Normal Women, page 62
Since many rapes are not reported to the police at all, this conviction rate is probably worse than 2 per cent. In the year 2000, the British Crime Survey estimated that 61,000 women aged between 16 and 59 had been raped in England and Wales, but only 20 per cent of these were reported and recorded by police (12,200).42 The charity and campaign group Rape Crisis agreed with that estimate, suggesting that in 2021–22 over 350,000 rapes may actually have taken place – making the likelihood of a rapist being convicted in fact less than 1 per cent.
In 1992, the English Law Commission reported that rape by a husband was equally as distressing for a woman as rape by a stranger. The old church law that ruled that a wife gave consent once on her wedding day, for the duration of her marriage, meant that marital rape was legal until 1994, when the law was changed to make a husband raping his wife a criminal act – probably the most frequently occurring rape.43 For the first time in English law since 1066, a husband did not have feudal rights over his wife’s body.
This attack on traditional marriage sparked an outcry of protest at the assault on marriage, but the expected ‘epidemic of prosecutions’ did not occur. Although surveys suggested that between 8 per cent and 14 per cent of wives said they had been raped by their husbands, accusations to the police were few, and charges were often dropped. Of the 450 marital rapes reported in 1996, only 22 sustained an accusation against their husbands – only 5 per cent felt able to pursue the complaint, and a horrifying 95 per cent of women who went to the police to tell them that they had been raped by their husbands went home to the man they had accused without pursuing charges. Women who complain of rape at home are the most likely to withdraw the complaint. In 2000, 42 per cent of women who withdrew accusations of rape after going to the police had named their current or former partner.44 As the evidence of wife murders makes clear, it was probably the safest thing to do. Unless she has a refuge, and reliable police protection, it is safer for wives to stay at home with a violent man or rapist than to accuse him and leave.
There is a significant proportion of women rapists. Most surveys suggest that between 6 per cent and 24 per cent of all rapists are female, abusing other women or men. A small survey of men in a London clinic found that 18 per cent of them had been forced to have sexual activity by a woman. Female rapists have been ignored partly because men who have been raped are reluctant to report, because of the continuing belief in female lack of sexual appetite, and the belief that rape is performed by a penis: until 2003, UK law defined rape as penile penetration. Experts have suggested that those few women who do rape or sexually assault unconsciously wish to be men, or are ‘nymphomaniacs’ and/or insane.45 Current thinking about rapists of any gender suggests that the crime is one of anger and an expression of power, not of sexual desire.46
There has been little research into violent and sexual assault in women’s prisons. The first studies, conducted in the 1990s, suggested that violent sexual assault among women occurred less often than in men’s prisons, but there was more coercion. Assault by male and female prison staff on inmates takes place routinely, as ‘strip and search’ and disciplinary procedures.
Recent research has only been undertaken because of expressed anxiety about transgender women in women’s prisons. While some of the assailants in women’s prisons have identified as transgender women, there are too few reports to show a clear pattern. Of the 97 sexual assaults recorded on women prisoners in England and Wales in the 3 years from 2016, 7 were committed by transgender women prisoners.47 In March 2022, there were 43 trans women prisoners being held in England and Wales and 187 trans men: a total of 230 trans prisoners. From 2023, trans women with male genitalia, or trans women with a record of violence, were held in male prisons unless granted individual permission to move.48
Greater care in the management of trans women prisoners in women’s prisons from 2019 has meant that no assaults by trans women have been recorded on women prisoners since then. Despite this progress, in 2022, the government responded to huge anxiety about prisoner safety by ruling that trans women with intact male genitalia should be housed in men’s prisons, exposing them to greater risk. There is more violence in men’s prisons; in 2019–20, 3.42 per cent of victims of assault were transgender.49
The question of where transgender criminals should be kept has become a highly publicised debate, with media and public apparently deeply concerned about the dangers of assault in prisons by trans people; not so much about assaults on trans people.
Especially bad for women is the tendency of the courts to imprison women for ‘consumer offences’ like shoplifting (21 per cent of prosecutions) and failing to have a TV licence (18 per cent of prosecutions). Once imprisoned, they are not kept safe. Thirty-five per cent of women prisoners harmed themselves in 2021, despite asking for help with mental health problems, money worries, housing difficulties and drug and alcohol addictions.50 Incidents of self-harm are a far more frequent occurrence than any relating to transgender people in prisons and are a far greater danger to women. But it is of less interest to people who like a moral panic about women.
Equally cruel, and also racist, is the UK tendency to lock up disproportionate numbers of women of African or Asian ancestry. In 2017, Black women were 25 per cent more likely than white women to be sentenced to prison, and 18 per cent of the women’s prison population were Black, Asian and minority ethnic women, from an overall population of women of 11.9 per cent.51
Work
In 1946, the Royal Commission on Equal Pay decided that women workers were less efficient and might be paid less than men. The commission quoted women’s inferior physical strength to that of male workers, and said that women were less able to deal with ‘surprise situations’.52 Despite this lack of alertness, women were not at all surprised to find their wages fell from 53 per cent of the male rate to 45 per cent.53
Although officially inferior, women were not obliged to give up work and return to their homes after the Second World War. Even wives should stay at work, according to the Spectator in 1946, though it was hardly a resounding accolade for women: ‘To dismiss women automatically on marriage is to waste education and training and . . . the female staff of the Civil Service will lack broad-mindedness if it is entirely composed of spinsters.’54
Women might keep their jobs, but many people thought the nation’s success depended on underpaying women at all levels in all industries. The 1946 Royal Commission on Equal Pay believed ‘the British economy would collapse if women obtained pay parity with men’.55 Scientist Rosalind Franklin complained vociferously about being paid less than men doing the same job.56 Her contribution to understanding the double-helix structure of DNA not only earned her less money, but it went uncredited. Her male colleagues used her crucial X-ray data without acknowledgement and the discovery secured them the Nobel Prize four years after Franklin’s death in 1958.
Equal pay for women was granted by London County Council in 1952, to women civil servants in 1955, and to teachers in 1956, followed by workers in the National Health Service and nationalised industries.57 In the 1960s, a series of strikes by women workers challenged the value that was put on their work compared with that of male workers in similar tasks. The strike of women workers at the Ford factory in Dagenham was followed by that of women at the Lucas factory at Acton, and women bus conductors – put out of work by the introduction of the one-man bus – demanded that their union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, allow them to retrain as drivers.58 In 1963, the Post Office allowed married women to retain their jobs after their weddings.59 Women rose into senior positions, mostly in retail, hotels, catering and local government. One of those was Diane Abbott, fast-tracked through the civil service and elected to Westminster City Council in 1982; by 1987 she had secured a seat in the House of Commons for Labour, becoming the first Black woman to become an MP.60 In 1988, 15 per cent of managers were women, but only 6 per cent of company directors.61 In the library profession, women pulled ahead by 1930 and accounted for 80 per cent of librarians by 1960.62 Women entered the Foreign Office in 1951 as equal diplomats – but they had to resign when they married, until the rules changed in 1973. In 1976, the first female ambassador, Anne Warburton, moved into the UK embassy in Denmark.63 It was not until the mid-1980s that the Metropolitan Police Force admitted that its unofficial policy of keeping the proportion of women at about 10 per cent of the rest of the force was discriminatory, and even now women make up less than a third of the UK’s police forces (29 per cent).64 It turns out that favouring men recruits to the police may not have been helpful – in 2023, the London Metropolitan Police were found by Baroness Louise Casey to show ‘widespread bullying, discrimination, institutional homophobia, misogyny and racism, and other unacceptable behaviours which are a far cry from the high ethical standards the public rightly expects of its police officers’.65
When the Labour Party came to power in 1974, the government passed laws against sexual discrimination, including equal pay, pensions for women working for their families, maternity rights, and establishing the Equal Opportunities Commission. The numbers of women working steadily increased, and women’s pay rose to a dizzy 75 per cent of the male rate. But in 1978, it started to decline.66 Employers avoided the new legislation. Part-time workers were not given rights, and pro-women campaigns tended to focus upon social benefits to poor families instead of equality for all women.
The financial crisis of the mid-1970s prompted the Labour government to give up on equal pay. Instead, it cut benefits and created a hostile atmosphere towards the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities. Unemployment rose, and women of colour were especially affected by abuse from employers. An Asian woman forced out of Uganda to live and work in England said: ‘There was no question of whether you wanted to or not – you had to work, so you did. And wherever you found work, you had to take it. It wasn’t that you were educated, so you only wanted certain kind of jobs – we had to work in factories and that’s how we brought up our children . . . We used to have people working for us, and now we had to work for others. That’s life . . . Of course I felt sad.’67
The rise of unemployment in England hit women workers nearly twice as hard as men: while male unemployment rose 146 per cent, women’s went up by 276 per cent in the early 1980s.68 Work began to be outsourced from poor women in England to even poorer women in the developing world and many English factories closed. The slump in manufacturing hit women of colour in low-paid non-union jobs very hard as their work was outsourced to women working in their homes at even poorer rates. Christina, a Greek-Cypriot clothing worker for 20 years, said: ‘Chinese, Turkish or Indian ladies are working at home now, so all the work from the factory is going to these people.’69
The ‘putting out’ system of employers delivering parts of work to women for them to assemble or complete in their homes was assumed to have ended with industrialisation, but in fact home-working (slop work, piecework) increased through the 1970s, and women who worked part-time or in their homes, unprotected by unions or even factory inspectors, found their rates falling, bringing women’s rates of pay down against the male rate overall.70 A list of occupations undertaken by homeworkers in north London in 1972 found women making ‘hats, belts, ties and buttonholes . . . packing crackers, stuffing toys, pasting jewellery, knitting, crocheting, making hooks and eyes, carding buttons and thread, wiring batteries, or making and mending netting. Equally a home worker might do skilled administrative work like copy-typing, addressing or stuffing envelopes.’71
The minimum wage was introduced in 1999 and set at £3.60 an hour.72 In 1995, women were packing tights in their homes for 36 pence an hour.73 Women of Asian descent reported that when men could not get jobs, women were forced into work at home, as they had to have a wage but their families did not want them working outside the home. Most of the homeworkers used their earnings for food and children’s clothing, and large families could barely make ends meet.74
When women did return to employment in the boom period of the 1990s, it was often to low-paid service jobs and part-time work – less and less protected by either unions or wages councils. At the same time as driving down wages, the Margaret Thatcher Conservative government privatised many public services such as care homes and the provision of school dinners, as well as services like cleaners. In these places, the new private employers made workers part-time wherever possible, without sick pay or pensions. Some posts paid by the hour and hired when needed.
Concern for poor working women translated into nostalgia for a fantasy past that never existed, where stay-at-home wives were fully catered for by reliable husbands. Some surprising people kept the happy dream alive: the chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission in 1978, Elspeth Howe, commented: ‘The traditional single role family where the wife stayed at home and the husband went to work is disappearing. As a society, we are right to worry about what is happening to women, as they struggle to carry the double burden of their traditional duties and their role as workers.’75
We are indeed ‘right to worry about women carrying the double burden’, but we could have worried about this any time in the last 900 years. Working-class women have carried the double burden of wage work and production for the family ever since wages were paid for work and they had to go outside the home to earn money as well as produce at home. The double burden is hard but profitable when home production is high and wages are good, but it is unendurable when neither is enough to sustain the life of the woman herself or her children.
In homes where both husband and wife work full time, the wife does on average twice the childcare and housework of her husband. When she gets equal pay, her domestic work decreases: she works less than she did – but never as little as him. But a woman who earns more than her husband does more than her fair share of domestic work. As her wages exceed his, her workload at home increases too. Even when the only wage coming in to the household is hers, when the wife is the only one earning – she still does the majority of the housework.76 By 1965, in England, the task of caring at home for the family was increasing. Older women were called on to help young mothers with baby-sitting and child care, as the state closed nurseries and fathers were persistently unavailable. As care for the disabled and the elderly was cut by the government, more women stepped up to look after relatives: 29 per cent of single women and 24 per cent of wives were caring for parents or relatives, but only 16 per cent of men, according to the 1985 household survey. Historian Sheila Rowbotham called women ‘the shock absorbers of the economic and social system . . . both couples and single mothers were relying increasingly on female relatives, mothers or partner’s mothers and grandmothers for sustenance . . . Amidst all the talk of expanded choice, familial obligations actually became heavier.’77
Women in Authority
The post-war idealisation of a balance of external work and domestic work for women led the queen of England, Elizabeth II, to release photographs and film of her with her family, even washing up at a family barbecue.
The first female prime minister of England, Margaret Thatcher, described running a country like running a house: ‘It may just be that many, many women make naturally good managers . . . each woman who runs a house is a manager and an organiser. We thought forward each day, and we did it in a routine way, and we were on the job 24 hours a day.’78
Women who gained authority post-war tended to pride themselves on their ability to perform all their domestic duties and run their businesses. Journalism and biographies, self-help books and novels all stressed that a successful woman in the world was a successful woman at home. The hugely popular queen and the divisive first woman prime minister modelled wifely obedience and subservience – both promised to ‘obey’ at their weddings – and middle-class family values of companionate marriage, good child-raising, and an emphasis on religion, patriotism and female modesty. Mrs Thatcher was explicit about her feminine softness combined with feminine authority in a 1976 speech that still makes me feel a little bit queasy: ‘I stand before you tonight in my green chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved. The Iron Lady of the Western World? Me? A cold war warrior? Well, yes – if that is how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.’79
In the 11 years that she was prime minister Thatcher promoted only one other woman to her 22-strong cabinet. With her arrival to power, she believed that the fight was over: ‘The battle for women’s rights has been largely won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone for ever. And I hope they are. I hated those strident tones that you still hear from some Women’s Libbers.’80
For many women, those who were neither prime minister nor queen, it was hard to see the victory of women’s rights. Women were not admitted to the upper House of Parliament, the House of Lords, until 1968. The Earl of Glasgow said frankly: ‘Many of us do not want women in this House. We do not want to sit beside them on these Benches, nor do we want to meet them in the Library. This is a House of men, the House of Lords. We do not wish it to become a House of Lords and Ladies.’81
Princess Elizabeth (1926–2022), a Girl Guide, doing the washing-up in 1944
[And Cover] Princess Elizabeth as a Girl Guide, in Windsor, Berkshire, 25 July 1944 (Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images)
The post-war settlement by the Labour government of 1945–51 was based on the belief that women would marry and wives would stay at home – not seek work and positions of authority. William Beveridge’s influential report on state insurance against poverty was rooted in his understanding that wives’ work at home was essential to keep their husbands at work for the benefit of the national economy.82 He wrote, ‘Housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of the British ideal in the world.’83
