‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.’ Rebecca West
Women’s Liberation: Deja Vu Again?
Last year in London, brandishing the slogan, ‘We’re not ugly, we’re not beautiful; we’re angry,’ groups of (mainly young) women assailed the 60th Miss World Pageant, held at Earl’s Court. Their anger was aroused by what they perceived as the demeaning spectacle of female bodies exposed for the scrutiny of the male gaze. Though the protest gained little press coverage, compared with the agitation of earlier decades, it was a dramatic replay of the first beauty contest demo at the Miss America Beauty Pageant in New Jersey 43 years earlier.
The Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960's and early '70s first gained attention by such demonstrations (famously mocked by the mass media as ‘bra burning’). Some of its greatest triumphs, though, came about by less dramatic means: through writings,conferences, and the work of trailblazer activists in single-issue campaigns. They brought about legal and social reforms that transformed women’s lives
Radical Thoughts about Subversive Actions
The early 1970's were exciting ones for feminists in Britain. Action was ignited by heady doses of radical ideas. Those early years saw publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Eva Figes' Patriarchal Attitudes (all in 1970) and radical historian Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972). In 1970 the first Women's Liberation conference in Britain was held at Ruskin College, Oxford. Participants called for free contraception and abortion on demand, equal education, equal job opportunities and equal pay.
So what did all that blathering accomplish?
For a start, seventies feminism challenged the grip of such popular stereotypes as the brainless sex kitten, the confused housewife, and the incompetent woman driver. (If the insurance industry has been forced to concede favourable terms to women, rewarding their safety record behind the steering wheel, it was with such challenges the terms were created)
Workshops in DIY -- and living with (or without) men
'Women's Lib' was nothing if not practical. There were DIY workshops for women who wanted to learn to do home repairs, and support groups for those wanting to persuade male partners to share childcare and housework. More radical thinkers challenged the very notion of the heterosexual relationship and the nuclear family. While not all feminists were prepared to go so far, the radical fringe forced stimulating debate on institutions taken for granted for centuries.
Domestic Violence: Refuges and Women’s Aid
In 1971, recognising that many women would not feel forced to stay with violent partners if they had somewhere else to go, Erin Pizzey set up the first UK refuge in Chiswick, London, for women fleeing domestic abuse. Pizzey (herself by no means an uncritical supporter of some trends in feminism), and the movement that became Women’s Aid, created a model emulated by women’s rights groups up and down the land. Women’s refuges are taken for granted now, as part of the social landscape. At the time of their founding, the idea was radical. It was a product of its time. And today's activists are still protesting against violence done to women.
Abortion: The Right of Choice
‘Every mother a willing mother. Every child a wanted child,’ was the slogan of the Seventies ‘pro-choice’ movement, uttered in the face of shocking statistics. To take an example from the United States, before the Supreme Court's 'right to choose' ruling of Roe versus Wade in 1973, nearly one-fifth of maternal deaths were due to unsafe illegal abortions. In the UK the 1967 Abortion Act gave even a woman under 16 the right to an abortion without parental knowledge or consent, provided two doctors considered her capable of understanding what was involved. (British law still requires even adult women to have consent forms signed by a doctor; unlike, say, Sweden, where in the first three months of pregnancy no such consent is necessary)
Contraception
Technology also helped in the campaign to give women greater control over their own reproductive systems with the development of the contraceptive pill. Suddenly women had at their disposal a simple means for preventing pregnancy, supplementing earlier more cumbersome and less reliable methods. In 1967 in the UK the pill became legally obtainable by single women. ( It had been available to married women since 1961)
Medical Empowerment
The campaign for women’s control of their bodies was about more than contraception and access to legal abortion, important though these are. Support groups encouraged greater independence in dealing with the medical profession for whatever kind of treatment. Some women used a speculum, a medical mirror, to carry out self-examination. They studied medical texts to be better informed when discussing treatment. They demanded changes in the doctor-patient relationship that today benefit patients of both sexes. Gone were the days when a doctor always knew best, and could dismiss a patient’s questions with a patronising phrase. Women have learned to expect, and get, truthful, sensible answers from their doctors, in a way that changed the doctor-patient relationship forever.
Outlawing Discrimination
In the workplace major change was afoot. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 established the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work’. The Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of sex or marital status in employment, education, or the provision of goods and services. The year before that, Jill Viner became the first woman bus driver employed by London Transport, ending a ban on women bus drivers with LT that had even survived the desperate driver shortages of World War Two.
Professional occupations now began filling up with female faces: lawyers, medical consultants, even (to the horror of some traditionalists) ministers of religion. Hard to imagine, now, that women were once excluded from broadcasting the national news: an ‘unfeminine’ occupation for which they supposedly lacked the necessary toughness. In the next 30 years the percentage of female Members of Parliament would leap from 4% to 20%.
Equality? A long way still to go
In the world of pay and promotion, admittedly, women are far from achieving equality, even in the 21st century. In March 2010 the Guardian newspaper reported that women in fulltime work still earn 10.2% less than men working fulltime. Only 58% of women today have a fulltime job, compared with 88% of men. Even though more than half of First-class university degrees go to women, 73% of women consider they still face barriers to top-level promotion in business, finance and other high-powered occupations. Working women still complain about being saddled with an unfair proportion of responsibility for child-rearing and running the home.
Meanwhile, it seems, women have returned to challenge the old diehard sexist stereotypes implicit in the beauty pageant, pretty much in the way they did back in the Seventies.
So is Women’s Liberation back, then?
It never went away.
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