Of course Potter’s highly personal, tormented vision was hardly representative of British popular culture in the 1970s. Even so, it is worth noting that the strangling of sexually active, intensely desirable women is a key element of another black comedy of the day, Alfred Hitchcock’s film Frenzy (1972), in which the jovial ‘necktie murderer’ Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) pursues attractive conquests with all the zest of the Persuaders! heroes, the only difference being that he gets his kicks out of choking them to death. In the Michael Caine thriller Get Carter (1971), meanwhile, the female characters, almost universally weak, untrustworthy and licentious, all meet decidedly sticky ends. Carter’s niece is sucked into the underworld of porn films, his mistress has her face slashed to ribbons, and his voluptuous landlady, whom he has already seduced, is attacked by gangsters. Meanwhile, Carter beats up and tortures the prostitute Glenda, eventually locking her in the boot of his car (where she is drowned), and kills another prostitute, Margaret, a key link in the conspiracy, by stripping her naked and forcibly injecting her with heroin – a particularly brutal scene in a film overflowing with masculine aggression towards women.
And yet by the standards of the early 1970s the misogyny of Get Carter was not especially shocking. Ken Russell’s dementedly extravagant The Devils (1971) wallows in female sexuality, hatred and irrationality: indeed, for scenes of naked nuns in a religious frenzy, nuns sexually assaulting a statue of Christ, and nuns pleasuring themselves with charred human bones, there is nothing to touch it. That the same year also saw the release of Sam Peckinpah’s film Straw Dogs (Cornish yokels lay siege to American boffin and sexy wife), in which a notorious rape scene shows Susan George apparently enjoying being anally violated, suggests that this was no accident. Horror films of the day, too, showed women as dangerously unstable, sexually obsessive creatures, verging on the demoniacal, like the monstrous red-coated dwarf in Don’t Look Now (1973), and a few years later Hollywood would make a speciality of punishing sexually promiscuous young girls in memorably gory ways. Even James Bond got in on the act. Few people could have been surprised when Sean Connery slapped Jill St John in Diamonds are Forever (1971), yet even the most embittered chauvinist must have winced when Roger Moore, of all people, hit Maud Adams in the face not once but twice in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).67
Perhaps mercifully, British culture had no real equivalent of Norman Mailer, the aggressively macho American novelist who transformed himself into virtually a full-time critic of women’s liberation as his literary powers waned. The nearest it came was probably the eternally disputatious Kingsley Amis, formerly a very keen lover of women (or ‘cocksman’, to use his own terminology), whose novels became increasingly acerbic in the late 1970s as his sexual potency declined and his second marriage began to crumble. Feminist critics frequently accused him of being a misogynist, and although his books were a good deal more complicated than that, his protagonists often have some very robust things to say. In Jake’s Thing (1978), the central character, the middle-aged Oxford don Jake Richardson (an updated version of Amis’s most famous hero, Jim Dixon), cannot contain his horror at the thought of admitting women to his college. ‘It’s the men who are going to be the losers,’ he says angrily, for there will be
women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about.
In the last lines of the book, Jake returns to the theme. After months of seeing therapists about his fading libido, he is finally told that the problem is purely hormonal and can be corrected easily enough. He does a ‘quick-run through of women in his mind’, taking in
their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate,
and so on, right up to
their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.
(That last phrase is wonderfully ambiguous.) His decision, then, is clear: ‘No thanks,’ he says.68
Amis bitterly resented biographical interpretations of his novels. Still, there is no doubt that he was animated by a fierce loathing of therapy culture and women’s liberation, both of which he associated with his wife Jane, who went to women’s groups and consciousness-raising sessions (‘GROUPS and WORKSHOPS and crappy new friends’, as he once put it). In Stanley and the Women (1984) the message is even more pointed: the book’s female characters are almost entirely loathsome, and the satire of feminism and therapy culture is unremittingly bitter. ‘I thought you’d given women a pretty good going-over in JT [Jake’s Thing],’ wrote an amused Philip Larkin. ‘Still got some more to say, eh?’ This was ‘not another JT by any means,’ Amis wrote back. ‘None of the sentimental mollycoddling that women get in that.’ Not surprisingly, therefore, many critics hated the book, although the academic Marilyn Butler, writing in the London Review of Books, managed to interpret it as a subtle demolition of anti-feminism, which Amis thought was ‘balls’. Indeed, several major American publishers turned it down for fear of sparking feminist outrage, which did nothing for Amis’s attitude toward feminism, or indeed Americans. But by this point his public attitude to women (always more complicated than the misogynist stereotype) had hardened into another of his deliberately provocative acts. Even his beloved Mrs Thatcher was not above criticism. ‘She doesn’t like being disagreed with,’ he told Larkin in 1982. ‘FUCKING WOMAN SEE.’69
While other literary novelists tended to steer clear of such contentious territory, the writers of cheap thrillers had no such inhibitions. In Pamela Kettle’s hilariously bad The Day of the Women (1969), a feminist political party, IMPULSE, wins the 1975 general election and inaugurates a reign of terror. ‘A female Prime Minister … human stud farms run by women … mass rallies at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the day of the dominating woman’: all were signs of ‘high-heeled fascism, a dictatorship of unbridled power lust’, according to the paperback blurb. The master of this kind of thing, though, was the pulp science-fiction writer Edmund Cooper, whose views on women’s liberation were full-bodied, to say the least. In an interview with Science Fiction Monthly in 1975, he commented that men were right to be suspicious of high-flying career women, because ‘most women are going to get themselves impregnated and piss off shortly after they’ve mastered the job and got themselves a decent salary’. He was in favour of ‘equal competition’, though, because then ‘they’ll see that they can’t make it. We have had free education in this country for a great many years, but where are the good female mathematicians? Where are the good female scientists? Where are the female Beethovens? They’ve gone back home to wash the dishes and produce children.’70
These views shone through in his books: in Five to Twelve (1968), for example, twenty-first-century Britain is run entirely by women, with men reduced to ‘chattels’, not only few in number but physically dwarfed by their Amazonian mistresses. This terrible situation, we discover, is all down to the Pill, which liberated women from their own biology and made them ‘both in the literal and in the metaphorical sense, impregnable’. One man, a ‘troubador’ with the bizarre name of Dion Quern, tries to resist, but, like Orwell’s Winston Smith, he meets a tragic conclusion. In Who Needs Men? (1972), meanwhile, twe
nty-fifth-century Britain is again dominated by women, lesbian orgies are all the rage and Nelson’s Column has been renamed Germaine’s Needle. The plot follows the adventures of Rura Alexandra, ‘Madam Exterminator’, who is leading the effort to wipe out the last men hiding in the Scottish Highlands. But even she is vulnerable to the most dangerous weapon of all – love – as she falls for her opponent, Diarmid MacDiarmid, ‘the last remaining rebel chieftain’.71
While feminists bitterly resented the caricature that they were all man-hating, fire-breathing dragons, it is nevertheless true that some presented to the world a very strident face indeed. The London Women’s Liberation Workshop, for instance, was gripped by a furious row in 1974 about something called the ‘CLIT Statement’, a series of American articles advocating total separation from men and condemning heterosexual women as ‘collaborators’. By this stage, men had been banned from the Workshop offices, while the movement was already splintering into rival ‘socialist’ and ‘radical’ factions, the latter apparently having the upper hand. In November 1974, one member complained about hostility to mothers and their little boys, while the rival socialist publication Red Rag claimed that ‘women with boy children have been turned away from the Kingsgate women’s centre’ and that ‘women in the office have refused to speak to men over the phone’, even when the men were ringing to voice their support. By the mid-1970s, in fact, it barely made sense to talk of a united ‘women’s movement’ when many groups spent as much time fighting each other as they did campaigning for change. ‘Political lesbianism’ was the latest slogan, again borrowed from across the Atlantic, as radicals argued that feminists had a duty to express themselves sexually only with other women. This did not go down well, however, with more moderate activists, and when the next national Women’s Liberation conference was held in Birmingham in 1978, the mood was so bitter that nobody ever wanted to call another one. Even in terms of public relations, the event was a disaster: with radicals arguing for a complete rebellion against the laws and institutions that entrenched male dominance, the movement seemed to be living up to all the stereotypes of its critics.72
This partly explains why, although most women by the end of the decade proclaimed themselves in favour of equal pay and equal opportunities, so many were reluctant to identify themselves as feminists. For women who had chosen (or been compelled) to become housewives, feminism could easily feel like a slap in the face, apparently mocking their husbands and children, and suggesting that they had wasted their lives as glorified domestic servants. Too often radical feminists – most of whom, of course, were highly educated, middle-class young women – sneered at the views and values of women like the housewife Patricia Andrews, who agreed with feminism ‘in moderation’ but said that ‘these women they usually have on television just put me off completely and utterly; they think men are dirt’. They did not ‘want men at all’, she added, not inaccurately. ‘They’re not really interested in being equal with men; they’re just interested in completely domineering [sic] men and being absolutely self-sufficient.’73
Anecdotal evidence suggests that most women probably felt the same way; it was common to hear women complaining that feminists were middle-class snobs, a ‘very exclusive club for about twenty women, who all talked to each other’, as one put it. This was unfair, but it had a grain of truth, and the impression proved difficult to shift. Interviewing her old classmates as they turned 30 in the late 1970s, Mary Ingham found that although they all believed in equality, they often regarded feminism as ‘extremist nonsense’. And these attitudes transcended generational boundaries. At a London comprehensive in 1974, not one of the teenage pupils in a girls-only sex education class said that she approved of women’s liberation. No doubt the mockery of the media had played its part. Still, in many ways this was surely feminism’s greatest failure.74
In 1978, the Hayward Gallery exhibited a gigantic sculpture, Brick Knot, by the artist Wendy Taylor. The press photograph, showing the artist making the final touches inside a 40-foot-long twist of brick, seemed a superb metaphor for what had happened to the cause of women’s liberation, caught in the coils of its own self-regard. But perhaps it was not surprising that feminism seemed to have run out of steam. Being an activist was hard work: as Sheila Rowbotham recalled, all the solidarity and good humour in the world ‘could not prevent a culture of complaint and protest from wearing thin as time passed and the world went on just the same – or pretty much the same’. Utopian hopes curdled into bitterness, consciousness-raising descended into self-indulgence, confidence turned into anger. Most women still had low-paid jobs in the ‘feminine ghetto’ of the service industries and public sector, and after years of slow progress, their earnings began to fall behind men’s again in the late 1970s, when they were hit hard by the government’s public-sector pay restraint. In the same year that Taylor exhibited Brick Knot, figures showed that only 1 per cent of bank managers, 2 per cent of accountants and 5 per cent of architects were women. The cause of women’s liberation seemed to be ‘running out of breath’, wrote Mary Ingham. Even in north London, the epicentre of the movement in the early 1970s, the magic had gone. In the autumn of 1978, Sheila Rowbotham’s Hackney group ‘dwindled to a halt’, while the women’s centre they had helped to set up in Islington closed down. Their golden age, it seemed, was over.75
And yet the picture was much more complicated than a simple one of failure and defeat. When Carla Lane’s BBC2 sitcom Butterflies first appeared in November 1978, some critics saw it as an old-fashioned celebration of the traditional nuclear family, with Wendy Craig’s bossy housewife Ria sparring with her taciturn dentist husband (Geoffrey Palmer), like some upmarket Terry and June. In fact, it perfectly captured the mood of the moment, delicately poised between feminism and conservatism. Ria is far from an old-fashioned housewife; bored, frustrated, she yearns for something more, for some excitement to leaven her suburban routine. She is no feminist, but she believes in equality and she dreams of having an affair with her friend Leonard. Yet at the same time she cannot bring herself to break with the settled routines of family life. She still does the cooking – albeit atrociously – and looks after her two grown-up sons, feckless wasters who take her for granted even more than her husband does. Critics who dismissed the series as backward-looking, in other words, were missing the point: Butterflies might not capture the experiences of activists at the front lines of the women’s movement, but it did reflect the lives of millions of women who were drawn to some elements of feminism, inhabited a cultural landscape that bore its imprint, and yet were reluctant to break entirely with the values they had learned as children. There were many more Rias than there were radicals, which is one reason the series proved so successful.76
By this stage, public attention was increasingly focusing on the woman who would soon dominate British life. Feminists almost universally loathed Margaret Thatcher, not merely because they disliked her social and economic policies, but because they despised what she symbolized: her accent, her manner, her hats, her husband and two children, her provincial, suburban attitudes. The feminist writer Beatrix Campbell even argued that Mrs Thatcher’s rise to power ended an emerging bipartisan consensus on women’s rights, representing a shift to the hard-right politics of the family and a new language of moral populism. It is certainly clear that Mrs Thatcher was no friend to feminism: asked about it at her very first press conference as Conservative leader, she replied simply: ‘What has it ever done for me?’ Her social services spokesman, Patrick Jenkin, was one of the few politicians who spoke out aggressively against women’s liberation. In 1977, he notoriously declared that ‘quite frankly I don’t think mothers have the same right to work as fathers do. If the good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work he wouldn’t have created men and women.’77
Interviewed by the Hornsey Journal in April 1978, Mrs Thatcher made her own position very clear. ‘You are a feminist –’ the questioner began, before she cut him off: ‘No, I’m not a
feminist.’ ‘Well, you are a feminist, but not a militant feminist,’ he pressed on. ‘How do you think you have helped women, and where do you think militant feminists have gone wrong?’ ‘I think they’ve become too strident,’ she said earnestly. They had
done great damage to the cause of women by making us out to be something we are not. Each person is different. Each has their own talents and abilities, and these are the things you want to draw and bring out. You don’t say: ‘I must get on because I’m a woman …’ You should say that you should get on because you have the combination of talents which are right for the job. The moment you exaggerate the question, you defeat your case.78
And yet there was another side to the story. Mrs Thatcher’s own career, after all, was a glaring refutation of Patrick Jenkin’s argument: despite being the mother of two young children, she had gone out to work without a second’s thought. In 1952, she had written a piece entitled ‘Wake Up, Women’ for the Sunday Graphic urging women to ‘play a leading part’ in business, politics and national life. ‘The idea that the family suffers’, she insisted, ‘is, I believe, quite mistaken. To carry on with a career stimulates the mind, provides a refreshing contact with the world outside – and so means that a wife can be a much better companion at home.’ She even called for a woman Chancellor or Foreign Secretary, which at the time, as her biographer remarks, was a ‘startlingly radical thought’. And in an article for the Young Conservatives’ publication Onward two years later she was even more explicit. ‘Some men I know are far too ready with the phrase “woman’s place is in the home,” ’ she wrote, ‘forgetting that their own daughters will almost certainly have to earn their living outside the home, at any rate for a time.’ If a woman had talent and ambition, she concluded, ‘it is essential both for her own satisfaction and for the happiness of her family that she should use all her talents to the full’.79
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