At the time feminists fighting for equality often felt the struggle was a lonely and groundbreaking one. With the benefit of hindsight, it now looks as if feminism was the only logical way out of the bottleneck caused by the convergence of a number of social changes. However much the immediate post-war era had been a time of homecoming and home-making, the Second World War had opened new horizons for women; they had occupied all sorts of ‘unfeminine’ roles and professions while the men were away. Afterwards, individual women made gradual breakthroughs into various spheres of work. This legacy was inherited by the generation of well-educated women who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to the equal educational opportunities given to girls in the post-war years. Demands for equal opportunities outside education as well were inevitable.
There were also more jobs, and more of them suitable for women. The main expansion of the labour market had been in the service sectors, opening up jobs in leisure, tourism, retail, design, information and catering; old-fashioned sexism was not so relevant here. Yet at the same time, all the old assumptions about motherhood as the great hiatus in women’s lives still dominated employment practices. Together with the general push throughout the 1960s to increase equality and human rights, these contradictory forces created a bottleneck, out of which feminism emerged.
This is not to say that social changes would have happened without feminism. In the 1990s several expanding Asian economies have drawn on female labour without any emancipation of women. Feminism in the West was a progressive, modernizing politics with a strong belief in equal rights and justice. It attracted women with an interest in wider political justice and it had to fight against a powerful element which strongly opposed any change in the traditional family structure. This is why, even at the time, it was not a mass movement, rather it belonged to a potent minority.
Those who did devote their time and energies to challenging the old assumptions were drawn by an ‘emotional agenda’ which several feminists recognize now as being the resolute determination not to live like their own mothers. ‘We would be different from our own mothers,’ Angela Phillips has said recently. ‘We were going out to work and our partners would share the childcare with us’ (Guardian, 20 January 1998). The mothers of feminists were the women who, in the relief of the war’s aftermath, gave up most of their own ambitions in order to build a better future for their children. Many transferred those frustrated ambitions to their daughters. Latterly, in more reflective mode, almost all the active feminists of the 1960s and ‘70s remember having heard their mothers describe how they had ‘given up everything’ for their families and warning their daughters not to make the same mistakes. To the liberated spirits of the 1960s and ‘70s, the defeated hopes and ambitions of wives and mothers, their dependency on men, their submersion in the family, all looked like suffering on a grand scale. Feminism made sense to women because it offered a way out.
Feminism was never only about jobs. Demands for equal pay and sex discrimination legislation were accompanied by demands to end ‘legal and financial discrimination’ as well as a more general and diffuse attack on all social activities which gave men privileges and discriminated against or belittled women. These included demands for ‘the right to control your own fertility’ and for ‘self-determined’ sexuality. Alongside that lay even more nebulous calls for sexual freedom, ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-fulfilment’.
In most feminists’ minds, these more diffuse aspects of social discrimination were closely connected with economic discrimination. They saw that many of the legal and financial structures affecting women, as well as attitudes towards appropriate family and sexual behaviour, reflected the economic model of father as breadwinner and provider for a dependent woman. In the 1970s welfare, taxation and provision of benefits still all assumed a household of a breadwinning father with financial dependants – women and children. Men could claim a married person’s tax allowance. Since the primary role for the woman was in the home, any income she had was treated as joint income. Married couples were taxed jointly, the taxation deducted from the husband’s pay. Benefits were paid to households on the assumption that men alone provided the family income. One example was supplementary benefit for a dependent spouse and children in the case of sickness. This was paid only to a man; a woman was not entitled to claim even if she was the main earner in the family. Feminists claimed these structures had been built on the model of the patriarchal family which had dominated English society for centuries and in which men exercised almost total control over their wives’ property and persons.
Fighting the discrimination – legal, political, sexual and emotional too – based on this patriarchal model was at the heart of modern feminism. Indeed, the infantilizing of women by the father-dominated family was feminism’s ‘big idea’. Women wanted the right to be autonomous, to support themselves by earning their own living. This was as much an ethical as an economic position. It was quite simply wrong for tax and benefits to assume women’s dependency on men; such assumptions discriminated against those who wanted to be or had to be financially independent. Worse, an acceptance of this model meant a tacit acceptance that men were superior.
Logically, most people with a broadly egalitarian and democratic view of society, even those unsympathetic to feminists’ lifestyles, could see the justice of this criticism of patriarchal social structures. So, intellectually and morally, feminism carried the day. Social and economic discrimination was easy to prove. Nor was it difficult to highlight the drudgery and hardship typical of the lives of women who were stuck at home or those who remained responsible for the home even when working. Even the routine belittling of women in images was acknowledged as supporting male privilege and discrimination against women.
Feminist objections to this notion of male power also went much further, extending into a critique of the sexual and emotional structures of society. These touched on much more problematic areas: lifestyle and sexual choices. It is this aspect of feminism – overthrowing traditional sexual and behavioural restraints – that tends to be remembered. What comes to mind rather than economic and legal reforms are the pro-abortion marches, the protests against the Miss World beauty contest, the changed sexual self-presentation of women, Germaine Greer appearing naked in a Dutch porn magazine.
Perhaps this is not wholly surprising. After all, the violent upheavals of the 1960s which transformed the face of British society for good were to do with radical changes in sexual behaviour and lifestyle. In some ways feminism was just part and parcel of a profound revolution in which the old values of sexual repression, monogamy, life-long commitment, paternalistic family responsibility (and the hypocrisy which sometimes went with that) came under attack; The arrival of a safe contraceptive in the form of the pill made this possible. When social commentators rue the ‘60s as the era which gave birth to the ‘me generation’ whose pursuit of individual gratification destroyed the old altruistic bonds of community and family, they invariably include feminism in this.
As it happens, feminism was as much challenge to this ethos as part of it. The political and sexual libertarians of the time, embodied in magazines like Oz, were challenging the old structures, the old restrictions, and the old hypocrisies which stunted them emotionally and sexually. Early feminists, however, spotted a ‘double oppression’ of women in this libertarian talk. Sheila Rowbotham has described how, working for the radical magazine Black Dwarf in the ‘60s, she became disillusioned with its contemptuous attitude to women, ‘chicks’ as they were called in these circles. Women like her realized that if traditional society had sexually repressed respectable women while exploiting the so-called disreputable women, the libertarian agenda wasn’t much better. Even anti-establishment radicals were capable of extreme contempt for women, as the American black activist, Eldridge Cleaver, summed up when he made his unforgettable comment: ‘Women’s position in the revolution is prone.’
Without the sexual revolution there would have been no feminism. But feminism also upped the ante. What was essentially a generation freeing itself up to enjoy a consumer society based on extreme individualism, became in feminist hands a tougher and more difficult fight about equal rights and equal treatment. Feminism had focused on a deeper problem, of discrimination based on gender so that masculinity conferred advantages and femininity guaranteed disadvantages. Power was no longer being seen in exclusively political terms; it was also seen to operate in less