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1
Enter Women
Let me begin this book with an autobiographical comment: when I went to university in 1964 there was no such thing as an explicitly feminist presence. Indeed, there were not very many women in universities, let alone women teaching a subject explicitly and unreservedly about women. At my alma mater (the London School of Economics) there were about eight male undergraduates for every female, and to say that the culture was vigorously masculine would be no exaggeration. The politics, the economics and the sociology that I was taught were all about the public world and the world of men. It simply did not occur to anyone, myself included, that it might be important to consider questions of gender in our discussions. Women, when they were mentioned at all, had a poor academic press from my left-wing (or at least Labour-voting) teachers, since women, it was stated, were more likely to vote Conservative than men. In those days of the white hot heat of Harold Wilsonâs Technological Revolution, anyone who stood in the way of the achievement of a meritocratic and technocratic social democracy was not to be trusted.
But women were as essential to young (and old) men in 1964 as they have ever been, and just as women barely appeared in the academic curriculum, so they were central to non-academic discussions. In the early 1960s, the rules of sexual relationships were being re-written, and my generation grew older within a set of shifting ideas about sexual behaviour. The Pill had just begun to be widely available, and widely discussed, and thus to a young, cosmopolitan cohort of students, it really did appear as if sexual intercourse, together with the Beatles, had been invented in 1964. Philip Larkinâs ironic, and wry, poem about the changing moral climate of the 1960s (âSexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-threeâ)1 caught some of the atmosphere of the time; what it left out was the resistance of women to the male construction of the new standards and the sheer confusion of the time, as differences of generation became politicized in a way unique to the post-war world. Into this mĂȘlĂ©e older voices occasionally intervened; I remember the famous Agony Aunt Evelyn Home sweeping all before her in a vivid denunciation of sexual liberalization as defined by men. Faced with an audience almost exclusively made up of young men, determined to mock this determined advocate of pre-marital chastity, Evelyn Home argued a case for women that was seldom heard in the portals of our lecture theatres.
However persuasive her oratory, Evelyn Home could not change or prevent the shifts in ideas â and, of course, in behaviour â that took place in the following decade. Sex and sexuality became an explicit part of the agenda of the West, and by 1970 the rules and expectations that had governed the early 1960s had either disappeared or begun to disappear. As numerous histories of the 1960s have pointed out, by the end of the decade sexual codes had changed, âpermissivenessâ had arrived and the explicit discussion of sexuality had become part of the lingua franca of the West.2 Inevitably, a generation grew up believing that it had invented sex and, as firmly, believing that the past had been one long dark history of the repression of sexuality. Sexual âfreedomâ, the sexually explicit and sexual availability became synonymous with an expectation of personal liberation and the pursuit of individual happiness. Older voices (on all sides of the political spectrum) could point out that having heterosexual sex was nothing particularly novel and offered as much a lack of freedom as it did the promise of freedom, but these voices were often dismissed as âPuritanâ, or even worse âup-tightâ.
This re-invention of sexuality took place, for the West, within the context of political systems still dominated by East-West rivalry and a fear of the threat of Soviet Communism as great as any in the 1950s. Indeed, one essential and salient point about the 1960s is that the national and inter-national politics of the decade, rather than the politics of inter-personal relations, were still locked into the dynamic of the early twentieth century and the Westâs terror of Communism. What brought the political and the personal together for many in the 1960s was the polarization of political opinion about the intervention of the United States in Vietnam. On the one hand, the 1960s had seen the rapid decolonization of the old Western empires, whilst on the other, the worldâs major power carried out a massive, and essentially imperial, engagement in a non-Western country. The political legitimacy of the West, which had been saved by the victory over German fascism, now came under fire for its own authoritarianism, and, as some commentators saw it, its own version of fascism.3
The question of Vietnam thus became a rallying cry for a generation, just as the Spanish Civil War had been a focus in the 1930s. Because the United States had become the power of the West in the years after 1945, its politics became the dominating factor for all its allies. But since Vietnam was not the only issue which beset the United States in the 1960s, other questions â particularly about race and sexuality â rapidly became internationally significant. The Civil Rights movement in the United States dramatized relations between races in a way previously unknown in the post-war years, whilst the Black Power movement that developed from the struggle for civil rights transformed Western thinking about the construction of racial identities. The politics of the 1960s were dominated by confrontational issues, in which the ideological hegemony of the United States was shattered by internal and external opposition. As the North Vietnamese, the Black Panthers and the student revolutionaries of 1968 pointed out, the military power of the United States might be absolute, but that still left a great deal to discuss and negotiate about the order and the agenda of the social world.4
These turbulent politics, and this stormy decade, left its mark on countries and governments just as assuredly as it made, and often un-made individual lives. For once, the Western academy was intimately and directly involved in these political upheavals. Campuses across the United States were the sites of organized protest about government policy in Vietnam whilst European universities, particularly in France, gave rise to the resurgence of highly critical accounts of government policies. The definitive European case remains that of the Sorbonne, where the domestic arrangements (that is male access to the accommodation of female students) of a new campus at Nanterre became the point of contention that brought a government to crisis and threatened the stability of a whole society. Thus did sex and politics in the 1960s join together to form an explosive mix that radically destabilized both social institutions and social assumptions. The ânewâ interpretation of the world in 1968 was for political and sexual liberation and against the war in Vietnam. A counterculture, which at any other time might have been simply a shift in the behaviour of a generation, acquired not just a political meaning but also a real political power.
Into these events, and within these events, came a further current which arguably has had a more important long-term impact on social life than the protest movements of the 1960s. The current was that of feminism, and the claim by women for their right to self-determination and personal autonomy. It was, like any social movement, complicated and often contradictory, riddled with dissent and fired with messianic zeal. Feminism was in no sense ânewâ to the twentieth century, but it assumed, in the 1960s and the 1970s, a new urgency and a new radicalism that made it a product of its times. If every generation has to re-invent the wheel â or tends to believe that it has just invented the wheel â so feminism in the West in the 1960s and 1970s took some time before it recognized its history and the longevity of the struggle that it represented.
The history of the âresurgenceâ of feminism (as it is often described) in the 1960s has now been fully documented both in fiction and non-fiction. Of all the accounts written of the coming of feminism and the coming to feminism of a new generation, one of the most vivid about the United States is Sara Davidsonâs Loose Change, which captures both some of the excitement and the chaos (whether sexual or intellectual) of the time.5 But to identify that novel as a representative account of second wave feminism carries with it a set of assumptions about feminism, which requires immediate comment. The novel is set in the United States, and is about white, middle-class women who came to feminism through and within the academy. It is not about the world, and worlds, outside that assumptive world, and indeed the novel ends on a note of integration: the characters, having made their protests and lived their lives of adolescent rebellion, become re-integrated into a white, professionally successful, middle-class world.
What has to be recognized, and the point of introducing this novel into a discussion about feminism, is that feminism was always, and is still, a form of protest by women about their exclusion from full citizenship in Western, bourgeois society. Western, post-Enlightenment feminism essentially took issue with the construction of citizenship by that world â a form of citizenship that originally (and still to a certain extent today) excluded women, not necessarily through conscious intention or conscious decision, but through the non-thinking assumption that the people in the public world were all male. Indeed, in many situations and many contexts the term âpeopleâ has actually been interpreted as exclusively male. Thus, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the dominant (although by no means the only) tradition within feminism was one that fought for the extension to women of those rights (for example the vote and access to the professions and higher education) automatically enjoyed by men. Yet even in saying this, what requires comment is that the men with whom women are comparing themselves are white and middle class. No feminist campaigned for entry to the world of the relatively under-privileged manual worker, anymore than the point of comparison in feminist campaigns in the West were the disenfranchised and racial minorities. In her work on the âhiddenâ feminism of working-class women, the British historian Sheila Rowbotham has reminded us that working-class women have a long history of campaigning for their rights (particularly for Trade Union representation and equal workplace rights), but the thrust of her long and distinguished work has been to make the point that, in talking about feminism, we must be aware of its complexity and its different meaning for women in different classes and countries.6
Thus the first point we have to establish in a discussion of feminism is that the term âfeminismâ in the 1990s needs more careful consideration than it received in the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Feminism has become more complex in its traditions, and the very word now demands a measure of deconstruction if we are ever to tease out from it the various appeals that this diverse movement makes to different constituencies. But the very diversity of feminismâs appeal has given to it much of its creative energy; a movement that has always had both furious disputes and rock-solid agreements is one that allows difference and debate. At times the degree of âallowanceâ has occasionally been stretched to breaking point, but what remains is the central, and crucial, organizing principle that gender difference is an essential part of any discussion of the social or symbolic world. Thus between those within and outside feminism is the fundamental division that those within feminism see the world â at least in part â in terms of gender divisions, whilst those outside feminism either refuse or reject the impact of gender difference on individual lives.
It was that assertion of difference, of the radically different experiences of the world of women and men which gave contemporary Western feminism its first great rallying-cry in the late 1960s. The great past of Western feminism â the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir and many others â was known, but only slowly re-discovered.7 What was said, by Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Sheila Rowbotham and Shulamith Firestone (and again â and as ever in the history of feminism â many others), was that contemporary sexual politics denigrated and degraded women, and that this denigration took many forms.8 Reading and reviewing this literature some twenty-five years after its publication still reveals the vitality of the work: at the same time what is now striking about it all is its concern with the West, and its narrowly defined and constructed set of social assumptions. A major target for many of the writers (and this was true in particular of Greer and Millett) was Western culture â in all its forms. A major focus was âhighâ culture, but feminists were equally vociferous in attacks on denigratory aspects of âpopularâ culture such as the Miss World contest. Sexual Politics, Kate Millettâs account of the misogyny of a group of Western writers is definitively about the inadequacies of Western literature. Similarly, Germaine Greerâs The Female Eunuch, whilst being in part a critique of misogyny was also deeply in debt to high bourgeois culture. Whilst Greer was for more heterosexual sexuality (at that point in her career) Millett was advocating a more cautious attitude to heterosexuality, an attitude that was eventually to emerge as explicit lesbianism.9
These works of non-fiction (and Greer and Millett in particular had close formal links to the academy) were matched by a flowering of feminist fiction.10 In part, some of this fiction was a rediscovery of the possibilities of the female bawd, and bawdiness. (Erica Jong, for example, belongs to this tradition and her Fear of Flying epitomised what was seen as female sexual liberation.) But the factor that united the fiction and the non-fiction was, more often than not, a furious plea for womenâs autonomy, and particularly their sexual autonomy. The sexual revolution was found to be, as far as women were concerned, deeply inadequate since the form of sexuality that it prioritized was both heterosexuality and a form of heterosexuality that took for granted male sexual desire for women. The rejection of this organizing perception became a key element of early 1970s feminism: in part the rejection was about the rejection of heterosexuality per se (and the United States in particular saw the emergence of a powerful and vital lesbian literature of which Jill Johnston â the author of Lesbian Nation â was perhaps the best known writer) but it was also about the more complex rejection of a particular form of heterosexuality in which women âsuccumbedâ to ânaturalâ male desire. As was soon pointed out by gay men, this set of assumptions trapped men, quite as much as women, within a straight-jacket of expectations about sexual behaviour. Thus the frantic heterosexuality of the late 1960s was rapidly taken to task by both women and men for the limits, rather than the extended possibilities, that it imposed on human actions.
In the cluster of best-selling feminist works of the early 1970s there is a rich vein of fury at misogyny and a general determination to persuade women to self-realization. Two key slogans that emerged from this time and this literature were âthe personal is the politicalâ and âsisterhood is powerfulâ. (The latter was also the title of a collection of essays by Robin Morgan.)11 Both slogans implicitly endorsed the idea that women were universally oppressed and exploited, and that only through a recognition of this common situation could women change the structures that oppressed them. An argument of Engels, that in marriage women are the proletariat and men the bourgeoisie, was one that had much currency, even outside circles sympathetic to Marxism.12 For some feminists, any participation in a heterosexual relationship carried with it inevitable exploitation; this was a situation, it was asserted, in which negotiation was neither possible nor desirable. From this theoretical position, in which the major organizing dynamic of human history was menâs hostility to women, it was inevitable that its adherents would interpret all history and all social relations in terms of war between the sexes. âWomen Onlyâ bookshops, cafĂ©s and living space became the practical results of this interpretation of the world, and within it differences between women became vastly less important than the common cause of women against men.
This theoretical position, to which the label âradical lesbianâ or âradical feministâ is sometimes attached is associated with the writings of women such as Sheila Jeffreys and Mary Daly.13 It is a position of engaging coherence, in that social divisions become very simple, indeed positively singular and can be identified in terms of gender divisions. At the same time, this very theoretical position also became the point at which other feminists began to offer interpretations of the social position of women that called into question solidarity and â most important â similarity between women, and offered instead ideas about difference and lack of common cause. The crucial arguments here were about race and class; in the early 1970s, Marxists offered readings of Marx and Engels that subsumed the sex war to the class war; the times were changing, but not changing enough for the great theoretical systems of the modern world to give way easily to ideas that seemed to complicate, rather than illuminate.
This reference â to the âgreat theoretical systems of the modern worldâ â is the point at which the emergence of contemporary feminism has to be situated not just in te...
