The victim feminism portrayed in the previous chapters is premised upon the notion that women are oppressed. Popular articles and blogs tell us, ‘Yes, women are still oppressed,’ and point out, ‘Five ways women are oppressed today.’ Elsewhere, we are told that women are oppressed by the media, by advertising, by conservative politics and – of course – by men. It seems as if any specific meaning of oppression is lost in such inflated claims and instead oppression has become convenient shorthand for anything feminists find unpleasant.
Challenging women’s oppression has been a goal of political and social reformers for over two centuries. From Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women to Mill’s The Subjection of Women, via Cady Stanton and the Pankhursts, through to de Beauvoir, Friedan and Greer, central to this battle has been an attempt to understand and explain the specific nature and cause of women’s oppression. Continuing this project today is important if we are to evaluate whether women are oppressed in a way that men are not. This chapter explores the changing nature of campaigns for women’s rights from their origin in the nineteenth century through to second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Over this time the position of women in society has changed beyond all recognition and the role of feminism in helping bring about sexual equality has been significant. At the same time, as we shall see, many feminist arguments for equality have, from the outset been premised on a problematic assumption that men and women are fundamentally different.
In his 1762 book, Emile, or On Education, the French philosopher Rousseau argued a view common among thinkers of his day: that men and women’s natural differences, evident even in a pre-social state of nature, explained the contemporary inequality between the sexes. It was for this reason, he argued, that boys and girls should be educated differently: ‘Give, without scruples, a woman’s education to women, see to it that they love the cares of their sex, that they possess modesty, that they know how to grow old in their menage and keep busy in their house.’289 A belief that the inferior position of women in society was down to the historical impact of biological differences between the sexes continued into the twentieth century and is evident in the work of anthropologists such as Levi Strauss.
Mary Wollstonecraft, writing 30 years after Rousseau, proposed that it wasn’t biology but the ways that men and women were treated that explained the differences between them. In her powerful polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, Wollstonecraft is critical of the way women conduct themselves. However, she argues their behaviour does not result from their innate disposition but from their lack of education. She suggests that education, far from responding to pre-existing biological differences actually helps create differences between the sexes. Women are not born as such inferior beings, Wollstonecraft claims, but are brought up to become ‘more artificial, weak characters than they would otherwise have been’.290 Their education and upbringing prevent women from having ‘sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name virtue’. Wollstonecraft is clear that endeavouring to keep women ‘always in a state of childhood’ degrades both men and women. She proposes we ‘strengthen the female mind by enlarging it’.291
Wollstonecraft drew a parallel between the position of women and slaves: ‘They may be convenient slaves but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.’292 The analogy of women with slaves was to become a recurrent theme of women’s rights campaigners throughout the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century, an analogy that highlighted the fact that at this time women were considered to be the property of men with no legal rights of their own. In most American states, the law considered married women to be extensions of their husbands, with men having full rights over their wife’s body, property, earnings and children. In both Britain and America, women were considered legally indistinct from their husbands.293
Karl Marx described women’s status within the family structure as akin to slavery: ‘The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus) but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains, in miniature, all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.’294 The idea that women were enslaved merged into later arguments that women formed a distinct social class. Engels makes this point most clearly and links the formation of women as a distinct class to the emergence of monogamous marriage. ‘Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other’; he writes, ‘The first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.’295
John Stuart Mill, writing in The Subjection of Women, makes an important amendment to the slavery analogy. He suggests, ‘All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite.’296 Mill argues that because men wanted willing slaves, women couldn’t be ruled by force or fear. For this reason, men ‘turned the whole force of education’ into enslaving women’s minds. The enlightenment idea of equality, as encapsulated in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, was not extended in practice to all people at the time of its formulation. But in its philosophy lay the intellectual basis for equality and the possibility, for the first time, of questioning assumptions that underpinned the way society was structured. The possibility of equality between the sexes, and the possibility that society could be different, allowed Wollstonecraft, Marx, Mill and Engels to question the position of women.
In America, women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Lucretia Mott, all leading advocates of women’s rights, first found their voices within the abolition movement. The campaign against slavery provided some women with a limited platform and with a means of confronting arguments about inequality which proved formative for women’s rights campaigners. It allowed them to organize and plan conventions and publications. The first women’s convention was held in America in 1848. Here, Cady Stanton presented her ‘Declaration of Sentiments’, a list of resolutions outlining the rights of women modelled on the Declaration of Independence.
The declaration summarized women’s position thus: ‘The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.’297 The blame for women’s position was laid firmly with man: ‘He has endeavoured, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.’298 All resolutions were passed unanimously except one: Cady Stanton’s late addition of a resolution for women’s suffrage.
For these first campaigners for women’s rights, questioning the basis of racial inequality brought sexual inequality into stark relief. Christopher Lasch notes that the struggle against slavery provided the basis for the first critique of patriarchal authority.299 But in doing so it also made clear the tension for early feminists between the promotion of black civil rights and women’s rights. The abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth, declared in a speech given in 1851: ‘I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.’300
Truth’s speech contained the now famous refrain, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ She demanded to know where there was room, in the emergence of campaigns for black civil rights on the one hand and women’s rights on the other, for the problems experienced by black women. Despite Truth’s efforts to bring the two groups together, the campaign for women’s rights became primarily identified with wealthy white women. By 1896, a separate organization had formed, the National Association for Colored Women, led by Mary Church Terrell and including Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.301
Educating Girls
Much early campaigning for women’s rights was not focused on the demand for suffrage but on other aspects of women’s lives. Following Wollstonecraft’s lead, there was an emphasis on the need to secure a decent education for girls. Cady Stanton was influenced by her own formal schooling in the 1820s having been curtailed prematurely. While her male classmates continued on to college, none at that time would permit women. Wollstonecraft’s argument that girls’ inferior education stunted women’s intellectual and emotional growth proved controversial at the time but later found favour. Campaigners for educating girls to a similar level as boys argued this would pave the way for a greater equality between the sexes. By 1869 Mill notes, ‘The claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge as men, is urged with growing intensity.’302
While some women in the nineteenth century were content to be treated differently, others fought for access to ‘the same branches of knowledge as men’ and ideas that could take them beyond the limited horizons of the lives they were expected to lead. At a time when movements for social reform were becoming increasingly popular in both America and Britain, societies and political associations designed to advance the interests of women sprang up. The drive for girls’ schools became part of this push for social reform. In England, the first schools offering an academic education to girls began to be established at this time with Cheltenham Ladies College opening in 1854 and the Girls’ Public Day School Trust established in 1872. By 1880, basic schooling became compulsory for all English children aged between 5 and 10. For the majority of those able to continue their education beyond this elementary level, there remained segregated schools and different curricular for boys and girls.
The quest for access to the same knowledge of the world as men led young women to demand entry to the universities. However, as Lucy Stone, Cady Stanton’s contemporary in the American campaign for women’s rights, was to discover, entry alone didn’t equate to an education. Stone managed to secure a place at Oberlin, the first US college to accept women. But, as Betty Friedan tells us, Stone, ‘had to practise public speaking secretly in the woods. Even at Oberlin, the girls were forbidden to speak in public.’ In the eyes of the college, the purpose of her education remained ‘intelligent motherhood and a properly subservient wifehood’.303
By the 1860s, British women were permitted to sit in on lectures in Liverpool and Manchester and in 1869 Emily Davies co-founded Girton College in Cambridge, the first residential university college for women. Having fought against social convention, legal limits to their independence, inadequate schooling and sometimes poverty to get to university, once there, women had to overcome institutional rules and social prejudice as well as prove themselves to be academically capable, morally virtuous and physically healthy in a way that was not expected of men. In the US, the establishment of women’s colleges, including Georgia Female College, Mount Holyoke Seminary and Elmira Female College, and more specifically their affiliations with universities such as Harvard, Columbia and Brown, allowed women to participate, in a limited fashion, in the educational opportunities afforded to men.304 As students, women had to put up with male academics refusing to teach them as well as a plethora of petty regulations that ‘stated exactly whom one could meet, in what circumstances, when, where, wearing what, and for how long’.305
The reluctance of American universities to allow women to enrol led to the emergence of single sex colleges such as Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Barnard, Radcliffe, Vassar and Bryn Mawr, which were designed to meet the specific educational needs of women. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most public secondary schools and colleges in the US had become predominantly co-educational but, as in the UK, this alone did not guarantee equal opportunities. In 1918 the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education made a case for the creation of a two track system: one track steered students, primarily males, towards college preparatory coursework, and the other track provided vocational training. Girls, even those with a strong academic record, were encouraged down the vocational track and required to take classes in domestic science or home economics.
Right up until the 1920s women at some universities were expected to be accompanied by chaperones wherever they went. Even though women took the same courses and exams as men and were judged by the same standards, many women students worked without any chance of graduating with a final degree qualification. Men were determined to ‘keep women away from the places that endorse exclusive forms of power’.306 It was not until 1948 that women were permitted to graduate from the University of Cambridge and 1959 before women’s halls at Oxford became fully incorporated into the university.
The campaign for girls to have access to education was, for many pioneers of women’s rights, a more important priority than securing the vote. Indeed, it was only when the importance of educating girls had become more widely accepted that the demand for suffrage began to take off. Campaigns for suffrage, on both side of the Atlantic, did not bring about a more liberal climate so much as emerge out of it. The British suffragist and union leader Millicent Fawcett was correct when she noted that:
Women’s suffrage will not come, when it does come, as an isolated phenomenon, it will come as a necessary corollary of other changes which have been gradually and steadily modifying during this century the social history of our country. It will be a political change, not of a very great or extensive character in itself, based upon social, educational and economic changes which have already taken place.307
Other significant women’s rights campaigns in the late nineteenth century focused upon the rights of women to divorce and to maintain access to their children following separation, to inherit, to hold property and to practice in professions such as law and medicine. The movement for women’s right to vote was considered at least at first to be of more symbolic rather than practical significance to improving the position of women; it highlighted the fact that women were denied citizenship rights and that their political interests were subsumed under those of men.
The demand for suffrage brought political differences between campaigners for women’s rights to the fore. Today it is often assumed that the suffragists, represented by Millicent Fawcett, and the suffragettes with the Pankhursts as figureheads, shared a common goal but disagreed over tactics, with the suffragists being in favour of peaceful protest in comparison to the more militant suffragettes. But this ignores a number of significant political differences between the two groups. One such disagreement arose over which women were to be included in suffrage campaigns.
Helen Taylor, the daughter of philosopher and women’s rights campaigner Harriet Taylor, petitioned Parliament in 1866. She presented a Ladies’ Petition to her step-father John Stuart Mill in the House of Commons. The petition argued, ‘Since women are permitted to hold property they should also be permitted to exercise all the rights which, by our laws, the possession of property brings with it.’308 For Taylor the demand for suffrage was a demand for citizenship rights to be extended to women with property and, as she made clear, ‘advanced so entirely without reference to any abstract rights’. Richard Pankhurst, husband of Emmeline, in contrast argued that, ‘The basis of political freedom is expressed in the great maxim of the equality of all men, of humanity, of all human beings before the law.’ He continued, ‘Each individual receives the right to vote in the character of human being, possessing intelligence and adequate reasoning power.’ Taylor and Pankhurst were expressing a fundamental difference between the rights of people and the rights of property – a distinction that became central to debates within what was later to be termed first-wave feminism.
Emerging from this was a far more significant political difference, epitomized by the disagreement over tactics, over whether campaigners should argue for universal suffrage or present certain women as more deserving of the vote. Those demanding universal suffrage recognized men and women as equals and argued that the right to have a say in how you are governed was a natural human right. The suffragettes’ militancy was initially premised on an assumption that for women to be taken seriously as men’s equals, they needed to fight like men. The suffragists, on the other hand, argued that women were different to men and needed to prove their worth as propertied citizens before they could win the privilege of the vote. Over time, these political differences emerged between the Pankhursts, with Emmeline and daughter Christabel happy to put the campaign for the vote on hold and throw their efforts behind the First World War. Sylvia Pankhurst, on the other hand, demanded women be given the vote on the same grounds as men and wanted franchise extended to both men and women without property. Sylvia refused to support British efforts in what she considered to be an imperialist and anti-working-class conflict.
In America, debates about the nature of men and women in relation to each other led to the view that women were not just different but morally superior to men. This perception of moral superiority stems from the fight against slavery having been waged, in part, as a fight against patriarchy. Perhaps more significantly it comes from the origins of many women’s rights campaigns in the temperance movement: women were at the forefront of calls for prohibition on the sale of alcohol. Likewise, in discussions of sexuality, men were deemed to be subject to animal appetites and the role of women was to withstand the sexual pressures placed upon them. Demands for women’s rights were premised on the view that women, who were naturally caring and nurturing, could be a civilizing influence on society.
In her early years as a campaigner, Cady Stanton held the belief that men and women had similar natures and therefore deserved equality under the law. However, in 1854, despite maintaining her views on equality, she strategically argued that women were morally superior to men. ‘Women’s moral power ought to speak,’ she argued, ‘not only in the home but in the ballot box.’ Giving women the vote, she claimed, would reform men through the regulation of saloons and gambling halls ‘which lure our youth on to excessive indulgence and destruction’.309 In her later years, Cady Stanton became more convinced of the existence of differences between the sexes and women’s innate moral superiority. She argued that problems such as war and violence were a result of the world having been governed by the ‘masculine element’. If the ‘feminine element’ had ‘asserted itself from the beginning’, she suggests, ‘those governments of force and religions of damnation would have been modified long ago, mercy would have tempered justice and love banished superstition. Neither capital punishment and war nor the concept of hell could have emanated from the mother soul.’310
The argument that women are morally superior to men takes us a long way from Mary Wollstonecraft’s view that men were the superior sex – not because of a ‘masculine element’ or any inherent virtues but because of the education, upbringing and opportunities society afforded them: ‘Men have increased that inferiority till women are almost sunk below the standard of rational creatures.’311 Wollstonecraft is similarly scathing of the idea that girls are naturally more nurturing than boys, ‘The doll never excite attention,’ she proclaimed, ‘unless confinement allows her no alternative.’ This view that men and women are born equal but created differently has been echoed by feminist writers ever since, from de Beauvoir who argued that the ‘“true woman” is an artificial product that civilization makes, as formerly eunuchs were made’,312 to Germaine Greer’s view that ‘a female is castrated and becomes feminine’.313 However, such arguments have also sat alongside a persistent view of innate differences between the sexes and a belief that women are naturally more nurturing and empathetic.
Ultimately, it was the pragmatism and the compromise displayed by Cady Stanton and Emmeline Pankhurst that led to the vote being granted in Britain to propertied women over the age of 30 in the 1918 Representation of the People Act and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution giving women throughout America the right to vote in 1920. Although suffrage represented a significant victory, it was granted only after demands for equality between the sexes had dissipated. As Rosalind Delmar notes, the dynamics of feminist activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries moved away from a concept of equality, ‘by developing much more than previously the concept of inescapable differences between the sexes, the term equal rights became filled with different contents’.314 The struggle for ‘human’ rights was replaced by a demand for ‘women’s’ rights; campaigners came to conceive of women not as lying within the generic category of ‘man’ but as a subgroup of humanity. It was on this assumption of fundamental difference that women argued they needed their own representatives. Such arguments reverberate in today’s feminist campaigns for women to be represented on boards of directors so that businesses are less driven by machismo and in campaigns against lad culture in higher education.
The Family
The reformulation of sex differences by women’s rights campaigners returns us to an old idea, one evoked by Aristotle and Rousseau, that the natural differences between men and women explain their inequality. This turns the clock back on Mill who described the subjection of women as ‘a universal custom’, explaining that ‘everything which is usual appears natural’. It is not sufficient to explain women’s oppression according to natural or biological differences; this gets in the way of understanding the social nature of inequality and the relationships between men and women.
Wollstonecraft, Mill and Cady Stanton looked beyond biology to the socialization of girls through their upbringing and schooling. But to understand why boys and girls were socialized in different ways, we need to look at men and women not as individuals but in collective relationship to each other. Frederick Engels, writing in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, located women’s oppression in the institution of the family. He argued that the role women were forced to play in the domestic sphere prevented them from fully participating in public life.
In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, feminists such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer argued that a combination of formal legislation and informal practices meant women were still oppressed because they were unable to participate in all aspects of society in the same way as men. Lack of access to contraception, abortion and childcare hindered women’s capacity to engage in the public realm on their own terms. Engels argues that women became a class, an oppressed class with collective interests in common, with the emergence of civilization and, in particular, the monogamous marriage. Within the family, Engels explains, the husband ‘is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat’.315 Germaine Greer follows through the logic of this argument: ‘If women are the true proletariat, the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system.’316
Engels argued women’s oppression began with the development of the family as an economic unit. Property became privatized, owned by the family and passed from father to son. Women, unable to inherit, became instead the man’s possession. With the industrial revolution, the production of goods moved from the domestic sphere to the factory. This separated men from the daily routines of the family and, later, separated many women from economic production. This division, naturalized through religion and education, made women solely responsible for the home; a status revered by many among the middle class but experienced as an additional burden by the working-class women who still needed to earn money. It became the role of women to ensure male wage earners were sufficiently fed and cared for to enable them to continue working.
Today, we have sadly become used to viewing the family as problematic. We have become accustomed to thinking of the intimacy of family relationships as sheltering domestic violence and child abuse. This makes it is all too easy to accept the argument that marriage is the site of women’s oppression. However, this is not what Engels meant. It wasn’t the relationships between people, either as a couple or as a family, that were oppressive, but the way the family became organized as a private economic unit and women were made into economic dependents, cast into a specific role in relation to children and home.317
Gaining an accurate picture of the number of women employed before the twentieth century is complicated by the low status and informal nature of women’s work. When weaving was first taken out of the home and established within factories, it was women and children who were considered best suited to operating looms. The paid work women did could be as arduous as work carried out by men, but they were nonetheless considered a cheap and easily disposable source of labour. Simone de Beauvoir reminds us of the long and ignoble history of women earning less than men even for the very same work, ‘The woman worker in France, according to a study made in the years 1889–93, received only half the pay of a man for a day’s work equal to that of a man.’318
Women are reported to have made up roughly 18 per cent of the American work force in 1900, although the real figure may have been higher.319 In the UK at this time it is thought that up to two-thirds of women had paid work.320 It is hard to know for certain because in the nineteenth century many working-class women were still employed in their own homes, perhaps engaged in ‘piece work’ such as sewing. Alternatively, they worked in other people’s homes as domestic servants or for family-run farms and businesses. For middle-class women, employment options were more limited and concentrated primarily within teaching or nursing. The idea of a woman having a career rather than a job, work that might have provided intellectual satisfaction rather than just a small wage, was rare indeed.
As we saw in the first part of this book, campaigns concerned with women’s rights at work are a focal point for feminism today. Paid work has become fetishized as a representation of women’s social status and the source of financial, emotional and intellectual fulfilment. However, in the past, the restricted opportunities for women to work, and even the far more labour-intensive demands of housework, did not prevent a number of women from becoming involved in voluntary work and reform societies outside of the home. As Christopher Lasch reminds us, women who did not work for wages were often active outside the home in voluntary organizations that demanded much more from women than simply a little fund-raising.
At the dawn of the twentieth century women took an active role in civic society, sitting on committees, managing budgets and being involved in local planning decisions.321 They created municipal life, distinct from both the private domestic sphere and the realm of business and profit, in the form of libraries, play grounds and youth clubs. This activity outside of either paid work or the home was not the preserve of middle-class women. As the sociologist Ann Oakley tells us, working-class women’s political activities continued throughout the nineteenth century, ‘Female chartists ran their own political unions and pursued questions of female independence, sex equality and political participation.’322
Voluntary work brought women into the public sphere but their domestic responsibilities did not diminish. On the contrary, as Lasch points out, voluntary work was attractive ‘in part because it was easily combined with domestic responsibilities, unlike the inflexible schedules imposed by paid work.’323 Involvement in civic society was made possible in part because child rearing wasn’t seen as the labour intensive and privatized concern it is today. Even very young children were thought able to spend time unsupervised, playing outside of the home and being looked after by older siblings and extended family members. For many women, the formal boundaries between work and home, between paid work and public duty, remained blurred until well into the twentieth century. At the same time, however, society remained rigidly segregated according to sex, class and race.
The Second World War marked a significant turning point in women’s lives. With men conscripted to fight, women were expected to take up work in all sectors including factories, mines, administration and agriculture. State-run nurseries provided some childcare and many women enjoyed the liberation and stimulation work provided; they were not, however, paid the same wages as the men whose jobs they had replaced. In the US, in 1942 the National War Labor Board urged employers to pay men and women the same for work that was comparable in quality and quantity. Unfortunately for women, employers did not heed this advice. In Scotland, Bella Keyzer, a weaver, was assigned to work in the Scottish shipyards during the Second World War where she trained as a welder. It was the trade unions that played a key role in reinforcing the message that Bella’s contract was only temporary. The unions welcomed the fact that the men she worked alongside as equals earned three times as much as she did. After the war, they helped to ensure women returned to the home and ‘men’s jobs’ went back to men. Bella had to leave welding and return to ‘women’s work’.324
After the Second World War, women in both Britain and America, especially those who were married or had children, were expected to give up their new found freedom and return to the home. Some women returned home reluctantly and fought against the closure of state-run nurseries and the loss of their jobs. Others embraced a return to the security of the domestic sphere after the disruption of the war. In the UK, child psychologist John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory and the consequences of maternal deprivation helped spread the message that a woman’s place was in the home with her children. In America, Betty Friedan describes the cult of domesticity that dominated American society throughout the 1950s noting that, there is no way a woman ‘can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife’.325
Women’s return to the home was not simply a matter of personal choice or social convention; trade unions and even national labour laws formally restricted women’s rights to work. As Alison Wolf points out, ‘A marriage bar for teachers and the civil service lasted until 1945 in the UK; until 1957 for civil servants in the Netherlands, the 1960s in Australia, 1973 in Ireland.’326 In America, this employment bar was particularly acute for black women. Women who weren’t legally prevented from working often felt morally compelled to give up work when they got married or following the birth of their first child.327 The paid employment they had enjoyed was gone and the public service roles they had played in a voluntary capacity had now been co-opted by the state or private enterprise. Women were effectively excluded from public life and, for some women for the first time, restricted to the domestic sphere. In America this sense of exclusion was exacerbated by the geographical move out to the suburbs, although, as Lasch notes, the initial impetus behind the move to the suburbs was the perceived freedom in the absence of public responsibilities and extended families.
The new model of the suburban family was initially welcomed. Escaping convention and family ties to an older generation was considered by many to be liberating. The image of the home as, to use Lasch’s phrase, ‘a haven in a heartless world’, with the figure of the wife and mother at the centre, was an important means for people to cope with world events that appeared scary and out of control and work that was experienced as increasingly mechanized and alienating. As Lasch notes, ‘It was in the suburbs, much more than in the city, that women became full-time mothers and homemakers.’328 The suburbs created the male breadwinner, solely responsible for earning the family income, who commuted into the city and left behind a socially isolated, financially dependent woman whose role was valued only as housewife and mother. This exacerbated the separation of the public and the private spheres that first emerged with industrialization.
Women who did continue to work outside the home at this time met a highly segregated labour market. Right into the 1960s, newspaper ‘situations vacant’ columns continued to advertise men’s and women’s jobs separately. Women’s jobs could be easily spotted – they were those offered at a considerably lower rate of pay. In America, between 1950 and 1960, women who worked full-time were paid between 59 and 64 cents, on average, for every dollar men earned. Differentiating between women’s and men’s jobs made it easy to justify paying women less; in fact, they could be paid less for doing the exact same work only with a different job title. Teachers, separated into schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, could teach the same classes, the same subjects, and for the same number of hours, but still be paid differently. Unequal pay was all too often accepted as inevitable when relatively few women worked outside the home and it was assumed that women were only working for ‘pin money’.
In the years immediately after the Second World War, fewer than one-third of American women were employed outside of the home.329 By 1971 this figure had risen, but only slightly to 38 per cent.330 Working women at this time were mainly older, unmarried and women of colour; few were pursuing careers. They bore the brunt of the sex discrimination that was rife in the workplace at that time. In contrast to today, the group missing from the labour market was the younger, white, middle-class women Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan describes 1960s suburban housewives as suffering from ‘the problem that has no name’: ‘Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”’331
In Britain, the position of women changed a little sooner. Women began to re-enter the workforce in significant numbers throughout the 1960s and by 1971 53 per cent of women had paid work, although, as we have already noted, for the majority this was part-time.332 Although employment was less rigidly structured than it was fifty years earlier, women still found that they were prevented from entering some careers or from being promoted beyond a certain level. The numbers may have been better but for many women the reality of work meant ‘the worst jobs, worst wages and worst conditions’.333
It was in this context, with women confronting a choice between what was experienced as an increasingly stifling domesticity or a highly segregated and discriminatory workplace, that what came to be known as second-wave feminism emerged. The four decades from 1920 to 1960 are often presented as a hiatus in feminism following the success of the suffrage movement. Indeed, a visible women’s movement did disappear from public prominence as the drive to get women first into work and fighting the war on the home front and then out of work and back into the home took centre stage. However, the absence of an active women’s movement did not preclude the development of feminist thought. Rosalind Delmar argues that an overly strict identification of feminism with a women’s movement depends on a definition of feminism as activity rather than theory. She argues this sleight of hand is also found in the use of ‘first-wave’ and ‘second-wave’ feminism to imply a seamless continuity between struggles beginning a century apart: ‘The past is used to authenticate the present.’334
Despite the implied continuity, the context, issues and politics driving second-wave feminism were quite distinct from the preoccupations of the first wave. The presentation in the media, advertising, academia and government propaganda of the role of mother as the natural fulfilment of a woman’s destiny made it seem as if the domesticity of the nuclear family had been an ever-present feature of society. In reality it represented a historically recent social phenomenon. Friedan tells us, ‘The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958.’ During this time, the age of marriage and the age at which women gave birth to their first child had both dropped. In the years after the Second World War, a well-maintained house with children in the suburbs was viewed by many young women as more aspirational than education or a career. ‘A century earlier,’ Friedan notes, ‘women had fought for higher education; now, girls went to college to get a husband.’335
It would be a mistake to see the women’s movement that began to take off throughout Europe and North America in the middle of the 1960s as simply a spontaneous reaction against domesticity. The political context from which it emerged is just as significant as the social position women found themselves in. The New Left, which emerged from left-wing political groups in the 1960s, defined in opposition to both the Stalinism of Eastern Europe and the resurgent capitalism of the West, expressed a growing sense of frustration with the working class at home for apparently colluding with capitalism and embracing a consumer lifestyle. The New Left became increasingly focused on the role of mass culture in sustaining capitalism and promoting the drive to suburbanization.336 Friedan’s critique of magazines, advertising and department stores for selling the myth of a purchasable domestic idyll to women was typical of this line of argument. Rather than seeing women as having positively embraced domesticity, or facing practical obstacles to any alternative lifestyle, the New Left began to see personal freedom itself as a mythical creation of the ‘culture industry’. Second-wave feminism was not only influenced by this political analysis but it was started by radical women who were themselves prominent within the New Left.
It was from this social and political context that The National Organization of Women (NOW) was formed in America in 1966 and held its first national conference in 1967. As Delmar reminds us, the women’s movement at this time did not label itself as feminist: feminism was simply one position that was adopted by particular groups within the movement.337 The label second-wave feminism was first used in a 1968 New York Times article by Martha Weinman Lear covering NOW and its activities. It was quickly adopted by a women’s rights movement rapidly growing throughout North America and Western Europe. Although the label stressed historical continuities with campaigns for women’s rights and played down the links to left-wing politics, the ideas that drove second-wave feminism continued to be firmly grounded in the ideology of the New Left.
The demand of second-wave feminism was for sexual equality – for women to have the same economic, social and political rights as men. A key aim was to complete the drive begun by an earlier generation of feminists for formal equality before the law. Many legal changes had already been introduced, or were in the process of being introduced, before the emergence of the women’s liberation movement at the end of the 1960s. In America, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 and made it illegal for employers to pay men and women differently for the same work. In 1964, sexual discrimination became illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Act made it unlawful for an employer to ‘fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin’.338 In America in the 1960s, it was the civil rights movement that represented the most significant demand for social change and many of the legal developments that women benefitted from developed out of a broader expansion of civil rights.
In 1972, the first black American woman to be elected to congress, Shirley Chisholm, won the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, becoming the first black candidate to run for president and the first woman to represent the Democratic Party. Chisholm proudly identified with second wave feminism; her campaign slogan was ‘unbought and unbossed’, the title of her autobiography released two years previously. Her candidacy provided a focal point for the women’s liberation movement but her campaign was underfunded and her principles considered too radical for people at the time. Chisholm later remarked that she experienced more discrimination for being a woman than for being black. Nonetheless, the women’s liberation movement emerged into a climate receptive to social change and within the space of a couple of years it became established throughout North America and much of Western Europe.
In Britain too, the passing, if not always the enactment, of equalities legislation coincided with the emergence of the women’s movement rather than being brought about directly by it. The Abortion Act was passed in 1967 and the Equal Pay Act in 1970, although it did not come into force until 1975. In the intervening period employers often sought to move women into different roles or to make them redundant altogether, making it easier for them to ignore new legislation and argue that men and women were doing different jobs. This incentivized an even more rigid division between men’s and women’s work.
The inadequacy of legal changes helped expose the fact that changing the law wasn’t enough in and of itself to bring about gender equality. Women didn’t just need to be treated exactly the same as men; they also needed additional rights and protections. NOW’s key demands were for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to be enforced; the establishment of a nationwide network of childcare centres and for childcare expenses to be tax deductible for working parents. NOW also campaigned for maternity benefits and a guaranteed right to return to a job and reform of divorce laws.339 In Britain, the first national women’s liberation conference, held in 1970, set out four key demands: for equal pay; equal education and opportunity; 24-hour nurseries and free contraception and abortion on demand.
A conference manifesto explains the perceived causes of women’s oppression at this time: ‘We are commercially exploited by advertisements, television and press, legally we often have only the status of children. We are brought up to feel inadequate and educated to narrower horizons than men. This is our specific oppression as women.’340 We can see here the New Left’s focus on culture and the media sitting alongside legal and practical demands for change. This dichotomy was to manifest itself in different priorities, for legal change on the one hand and a critique of social and cultural restraints on women on the other hand. Second-wave feminism began to develop in different directions and, much as with earlier campaigns for suffrage, this was a movement that did not take all women along with it.
Meanwhile, the push for new legal rights for women continued. In the US, court cases in 1970 and 1974 ruled that work did not have to be strictly identical but just ‘substantially equal’ to warrant equal pay and that ‘the going market rate’ could not be used to justify paying women less. In 1973 a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Roe v. Wade disallowed state and federal restrictions on abortion, making the procedure legal, for women who could access and afford it, up to the point at which the foetus was considered to be viable outside of the womb. A religious and socially conservative movement began to form in opposition to such developments, laying the groundwork for a later culture war between feminists and the political right.
British women won limited reproductive rights six years before their American counterparts, but they needed to wait until the passing of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act before they were able to apply for almost any job they wanted.341 Finally, Bella Keyzer, who we met earlier, was able to return to welding 30 years after the end of the Second World War and when she did she saw her weekly wage jump from £27 to £73.342 For Bella and many other women like her, legislation helped expose where women were being paid less than men for doing the same work and allowed women the freedom to apply for better paying jobs that had previously been denied them. It opened up new career possibilities for girls yet to enter employment.
Unfortunately, changing employment and pay legislation only went so far in closing the gender pay gap. The long history of a gender-segregated labour market meant that cultural attitudes about ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s jobs’ had become entrenched. This hit women in unskilled jobs the hardest; women ‘manual workers’ were ‘paid at rates little more than half of those for men in similar jobs’.343 Another reason why legislation only had a limited impact upon the pay gap was because women were still expected to be primarily responsible for home and children. Taking time away from work followed by a part-time return meant that women were often starting from scratch after years away from work rather than returning to the jobs they held before having children. All women, whatever their level of education, found they were left with low-paid and unskilled jobs rather than careers. As we saw in Chapter Three, the legacy of this inequality continues to play out today.
Awarding men and women equal status within the law was an important move for women’s rights, as were additional legal provisions for access to maternity leave and abortion services. But such developments revealed that legal changes alone could not bring an end to women’s oppression. This prompted feminists to look beyond the public sphere into the private realm for the source of sexual inequality. Ann Oakley, exploring the role and experiences of the housewife, argued the source of women’s oppression lay within their role as wives and mothers and subsequent financial dependency upon their husbands. In many ways this can be seen as a continuation of a line of thinking begun by Engels a century earlier. However, whereas Engels located women’s oppression within the institution of the family and not the relationships between people, for Oakley this line is less clear cut. The emerging theory of patriarchy meant that women’s oppression within the family was often understood as emanating from the marital relationship between husband and wife.
One solution to this form of oppression was to bring women – and their particular struggles – out of the private sphere and into the public domain. In part this meant a focus on getting women into the workplace, but it also prompted a discussion about the financial value of domestic labour. The activist Selma James was a key proponent of ‘wages for housework’. Although it made for a popular slogan, such campaigns never really got off the ground because the private and personal nature of housework and the emotion inherent within caring for a family made putting a price on domestic labour not only impossible but, to many people, distasteful too.
The post-war nuclear family had been marked by a strong boundary between public and private, perhaps best symbolized by the picket fence, the net curtains at the window, or the traditional maxim that an Englishman’s home is his castle. In an earlier era the house would have been the site of work as well as sustenance and would have been open to extended family members as well as neighbours. But this did not challenge the autonomy of the householder or subject the family to scrutiny from those outside of a closed circle. In the 1970s, the private sphere became so significant for feminists because it was understood not just as a way of organizing society and relationships but also as an ideological means of shaping an individual’s consciousness. According to this understanding, bringing about changes in the private sphere and personal relationships would alter the way individuals looked at the world. In turn, this would help bring about social change, rather than, as an earlier generation of Marxists would have had it, the other way around.
The determination to bring discussion of the private sphere into the public realm became a central tenet of second-wave feminism and marks one way in which it is quite distinct from previous iterations. Kate Millett’s 1969 work Sexual Politics was lauded for bringing the most intimate aspect of personal relationships into the public domain: ‘he fucks her as woman, as subject, as chattel’.344 Sex was no longer the sole source of a woman’s fulfilment, as 1950s American housewives were taught to believe. But neither was it a relationship between men and women as equals. As Millett explains, sex was a paradigm for the exercise of men’s power over women; the personal had become political.
Carol Hanisch used the phrase ‘the personal is political’ in a 1969 article in which she discussed the importance of bringing personal, subjective experiences into the public domain. This focus on subjectivity, on an individual’s emotional response and personal understanding, came to dominate left-wing thinking in the 1960s. It was a reaction against the totalizing ‘grand narratives’ that were assumed to have led to Stalinism on the one hand and fascism on the other. Introducing subjectivity was thought to expand the political realm. Millett argued for a rejection politics as the ‘narrow and exclusive world of meetings, chairmen and parties’ in favour of a view of politics as ‘power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another’, with sex as the primary mechanism for control.345 The sociologist Jennie Bristow suggests that this shift to the personal realm became a ‘generational subjectivity forged less by relationship with grand narratives and more by a sensibility that the project of history making lay within personal action and experience’.346
The project of making the personal political, the aim of consciousness raising groups, was inherently problematic, in that it aimed to create a collective outlook through the sharing of private experiences. But such a focus on the individual revealed only the essential differences at the heart of every woman’s private experiences. The middle-class mother with a twice weekly home-help and all modern conveniences faced different problems to the working-class woman who combined looking after her children with shifts in the local factory. The only shared experience was to be found in personal relationships with men. This led to the location of women’s oppression within men’s collective interests and male behaviour; women’s inferior social status was as a result of the patriarchy exercising power.
Patriarchy took a material form; to Millett it was evident in ‘the military, industry, technology, universities, science, political office, and finance – in short, every avenue of power within society, including the coercive force of the police, is entirely in male hands’.347 But more than this, patriarchy became seen as a framework for making sense of women’s oppression; the ideology of patriarchy not only shaped relationships between the sexes but formed individual consciousness from the moment of birth, through the family, education, and into the workplace, able to exercise complete control over its subjects. Patriarchal rule was so successful for being able to pass itself off as entirely natural.
Yet feminism needed to go further to explain why, even after consciousness raising, the domestic sphere, and particularly the role of mother, was not experienced by all women as oppressive. Indeed, not all women looked at their husbands going out to work with envy and some had been only too pleased to leave behind tedious and exhausting jobs for the status of mother. In response, Millet describes patriarchal power as ‘the most persuasive ideology of our culture’ because of its operation primarily through ‘interior colonization’.348 This notion, that patriarchy turned women into willing collaborators in their own oppression, became a significant assertion of second-wave feminism.
A key feature of this interior colonization was, as Oakley explains, the widespread acceptance of the myth that ‘femininity and domesticity are equated’.349 Feminists explored how sexual politics operated through consent coerced at the point of the ‘socialization’ of both sexes into ‘basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role and status’.350 Girls were, in other words, socialized from childhood to see their future role as wives, homemakers and mothers. As all other ambitions were educated out of them, the fulfilment of their destiny, however inevitable, appeared to be a matter of personal choice.
The foundation of second-wave feminism in the politics of experience led to renewed focus on the role of language, images, music, toys, fashion and entertainment to shape a specifically female consciousness and acceptance of subservience. The patriarchal notion of women as secondary to men was thought to be written into every aspect of culture, altering the relationships between the sexes and the very identity of individual men and women. This turn towards culture was perceived as a radical move because it challenged the way in which society was organized. Instead of demanding legal changes so that women could compete as equals in a game designed and operated by men, feminists demanded instead a new way of organizing society along more feminine lines. Rather than women being held to masculine standards and judged by a masculine norm, they argued the norms had to change.
Where an earlier generation of feminists demanded rights so women could reach their true potential as the equals of men, second-wave feminism argued that while women were forced to emulate men they would be permanently judged as inferior. In practice this meant that, as Oakley makes clear, ‘Unless the gender role system itself, together with its economic base, is questioned, what women gain in the way of rights is too easily put to the service of men.’351 The rejection of a masculine norm was taken up by Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch: ‘If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.’352 She argued that sexual equality, rather than being something to aspire towards, was actually ‘an utterly conservative aim’, because in taking ‘the male status quo as the condition to which women aspire’ a woman ‘finds herself in an alien and repellent world which changes her fundamentally even as she is struggling to exert the smallest influence on it’.353 The rejection of a masculine norm was ultimately a rejection of sexual equality in favour of celebrating differences between men and women. Here, second-wave feminists come to share Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s argument that women were not just different but morally superior to men.
Despite the best efforts of socialists to insert a critique of capitalism and the bourgeois family into feminism, the totalizing theory of patriarchy left little room to account for the impact of social class in structuring society and impacting upon experiences and relationships. Some argued that social class was irrelevant to understanding the position of women who were often outside of the workplace and dependent upon first fathers and then husbands for their social position. Millett went further and argued that, under patriarchy, the concept of class was a mere distraction, designed to ‘set one woman against another’.354
By the mid-1970s, women had achieved some significant legal victories that saw their position in society transformed from what it had been a century earlier. Second-wave feminism’s recognition that these legal changes were not in themselves enough to bring about women’s liberation was a significant insight. The exploration of the role played by the family, the workplace, relationships and culture in the socialization of men and women and the naturalization of sexual differences also represented an important political understanding. However, the blurring of the private and the public and with it an attempt to focus on women’s subjective experiences proved more problematic; the rejection of a ‘masculine norm’, leading inevitably to a celebration of women’s difference, places feminism in a bind.
Feminism, with its demand for women’s liberation, consciousness raising workshops and apocryphal tales of bra burning, burst upon a suburban and conservative society and shook it to the core. Or at least, that’s as legend would have it. Certainly, the idea that patriarchal power was exercised in the home gave once private issues a public airing and helped expose the continued nature of women’s oppression. In casting a new focus on women’s personal experiences and intimate relationships, feminism drew attention to reproductive rights, childcare and housework. However, while campaigns for sexual equality aimed, at least in theory, to improve life for everyone, pitching men as the cause of women’s problems eroded the possibility of men and women finding common cause. But challenges to tradition and to the universalism inherent within a concept of such as equal rights were already well underway before feminism’s second incarnation.
Despite resistance from those who felt their position to be most threatened, feminism in the 1970s was less revolutionary than is sometimes portrayed and, in many ways, it met a receptive political climate. It was precisely because second-wave feminism emerged into a period when an older set of values was already being discredited that it had such a profound impact. The Enlightenment notions of instrumental reason, scientific progress and mankind’s domination over nature were thought to have contributed to the horrors of the Second World War; the obsession with taxonomy, eugenics and man’s domination over man were assumed to lead logically and ultimately to the holocaust. Feminism’s further challenge to a patriarchal social order pushed at an open door.
In the 1970s, traditional values were being called into question but a new sense of purpose, a new driving force to shape society and institutions such as government, education, trade unions, the workplace and the family, had yet to be consolidated. Feminism provided a moral framework to fill this void not by defeating old arguments so much as through articulating alternative values that matched the needs of an economic system beginning to decline. Whereas the golden age of capitalism, the long post-war boom, called for physical labour, competitiveness, intellectual risk taking and demanded the emotional separation of workers from mechanized and alienating production processes, the recession of the early 1970s called for an acceptance of the limits to economic growth, an emphasis on leisure rather than work and on consumption rather than production. The emerging economic climate required people to be customer focused, empathetic and environmentally conscious. These new values found their clearest expression within a feminism that emphasized women’s essential differences to men, and celebrated their caring maternalism and apparent closeness to nature.
The challenge to feminism at this time came primarily from those with something to lose, not only from men of all social classes who perceived their livelihoods and social position to be under threat but also from more socially conservative women. The American religious right, which became increasingly influential throughout the 1970s, emphasized traditional family values and opposition to abortion. However, significant challenges to second-wave feminism emerged from within the women’s movement itself and this will provide the focus for the next chapter.