Feminism: "The Longest Revolution"

I started to look at feminism in a systematic way when I first read Simone de Beauvoir. I realised from being a student at Oxford the extraordinary gender disparity that there was between the 1 in 12 students who were women, and the 11 men who were men. All of them back then were dominated by the public-school ethos and hadn’t really seen a woman since they went to boarding school at the age of eight. I wanted to understand a bit about this. Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex was very much on the agenda of an interest that we all had in French literature.

And so I read Simone de Beauvoir and was horrified. I thought, my God, is it as bad as that here? Is it really as awful as she’s making it out to be? I started work in the late 1950s to look at the situation of women in Britain and I’m afraid I found that it was as bad! It wasn’t only bad in the obvious way of very poor pay. Everyone said it was half pay, but I think, if anything, it was often under half pay because women did much lower jobs and there were huge discriminations. In fact, what had happened was a discrimination that set up a division between women in the family and women in work.

What Simone de Beauvoir had emphasised is that women were the original Other. She said that everybody in relation to one another is sometimes the Other and sometimes the Self, so to speak. And that can shifts places, but not with those who are women, who are, or were always, the Other. I think that’s right, but there’s another side to that Other, which is No One. (That) One is both Other and No One. That really makes for quite a major turn that one was later to use of oppression.

I think oppression goes across all people who are oppressed. There are lots of different groups of oppressed people – and women are one of them. It doesn’t mean that a lot of us are not, like myself, hugely privileged or at Oxford, privileged to be there. We can be privileged. But generically, as women, in what we might call in a term that is not very fashionable now, but in our universal status as women, we’re not privileged. Even with all my privileges, I still feel frightened if I go for a walk at night on my own. I wouldn’t go for a walk at night on my own. Something might easily happen. So, we’re always, as women, in some way, disadvantaged. I think that is what feminism is about. It is about understanding what it is that makes women always the Other and always, as it were, No One.

Once I realised that there was no such thing as women in the census and that we were, in a sense, No One, I wondered where to find them. In imperial China, if anybody knocked at the door, the housewife, the wife, the mother or the widow would call out, ‘No one is here.’ So, No One is very important. No One and the Other are very important. So, I thought, well, where do we find women? Because, after all, we are here. There’s no question about that. Here we are. Where do we find them?

At that stage, in the early 1960s, everybody on the socialist or radical left was saying ‘Let’s get rid of the family.’ There was a terrific movement to get rid of the family. At the same time, paradoxically, there was an enormous number of books being produced on the family. So, I thought, if women don’t exist as women but only as maid, daughter, widow and wife, then we must only exist in the family. That was later to become the hugely important phrase ‘The personal is political.’ That’s almost the most important phrase of second wave feminism. I thought that I needed to understand the family, which is, in a way, a substitute for women. It’s what women do; women do the family. That’s where they are. That’s where they were feeling so absolutely isolated during the 1950s.

A study of women during the feminist revolution led to a deconstruction of the family. It looks at what it is that women actually do in the family, and it sees it not in terms of the pragmatics of what women do, but what, structurally, women do and therefore why they can’t, in a sense, escape from it. The family structure had been a part of their oppression, part of the woman being the Other, part of her being No One.

I think that the radicalism of the feminist movement and second wave feminism was multiple. Consciousness raising was its creation. It was borrowed from some Chinese practices, developed in feminist terms in which everybody was meant to be equal with one another and share privileged positions. There were mass rallies and demonstrations for equality.

At that point, I didn’t have children. In the local street group that I was in, we looked after one another’s children, even if we didn’t have children of our own. We cooked a meal for one another every night. So, I would say that, from a retrospective point of view, one of the main things that came out of this early moment was the complex and problematic but incredibly important concept of sisterhood. It showed us that relationships with sisters are different from relationships with men.

It is not that individual men are necessarily oppressive; many individual men can be quite feminist. But, nevertheless, just as it is White people who are the oppressors for Black people, however decent any individual white person might be, and however supportive of a Black struggle they might be, it is the white people who are the problem. So it is Men who are the problem. That, I think, is the analysis of patriarchy. With the establishment of the National Organization for Women in 1966, what we had to do was, on all counts, combat patriarchy.

My hope within the revolutionary aspect of the feminist combat isn’t one in which we have a sudden ending, to something like ‘Oh gosh, let’s chalk it up that we’re all equal.’ It’s the re-evaluation of what women do. Women are in a different historical position. I don’t think we’re in a different biological position. But, historically, of course, we’re in a very different position.

If you look at the number of men today who, as doctors, are going to leave the caring profession because it’s just been too much, it is women, as nurses, who are going to stay in the caring profession. What we have to do is re-value the present, the work of caring. We want a different and better society in which women’s contribution is hugely important. How would we live if it weren’t for what women do? We wouldn’t. We couldn’t. We need women’s caring to be valued at least as much as men’s. Men have to go and fight. Women care. Let women care, and everybody care – and nobody fight.