Normal Women, page 63
By the 1980s, the ruling party of the Conservatives focused discussion not on women but on the family, which was understood to be a middle-class family, where the man earned a breadwinner wage, and the wife maintained the home, raised children and serviced the needs of her husband.84 In difficulties, like illness or redundancy, the state was supposed to provide temporary benefits until the family could return to its usual imaginary prosperity.
Trade unions and employers continued to prefer male workers in the late 1960s and just as conditions and wages deteriorated for women, psychologist John Bowlby produced ‘attachment theory’, the theory that a baby is predisposed to attach to one (only one) parent and will be damaged if this attachment does not successfully take place. Attachment theory was inspired by research with ducklings and ‘proved’ by research with monkeys.85 As someone who has raised both babies and ducklings, I am happy to reassure scientists that they are very different.
Attachment theory ‘proved’ that women needed to be at home because of their innate nature, and babies needed to be with their mothers because of their innate nature. Biology triumphed over History – women should not go out to work because to do so was to fly against their own nature. Women staying at home and doing all the housework and caring for the children was not only convenient for men, good for wage control and helpful in keeping an army of workers in reserve till needed – turns out it is essential for the well-being of women and children. Voila!
Theories about the nature of women as mothers and guardians of the family spread from the middle classes to every strata. From the World Health Organization to John Bowlby, everyone agreed that the mother should be available to the baby 24/7. Other family members could help only briefly. As Bowlby said: ‘The exacting job is scamped at one’s peril.’86
The failings of poor and unhappy families were increasingly visible both to private do-gooders and to the state and police systems. Successive laws created greater protection for children and increasing intervention into the family until 1989 when children were given a right to inquiry and intervention for their safety.87 Theorists no longer talked about the ‘undeserving poor’ but about ‘problem families’, and ‘families’ were understood to be ‘mothers’. Mothers working outside the home were accused of failing to care for their children: ‘latchkey children’ were the tragic result of women in work.88 It was the mother and only the mother who could produce a well-balanced child. Only her constant presence – constantly loving, never rejecting – would make a secure person. Her absence or incompetence would ruin both the child and society.
Women and children who fell outside the model of the imaginary two-parent, breadwinner-father family were punished. The Child Poverty Action Group showed that 3 million children were growing up in poverty in 1970 and quoted the case of a deserted wife with three children, who was refused £12.6s benefit a week, as she owned a washing machine and a television. The lives of working women with young children were made yet more difficult by the 1980 Education Act, which ruled that local authorities were no longer obliged to provide nurseries. When employers did offer workplace nurseries, the Inland Revenue taxed them as a ‘perk’.89 Poor women were further disadvantaged in 1986 when a new law stopped payment of a one-off grant on birth to the 94,000 women who were on income support.
The belief in the traditional family led to changes in the adoption laws to make it easier to create families. Local government officials, guardians, grandparents and parents could all sign adoption orders, so that children could be taken from their mothers and put into new families. Unmarried women were forced into giving up their babies and bullied and belittled. Maternal benefits, food stamps and birth certificates were taken from unmarried mothers, and social workers lied to single mothers, saying that babies were on ‘trial’ with foster families, when they had been permanently placed. Mothers were declared unfit or confused and their babies taken away.
Pat King was 15 years old when forced to give up her illegitimate baby for adoption in 1973. She never saw him again, but kept his name tag all her life
Pat King’s baby’s name tag from 1973, personal archive (Courtesy of Pat King)
Pat King was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Whitchurch, Shropshire, when the head teacher at her school told her parents that she believed the girl was hiding her pregnancy. Only three weeks later, Pat gave birth to a boy, and after two weeks of caring for him, she was ordered to hand him over to a social worker. ‘My dad was there, quite firmly making sure I didn’t make too much fuss. It’s one of those things you never forget, just like it was yesterday.’
Pat King said her social worker was ‘of the view that you’d committed a sin and this was the best thing, and loving couples out there needed these children. It was almost like that was her goal, to find babies for the parents she’d got on her list; she didn’t care about the person giving the child away at all.’
In adult life, Pat looked for her son but never found him.90
Not until 1976 were mothers given the right not to be coerced and to have full information before permitting adoption, and the baby had to be more than six weeks old.91 This decade also saw the ending of ‘child migration schemes’ that shipped poor, abandoned children and those in foster care to Canada and Australia.
The fashion for encouraging women into the home could not be sustained. In the 1970s, the demand for workers meant women were needed to fill vacancies, while poverty drove many women to work and others demanded a working life. Left-wing feminists insisted on and organised provision for children and called for an end to child poverty, with financial support for children whatever their parent’s status. Advice to women as to how to mother their children changed dramatically when the nation needed women workers. In the late 1970s, the emphasis fell on the beneficial educational and socialising effect of nursery and pre-school education for babies and toddlers. Having needed no one but Mother, babies and small children now needed everyone but – and now mothers caused much fake concern about their ill-educated, unsophisticated narrow lives at home, where they were spoiling and overprotecting sheltered children.92
Protest
Even during wartime, women protested against the rationing of essential foods. On 16 July 1945, The British Pathé News filmed women demonstrating against the government, publicly protesting against austerity. By the end of the war, frustration with austerity and state control had increased, particularly among women who demanded purchasing power and freedom of choice. Meat, bacon, butter, sugar, eggs, tea, cheese, milk, sweets, clothes, petrol were all still restricted.
Women led the protest against the ‘national loaf’, a new recipe for bread that the government enforced to economise on wheat imports from Canada during wartime. But in 1946, the Labour government introduced bread rationing. Mrs Irene Lovelock of the British Housewives’ League led the protest: ‘We have put up with the loaf being made smaller, we have put up with it being made darker, but women say here and now that we won’t have bread rationing.’93
In an extraordinary re-enactment of the medieval food riots, the modern British Housewives’ League organised marches with banners that read ‘Bread: No Ration.’ The women food rioters won and the government took bread off the ration for two years.
As concern increased about the Cold War and damage from radioactive poisoning released by atom bombs, mothers pushing prams led a peace demonstration of 400 marchers to the Russian embassy in 1961. One of the mothers said: ‘Up to now women have not had much say in politics . . . but we can’t just go on cooking food for our families when we know it has been contaminated with radioactive poisons. We know that women all over the world, especially those who have or hope to have children, feel as we do.’94
In the fishing port of Hull, Lil Bilocca, a fisherman’s wife, set up the Hull Equal Rights Group to support a safety campaign for trawlers, and a year after the Ford strike at Dagenham, women trade unionists established a national campaign for women’s equal rights. ‘The year of the militant woman’ was announced by the magazine Black Dwarf in 1969, as women’s liberation groups sprang up around the country, picketing the Miss World beauty contests and the Ideal Homes Exhibition.95 The first women’s liberation march took to the streets in London in 1971, calling for equal pay, workplace nurseries, equal representation in the trade unions, free contraception, abortion on demand, and financial help for women and families.
The lack of trade union support for women workers led to a ‘mass uprising’ in clothing workers at Leeds in 1970, when women workers went around factories calling on other women workers to support a strike for a wage increase, protesting against the employers, the wage council and the trade union that represented them. They elected their own committees.96 Women also campaigned for wider causes, protecting the environment in Swansea in 1971, blocking the gates of a polluting factory, and campaigned against asbestos dust in 1976.
In 1974, Asian women walked out of the Imperial Typewriter Factory in Leicester because the pace of work had been increased. They faced racial prejudice from employers and even from the trade unionists, who failed to represent them. Two years later, Asian women workers organised a walk-out at a non-union film processing factory at Grunwick, north-west London, demanding improvements to their workplace and better treatment. The women had been forced to raise their hands for permission to go to the bathroom. They joined a union, and their walk-out was widely supported. The government appointed a commission, which reported that the processing plant should be unionised and the striking women should have their jobs back. The company refused, and the Trades Union Congress decided that the strike could not be won and withdrew support. The two-year-old strike by women was broken by a combination of government apathy, employer power and trade union betrayal.97
Reclaim the Night marches started in 1978 as part of an international women’s demonstration against the threat to women on the street. The first march, in Leeds, was defying police advice that women should stay home after the Yorkshire Ripper attacks. A later march in London brought 2,000 women onto the streets with the slogan ‘No curfew for women’.
The internationally famous Greenham Women’s Peace campaign began in 1981 with a march of 30 people, mostly women with small children, from Cardiff to Greenham Common, a US base of nuclear missiles. They set up the Greenham Women’s camp, leading a national and worldwide protest. A clerk in the Foreign Office, Sarah Tisdall, leaked plans for the arrival of the American Cruise missiles, and was imprisoned for six months, while an MI5 agent, Cathy Massiter, revealed that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was under surveillance as a subversive organisation, along with trade unions and other organisations. The camp lasted for 19 years – itself an extraordinary achievement – and the women appeared in court to defend themselves at almost every level of appeal. In 1991–92 the missiles at Greenham Common were returned to the USA as part of the reduction of the Cold War, and in 1997 Greenham Common was designated a public parkland – returning the common land to the people as women have demanded since 1066.98
Striking miners in 1984–85 were out for a year to prevent pit closures under the Margaret Thatcher Conservative government, which was determined to break the power of the big industrial unions. The women who lived in the pit villages defended their homes, their way of life and their family’s income in public demonstrations that rallied 50,000 women to London: ‘It clearly wasn’t any longer about wages or even just jobs it was about who’s got the right to decide really how you live,’ said protester Jean McCrindle. After the strike was broken, many women moved on to support the 1986 printers’ strike against new technology for newspapers at Wapping, London, demonstrations against nuclear power in 1986 and the seafarers strike against new shifts in 1988.99
One English-Pakistani woman, Anwar Ditta, fought an almost-solo battle against the English government to regain her children. Ditta was born in Birmingham to Pakistani parents and sent to live with her paternal grandparents in Pakistan when her parents divorced. A marriage was arranged for her there, at the age of 14, and she had two children with her husband, who moved to England, where she joined him, expecting her children to join them later. The Home Office took two years to consider the matter and declared itself unconvinced that the children were hers. Anwar Ditta started her own campaign to be reunited with her children, despite criticism from the Asian community in England. ‘They said a woman’s place is in the house and not campaigning . . . I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks,’ she said.100
Anwar Ditta faced racism from the white community, some of whom abused her, pulled her hair and sent hate mail – which she donated to the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre. She was dismissed from her job. Every weekend she campaigned for her children to be admitted to England, taking a bucket for donations and asking for signatures on a petition. She was supported by the Asian Youth Movements in Manchester and Bradford, especially the women’s wing of the Asian Youth Movement at Manchester which worked against the deportation that was dividing families, as well as anti-racist groups. Despite witnesses, sworn depositions and support, Ditta’s appeal to the Home Office was rejected in 1980.101 Her appeal was denied but her campaign became part of a TV documentary, which was shown in March 1981; the Home Office refusal was overturned the following day and Anwar Ditta’s children came home to her in Rochdale a month later in April 1981.102
Anwar Ditta (1953–2021), born in Britain and with a British passport, had to publicly challenge the Home Office for five years, when it excluded her children from England
Anwar Ditta with her daughter Samera Shuja by John Sturrock, 1981 (John Sturrock/Report digital)
Two women of colour became leaders of the immigrant community: Amy Ashwood Garvey (widow of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican radical) was president of the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, while Claudia Jones ran the West Indian Gazette, which campaigned for women’s rights and organised the Caribbean Carnival in Notting Hill, west London.103
The 1981 British Nationality Act denied admission to Britain to some British overseas citizens, and women of colour protested deportations and changes to migrant rights. Police violence, especially against young men of colour, radicalised Asian and Black women. In 1986, Shreela Flather, the first Asian mayor of Windsor, said the police were ‘sexist and racist and not at all welcoming’.104
The marches fizzled out during the 1990s but were revived in 2016 as part of the MeToo movement, and in 2017, 100,000 women marched as a world-wide rebuke to the abuse and repression of women, as Donald Trump – who had admitted assaulting women – was inaugurated as president of the USA. In 2021, after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a Metropolitan Police officer, more than 1,000 women gathered in a vigil to mourn her. The vigil – organised by Reclaim These Streets – was banned by the police under coronavirus regulations and the organisers threatened with fines. The demonstration – now declared illegal – went ahead, and many women were forcibly arrested. A hearing by High Court judges said that the police should have allowed the demonstration, and lifted the fines on the organisers.105 The government called for an independent review of the police, which discovered the London police was failing women and children with ‘institutional racism, sexism and homophobia, inside the organisation’.106
In the 1990s, women came together for a number of campaigns: for the environment, for the poor, to ban the export of live animals. Debjani Chatterjee from the Bengali Women’s Support Group in Sheffield said: ‘Many of us would rather not make artificial choices between the individual and the group, between femininity and feminism, and there is a perception that Western feminism has required that such choices be made . . . within our sisterhood, there is room for many points of view, and a variety of approaches. Arms are wide.’107
Women Divided
Alas, arms were not always wide, as Sheila Rowbotham remembered: ‘The 1978 women’s liberation conference divided so acrimoniously on the question of inherent male violence that no one was ever prepared to call another one.’108
Even women’s own causes could be divided when some women felt patronised by protective and safety legislation while others felt that women workers needed specialist protection. The 1960s saw the rise of right-wing women who wanted protection rather than opportunities for women. Mary Whitehouse campaigned against BBC programmes exploring sex and its reporting of war. In 1979 she wrote:
Dear Sir, With ref. to Monday Film BBC1 at 9.25pm Jan. 22nd. The general scenery was superbly photographed, but WHY must you spoil a good film by crudeness and vulgarity. You seem to delight in close-up pictures of . . .
(i) A young girl putting on her panties.
(ii) A native boy’s buttocks.
(iii) A close-up of breasts belonging to a native whilst climbing a tree.
(iv) And please don’t tell me it was not done intently: the branches of a tree, photographed in such a way as to resemble the lower part of a woman’s body.
(v) The scientist scene, was there a necessity to show a close-up [of] the legs of the woman sitting there?
And you have the cheek to increase our licences! WHAT FOR? To receive rubbish like this in our homes? Yours sincerely.109
Margaret Thatcher, prime minister, was more interested in supporting housewives and mothers to stay at home than the rights of women at work, but Labour political star Barbara Castle described feminism as a quest for ‘real’ equality for poor women struggling with poverty as well as elite women struggling for opportunities: ‘To find out what they are, what they want to be and whether they are given the backing of society to lead the lives they want to lead. Equality must go down to the mundane things like – “How do I get enough to live on? Do I or do I not have children? Who will help me to bring them up?”’110
