardest to cut, because they are woven with so many of our own desires.’
It was the extension of the model of male power into more nebulous aspects of behaviour which eventually lost feminism much of its wider support. But by then feminism was in no mood to consider that its analysis might be ham-fisted and inappropriate for the subtle differences in how individuals negotiate ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ roles in their own lives. By the mid-1980s, Thatcherism, with its ferocious ideological drive against the ‘nanny state’, had taken hold. Liberals feared this was an attempt to reverse the changes which had begun to occur in the family and sexual behaviour. They suspected a will to return to a more conventional family which would be available to care for the casualties from a dismembered welfare state. This was not a moment for backsliding. Instead, feminism sought to strengthen alliances with other groups who considered themselves targeted.
The idea that aspects of masculine behaviour could oppress women was an important insight and one which showed that class and material disadvantages were not the only ones that mattered. But it was also a Trojan horse. What came with it were the disaffected, the marginal groups, the ‘oppressed’ who found a natural home in a movement which defined itself as the rebellion of the oppressed against their oppression. By a giant non-sequitur, the logic ran that if oppression was broader than actual economic discrimination, then any group which felt discriminated against by the status quo must have a home in a movement which had made the subjective experience of oppression a valid basis for not just protest but action. Thus feminism became, in its own words, a ‘rainbow alliance’ offering