In June and July 1971, Court Two of the Old Bailey was thronged to witness the trial of Richard Neville, who had founded Oz magazine while a student at the University of New South Wales, and relaunched it in 1966, Jim Anderson, a former lawyer from Sydney, and Felix Dennis, an Englishma.1 The previous year the three had published Oz 28, the ‘School Kids’ Issue’. The cover showed four naked females entwined in lesbian embrace, and with rats’ tails dangling from their vaginas. The editorial content was largely written by appallingly self-important schoolchildren, and, as has been written, ‘their juvenilia sits uneasily among adverts for penis magnifiers, “massagers” [dildoes], leather posing-pouches and Swedish porn books, magazines and films’.2 At the end of a three-week trial, Neville was sentenced to fifteen months, with recommended deportation, Anderson to twelve months and Dennis to nine months. These sentences were squashed upon appeal, heard before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery.
Whereas the Chatterley trial had been about a book which was written with serious intentions, the Oz trial was a test of how far society had come to accept sexual liberation, and an abandonment of traditional restraints. The Oz defendants were charged with an offence which had not been used by prosecutors for 130 years: ‘conspiracy to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and young persons within the realm and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires’. This had, in one sense, been the intention of the magazine, with its childishly priapic depiction of Rupert Bear. But the trial was memorable because it reminded many newspaper readers, who had not hitherto heard of Oz and would have been displeased by it, that they no longer quite knew how to define good and evil. The three young scallywags were defended by John Mortimer QC, an Old Harrovian with a high, drawly camp voice, but of heterosexual disposition, whose successful career as a barrister paralleled one as a middlebrow playwright. During the trial, Mortimer, in the words of Noel Annan, ‘put forward three astonishing arguments. It was not possible, he said, to be a writer if you were prevented from exploring any area of human activity; obscenity could not be identified; and it was good for us all to be nauseated and outraged by what we saw and read–regardless apparently of the nature of the outrage.’3
Mortimer, whose pudgy expression and always dribbling lips, even in middle age seemed like an embodiment of moral as well as physical dilapidation, became one of those broadcasters who was everyone’s darling–largely because of a successful TV drama series about an idealised version of himself at the bar–Rumpole of the Bailey. It would be possible to see Mortimer, and the gallery of witnesses he assembled as witnesses for the defence of Oz–such as Kenneth Tynan and George Melly–as similar demonstrations of the collapse of Western morals. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine any other society, at any other period of history, being presented with the arguments which Mortimer advanced in defence of the School Kids’ Issue of Oz and taking them seriously. To that extent the trial was an emblem of ‘something rotten in the state’. The actual participants, however, are not worth dignifying with the charge that they actually, in their own persons, changed anything. They were symptoms, not causes. Melly, another figure like Mortimer, who was depressing not because he was immoral but because he was second-rate (his particular area of non-expertise being jazz), continued to make gallant efforts to show off and shock people until he died. In case you did not get the message that he was unconventional, he wore scarlet trilby hats, and suits which would have been garish if sported by circus clowns. His only real distinction had occurred early in life, at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, when he had been briefly fancied by the future journalistic genius Peregrine Worsthorne. ‘The alternative society,’ droned Melly from the witness box, ‘is one that tries to invent or evolve its own lifestyle, which is usually in opposition to the official lifestyle.’4 Hindsight makes not only these figures seem like clowns, but so, alas, also those who opposed them. Whereas Mortimer and his would-be bohemian, largely public school educated friends had made fools of themselves in the eyes of the intelligent majority by their behaviour in the Old Bailey, so too had those who defended ‘the official lifestyle’. Lord Longford’s Christian faith led him to conduct an inquiry into pornography, in which, poor old donkey, he led his researchers into striptease joints and brothels in several European capitals. (What had he expected to find in the Copenhagen red-light district?) His campaign against filth linked him up with some strange companions, such as Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers and Listeners Association (founded 1965), a bustling, busy woman whose grin was rendered mirthless by too large false teeth, and whose obsession with rude words or suggestiveness in broadcasts were just as prurient, and no less offensive, than Neville’s in the School Kids’ Issue. She was dishonest, too, never fully admitting that all her lawsuits and campaigns were funded by Moral Rearmament. How else could the modest housewife and former schoolmarm, as she liked to present herself, have been able to bring expensive court cases, such as her ludicrous prosecution of Gay News for Blasphemous Libel in 1977? Moral Rearmament came back in 1971 under the new name of the Nationwide Festival of Light, and on the platform in Trafalgar Square was to be seen not only Whitehouse and Longford, but also that former Diogenes, the arch-mocker Muggeridge, who was, from now onwards, to the bewilderment of his old friends, seen as a sort of secular friar–Saint Mugg. His old friend Anthony Powell bemusedly examined a book published in 1987 called My Life in Pictures by Muggeridge. ‘There is nothing against publishing 138 representations of oneself (Malcolm pondering on his own bust counting as two) in the interests of publicity, nor spending some hours of one’s own time in prayer and meditation. What is hard on the reader is all the sanctimonious stuff about Christianity, RC conversion and Love of the Human Race, being exchanged by Malcolm for his former preoccupation with the world of Power, when a book of this self-promotional kind is purely an expression of one form of power: while should it really be necessary to be photographed praying and meditating, for the benefit of the public, especially if the material world has been forsworn?’5
The few show-offs on both sides of the argument about the Permissive Society were the sorts of people who would have been playing to the gallery at any era in history. At this particular moment, Melly and Mortimer were showing off that they had broader minds than anyone else (the slightly odious implication always being, especially in Mortimer’s case, that they were nicer, too), and the Muggeridge–Whitehouse–Longford brigade quite literally advertising that they were holier than others. But the background of all this was a set of circumstances which was bound to have caused a ‘sexual revolution’. That is: politics had quietened down and there was no longer any danger of a European war. There were more young men about whose primary concern could be chasing girls, not jobs, and being in no danger of having their amorous exploits interrupted by the recruiting sergeant. That hadn’t happened in England since the eighteenth century. In addition to leisure and prosperity had to be added the quite extraordinary revolution in the lives of women, caused by improvement in obstetric techniques and the invention of oral contraceptives.
The improvement in medical care, and in general prosperity, during our times was reflected in the infant mortality rates. In 1945–49 the average rate of infant mortality in England and Wales was 39.2 per thousand, compared with 156 per thousand for the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. By 1965–69, this had sunk to 18.5.6 Until the mid-1970s all social policies assumed the dependency of a woman upon a man, but this was to change, with a number of legislative measures changing the status of women. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 was brought into force on 1 January 1976. This did not mean an instantaneous equality in the workplace. In 1970, women’s pay was some 65.4 percent, rising to 75.7 percent in 1977, falling back again the following year, as male employers redefined women’s jobs and downgraded their women employees.7 Nevertheless, the Equal Pay Act was in place, and, gradually, women could regard themselves as the economic equals of males in society. The contraceptive pill had, at least theoretically, helped to make women more independent about their life choices. It was under the Conservatives, and at the behest of Keith Joseph, that the Pill became available on the National Health Service after a major parliamentary row over ‘immorality at the taxpayers’ expense.8 In fact, Joseph introduced free contraception for the very poor, and levied a normal prescription charge for the rest. The cost of the measure was £13 million. He was not moved by the arguments of some Catholic MPs that free contraception would lead to greater immorality; ‘loose and casual people are not made loose and casual by the availability of contraceptives, whether free or for 20p’. For Joseph, the real problem was to ‘break the cycle of deprivation’ of which unwanted children were one manifestation.9
Birth control was a central political and social issue. The economy now depended upon mothers of young children being able to leave their children in someone else’s care while they went out to paid work. Between 1971 and 1976 the proportion of children under five who spent time apart from their mothers rose from one child in six to one in four. The Education Secretary under Heath, Margaret Thatcher, made it her target in 1972 to provide 15 percent full-time education for three- and four-year-olds, and part-time education for 35 percent of three-year-olds, and 75 percent of four-year-olds within a decade. These targets were never met, but they show that although the Conservatives continued to say that they were the party of the family, they did not wish to encourage mothers to stay at home and be mothers. The Conservative Sue McCowan admitted in 1975 that the result was ‘latchkey children, truancy and juvenile crimes’. The previous year, Keith Joseph’s expressed belief that too many poor mothers were breeding unfit children was deemed to be out of kilter with the benevolent spirit of the age.
‘The balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened… A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up… Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness, which are more important than riches. They are producing problem children…Yet these mothers, the under-20s in many cases, single parents, from classes four to five, are now producing a third of all births.’ This speech was followed by the predictable response in the newspapers: ‘SIR KEITH IN STOP BABIES SENSATION’. A Labour MP glossed Joseph’s solution to the problems facing society as ‘castrate or conform’. Yet the children in Joseph’s speech existed, even though he was challenged about his statistics. No one who chronicled the development of that generation over the next thirty years could deny that Joseph had been right to express his concern. After all, he was the Secretary of State for Social Services, and he was speaking to his brief.10 But though he was undoubtedly right to draw attention to the rise, proportionately, of those in the lower intelligence and income ranges, there were also major changes taking place in the lives of women higher up the scale. If the stupidity and fecundity of the proles gave rise to appropriate concern in Whitehall, family life itself was changed more radically by the enterprise and cleverness of women who were not prepared to devote the best years of their life as housewives and nursery maids. The truth was that the values espoused by the Conservatives, more than those of the left, were doing damage to the traditional, basic structure of the family, in which the father was the breadwinner and the woman took charge of housework and child-minding. The Equal Opportunities Commission, whose Deputy Chairwoman was Elspeth Howe, another Conservative lady, admitted in 1978, ‘The traditional single-role family, where the wife stayed at home and the husband went to work, is disappearing. As a society, we are right to worry about what is happening to women as they struggle to carry the double burden of their traditional duties and their role as workers.’11
If the aims of feminism had once been to allow women to pursue jobs, as well as be housewives and have babies, then it seemed as if the forces of the marketplace, the sheer need to pay bills, was bringing about the revolution which had in previous generations been a theoretical dream. In the early 1970s, when feminists spoke of ‘liberation’, it might have seemed, both to feminists and to the men who feared their progress, as if a campaign was being artificially waged to achieve their objectives. With hindsight, it perhaps seemed as if feminism had been the inevitable social and economic consequence of more efficient birth control, and the economic necessity, in many families, of young mothers seeking paid employment outside the home. In such a climate, it would have become inevitable that society would have changed, without the feminist prophets cheering on the sisterhood. In March 1971, between five hundred and a thousand women marched through a blizzard in London singing (with intended irony) ‘Keep Young and Beautiful if You Want to Be Loved’. It was the first women’s liberation demonstration in Britain, a rather tame affair compared with what was happening in the United States, with 50,000 women, in 1970, marching down Fifth Avenue in New York to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment (giving women the vote). The American songs were better too, such as:
Oh do you remember Sweet Betsy the Dyke
Who came from New Jersey on her motorbike,
She rode across the country with her lover Anne,
And said to all women, ‘YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN!’
So leave all your menfolk and come on with us.
If you don’t have a cycle, we’ll charter a bus.
American feminists were the first to popularise the notion that men could use their genitalia ‘as a weapon to generate fear’.12 ‘Pornography is the theory and rape the practice’ was another saying (by Robin Morgan) where, paradoxically enough, the vanguard of feminism met, if not exactly joining forces with, Lord Longford’s campaign against pornography.
But for many women who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, the totemic and life-changing figure was Germaine Greer.
The Female Eunuch was published in 1970. The author was a thirty-one-year-old lecturer at Warwick University. She claimed to be leading the second wave of feminism. The first was for parliamentary suffrage. ‘Then genteel middle-class ladies clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution.’13
As already indicated, the conditions in society were ripe for the feminist revolution. Economic circumstances would have demanded that more women, whether or not mothers, entered the workplace, and political and economic circumstances would have eventually determined that they were treated fairly and equally. But though an open door, it was not open very wide, and there can be no doubt that Greer’s forceful heaves, and the eloquent way in which she skewered so many ancient male prejudices, had an explosive effect. Nothing was ever going to be completely the same after The Female Eunuch. She began with a bit of science, pointing out that of forty-eight chromosomes comprising a human individual, only one determines sex difference. In the short chapter on hair, she stated, ‘Not so long ago Edmund Wilson could imply a deficiency in Hemingway’s virility by accusing him of having crepe hair on his chest. The fact is that some men are hairy and some are not; some women are hairy and some are not…that most virile of creatures, the buck negro, had very little body hair at all.’14 Greer devotes only an aside to the interesting question of female body-shaving: ‘Men who do not want their women shaved and deodorized into complete tastelessness are powerless against women’s own distaste for their bodies.’ It is a very typical Greer sentence; while it registers disgust at men’s arrogance, it exhibits as much contempt for women as it does for men. Did women shave or deodorise their bodies in order to please men, or to please themselves, or because they had been brainwashed by advertisers and cosmeticians? It would be interesting to know at what point during our times (and it surely was during our times) women began to shave their armpits. In communist countries, and sometimes in France, they continued to allow pubic hair to grow, even if it protruded from the bikini or swimsuit. In Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, the post-Marxist professor wrote in 2003 that ‘not all students are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day.’15 There are fifteen theses, at MA, M.Phil. or Ph.D. level, in the British Library database which include pubic hair in the title.16 Whether they are as ‘inconsequential’ as the professor believes, one might take leave to doubt, since the question of why women shave their legs, armpits or pudenda, and whether this suggests, as Greer stated in 1970, ‘women’s own distaste for their own bodies’, remains perhaps open. Much of the impact of Greer’s classic was merely shock value: the Oz who dared to speak her mind when the Poms were too shy to talk about fucking or vaginas. ‘Even the much-vaunted cervical smears are rarely given in our community. I first managed to get one when I went to the V.D. clinic in despair because my own doctor would not examine my vagina or use pathology to discover the nature of an irritation which turned out to be exactly what I thought it was.’ These sentences in which the author puts her sex organs in the reader’s excited face, while her brain outfizzed that of medical professionals, remained part of the ever-selling Germaine Greer formula for the next forty years. She wrote in the confidence that, although her doctor might have been too shy to look at her vagina, there would be many who would be only too happy to do so. But her lack of ‘distaste’, a favourite word, for her own body parts, was perhaps less feminist than simply Australian. Part of her success was to be built, as was that of her Cambridge-contemporary Oz, Clive James, playing up the Oz brashness for slightly more than it was worth, and then, to compensate, needing to remind the company that in spite of the directness of her approach, she was actually cleverer, and better read and more subtle-minded than her hearers, as well as infinitely less stuffy. (This, too, was very much Clive James’s no less successful line of attack as he pursued the incompatible dual careers of polymath intellectual and cheeky chappy television chat-show host.)
These considerations aside, however, no history of our times would be complete without recognising the importance of The Female Eunuch as a liberating book. The exciting thing about it was not its appeal to violent radicalist feminists, but to the great majority of women, certainly those under fifty, who recognised the picture she drew of a paternalistic society, its conservative social stereotypes underpinned by the psychology of Freud, posited on the wish to subjugate and belittle half its population. ‘Woman must have room and scope to devise a morality which does not disqualify her from excellence, and a psychology which does not condemn her to the status of a spiritual cripple.’17 Writing six years before the enactment of the Equal Pay Bill, she pointed out that the average weekly pay for a woman in clerical or administrative work was £12 per week, compared with £28 per week for men in the same industries.
In her analysis of marriage, she seemed already, at thirty-one, to be writing herself out of the story of life-long relationships. ‘Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband’s favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to reject the consensus of opinion and find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both.’18 Many married couples would recognise the truth of her analysis. She punctured the ‘middle-class myth of love and marriage’ and mocked family life as ‘mother duck, father duck, and all the little baby ducks’.19 Many people of later decades, in the loneliness, exhaustion and poverty of bringing up children single-handed, might pine for the duck family and question Greer’s adventurous assertion that ‘there is no such thing as security’.20
Read at the time, The Female Eunuch felt like a liberation manual. Read with hindsight, its contextual and historical importance did not diminish, but its message seemed a little more blurred. Like revivalist evangelists, who depended upon their success in shattering the audience’s sense of self-worth, in opening the sinner’s soul to its need for redemption, Greer devoted the last third of her book to direct appeals to the feminine reader’s heart. ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’21 Like the assertion that we are all sinners going to hell, it was not possible to prove or disprove. But here came a woman who had been vouchsafed a glimpse of the truth about life, illustrated with learned extracts from the Book of Genesis, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and even contemporary songs. Bob Dylan was revealed as a woman hater every bit as noxious as John Milton. This last bit of Greer’s book was the best. It assembled a great deal of evidence to illustrate misogyny, in literature, in medical practice, in the law, in common language and expressions. As always, her rhetorical tricks were as impressive as the range of examples she mustered. ‘There are the cute animal terms like chick, bird, kitten and lamb, only a shade of meaning away from cow, bitch, hen, shrew, goose, filly, bat, crow, heifer and vixen, as well as the splendidly ambiguous expression fox, which emanates from the Chicago ghetto. The food terms lose their charm when we reflect how close they are to coarse terms like fish, mutton, skate, crumpet…Who likes to be called dry-goods, a potato, a tomato, or a rutabaga?’
Not many, one might conclude, but though most English-speakers in Britain have heard men and women use words such as cow and bitch to describe women, how many have ever heard or used the word tomato as a synonym of the feminine? It is a measure of how far and fast we all travelled in our times, however, that most of these synonyms had become obsolete by the end of the century, or if not obsolete, words such as crumpet, which were only to be used ironically. To refer to a woman as a bird by the end of our times would be as outmoded as to refer, as Greer does in the quotations from The Female Eunuch already cited, to the ‘buck negro’ or the ‘cripple’.
At the end of her book, Greer would have convinced most dispassionate readers that the female sex had indeed been subjugated and humiliated in many subtle linguistic ways, and by the means of many quite crude religious and social structures which had by now become obsolete. She urged her female readers to joy in the struggle. ‘Privileged women will pluck at your sleeve and seek to enlist you in the “fight” for reforms, but reforms are retrogressive. The old process must be broken, not made new. Bitter women will call you to rebellion, but you have too much to do. What will you do?’ And so the book, brilliantly and provocatively, ended.