Even in recent years we have had poignant reminders of the restraints society once imposed on women; and of how quickly the world changed after the combined forces of ‘free love’ and feminism overturned the old morality. There was huge sympathy for Clare Short in 1996 when it became known that she had given away her baby for adoption in the mid-1960s, merely because she became pregnant before marrying the baby’s father. It has recently been revealed that Joni Mitchell, doyenne of the sexual revolution, had a baby daughter whom she too gave up for adoption. Even in the early 1960s, for a respectable girl to have a child out of marriage was a source of deep shame to many families.
There are many heartbreaking stories which explain exactly why women needed to overthrow hypocrisy and double standards. A few years ago I interviewed a woman in her eighties in connection with a television series, The Hidden History of Sex. When not quite twenty, she had become pregnant on a first date after being virtually raped. She did not fully understand what was happening and only realized when her mother challenged her that she was seven months pregnant. Her parents threw her out of the house; she found her way to a nursing home in London. Her parents ignored her, but a few days after the baby was born, her mother visited her and told her she would adopt the baby herself but that there was never again to be any mention of what had happened. The baby boy was then brought up as her brother. The woman later married and failed to have any more children, so she went out of her way to treat him specially but could never tell him. After she agreed to talk on the television programme when she was eighty and her son sixty, she told him. But he rebuffed her, asking why she had chosen to do this to him now.
Such tragedies show exactly why the sexual revolution was necessary. Women were being controlled by something deeper: age-old assumptions about appropriate lifestyles and behaviours and a contempt for women who strayed. Hence women’s demands for the right to sexual self-discovery, and the right to have a sexual life without judgement. All of this entailed challenging assumptions about sex premised on male superiority: the hypocrisy which accepted men’s sexual desires as normal but castigated women for theirs; women’s rights to control their own fertility rather than being at the whim of men’s desires (with consequent unwanted pregnancy); the taking of the male body as norm with the consequence that female health and sexual problems were regarded with a combination of neglect and disgust.
Although all these looked like exclusively sexual issues, in feminists’ minds they were intertwined and based on models of male power and female dependency. Much of the passion invested in the pursuit of sexual liberation came from the belief that challenging sexual stereotypes and pursuing personal fulfilment necessarily also spelled the end of a society based on the hierarchical father-dominated family and related notions of male supremacy. Feminism viewed this as a struggle against an old and tenacious social form; history showed that under the patriarchal model, in law, if not always in practice, women were little more than sexual chattel. Until reforms in the nineteenth century, a wife could be divorced at the man’s will, if a woman was unfaithful she lost all rights, fathers had automatic rights over children, fathers could marry off their daughters. In short, a woman’s sexuality, body and reproduction were very much controlled by husbands and fathers.
So these challenges to sexual attitudes were also challenges to the unearned power and authority of the father with its culture of dependency, emotional infantilism and misogyny. And what had until that point been taken for granted as the ‘feminine’ way to live – a journey from obedient girl to subservient wife and devoted mother – was now described as sexist, the cultural expression of the control and dominance implicit in the patriarchal family. When feminism attacked ‘patriarchy’, it was attacking the whole package of men’s power – economic, legal, sexual and emotional. Even though Ibsen’s vision of the Doll’s House had been written a hundred years previously, most feminists thought it still pretty well summed up the inevitable female subordination in the patriarchal family. This is why feminists were invariably hostile to the traditional family.
Perhaps given the state of society at the time, it is not surprising that feminism’s rhetoric was borrowed from ideas of freedom fighting and a struggle against a powerful oppressor. The parallel was appropriate but also questionable. Feminist demands and visions were couched in terms like female autonomy, women’s freedom, women’s rights, women’s self-determination. It was the language of anti-imperialist struggles, the right of colonized nations and people to define their own objectives, to win full political and economic subjectivity and to define their own status. This imagery and much of feminism’s impetus, came from the American civil rights movement.
The imagery also had a metaphorical richness. Women could see a parallel between their lives and those of slaves and colonized peoples. They felt defined as second-class citizens and restricted by their gender from having the same expectations as the other half of the population. They talked of women’s ‘colonized’ bodies, their fertility and sexuality controlled by what men wanted, not by themselves. With that rhetoric went assumptions about male power. If women were deprived of equal rights by virtue of their gender, it followed that men had corresponding advantages. Men were potent oppressors and, however diminished their own particular circumstances, they would also have this familial power over women. Consequently, women must constitute a class or caste of people whose identities and experiences as women were much more important than any other social factors.
Male power meant different things to different feminists. Few went so far as radical feminist Sheila Jeffries who, at one conference I attended, described men as ‘phallic imperialists’. That idea implied not just that the male gender conferred power, but that men actively went out to subjugate and dominate women simply by virtue of their gender. Historian Barbara Taylor also points out that ‘the notion of women as powerless victims of male power never went entirely uncriticized’. Socialist feminists always believed ‘that male power over women was in a sense a derivative secondary form of power, essentially derived from who had control over the economy’. But she acknowledges an elementary consensus about male power and the moral superiority conferred on men by virtue of their gender. ‘We called that “the patriarchy”, the favourite term for that organized male power over men as we imagined it to be’ (interview with author).
Even at the time some feminists doubted just how appropriate this language was for relationships between men and women. The father clearly had authority and power, but was the model of colonization, implying capture and defeat of one type of society by another, followed by domination and slavery, really appropriate as a metaphor for the more complex bond of a sexual relationship? After all, women were not captured and enslaved against their will, even if they were curtailed by financial dependency. Indeed, many social historians have insisted that the twentieth century, unlike previous periods, is characterized by affectionate, companionate marriage rather than coercion.
Marriage could also entail advantages for women. If a woman was married to a rich man, could we really think of her as a member of an oppressed group? She might have the misfortune to be married to a violent bully or her husband might divorce her and leave her penniless. Indeed, even thirty years later, the whole sorry scenario which unfolded around Princess Diana and her marginalization by a powerful family was a reminder that even the most glamorous and apparently powerful women can suffer in a rigidly patriarchal family. In such cases, even the richest woman might experience the types of discrimination which could and did afflict women.
Then again, she might not. Instead she might remain comfortably married, and even