Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

Sacred Cows

IS FEMINISM RELEVANT

TO THE NEW MILLENNIUM?

Rosalind Coward

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been written without the support and encouragement of certain friends and colleagues. In particular I would like to acknowledge the institutional support given by University College, Northampton and the personal and intellectual support of George Savona of the same institution. Without blaming them, I would like to thank the following people: Karen Binks, Karen Selby, Judy Holder, and Tessa Adams. Jo Dobry, Julian LeVay and Ann McFerran deserve especial thanks for their refusal to let me give up on the project. I would like to acknowledge Barbara Taylor for her ongoing contribution to formulating some of the ideas and more specially for her collaboration with an original version of the chapter, Whipping Boys. Ruth Glaser also gave practical support at a critical moment. I would also like to acknowledge various editors at the Guardian, especially David Rowan, David Leigh and Sally Weale for giving me space to develop ideas and sometimes for ruthlessly challenging them. I owe thanks to Michael Fishwick at HarperCollins and Antony Goff at David Higham Associates for their incredible patience. I would also like to thank my Mother for her continuing support and her invaluable cuttings service. Finally I would like to thank John Ellis. Quite simply, without his support this book would never have been written.

Table of Contents

Title Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 THE ASSAULT ON UNEARNED MALE POWER

2 FEMINISM: A MOVEMENT BLIND TO ITS OWN EFFECTIVENESS

3 A NEW GENDER LANDSCAPE

4 THE FULL MONTY

5 MALE LOSS

6 MASCULINITY: FROM POTENCY TO ABSURDITY

7 MASCULINITIES

8 SEARCHING FOR THE HERO INSIDE OF US

9 WOMANISM

10 THE ‘MASCULINIST’ REACTION

11 WHIPPING BOYS

12 THE REDUNDANT FATHER

13 MOTHERING AND FEMALE COMPLICITY

14 THE BOY CHILD

15 VULNERABLE OPPRESSORS

16 POTENT VICTIMS

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

About the Author

Copyright

About Publisher Page

INTRODUCTION

Feminism has been a dramatically successful social movement. It has utterly changed what women can expect from, or do with, their lives. It has also transformed when men expect from sharing their lives with women and how they will behave towards them. Children growing up now simply take for granted feminism’s messages about sexual equality and justice when only thirty years ago such messages were widely opposed as extremist and threatening to the social order. No other social movement has so rapidly revolutionized such deeply held patterns of behaviour. The problems faced by feminism now have nothing to do with getting its ideas across and everything to do with how to face up to the unpredictable consequences of this success.

Paradoxically, however, as an increasing number of feminists reach ever more powerful positions, they seem determined to breathe new life into the original tenets of feminism, insisting that female oppression is just as real now as ever before. In the UK and America there are powerful feminists in government who call on the female populace to back them up in a continuing struggle. ‘At last’, they seem to say, ‘you have someone to take up your cause, to fight for women’s rights. And what a hard fight it will be because nothing has really changed.’ Recently I told a well-known, highly paid woman novelist the sub-title of this book: ‘Is feminism relevant to the new millennium?’ ‘Of course it is,’ she said without missing a beat. ‘We still don’t have equal pay.’ Everywhere, powerful women repeat this mantra. Even Germaine Greer now says nothing has really changed. Influential feminists insist that because there are still many individual areas of injustice or unfairness, there is still an overarching system of sexual injustice with men always advantaged and women disadvantaged. One injustice, like the inequality which exists between the average pay of women and the average pay of men, is supposed to prove the rest. But this is no longer true in any simple way. Of course, women still suffer many injustices, discriminations and sometimes even outrages but it is no longer a simple coherent picture of male advantage and female disadvantage.

There are many social practices and attitudes which still discriminate against women. I encounter this regularly in my own life as a journalist and in the media. In these areas, men still tend to dominate. They are still more interested in each other and in each other’s interests than in women – a sort of unconscious marginalization which women have long noticed in business. It is still more difficult for older women or intellectual women than it is for older or intellectual men. While this is galling, it is not part of a coherent picture of male domination and female subordination as it once was. At least now there are many women working in the media. Some are not simply successful but very powerful, such as Rosie Boycott, editor of the Daily Express. In some areas of the media, to be young and female is a definite advantage; in the late 1990s the fashion has been for female newsreaders. It would be wrong to suggest male domination is the most significant unfairness. Now the dominance of the media by a certain class, certain families even, and the absence of ethnic minorities are much more striking. There are now different unfairnesses coming from different places and causes. When gender is significant, it is not always women who are disadvantaged.

Some people recognize that reality has changed, that something is up. Invariably this recognition leads to questions such as ‘What does it mean to be a feminist now?’ or ‘What can feminism tell us about this new reality?’ The publishing world is full of editors hunting for the young feminist who will galvanize new audiences with a contemporary version of the old theme of female oppression. In other words, there’s a search for a feminist ‘take’ on contemporary society. But feminism will never be relevant in that clear-sighted simple way again. Gender remains a crucial division in western society but in a much more fractured and inconsistent way. Sometimes when gender division is relevant, it is men who are disadvantaged not women.

These thoughts go into new and uncharted territory and there is not a huge amount of encouragement to undertake such a journey. Feminism is still a subject which provokes passion and, it has to be said, unreason. ‘Are you for it or against it?’ is the most common question. But such polarization is now unhelpful, obscuring an understanding of what feminism has achieved, what has changed, and what role gender now actually does play. It also prevents us asking an even more fundamental question: Is feminism relevant at all now?

It took me a long time before I allowed myself to ask this question. My intellectual and political formation were in feminism and it feels a bit like casting myself adrift and betraying friendships which have formed me, but for the past few years I have had a growing sense that, at some point, for my own benefit as much as anything else, I would have to look at feminism afresh, to settle my own accounts with it. I needed to understand why feminism had once been so important and why I now felt it had become a straitjacket.

This was no overnight revelation but a growing sense of unease. Over the years I have regularly had phone calls from newspapers or magazines, or received letters from research students, asking me one or all of the following questions: Do you think feminism has achieved its goals? Would you still call yourself a feminist? Is feminism dead? I used to answer these questions reasonably confidently. Women still have a very long way to go before they reach real equality so, yes, they still need a political perspective which attends to women’s specific needs. Yes, I’m still a feminist. No, feminism is not dead.

Over the last few years, though, my answers have become more and more convoluted and hesitant. I found it increasingly difficult to say I was a feminist. This was not because it was unfashionable to do so, although it was; rather it was because, almost without noticing, I had become disenchanted with the idea of being ‘a feminist’ in such times. I still identified with the feminist objectives of abolishing discrimination based on gender and the move towards a sexually equitable society. I still cared about many of the injustices feminism cared about. But somewhere along the line, my relationship with feminism had come unstuck.

Of course, few feminists, including myself, had ever really seen themselves as fully signed up, uncritical members of some united feminist movement. Feminism wasn’t like that anyway. It was more a loose alliance of women with different approaches to problems affecting women arid a number of different primary concerns. So there had always been a place for ideas to be discussed critically and I had always seen myself as being on a critical wing of this broad church. The religious imagery is not accidental, however; feminism was a broad church and ‘belief’ is an apposite term for its dynamism. When I first encountered feminism in the 1970s, it had the force and attraction of a profound explanatory system. As the old traditional family crumbled and women began to feel the effects of postwar education and consumerism, feminism was the ideology which galvanized women, putting them in the driving seat of these profound social changes.

Certainly feminism made sense of my own experience, emerging as I did, highly educated, from university in the 1970s, yet facing ancient prejudices and discrimination. And having espoused this doctrine, it was exhilarating to be involved in the astonishing changes it made to relationships between the sexes, transforming cultural prejudices against women, knocking on the doors of workplaces and educational institutions to transform women’s opportunities probably for ever.

Because of the importance which feminism had both personally and socially, it took me a long time to recognize just how uncomfortable I had become with that association. By the late 1980s, although publicly still very much associated with feminism, I was also beginning to feel compromised, drawn into interpretations of the world which no longer rang true. Throughout the 1990s I gradually realized I was travelling beyond some invisible boundary. One incident which brought this home to me was the reception given to Katie Roiphe’s book, The Morning After, published in Britain in 1993. In reviews and features it was explained that Katie Roiphe was a young American, the daughter of a woman who had been politically active as a feminist in the 1960s and ‘70s. Roiphe, it was explained, had written a naive book, the result of discovering as a student at Princeton University that the feminism which she had imbibed with her mother’s milk had turned into the sour doctrine of sexual repression dressed up as political correctness.

I heard many conversations about Roiphe’s book. Most were indignant in tone; what were we doing importing a book by a young American student about American sexual attitudes which were so different from our own? Why should we be worried about feminist political correctness in the USA when there were still so many steps towards equality for British women to take? Was the eagerness with which the British media had grasped this attack on feminism part of what many perceived as a growing backlash against feminism?

When I finally read the book it came as something of a surprise. It was naive, but it was also a valid set of observations about the dangers of applying rigid feminist views to intimate human relationships where power does not obligingly belong to one group only. What is more, although it was a vignette of life on an American campus, it was not altogether distant and unrecognizable. What she had to say about the victim culture of feminism, about the problems with a positive discrimination programme, and especially about how relationships between the sexes might be viewed in a new, more egalitarian context, were certainly recognizable to me in the UK.

The reception of that book made me realize that although British feminists always insist that there is no single uniform feminism, only a disparate set of voices addressing women’s issues, there are some no-go areas. Roiphe’s book touched in a naive way on precisely those areas, questioning the fundamental feminist convictions that women can never be powerful in relationship to men and, conversely, that men can never occupy a position of vulnerability. Roiphe argued that on the sexually egalitarian campus, sexual relationships are not always characterized by male oppressors and female victims. So, however broad the church of feminism, it clearly had its limits and, like most other systems of belief, it responded with indignation and accusations of treachery to such challenges.

Feminism’s self-image, as a beleaguered minority, does not help it to tolerate criticism. Women involved with feminism tend to feel they have never really had the chance to explain themselves or make a significant impact with their ideas, so what they really want is more support, not criticism. This is understandable. To call oneself a feminist has never been an easy choice and it has never made anyone popular. It is still hard for individual women to confront the injustices and plain bad behaviour that they meet in life, and to try to do something about them. More often than not, the result is marginalization, designation as a ‘trouble-maker’ and much ad feminam hostility.

Those women who fought the original battles suffer more than most. Hated and opposed when originally pushing down the barriers, they now often have to face contempt from a society which takes for granted their achievements. At a recent party I witnessed one such woman being challenged by a young man who had no sense of feminism’s history or her involvement in it. ‘Do you really call yourself a feminist?’ he asked belligerently. ‘Yes,’ she answered rather wistfully, ‘I’d still call myself that.’ ‘But what on earth does it mean?’ he continued. ‘I mean, is there really any need for it? Isn’t it just part of the way we are, part of our unconscious?’

It was a difficult and poignant moment for me, because it encapsulated both sides of my relationship with feminism. I greatly respected the woman for what she had achieved and deplored the man’s lack of respect for why she had placed herself as she did. In such circumstances, no wonder she dug her heels in. This continuing lack of credibility and acceptance explains why feminists react badly when the fundamental tenets of the movement are challenged. But when I began to examine feminist ideas critically and challenge the idea that nothing had changed, I too met with resistance. There is a real reluctance to submit feminism’s fundamental assumptions to an audit to see just how relevant they are to changing realities.

The problem is that, by and large, I also agreed with what the man at that party said. Somewhere along the line something remarkable has happened. Individual feminists still meet with resistance and problems, but feminism as a movement has been extraordinarily successful; it has sunk into our unconscious. Our contemporary social world – and the way the sexes interact in it – is radically different from the one in which modern feminism emerged. Many of feminism’s original objectives have been met, including the principle of equal pay for equal work, and the possibility of financial independence. Girls now are growing up in a world radically different from the one described by the early feminists. Feminism no longer has to be reiterated but simply breathed.

Few, surely, can fail to recognize that the opportunities and expectations facing young women in the new millennium make thirty years ago seem like another planet. When I left university, the sex discrimination act and equal opportunities legislation had only just become law; battles about combining careers and motherhood still lay ahead. Now, rather than feeling there are uncharted waters in front of them, young women are more likely to feel daunted by the potency of the female icons before them. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher destroyed the notion that women could not reach the top. And in the 1990s, stockbroker Nicola Horlick, a mother of five with a million-pound-a-year job, put paid to the idea of motherhood as an obstacle. Both women are problematic figures, certainly, and both can be called exceptions, but in the 1960s, such figures were simply unthinkable.

Feminism has, to a considerable degree, got what it wanted and most of it came to fruition in the 1980s. Jobs opened up to women; career expectations went up dramatically; most women, including many mothers, worked. Legal changes and changes in family patterns also made it possible for women to survive financially on their own should they so wish. The old morality which had restrained and oppressed women lifted. We always complain about the cliché of calling the 1980s the ‘women’s decade’, but it was true. Rarely a month went by without another first for women, as barrier after barrier came down. The public perception of women through the ‘80s was that they were on a roller-coaster. The decade had begun with Margaret Thatcher becoming the first British woman prime minister, creating the strong impression that there were no longer any barriers between a very determined woman and the fulfilment of her ambitions. With the media also taking up the cause of the working mother and focusing attention on high-achieving women, it was hard not to notice women’s potency.

In fact, many of the things feminism had wanted came about because of other social changes and not quite in the form anticipated. The increase in part-time and flexible working came as the result of brutal economic changes and not, as many feminists had envisaged, through a benevolent process of social relaxation. The economy was demanding the kinds of work that women could provide. At a social level, however, feminism appeared to be making little headway. The 1980s’ economic boom had disguised major economic shifts and the public face of that boom was the young male ‘yuppy’, apparently embodying male economic power. Combined with Margaret Thatcher’s overt hostility to feminism and her lack of support for women in general, it is easy to see now why so many feminists imagined that nothing was changing.

At the same time, it took a peculiar form of blindness to ignore the profound changes which were affecting men in the same period. In the 1970s the problem confronting women was how to reverse the dip in achievement and expectation which seemed to afflict teenage girls prior to their disappearing off the career ladder altogether. From the end of the 1980s, the main worry over teenagers became the poor performance of boys, not of girls. While the morale of girls and women is high, and expectations about future careers robust, the opposite appears to be true of boys. Throughout the 1990s, boys’ performance at school took a nosedive.

This was just a symptom of a wider shift, of the fact that the changes affecting women’s position have intersected with very great changes for men in their working patterns, in their family roles and in their social expectations. A number of forces came together at the end of the 1980s: the changes in the type of work available, a massive increase in unemployment and job insecurity which affected men very badly, and a growing pinpointing of crime and social disaffection as a male problem.

From the end of the 1980s onwards, it was men in the eye of the storm not women. First came evidence that the job market was beginning to discriminate against men. More men than women were losing their jobs and ‘male’ industries were closing down while areas of women’s work were expanding. The new patterns of work – part-time and flexible – seemed geared to women not men. There was also evidence that men were finding the changes more difficult than women; some perceived the shifts in the family as entirely to their disadvantage, and were, in some communities, seriously disaffected.

The social and economic policies of the 1980s created extraordinary changes in the relative position of the sexes, but they also created enormous divisions between groups that went far beyond discrimination based on sex. Social disaffection, poverty and crime were visible and unsettling; there was talk of an underclass. A series of horrendous crimes fed anxieties that society was in some way falling apart. Social commentators and politicians began to question the liberalization of society which had so changed family morality. Feminism was heavily implicated in their scenarios of doom.

As a journalist writing throughout this period, it was impossible not to notice what was happening. If women had been the leading political subjects of the 1970s, men became the political problem of the 1990s. Subtly, men and their dilemmas had moved centre-stage; no longer willingly standing aside while women took priority but increasingly expressing concern at having been moved aside. The changes affecting men and the changes men themselves were making now occupied the centre of attention in a strange echo of what had happened to women twenty years previously. Whatever you made of it, there was no way this was the same society as that originally described by feminism. These changes made feminism’s theoretical assumptions seem questionable, its political aims problematic and its expectation that men should cheer at the sidelines while women ran the race to the top, naïve.

Nor were men so willing to accept feminism’s version of themselves; the days of genial masochism were over. In the 1970s they might have shared a sense of themselves as consistently advantaged over women. Now many were questioning this, alongside a growing belief that women have wrested power and advantages from those who are already diminished. As this new mood began to surface, feminism could have re-evaluated its previous assumptions. Instead, it tried to fit the changing landscape into the old models, ridiculing the idea of a male crisis, and taking men’s complaints as further proof of their intransigence. What else would you expect from threatened potentates? This was typical of feminism’s reluctance to let go of certain fundamental tenets: the insistence on the primacy of gender, a reluctance to rethink power relations, a refusal to abandon those old assumptions about oppression.

Only one writer came up with a viable idea to deal with this new male mood, but what a useful idea it was! ‘Backlash’, a term taken from the title of Susan Faludi’s book (1991), threw feminism a lifeline just when it might have sunk. In many ways, Backlash, the book, is impressive. It has a firm grasp of the social and economic movements of the 1980s. Faludi looks both at the cultural representations of women, in newspaper articles, films, sitcoms and so on, as well as at the minutiae of women’s earnings and women’s political activities. Setting the two against each other, she concludes that women’s political and economic progress was paralleled by a series of growing preoccupations which operated to undermine women’s progress – stereotypes such as the childless career woman who is not only a tragic figure but also potentially a mad and dangerous one, as portrayed by Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction (1987).