Yet the risk has never deterred the true revolutionary. In the last of the major upheavals involved in the re-making of the modern world, China’s revolution was distinguished by a long history of preparatory activity by women, and female volunteers were among the first to join the final strike of this epic struggle, some, like K’ang K’o-ch’ing taking up arms as a very young teenager. Like K’ang K’o-ch’ing again, Teng Ying-ch’ao was one of the only thirty-five women who made the Long March of 1934–5, abandoning her home and family for the 8000-mile trial of endurance to ‘plant Communism in China’ with her husband Zou Enlai. Teng Ying-ch’ao lived to see her husband as premier of the new China, herself holding a series of the highest political offices; Ho Hsiangning, one of the first Chinese feminists to adopt the revolutionary gesture of bobbing her hair in the 1920s, lost her husband to the struggle when he was assassinated in 1925; Xiang Jingyu, who had originated the vogue for bobbing hair as a gesture of feminist defiance, lost her life in the 1927 ‘White Terror’ purge of the Communists, shot in a gag to prevent her final speech. Yet the roll-call continues, through the revolutions of the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s: in Spain, Dolores Ibarruri, ‘La Pasionaria’, who inspired a whole generation with her powerful anti-fascist slogan, ‘No pasaran!’ (They shall not pass); Algeria’s Djamila Boupacha and Haydee Santamaria of Cuba, both of whom suffered appalling sexual tortures that awakened the conscience of the whole world; and Joyce ‘Teurai Ropa’ (Spill-Blood) Nhongo, who fought off a Rhodesian attack intended to capture her for propaganda purposes, two days before giving birth to her daughter.
The cost was high, but then so were the gains. In pre-revolutionary China, any man refusing to beat his wife every night, against the order of his father, could be thrown into the dungeon of the local magistrate or landowner. The Revolution forbade it, and the women immediately seized the chance to escape from the misery of 5000 years, as one aggrieved husband complained:
All my friends beat their wives, so I was only observing custom. Sometimes I didn’t have any reason except that I hadn’t beaten her recently . . . Right after liberation it was difficult for me to beat her any more. I would sometimes lose my temper and raise my elbows to beat her, and she and the children would restrain me, reminding me that Chairman Mao wouldn’t permit it, so I refrained . . . They maintained a spirit of revolt and if we mistreated our wives, all would protest. It was impossible.10
For him, maybe. For her, this was the real revolution. And she did not owe it all to Chairman Mao. Although the ban of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on wife-beating was crucial, what ensured its success was the strength of the Chinese Women’s Association. In an early forerunner of the ‘consciousness-raising’ groups developed by the women’s movement in the late 1960s, Chinese women were encouraged to come together to ‘speak bitterness’, to confront their situation and their husbands’ abuse of this power, and to challenge (and even physically punish) any men who refused to give up their bad old ways.
The overthrow of one regime for another does not always produce such clear and immediate benefits for women. For rural women or the urban poor, life may change little from the round of endless child-bearing and the struggle for survival. Often the real events destined to change women’s lives seem at first to be remote or insignificant. When in 1955 an American researcher at the Worcester Institute for Chemical Biology, Massachussetts, announced that he had isolated a group of chemical steroids of the progestagen type, the average woman neither knew of it nor cared. But Gregory Pincus had in fact discovered the philosopher’s stone of genetic science, the element with the power to turn centuries of wishful dreaming into reality. For progestagens, Pincus had discovered, had the power to prevent ovulation when taken orally. Without fanfare, then, ‘the Pill’ was born, an insignificant compound of naturally occurring chemicals, yet in its impact due to change as many lives as any other of this century’s revolutions.
The 1955 meeting of research scientists in Tokyo at which Pincus reported his findings was in itself a moment of profound change. Another of its revelations was the quite unexpected reappearance of the intra-uterine contraceptive device. This had first been developed in Germany and Israel in experiments of the 1920s and 30s, based on much older medical knowledge – every Indian bazaar dhai, however ignorant, knew that if she could wedge a seed pod, stick of vanilla or licorice root up through the vagina into the womb itself, a woman would not conceive. But the early results were disappointing and even disastrous. The technology was simply not available either to introduce the device safely, or to develop a material that the womb would not try to break down, with the often-fatal result of pelvic inflammatory disease. Now the Japanese, fresh from their technical triumph in revolutionizing radio, succeeded in transistorizing contraception. A miniaturized squiggle of indestructible plastic, soon to be known familiarly as ‘the coil’, when placed in the uterus, ensured no babies.
Within 15 years, over 20 million women were using the contraceptive pill, and over 10 million women the coil.11 It is not difficult to see why women embraced these new contraceptives in such numbers, and with such speed. After some initial teething troubles, both had a significantly increased reliability rate over the existing devices. Both had the advantage that they were in the sole and entire control of the woman, unlike the sheath – a wife no longer had to lie there wondering if her husband had called at the barber’s, if he would submit to one of ‘them things’ that ‘spoiled his pleasure’, if he would still be sober enough to get it on, and if he could keep it in place.
The pill and the IUD had another advantage over the cervical cap, too. This lay in their twenty-four-hour, all-the-year-round capacity. The cap, with the addition of the spermicidal jelly that had emerged from the unlikely source of the dreaming spires of Oxford in 1932, required forward planning for sex, making it feel uncomfortably like an act of calculation (‘I’m going to get laid tonight’) or a routine that often missed its point – ‘just slip it in every night when you brush your teeth, and leave the rest to your husband,’ warbled a British birth control leaflet of the innocent 1950s. Now, whether moved by some romantic myth of spontaneous passion, or an impulse of hypocrisy generated by the patriarchal double standard, women could distance themselves from the direct practice of contraception. Contraception itself had separated sex from reproduction – the new technology now divorced contraception from sex.
In doing so, it brought to a head the argument that had been part of the fabric of human existence since humanity realized that it had existence, the question that as much as anything else created the war between the sexes, even the sex war within individual couples – who controls a woman’s body? For the first time in history, Western societies found themselves grappling with a situation that would have seemed an unthinkable blasphemy to earlier ages, the prospect that a woman could use and take sex in exactly the way that men had always been able to do, casually, at will, without premeditation and – perhaps worst of all – without consequences. This last took on a new edge with the liberalization of Western laws regulating abortion during the course of the 1960s.
The history of abortion in itself forms a microcosm of the way that social and legal controls over women’s bodies have, until very recently, always reflected patriarchal imperatives and paranoias, never women’s needs. As late as 1939 in Britain, a government committee chaired by Lord Birkett was still reaffirming the state’s right to control women’s reproduction in order to keep the birth rate up. A profound shift took place in the West when the state’s political interest in having control, gave way to a legal recognition of the individual right to personal autonomy.
In countries with a strong Roman Catholic tradition where abortion was not simply illegal but inconceivable, the conflict was bitter, the battle prolonged, the hostilities ongoing. Success there came as it did everywhere, from strong and concerted feminist action. In Ireland, a large number of women travelled together from Dublin to Belfast (in the north of the island, and
as such part of the UK and subject to British laws) to buy contraceptives. When the so-called ‘contraceptive train’ returned to Dublin, crowd support was very marked, and customs officers turned a blind eye to the illegal importations. In France, a group of women, including leading luminaries like Simone de Beauvoir, signed and circulated the Manifeste des 343, a document admitting that all the signatories had had illegal abortions, and challenging the authorities to prosecute them. From this came the pro-abortion organization ‘Choisir’ (Choose), founded by Gisela Halimi, the lawyer who acted for the tortured Algerian freedom fighter Djamila Boupacha. The campaigns of Choisir resulted in the epochal laws on contraception and abortion carried through the French parliament by Simone Veil in 1974.
By the end of the 1970s, key legal decisions on both sides of the Atlantic had turned the tide for the women of Europe and America. In 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced that ‘the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision’, later confirming this in a landmark pronouncement:
Inasmuch as it is the woman who physically bears the child and who is the more directly and immediately affected by the pregnancy, as between the two (male parent and female parent) the balance weighs in her favour.12
In a similar British decision, confirmed on appeal to the European Court of Justice in 1981, the court was even more specific: the law of England ‘gives no right to a father to be consulted in respect of the termination of a pregnancy’.
No right to father? Women proclaiming ‘my cuntry ‘tis of thee’, and receiving the support of the courts? How had this come about? Only through almost twenty years of the most intensive feminist activity that women had ever generated. It is important to understand that the women of industrialized societies had not simply crept back into their homes, tugging a grateful forelock to their lords and masters, after the successful climax of the suffrage campaign. In the words of Dora Russell, a life-long activist, to Dale Spender, ‘There’s always been a women’s movement this century!’ The inter-war period produced, too, one major feminist text, Simone de Beauvoir’s dazzling analysis of the web of women’s oppression, The Second Sex (1949).
But through women’s perennial absence from the history books, from the records of contemporary experience, from vigorous and self-renewing contact with each other such as men have always enjoyed through work and public activity, there has never been a visible, continuous, accepted tradition of women’s political action. Only when the inevitable claw-back of the undefeated patriarchs of male power and privilege in new and usually unsuspected disguises produces the next generation of revolt, do women look back and discover their strength, their solidarity, their political history. And on each of these occasions, everything has to be rediscovered, reinvented, usually in the teeth of men’s assurances that women have never had it so good. So powerful is this denial of women’s oppression that the bad feeling it produces becomes for each woman, ‘the problem without a name’. In this justly famous phrase, Betty Friedan, the mother of modern feminism, initiated in 1963, with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the crucial post-suffrage phase of the women’s struggle:
It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question, ‘Is this all?’13
Betty Friedan’s achievement lay in blasting to smithereens the myth of the happy housewife. She thus made it possible for women to break the candy bars of their imprisonment within the ‘domestic sphere’ and share with one another their frustration and their rage. A powerful anger was flowing in from another source, too, at very much the same time. The radical politics of the 1960s attracted many strong and committed young women to the fight against racism and the Vietnam war. Inside every ‘revolutionary’ movement, however, they found that ‘men led the marches and made the speeches and expected their female comrades to lick the envelopes and listen.’ When the black leader Stokely Carmichael was heard to say that the only place for women in the movement was ‘prone’, activist women saw that there was a subject class more in need of liberating than the occupied Vietnamese, nearer to them in oppression than their own blacks – themselves. The explosion of women’s anger and action clearly emerges from an indication of the principal events of the years that followed:
1966 The founding of America’s National Organization of Women, with Friedan at its head
1969 ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, a ‘landmark paper by [Anne] Koedt that unhooded the clitoris from generations of oblivion and mystery, and used it as a rallying cry for women’s sexuality’14
1970 The publication of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
First National Women’s Liberation Conference in Britain
1971 The founding of the US National Women’s Political Caucus
1973 International Feminist Congress
1975 UN Decade of Women’s Rights
1960s–80s Programmes of law reform, equal opportunities legislation, and positive action throughout the industrialized world.
From its puzzled and uncertain beginnings, then, the new women’s movement swelled into a commanding political force, enlisting the commitment of individual males and entire governments, not merely the women’s franchise. A new note in the voice of protest, a new dimension in the analysis, gave the movement an authority and authenticity that did not merely demand attention, but commanded it:
Women are an oppressed class . . . We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants and cheap labour . . . our prescribed behaviour is enforced with threats of physical violence. Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition.15
Out of this original, and, once understood, irresistible insight sprang the most powerful of the new movement’s slogans: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL. For the first time, large numbers of women took on board the concept that the enemy was not the Church, the state, the law, the government, ‘them’ – but the agent and representative of all these, the man in their bed – him.
Millions of women heard this as the statement they had been waiting for all their lives; an account of the way social reality works that finally explained their experiences to them. For some of these women, one course of action seemed obvious. If women could succeed in taking the feminist slogan to the next stage and make the personal political, then they would have the power to turn back at least some of the titles that have flowed against women in the past. The advent of women into politics and power worldwide was scattered and slow. When Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka became the world’s first woman prime minister in 1960, it did not look like much of a portent. But her appointment was the harbinger of a new race of women politicians, tough, able, hungry for office and above all committed to living out the truth of the American Jill Johnston’s dictum, ‘No one should have to dance backwards all their life.’
Dancing at all in the wholly male arena of power politics called for nifty footwork and enormous stamina, both emotional and physical. When Nancy Astor was elected as the first woman to enter the British parliament in its 1000-year history, she described her first six months as ‘sheer hell’. Even to win the right to stand for election had been, in most countries, a hell of its own – the French Socialist Jeanne Déroin had incurred ridicule and persecution in 1849 for her attempt to enter the French parliament at a time when the only public offices open to women were those of postmistress and schoolteacher. Yet women persisted with their candidatures, often showing an unshakeable refusal to accept the limitations placed upon their sex: in 1872, the kaleido
scopic Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman in the history of the United States to run for the presidency. Woodhull, who with her sister also set up the country’s first female professional stockbrokerage business, was so far in advance of her time as to become a national scandal and laughing-stock.
But within a century of Claflin’s audacious challenge, the ‘firsts’ for women in previously all-male posts, often in highly conservative countries, were beginning to happen every year. In 1966, Indira Gandhi became India’s first female prime minister; in 1969, Golda Meir triumphed in a stronghold of the patriarchs, Israel; in 1974, Eleanor Grasso became America’s first woman governor to be elected in her own right, the same year that France’s newly appointed health minister, Simone Veil, had her own triumph in piloting abortion reform through her parliament; 1979 brought Benazir Bhutto to Pakistan, Hao Tianx’u of China and Margaret Thatcher of Britain to power in their respective countries, to be followed by other exhilarating ‘role-busters’, as the American press soon dubbed these women: Finnis Bogadottir, in 1980 Iceland’s first woman head of state; in 1984 Geraldine Ferraro of New York, a serious contender for the US vice-presidency where she would have been only a heartbeat away from one of the most powerful positions in the Western world. Repeat these successes worldwide at parish and département level, in civil services and executive wings of their administrations, and it is easy to feel the substance of one American businesswoman’s claim that ‘the women are coming – with a great orgasmic roar!’
The Women's History of the World Page 31