Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

Those women who fought the original battles suffer more than most. Hated and opposed when originally pushing down the barriers, they now often have to face contempt from a society which takes for granted their achievements. At a recent party I witnessed one such woman being challenged by a young man who had no sense of feminism’s history or her involvement in it. ‘Do you really call yourself a feminist?’ he asked belligerently. ‘Yes,’ she answered rather wistfully, ‘I’d still call myself that.’ ‘But what on earth does it mean?’ he continued. ‘I mean, is there really any need for it? Isn’t it just part of the way we are, part of our unconscious?’

It was a difficult and poignant moment for me, because it encapsulated both sides of my relationship with feminism. I greatly respected the woman for what she had achieved and deplored the man’s lack of respect for why she had placed herself as she did. In such circumstances, no wonder she dug her heels in. This continuing lack of credibility and acceptance explains why feminists react badly when the fundamental tenets of the movement are challenged. But when I began to examine feminist ideas critically and challenge the idea that nothing had changed, I too met with resistance. There is a real reluctance to submit feminism’s fundamental assumptions to an audit to see just how relevant they are to changing realities.

The problem is that, by and large, I also agreed with what the man at that party said. Somewhere along the line something remarkable has happened. Individual feminists still meet with resistance and problems, but feminism as a movement has been extraordinarily successful; it has sunk into our unconscious. Our contemporary social world – and the way the sexes interact in it – is radically different from the one in which modern feminism emerged. Many of feminism’s original objectives have been met, including the principle of equal pay for equal work, and the possibility of financial independence. Girls now are growing up in a world radically different from the one described by the early feminists. Feminism no longer has to be reiterated but simply breathed.

Few, surely, can fail to recognize that the opportunities and expectations facing young women in the new millennium make thirty years ago seem like another planet. When I left university, the sex discrimination act and equal opportunities legislation had only just become law; battles about combining careers and motherhood still lay ahead. Now, rather than feeling there are uncharted waters in front of them, young women are more likely to feel daunted by the potency of the female icons before them. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher destroyed the notion that women could not reach the top. And in the 1990s, stockbroker Nicola Horlick, a mother of five with a million-pound-a-year job, put paid to the idea of motherhood as an obstacle. Both women are problematic figures, certainly, and both can be called exceptions, but in the 1960s, such figures were simply unthinkable.

Feminism has, to a considerable degree, got what it wanted and most of it came to fruition in the 1980s. Jobs opened up to women; career expectations went up dramatically; most women, including many mothers, worked. Legal changes and changes in family patterns also made it possible for women to survive financially on their own should they so wish. The old morality which had restrained and oppressed women lifted. We always complain about the cliché of calling the 1980s the ‘women’s decade’, but it was true. Rarely a month went by without another first for women, as barrier after barrier came down. The public perception of women through the ‘80s was that they were on a roller-coaster. The decade had begun with Margaret Thatcher becoming the first British woman prime minister, creating the strong impression that there were no longer any barriers between a very determined woman and the fulfilment of her ambitions. With the media also taking up the cause of the working mother and focusing attention on high-achieving women, it was hard not to notice women’s potency.

In fact, many of the things feminism had wanted came about because of other social changes and not quite in the form anticipated. The increase in part-time and flexible working came as the result of brutal economic changes and not, as many feminists had envisaged, through a benevolent process of social relaxation. The economy was demanding the kinds of work that women could provide. At a social level, however, feminism appeared to be making little headway. The 1980s’ economic boom had disguised major economic shifts and the public face of that boom was the young male ‘yuppy’, apparently embodying male economic power. Combined with Margaret Thatcher’s overt hostility to feminism and her lack of support for women in general, it is easy to see now why so many feminists imagined that nothing was changing.

At the same time, it took a peculiar form of blindness to ignore the profound changes which were affecting men in the same period. In the 1970s the problem confronting women was how to reverse the dip in achievement and expectation which seemed to afflict teenage girls prior to their disappearing off the career ladder altogether. From the end of the 1980s, the main worry over teenagers became the poor performance of boys, not of girls. While the morale of girls and women is high, and expectations about future careers robust, the opposite appears to be true of boys. Throughout the 1990s, boys’ performance at school took a nosedive.

This was just a symptom of a wider shift, of the fact that the changes affecting women’s position have intersected with very great changes for men in their working patterns, in their family roles and in their social expectations. A number of forces came together at the end of the 1980s: the changes in the type of work available, a massive increase in unemployment and job insecurity which affected men very badly, and a growing pinpointing of crime and social disaffection as a male problem.

From the end of the 1980s onwards, it was men in the eye of the storm not women. First came evidence that the job market was beginning to discriminate against men. More men than women were losing their jobs and ‘male’ industries were closing down while areas of women’s work were expanding. The new patterns of work – part-time and flexible – seemed geared to women not men. There was also evidence that men were finding the changes more difficult than women; some perceived the shifts in the family as entirely to their disadvantage, and were, in some communities, seriously disaffected.

The social and economic policies of the 1980s created extraordinary changes in the relative position of the sexes, but they also created enormous divisions between groups that went far beyond discrimination based on sex. Social disaffection, poverty and crime were visible and unsettling; there was talk of an underclass. A series of horrendous crimes fed anxieties that society was in some way falling apart. Social commentators and politicians began to question the liberalization of society which had so changed family morality. Feminism was heavily implicated in their scenarios of doom.

As a journalist writing throughout this period, it was impossible not to notice what was happening. If women had been the leading political subjects of the 1970s, men became the political problem of the 1990s. Subtly, men and their dilemmas had moved centre-stage; no longer willingly standing aside while women took priority but increasingly expressing concern at having been moved aside. The changes affecting men and the changes men themselves were making now occupied the centre of attention in a strange echo of what had happened to women twenty years previously. Whatever you made of it, there was no way this was the same society as that originally described by feminism. These changes made feminism’s theoretical assumptions seem questionable, its political aims problematic and its expectation that men should cheer at the sidelines while women ran the race to the top, naïve.

Nor were men so willing to accept feminism’s version of themselves; the days of genial masochism were over. In the 1970s they might have shared a sense of themselves as consistently advantaged over women. Now many were questioning this, alongside a growing belief that women have wrested power and advantages from those who are already diminished. As this new mood began to surface, feminism could have re-evaluated its previous assumptions. Instead, it tried to fit the changing landscape into the old models, ridiculing the idea of a male crisis, and taking men’s complaints as further proof of their intransigence. What else would you expect from threatened potentates? This was typical of feminism’s reluctance to let go of certain fundamental tenets: the insistence on the primacy of gender, a reluctance to rethink power relations, a refusal to abandon those old assumptions about oppression.

Only one writer came up with a viable idea to deal with this new male mood, but what a useful idea it was! ‘Backlash’, a term taken from the title of Susan Faludi’s book (1991), threw feminism a lifeline just when it might have sunk. In many ways, Backlash, the book, is impressive. It has a firm grasp of the social and economic movements of the 1980s. Faludi looks both at the cultural representations of women, in newspaper articles, films, sitcoms and so on, as well as at the minutiae of women’s earnings and women’s political activities. Setting the two against each other, she concludes that women’s political and economic progress was paralleled by a series of growing preoccupations which operated to undermine women’s progress – stereotypes such as the childless career woman who is not only a tragic figure but also potentially a mad and dangerous one, as portrayed by Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction (1987).

When Faludi interpreted expressions of hostility to feminism in terms of a backlash against women’s achievements, however she handed feminism a most impressive weapon against accepting that society had really changed. From her perspective, it was possible to interpret any number of phenomena, from films to newspaper concerns with career women, to hesitancy over positive discrimination programmes, as manifestations of a deeper underlying principle: male resistance to female progress. With a concept like this to play with, the idea that a new order might emerge from women’s changing status interacting with rapid changes in men’s lives was simply ruled out of court. What remained intact was the idea of men’s structural power over women which they would fight to hold on to at all costs. For many feminists, the idea that all men have power over all women remains fundamental, in spite of male protests to the contrary. From this perspective, the proposition that men might be experiencing some kind of crisis of their own is just part of an attempt to derail the needs of the truly powerless group.

Here I could see I was seriously travelling in a different direction. Many women fell on the idea of backlash as the new feminism, whereas I disliked its assumption that men would inevitably seek to oppose and challenge women’s equality. But I wasn’t surprised that the idea was so popular. Such assumptions were everywhere, especially in what I have called ‘womanism’, a sort of popularized version of feminism which acclaims everything women do and disparages men. Womanism is feminism’s vulgate. It asserts that women are the oppressed or the victims and never the collaborators in the ‘bad’ things that men do. It entails a double standard around sexuality where women’s sexual self-expression is seen as necessary and even desirable, but men’s is seen as dangerous or even disgusting. Womanism is by no means confined to a tiny, politically motivated bunch of man-hating feminists, but is a regular feature of mainstream culture. It fuels the tabloids and the broadsheets alike. Womanism is a convenient response to many of the uglier aspects of the great convulsions shaking modern society; the very convulsions that are, in other aspects, delivering what feminism demanded.

Of course, many men, especially social commentators, have not responded any better. They have indulged in nostalgia and made various attempts to push the genie back into the bottle. They made it easy for feminism to justify ignoring the changes. But both sides seemed to me to be insisting that there was only one relevant question for understanding sexual relationships: given the gender divide, which sex has power?

I knew that I had finally crossed some invisible boundary when, after New Labour came to power in May 1997, I began to feel so ambivalent about the activities of feminists at the highest level of government. The establishment of a women’s unit and the appointment of a women’s ministry did not fill me with joy and enthusiasm, nor did the sight of ‘Blair’s Babes’, the huge increase in the number of female MPs ensured by the policy of all-women shortlists. Of course I was pleased to see all those women at last changing the appearance of the Houses of Parliament and promising to change the culture too. I ought to have been delighted to see people with the same history as myself now able to argue the feminist corner, fighting for greater equality between the sexes of all levels of society. So why feel uneasy?

This was not the usual radical unease – that feminists in government are prepared to do too little, are too cautious, too ready to kowtow to the limitations imposed by a government determined to carry majority consent with it at all times; instead, it was caused by the conflict between the certainties of this new feminist regime and my own perception that there were real social changes underway no longer easily understood by these feminist ideas. I thought we needed to look at what was happening to the sexes, without the preconceptions that one group still has power and the other needs special privileges to compensate for this. Yet here was a women’s unit confidently telling us it would champion ‘women’s interests’, apparently taking it for granted that we all knew what these were, so that we would finally be on the way to that elusive equality. The unit took for granted as truth that very rhetoric which I was beginning to question.

While these tendencies were steadily building a power base, I had been travelling in the opposite direction. I’d let go of the fundamental proposition that women are by definition oppressed. I began to wonder what it means to have institutions fighting for ‘women’s interests’ at the beginning of the new millennium. But no discussion was forthcoming. Everyone seemed to know what women’s interests were, from types of childcare, through assumptions about what women want and what men are, to the continued need for privileging women in order to further their equality. In contrast, I wanted a more honest appraisal about whether women are consistently discriminated against and what different women really want now in terms of work, childcare and mothering.

Once you let go of feminism’s fundamental propositions, the world looks very different. In the West in the 1990s the meaning of gender has changed and so too has its significance in relation to other aspects of society. Interpreting these changes from the perspective of an unchanging model of male power seemed to be less and less tenable. Instead I could see situations where men were really becoming vulnerable and women potent. And I was worried that because it did not share this realization, feminism could end up allying itself with socially divisive and bigoted ideologies which attack and blame poor men for all society’s problems.

So this is the complex context of men’s and women’s relationships as we enter the new millennium. Many aspects of the feminist vision are within grasp but not in the form originally envisaged. Instead of the rout of men sought by the radical feminists or the cosy co-operation envisaged by the socialist feminists, the 90s has been a sexually uncomfortable and sometimes antagonistic time. Oliver James, the psychiatrist, has described it as a time of ‘gender rancour’. There is much confusion about how to interpret this antagonism and neither sex has covered itself in glory when trying to do so. Some women have fallen back on old simplicities about men’s power and women’s moral superiorities. Some men have called for traditional solutions so that they can feel comfortable again.

This book is a detailed account of what has been happening between the sexes. What is the truth about the so-called male crisis? Is it an illusion? Or has men’s position really changed for the worse? If so, is this descent of man anything to do with the ascent of woman? What has been feminism’s contribution to these complex economic changes? Has it been useful in keeping gender in mind or has it simply hung on to its old ideologies and policies, involving a problematic blindness to the most vulnerable groups of men? And if blind to the different degrees of vulnerability of men, is it possible that feminism might have helped demonize certain groups, disguising rather than illuminating what is really happening in society.

This book has three key themes: families and parenting; the increasingly problematic socialization of boys and young men; and the fraught area of sexual relations. In each it is clear that feminism clings to the fundamental tenet that women are by definition the oppressed party. In each case this obscures what is really happening and can produce public reactions and social policies which can be retrograde and divisive. And in each case, by clinging to its old tenets, feminism fails to see that it has been successful, that it has changed society in deep and unforeseen ways. It is time that feminism faced up to the problems of its success.

So first I examine where feminism came from, why it was necessary in the 1970s and the ideas that drove it on (Chapter 1 (#u8baa3200-8dac-5b24-851d-17ff494b49e1)). In Chapter 2 (#u0ab57162-6ea6-5e85-a588-01aab094268e) I look at the tidal wave of social emancipation that resulted and how feminism’s fundamental ideas spread into the area of personal interaction where perhaps they were not as illuminating as they had been in the public areas of work, leisure and politics. Feminism’s demand for women’s rights began to become problematic and Chapter 3 (#u91a512fa-ad28-51bf-995e-77df8dbe13a1) looks at the success feminism had despite, rather than because of, its best intentions. The whirlwind of economic change in the 1980s, which bears the name of a woman, ‘Thatcherism’, delivered women the economic role that feminism demanded but without the accompanying social benefits and at the direct cost of many men. Families and communities were torn apart and by the 1990s men had become a problem.

In Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo), I look at this unexpected turn in sexual relations and how feminism’s response was to deny rather than face up to the crisis of masculinity, to the fact that men were being forced to change by economic realities. This was a missed opportunity; hadn’t feminism demanded that traditional male values and behaviour should change? But it was hostile economic forces, not feminism, which brought this about. So when (Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)) men appeared vulnerable, with a significant increase in the suicide rate, feminism had no help to offer. In fact, men were losing moral authority in the family and on the public stage, a change which should have had an entirely positive effect on the balance of power between the genders (Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) and Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)). Unfortunately, the centre of moral certainty was gravitating towards women (Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)), not just swinging against men. It produced a situation where on the one hand some men identified with the self-mockery of Nick Hornby and Men Behaving Badly, and, on the other, women adopted the posture of superwoman, and no one quite believed the rhetoric.

Women were unsure of what it all meant and many found it easier to take refuge in ‘womanism’ than to take seriously a growing crisis of masculinity (Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)), so it is not surprising that womanism gave birth to a reaction, a call for the need to reassert traditional masculine values and male authority (Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)). This confrontation of views, of reasserting the traditional emotional divisions between the sexes, however, was and is profoundly out of touch with how parenting is being done, with the choices both sexes are making, with the way in which young males are being socially stigmatized and in the conduct of sexuality. These simplifications about gender have turned out to be worse than useless in explaining what is really going on. In fact, they have been actively misleading, disguising other problems which needed to be recognized. So the final chapters of this book are devoted to examining each of these in turn. I look at how social problems involving young men and boys are not caused by gender in a simple way but because they are at the sharp end of dramatic changes in the mix of our society (Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo) and Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)). Around parenting too (Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo) and Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)), gender simplifications have muddied our perceptions, preventing us from recognizing how people are living their lives and what really concerns them. Finally I look at how gender relations are in fact much more complex and muddled. When it comes to some of the controversial sexual issues of the times – sexual harassment (Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)) and date rape (Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)) – the old polarities of men as powerful oppressors and women as passive victims simply will no longer work.

In short, feminism has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the brave women who fought its first battles. Its future in the new millennium is to face up to the problems of its success, and to see gender as just one possible reason for social and personal conflicts rather than an all-encompassing cause. But if it is going to be capable of making these changes, it will first have to let go of its sacred cows.

Chapter 1 (#ulink_a14cbb4a-cd35-5053-866a-488c95854664)THE ASSAULT ON UNEARNED MALE POWER

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.