Where the programme broke new ground was that it refused to move on from the story, showing how Deirdre remained in shock long after others had almost forgotten the incident. In the episode on 7 November, for example, she finally goes into work, but breaks down when a man comes into the office where she has been left alone. On 16 November, when her husband takes her for a night out and the babysitter compliments her on looking ‘dead sexy’, she again breaks down, and the next episode ends with her standing on a motorway bridge, staring down, apparently about to throw herself off. As it turns out, a lorry driver eventually talks her down, and after confessing to her husband she agrees to see a psychiatrist. By Coronation Street’s standards, this was strong stuff. But given how many people watched it, and the place the series occupied in the popular imagination, it probably did as much to persuade people about the terrible effects of sexual assault as any number of feminist tracts.19
Since so many early feminists were highly articulate, literate young women, their movement left an unsurprisingly deep imprint on the world of arts and letters. Although there were a vast quantity of feminist papers and newsletters, many of them short-lived, easily the best known was Spare Rib, which was founded by a collective of young women in the summer of 1972, The driving forces, Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, were just 20 and 26 respectively, with very little journalistic experience. Between them, however, they managed to scrape together the necessary funds: Rowe went to consciousness-raising groups and feminist meetings, while Boycott, by her own account, went to ‘a large number of parties and talked the whole idea up to anyone who would listen in the hope that they’d forget [my] age and inexperience and come over with the cash’. And somehow, by early 1972, they had done it. They borrowed typewriters from friends, picked up desks, chairs and filing cabinets from the offices of the defunct underground paper INK, and raised thousands of pounds at a succession of parties. Working by candlelight during the power cuts of early 1972, they sent out questionnaires to discover what women wanted from a feminist monthly; and finally, in June, they were ready to go.
The whole point of Spare Rib was that it was not like other feminist papers. Compared with its competitors, Boycott said later, ‘it was a very straight-looking magazine: it was clearly designed, it was clearly printed, it looked nice’. Rowe agreed: they wanted above all ‘to be accessible’, to be ‘professional’ and to be ‘in WH Smith’. At first, she said, they emphasized ‘very traditional women’s role things’ like make-up and cookery, simply because they were desperate to attract a wide female readership. This brought them fierce criticism from older and more radical feminists; even their launch party was invaded by gay activists dressed as clowns, who told them that they were ‘selling out’ and that Spare Rib was ‘straight and bourgeois’. But that was nonsense: Spare Rib was clearly not just another glossy women’s magazine, and even in the design and layout, the debts to the underground press were obvious. The cover might show two attractive women and promise ‘Georgie Best on Sex’, but inside there were pointed feminist cartoons, an article on the campaign to get better wages for night cleaners, a story on the suffrage movement, and a recipe for a banana and raw cabbage salad that would have received short shrift from Woman’s Own. As one writer puts it, ‘article by article … it laid bare the intricate workings of gender inequality in Britain’, from the drudgery of housework to a woman’s fear of going into a pub on her own. Predictably enough, the founders soon fell out among themselves, and Boycott eventually parted company with the others. But sales were better than they could possibly have imagined: 20,000 for the first issue alone. Revealingly, though, most copies were sold in London and university towns; it was not easy to find in the newsagents of Wakefield, Wigan or Wolverhampton.20
Boycott and Rowe’s ambitions were not limited to magazines. In June 1973 they attended the first board meeting of a new publishing imprint, Virago, which presented itself as ‘the first mass-market publisher for 52% of the population – women’. This was the brainchild of Carmen Callil, an Australian in her mid-thirties, who had been working for the now-deceased INK and had decided that she would ‘change the world by publishing books which celebrated women and women’s lives, and thus spread the message of women’s liberation to the whole population’, while also banishing ‘the idea that it had anything to do with burning bras or hating men’. Inside every book was printed the message ‘Virago is a feminist publishing company’, together with a quotation from Sheila Rowbotham: ‘It is only when women start to organise in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can be brave, responsible, thinking and diligent in the struggle to live at once freely and unselfishly.’ But Callil’s new venture was more than a political statement; it was to prove an extremely successful imprint, publishing major writers like Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Eva Figes, Angela Carter, Juliet Mitchell, Lynne Segal and Elaine Showalter, and rediscovering forgotten classics of women’s writing such as Antonia White’s Frost in May and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which was adapted as a BBC television serial in 1979.21
Virago’s success reflected the broader accomplishments of women writers during the post-war years. Even before the revival of feminism, women’s writing was enjoying a golden age: novelists such as Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble had been writing superbly and sensitively about women’s experiences for years, anticipating many of the concerns that feminists would make their own in the 1970s. The plight of women banished to a life of domesticity, as the critic D. J. Taylor points out, is a constant theme in A. S. Byatt’s novels: in The Game (1968), an Oxford don’s wife, once a promising academic, now a frustrated housewife, admires the heroine’s books because they explore the ‘real boredom’ of ‘intelligent women, who are suddenly plunged into being at home all day’.22
Then there was Angela Carter, whose heady blend of feminism, science fiction and magic realism delighted, baffled and repelled readers in equal measure. In Love (1971), a relatively conventional novel by her standards, the innocent, trusting female protagonist, callously betrayed by her uncaring husband, ends up gassing herself. In the surreal and violently explicit The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), meanwhile, the female characters freely use their sexual allure and desires as weapons to proclaim their own independence. But it was Carter’s next book, The Passion of New Eve (1977), which became perhaps the emblematic feminist novel of the decade, albeit a disturbingly peculiar one. The plot defies easy summary: to put it very simply, Evelyn, a male English professor in a dystopian New York, impregnates a young black nightclub dancer, forces her to have an abortion, and then spends the rest of the novel being punished for his aggressive masculinity. Captured by a cult of Amazonian desert women, he is brought before a mother-goddess, who tells him: ‘You’ve abused women, Evelyn, with this delicate instrument that should have been used for nothing but pleasure. You’ve made a weapon of it!’ Evelyn is promptly transformed through surgery into Eve, a woman: when he protests, one of his captors remarks: ‘Is it such a bad thing to be like me?’ Eve spends much of the rest of the novel being raped; at the end, after being symbolically reborn in the womb of time, she is offered her old male genitals, which have been frozen in ice. But she ‘bursts out laughing’ and refuses them; instead, she sails out to sea, in search of her new Eden.23
By far the best-known feminist writer of the 1970s, however, was neither British nor a novelist. Born in the middle-class suburbs of Melbourne in 1939, a privately educated convent-school girl who studied Elizabethan drama at Cambridge and became a leading light in the underground of the late 1960s, Germaine Greer was a tirelessly flamboyant figure even by the standards of her fellow bohemians, her undoubted energy supported by a fierce thirst for publicity and desire to shock. The historian Lisa Jardine recalled meeting her at Cambridge in the late 1960s, the setting a formal dinner in the women’s college of Newnham. What happened next was a classic
example of the Greer effect:
The principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian accent reverberating around the room.
At the graduates’ table, Germaine was explaining that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses, two stitched white cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression.
I’d like to be able to recall that we hallooed and thumped the tables, or that we erupted into a spontaneous roar of approval, a guffaw of sisterly laughter. We should have done, but we didn’t. We were too astonished at the very idea that a woman could speak so loudly and out of turn, and that words such as ‘bra’ and ‘breasts’ (or maybe she said ‘tits’) could be uttered amid the pseudo-masculine solemnity of a college dinner.
But Greer’s activities went well beyond shocking bluestockings at formal dinners. She wrote a gardening column for Private Eye, contributed articles for the controversial underground paper Oz, and edited the Dutch paper Suck, for which she famously posed ‘stripped to the buff, looking at the lens through my thighs’, as she later put it. ‘Face, pubes and anus framed by vast buttocks, nothing decorative about it. Nothing sexy about it either. Confrontation was the name of the game.’24
What transformed Greer from a bohemian Amazon with a weird taste in exhibitionism into the world’s most celebrated icon of women’s liberation was her book The Female Eunuch, which was published in October 1970. A deliberately provocative attempt to bridge the gap between academic writing and crowd-pleasing polemic, the book argued that not only do men hate women, they teach them to hate themselves through the institution of the suburban, consumerist nuclear family, which denies their sexuality and turns them into ‘female eunuchs’. Women had become ‘separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality’, Greer explained. ‘Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives – to be fattened or made docile – women have been cut off from their capacity for action.’ They needed to cast off the shackles of the family, throw themselves into sexual action, and embrace their own distinctive physicality. ‘A woman should not continue to apologise and disguise herself,’ she wrote witheringly, ‘while accepting her male’s pot-belly, wattles, bad breath, farting, stubble, baldness and other ugliness without complaint.’ Only a woman who had tasted her own menstrual blood, she added, could consider herself genuinely liberated.25
Greer admitted later that The Female Eunuch was far from perfect, its scattershot argument clearly derived from the fashionable ideas of the late 1960s, from the iniquity of consumerism to the supposedly irresistible power of sex to bring social change. And what is often forgotten is that the reviews were mixed to say the least. In the Listener, Greer’s fellow Australian exile Clive James called it a ‘brilliant attack on marriage and on the psychological preparation for it, and on the nuclear family which is a result of it’, although even he noted that a lot of the argument could be traced back to the Edwardians. But other critics disliked her strident, hectoring tone: ‘as often with hastily-written polemic,’ noted New Society, ‘there is a good deal of nonsense.’ There was rather too much ‘nagging’, agreed Penelope Mortimer in the Observer, commenting that Greer’s advice to women on how to handle their lovers came close to being a ‘contemporary manual on How to Get Your Man’. Still, there could be no argument with the sales figures. Published in October, it had been translated into eleven languages by the following summer and had almost sold out its second print run. By 1971, Paladin’s paperback edition, which boasted a striking cover image of the naked female torso as a metallic swimming costume, hanging from a rail, was being reprinted every month to meet the demand. The Sunday Mirror even bought the serial rights and in March 1971 ran three weeks of extracts, billed as ‘a series to challenge the woman who thinks she’s feminine – and the man who likes her that way’.26
Whether everybody who bought The Female Eunuch actually read it is beside the point. It was one of those books that came to symbolize a particular historical moment, a book that everybody of a certain class and age thought they simply had to own. It made Greer a media star, writing columns for the Sunday Times and co-presenting a Granada comedy show with, of all people, Kenny Everett. Many of her fellow feminists, however, were outraged. Before The Female Eunuch, Greer’s reputation had been that of a sexually voracious rebel rather than an earnest women’s liberationist. She had not even turned up to the Ruskin conference and showed little interest in joining consciousness-raising sessions or building playgrounds and childcare centres. For the serious-minded Sheila Rowbotham, she was a ‘scare crow radical’, more interested in entertaining the media than in putting in the hard graft that would bring social change. Like other feminists, Rowbotham preferred more earnest tracts such as Eva Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes (1970), or Juliet Mitchell’s Women in Society (1971), a frankly turgid blend of Marxism and radical feminism. But to the general public, Germaine Greer was feminism incarnate, freely discussing everything from her sexual experiences to the self-indulgence of hippies, often in shockingly coarse and caustic language. Her ‘wit and style and intelligence and beauty and guts made her impossible to ignore’, the admiring Rosie Boycott said later. ‘There were loads of people writing equally serious works who you could just dismiss because they looked depressing and they were hangdog.’27
Whether Greer’s book made more converts than the unsung activists who never made the headlines is impossible to say. Between them, though, they made a deep impression on British society in the early 1970s, not least because, with so many more women going to university and flooding into the workplace, they found such a receptive audience. It is revealing that although the newspapers continued to mock ‘women’s lib’, they all made strenuous efforts to attract female readers, which often involved concessions to the feminist agenda. The Guardian’s women’s page famously became a bastion of feminist ideas – although at one stage it was temporarily dropped under pressure from activists who argued that women should not be patronized with their own page. Yet what was even more revealing was the Daily Mail’s campaign to present itself as a modern woman’s paper, complete with the slogan ‘Every Woman Needs Her Daily Mail’.
Even the Sun, despite the evidence of Page Three, billed itself as a woman’s paper. Larry Lamb, its first editor, rather dubiously claimed that it was the first paper ‘to recognise the obvious truth that every other reader is a woman’. It was ‘in tune with the new mood of feminine feminism’, he said, ‘as opposed to militant feminism’, and he prided himself on addressing women, not just about ‘clothes, slimming, knitting and babies’, but about ‘matters emotional and matters political … men and money, sex and sin, sport and crime’. The Sun even had a dedicated department of female journalists nicknamed the ‘Pacesetters’ who were given their own section, called ‘the pages for women that men can’t resist’ – although in practice their stories tended to be even more skewed towards sex than the rest of the paper.28
And then, of course, there was Cosmopolitan. Launched in 1972 as an offshoot of the American original, this was a woman’s magazine with a difference, aimed not at the housewives who had traditionally made up the women’s market, but at upwardly mobile, ambitious young professionals. Its ideal reader was ‘lively, sensual, fun, adventurous … honest with herself’, or so the adverts claimed. Its first editor, Joyce Hopkirk, made no secret of the fact that sex and men were central to her strategy: as one early reader put it, the first issue read as ‘a guide to getting, keeping (and if necessary getting rid of) your man’. ‘How To Turn a Man On When He’s Having Problems in Bed’, read the headline on the first cover, although other items (‘Michael Parkinson Talks About
His Vasectomy’) were rather less enticing. The ideal reader, Hopkirk explained, was aged between 18 and 34, ‘although she will be addressed as if she’s 25’, and the magazine would address her as a woman, not just ‘as a wife and mother’. She would be ‘very articulate, intelligent but not intellectual … smart and ambitious’, with ‘brains as well as a body’. It was clearly a formula that worked: within twenty-four hours the first issue had sold out. For the rest of the decade, Cosmopolitan reigned supreme as the magazine for go-getters. Oddly, though, it was Penthouse’s publisher Bob Guccione who put his finger on the key to its appeal. ‘They want to see the kind of woman who is being idealized for men,’ he remarked of Cosmopolitan’s readers in 1972. ‘They want to see what the ideal values are.’29
Film and television producers also tried hard to appeal to female audiences, although the end products were not always to feminists’ liking. Few television series of the mid-1970s were complete without their share of tough, self-reliant women: Carolyn Seymour’s Abby Grant in the first series of Survivors (1975), for example, a middle-class housewife who finds extraordinary reserves of strength in the midst of a global plague; or Siân Phillips’s Livia in I, Claudius (1976), who unrepentantly poisons her way through the first generations of the Roman imperial family; or Jacqueline Pearce’s magnificently camp Supreme Commander Servalan in the science fiction series Blake’s 7 (1978–81), an irresistible combination of ruthlessness and sex appeal who haunted the daydreams of more than a few anorak-wearing adolescents. Then there was Felicity Kendal’s Barbara Good in The Good Life (1975–8), whose jeans and dungarees immediately proclaimed her status as a liberated woman, while even Penelope Keith’s sitcom characters Margo Leadbetter and Audrey fforbes-Hamilton (in To the Manor Born, 1979–81) were formidable presences. Indeed, across the board there was a clear effort to show female characters as more independent and assertive. So when Sarah Jane Smith was written out of Doctor Who in 1976, she was replaced not with a more conventional sidekick, but with Leela, a savage huntress in skins, supposedly named after the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled. As a feminist icon, however, Leela was limited by the fact that she appealed so obviously to male viewers. ‘She is a bit of a Woman’s Movement sort,’ wrote the television critic Stanley Reynolds; ‘a militant is Leela and she kills with a knife with the ease of a Royal Marine Commando.’ But deep down, he suspected, ‘the leggy Leela is there for the dads and more earthy 14-year-olds, rather like those appalling rhythmic girls who practise dancing each week on Top of the Pops’.30
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