State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Mrs Thatcher’s career was, in many ways, the story of a dedicated career woman triumphing over sexist prejudice. Throughout the 1950s she worried that her sex counted against her within the Conservative Party, and even after being adopted as the Tory candidate for Finchley she confided to a friend that ‘anti-woman prejudice’ still lingered ‘among certain Association members’. Once she was in Parliament, her femininity counted as an asset, up to a point: it meant that she stood out from all the middle-aged men in grey suits, it gave her an extra weapon with which to charm Tory grandees, and it probably helped her to advance up the ladder of office. But it also worked against her: because she was a woman, colleagues took her less seriously and dismissed her ideas, and because she was a woman, the press focused unerringly on her outfits, her hats and her efforts to juggle work and family. Even after she became party leader, the fact that she was a woman still counted against her in some quarters, and made it easier for critics to dismiss her as an aberration.80

  In some ways, therefore, her story was much more representative of the lives of other, unsung British women than we often remember. And while she was no feminist herself, her victory in 1979 – something unthinkable only a few years before – made a supremely fitting end to a decade that had seen women win unprecedented gains and publicity, even if they had not travelled as far as the feminists would have liked. As one woman put it in July 1978, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Suffrage Act: ‘Women are tired of being patronised and condescended to. We are bored by being considered as a curious and endangered species. We are certainly not “more deadly than the male” – indeed as history emphasises, we are noticeably less deadly. If our homes and our families remain central to us and our concerns, they are no longer our horizon.’ It could easily have been Sarah Jane Smith talking. In fact, it was Mrs Thatcher.81

  11

  The Ravages of Permissiveness

  BASIL: All this psychiatry, it’s a load of tommy-rot. You know what they’re all obsessed with, don’t you? … You know what they say it’s all about, don’t you? Hmm? Sex. Everything’s connected with sex. Coh! What a load of cobblers!

  – Fawlty Towers, ‘The Psychiatrist’, 26 February 1979

  ROBIN DAY: Why should a man of your charm and personality have to go to whores for sex?

  ANTONY LAMBTON: I think that people sometimes like variety. I think it’s as simple as that and I think that impulse is understood by almost everybody. Don’t you?

  – Panorama, 25 May 1973

  On Friday, 16 April 1971, a retired Shropshire schoolmistress went to the cinema. Mrs Mary Whitehouse was one of a hand-picked audience invited to the West End premiere of Dr Martin Cole’s film Growing Up, a thirty-minute sex education film – ‘in colour’, as the papers excitedly noted – that broke new ground not just in the frankness of its advice, but in the explicitness of its imagery. As the eclectic audience of schoolteachers, educationalists, moral campaigners and wide-eyed teenagers watched with a mixture of fascination, horror and indifference, they saw full-frontal nude shots of teenage boys and girls, long sequences showing a teenage boy and a young woman masturbating, and to cap it all, a fifteen-second shot of a couple actually having sex. And even though Mrs Whitehouse had spent the previous eight years campaigning across the land against the ravages of obscenity and permissiveness, she had never seen anything like it. As she emerged pale and blinking into the spring sunlight of Soho, she made her feelings quite clear. ‘Educationally speaking, it is a rotten film,’ she said angrily, ‘which makes children no more than animals.’ It was ‘balderdash’, agreed her friend Lord Longford, who was already beginning to carve out a reputation as a moral campaigner in his own right. But not all of the audience shared their horrified reaction. ‘It was good,’ remarked Janet Caunt, a 16-year-old from Baldock in Hertfordshire. ‘I think this is the sort of film that is needed. I did not find it at all embarrassing. It was done very tastefully.’1

  The man at the centre of the Growing Up storm, Dr Martin Cole, was not, perhaps, a very good advert for sexual permissiveness. As Mrs Whitehouse immediately pointed out, he was neither a doctor of medicine nor a trained teacher; in fact, he was a 39-year-old biologist who, while working at Birmingham’s Aston University, had become involved with the nationwide campaigns for legal abortion and free contraception, setting up Birmingham branches of the Abortion Law Reform Association and Pregnancy Advisory Service, and then his own ‘Institute for Sex Education and Research’. Cole himself admitted that he had an ‘obsessional’ interest in sexual freedom, which he traced back to a ‘crisis over guilt over masturbation’ that he had suffered when he was 17. And whereas earlier campaigners for sex education had urged a self-consciously sensible, even conservative approach, he made no secret of his highly libertarian views. ‘I think teenagers should be promiscuous,’ he told the Guardian. ‘I think being promiscuous can, in many cases, be a vitally important part of growing up.’ At least he practised what he preached: unfortunately for the image of his film, he had already been married and divorced twice when the scandal broke. Even more unfortunately, he had only just married again, this time to an attractive former student, sixteen years his junior. And when his critics discovered that his wife worked in his clinic as a ‘surrogate therapist’, sleeping with paying customers who said they had sexual problems, his image as a ‘decadent middle-aged roué’ and glorified brothel-keeper was confirmed. ‘Sex King Cole’, some papers called him, or just plain ‘Dr Sex’.2

  Given the extraordinarily explicit content of his film, Cole must have realized that Growing Up would provoke a storm. Immediately after having seen it, Mrs Whitehouse wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, who duly issued a measured but nonetheless hostile verdict, explaining that Cole’s enthusiasm for sex outside marriage made it ‘unsuitable for use in schools’. In Birmingham, meanwhile, the local education authority demanded that Cole put on a special screening, and once they had seen it, they banned it. There were rather more drastic consequences for one of the amateur actors involved in the film, for the masturbating woman turned out to be a 23-year-old Birmingham teacher called Jennifer Muscutt, who was promptly suspended from duty. Meanwhile the controversy was threatening to spill over into the national political arena: on 21 April, the Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher, told the Commons that although she had not seen the film, she had sent one of her ‘professional advisers’ and understood that it ‘shows the sex act and some sequences on masturbation’. Although she had no direct power to ban it, she said earnestly, she was ‘very perturbed’ at the thought of it being shown in schools, and urged local authorities to treat it ‘with extreme caution’. But her advice was probably unnecessary: by the end of the year, there was no record of it having been shown to schoolchildren anywhere. Desperate to drum up publicity, Cole agreed to a screening at, of all places, a Birmingham strip-club, but then changed his mind when reminded that if he took money in return for letting people watch it, he could be charged as a pornographer. Finally, the affair reached a kind of bathetic climax when he showed the film to students at Oxford University. According to the student newspaper, though, the general reaction was awe at the unusual athleticism of the couple having sex (‘one could sense every male beginning to doubt himself’) – not, perhaps, the reaction Cole had anticipated.3

  The odd thing about the Growing Up controversy was not so much the furore about a film that virtually no one had ever seen, but the fact that people were arguing about sex education at all. Until the late 1960s, sex education had rarely been a subject of public debate, and most politicians took the line that as ‘an effective tool in the fight against venereal disease’, its introduction was a welcome development. Most experts agreed that children were woefully uninformed about sex, with neither parents nor teachers inclined to enlighten them. Two out of three teenage boys, the researcher Michael Schofield reported in the mid-1960s, had been told nothing by their parents, and much of what passed for their knowledge was ‘inaccurat
e and obscene’. And even after the Growing Up scandal, there was still a strong sense in political circles that sex education should be defended as a good thing. When Mary Whitehouse asked her to give parents the legal right to remove their children from sex education lessons, Mrs Thatcher refused point-blank, although she added that she hoped that schools would respect the views of parents who had strong objections. And in a Commons debate in May 1971 Mrs Thatcher even stood up for sex education against her own backbenchers. They should not let Growing Up make them ‘get the whole subject out of perspective,’ she said, for ‘some very excellent work on sex education is being done in the schools in a way of which the parents approve and which is tasteful and satisfactory to all concerned’.4

  And yet already the reaction against liberalized sex education was gathering pace, thanks not only to the noisy protests of conservative commentators and Christian pressure groups, but also to a broader sense of disquiet that the ‘traditional’ British family was under threat. In the nine months after the Growing Up controversy, the press reported the establishment of Lord Longford’s unofficial commission to investigate pornography; the foundation of a group called the Responsible Society, aimed at reversing the tide of sexual permissiveness; the launch of an anti-permissive religious revival movement in the Nationwide Festival of Light; and blazing controversies over sex and violence in four major films, The Devils, Family Life, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. Against this background, sex education seemed to many people a symbol of a gathering storm of moral corruption, splintering families and sexual chaos, promoted by an unholy coalition of addled-headed liberals and profit-crazed pornographers. Even Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, the newspaper that best exemplified the new fascination with sex and self-gratification, thought that ‘people are getting sick of a society which has made emotional and physical demands on people whose minds and bodies are too unformed to cope’. And in an atmosphere of ‘sexual jealousy, unemployment and social conflict’, agreed the women’s style magazine Nova, this was the ‘authentic voice of the British backlash’.5

  In the public memory, the 1960s are now indelibly stamped as the decade of the sexual revolution, a watershed in social history marked by a new mood of liberalism and tolerance, the retreat of the state from private life and a move towards greater sexual freedom and self-indulgence. Historians often write of a ‘permissive moment’ between roughly 1958 and 1970, when decades of public pressure bore fruit in the relaxation of laws governing everything from gambling, suicide and obscenity to divorce, abortion and homosexuality – a ‘historic shift’, as one scholar puts it, that meant individual morality was no longer governed by law, and that a gay man, for example, could pursue physical happiness without being hounded by the state. At the same time, at least according to the conventional wisdom, technological innovations like the Pill were radically changing everyday sexual behaviour both within and outside marriage. ‘It is no longer possible,’ the novelist Margaret Drabble told readers of the Guardian in 1967, ‘to deny that we face the certainty of a sexual revolution.’ Thanks to the ‘new contraceptive techniques’, Drabble explained, ‘a woman need no longer dread pain, or years of motherhood, or even, on the crudest level, discovery, as the result of her sexual activities. Nor, on a higher level, need she fear the guilt of bringing into the world a child for which she may not be able to provide. She is free now, as never before.’6

  In fact, the lazy stereotype of the permissive, self-indulgent 1960s is enormously misleading. The landmark reforms of the era, such as the abolition of capital punishment and the legalization of homosexuality, were passed in defiance of public opinion and remained deeply controversial: when the magazine New Society conducted an extensive poll on public attitudes in 1969, ‘easier laws for homosexuality, divorce, abortion, etc.’ was ranked as comfortably the most unpopular change of the decade. Of course things were gradually changing, largely as a result of greater prosperity and education: sex before marriage, for example, was much less of a taboo than it had once been, and by the end of the 1960s only one in four men was a virgin on his wedding day (although, intriguingly, two out of three brides were still virgins). By and large, however, the great majority of the British population – who rarely feature, of course, in rose-tinted retrospectives of the Swinging Sixties – remained remarkably conservative both in attitudes and in behaviour. Even most teenagers, supposedly in the vanguard of permissiveness and self-gratification, made very unconvincing sexual revolutionaries. Research by the pioneering sociologist Michael Schofield found that most teenage boys in the mid-1960s not only expected their bride to be a virgin, but agreed that a boy should marry a girl if he got her pregnant. Schofield’s teenagers had great respect for marriage, disliked homosexuality and generally led lives of remarkable chastity: more than two out of three boys and three out of four girls were still virgins. And even at the end of the decade, other surveys reported similar findings; in Sex and Marriage in England Today (1971), Geoffrey Gorer wrote that although attitudes were becoming more tolerant, only one in ten people was even vaguely promiscuous, and overall ‘England still appears to be a very chaste society’.7

  Of course this flies in the face of the tiresome and sadly invincible myth that sexual intercourse began in 1963, with the advent of the Pill as the decisive factor. In fact, while the Pill first went on trial in the glamorous settings of Birmingham and Slough in 1960, most women could not get hold of it until ten years later. Only a handful of pioneering Brook Advisory Centres – mocked at the time as ‘teenage sex clinics’ – handed out the Pill to young single women, while the much bigger Family Planning Association network catered for married couples only. By the end of the decade, therefore, Geoffrey Gorer found that only 4 per cent of single women were taking the Pill, while fewer than one in five young married couples used it – typically, affluent young professionals, because at that time the Pill was the only drug for which doctors were allowed to charge a fee. In other words, although the advent of the Pill is often seen as both a symbol and an instigator of sexual liberalization, the early story of the Pill is a much better reflection of the sheer conservatism of moral attitudes. It was only in 1968, after all, that the Family Planning Association grudgingly allowed some of its branches to give contraception to unmarried women. And for all the excitement in the press about the wonder contraceptive drug, many people remained suspicious of the Pill. Many men disliked giving up their control over contraception, and working-class couples were much less likely to use it than middle-class ones. When the Evening Standard commissioned a poll in 1971 asking whether it should be available to single women, 32 per cent still said no, with opposition highest among women over 65. Most younger women who had tried it were great fans; even so, one in three women under 44 and even one in five women under 24 opposed giving it to unmarried women – a useful reminder that not everybody was swept up in the enthusiasm for change.8

  The crucial breakthrough in the availability of the Pill came in 1970, when, under pressure from the government, the Family Planning Association instructed all its clinics to make it available to single women. This was without doubt a landmark moment: although the pioneering Brook clinics had led the way in legitimizing the provision of the Pill to young women, there were so few of them that they could not possibly reach the majority of the population. From 1970, however, hundreds of FPA clinics were required to make provision for single women, and five years later, the FPA having been absorbed into the National Health Service, contraception was made free for all women, married or single. At the time, some Tory backbenchers and tabloid critics made a great fuss about ‘sex on the rates’. Yet within just a few years it was clear that as a relatively simple and highly effective form of contraception, the Pill was enormously popular. As early as 1973, surveys showed that 65 per cent of young women had taken it, and this rose to 74 per cent two years later. And even though a health scare – based on reports in the Lancet in 1977 that the Pill increased the risk of thrombosis in older women – temporarily damag
ed its popularity, there is no denying its overall impact: by the end of the 1980s, almost nine out of ten young women had taken it. For the first time women had a reliable contraceptive about which there was no need to feel squeamish or embarrassed – ‘It’s absolutely safe and no fiddling about – so natural,’ ‘It’s just like not using anything and you can really relax and enjoy it,’ women told an interviewer in 1970 – and for the first time they had complete control over their own fertility. The Pill meant that ‘sex was not a big risk any more and neither were men’, one young woman recalled. Even after she stopped taking it, she still basked in the confidence it had brought. ‘I was allowed to have what I liked,’ she said, ‘and did not have to be frightened of sex because it could trap me into things. I didn’t have to be punished.’9

  One of the many myths about the Pill was that because it gave women control over their own fertility, it represented an extraordinary and revolutionary breakthrough, opening the door to a new age of heedless promiscuity. We tend to forget, though, that men and women had been using reasonably reliable methods of birth control for years, such as the condom or the cap. Even after 1970, many women stuck to more familiar devices, and it is not true that it immediately inaugurated an era of wild abandon. In 1972, a survey of 3,000 women for the Sunday Times concluded that ‘the more promiscuous you are, the less likely you are to be on the Pill’. Yet there is no doubt that the popularization of the Pill did mark a crucial turning point, not just in behaviour, but in the way people talked and thought about sex. As the medical researcher Ann Cartwright pointed out in 1970, ‘an oral contraceptive could be discussed more easily and with less embarrassment than methods related to the vagina, penis or sexual intercourse’, prompting people to talk much more openly about the entire subject. And in a broader sense the Pill came to symbolize a whole series of related innovations, from the new divorce and abortion laws to the spread of family planning clinics and the general acceptability of various forms of birth control. We commonly think of all this as a ‘sexual revolution’, although the crude division into pre-revolutionary monasticism and post-revolutionary hedonism obscures the fact that some people had been buying condoms, sex manuals and the services of prostitutes for decades anyway. As the historian Hera Cook points out, the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s were merely the latest stage in a long history of change – a ‘long sexual revolution’, indeed – stretching back to the nineteenth century. And yet the Family Planning Association’s decision on the Pill in 1970 makes as good a dividing line as any. With that decision, generations of women were handed unprecedented control over their own fertility, breaking the historic bond between sex and childbirth. From that point onwards, there was no going back.10