Normal Women, page 67
Extraordinarily, not all ladies chose to stay in their privileged, airless, protected ‘sphere’. From the 1790s, women of the upper classes chose to interrogate the real world about the treatment of women enslaved by the early European empires. Upper- and middle-class women led the campaign against slavery, but failed to see and oppose the racism that was now invented to try to explain enslaving African people. A further gulf opened between white women and women of other races, and another ‘nature of women’ was created to describe imaginary characteristics of race.
Elite English women learned from the success of the abolition of slavery campaign and in 1850 took their political skills and a dawning sense of feminism to campaign against the Control of Disease laws, designed to manage prostitutes and protect men from disease. Banned from the male campaign because of the fear of shocking their delicate natures, the upper-class women set up their own ‘ladies’ committee’ to stop the curfew, arrest and compulsory treatments of women suspected of prostitution. Later campaigns for the rights of all women, for better work conditions and for the vote drew ladies from sickly luxurious dependence and exposed them to the real world, teaching them political skills and solidarity with women of all classes. Breaking the boundaries of the separate spheres proved an extraordinary step that could only have been taken by women with courage, intellectual curiosity, determination and resilience – all characteristics widely agreed to be absent from ‘ladies’.
But physicians, psychologists and educationalists ignored the success of radical and political women and continued to observe innate and ‘natural’ female inferiority. Nineteenth-century science could be extraordinarily flexible in finding female weakness to explain why women should not be paid a proper wage, or be trusted with power. Charles Darwin himself said that while men were evolving to greater complexity and strength, women were only becoming more fertile.11
Female inferiority proved such an ingrained belief that by the time the suffragists demanded the vote at the end of the nineteenth century, there were more women saying that they were not fit to have it than those who wanted it.12 Only the experience of organising for the vote, violently opposing the government, and then breaking out of the separate sphere into the world of wartime work, persuaded women that they were competent to vote for MPs and to stand for Parliament themselves. But women did not win the vote by their campaigns, nor for their patriotic work. Upper-class women got the vote because it had to be granted to soldiers returning from the trenches of the First World War. Since no working-class man could have anything that an elite woman did not, the vote was allocated to wealthy women so that they should remain – in every way – superior to working men. However disappointing to historians of the suffragettes, this was a decision to maintain the superiority of elite women – not to reward them for their campaign or their war work.
Although some women had the vote and were emerging into society, they were still rigorously coached in appropriate behaviour from babyhood. Babies, previously dressed in white, were now colour-coded, so that even total strangers could cue them appropriately. Unisex rompers went out of fashion, with little boys going into trousers at three or four and girls wearing dresses. A boy would be dressed in pink, as it was a ‘strong’ colour, while pale blue or pale yellow was suitable for a girl.13
In the early twentieth century, sexologists announced four sexes: men, women and two new sexes – men who preferred male lovers and women who preferred women lovers; but after the traumatic evacuations, the destruction of homes and the attack on civilian populations in the Second World War, there was a longing to return to pre-war domestic stereotypes. Media, law and society retreated to the security of the two sexes. Wartime advances in surgery, especially to alter appearance, meant that men wishing to live as women, and women wishing to live as men, could have genital, breast and facial surgery, and they could apply for a legal change in identity. Charing Cross Hospital became a centre for transitions, and those very few people who could afford it made changes to appearance and to legal identity – the transitions sometimes foundered under persecution and challenge.
Awkwardly, psychologists reviewing a man’s fitness to transition to his female identity expected patients to conform to the imaginary nature of women – now the 1950s housewife – and male patients learned to express their femininity in stereotypical phrases and a desire for hyper-feminine clothes and goods. Behaviours that women had been challenging for years, such as submissiveness, passivity and emotionalism, had to be exhibited by men wanting to transition, in order to satisfy the doctors. Historians explain: ‘For a man to be considered for sex change treatment he has to convince the doctors of his femininity. He has to present as “hyper” feminine – and even if he feels it – he is advised not to express the ambivalence and androgyny that birth women experience.’14
The word ‘sex’ was found inadequate to express the many meanings loaded on to it and in the 1950s – following anthropology and sociology – people started using the word ‘genders’ in place of ‘sexes’, to describe a sexual identity which was created by culture. It didn’t take long before ‘gender’ also became defined as strictly one of two and any ambivalence was defined as an ailment: named as a disorder in the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1950s, only softened to ‘dysphoria’ in 2020 – still insisting that there are only two options and anyone who fails to fit one or the other is at the very least confused, and that so-called experts are better fitted to judge which one of two someone should be – not they themselves.15
The post-war housewife was a fantasy beloved not only of the psychologists who should have known better, but of the marketeers who sold goods to the post-war home, the employers who wanted part-time part-paid workers, the men who longed to return from war to an imaginary haven at home, and the politicians and economists who wanted recovery fuelled by free domestic care, cheap part-time labour and domestic consumers. Women themselves fantasised about an imaginary time when a breadwinner wage had been enough to keep a family in a house with a mother at home. As late as 1978, Elspeth Howe, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, remained nostalgic for a time that had never existed: ‘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.’16
Pink became a girl’s colour, and different toys for boys and for girls began to be relentlessly flogged to the booming consumer market.17 ‘Barbie’ the doll was invented in 1959, her first occupation ‘teenage fashion model’, sporting a body shape that could not sustain life, on legs that would break if they were flesh and bone.18
From the 1960s onwards, the booming industries of fashion, make-up and wellness encouraged all women to see themselves as consumers rather than producers. The imaginary ‘Cosmo girl’ of the magazines goes to work mainly to display herself and to meet eligible partners; her ideal work is piecework, clerical services or assisting a more important man. She does not craft or make a whole product in her working life; the only thing she produces from first vision to final presentation is her own body: painted, dressed, tattooed, pierced, sometimes abused by dangerous diets or cosmetic surgery, sometimes available for sex, marriage or sale – or a combination of all of those transactions. From the 1960s, women were their own product – commodities – and the arrival of social media in the 1990s meant they could market their own image in their own media campaigns.
Increasingly safe births led parents to announce the sex of a baby even before birth, and the ultrasound scan – developed to diagnose fetal abnormalities – provided highly developed technology to image an unborn child in the womb. Wealthy parents announced their news in ‘gender reveal’ parties with cannons of pink or blue confetti, a ‘reveal’ cake and balloons in blue or pink. (Incidentally, this is a misuse of the word ‘gender’ – but understandable because a ‘sex party’ would attract a very different sort of guest and dress code.) The popularity of the bigger and bigger reveal party peaked in 2020, when a reveal firework caused the El Dorado wildfire, among the largest in Californian history. The woman who claims to have pioneered the gender reveal party with a pink cake said: ‘Could we just stop having these stupid parties?’ Her child, whose pink party started the trend, believed (aged 10) that there are many genders.19 The current science agrees: in 1910, Magnus Hirschfeld calculated 43 million possible combinations of gender and sexuality: ‘In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics exactly match in kind and number.’20 In the 1990s, Anne Fausto-Sterling counted five sexes, and in the twenty-first century Eric Vilain suggested an ‘infinite number of biological genders’, since chromosomes, gonads, anatomy and hormones all define a person’s sexuality, and each one has multiple variants.21 The current understanding is that ‘sex’ can be defined by fetal hormones, fetal gonads (which are simultaneously both male and female), adult hormones, adult chromosomes and physical appearance. All of these occur in different combinations, all vary, and all can be altered by behaviour or drugs or surgery – so they are no help in proving an individual to be one gender or another. The current science suggests – as the Greeks believed – a spectrum of sexes, and the possibility of moving through the spectrum as a result of experience and stimuli.
There are no aptitudes, tastes or behaviours exclusive to any particular sex. Modern tests show more difference inside the sexes than between them. Male brains differ more from other male brains than they do from female brains; and, in any case, brains are changeable: education and encouragement mould how they work and how successfully. As sports are discovering, highly trained individuals do not triumph only in their own sexual category. When, in March 2019, cyclist Nicole Hanselmann of Switzerland threatened to overtake male competitors for the first time ever in an elite professional race (at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad), the ‘organisers had to intervene because the leader of the women’s race was getting too close to the convoy of the men’s race’.22 This endangered the safety of the race, but it was catastrophic for people who wanted to believe in innate male physical superiority. Professional sports troubled by the old categories of male or female, with no reliable way to prove the existence of either, are creating a third ‘open’ category for athletes in the hopes of preventing trans women from competing with people identified as female at birth.23
Strength comes from physique and training, for all the sexes. Aptitude is created by teaching and encouraged by practice. One experiment in the early 1980s found only one highly gifted girl to every 13 highly gifted boys in a programme – supporting a belief in the innate cleverness of boys. Twenty years later, in 2005, after teachers had deliberately encouraged girls, there was one highly gifted girl to two boys.24 Girls told before a test that male brains have an aptitude for the task do worse than boys. Girls who are not told this perform equally with boys.25
The idea that anyone should choose one identity and never change is not supported by scientific research or history. Debates about choice – however violently and passionately expressed – are arguments over two imaginary stereotypes, not about normal women and normal men and all the normal varieties between and beyond. All of the discussion about transitioning from one sex to another relies on the myth that there are only two sexes, that they are quite different from one another, recognisable at a glance, and that it is the task of growing up to choose your team and stick to it.
The diversity and variety of sex discovered by the scientists is reflected in the real world when people are free to identify as they wish. In the 2021 UK census, 30,000 of 45.7 million respondents identified as non-binary (0.06 per cent) and 18,000 (0.04 per cent) replied with what was described on the form as a ‘different gender identity’– not one of two.26 The science, the history and the lived experience suggest that forcing people into one of two categories is as fictional as a ‘sorting hat’ – we are more diverse and more varied, and more changeable over time, in a richer multiple world than the binary model described. But our varied sexuality has been recruited into a cultural conflict which argues that people should be one of two sexes and that anything else is inauthentic, unbiological and sometimes even dangerous to others.
The safety of everyone in their homes, on the streets, in public bathrooms and in prisons is endangered by badly behaved men, falsely proud of their maleness and the privilege they think it confers on them, who think that they have a right to access women, and to control and abuse them. Very few men abuse and attack women who are unknown to them – most men are violent to women they already know. The problem – as nearly always – is male violence from the minority of violent and abusive men.
At the time of writing there is exaggerated concern about violent men trying to enter female safe spaces using trans women identity as a disguise for their toxic male intentions. In 2019, 76 of the 129 trans women in women’s prisons had previously been male sex offenders.27 Yet even then, there were no reported sexual assaults by the trans women upon women prisoners, and only 4 sexual assaults on women prisoners at all in 2013. Non binary people are most at risk of being a victim of sexual assault – they are not the most dangerous. Also at risk are young people: 9.5 per cent of juvenile prisoners reported sexual abuse in 2012 and 70–80 per cent said they had been assaulted – not by violent prisoners, but by staff.28 Most at risk are people of colour. The problem is that even spaces designated as ‘safe’ for women show a lack of care and protection for women. In women prisons, the greatest threat to the lives and well-being of women prisoners is their self-harm and mental illness.
For centuries our societies have trained men to prioritise their needs over others. But the aim of sex training was not to create ‘doormat women’ – that was an unintended side effect of the real project. The aim was to boost men; making a bully, a winner, a commander out of a sensitive little boy: even if all he can beat are girls, even if all he can command is his wife. Once the tradition was established that inheritance was passed to the boy and not to the most able heir, once authority was vested in men and not in the best candidate, once wealth migrated to male pockets and was not shared among those who had created it, it became essential that the ‘nature’ of men should be authoritative, powerful and greedy – in order to keep the inheritance, the power and the money. This has been a painful and difficult road for women but also for those good, gentle and kind men who do not want to be overbearing – not even for the rewards they can win.
Defining women as second-rate was not actually designed to oppress women (though it does); it was intended to free men from competition with everyone but other men. It is the fragility of masculinity, the delicacy of patriarchy and the weakness of male candidates that means that our society has to give men the huge advantage of a head start: men only win if we hold women back.
The linking of women to light work, casual work and ill-paid work did not happen because women were defined as having inferior abilities; it was vice versa. Women were forced into light work, casual work and ill-paid work so that challenging, reliable and rewarding labour could go to male candidates. Guilds, professions and universities excluded women so that the feeblest male candidate might get the plum jobs. As a historian makes clear: ‘It is fairly clear that this particular working of patriarchy was motivated by fear of female accomplishment.’29
A gap between men and women’s wages was brought about deliberately as the population recovered from the Great Pestilence, and landlords and employers sought to recoup their losses. Women excluded from making money at home by the enclosure of their shared lands found themselves forced to accept lower rates of pay. Later laws made a pay gap compulsory and men’s unions excluded women from craftsmen’s work and rates, as professions excluded them from professional fees. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the ‘breadwinner wage’ was invented to run alongside the separate spheres argument. Men must be paid enough for two, so that their wives could inhabit the separate sphere of the home and not go out to work. Poor women, desperate to see their husbands earn a living wage, supported the argument for a breadwinner wage, discovering only later that a single woman head of a household with a family to keep did not get a breadwinner wage.
Of course, women will always be paid less than men if half or more of their working life is unpaid. As the commission on wages found to its surprise in 1840, Mrs Sherwin, the weaver’s wife, would have earned 4s 7½d a week if her husband had paid her the going rate for winding bobbins for him. But because she worked for her husband for free, she earned only 3s and he earned 6s 6d.30 Women who work for their husbands as their assistants, supporters or secretaries find that not only are they unpaid, they are unrepresented by anyone but themselves, and have no way of improving their career. A businessman’s wife who does the books for him, keeps the wages, and hires and fires at his work, is in effect in management; but she has no title, no career and no salary. No woman sitting with a sick child, or in constant attendance to an elderly parent – even someone else’s elderly parent, her husband’s elderly parent – expects to receive training, time off, a lunch break, expenses, or proper pay. The GDP figures do not even count her labour as work. Once the nineteenth-century census had ruled that ‘ladies’ do not work, anything a woman does at home is ‘not-work’.
