Women were unsure of what it all meant and many found it easier to take refuge in ‘womanism’ than to take seriously a growing crisis of masculinity (Chapter 9), so it is not surprising that womanism gave birth to a reaction, a call for the need to reassert traditional masculine values and male authority (Chapter 10). This confrontation of views, of reasserting the traditional emotional divisions between the sexes, however, was and is profoundly out of touch with how parenting is being done, with the choices both sexes are making, with the way in which young males are being socially stigmatized and in the conduct of sexuality. These simplifications about gender have turned out to be worse than useless in explaining what is really going on. In fact, they have been actively misleading, disguising other problems which needed to be recognized. So the final chapters of this book are devoted to examining each of these in turn. I look at how social problems involving young men and boys are not caused by gender in a simple way but because they are at the sharp end of dramatic changes in the mix of our society (Chapter 11 and Chapter 14). Around parenting too (Chapter 12 and Chapter 13), gender simplifications have muddied our perceptions, preventing us from recognizing how people are living their lives and what really concerns them. Finally I look at how gender relations are in fact much more complex and muddled. When it comes to some of the controversial sexual issues of the times – sexual harassment (Chapter 15) and date rape (Chapter 16) – the old polarities of men as powerful oppressors and women as passive victims simply will no longer work.
In short, feminism has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the brave women who fought its first battles. Its future in the new millennium is to face up to the problems of its success, and to see gender as just one possible reason for social and personal conflicts rather than an all-encompassing cause. But if it is going to be capable of making these changes, it will first have to let go of its sacred cows.
Chapter 1 THE ASSAULT ON UNEARNED MALE POWER
Think-tanks and universities regularly commission research on young women’s attitudes to feminism. Why, they ask, do young women no longer respond to the clarion call of feminism? Meanwhile, publishers are puzzled because they cannot anywhere find a new young feminist who will set hearts racing. Perhaps, they speculate, contemporary writers lack the flair of earlier feminists. Or perhaps young women themselves are more selfish and fainthearted. Perhaps it’s ‘the backlash’. Whatever the reason, the effect is clear; whoever and however they try, the fundamental idea of women’s oppression fails to inspire contemporary young women.
All I can say is that it was not ever thus. When I encountered feminism in the 1970s, it was quite simply electrifying. I recognized immediately that notions of male power and oppression had direct relevance for my own life. Feminism illuminated frustrations I had met and offered a way out. And this was in the face of considerable media and family hostility to such views. In the early 1970s, feminism was just as unpopular as it is said to be now by the backlash theorists. Then it was tarnished with the image of the Miss World protests; feminists were seen as a bunch of sexually promiscuous bra-burners. Anyone taking up the cause knew that at some point they would be accused of hating children, families and men. My father certainly – as part of a series of more complicated views – warned me that fighting for sexual and economic autonomy would destroy men’s respect for me.
Such opposition, however, simply could not override my conviction that feminism was relevant and made sense to me. The calls for equality of opportunity, for greater personal fulfilment, for an end to women basing their lives on childcare and domestic subservience, and the challenge to the automatic superiority assumed by men, echoed my own experiences. Feminism also seemed to offer a model for new and better relationships with men. For those of us who took it on board, it resonated at an emotional level.
It is not hard to see why. Arriving at university in the 1970s it was almost inevitable that any woman with ambitions and a critical stance on society would be drawn to this dynamic new ideology. It was in and around higher education that feminism found its most fertile ground. Most of the women who threw themselves into feminist politics in Britain came from among the well-educated. We got to university after schooling which had subtly directed girls away from ‘male’ subjects, steering them instead towards ‘female’ subjects with lower career expectations. Ahead lay the overt discrimination of the job market which at the time was assumed to be the natural order of things.
When I started at Cambridge University only three out of the twenty-odd colleges, were for women. Men outnumbered women by eight to one. There was still an overt culture of misogyny: there were men’s clubs, men-only sports with their attendant prestigious culture, men-only dining clubs. The academic staff were dominated by men; female professors were still eccentric oddities. Admittedly, Cambridge was ‘old establishment’ but it also mirrored pretty exactly the establishment which ruled Britain. It was easy to see in microcosm the exclusion of women from wider positions of political, social and economic power.
Women often did extremely well academically but even so it was no passport to equal employment. Certain kinds of employment were still closed to women. Even though I entered the job market after the introduction of equal opportunities and sex discrimination legislation in the mid-1970s, there had been few changes in traditional working patterns. Many jobs were still considered ‘men’s’ or ‘women’s’ jobs and there were significant disparities of earnings as a consequence. Jobs which we now take for granted as being open to both sexes – stockbroking, some sections of the media, engineering, architecture, medicine and so on – were then totally male dominated. Because women and men continued to be employed in sex-segregated areas, there were few opportunities to challenge unequal earnings directly.
When I became aware of feminism, the situation was not hugely different from that described by Betty Friedan in her milestone work, The Feminine Mystique (1963). She wrote of the ‘female malaise’ of many university-educated women who did not use their education but were condemned to lives of stultifying boredom as housewives. In the 1970s women already made up 35 per cent of the workforce and most graduates certainly expected to work. Yet most employers still assumed that women would eventually give up careers in favour of families. As a result, prejudice against women employees was still widespread.
The job market was shaped by the assumption that women would ultimately drop out of work. Job interviews routinely included questions to women about their marriage and childbearing plans. In one job interview my male rival was asked what his career plans were for the next ten years, a question which gave him the opportunity to shine. I was asked a series of (now illegal) questions about my hopes for a family and how that affected my career expectations. They were questions designed to put my commitment to the job (or lack of it) on trial.
Such assumptions lay behind the discriminatory practices in employment at that time. Employers justified excluding women because they would soon be claimed by families. Women scaled down their own ambitions for similar reasons. Childcare was almost non-existent, so the idea that a career and motherhood were, if not totally incompatible, then at least extremely difficult to combine, was accurate. When