by A. N. Wilson
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.
16
The Decline of the Roman Catholic Church
The dissolution of the Church of England during our times was an inevitability. That Church had originated in a time when its Erastian claims had known only one serious challenger, the Church of Rome, which had been seen off by the Penal Laws, which existed until 1829. While it tolerated the existence of Protestant sects, the central reason for the Church of England’s existence was that any other religious body in England was superfluous. To be English was to be a member of the Church of England, unless one opted out. Hence the fact that nearly all primary schools were, throughout our times, Church schools. They were different in status from ‘faith schools’, run by Jews, Muslims or Catholics. Though–because–attached to the Church of England, they were also, ipso facto, state schools. The Church was part of the state. The Church of England was the religion of the monarch, and of the two older universities. It had periodic moments of spiritual revival, sometimes ‘high’, sometimes ‘low’ church, but its life had been bound up with the organism of the post-1660 nation state. That state was now unravelling. The aristocracy still existed, but they were no longer the ‘governing class’. There was all but no squirarchy left, so that in those parishes where the living still had a patron–often the lord of the manor, who had been associated with the same area of England since the Norman Conquest–it seemed to many anomalous that a landowner, rather than a bishop, together with the church wardens, should choose the parson. The very word ‘parson’, familiar term for the parish priest since Chaucer, went out of use. Few quite realised it in the 1960s, but the last generation of literate parsons had been ordained. Those clerical families, such as had given birth to Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, John Cowper Powys, etc, were a thing of the past. The large, draughty rectories–one in every parish, rural or urban–were also a vanished thing, as the Church began a policy of selling off its parsonage-houses, and rehousing the clergy in small, modern dwellings, which reflected the character and class of the new ordinands: no room for books, no room for eight children, all dressed in hand-me-downs; in short, they were no longer gentlemen’s houses, and those gentlemen who would in a previous generation have taken orders were now drawn to other ways of life.
The organic unity of the Church of England, then, was threatened even before it had an Archbishop of Canterbury–
Michael Ramsey–who candidly hated it, and who, by giving it its own parliament, the Synod, and cutting it loose from the Parliament, had sawn off one of its vital limbs. Hitherto, as has been stated already, there was a new sect, ‘Anglicanism’, which attracted fewer and fewer adherents.
Those who believed in Christianity as some ecstatic personal experience were drawn more and more to the Billy Graham religion, which had first been manifest in Britain in 1954, and which grew apace, until in many quarters it was seen as the only plausible version of Protestantism, sometimes flourishing in buildings belonging to the Church of England, but having little in common with the worship or beliefs of that organisation. Those who believed in an institutional form of Christianity looked, perhaps, to the parent Church from which the Church of England had broken away in the sixteenth century, namely that of Rome.
Those who had been drawn to the Roman Catholic Church in the past had often been under the impression that, unlike any other human institution, it was unchangeable. In fact, the Church of Rome had undergone many changes since the nineteenth century, when first the temporal power of the popes had been curtailed by the political unification of Italy, and then the Church had been shaken within by the crisis known as modernism, in which many so-called modernists–tentative believers in modern science, scholars prepared to accept some of the findings of textual scholars of the Bible, and others–were ruthlessly silenced or driven from the Church in the years before the First World War.