Читать книгу Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium? - Rosalind Coward - Страница 6

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 women thought about careers, they imagined difficult choices, between career and children, or at least between uninterrupted career and children.

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 obvious ways – through sexual assumptions, sexual behaviour and attitudes.

Everything changed so rapidly in the wake of feminism that it is easy to forget what society was like before. Indeed, when Melanie Phillips writes that contemporary family problems are caused by ‘the loss of male authority’ (Times Literary Supplement, 20 March 1998), one wonders if she has forgotten the suffering caused by the imposition of patriarchy. Maybe it is easy to forget. There is a huge gulf between the kinds of sexual and familial decisions which women were forced to take before and after this social upheaval. The Profumo affair which so scandalized British society in the early ‘60s seems to belong not just to earlier decades but an earlier century. Then it was utterly scandalous and dangerous for an establishment figure to be seen to mix with women whose sexual morality was even faintly questionable. By today’s standards what happened seems so trivial; then it was enough to bring down a government.

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 if not ‘fulfilled’, she might partake of all the privileges and power which accrued to a powerful husband. Unless it is assumed that all men bully, exploit and control their wives, leave them as soon as their breasts sag, beat them for pleasure, rape them, stop them from experiencing any kind of personal development, then it is impossible to assume women never share in the privileges of their husbands or never, in emotional terms, have power within households.

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?