My memory of feminism in this period was that it was both exhilarating and mad. Exhilarating because it was a very creative time. Women were not just defining problems for the first time but were constantly coming up with new ideas to improve women’s position. Many policies and ideas we now take for granted as objectives of liberal or socialist governments were thrashed out then in workshops and seminars without funding and without formal organizations. Many of the criticisms of the old Labour and its workerist ideologies came first from feminism which spearheaded the idea of democratic alliances. Women freely volunteered their time and energy to attend conferences and workshops to discuss anything and everything which might improve women’s position; few imagined there would be any immediate rewards for themselves.
It was also a wildly frustrating time. At this point, feminism attracted some really very disturbed people and the amazing thing in retrospect was how tolerant feminism was of some crazy excesses. Feminists objected to how the tabloid press in the 1980s characterized their activities as being part of the ‘loony left’, poking fun at the way in which feminism and the Left abased themselves in the face of ever-escalating claims of oppression. But this was not all misrepresentation. At one conference, Linda Bellos, who later mysteriously became leader of Lambeth Council, listed her oppressions to an audience rendered sullen and passive by her superior claims to speak: ‘I am black, a woman, lesbian, Jewish, Polish.’ ‘You are not disabled… yet,’ countered one participant who still had the energy to protest.
People who were very damaged by personal experiences found a place to feel powerful. The more oppressed they could claim to be, the more right they had to speak. It is no longer heresy to point out how virtually everyone who identified with feminism had some level of problem with male power, for that was the nature of the movement. Autobiographies by women like Gloria Steinem (Revolution from Within, 1992) show both how women had problems and why. But there was always a fine line between those who had a problem yet nevertheless kept their eyes on the wider picture, and those who were seeking some kind of compensation for previous damage. It was often difficult to draw that line very clearly. Perhaps those who did most to effect changes for women were creatively damaged, but there must have been enough empathy with those who were seriously damaged for their use of guilt to silence and inhibit others.
What resulted were endless unproductive, unresolved discussions where the logic of the feminist rhetoric of male oppression in the most personal began to emerge. If men are the oppressors, did that mean that any sexual relationship with them was oppressive? Was any male expression of sexual interest the act of a dangerous predator? Was any expression of male sexuality the same as its most brutal expression in crimes like rape? There were some groups of women who answered yes to all these questions. Bonkers, perhaps, but not so wildly out of step that every other feminist silenced them. Rather it was the other way round. Active feminists who lived with men, loved men, had children with them, fell sullenly silent. Life was too short to waste time arguing with your supposed allies when the overarching political culture of the time was so antagonistic.
The weaknesses of the rhetoric which had led logically to this point began to emerge but it didn’t stop the bandwagon from rolling on. In the 1980s, partly as a response to the extreme conservatism of the government, there was a mushrooming of radical socialist councils which incorporated much of this rhetoric into their own politics. It was here – looking to America – that the flesh was put on the bones of anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies aimed at challenging prejudice and power in situations which might in the past have been accepted as natural. In England it never quite became strong enough to deserve the title of ‘political correctness’ but it still appeared to many as an unwarranted intrusion into situations which many people thought were just too diverse and personal to call for such intervention. Had discrimination against women remained blatant, these legislative initiatives might yet have come to fruition, but by the end of the 1980s social and economic realities began to change dramatically. The economy suddenly delivered many of the objectives which feminism had aimed at, even if not quite in the form wanted. This time the arguments about covert discrimination wouldn’t quite wash. The world of gender expectations appeared to be turning upside down and feminism had few tools for understanding what had happened.
Chapter 3 A NEW GENDER LANDSCAPE
At the same time as feminism steeled itself to do battle with those intransigent aspects of male behaviour apparently standing in the way of women’s progress, the UK economy and society were undergoing seismic changes. Men’s economic supremacy, supposedly the basis for all other oppressive behaviour, was crumbling and with it the sex roles originally described by feminism. The widespread support for the conservative values of Thatcherism meant that feminists had failed to recognize the radical changes affecting women’s position, let alone to register the changes affecting men. By the 1990s these dramatic upheavals could no longer be missed. When the dust settled, it was clear the gender landscape would never be the same again.
Feminism had come into being to attack a world of male privilege, a world where the economy was driven by male work and where individual homes mirrored this economic reality. In the 1980s this ceased to be true in any simple sense; the sexual composition of the workforce changed out of all recognition. What happened far exceeded any steady incremental increase of women in the labour market. It was so rapid that by the beginning of the 1990s there were as many women working as men. All projections suggest this is a continuing trend; there will soon be more women than men in the workforce.
How had these changes come about? And why did feminists dismiss them as insufficient and pay them such scant attention? The second question is easier to answer. Feminists were much too preoccupied with the superficial lack of change and even the possibility that gains might be reversed. Nor were they alone in missing signs of revolution. Few ordinary citizens understood these changes until they were fully upon us. In the UK most people were bedazzled by the economic boom in the 1980s and failed to notice the deeper changes. This boom was, in fact, underwritten by money raised from selling off North Sea oil resources, thus disguising profound economic difficulties. But at the time, the image of the yuppy, in particular the male stockbroker, embodied a thriving economy. This was also the time when the first images of highly successful career women began to appear, the so-called ‘post-feminist career woman’, feminists dismissed her as atypical: the city profiteers were just a modern version of an old theme.
In fact, behind the façade of a buoyant economy based on relatively unchanging sexual patterns, long-term changes were dramatically altering the balance of power between the sexes. The generally agreed term now for what has been happening is the ‘feminization of the economy’. What it describes is the fact that although the actual number of jobs has remained unchanged since 1970, the types of jobs, the way they are done and who does them have changed. And what is most important here is the change in the ratio of men to women. Women’s employment, which had been steadily increasing since the 1970s when the service sector expanded, accelerated in the 1980s at the same time as the number of men employed fulltime declined. All in all, since 1970, large numbers of men have left the workforce. There was also a huge increase in the amount of part-time work, much of this going to women. There are now three million more part-time jobs than in the 1970s while, over the same period, men have lost over three million full-time jobs. The proportion of men employed full-time declined from 62 per cent in 1970 to 50 per cent in 1996 (Demos Report, Tomorrow’s Women, 1997).
These changes in the sexual composition of the workforce were caused by several converging factors in which the ideological contribution of feminism was relatively minor. Feminism certainly made them possible: equal opportunities legislation meant it was no longer legally possible for employers to exclude women from certain jobs, and feminism had broken down social prejudices. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than attitudes towards working mothers. Until feminist values became established, social disapproval made it extremely difficult for middle-class mothers to work. Now the employment