State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Since there were so few British films in the 1970s, it is hard to make out a similar pattern. By far the most successful film actress of the early 1970s, Glenda Jackson, was the perfect symbol of liberated womanhood, her politics ‘a sort of diffused feminism, militant up to a point, but not calculated to frighten the bankers in their counting-houses’, as the critic Alexander Walker put it. In films such as Women in Love (1969), Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) and A Touch of Class (1973), she played articulate, assertive, often deeply pragmatic women, more forceful than the screen characters played in the 1960s by, say, Julie Christie, winning Oscars for the first and third. Jackson’s ostentatious disdain for stardom – she often talked of her desire to retire and plunge into ‘social work’ – was perfect for the mood of the early 1970s. But so were her dismissive quotes about men: ‘One heck of a lot of outlay for a very small return from most of them.’ She would have made an entertaining companion for Roger Moore’s splendidly unreconstructed James Bond; instead, the producers of Britain’s best-known film series continued to cast pneumatic sirens such as Jane Seymour and Britt Ekland. But even Bond eventually faced the challenge of women’s liberation. In The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), he seems to meet his match: a gorgeous KGB agent, Major Anya Amasova (played by Barbara Bach, later unaccountably married to Ringo Starr), who is just as daring, witty and accomplished as he is. Of course Bond ultimately gets the upper hand (not least by ‘keeping the British end up’ in the final scene), but Anya strikes plenty of blows for her sex along the way. Bach herself, however, was not a Bond fan: the character, she said, was ‘a chauvinist pig’.31

  Even the most obviously chauvinist film series of all did its best to engage with the spirit of Sheila Rowbotham and Germaine Greer, although it is hard to imagine either of them enjoying it. In Carry On Girls (1973), we find ourselves in the seaside town of Fircombe, whose weak-willed Mayor (Kenneth Connor) gives way to demands for an old-fashioned beauty pageant – which will, of course, be organized by Sid James, here in the guise of the distinctly sexist Councillor Sidney Fiddler. However, Sid has not bargained for the fiercely militant ‘women’s libbers’ on the town council, led by June Whitfield’s redoubtable Augusta Prodworthy and supported by her sidekick Rosemary, who wears a shirt-and-tie, cardigan and trousers, just in case there is any doubt about her being a lesbian. Predictably enough, the film has great fun with the women’s libbers: a policeman calls Rosemary ‘this gentleman’, a bra-burning ritual rapidly degenerates into a farcical inferno, and Mrs Prodworthy, who opposes the building of a men-only toilet, is given the extraordinary line: ‘We will squat upon this erection to man’s so-called superiority!’ Less predictably, however, the feminists win the day, sabotaging the beauty contest with oil, itching powder and sneezing powder, in an exaggerated replay of the events at the Miss World contest three years earlier. Ten years earlier, the film might have ended with them frustrated; instead, the pageant falls apart. Not even Sid James, it seems, can hold the line against the women’s libbers.32

  Since Sally Jordan never went to the cinema, she is unlikely to have appreciated Carry on Girls. She liked watching films, but her husband never took her out and she was reluctant to go on her own. In any case, there was always too much to do. Every morning, as dawn broke over their London council estate, her husband brought her tea in bed; but from that moment, there was no rest. In little more than an hour, she said, ‘I come down, lay the table for breakfast, get dressed, and then I charge around doing what I can: the children make their own beds. I make my bed, I carpet sweep: if I’m hoovering, I leave that till I come home, I dust, draw curtains, drink tea, smoke a million fags with nerves, and then I make sure the children are all dressed and ready for school.’ Then it was time to go out to work. Sally was a shrink-wrapper (‘I know it sounds ridiculous,’ she said, ‘but that’s what I actually am. I would rather describe myself as a shrink-wrapper than as a housewife. I pack tins in cellophane, and the cellophane shrinks’), and she worked every day from nine till one. Then she came home, prepared her dinner, and started the washing and ironing, washing some clothes by hand and shoving others into the machine, and later hanging them out on a line or taking them down to the launderette. At half past three, it was time to pick up her daughter; there was the children’s tea to prepare, and her husband’s dinner, and ‘after that I wash up, put the dishes away, sweep the floor, wash the floor’, she explained. Then she put the children to bed, and at last, ‘I come down, make a cup of coffee, and then I sit down!’33

  Nothing was more likely to make a radical feminist shudder than contemplating the lot of the average housewife. The very word struck them as deeply offensive, and they regarded stay-at-home wives and mothers as a slave underclass, so deeply oppressed that they did not even realize the extent of their own plight. ‘Abolish the housewife role, abolish the family,’ was the recommendation of Ann Oakley, a feminist writer whose interviews provided the basis for her pioneering study Housewife (1974). Like many of her contemporaries, she was appalled by what seemed the blatant unfairness of the division of labour within the home. Even though almost half of all married women, like Sally Jordan, were working either part-time or full-time by the early 1970s, they still did the lion’s share of work at home. In 1970, one extensive survey of family life in the Home Counties (the most affluent, middle-class area of the country, where attitudes were likely to be most progressive) found that women with part-time jobs still did 35 hours of housework a week, while women working full-time did 23 hours. Men, meanwhile, did just 9 hours, very little of it involving dull, repetitive tasks such as cleaning and ironing. The advent of feminism had little immediate effect: in the mid-1970s, another survey reckoned that men did ‘less than 10 per cent of routine domestic work’. And although there was much talk of young men sharing the burden, a study in 1984 found that nine out of ten married women still did the washing and ironing on their own; seven out of ten did all the household cleaning; and five out of ten still did all the shopping.34

  Not surprisingly, many housewives suffered from terrible loneliness. In Ann Oakley’s survey of forty housewives, almost all said they often found their work boring or unsatisfying, and many admitted that they felt abandoned during the day. ‘I could be murdered here and no one would know. When the milkman comes, it’s an event,’ said the wife of a lorry driver, while a shop manager’s wife said that she often got ‘this feeling that unless you go out and talk to someone, you’ll go stark raving mad’. Sally Jordan’s was an exceptionally bad case of a housewife abandoned at home by her husband and expected to work all hours of the day. ‘Even before you go to bed you’ve got something to do – emptying ashtrays, wash a few cups; you’re still working,’ she said sadly. Her husband, a dustman, barely lifted a finger to help her; he refused to change their children’s nappies, to push a pram or even to set foot inside a supermarket, presumably because these were not things a ‘real man’ did. He disapproved of Sally going out without his permission – ‘It’s all right for a man, but it’s not all right for a woman’, he told her – yet he went to the pub every single night, weekdays and weekends. ‘I’m a very lonely person,’ Sally admitted. ‘I suppose I’m frightened of my husband to a certain extent. I’ve always been led to believe that a man is the boss of the home, and I feel I can’t get that idea out of my mind. My marriage is like boss and employee; I take orders from my husband.’35

  In this context, Oakley’s verdict that Sally was ‘deeply oppressed’ seems absolutely right; revealingly, however, her male doctor diagnosed her as ‘neurotic’. She was certainly no feminist: she told Oakley that a man had the right to run his family as he wanted, and that a woman’s place was in the home. ‘Right from birth you’re like a robot, you’re programmed,’ she said; ‘it’s as if you’re born, you get the toys – the prams and everything – and then later on you get the real things.’ Yet she was unable to break the cycle. Even though she would have liked to buy her daughter ‘trains and motor cars’, she had in fact got her a minia
ture cot, a doll, a little pram, even ‘a little washing machine’ and an ironing board. Asked what she thought of women’s liberation, her reply was highly revealing. ‘I don’t fancy burning my brassieres,’ she immediately shot back. ‘I say equality is all right to a certain extent. A woman can never be as equal as a man: although they’re not inferior, they’ll never be quite as equal … If it’s equality so far as women MPs are concerned, why not women dustmen? And I don’t think women could do it. So I therefore say men are the stronger sex in some things, but not in all things.’36

  Sally’s values were by no means unusual. Asked if she envied her husband, another of Oakley’s housewives, an outgoing redhead called Patricia Andrews, admitted that she often told him: ‘I wish I was the bloke.’ But when she was asked if she would like to go out to work while her husband stayed at home, her answer was firm: ‘I don’t think men can look after the children and do the housework and everything like we do. It’s not the same. I’d think the man was a bit funny, wouldn’t you? Lazy sod.’ Like Sally, she worked hard: washing and cleaning every morning, then shopping and cooking, and more housework at weekends. ‘I never sit down in the morning,’ she said; ‘I never even have breakfast. I don’t sit down until half-past four when I watch Crossroads.’ But her story was different from Sally’s, illustrating the point (often ignored by radical feminists) that no two housewives’ lives were exactly alike, and that some actively enjoyed their work. One obvious difference was that Patricia’s husband, a delivery man, was relatively keen to help: he happily fed the children, changed their nappies, went shopping for supplies, made the evening meal every night and washed up every Sunday and sometimes in the week.

  Perhaps this explained why Patricia clearly felt much less oppressed, and even admitted that sometimes she ‘really liked doing housework’ and that it gave her a sense of pride. Oakley saw this as false consciousness. A less patronizing verdict, though, might be that Patricia knew what she liked better than her visitor did. As the journalist Mary Ingham pointed out a few years later, Oakley was so determined to present housewives as an oppressed underclass that she dismissed the testimony of women who said they felt happy and fulfilled. ‘I don’t find it a terrible chore, and I enjoy cooking,’ one housewife told her. ‘I know it’s old-fashioned, but I see it as a labour of love. Andrew is out there slogging away for us and I’m doing my bit on the home front.’ ‘I’m going nowhere, but fortunately my life is rather full,’ said another. ‘I like not having to keep to a timetable, and I do have a lot of control in the house. It’s my territory … I don’t feel I’ve missed out on anything by putting my husband and children first.’37

  The fact is that, despite the condescending stereotype that all housewives must be lonely and frustrated, many insisted that they cherished their freedom and independence, and certainly preferred it to the alternative, which was often a low-paid menial job. And it is not true that housework gave women no opportunity to win status and respect. As one historian writes, it was ‘of major economic, social and cultural importance’, for the skills of the housewife helped to determine the social standing of her family, and ‘provided the means by which the family presented itself to the world’. And yet as families came under increasing pressure to maximize their earnings and thus to share in the opportunities of the affluent society, so the number of housewives steadily fell. It is a myth that the 1960s changed everything: even in 1951, one in five married women was working, and by 1961 it was more like one in three. Economics was not the only factor: as women were better educated, so they were likely to have loftier career goals, and as contraception freed them from the routine of childbearing, so they tailored their family lives to suit their ambitions. But one crucial and much underrated development was the economic transition from labour-intensive heavy industry, which obviously suited men, to white-collar clerical and service work, which women could do just as well. In other words, not only were there more women who wanted to work, there were more jobs for them to do. By 1971, almost 47 per cent of married women were working, and by 1981, 54 per cent. Most were only part-time; even so, it marked a radical change from the days when women had attracted frowns of disapproval if they stayed in work after marriage.38

  The influx of women into the workplace inevitably brought subtle changes in the dynamics of the office. ‘Would you let your daughter work in an open-plan office?’ asked an Observer feature in 1968, noting that male employees were so afflicted with ‘visual distraction’ that one ‘had to turn his desk sideways to avoid seeing the miniskirts’. Two out of three secretaries, reported the Mirror, wanted ‘modesty boards’ to ‘stop the boss peering at their legs’, although by the mid-1970s, when longer skirts and trousers had ousted the mini-skirt, the issue was less pressing. But there were other changes, too. Cartwrights, the biggest mill in Huddersfield, employed 2,000 people at the beginning of the 1970s, a growing proportion of them ‘mill girls’. One visitor noticed that the men, whose workplace conversation often consisted of sexual banter, were clearly ‘embarrassed’ mentioning sexual matters in front of the women, as though they were ‘trespassing against traditional ideals of womanly purity and, at a deeper level, the securities of family life’. If a woman joined in with their sexual banter, he noted, ‘she immediately lost their respect’: one man who happily joked with his female neighbour one moment (‘Have you got a match?’ ‘Yes, your face and my arse’) contemptuously dismissed her as ‘a common thing’ the next. In interviews, the men almost universally voiced the belief that ‘the different worlds of work and home should remain separate’, not so much because they thought that women were inferior, but because their presence made them feel uncomfortable. It challenged their ‘basic categories of thought about women’, who were meant to be maternal, domesticated creatures, protected from swearing and sexual banter. ‘I wouldn’t like my girlfriend to have to work here,’ one said: ‘not from t’work point of view, but from what they have to put up with and t’language they have to hear.’39

  In June 1970, the Daily Mirror held a competition to celebrate the new importance of working women, asking female readers to write in about their experiences in the workplace. The winner was Ivy Williams, a welder from Hemel Hempstead, who carried off the reward: ‘the difference between her pay and a man’s rate for the same job for three years’. As gimmicks go, it was a brilliant way of illustrating the fact that in 1970 a woman was generally paid less than two-thirds per hour of what a man earned for the same work. Yet it was a measure of how much things had changed that both parties agreed this was no longer acceptable. The Heath government was already preparing a Sex Discrimination Bill when it fell from office; a year later, Labour passed a heavily revised and expanded Sex Discrimination Act outlawing discrimination in employment, education, training, housing and the provision of goods and services. And these landmark laws were enforced by a new Equal Opportunities Commission, which was empowered to launch investigations and to take action against wrongdoers.

  On the radical right, some complained that the EOC was a damnable interference with the free market and the rights of employers; on the radical left, however, there were complaints that it did not go nearly far enough. In its first two weeks, the commission was inundated with more than 2,500 enquiries about sexual discrimination. But Britain had no real tradition of civil rights legislation, proving discrimination turned out to be a difficult and lengthy business, and the grim economic climate of the day was hardly the ideal time for an assault on embedded inequalities. By the late 1970s, the Guardian was already dismissing the EOC as a ‘wet lady-like body too concerned with holding its skirts down against the rude winds to have a go at entrenched masculine strongholds’. And despite the high hopes, working women still lagged a long way behind their male counterparts. By the end of the decade, most still worked either part-time or in jobs where there were almost no men anyway. In 1980 the Women and Employment survey found that 63 per cent of women worked in areas that were virtually women-only (like nursing), where
their low pay could not legally be challenged. As the Sunday Times had presciently put it ten years earlier, ‘the woman’s dilemma is not so much equal pay as gross and systematic lack of opportunity’.40

  Since the EOC was so toothless, many women looked elsewhere for help. Historically, the trade unions had been seen as bastions of male chauvinism, but times had changed. Visiting Blackpool for the annual conference of the Textile Factory Workers’ Association in April 1972, Tony Benn was ‘very struck by a woman trade unionist who demanded maternity leave for women textile workers’, who automatically lost their jobs if they had children and had to start from the bottom if they returned to work. ‘She put it so toughly and the men looked so shifty,’ Benn recorded, ‘that all of a sudden it focused my mind on what the things are that change society.’ In fact, by 1975 one in four trade union members was a woman, and by 1980 almost one in three. They were particularly prominent in white-collar public sector unions: during the 1970s, the female membership of NALGO went up by 141 per cent, of NUPE by 236 per cent, of COHSE by 309 per cent and of ASTMS by a staggering 721 per cent.