Philobiblon

It was a Housman’s £1 special, and a well-spent £1 it turned out to be. Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945-1968 by Elizabeth Wilson (published 1980)was fascinating in part because although I was born in Australia, which was probably a half to full decade behind Britain in social developments at this time, it pretty well stops where I came in – getting to the point, more or less, that I remember. (I was born in 1966.)

A rather different idea of feminism, before the second wave: it quotes Sheila Rowbotham in the 60s: “Feminism … meant shadowy figures in long old-fashioned clothes who were somehow connected with headmistresses who said you shouldn’t wear high-heels and make-up. It was all very prim and stiff and mainly concerned with keeping you away from boys.” (p. 4)

Citing sociologist Ferdynand Zweig, it suggests that in the 50s “housekeeping money” was the dark secret of the British family “the subject of equivocation on the part of both husbands and wives. He also discovered that, amongst the older generation at leas, the housekeeping allowance was still often referred to as ‘wages for the missus’.” (p 32) And fascinating that in 1952 Michael Young was pointing out the household income was not an adequate measure of how individual members were doing (something Fawcett has recently had to again try to point out to policymakers), and consequently a significantly inadequate easure of poverty. he argued that “the financial burden of having an extra child fell not, as was always assumed, on the family as a whole, but on the mother and previous children.” This was all in the context of the debate over who should get the children’s allowance (which I assume became child benefit – now of course being cut by the new government.)

But there’s plenty of traditional 50s stuff of the sort of attitudes I recall from my childhood among my parents’ generation. A pamphlet on education and training of girls in 1962 saw education of girls “as a barrier against the degeneration of moral standards of which there was evidence in the increase in veneral disease amongst the young, and in the commercial exploitation of sex. … clung to the idea of women as moral saviours in the face of declining standards of behaviour. Implicitly this invoked a double standard, in which men had natural sexual urges which it was for women to control.” (p35)

And I also well recall the arguments about women’s education being a “waste”, except in cases of exceptional talent. Commenting on the Royal Commission on Equal Pay in 1946, Wilson says “Work and marriage were understood as alternatives…. You could either be a wife and mother or a single career woman… It was assumed that the majority of those who chose to work belonged in the more interesting fields of work; in the professions, in the Civil Service, or in teaching. The rest were, as workers, transient, less highly skilled, inferior in class and status. The Report implied that the first group whould receive equal pay, partly because it was from these women that the pressure for equal pay had come; but it was argued that woman in manual employment did not make a contribution equal to that of men. This was because of their lesser strength, greater absenteeism, and ‘a certain relative lack of flexibility in response to rapidly changing or abnormal situations.’ But the three women members of the Committee, Annie Loughlin, Janet Vaughan and Mrs P.L. Nettlefold, all disagreed with these assumptions.” (p. 45) Underlying this was the fear that given a decent work opportunity “no women would want to reproduce”.

Women who said they wanted job AND career found it very hard to get attention, Wilson reports. Yet mothers were welcome back in the workforce under highly restricted conditions. Older women workers who’d had their children (now usually only two), raised them, were welcome back but would “often be both part-time and unskilled, to fit in with their diminished but not extinguished domestic responsibilityies; to fit in, too, with a shortage of unskilled labour.” (p. 48) Wilson describes this division (and she seems to be speaking here right up to publication time), as “rigid”. That I can attest too – I was 11 when my mother nearly got a job she was extremely keen on, as an estate agent. But in the end they gave it to a man, telling her, “well you might need to take time off for the child”. (I was at high school remember.) It was a blow for my mother, who then went back to part-time, less challenging jobs.

And in the nothing’s changed category, Wilson quotes Laura Balbo on women’s dual role leaving no space for a third sphere of activity. “Study, leisure, creative rest, political participation, active membership in trade unions or other associations, are experiences unknown to the great majority of adult women.” (p. 49)

There’s an interesting alternative view of the Pill (in this age when divorce was still rare). “What was never understood was the meaning of contraception to quite large numbers of women. It meant you were always available and sex became a duty. A study of 100 large families undertaken by Pauline Shapiro (1962) showed that the women, many of whom were depressed, anxious or resigned, seemed to feel disapproved of and one commented: ‘People think that if you’ve got a lot of children you’re inclined that way (ie towards sex) but I’m not.’ Many of these women felt that if they used contraceptives they would have to ‘go with’ their husbands again. Eleven were openly refusing intercourse and many others were able to use the risk of pregnancy as an excuse for avoiding regular or frequent sex. Many of the husbands were hostile to birth control Some objected to female sterilization because they thought their wives would be ‘no use’ to them afterwards; some equated fertility with potency, some saw it as a way of controlling their wives, others as a way of punishing them.” (p. 99)

Wilson concludes that the ‘permissive’ society was pretty much a conservative myth. Legal penalties for some sexual behaviour were removed, but “it did not imply that promiscuous girls or homosexuals were happy. On the contrary they were lonely misfits.” She quotes a journalist, Corinna Adams, writing in the New Statesman in 1966, about her 9-year-old daughter coming home from school to say that a friend had told her “people fuck for fun.” “Corinna Adam confessed that, progressive parent as she felt hersellf to be, she could not bring herself to admit to her daughter that it was indeed the case, but felt compelled to stress how sacred and serious sex must be.” (p. 108)

But there is some of the Sixties as generally understood – Wilson notes the appeal in the student movement of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation. “‘Make Love Not War’ was a distillation of his thesis that the ‘permanent arms economy’ necessitated the narrowing down and the repression and control of sexual behaviour. If this was so, then part of the revolutionary task was to break out of this ‘surplus repression’ and liberate creative energy in a free, polymorphic, perverse sexuality no longer chained to the demands of capitalism or the death instinct.” (p. 109-10)

And “for the young, sexuality was definitely associated with revolt and rebellion; typical in accepting the contemporary definition of the rebellious girl as a sexual rebel. For this was also the definition found within the sociology of delinquency where girls appeared as criminals only in so far as they were sexual. For girls their sexuality was a crime.” (p. 141) The goalposts might have shifted, but has this really changed? I suspect not…

On fictional explorations of the era’s issues, Wilson quotes a character from Rosamund Lehman’s The Echoing Grove, “I can’t help thinking it’s particularly difficult to be a woman just at present. One feels so transitional and fluctuating … So I suppose do me… Our so-called emancipation may be a symptom rather than a cause. Sometimes I think it’s more than the development of a new attitude towards sex: that a new gender may be evolving – psychically new – a sort of hybrid. Or else it’s just beginning to be uncovered how much woman there is in man and vice versa.” (p. 150)

But there was also growing hostility, related, I think reading this, to the women as defenders of respectability and controlled sexuality. “Beyond… male egomania was a realm in which contempt for women shaded into hatred. … In Look Back in Anger, John Osborne felt justified in letting rip at women as if this were itself an attack on convention and bourgeois values. … just below the surface of this obsessively heterosexual world lay an absolute loathing of women. If women were chaste, men hurt and bullied them. If they were martyred, they were further humiliated. If they were predatory, they became comic and contempible, and the sight of a woman sexually aroused appeared to be threatening, obscene and horrific to these womanisers.” (p. 153)

There were two more things that struck me: Wilson comments on how Greer, Firestone, Kate Millett and others of the late 60s and early 70s had to rediscover the same history of oppression their foremothers had. “The necessity for each generation of feminists to go over the same ground… in order to rediscover women’s oppression – testifies to the extent to which this history of women and their oppression never has become part of known ‘cultural heritage’. .. If you have no access to your own tradition, and no validation from knowing that other women felt and feel as you do – which seems to have been the case in the 1950s particularly – self-doubt sets in.” Indeed – I can remember finding and secretly reading The Women’s Room when aged about 16, and it was revelatory. So much of what I thought was there!