Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

People who were very damaged by personal experiences found a place to feel powerful. The more oppressed they could claim to be, the more right they had to speak. It is no longer heresy to point out how virtually everyone who identified with feminism had some level of problem with male power, for that was the nature of the movement. Autobiographies by women like Gloria Steinem (Revolution from Within, 1992) show both how women had problems and why. But there was always a fine line between those who had a problem yet nevertheless kept their eyes on the wider picture, and those who were seeking some kind of compensation for previous damage. It was often difficult to draw that line very clearly. Perhaps those who did most to effect changes for women were creatively damaged, but there must have been enough empathy with those who were seriously damaged for their use of guilt to silence and inhibit others.

What resulted were endless unproductive, unresolved discussions where the logic of the feminist rhetoric of male oppression in the most personal began to emerge. If men are the oppressors, did that mean that any sexual relationship with them was oppressive? Was any male expression of sexual interest the act of a dangerous predator? Was any expression of male sexuality the same as its most brutal expression in crimes like rape? There were some groups of women who answered yes to all these questions. Bonkers, perhaps, but not so wildly out of step that every other feminist silenced them. Rather it was the other way round. Active feminists who lived with men, loved men, had children with them, fell sullenly silent. Life was too short to waste time arguing with your supposed allies when the overarching political culture of the time was so antagonistic.

The weaknesses of the rhetoric which had led logically to this point began to emerge but it didn’t stop the bandwagon from rolling on. In the 1980s, partly as a response to the extreme conservatism of the government, there was a mushrooming of radical socialist councils which incorporated much of this rhetoric into their own politics. It was here – looking to America – that the flesh was put on the bones of anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies aimed at challenging prejudice and power in situations which might in the past have been accepted as natural. In England it never quite became strong enough to deserve the title of ‘political correctness’ but it still appeared to many as an unwarranted intrusion into situations which many people thought were just too diverse and personal to call for such intervention. Had discrimination against women remained blatant, these legislative initiatives might yet have come to fruition, but by the end of the 1980s social and economic realities began to change dramatically. The economy suddenly delivered many of the objectives which feminism had aimed at, even if not quite in the form wanted. This time the arguments about covert discrimination wouldn’t quite wash. The world of gender expectations appeared to be turning upside down and feminism had few tools for understanding what had happened.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_1539e5f3-3a2f-59e1-b1fe-c4b0b7dd141e)A NEW GENDER LANDSCAPE

At the same time as feminism steeled itself to do battle with those intransigent aspects of male behaviour apparently standing in the way of women’s progress, the UK economy and society were undergoing seismic changes. Men’s economic supremacy, supposedly the basis for all other oppressive behaviour, was crumbling and with it the sex roles originally described by feminism. The widespread support for the conservative values of Thatcherism meant that feminists had failed to recognize the radical changes affecting women’s position, let alone to register the changes affecting men. By the 1990s these dramatic upheavals could no longer be missed. When the dust settled, it was clear the gender landscape would never be the same again.

Feminism had come into being to attack a world of male privilege, a world where the economy was driven by male work and where individual homes mirrored this economic reality. In the 1980s this ceased to be true in any simple sense; the sexual composition of the workforce changed out of all recognition. What happened far exceeded any steady incremental increase of women in the labour market. It was so rapid that by the beginning of the 1990s there were as many women working as men. All projections suggest this is a continuing trend; there will soon be more women than men in the workforce.

How had these changes come about? And why did feminists dismiss them as insufficient and pay them such scant attention? The second question is easier to answer. Feminists were much too preoccupied with the superficial lack of change and even the possibility that gains might be reversed. Nor were they alone in missing signs of revolution. Few ordinary citizens understood these changes until they were fully upon us. In the UK most people were bedazzled by the economic boom in the 1980s and failed to notice the deeper changes. This boom was, in fact, underwritten by money raised from selling off North Sea oil resources, thus disguising profound economic difficulties. But at the time, the image of the yuppy, in particular the male stockbroker, embodied a thriving economy. This was also the time when the first images of highly successful career women began to appear, the so-called ‘post-feminist career woman’, feminists dismissed her as atypical: the city profiteers were just a modern version of an old theme.

In fact, behind the façade of a buoyant economy based on relatively unchanging sexual patterns, long-term changes were dramatically altering the balance of power between the sexes. The generally agreed term now for what has been happening is the ‘feminization of the economy’. What it describes is the fact that although the actual number of jobs has remained unchanged since 1970, the types of jobs, the way they are done and who does them have changed. And what is most important here is the change in the ratio of men to women. Women’s employment, which had been steadily increasing since the 1970s when the service sector expanded, accelerated in the 1980s at the same time as the number of men employed fulltime declined. All in all, since 1970, large numbers of men have left the workforce. There was also a huge increase in the amount of part-time work, much of this going to women. There are now three million more part-time jobs than in the 1970s while, over the same period, men have lost over three million full-time jobs. The proportion of men employed full-time declined from 62 per cent in 1970 to 50 per cent in 1996 (Demos Report, Tomorrow’s Women, 1997).

These changes in the sexual composition of the workforce were caused by several converging factors in which the ideological contribution of feminism was relatively minor. Feminism certainly made them possible: equal opportunities legislation meant it was no longer legally possible for employers to exclude women from certain jobs, and feminism had broken down social prejudices. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than attitudes towards working mothers. Until feminist values became established, social disapproval made it extremely difficult for middle-class mothers to work. Now the employment rates for mothers is growing faster than the employment rates for women without children. Nearly half of all women with pre-school-age children are working today, compared with a quarter fifteen years ago, a trend which accelerated throughout the 1980s. Between 1985 and 1991, the UK had the fastest rise in employment among women with children under ten in the European Union.

The real engine of this revolution was deeper economic forces. There was a shift from direct production to an economy based on the finance and service sectors which led to the complete closure of certain types of industry, particularly heavy industry. Some traditional male jobs in mining and the steel industry disappeared altogether. Since 1950, five million jobs had gone from industries producing goods. Jobs depending on physical strength, such as construction or the Army, have vanished in their millions. As a consequence of these shifts, in the past fifteen years, two million men have disappeared from the workforce (Independent, 2 January 1996). On top of these long-term changes, recession and the development of global markets also played a profound role. Both favoured industries which could shift production from base to base and ‘down-size’ their workforces at speed in order to stay in business. The result was ‘flexibilization’, a shift to a culture of short-term contracts, and more part-time work, changes in working patterns which had a profound impact on men.

Actually it is not strictly accurate to talk about the destruction of heavy industry. Those difficult, dirty and arduous industries which relied on skills traditionally associated with men disappeared from the UK but were relocated to the Third World. That sort of work is now performed wherever the production cost is lowest. So Third World countries bear the cost both in environmental terms – the exploitation of their raw materials - and in terms of human health. In the UK, though, these jobs appear to have gone for good. The jobs in finance and information technology which replaced them are gender-blind, or even favour women because of their dexterity and communication skills. Increasingly big companies have become multinational or global, and prefer to work with part-time or short-term contracts which allow them to move base quickly.

It is hard to say definitively how much the huge increase in women workers, especially part-time women workers, was driven by demand from women themselves for such work and how much by these economic changes. There was probably a meshing of interests. Throughout the 1980s the culture of permanent contracts for full-time jobs gave way to short-term contracts and part-time employment which was both cheaper and more easily dispensed with as companies maintained profit levels in a recession. Certainly women were more prepared for these developments when they came. They were more used to career breaks, had often argued that part-time work might solve childcare problems and had already suggested employers stop valuing unilinear careers and look instead at the overall ‘portfolio’. Indeed, feminism had always been vociferous about the way the old male career pattern thwarted human potentiality in both sexes. ‘The assumption that people want to change careers, that they want time out of work, that they want to learn new things, go to college, have kids, move in and out of the labour market, rather than stay fixed in one place for forty years, with a gold watch at the end of it, all of those transformations are associated with women’ (Bea Campbell, ‘Analysis’, BBC Radio 4, 1994).

Feminism’s interest in increased part-time work and increased flexibility, however, was connected with calls for increased involvement in parenting, and a different relationship between work and home. Such ideas were and remain one of the most significant progressive discourses on how to live in the new millennium, on how to develop new ways of feeling good about yourself and your contribution to society other than just in terms of work achievement. When feminists were vocal about the need for work flexibility, they couldn’t have known that global capitalism would deliver the goods quite so promptly and quite so unpleasantly. Nor could they have anticipated that the time at which these arrived would coincide with social developments which whipped the rug out from under men’s feet.

Professor Ray Pahl, author of After Success (1995), says that men were hit particularly severely by the needs of the global market for job flexibility. The idea of the unilinear career was the basis of masculine identity. It involved sacrifices, either of the body to physical labour or of the soul to the company, to provide for the family. ‘Contracting out’, ‘down-sizing’ and ‘delayering’ meant the end to steady career paths. Some chose self-employment and some had it thrust upon them, but however it arrived, it marked a shift to personal autonomy in the labour market. ‘Career ladders’ gave way to ‘portfolio careers’ and men were at first unready. Young men now no longer have those same expectations of traditional jobs for life but it took at least a decade to abandon such expectations. Women, however, were already used to interrupted employment. They had learned to market their diverse skills and demanded praise for balancing home and work. Women ‘juggle their lives’, She magazine proclaimed, coining the ultimate ‘80s slogan. Many men were unprepared and even unwilling to accept these new conditions when so much of their identity previously rested on traditional careers. There was more at stake for men than women.

As we shall see in the following chapter, there are many who play down the implications of these developments for gender roles or the levelling of the sexes. The increase is in poorly paid, part-time jobs such as retailing, catering and services, so feminization of the workplace just means more poorly paid female employees. This argument does not hold water. In the 1980s it was certainly true that the biggest increase in the numbers of women working was at the lower-paid end, especially in part-time work. But this was no deployment of some reserve army of labour which could be speedily withdrawn at will: this was a shift to more women permanently in the labour market.

This is still not the full story. In the 1990s there has also been a steady increase in the numbers of women working fulltime and even at the higher-paid end of the economy. Indeed, women appear to be making dramatic progress in the professions; in 1997, 52 per cent of new solicitors were women; 32 per cent of managers and administrators; 34 per cent of health professionals; and 27 per cent of buyers, brokers and sales reps (Demos Report, Tomorrow’s Women, 1997). Given that professional jobs are growing faster than any other occupational group, with women forecast to have 44 per cent of those jobs by 2001, this does not sound as if women are confined to the poorly-paid sector. With girls currently outperforming boys at school and universities, the education gap is also closing and women are likely to be more highly qualified than men. ‘The high skill end of the economy… is finding as many candidates among young women as young men and since the mid-eighties …it has been jobs for women in the full-time sector, in the professional and technical occupations, that have been on the increase’ (Heather Joshi, interview with author, 1998).

Women’s increased role in the economy means that women have more personal wealth than ever before. Two-income families, while often necessary to deal with rising costs, now have great advantages over one-income families. The number of women earning more than their partners has trebled from 1 in 15 in the early 1980s to 1 in 5 by the mid-1990s. Among childless couples with degrees, it is normal for women to provide half the income. In 1996 it was estimated that more than 20 per cent of couples had the woman as the main breadwinner (Focus, March 1998). Women have also made inroads into the corridors of power. There are more women on boards than ever before, and a larger number of women running successful businesses. These are the statistics behind the fact that, for most educated couples now, sexual equality at all levels of life is simply taken for granted.

Although many of these changes may appear to affect only the higher paid, it does not mean they are any the less significant. The old feminist equation that being a woman necessarily entails low income and low status is no longer always true, even if it sometimes is. Feminists cannot have it both ways. Maybe not all women are in well-paid full-time jobs, and maybe it is still more usual for women to be in low-paid part-time work, but not all are, and nor do they of necessity have to be. So one of the vital foundations of feminist argument – that women are always financially disadvantages – has been seriously shaken. As we have seen in the previous chapters, these economic changes also coincided with changes in law and morality which mean that, for the first time in recorded history, women have at least in theory the opportunity to be economically autonomous and to earn money at the same level as their male counterparts. These developments cannot be dismissed just because the poorest women are still at the bottom of the heap; if feminism was premised on the idea that women are always structurally disadvantaged, what happens to that premise if it is no longer true?

In theory these developments do not necessarily have any implications for the relative position of the sexes, but at the beginning of the 1990s, as the recession deepened, the public began to notice the differential effect of these changes on men and women. In the past, a recession would have signalled that the part-time, less protected workforce was about to be laid off. On this occasion, it was the full-time ‘men’s jobs’ which went. At first this was picked up by the media as a temporary phenomenon, the stuff of a classic recession. They began to describe the estates where men hung about idle and depressed, and to interview men who stayed at home while their women worked. Rioting in the early 1990s on several estates in Newcastle, Cardiff and Oxford drew attention to something worse – dangerous anger rooted in enforced idleness. Gradually recognition filtered through that there were communities in which traditional forms of male employment might never return.

Once questions had been asked about how these changes were affecting men and women rather than how they were affecting communities or families or different social classes, it was impossible not to notice that men and women had gradually been affected in opposite ways. Endless articles in the 1980s had documented high-achieving women and women’s new economic and social clout. This had been, in the media cliché, the ‘women’s decade’, with Margaret Thatcher delivering the message that nothing stood between a determined woman and her ambitions. The fact that the markets suddenly began to deliver the kinds of work and working patterns for which feminists had campaigned added to the perception that women were on a roll. Simultaneously, though more difficult to prove, individual women seemed to be buoyed up by a sense of overthrowing the old obstacles to women’s achievements and suddenly finding themselves the prototype employee for global capitalism.

By the late 1980s men were appearing in the opposite light. The huge increase in male unemployment, both in heavy industrial and small businesses, accompanied by visible signs of recession, suddenly revealed men as disproportionately affected. Psychologically they were unprepared. The media began to note the effect on households where unemployed men refused to consider taking ‘demeaning’ women’s jobs as well as refusing to help in the home while the women struggled with both. Feminism had given women the confidence to move into masculine areas, combining work and motherhood, seeing new opportunities in new work patterns. Men, by contrast, were experiencing their work changes, this so-called feminization of labour, more like a smack in the eye.

Evidence of male difficulties came from every quarter, including statistics on suicide and male homelessness. It also came from the so-called lucky ones, the employed. Frustration and resentment were rife, especially over any calls for positive discrimination. The Equal Opportunities Commission began to receive complaints from men; by the mid-1990s it was receiving more complaints from men than women.

The concept of a male backlash does not begin to address what was happening here. A report published in 1995 by Parents in Work showed that men were suffering from very real insecurity, not some imagined loss of prestige. Britain had the longest working hours in Europe and the lowest productivity. Some feminists joked about these statistics; they proved women’s suspicions that overtime is often empty macho time, an ethos expressed clearly in an advertisement for an engineering firm spotted by Professor Pahl: ‘people with outside interests need not apply.’ But these long, unproductive hours were evidence of a desperate desire to hold on to jobs at all costs. At the time, Ray Pahl said: ‘People are scared of not being seen as good workers although in a rapidly changing market, they are not clear what that means. The traditional male career has collapsed. One response is extreme competitiveness, ruthlessness about getting to the top and getting vast salaries. But the other is anxiety and even disillusionment about work altogether.’ According to surveys conducted in the mid-1990s, such distrust and anxiety was endemic, a crisis of confidence which spread across all classes and age groups (Demos Report, No Turning Back, 1995).

Demos, the left-liberal think-tank which conducted a survey of attitudes among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, elsewhere referred to these changes as merely ‘women’s enhanced role in the economy’ (Tomorrow’s Women, 1997), a gradual evolution towards a more level playing field. The public, however, did not always see it that way. By the time knowledge of these changes entered public consciousness, they already had a particular spin on them, connected with general anxieties about society and what was happening to the family. None of this was happening in isolation. Other social changes were pushing men into the forefront of social concerns: recession and unemployment; depression and school failure; changing family patterns; the increase in violent crime with young men as both its perpetrators and victims; and a preoccupation with yobs and their ever-younger counterparts, ‘evil-boys’. Each crisis further undermined the old feminist way of viewing men as potentates. Increasingly they were appearing as both cause and symptom of a society in crisis.

Perhaps these economic changes would not have been taken up as so critical for men had they not coincided with growing insecurities about the family. However, they were experienced by most ordinary people as part and parcel of difficult times. When Britain entered the 1990s, it entered a dark period both socially and politically. Scarcely a day went past without news of ever more shocking acts of violence and immorality: stories of increasing lawlessness, joy-riding, riots on estates, drunken violence and property destruction. Many of these stories concerned younger and younger children. There were twelve-yearolds who had killed children when their stolen car veered out of control; there were lawless youngsters intimidating estates; there were thirteen-year-olds accused of rape. Kenneth Clarke, then Home Secretary, vowed that his government would deal with ‘nasty persistent, juvenile little offenders’. This violence among children seemed to symbolize a rot which had spread from adults into the very core of society. In February 1993 came the ultimate tragedy – the murder of two-year-old James Bulger, abducted, tortured and sadistically killed by two ten-year-old boys.

Jamie Bulger’s murder was set against the background of the changing economy and the changes in domestic life. For many it was the apotheosis of a time out of joint. It signified the ruin of old communities, of poverty and increasingly harsh conditions. Above all, it was seen as a crisis of morality, a moment when we were invited to ask whether we were rearing monsters. ‘The case fills us’, said A. N. Wilson in the Evening Standard, ‘with the uneasy dread that this horrifying crime is somehow symptomatic of something which has happened to our society at large.’ The Bulger murder came to symbolize what happens in a society of divorced parents, single mothers, unemployed fathers, drunkenness, and no authority or discipline. ‘Few can doubt the family is in trouble,’ pronounced the Sunday Times in March 1993. ‘Parliament and the people are now casting around for solutions to what is seen as a problem of epidemic disorder – rising crime, intrusive squalor, spreading welfare dependency, collapsed community.’ This anxiety about the family would frame all further discussion of gender roles.

Of course, ever since the first stirrings of feminism there had been a vocal minority who warned of the dire consequences of women’s push for greater economic and legal autonomy from the family. But even in the heyday of Thatcher this remained a relatively marginal, backward-looking position. If one dares use old Marxist terms, libertarian and feminist views were still ‘hegemonic’, meaning that the emphasis was still on the obstacles to women’s full independence, and crime and social disorder were still seen as stemming from poverty and hardship not from the disintegration of the traditional family.

Increasingly, however, politicians of both Left and Right began to express concern that many social problems had their source in the demise of the traditional family and men’s displacement within that. ‘Across the political, moral, intellectual and religious spectrum there is today agreement that small, warm, caring families are the one way of virtually guaranteeing that children do not end up as criminals, but they seem to be a dying breed. The abnormal family seems now to be the norm’ (Sunday Times 1993). As Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said in 1992: ‘There is something very wrong with our society …criminals of 10 or 11 don’t just happen. Broken homes, bad housing, poor education, no job or training, lack of hope or opportunity – affect the way a child develops.’

Clearly, optimism about the liberalizing changes of the 1960s and ‘70s – including the vast improvements in women’s position – had unravelled. The ‘enhanced role’ of women in the economy was not seen in isolation but alongside everything else. Some feminists continued to focus on further obstacles to their advancement, their freedoms, but this old story of the male oppressor no longer resonated in the same way, no longer ‘galvanised the imagination’ as Liam Hudson has put it (TLS