Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

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?

Chapter 2 (#ulink_bfc5c2eb-7506-5259-948d-e1286fe2922a)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 of the reality of human existence’.

Popular magazines like Cosmopolitan carried their own version of the feminist message, asserting the need for women to become more powerful in the bedroom as well as in the workplace. These magazines saw themselves as the voice of modern women, women who had a right to be equal, who were striking out for careers, who demanded a sex life to equal men’s. Cosmopolitan may have derided dreary feminist politicos, but the main voice of modern women was feminism. It was feminism which supplied the vision of working women, and raised questions about the obstacles still in women’s way. It was feminism which argued the case for overthrowing the old repressions in pursuit of greater self-knowledge and greater autonomy.

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 changes were not always easy to see, especially if you were in the thick of them and experiencing more resistance than benefit. Robin Morgan says:

The real changes have occurred in consciousness, in lifestyle, in the labour force, in consciousness about work, in consciousness about violence against women, about sexuality, about recognising different kinds of families. There has been an extraordinary shift in consciousness in what is historically a very short period of time. When it’s your life it seems like a damned long period of time and you think, ‘Let’s get on with this. I’ve only got one life here, I’d like to see a little progress.’ (In S. Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 1997)

In addition, visible changes were not always easy to interpret as progressive. The increase in numbers of women working did not seem to have appreciably helped women’s lot; in the 1980s feminists became much more aware of how motherhood affected women’s role in the economy. Statistics showed that women were simply not reaching the same levels as men, and the difficulties of combining childcare and work seemed almost insurmountable. There was no real evidence that childcare would become a political priority. So, throughout the 1980s, most feminists insisted that the changes were superficial. Women, they pointed out, continued to earn on average only 75 per cent of the male salary. Career women met a ‘glass ceiling’ in their professions and corporate cultures. Increased career opportunities, without a redefinition of men’s role in the home, looked like a double burden for women rather than a liberation.

Some of the improvements in female visibility were also double-edged. Feminists often disagreed about whether a female icon like Madonna, pushing at the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ sexual behaviour for women, made them more powerful or exploitable. Sexual liberation seemed to have jumped out of feminists’ hands and become a much more problematic force, sometimes even producing hardcore pornography and films of grotesque violence against women. In 1984, Dressed to Kill coincided with the activities of the Yorkshire Ripper in the North of England, suggesting that whatever gains feminism might have been making on equal opportunities, expectations and cultural representation, misogyny was still rampant. And cultural representations aside, women’s interests were still poorly represented in politics and law; women and girls still could expect hostility and even defeat when bringing charges of harassment, rape, domestic violence or child abuse. Superficially at least, not much had changed since Germaine Greer had provocatively declared that all men hate women.

Certainly, what these phenomena seemed to require was a greater depth in the understanding of both overt and covert oppression. Women were clearly constrained by more than overt discrimination; they were also constrained by deep prejudices and their own internalizing of negative attitudes. Policies to challenge these would help women achieve equality.

So although formal equality was coming within reach, there was no retreat from an analysis of male power. Rather, this was the period when it was extended into more personal areas such as domestic violence, pornography, rape and sexual harassment as work. These were all seen as areas of women’s ‘oppression’ which had previously been invisible and had to be pulled into the light of day. Like domestic violence, they had been hidden through shame, or, like sexual harassment, rendered invisible because they were accepted as a natural part of relations between the sexes. Aspects of taken-for-granted male behaviour came under scrutiny: sexist attitudes towards women as inferior or available to be used by men; domestic violence where men felt they had a right to chastize and control their wives; rape where men sometimes claimed that they knew better than the women involved what their victims had wanted; or sexual harassment where a man might use sexualized behaviour or language to degrade or humiliate a woman. These seemed to embody the deeper obstacles to achieving total equality, rooted in assumptions about masculinity and femininity.

This was not inventing problems where there were none. Women were drawn to feminism not only because of issues like pay differentials but also because it made sense of bad experiences in their personal lives where they had been restricted, belittled or even brutalized by traditional assumptions about masculine behaviour. Feminism insisted that the analysis of male power, originally mobilized to tackle overt discrimination at work and in the family, was relevant to these deeper areas; these activities expressed the contempt and hostility which was directed towards women because of their inferior status. Power, they said, was working at the points of most intimate connection between the sexes, and in the 1980s most feminists agreed.

Natasha Walter in her book The New Feminism (1998) suggests that present-day feminism should ignore this former preoccupation with challenging masculine and feminine stereotypes and concentrate instead on the ‘material inequalities’. But she is ignoring important insights. Oppression based on the expression and exercise of conventional notions of masculinity in sexual relations is not only more subtle and deeper than the overt discrimination practised in the job market, it is often more damaging and demoralizing. Eating disorders, for example, are rampant among girls because of the emphasis placed on women’s sexual desirability defined in terms of her conformity to the prevailing body ideal. Disregard for the contribution a woman makes in the home and as a mother can lead to her being badly exploited and treated with contempt. Assumptions about what is ‘normal’ in sexual relations can lead to instances of harassment and justifications for the use of force and fear. All show the deep way in which personal, emotional and sexual interactions can be an expression of the hostility and contempt directed towards women in an unequal culture.

These are important insights still not fully integrated into perceptions of society, but the politics which flowed from some of these concerns were often highly problematic. The most forceful of these were the anti-sexist, anti-harassment and positive discrimination campaigns in the 1980s. These were about legislating around the perceived relationships of power and oppression. If there had been problems before with applying civil rights rhetoric to the situation between men and women, they certainly got a whole lot worse when applied to these more nebulous areas. Even before drastic changes in sex roles, there were problems with converting perceptions about male power into actual campaigns about personal sexual behaviour and attitudes.

The personal may be political but should the political involve itself with the personal? In the intimate connections between men and women, where attitudes and behaviour are more relevant than economic and legal status, oppression and discrimination become much more difficult to prove. Away from obvious economic and legal discriminations based on gender, the intimate connections between men and women are more muddied by individual differences and lifestyle, by emotional agendas. Prescriptions for appropriate behaviour become difficult in this context. Not all relationships are built on the same chemistry and anyway there is the question of how much the ‘feminine’ draws out its masculine counterpart. As Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander pointed out in the New Statesman (1980): ‘The ropes which bind women are the hardest to cut, because they are woven with so many of our own desires.’

It was the extension of the model of male power into more nebulous aspects of behaviour which eventually lost feminism much of its wider support. But by then feminism was in no mood to consider that its analysis might be ham-fisted and inappropriate for the subtle differences in how individuals negotiate ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ roles in their own lives. By the mid-1980s, Thatcherism, with its ferocious ideological drive against the ‘nanny state’, had taken hold. Liberals feared this was an attempt to reverse the changes which had begun to occur in the family and sexual behaviour. They suspected a will to return to a more conventional family which would be available to care for the casualties from a dismembered welfare state. This was not a moment for backsliding. Instead, feminism sought to strengthen alliances with other groups who considered themselves targeted.

The idea that aspects of masculine behaviour could oppress women was an important insight and one which showed that class and material disadvantages were not the only ones that mattered. But it was also a Trojan horse. What came with it were the disaffected, the marginal groups, the ‘oppressed’ who found a natural home in a movement which defined itself as the rebellion of the oppressed against their oppression. By a giant non-sequitur, the logic ran that if oppression was broader than actual economic discrimination, then any group which felt discriminated against by the status quo must have a home in a movement which had made the subjective experience of oppression a valid basis for not just protest but action. Thus feminism became, in its own words, a ‘rainbow alliance’ offering a home to any group which considered itself marginal to a white heterosexual male norm: blacks, gays, the disabled. This was in spite of the fact that the sort of discrimination experienced by, for example, a disabled person might have very different roots from the oppression resulting from gender.

My memory of feminism in this period was that it was both exhilarating and mad. Exhilarating because it was a very creative time. Women were not just defining problems for the first time but were constantly coming up with new ideas to improve women’s position. Many policies and ideas we now take for granted as objectives of liberal or socialist governments were thrashed out then in workshops and seminars without funding and without formal organizations. Many of the criticisms of the old Labour and its workerist ideologies came first from feminism which spearheaded the idea of democratic alliances. Women freely volunteered their time and energy to attend conferences and workshops to discuss anything and everything which might improve women’s position; few imagined there would be any immediate rewards for themselves.

It was also a wildly frustrating time. At this point, feminism attracted some really very disturbed people and the amazing thing in retrospect was how tolerant feminism was of some crazy excesses. Feminists objected to how the tabloid press in the 1980s characterized their activities as being part of the ‘loony left’, poking fun at the way in which feminism and the Left abased themselves in the face of ever-escalating claims of oppression. But this was not all misrepresentation. At one conference, Linda Bellos, who later mysteriously became leader of Lambeth Council, listed her oppressions to an audience rendered sullen and passive by her superior claims to speak: ‘I am black, a woman, lesbian, Jewish, Polish.’ ‘You are not disabled… yet,’ countered one participant who still had the energy to protest.