Normal Women, page 64
The question of free abortion for unwanted pregnancies divided women. Anti-abortionists themselves were divided, some of them wanting to hold men responsible, some to ‘protect’ the woman from a surgery that she might later regret, some to ‘protect’ the fetal life. Pro-abortion campaigners were split between those who regarded abortion as an acceptable form of contraception for all women and others who wanted it limited to patients with particular issues.
In 1983, Victoria Gillick, a Roman Catholic mother of ten, petitioned Parliament to ensure that none of her daughters under 16 years old would be given contraception or an abortion without her knowledge. The ‘Gillick Competence’ test became enshrined in law, ruling that doctors must review a child seeking treatment to confirm they understand the treatment.111
Both Conservative-type moral crusaders and feminists campaigned against sex shops. In 1984, the Video Recording Act set up a licensing system for pornography. There was little concern for women in the business of sex. The 1959 Street Offences Act was used against prostitutes, banning them from soliciting on the street (or out of their windows or front doors). The concern was to keep the streets free of soliciting, not to prevent women working as prostitutes, nor to provide them with safe spaces. The 1985 Sexual Offences Act made kerb-crawling (seeking sex in a car from female pedestrians) an offence. Concern about the enslaving of women in England for work, especially sex work, led to an addition to the Sexual Offences Act in 2010 that made it an offence to pay for sexual services from anyone who has been coerced into prostitution.
The Child Support Act of 1991 proved divisive for women as it required a mother to name the father of her child and a government agency to pursue him for payment. Since single mothers carried most of the burden of raising children, this was seen by some women as a positive step. Others resented being forced to name an unwilling man for support, and some second wives bitterly resented the cost of a previous household.112
Women were painfully divided by race, as increasing numbers of people were invited to come to England from the former British colonies to undertake hard and dirty work, and join the expanding National Health Service, facing racism at every step.
Immigration
Over 1,000 people from the Caribbean voyaged on the MV Empire Windrush in 1948 to dock at Tilbury Docks, London, the first post-war overseas workers invited from the Commonwealth to fill vacancies in Britain. Women on the Windrush were required to pay a higher ticket price – the equivalent of half a year’s National Assistance – and take a cabin, rather than going steerage like the male immigrants. But 27-year-old dressmaker Evelyn Wauchope stowed away and was discovered mid-voyage. She lived in England for a while before marrying a Bajan man and emigrating to America.113
Mona Baptiste was a 21-year-old Trinidadian blues singer, registered as a clerk for the voyage. Six weeks after disembarking, she was singing on the BBC’s Light Programme, and would go on a successful tour of English theatres and perform on TV shows, including the Ken Dodd show on the BBC. She went on to develop a hugely successful career as a singer in the UK and Germany.114
Most of the women were in their mid-thirties, travelling with their families.115 Although official policy was to welcome volunteers from the Caribbean, there was widespread racism in the Services.116 Racism towards immigrants prompted the government to impose immigration controls on women, who were banned from bringing husbands and children to England, though incoming men could bring wives and children.
For the next 20 years about 500,000 people of colour from former Commonwealth countries migrated to England. They had permission to stay only if they had both a work permit and proof of a parent or grandparent born in the UK. In 1971, Commonwealth citizens already living in the UK were given leave to remain. But migrants who arrived before 1971, and those without parents or grandparents living in the UK, could not prove their right to remain and could not access health services or benefits. Some born in England, or who had lived most of their lives in England, faced deportation. Even at the time of writing, a government apology and compensation scheme has not fully compensated people cruelly treated under this confused and unworkable policy.
Mona Baptiste (1928–93), internationally successful singer and actress, came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago on MV Empire Windrush in 1948
Mona Baptiste in Hamburg by unknown photographer, 13 September 1956 (Keystone/Getty Images)
Racist injustice from government and British institutions continues to this day in underrepresentation of people of African and Asian descent in institutions, who have worse outcomes than white people in health, education and the justice system.
The people of the Chagos Islands, descended from African people captured as slaves by the French in the seventeenth century, were forcibly evicted from their Indian Ocean homeland by the UK in 1968, to provide the USA with empty islands for a military base on Diego Garcia. The Chagossian people were banned from returning despite multiple appeals under international law. Some people were left without provision in Mauritius and the Seychelles islands, and a few managed to get to England, where they still struggle for permission to either return to their homelands or naturalise in England. A government review recommended that the Chagos people be allowed to return to their homeland; but the naming of the Chagos Island area as a Marine Protected Area – a huge benefit for conservation – is used to continue to keep the people from their homes.
The 1950s also saw increased immigration from India and Pakistan and attacks, verbal and physical, on people of colour, expressing an imaginary belief in white superiority, which continues to this day. Attacks on people of colour and fears about immigration announced in inflammatory language are one of the identifying hallmarks of the English right-wing parties and of those ignorant of demographics or basic manners in the twentieth century.
Health
In 1967, the National Health Service Family Planning Act allowed for contraception to be dispensed for social as well as medical reasons, to married and unmarried women.117 For the first time, women could reliably control their fertility. Women enjoyed greater sexual freedom, and sexual intercourse before marriage became widely accepted. Some feminists saw this as increasing the exploitation of women – images of women in the media and art became more and more sexualised, and all women (not only poor women, as had been the tradition) were considered potentially available for male sexual gratification.118
The use of herbs, fungi and woods to cause abortions or miscarriages, or to ‘bring on’ reluctant periods, remained part of folk medicine as late as the twentieth century in Norfolk and Lancashire.119 The debate about abortion increased in the 1950s with growing concern for women who resorted to so-called ‘backstreet’ abortionists – unregistered, and sometimes fatally incompetent. Abortion was legalised in 1967 if two doctors agreed that it was necessary on grounds of mental or physical health. In the same year, local authorities were allowed to provide contraceptive advice.
There was a pushback, especially from the Catholic Church in the 1970s and large street demonstrations were organised by the Society for the Unborn Child. Women anti-abortionists were themselves divided into those who wanted to support pregnant women so that they could give birth to an unwanted child and those who wanted to encourage births of white babies.120 Even now, after increased liberalisation and the invention of the morning after pill, there is no general agreement that the woman who is going to carry and birth the child should be the one who chooses to do so.121
Abortion is so sensitive because it plays against the imaginary ‘nature of women’ as maternal or nurturing. The woman seeking an abortion can be cast as deviant, unnatural. It is not seen as a dilemma that any sexually active woman might face since no contraception can be 100 per cent reliable. Instead, it is seen as a failure of the woman to use contraception properly, or at all; or a problem that can only be resolved by a ruling from the House of Commons and the joint advice of two doctors – surely an excessive taxing of medical and legal brains to make a decision that, however painful for the rest of us, surely belongs to the pregnant woman herself.122
Sport
Maureen Gardner, a ballerina who took up running to improve her health, won a silver medal in the 80 metre hurdles in the 1948 London Olympics. In 1964, the women’s athletics team won a record-breaking five medals in 12 events – the men took 7 from their 24 events. Star of the women’s team proved to be Mary Rand, who won gold and broke the world record in the long jump, took silver in the pentathlon and bronze in the 4 x 100 metres relay.123 Mary Peters won gold and broke the pentathlon world record in the 1972 Olympics, going on to be manager of the British women’s team. Tessa Sanderson competed at every Olympics from 1976 to 1996, winning the javelin in 1984 – the first Black British woman to win a gold medal. Sally Gunnell became the only British female athlete to have won Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth titles in the same event – hurdling – and the only woman to have done so over 400 metres.
In 1971, pioneering sportswoman Rachael Heyhoe-Flint set up the first cricket Women’s World Cup. She hit the first six in a women’s Test match and regularly captained the England international squad. She persuaded Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) to give women permission to play at the prestigious men-only ground at Lord’s, saying: ‘Now the mums and the daughters have their own cricket instead of making cucumber sandwiches every weekend.’124
Horse-riding remains the only Olympic sport in which men and women compete equally against each other, since women were first allowed into dressage events at the 1952 Olympics, followed in 1956 by showjumping and finally, in 1964, eventing. Britain’s Pat Smythe won team bronze for showjumping in 1956, though she had been representing Britain in international competitions since 1947.
The youngest ever British Olympian, ice skater Cecilia Colledge, finished eighth in 1932, aged 11. Four years later she won silver. The first woman skater to perform a double jump, she invented the camel spin and layback spin. During the Second World War, Colledge served as an ambulance driver, before returning to skating and winning the national title for the sixth time.
Football for women reappeared when the Women’s FA was formed in 1969 and eventually in 1971 the 50-year-old ban on women’s football was reversed. Within three years, the first Women’s FA Cup Final and England women’s international had been played. In 1993, a Women’s Football Committee was established to run the women’s game in England. The FA outlined its plans to develop the women’s game from grassroots to elite level in 1997 and in the following year appointed Hope Powell as women’s national coach.125
Women’s hockey finally made its way onto the Olympic schedule in 1980 and the British women’s team won bronze in 1992. Fencing for women was added to the Olympic schedule in 1924, with Gillian Sheen taking gold in 1952. In 1962, women came first, second and third in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. Swimmer Anita Lonsbrough, who won three gold medals at the Commonwealth Games that year, became the first woman to win the award. Second was sprinter Dorothy Hyman (who would go on to win the following year), and third, swimmer Linda Ludgrove.
Wealth
Women’s share of total personal wealth had increased after the 1920s in Britain and the US, to approximately 40 per cent of male wealth in the 1950s. This was probably not caused by women earning more, or families treating boys and girls equally, but that more women were outliving their husbands and transferring the family fortune from his name to theirs.126
Women’s rights in their own homes were set back in 1969 when a bankrupt husband, Mr Caunce, lost the family home as the bank reclaimed on a loan. His wife, who had contributed to the purchase of the house, had no rights: the judge ruled that the bank was not obliged to discover if she had an interest (in her own home) and that her presence in the house did not establish her right to it. Judge Stamp said from the bench that to enquire into a wife’s rights in her home would be an intolerable invasion of privacy.127
Mrs Caunce lost her home but a subsequent ruling for Mrs Boland – that houses should be in joint ownership for married couples, and a wife could insist on her right to live in the house – ought to have improved the security of married women in their own homes. It did not. Husbands who had previously obtained loans in secret, now coerced and bullied wives into signing away their rights and allowing their homes to be used for security against a husband’s debts. Law historians believe this shows how often women experience pushback: ‘Legal reforms that benefit women, are so often followed by renewed efforts by men to maintain the status quo.’128
Another Married Women’s Property Act in 1964 ruled that women who bought property, or made a profit on the money given them by their husbands, were entitled to half of it on divorce.129 In 1988, the Finance Act ruled that a wife’s earned income should not be included with her husband’s earnings for taxation. In effect, this meant that a wife did not have to report to her husband what she earned. It was the last bastion of couverture that had kept women under marital control for 898 years.130
In 1969, the Divorce Reform Act allowed couples to divorce after they had been separated for two years (or five years if one of them resisted a divorce). A marriage could be ended if it had irretrievably broken down, and neither partner had to prove ‘fault’. But the tradition that wives got 50 per cent of the assets – whoever had earned them – was not established until White v White in 1996, when the appeal judge ruled that a wife’s contribution to the family fortune should be considered as equal to the breadwinner husband’s: ‘There should be no bias in favour of the money-earner and against the home-maker and the child-carer’ – a win for home-making wives but a disadvantage for working wives who also did the domestic work with lesser-earning husbands.131
Women Loving Women
The finding by sexologists in the 1950s and 1960s that women’s sexual intimacy with women occurred so frequently that it had to be considered a ‘normal’ expression of desire was widely ignored by doctors and psychologists who only met professionally with women troubled by their feelings – not those who were living happily in loving or sexual relationships with other women.132
Lesbians started to speak of themselves as women who choose a particular lifestyle, not identified with homosexual men, and not defined by any particular sexual practice from 1950. They also challenged the convention of heterosexual relationships and traditional female subservience.133 This linked lesbianism with feminism – which itself was becoming clearer, more coherent and better known.
Observing that the ‘breadwinner family’ underpaid them at work and made them work for free at home, women began to explore the possibility of a life independent of men. One woman explained: ‘If you grew up wanting to be whole as a woman in this society then you have to be a feminist . . . And once you’re a feminist, it’s almost impossible to have any kind of whole relationship with a man, because there’s all kinds of roles that you’re taught, and even if he’s really cool, you know, other people lay trips on you, and it’s all so ingrained. That’s the only way I can see myself going really, from a strong person, to a feminist, to a lesbian. It’s just a very logical progression.’134
The belief that ‘real’ sexual intercourse could only be penile penetration with man in dominant position was challenged when lesbians described love-making that satisfied them, without a penis or substitute, without a masculine sex drive and without manly behaviour. While the absence of historical records means that women’s experiences in previous centuries can only be imagined, once they began publishing their experiences, they described a range of affectionate, loving and erotic behaviours. Some, in their insistence on lack of sexual contact, would have been familiar to the Ladies of Llangollen and this came to be understood not as modest discretion, hiding a raunchy secret, but as describing a genuine absence of genital sexuality, preferred by some women.
It was difficult for lesbians to speak openly about asexuality, chastity, virginity and frigidity or erotic experimentation without sounding as if they were denying their sexuality. Male sexual rhythms and needs, and male genitals, have dominated discussions about sex for so long that it is hard to know what women might prefer in the absence – not only of men, but also of male ideas about sex.
As late as 1957, the Wolfenden Committee, set up to consider the law on homosexual offences, continued the established silence about lesbianism, since the committee members believed that women did not show the ‘libidinous features that characterise sexual acts between males’.135 In May 1988, one of Margaret Thatcher’s most controversial laws came into force. Section 28 prohibited local authorities and schools from promoting homosexuality and prevented councils from funding any lesbian and gay initiatives. Teachers censored their lessons. Librarians removed books from the shelves. Councillors restricted children’s services for fear of breaking the law, since ‘acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’ was no longer legal.
One mother claimed that her court hearing about her protection from her violent husband concentrated on the fact that she was a lesbian: ‘It was amazing how all the men in the court, whatever their age or their position, were united against lesbianism. My husband and the judge were on the same side.’ She was accused of ‘feminising’ her son, and her husband’s violence was seen as justified, and she was banned from having any contact with her woman lover.136
In response to the dangerous law, lesbian activists stormed the BBC News studio during the Six O’Clock News, believing that the nationwide marches, blockades and protests were being ignored by reporters. Another group abseiled into the House of Lords on knotted washing lines after peers voted in favour of the bill. Scotland repealed the law in 2000 and despite several failed attempts, England and Wales finally followed in 2003.
In 1983, Victoria Gillick, a Roman Catholic mother of ten, petitioned Parliament to ensure that none of her daughters under 16 years old would be given contraception or an abortion without her knowledge. The ‘Gillick Competence’ test became enshrined in law, ruling that doctors must review a child seeking treatment to confirm they understand the treatment.111
Both Conservative-type moral crusaders and feminists campaigned against sex shops. In 1984, the Video Recording Act set up a licensing system for pornography. There was little concern for women in the business of sex. The 1959 Street Offences Act was used against prostitutes, banning them from soliciting on the street (or out of their windows or front doors). The concern was to keep the streets free of soliciting, not to prevent women working as prostitutes, nor to provide them with safe spaces. The 1985 Sexual Offences Act made kerb-crawling (seeking sex in a car from female pedestrians) an offence. Concern about the enslaving of women in England for work, especially sex work, led to an addition to the Sexual Offences Act in 2010 that made it an offence to pay for sexual services from anyone who has been coerced into prostitution.
The Child Support Act of 1991 proved divisive for women as it required a mother to name the father of her child and a government agency to pursue him for payment. Since single mothers carried most of the burden of raising children, this was seen by some women as a positive step. Others resented being forced to name an unwilling man for support, and some second wives bitterly resented the cost of a previous household.112
Women were painfully divided by race, as increasing numbers of people were invited to come to England from the former British colonies to undertake hard and dirty work, and join the expanding National Health Service, facing racism at every step.
Immigration
Over 1,000 people from the Caribbean voyaged on the MV Empire Windrush in 1948 to dock at Tilbury Docks, London, the first post-war overseas workers invited from the Commonwealth to fill vacancies in Britain. Women on the Windrush were required to pay a higher ticket price – the equivalent of half a year’s National Assistance – and take a cabin, rather than going steerage like the male immigrants. But 27-year-old dressmaker Evelyn Wauchope stowed away and was discovered mid-voyage. She lived in England for a while before marrying a Bajan man and emigrating to America.113
Mona Baptiste was a 21-year-old Trinidadian blues singer, registered as a clerk for the voyage. Six weeks after disembarking, she was singing on the BBC’s Light Programme, and would go on a successful tour of English theatres and perform on TV shows, including the Ken Dodd show on the BBC. She went on to develop a hugely successful career as a singer in the UK and Germany.114
Most of the women were in their mid-thirties, travelling with their families.115 Although official policy was to welcome volunteers from the Caribbean, there was widespread racism in the Services.116 Racism towards immigrants prompted the government to impose immigration controls on women, who were banned from bringing husbands and children to England, though incoming men could bring wives and children.
For the next 20 years about 500,000 people of colour from former Commonwealth countries migrated to England. They had permission to stay only if they had both a work permit and proof of a parent or grandparent born in the UK. In 1971, Commonwealth citizens already living in the UK were given leave to remain. But migrants who arrived before 1971, and those without parents or grandparents living in the UK, could not prove their right to remain and could not access health services or benefits. Some born in England, or who had lived most of their lives in England, faced deportation. Even at the time of writing, a government apology and compensation scheme has not fully compensated people cruelly treated under this confused and unworkable policy.
Mona Baptiste (1928–93), internationally successful singer and actress, came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago on MV Empire Windrush in 1948
Mona Baptiste in Hamburg by unknown photographer, 13 September 1956 (Keystone/Getty Images)
Racist injustice from government and British institutions continues to this day in underrepresentation of people of African and Asian descent in institutions, who have worse outcomes than white people in health, education and the justice system.
The people of the Chagos Islands, descended from African people captured as slaves by the French in the seventeenth century, were forcibly evicted from their Indian Ocean homeland by the UK in 1968, to provide the USA with empty islands for a military base on Diego Garcia. The Chagossian people were banned from returning despite multiple appeals under international law. Some people were left without provision in Mauritius and the Seychelles islands, and a few managed to get to England, where they still struggle for permission to either return to their homelands or naturalise in England. A government review recommended that the Chagos people be allowed to return to their homeland; but the naming of the Chagos Island area as a Marine Protected Area – a huge benefit for conservation – is used to continue to keep the people from their homes.
The 1950s also saw increased immigration from India and Pakistan and attacks, verbal and physical, on people of colour, expressing an imaginary belief in white superiority, which continues to this day. Attacks on people of colour and fears about immigration announced in inflammatory language are one of the identifying hallmarks of the English right-wing parties and of those ignorant of demographics or basic manners in the twentieth century.
Health
In 1967, the National Health Service Family Planning Act allowed for contraception to be dispensed for social as well as medical reasons, to married and unmarried women.117 For the first time, women could reliably control their fertility. Women enjoyed greater sexual freedom, and sexual intercourse before marriage became widely accepted. Some feminists saw this as increasing the exploitation of women – images of women in the media and art became more and more sexualised, and all women (not only poor women, as had been the tradition) were considered potentially available for male sexual gratification.118
The use of herbs, fungi and woods to cause abortions or miscarriages, or to ‘bring on’ reluctant periods, remained part of folk medicine as late as the twentieth century in Norfolk and Lancashire.119 The debate about abortion increased in the 1950s with growing concern for women who resorted to so-called ‘backstreet’ abortionists – unregistered, and sometimes fatally incompetent. Abortion was legalised in 1967 if two doctors agreed that it was necessary on grounds of mental or physical health. In the same year, local authorities were allowed to provide contraceptive advice.
There was a pushback, especially from the Catholic Church in the 1970s and large street demonstrations were organised by the Society for the Unborn Child. Women anti-abortionists were themselves divided into those who wanted to support pregnant women so that they could give birth to an unwanted child and those who wanted to encourage births of white babies.120 Even now, after increased liberalisation and the invention of the morning after pill, there is no general agreement that the woman who is going to carry and birth the child should be the one who chooses to do so.121
Abortion is so sensitive because it plays against the imaginary ‘nature of women’ as maternal or nurturing. The woman seeking an abortion can be cast as deviant, unnatural. It is not seen as a dilemma that any sexually active woman might face since no contraception can be 100 per cent reliable. Instead, it is seen as a failure of the woman to use contraception properly, or at all; or a problem that can only be resolved by a ruling from the House of Commons and the joint advice of two doctors – surely an excessive taxing of medical and legal brains to make a decision that, however painful for the rest of us, surely belongs to the pregnant woman herself.122
Sport
Maureen Gardner, a ballerina who took up running to improve her health, won a silver medal in the 80 metre hurdles in the 1948 London Olympics. In 1964, the women’s athletics team won a record-breaking five medals in 12 events – the men took 7 from their 24 events. Star of the women’s team proved to be Mary Rand, who won gold and broke the world record in the long jump, took silver in the pentathlon and bronze in the 4 x 100 metres relay.123 Mary Peters won gold and broke the pentathlon world record in the 1972 Olympics, going on to be manager of the British women’s team. Tessa Sanderson competed at every Olympics from 1976 to 1996, winning the javelin in 1984 – the first Black British woman to win a gold medal. Sally Gunnell became the only British female athlete to have won Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth titles in the same event – hurdling – and the only woman to have done so over 400 metres.
In 1971, pioneering sportswoman Rachael Heyhoe-Flint set up the first cricket Women’s World Cup. She hit the first six in a women’s Test match and regularly captained the England international squad. She persuaded Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) to give women permission to play at the prestigious men-only ground at Lord’s, saying: ‘Now the mums and the daughters have their own cricket instead of making cucumber sandwiches every weekend.’124
Horse-riding remains the only Olympic sport in which men and women compete equally against each other, since women were first allowed into dressage events at the 1952 Olympics, followed in 1956 by showjumping and finally, in 1964, eventing. Britain’s Pat Smythe won team bronze for showjumping in 1956, though she had been representing Britain in international competitions since 1947.
The youngest ever British Olympian, ice skater Cecilia Colledge, finished eighth in 1932, aged 11. Four years later she won silver. The first woman skater to perform a double jump, she invented the camel spin and layback spin. During the Second World War, Colledge served as an ambulance driver, before returning to skating and winning the national title for the sixth time.
Football for women reappeared when the Women’s FA was formed in 1969 and eventually in 1971 the 50-year-old ban on women’s football was reversed. Within three years, the first Women’s FA Cup Final and England women’s international had been played. In 1993, a Women’s Football Committee was established to run the women’s game in England. The FA outlined its plans to develop the women’s game from grassroots to elite level in 1997 and in the following year appointed Hope Powell as women’s national coach.125
Women’s hockey finally made its way onto the Olympic schedule in 1980 and the British women’s team won bronze in 1992. Fencing for women was added to the Olympic schedule in 1924, with Gillian Sheen taking gold in 1952. In 1962, women came first, second and third in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. Swimmer Anita Lonsbrough, who won three gold medals at the Commonwealth Games that year, became the first woman to win the award. Second was sprinter Dorothy Hyman (who would go on to win the following year), and third, swimmer Linda Ludgrove.
Wealth
Women’s share of total personal wealth had increased after the 1920s in Britain and the US, to approximately 40 per cent of male wealth in the 1950s. This was probably not caused by women earning more, or families treating boys and girls equally, but that more women were outliving their husbands and transferring the family fortune from his name to theirs.126
Women’s rights in their own homes were set back in 1969 when a bankrupt husband, Mr Caunce, lost the family home as the bank reclaimed on a loan. His wife, who had contributed to the purchase of the house, had no rights: the judge ruled that the bank was not obliged to discover if she had an interest (in her own home) and that her presence in the house did not establish her right to it. Judge Stamp said from the bench that to enquire into a wife’s rights in her home would be an intolerable invasion of privacy.127
Mrs Caunce lost her home but a subsequent ruling for Mrs Boland – that houses should be in joint ownership for married couples, and a wife could insist on her right to live in the house – ought to have improved the security of married women in their own homes. It did not. Husbands who had previously obtained loans in secret, now coerced and bullied wives into signing away their rights and allowing their homes to be used for security against a husband’s debts. Law historians believe this shows how often women experience pushback: ‘Legal reforms that benefit women, are so often followed by renewed efforts by men to maintain the status quo.’128
Another Married Women’s Property Act in 1964 ruled that women who bought property, or made a profit on the money given them by their husbands, were entitled to half of it on divorce.129 In 1988, the Finance Act ruled that a wife’s earned income should not be included with her husband’s earnings for taxation. In effect, this meant that a wife did not have to report to her husband what she earned. It was the last bastion of couverture that had kept women under marital control for 898 years.130
In 1969, the Divorce Reform Act allowed couples to divorce after they had been separated for two years (or five years if one of them resisted a divorce). A marriage could be ended if it had irretrievably broken down, and neither partner had to prove ‘fault’. But the tradition that wives got 50 per cent of the assets – whoever had earned them – was not established until White v White in 1996, when the appeal judge ruled that a wife’s contribution to the family fortune should be considered as equal to the breadwinner husband’s: ‘There should be no bias in favour of the money-earner and against the home-maker and the child-carer’ – a win for home-making wives but a disadvantage for working wives who also did the domestic work with lesser-earning husbands.131
Women Loving Women
The finding by sexologists in the 1950s and 1960s that women’s sexual intimacy with women occurred so frequently that it had to be considered a ‘normal’ expression of desire was widely ignored by doctors and psychologists who only met professionally with women troubled by their feelings – not those who were living happily in loving or sexual relationships with other women.132
Lesbians started to speak of themselves as women who choose a particular lifestyle, not identified with homosexual men, and not defined by any particular sexual practice from 1950. They also challenged the convention of heterosexual relationships and traditional female subservience.133 This linked lesbianism with feminism – which itself was becoming clearer, more coherent and better known.
Observing that the ‘breadwinner family’ underpaid them at work and made them work for free at home, women began to explore the possibility of a life independent of men. One woman explained: ‘If you grew up wanting to be whole as a woman in this society then you have to be a feminist . . . And once you’re a feminist, it’s almost impossible to have any kind of whole relationship with a man, because there’s all kinds of roles that you’re taught, and even if he’s really cool, you know, other people lay trips on you, and it’s all so ingrained. That’s the only way I can see myself going really, from a strong person, to a feminist, to a lesbian. It’s just a very logical progression.’134
The belief that ‘real’ sexual intercourse could only be penile penetration with man in dominant position was challenged when lesbians described love-making that satisfied them, without a penis or substitute, without a masculine sex drive and without manly behaviour. While the absence of historical records means that women’s experiences in previous centuries can only be imagined, once they began publishing their experiences, they described a range of affectionate, loving and erotic behaviours. Some, in their insistence on lack of sexual contact, would have been familiar to the Ladies of Llangollen and this came to be understood not as modest discretion, hiding a raunchy secret, but as describing a genuine absence of genital sexuality, preferred by some women.
It was difficult for lesbians to speak openly about asexuality, chastity, virginity and frigidity or erotic experimentation without sounding as if they were denying their sexuality. Male sexual rhythms and needs, and male genitals, have dominated discussions about sex for so long that it is hard to know what women might prefer in the absence – not only of men, but also of male ideas about sex.
As late as 1957, the Wolfenden Committee, set up to consider the law on homosexual offences, continued the established silence about lesbianism, since the committee members believed that women did not show the ‘libidinous features that characterise sexual acts between males’.135 In May 1988, one of Margaret Thatcher’s most controversial laws came into force. Section 28 prohibited local authorities and schools from promoting homosexuality and prevented councils from funding any lesbian and gay initiatives. Teachers censored their lessons. Librarians removed books from the shelves. Councillors restricted children’s services for fear of breaking the law, since ‘acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’ was no longer legal.
One mother claimed that her court hearing about her protection from her violent husband concentrated on the fact that she was a lesbian: ‘It was amazing how all the men in the court, whatever their age or their position, were united against lesbianism. My husband and the judge were on the same side.’ She was accused of ‘feminising’ her son, and her husband’s violence was seen as justified, and she was banned from having any contact with her woman lover.136
In response to the dangerous law, lesbian activists stormed the BBC News studio during the Six O’Clock News, believing that the nationwide marches, blockades and protests were being ignored by reporters. Another group abseiled into the House of Lords on knotted washing lines after peers voted in favour of the bill. Scotland repealed the law in 2000 and despite several failed attempts, England and Wales finally followed in 2003.
