There were other disconcerting elements in this rhetoric too. Somewhere lodged in it was an agenda for the emotions; ‘autonomy’ was seen as crucial not just economically but emotionally too and that gave work almost moral status as the principal means to this autonomy. An ambiguity towards children followed from this. Feminists, being women, were obviously concerned with acknowledging the overwhelming importance which children had in women’s lives. But in equal measures they regarded them as ‘a problem’ or ‘a threat’ to that financial autonomy. Behind all these calls for autonomy, self-determination, self-fulfilment, there was a rejection not just of the actual social and political models of male dominance, but also a rejection of a model of emotional dependency which was assumed to come with it; dependency is infantilism, commitment is imprisonment, loyalty is possession.
There were many bizarre manifestations of this, such as ‘the politics of anti-monogamy’ which elevated casual sex into an act of political liberation. I’m not sure how much people were deliberately deluding themselves in order to have a good time, but they certainly put on a good show of thinking that their own anti-monogamy stance would have repercussions at the political and social level. Anyone whose lifestyle seemed to break the bonds of mutual dependency and inter-relationships with men could find herself depicted as a paragon of feminist living. This included lesbianism, which some feminists represented as the ultimate freedom from men. Even with the fervour gone, along with the illusion of changing the world by sleeping with most of it, feminism is still equated in some minds with sexual independence.
In the 1970s none of this seemed odd to the people involved. These were experiments to find a way of life in which the unearned power of men could never again limit and control women’s potential. But what happened as society began to change and feminism, once the discourse of the powerless, became the most potent source of change?
Chapter 2 FEMINISM: A MOVEMENT BLIND TO ITS OWN EFFECTIVENESS
Most liberal-minded people, even if they disliked what they saw as feminist behaviour (usually characterized as anti-family, selfishly careerist and sometimes sexually immoral), were prepared to accept the broad ethical position that equal rights should apply to women. Consequently there was little opposition either to the Equal Opportunities or the Sex Discrimination Acts. Most people also tolerated the criticisms of men’s dominance within the family and across society generally; the restrictions this placed on women’s opportunities were all too obvious. As a result, throughout the 1970s, many of feminism’s propositions came to be accepted as common sense.
Feminists themselves, however, are not always ready to acknowledge the huge effect they have had on society. This is partly because one of the favourite sports of certain rightwingers has been to blame feminism for all the negative changes they detect in society. Victoria Gillick, Margaret Thatcher and Charles Murray are just a few among many who, over the last two decades, have blamed the ‘me-first’ philosophy of the feminist generation for undermining stable family life. This is the reductio ad absurdum of complex social changes. Feminists, though, often respond with their own simplicities. How can you blame feminism, they reply, when feminists themselves never had power? How can feminism have been responsible for major changes when it has only ever been a handful of women working on the margins of society?
It is true that individual feminists, such as Hillary Clinton in America or Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt in the UK, have only recently become prominent. Prior to the leftward shift of these countries’ governments, active participation in feminist politics was always a career handicap, but it is disingenuous to conclude that feminism was marginal. Feminism had an enormous impact on society, probably a greater impact than any other social or political ideology this century. On the other hand, feminists are not lying when they play down their impact; they felt marginalized because they met opposition, rarely benefited personally and when the real changes began to happen, they were not quite as anticipated.
Yet it was feminism which changed what women thought was desirable or possible for themselves. Once the equal opportunities and sex discrimination legislation was in place, making it illegal for women to be treated unfairly, the groundwork was there for radical changes in expectations. Educational opportunities, for example, had been steadily improving for girls since the war. But in the 1970s, there were dramatic changes. Feminists who promoted anti-sexism and equal opportunities in school, colleges and the workplace played a major part in broadening horizons. Once schools and universities became selfconscious about girls’ career expectations, then traditional assumptions about appropriate subjects for boys and girls began to break down.
Women’s actual career prospects also began to improve as a result of feminism. Changes in the job market helped quite considerably, but again it was women’s changed outlook that was critical. In the 1970s, the expanding service sector looked to a previously untapped pool of labour: women. By the 1980s it would also use the last remaining reserve of labour: mothers who, crucially, ‘matched’ the need for part-time, contract workers. This might have happened without feminism, but women’s readiness was due to a change in consciousness.
Feminism had a transformative effect on the cultural front as well. This was much more than individual feminists being influential in the media – they weren’t particularly. Individuals like Germaine Greer were regularly hauled up for bear-baiting sessions with hostile opponents. An evening with Mary Whitehouse, the prominent anti-pornography campaigner, comes to mind, for example. But apart from these one-offs, it was more a case of feminist perspectives infiltrating most subjects. For a debate on virtually any subject, liberal programmemakers went out of their way to find someone to put the case for how gender came into the issue. Often the feminist angle carried the day.
Writers and film-makers began to document women’s experiences of oppression in the home, at work and in sexual relationships. All those who fought to have women’s art and writing valued will remember the initial howls of outrage. When I wrote an undergraduate dissertation on women novelists in the nineteenth century, the ratifying committee disputed whether or not this was a valid subject in literature. Those who set up Virago, initially a collective operating with limited funds, remember similar scorn. Not long after, what had started on the margins of mainstream publishing became a commercial success. Virago made its name reprinting forgotten women authors, along with contemporary feminist ideas. They had found an audience hungry for accounts of women’s experiences or discussions of women’s concerns. The Women’s Press followed suit and then more mainstream publishers.
This was not surprising. The runaway best-sellers of the decade were all women’s novels. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1971), Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1976) and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977), were novels which fictionalized the journey at the heart of the feminist project; from repression in the patriarchal family to sexual self-knowledge and a new female autonomy. Taking responsibility for your life, changing it, finding a new freedom – however watered down into more acceptable mainstream forms, this female journey was the project of the decade.
Academia was also shaken by feminism. Many disciplines came quickly under scrutiny for their neglect of female subjects or experiences. Some universities welcomed women’s studies options into their courses, others violently opposed them. But there were plenty of academics in other conventional subjects who recognized the impact. History was transformed by the writings of women like Sheila Rowbotham who showed how women had been ‘hidden from history’ English literature courses recognized how their great tradition almost invariably excluded all but a handful of women writers; even science subjects had to recognize previously excluded questions of gender. As Mary Evans says in Introducing Contemporary Feminist Thought (1997), feminism introduced a new perspective into intellectual and academic life. This was ‘the recognition that the once universal he/man of academic disciplines is only one half