When I asked women what they would tell, or had told, their daughters, almost invariably it would be a romantic story, even though their own experiences had been grim. One woman said that her husband used her like a rubber doll for his pleasure. Yet she was still claiming that sex was beautiful and uplifting and something to be kept for the right man. In the 80s mothers often taught girls to wait for their prince to come. Young girls expected sex to be a gift conferred upon them, instead of accepting that their sexuality was within themselves to discover. Lesbian experience was still perceived as deviant.
Many women use fantasies to escape from the reality of their relationships. If the way a man makes love is crude – get it up, get it in, pull it out, roll over and go to sleep – all a woman may be left with are the cobwebs of fantasies.
Sexual energy is not only expressed in foreplay and intercourse. As a writer, I must admit that sometimes I feel so alive when I am writing – when things are going right and I am carried away by ideas – that it feels like sexual energy rushing through me.
You can feel sexual energy very strongly with a baby, when breastfeeding is going well, for example. I remember talking to a much older woman whose husband had died some years ago, and she said that when the first grandchild was born and put into her arms, she felt a rush of feeling as strong as anything she had ever acknowledged as sexual. She felt ‘This is what these arms are for’.
I was apprehensive about writing the book because I knew I was not an expert. I was not a sex therapist or doctor, and here I was daring to write for other women. But as I listened and learned from them, I realised that I was acting as a channel for their thoughts.
Before we can accept the validity of our own experiences, we have to disabuse ourselves of the idea that there are experts who know more about us than we do ourselves. Our society told us to rely on ‘professional’ advice, to go to our doctors and do what they say. The women’s movement, drawing on the ideas of Illich and others, was questioning this in the 70s and 80s. We were beginning to draw on our own experience. Quite a lot can be done in small groups of women sharing experiences. This was already happening with those who had been through traumatic experiences, such as rape, or who were in consciousness-raising groups. But many women still felt isolated.
In order to share we needed the words to communicate. It was the same with birth. When I first started writing about childbirth, there were few words to describe all the sensations, the firework display of labour, and so I invented them. I had to give other women the opportunity of saying, ‘Yes, I felt like that too…’ The more we could forge new words we could reclaim these experiences as our own. That was how my book Woman’s Experience of Sex came to be written.
Kitzinger Women
I work closely with my daughters, and we share the same ideals. The 80s saw the Kitzinger women campaigning vigorously for social and political change. Polly and Jenny worked closely together organising ‘Women’s Strength’ demonstrations flying massed balloons painted with messages like ‘Lesbians are Flying High’, ‘Lesbians are Everywhere’, and ‘Dykes Against the Bomb’.
Polly wrote to me when I was on holiday in France: ‘The Women’s Strength Festival was very successful – we had hundreds of purple helium-filled balloons and marched through Carfax on Saturday morning with lots of musical instruments. It POURED down with rain, however, as soon as we’d left the city centre and 150 sodden and dripping lesbians turned up at the Poly for evening entertainments.’ There was a lively social programme, too: ‘I had a great party the weekend before. 25 women turned up and we ate and played croquet and things. I hadn’t intended there to be 25 women but once I’d invited my special friends, I then had to invite their households and their lovers – and their most recent ex-lovers (just to be impartial) and all their lovers’ households too – and then I had to make sure I’d invited women with cars!’
Jenny worked with Women Against Violence Against Women and was part of a collective which set up one of the earliest refuges for incest survivors. She moved to Scotland to work with the Glasgow University Media Group on communication strategies in the AIDS crisis, and later researched issues such as genetic research and medical ethics. She became a specialist in focus group methods and then went to Cardiff University leading research into science, health and risk.
Celia campaigned for a Lesbian and Gay Section of the British Psychological Society. As a visiting speaker finished his lecture at the annual conference a group of women jumped on stage wearing T-shirts announcing that they were ‘visible lesbians’ and challenged the organisation to establish a lesbian and gay section. They won their case! Celia’s book The Social Construction of Lesbianism was published in 1987. It broke new ground in psychology, presenting lesbianism as a political statement rather than either a pathological condition or, on the other hand, an affirmation of ‘gay’ lifestyle. Journalists began to interview me asking about Celia and my disclosure that I had another two lesbian daughters. This continued to perturb journalists for many years. As late as 1997, the front page of the Telegraph ran a strap line reading: ‘She’s the expert, so how did her children turn out?’ – with an article speculating about why three of my daughters were lesbian. Was it a reaction to my work in childbirth? Wasn’t it a terrible shock for me? I said that I had learned a great deal which challenged my own liberal humanist ideology and led to deeper understanding of the oppression of women.
Lots of people saw my work as ‘maternal’, simply to do with ‘natural’ birth and over the top. I was a ‘guru’ extolling a weird religion. In the past other radical movements have been marginalised, too. Higher education for women was considered ‘unnatural’ in the nineteenth century and the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth. When slaves ran away they were described as mentally ill, suffering from a disease called ‘drapetomania’.
Mutilating Sexual Surgery
When I became Co-Chairperson with Baroness Caroline Cox of The Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (FORWAD) in 1983, it was not with the idea of attacking a tradition that is a rite of passage in the culture of many African societies, including Somalia, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, the Sudan, Mali and Ethiopia. For me there was an imperative to challenge genital mutilation in western culture too, and assert the rights of women everywhere to control what is done to our bodies.
Western campaigners against female circumcision often talk about clitoridectomy and infibulation (removal of the labia minora and labia majora) as if genital mutilation were practices of an alien culture. In fact, routine episiotomy in childbirth is our western way of female genital mutilation, and cosmetic operations to reshape the vagina and labia, sought by women who are convinced that their genitals are ugly, are on the increase. In the United States ‘designer laser vaginoplasty’ and laser vaginal ‘rejuvenation’ are one of the fastest growing forms of plastic surgery.
In Victorian times, in Britain, and the United States, excision of the clitoris was performed to stop women masturbating and in the belief that it cured, among other things, mental illness, insomnia, infertility and ‘nymphomania’. Isaac Baker Brown, an eminent surgeon, published his book On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy and Hysteria in the Female in 1886. Earlier, his paper in the British Medical Journal of 1867 describes how to cut out the clitoris using two hooked forceps and a hot iron.
The Swedish Save the Children Fund wanted to make it possible for women in large areas of North and East Africa to choose not to submit their daughters to female circumcision. It is done on little girls, not only Muslim, but often Christian families too, usually between four or five and 11 years old.
In may seem that female ‘circumcision’ is a minor operation. But it is not a matter of lopping off a piece of skin, but usually excising the whole of the clitoris, and in much of the Sudan, the Somali Republic, the Gambia and Mali, cutting away the labia as well, and stitching the wound so that only a tiny hole remains, through which urine and blood can be passed.
Though in cities anaesthesia may be used, in country areas the operation is usually done without anaesthetic. It is believed that it makes the girl ‘clean’ and that if she does not have it she will be dirty, smell objectionable, be too highly sexed, and may not be able to bear children. Infection is common and she may not be able to pass urine for days or weeks after the surgery. She may haemorrhage and become anaemic. Abscesses and urinary tract and pelvic infections lead to infertility. Every now and then a child dies. After a man has tried to open up his bride using a knife, razor or acid, she is often rushed to hospital bleeding heavily and in terrible pain.
The practice persists in Britain, and some Harley Street surgeons specialise in it. Other families send their daughters back to Africa to have it performed, largely because it represents a guarantee of virginity before marriage and is considered proof of chastity. In 1985 the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act became law in England and Wales, making it illegal to cut off the genitals, the clitoris, labia minora or majora of any child or woman.
Even in those early days of protest I believed that we must put the emphasis on education, not condemnation, and make the education entertaining and fun. I thought that it was also important to understand the social and economic conditions in which this practice flourishes. Some of the African women performing clitoridectomy and infibulation are midwives who are no longer able to assist at births because women are going to hospital or nurses trained according to the western medical model have taken over their jobs. So they supplement their meagre income by doing genital surgery.
When people feel they are under attack and degraded they may cling to traditional practices in order to stress their cultural identity. Somali immigrants in the UK are shocked by the promiscuity they witness here and one way they seek to maintain standards with their young is to have their girls ‘circumcised’.
The first thing I proposed was to change the name of our organisation from FORWAD to FORWARD so that we presented a dynamic image. It was important to use the media. An impressive film was made by Louise Pantin for BBC TV, and two others on African Women and Health for Thames Television. Radio included discussions and talks on Radio London, BBC African Service, Network Africa and Gambia Radio. Articles appeared in the press, notably the New Statesman, the Economist, the African Times, the New African, Third Way and Connexions.
FORWARD contributed to the report from the Women’s Action Group on Excision and Infibulation to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and its advice was sought throughout the various stages of the Bill on Female Circumcision that came into force in the UK in 1985.
FORWARD was represented at major conferences, including the UN End of Decade Women’s Conference in Nairobi, the mass lobby of Parliament on World Poverty, the Gambian Women’s conference on Women in Development and the Scottish Catholic International Fund Conference. We were also represented at many other smaller conferences and workshops run by women’s development groups, educational institutions, African aid organisations and other bodies.
FORWARD published Sister Links and Your Health, the magazine of its African Mother and Child Campaign. In Ghana Sister Links was established as a voluntary organisation to distribute that magazine. Information packs went out to many other African countries. Health education material about vaginal health was prepared for rural women in the Gambia and sent in the form of taped cassettes with radio cassette recorders on which they could be played.
The African Mother and Child Health Campaign held workshops on health and beauty which attracted women who would not have wanted to come to workshops that were simply about their vaginas. A make-up demonstration among a group of friends in a woman’s home was used as a basis to discuss aspects of reproductive health and issues relating to female ‘circumcision’.
Our offices also became a drop-in advice centre and women came seeking help with personal and socio-economic problems and to find refuge from domestic violence. FORWARD worked with other helping agencies and links were developed with Elders in African communities in Britain.
Educational materials were developed for health trainers – some specifically for non-literate groups. A very successful play was written about clitoridectomy and infibulation and shown in African communities. In all this Efua Graham, later Dorkenoo, worked tirelessly and effectively to spread the message and inspired the voluntary workers. She died in October 2014, just a week after launching The Girl Generation, a global, Africa-led campaign against FGM.
The Crying Baby
In 1985 I started to study what it is like to have a crying baby and to learn from mothers about their experiences. They told me the advice they were given, different things they did to try to stop the crying, and those that worked and didn’t work.
The research began with a questionnaire in Parents & Children magazine in Australia and Parents magazine in the UK, to which 1,310 women responded. I followed this up with interviews with a large number. One subject we discussed was the advice they received from their doctors. Many seemed to know very little about crying babies and treated the matter lightly. They tried to reassure the mother and told her to put the baby out of earshot and leave it to cry. Women often lived in housing where it was impossible to do this so that the screaming was not bothering somebody.
Even when they could put the baby out of hearing, most women believed a crying baby had needs which must be met, and couldn’t tolerate the crying, even in the distance, for more than 10 minutes or so. They said they couldn’t concentrate on anything else and longed to comfort the baby. I don’t think we need be ashamed of these feelings which run counter to so much professional advice. Right through human history these emotions have had biological survival value and have meant that mothers have picked up their babies when they were unhappy, kept them close – and protected them from danger.
Doctors also suggested giving up breastfeeding or introducing bottle-feeds as well. Yet my research showed that just as many bottle-fed babies cried for long periods as those who were breastfed. And many only started prolonged crying bouts after they were put onto artificial milk and other foods. They almost certainly had an intolerance to cow’s milk. Though a baby who is simply hungry will quieten down when artificial feeds are added, these babies cried more.
Doctors often reached for the prescription pad, too, perhaps because they couldn’t think of anything else to do when they saw a woman obviously at the end of her tether, and also because patients expect a prescription. The result might be tranquillisers for the mother and/or colic medicine for the baby.
I was alarmed to discover that a quarter of all babies had had sedatives by the time they were 18 months old, some for four months or longer. Many had a succession of different drugs – not only sedatives, but also pain-relievers, antihistamines (which also have a sedative effect) and anti-spasmodics.
The drug used most frequently was dicyclomine in the form of Merbentyl syrup and other colic drops. In 1984, 74 million doses of these medicines were sold in the UK alone. But in February 1985 a letter went out in the UK from the Committee on Safety of Medicines and the manufacturers warned doctors that a number of babies had stopped breathing for a while, had convulsions, or went into a coma, and some had died, after being given this drug. Since then Merbentyl had a label on the bottle saying that it is not suitable for babies under six months.
This was a shock to mothers who relied on regular dosing with this medicine to keep a baby placid. One mother described it as her ‘liquid gold’.
Babies might have been having much more than the recommended doses if they were fed on demand, since the manufacturers assumed that it was given before every feed on the basis of four or five scheduled feeds a day. But if a woman was demand-feeding and gave the baby the drug every time, this maximum dose could easily be exceeded. There were other difficulties too. It was supposed to be given 15 minutes before a feed and with demand-feeding it might be difficult to know when a baby was going to wake. And mothers said they hated trying to keep a
crying baby waiting for quarter of an hour before a feed was allowed.
Dicyclomine could sometimes make the baby even more uncomfortable, with a dry mouth, constipation, retention of urine and skin rashes. Some mothers also described how this drug had been over-prescribed by the doctor, with the result that a baby did not wake for feeds, had to be coaxed to suck, and fell asleep before a feed was finished. The effects of dicyclomine were often increased by combination with other drugs, such as tranquilisers or antihistamines. Sometimes this drug mixture made the baby more jumpy and irritable.
Some babies got a succession of drugs or a mixture that interacted with each other. Vallergan, for example, is a powerful sedative also used in psychiatry and as pre-medication for surgery. The manufacturers warn that it can potentiate symptoms of other drugs. A mother whose baby was on Merbentyl and Vallergan at the same time told me she stopped giving the drugs because ‘I couldn’t bear to see him so dopey’.
Occasionally drugs made a baby so sleepy that the mother could not make eye contact with it, mothering became very unrewarding and the baby did not put on any weight. Some of these babies were admitted to hospital for failure to thrive.
Drugs were often prescribed when what the mother really needed was emotional support with a new and frightening task – and help with building up her self-confidence. A 20-year-old first-time mother was prescribed six different medications by her GP including Infacol, Merbentyl, Piptal, and Phenobarbitone, and gave the baby gripe water and whisky as well! The problem, she told me, was that her baby cried for about one hour every day. She needed help for her loneliness, anxiety and depression – and resulting panic when the baby cried – but she never got that. Instead her baby was drugged to the eye-balls.
A Passion for Birth Page 24