Feminists often distanced themselves from these changes when they came about in ways not quite anticipated or perhaps even not quite wanted. Cosmopolitan is a case in point. It shared in many of feminism’s fundamental tenets, yet it carved out a version of feminism which was not always compatible with the stance of politically active feminists. Cosmopolitan’s version of sexual freedom and the objective of a have-it-all, do-it-all lifestyle, with its emphasis on consumerism and how to make yourself sexually desirable to men, often provoked ambivalence. Commenting on another new magazine, feminist academic Janice Winship sighed, ‘What’s new about pubescent girls in soft porn pics?’ (‘Magazines for Girls’, 1987) Ultimately, though, these magazines were seen more as allies than foes, a recognition that their emphasis on liberalizing sexual attitudes and the building up of the female consumer, were closer to feminism than not.
Indeed, these rapid changes in the sexual mores which had previously controlled women’s lives were probably the most significant changes of the period. In the 1970s, traditional lifestyles which had been identified as controlling and limiting women’s lives began to crumble. The institution of marriage took the most direct hit. It wasn’t just that women were winning equal legal rights in marriage, although these had profound implications for women’s status in marriage; nor was it that many women were beginning to argue that becoming a wife and mother should not spell the end of careers. Women had begun to reject the institution of marriage altogether.
Reform of the divorce law in the 1960s had made divorce easier. By the 1970s the notion of marriage as an indissoluble union had gone. Simultaneously, the new sexual freedoms, and awareness of the restrictions that traditional marriage placed on women, meant there were increasing numbers of unmarried cohabitees and children born outside marriage. The improvement in women’s economic position combined with welfare provision for single parents meant that unmarried parenthood, whether through divorce or choice, became not just thinkable but common. Combined with women winning increased rights in divorce settlements, especially around economic provision, these changes amounted to very great improvements in women’s legal status as sexual partners and mothers.
Once under attack, the old attitudes changed with astonishing rapidity. By the mid-1970s, attitudes towards unwanted pregnancies, to living together before marriage and even to having children outside marriage had been transformed. By the 1980s, the vast increase in cohabiting unmarried couples with and without children was the most significant demographic trend and the most significant source of worry to the moralists. With the exception of the two world wars, the proportion of births outside marriage had remained stable for fifty years at 4 per cent of the population. By the late 1980s, 25 per cent of all children born in England were born outside marriage.
In less than fifteen years, society had moved from viewing extra-marital sex as shameful to the abolition of all stigma for those who have children outside marriage. Indeed, in contemporary society, so total has been this change that however hard politicians try to reverse public opinion, there is no longer any real disgrace in pregnancy outside a stable relationship. In the 1990s Madonna, Michele Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster were just a few among many who had babies ‘on their own’, asserting their ‘right’ to have children. By the mid-1990s, the stigma attached to a healthy, normal-aged, single mother had disappeared so completely that the problem with this event was located in another place altogether as far as the media were concerned: people no longer worried about the morality of errant females, only whether such women had rendered men redundant altogether.
Without knowing I was part of the most significant demographic trend of this century, I did my bit for these statistics. I was able to start living with someone without having to think about taking the step of formal commitment; there was no question about not earning my own living and in so far as I thought about marriage I thought about it in negative terms as involving a loss of identity, a loss of financial autonomy, an abdication of my independence and identity to the unearned authority of someone whom I wanted to see as my equal. The question of making a formal commitment arose only when we had children. By then, however, we had been together long enough to feel that we would stay together because we wanted to and because of our commitment to the children rather than because we had been told to do so by ‘patriarchal’ institutions.
My motives were explicitly connected with feminist arguments, but I suspect they were typical of the millions of other women who made the same lifestyle choices at the same time without a similar involvement in feminist politics. Marriage had quite simply lost its hold and however much feminism might now want to distance itself from what is often called the disintegration of the family, it was at the emotional epicentre of these changes in family life and sexual behaviour. It was the feminist argument on behalf of autonomy, equality, and the need to be freed from the emotional and sexual infantilism of traditional marriage which underpinned and justified so many of the reforms in family law and practice and changes in behaviour.
Looking back at this period with the advantage of hindsight, the transformations were so rapid that it is hard not to imagine the door was already partly open when feminism pushed on it. ‘A fair wind was blowing behind women’s liberation,’ one male writer has noted. ‘Even conservative men couldn’t stop them’ (Jack O’Sullivan, in G. Dench, Rewriting the Sexual Contract [1998]). But to feminists active at the time, it did not feel like that. To push over the traces of the old society, to transform tradition into a desire for democratic and equal relations, to win that moral and ethical high ground, feminists were in constant argument and meeting constant opposition and hostility. I have an outlaw mother (how can you have an in-law if you are not married?) who still finds it hard to forget I am not legally married.
It is also easy to imagine that because the changes look so inevitable now, 1970s’ feminists were unnecessarily po-faced and extreme about getting their ideas over. Anyone who doubts how hard that struggle was should take a look at the interviews with leading feminists in Susan Mitchell’s book Icons, Saints and Divas (1997). The women she talked to all wrote books in the 1960s and ‘70s which ‘changed’ lives; Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1971) coined the idea of the ‘zipless fuck’ as a symbol of women’s sexual freedom; Phyllis Chessler’s Women and Madness (1972) is the definitive study of how women’s struggles against oppressive institutions were often categorized as madness; Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) runs through English literature exposing the utterly damaging stereotypes which surrounded women; and Robin Morgan, editor of Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), coined the phrase ‘the personal is political’, also popularizing the idea of sisterhood. These are all books which exerted massive cultural influence, yet the frustrations and slights accorded to their authors show just how much hostility could be expected and how few personal rewards were on hand.
Interestingly, most of these authors reject the idea that there has been real change in women’s position. Mostly they endorse Susan Faludi’s theory that contemporary society is characterized by a backlash against feminist ideas. As Erica Jong puts it: ‘We’re a long way from having a truly equal society where both genders have equal input intellectually, financially, politically, sexually; a long, long way. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever have it.’
This attitude is typical of what happened to feminism in the 1980s. Feminists barely acknowledged the significance of what we now know to be the momentous changes which were taking place around them and because of them. The changes were seen as either not deep enough or in danger of being overturned. At the very moment when feminism could have changed its rhetoric as many of its objectives were being met, there was instead a reassertion of its basic propositions. Why?
Certainly one significant factor was that