Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  My personal life might be messy and inconclusive, but a new decisiveness was discernible on the left that autumn. After that meandering summer in which so many currents had been swirling under the surface, a sudden change of purpose was evident along with a certain sense of being implicated in history with a capital ‘H’. Just as 1967 had begun in 1966, 1968 was starting already. On 8 October the Bolivian military shot Che Guevara. I can remember the sobering shock of the photograph of his corpse along with Richard Gott’s report on the front page of the Guardian. I started to keep a diary on 14 October after meeting Tariq Ali, who had recently returned from Bolivia, where he had been arrested with Robin Blackburn and Perry Anderson during the trial of the French writer on guerrilla warfare Régis Debray.

  I was being pulled back into politics. On 22 October the Vietnam Solidarity Committee held another demonstration. It was the day after the Pentagon demonstration in the United States and was the first mass demonstration in solidarity with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Feeling groggy because hippie visitors had woken me up at four in the morning, I was nonetheless exhilarated by the size of the march, a great gathering of everyone I had ever known plus thousands more besides. I found an excited Bob in the crowd enthusing about the building workers’ strike at the site of the new Barbican development in the City.

  This Barbican strike signalled a new unruly militancy among young workers and the Labour government responded to them with a heavy hand. By November 2,000 police were down at the Barbican and mounted police broke through the picket line, confirming left-wing disenchantment with the Wilson government. The building workers’ bitter anger merged with a widespread desperation among opponents of the Vietnam War, haunted by the photographic images of hunted Vietnamese being lined up, the Buddhist monks’ self-immolation, the TV coverage of unrelenting US bombing raids. Yet Wilson, despite pressure from the Labour left, despite our demonstrations, remained resolutely in support of President Johnson.

  Two disturbing letters arrived from Lawrence in California during November. In the first he reported, ‘The FBI doesn’t know I’m in the country so there’s no warrant out yet,’ and described how one of his friends was ‘in hospital trying to keep his leg on after stepping on a mine’. He was still asking for news of the surfboard – Lawrence retained a trusting faith in people. The next letter was on American National Red Cross notepaper. They’d picked him up in Hawaii, where the US Attorney had told him, ‘Go to serve your nation or go to prison.’ The lure of those big waves had been his undoing. When he refused to eat, they strait-jacketed him and kept him in jail under observation for a month, diagnosing him as ‘a chronic schizophrenic manifested by severe hallucinations, loose associations and autistic behaviour’. In extremity, Lawrence’s optimistic, nature-child personality was mutating. ‘Went to a rally in Frisco against the war and for the Black Panthers last time I was AWOL. You’ll be pleased to know a Marxist has captured control over the Peace and Freedom party.’

  It was ironic that Lawrence, who just wanted big waves to ride and quiet ecstasy, was being strait-jacketed for refusing to kill people in a war he had simply turned his back on. He was in prison for not fighting Marxism, while I, the one who had lectured him remorselessly on Lenin, Trotsky and the Workers’ Opposition, was simply scuffling about outside the American Embassy. I tried to imagine how I would face the military police, but my timorous imagination couldn’t stretch that far. Lawrence’s letter helped me to make a decision. The International Socialists were drifting out of the Labour Party and, along with the Young Liberals and the International Marxist group, were setting up a local branch of Vietnam Solidarity. I decided this was the place I would concentrate all my energy and left the Labour Party. I couldn’t be part of an organization that supported Lyndon Johnson.

  In Oxford that November I finally spoke at Raphael Samuel’s meeting on working-class education, which turned into History Workshop 2. I was nervous and apprehensive facing the crowd of students in the hall at Ruskin College. I had given a talk on the Luddites at Hackney Young Socialists at which I’d been denounced by members of Militant, who had insisted the Luddites were being objectively reactionary because they should have realized that a modern proletariat had to be created by the factory system. I had told them I thought this was a daft way of thinking, but I had been on home ground. The Ruskin trade union men could have given me a hard time because I was describing a class experience which was not my own. Instead they came up to me and compared what I had said about the worker-students of the 1890s and 1900s with their own lives. It was reassuring that the personal details I had been unsure about regarding as ‘history’ were recognizable. Their generosity was to be a reminder, when the women’s movement came along, that historical inquiry can travel over boundaries and does not have to be confined within specific identities.

  In fact class in British society was changing noticeably by 1967. It wasn’t, as Mary Quant and others have implied, that ‘Swinging London’ had become classless. But the relative prosperity of the previous decade, along with low unemployment, had resulted in a generation of young workers who were shedding deference. Young working-class women on the pill had acquired just a bit more space and confidence to break the rules. The Who hit in 1965 ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ had heralded their arrival and by 1967 they were making their way in miniskirted droves through ‘Swinging London’. I was impressed when two blonde sassy independent travellers visited our house. They had just gone round the world dancing in cages. I was sure I would never have had the bottle.

  This was the year of two important sexual reforms: homosexuality between consenting adults and abortion were legalized. I can remember hearing the news of the latter and thinking, ‘Thank goodness,’ at the back of my head. But with little knowledge of the long campaigns behind the two reforms, I took them for granted, regarding the laws as simply keeping up with attitudes which I assumed were spreading inevitably through the land. In fact both these changes marked real shifts which were to alter assumptions.

  Quite suddenly that December I started ruminating about being a woman in a spate of diary entries. Brooding on the masculine lens which filtered perceptions of femininity – ‘State of being a woman seen through the eyes of men’ – I was reinterpreting the women characters in books by male authors. For instance, I questioned the ‘good girl’, ‘bad girl’ dichotomy in John Braine’s Room at the Top, a novel in which I had obediently loathed Susan and identified with Alice (especially after she was played by Simone Signoret in the film). I also began reconsidering Sartre’s passive woman in the dressing-gown, a figure of dread for me because Bob had communicated her ‘immanence’ as a kind of female living death. Now I had stumbled into an insight about the obvious: those literary figures I had worried so much about resembling had simply been created out of men’s hang-ups. It was all in their heads.

  I tried to make sense of incidents I had observed with resentment, putting many uneasy feelings and responses together – a man at a party talking about a woman’s buttocks as if she was meat, another calling girls ‘bits’. Women, I noted, operated within the narrow spaces allotted to femininity, as assertive hip chicks, academic women, mother goddesses, geisha-type sex symbols, independent girly girls, being matter of fact or taking comfort in dismissing men. I thought we jumped in and out of these modes of being and that our discomfort about how to ‘be’ put us at a disadvantage in relation to men. There was an emphasis upon ‘wholeness’ in hippie thinking, and Mary had suggested to me that if these diverse forms of behaving and relating could only be combined it would make women much stronger and less dependent on men.

  I puzzled over how this integration could happen. Even in resisting we seemed to ‘map out certain areas of independence and compensate in others’. I was convinced the solution couldn’t be found by simply working out an ideal of emancipation in your head, for the very ways women learned to be feminine came from a male culture: ‘Women take on the attributes given them by men and pa
rade them with pride. Very like the black/white thing.’ Nor were we necessarily conscious of how we assimilated our femininity.

  Before Lawrence had left, we had gone to see Bonnie and Clyde, the romantic film about two outlaws in thirties America, starring Faye Dunaway as Bonnie in a becoming black beret. When Bonnie adjusted her hair to please Clyde (Warren Beatty), I looked at her expression, taking her cue from a man’s, and thought, ‘I’d never be so submissive.’ Lawrence turned to me in the cinema, saying innocently, ‘She looks just like you often look.’

  It was unbearable to think that there was nothing we could call our own. Women, I decided, did have a culture, though I observed that this took various forms depending on your class. I was aware that my education meant the way I saw myself and the world differed from many other women and that this self-consciousness isolated me. But I already knew that I was not entirely alone, catching a glimmer of a group, writing, ‘Only our kind who operate in men’s world can acquire a marginality which makes it possible to ascribe limits and areas to the assumptions somehow inherited. We become in fact half men.’ (I’d been reading Genet.)

  As I started to rethread and reinterpret previously disconnected memories, films and books about women came to assume a new significance. Peter Collinson’s Up the Junction, based on articles by Nell Dunn, was kitchen-sink drama sentimentalized, but it was unusual in dealing with contemporary class dynamics from the vantage point of the woman. Despite its superficiality, I could empathize with the theme of the middle-class girl going to live in working-class Battersea. The very different Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s tortured film about a woman who breaks down and starts to live the illusion she plays as an actress, left me with a profound anxiety which I could not articulate.

  I returned to Simone de Beauvoir’s writings, to find they had taken on a new relevance and clarity. From 1966 I had also been working my way through Doris Lessing’s novels, discovering in The Golden Notebook a new sensibility which mixed the personal with left politics, a startling reflection of perceptions I had assumed to be purely individual. The essays of the left-wing German psychoanalyst Karen Horney on ‘feminine psychology’ in 1967 made me realize that concepts of cultural hegemony, familiar from Marxism in relation to class, were being applied during the twenties to women.

  Yet ‘feminism’ did not interest me. I knew it only as the suffrage movement of long ago or as a lobby of professional women for advancement at work. This narrow version of ‘feminism’ as the demand for external rights had no purchase on the personal relationships which preoccupied me. I associated even the broader term ‘emancipation’ with competing with men and regarded the claims of women in the public arena as ‘men’s attitudes’ in reverse.

  Adamant that I didn’t want to be like a man, the evident contradictions in how to be a woman kept making me question my own emotions and relationships. I was aware of different kinds of desire, and wondered whether there was a connection between my sexual feelings and the cycle of my periods. I tried to chart moods and responses in a haphazard way in my diary, but the infinity of variables ultimately foxed me. I knew that I could simply want sex physically and not emotionally, but this was more or less impossible to assert publicly in 1967. Such an admission would be too likely to be met by derision from men and scorn from women.

  I was also troubled because I knew that in some of my encounters with men sexually I could be as detached and controlled as they sometimes were with me. I was, I thought, ‘using’ them sexually for physical satisfaction. I interpreted this as an inversion of the traditional male approach to sex and thus a dead end which simply reproduced relations of estrangement.

  I did not see men as a group as uniformly powerful or myself as a defenceless victim, for I had observed that men could be vulnerable and that they seemed to fear women. It was the contrariness within myself which concerned me. My desire to lose myself in passion locked with a ferocious resolve to hang on to myself. With some men I could contrive to be possessed physically but not emotionally. But I hankered after the total risk – to be annihilated and yet still there; to be taken over and remain intact. At the same time I was driven by a longing for a sexuality which was not about possession or being possessed, for forms of relating and loving I could hardly express or even imagine.

  I was puzzling over the gap which divided these private musings about sexuality from ‘politics’ when the first hint of the existence of a Women’s Liberation movement reached me. The news arrived unexpectedly and I nearly missed it.

  I didn’t want to go out on a cold December night to the first meeting of the East London Vietnam Solidarity Committee; I had to grit my teeth as I headed off down Mare Street to the Trades Council Hall. Sure enough it was all too familiar – another meeting dominated by unpractical but opinionated Trotskyist men. The new East London VSC group had no money. I brightly suggested a jumble sale; no one responded, so I piped up again. They kept cutting me out of the discussion as if I had never spoken. I was exasperated but it was a familiar pattern. The unconscious assumption was that because a jumble sale involved women – old women to boot – it was inherently ‘reformist’. But they had no other suggestions for raising funds and I stuck to my guns. I knew how to organize a jumble sale. We had no money. My voice was beginning to rise. I was being overemphatic. Eventually the chairman begrudgingly agreed I could organize a jumble sale. The secretary equally begrudgingly consented to book a room.

  The meeting moved on with relief to more serious matters, asking the comrade from the Stop It Committee to give his report. I waited for someone to come forward. Nothing happened. Then I heard something peculiar. From the back of the room came a male voice rejecting the offer to take the floor. This was an unprecedented event in my experience. Moreover, he was speaking in a modest mumble – I heard an American accent saying ‘like’ every third word. Like he could just talk like from the back like. Most peculiar! I turned round and saw a good-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties with longish dark hair, a white kaftan shirt and hippie beads. How on earth had he got to Hackney Trades Council and what was all this diffident stuff?

  Henry Wortis, the comrade from Stop It, a group of Americans against the Vietnam War, did another surprising thing that night. According to the North American custom, he offered me a lift home after the meeting. In Hackney you walked or got the bus – there was still no feeling of any danger. But it was cold and a lift was welcome. I liked this American man with his quiet air of authority despite the libertarian front. He proceeded to tell me that they were shutting me up at the meeting. I grinned. People were always telling me I talked too much and men in left meetings often made me feel as if I was being unruly, which made me more defiantly unruly. But, Henry went on, it was because I was a woman. I couldn’t believe my ears. This was an extraordinary thing for a left man to be saying. According to Henry, there was this thing called ‘male chauvinism’ and that’s what had been going on in that VSC meeting.

  I usually thought that I had a hard time because I wouldn’t adopt the particular mannerisms acceptable for women in left groups, which involved holding your body stiff in an asexual neutrality and jabbing in the air to prove you were ‘hard’. This I knew very well turned off every other woman in the room who was sitting there silent and alienated. I was determined not to be cut off from women by turning myself into a ridiculous martinet to impress men. I could acknowledge that the common deadpan response from men when I or another woman spoke might be because we had said something foolish. On the other hand, this was not how they behaved with men. If they disagreed with one another, they engaged and argued. Our remarks seemed, in contrast, to just fall into oblivion. It was as if you had never spoken. This made your voice falter or you would shout with the pitch just too high. I definitely didn’t want them to be chivalrous, just for communication to be easier. Now Henry had produced a name for all these puzzling difficulties: male chauvinism. He explained that he knew this because his wife, Shelley, had been in a Women’s
Liberation group in Boston. Several groups in the United States had been started by women from the New Left.

  I was to meet Henry and Shelley over the next two years as Women’s Liberation groups began to form in Britain. But it was not until many years later that I learned about Henry’s own political background. In the mid-fifties, during the McCarthy era, Henry Wortis had kept left debate going at his university – Madison, Wisconsin – through the secret Labor Youth League, acting as a bridge between the old left and the new. The historian Herbert Gutman described Henry and his fellow undergraduates in this difficult period as ‘very funny, wonderful, free in their spirits, radical but a whole separate generation from the old left true believers’.

  The dramatic events of 1968 were to relegate personal concerns to the back burner of consciousness. However, the new insight Henry had transmitted from the Boston Women’s Liberation movement did not entirely go away and that ‘male chauvinism’ term was to churn around in the back of my head.

  Right at the end of 1967, however, it felt like time to take a breath. John Hoyland wanted to know if I would like to parade around an architectural students’ ball in a mask. A friend of his, a poet and puppeteer, was making elaborate papier-mâché masks. Though mine was an unartistic white paper bag with a red nose, we were a big hit on the tube, where we were treated as minor celebrities. We waltzed around the dance floor at the ball to oohs and aahs until it was time for the next act, when the architects quickly lost interest. A strip-tease had begun on stage. I looked at the stripper through the slits in my white paper bag with a queasy sensation. Yet another of those contradictions. How was I to regard her?