by Andy Beckett
There was some truth in this. Spare Rib was set up as a limited company with shareholders. Rowe and Boycott were both conventional figures by GLF standards: they both had boyfriends and plenty of contacts outside the counter-culture. For fund-raising purposes, Boycott wrote, ‘Rosie had even dragged Marsha, protesting strongly, to see a rich Arab in Park Lane … Rosie thought it was fine to accept money from any source.’
Yet to focus on such compromises – or potential compromises: the Park Lane meeting came to nothing – was to miss the radicalism of Spare Rib. Article by article, and for the first time in a widely available publication, it laid bare the intricate workings of gender inequality in Britain: the discomfort of going to the pub as a woman alone (all the ‘leeringly interested male faces’); the difficulty of being a sportswoman when sports insurers preferred men; the demeaning imagery of women’s fashion magazines; the dismal working conditions in women’s fashion boutiques; the drudgery of family weekends spent buried under washing and dishes. At the same time, Spare Rib suggested ways out: ‘Do-It-Yourself Divorce’, ‘Working Without a Boss’, ‘Seeing the Right Sort of Doctor’, ‘Discovering Women’s History’, ‘Where Can You Turn When Criminal Assault Happens at Home?’ And the magazine brought news from around Britain of a spreading wave of women’s revolts. In June 1973, it reported,
Twenty mothers sat on playground swings and roundabouts stopping work from starting on the £6m Teeside Parkway road. They were protesting at a plan to turn the play area at Longbank estate, Ormesby into a compound for machinery. [In response] the council has suggested that the playground be resited in an area of the residents’ own choice. They also pledged to rebuild the original play area when road works end …
This irreverent new politics was focused on the everyday and the local. ‘I thought that people involved in big party politics were a bit irrelevant,’ said Rowe. ‘I thought, “What’s happening that’s real is what’s on the ground.”’ And this new politics was as critical of the British state and its paternalistic assumptions as it was of male-dominated trade unions. After all, women had played little part so far in the post-war ‘consensus’. Senior civil servants were almost always men. In the early seventies, there had never been a female party leader, let alone a female prime minister. Spare Rib may have praised Barbara Castle, but it also had to note that she ‘lost the war’ when she took on the unions. At the 1970 general election, only twenty-six women had made it into the Commons, less than a twentieth of the total number of MPs. At the February 1974 election, despite the prominence of the women’s movement, the number dropped to twenty-three.
Yet while the new feminists felt justifiably alienated by the post-war consensus – and were one of the decade’s first significant rebellions against it – they also shared some of its optimistic assumptions. Their movement had crystallized in Britain in the years before the oil crisis and the turmoil of the mid-seventies. ‘Women’s demands were formulated at a time when the economy was relatively healthy,’ write Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell. Arguments about equality in the workplace, for example, were made on the basis that women ought to share more fairly in this prosperity. How women might be better protected when and if this economic growth went into reverse was less discussed. When the unemployment rate surged in the mid-seventies, proportionally more women than men lost their jobs. Similarly, the feminist critique of the welfare state assumed that the government would continue to provide; it should simply do so with more sensitivity to women’s needs. In practice, this was likely to mean more generously: the free twenty-four-hour nurseries demanded on the first march for women’s rights would cost a lot of money. ‘We tended to take the reforms of the 1945 government for granted,’ wrote Sheila Rowbotham, the historian of British feminism and regular Spare Rib contributor, in her memoirs. ‘It seemed to follow that only a fundamental transformation could alter social inequality. We never imagined that this was going to come from the right and actually make Britain more unequal.’
As Spare Rib became established, it started to take on more conventionally left-wing characteristics. In 1973, the magazine became a collective. ‘I started going to political study groups and reading Das Kapital,’ said Rowe. ‘I did go to a few trade union conferences. The first one I ever went to, I just thought, “Oh, middle-aged men.” [But] it seemed to be important what women could gain through the trade union movement.’
For all the unions’ machismo, real and imagined, as early as 1961 a fifth of their members were women. By 1980, the proportion was approaching a third. Women disproportionately did the worst and lowest-paid jobs, so at least theoretically they had much to gain from joining. And unions were potentially powerful political vehicles, for Women’s Lib as for other causes: during the seventies, ‘Feminists [took] jobs in unions’ expanding research departments,’ record Coote and Campbell. ‘[There were] small but conspicuous incursions of women into manual trades, directly inspired by the women’s movement … into such solidly male enclaves as the building workers’ union.’
There was male resistance to this growing female interest in trade unionism. When Pat Sturdy, a shop steward from Burnley, set up the Women’s Industrial Union in 1971, the first British union for female workers, ‘The established union at the plant was even more hostile than management,’ Spare Rib later reported. ‘She was sent to Coventry by the shop stewards. Called everything from anarchist breakaway to reactionary.’ After barely a year, Sturdy wound up her organization and reluctantly applied to rejoin her original, traditional union. The male orientation of such bodies can be gauged from the fact that it took until 1979 for the TUC to publish ‘Equality for Women within Trade Unions’, a charter calling for ‘equality of job opportunity for women’ and ‘an end to all pay discrimination against women workers’.
But the charter was published. The increasing number of female trade unionists, and the notions about women’s rights put into circulation by the new feminism, could not be ignored for ever. The changing nature of the economy also worked in their favour: with male-dominated heavy industry in decline and the more female-dependent service sector and government bureaucracy on the rise, the fastest-growing unions, such as APEX, the office workers’ union, and NUPE, the National Union of Public Employees, had large proportions of women members and had to address their concerns. APEX campaigned successfully against discriminatory ‘women’s grades’ of pay in several large companies, while NUPE negotiated better rates of maternity pay.
Even the maligned British government responded to the women’s movement in its own halting way. Harold Wilson’s relatively enlightened attitude to gender went beyond promoting charismatic figures such as Castle and Shirley Williams. In 1970, his first government passed the Equal Pay Act, which established that women should be paid the same as men if they were doing work that was ‘the same or broadly similar’. The Heath administration that followed made a half-hearted attempt to introduce a law banning discrimination against women, but it was too full of exemptions, including clauses excluding education and training from its provisions which were introduced at the insistence of the education secretary – Margaret Thatcher – to have much credibility. The proposed act died with the Heath government.
With Wilson’s return to office in 1974, the Westminster campaign for women’s rights regained momentum. In 1975, the Equal Pay Act finally came into force. The same year, the government passed a much more comprehensive anti-discrimination law, the Sex Discrimination Act, which covered everything from housing to employment. That year also brought the Social Security Pensions Act, which preserved women’s pension rights if they took time off work because of ‘home responsibilities’; and the Employment Protection Act, which introduced paid maternity leave, outlawed dismissal on grounds of pregnancy and gave women the right to spend up to twenty-nine weeks off work after their baby’s birth. Finally, the Wilson government set up an Equal Opportunities Commission to enforce the new gender laws.
Many of these initiatives proved flawed in
practice. The Equal Pay Act was easily evaded by many employers, who divided their workers by gender and gave each group slightly different tasks and job titles, sometimes with union connivance. Between 1970 and 1977, women’s wages as a proportion of men’s did rise, from 65 to 76 per cent, but in 1978 the gap started to widen again. The Sex Discrimination Act, in turn, required individuals to prove that they had been unfairly treated in situations – a job interview, a loan application – where the decisive factors were often impossible to disentangle. Between 1976 and 1983, note Coote and Campbell, barely a tenth of the claims made about sex discrimination in the workplace were successful. Meanwhile, the Equal Opportunities Commission was overseen by a cumbersome and divided panel of grandees drawn from both the main parties, the unions, the business world and Whitehall. They were often cautious about women’s rights and alienated their more committed young staff. During the commission’s first eight years, it launched only nine anti-discrimination investigations.
Yet as in the unions, and as in society as a whole, the political weather in Westminster and Whitehall had unarguably changed for women. The change was often slow, and would remain so, but the world that existed before Women’s Lib was not going to be restored.
One sign of this, in urban Britain at least, was the improvisation of a new physical and social infrastructure for bringing up children: community nurseries, one o’clock clubs, toy libraries, adventure playgrounds. Often these were created with limited official assistance and housed in temporary structures – self-built shelters of breeze blocks or rickety wood that stood on patches of waste ground, seemingly held together by little more than rainbow paint schemes and sunny murals. Yet these facilities were places where the grey-brown entropy of many British inner cities in the seventies was first challenged and reversed, and where new, more collaborative arrangements for parents were established. These community projects also proved surprisingly enduring. In Stoke Newington in north London, where Marsha Rowe was living when we met in 2005 and where I live now, most of the squats and shabby terraces that filled the area in the seventies are long gone: refreshed Victorian features and shiny Saabs are more the local rule. But there is still a community nursery and an adventure playground, both set up in the seventies, both a little saggy and peeling yet eagerly staffed and heavily used, within a minute’s walk of my house.
‘Feminism in the seventies was about all the things that now everyone takes for granted,’ Rowe said. As in most revolutions, the gains came at a cost: ‘I was exhausted at Spare Rib, absolutely on the edge the whole time.’ In 1976, after four years on the magazine, she resigned. She carried on doing bits and pieces for Spare Rib, but her sense of political certainty, like that of the British women’s movement in general, was ebbing.
Like Gay Lib, Women’s Lib had split. On the one hand, there was radical feminism and its more dogmatic late-seventies variant, revolutionary feminism. They held that the oppression of women by men was so all-pervasive that only a fundamental change in how the genders related would end it. ‘As long as women’s sights are fixed on closeness to men,’ warned the first high-profile British radical feminist manifesto, which was presented at the 1972 National Women’s Liberation Conference, ‘the ideology of male supremacy is safe.’ Relationships with men, therefore, were at best potentially problematic and at worst impossible. Socialist feminism, meanwhile, saw such thinking as wrong and counterproductive: many men and women were inextricably linked through family or friendship or common class interest. The task of modern feminism, this second philosophy argued, was to build alliances with the mainstream left while challenging its male biases.
Rowe had more sympathy with the latter position. ‘I was not a separatist. I was a coalitionist. I was in relationships with men. I found the radical feminists alienating.’ In 1977, she left London for Bradford with her then boyfriend. After a year, she moved to Leeds. At the end of 1978, burnt out by a decade of activism, she got a serious kidney infection. ‘I was ill for almost a year. I just disconnected completely.’ When she resurfaced, feminism felt less central to her: she had also become interested in alternative medicine, in Jungian therapy, in French literary theory. She had embarked – she said this even more softly than usual – on ‘a long inward journey. A lot of people went inward. It was very hard and painful. It took until about 2000 to look back at the seventies positively.’
She looked up from her living-room carpet. She was in her late fifties now, a freelance writer and ‘life writing’ teacher, slight and neat, in expensive black combat trousers and a dash of pale lipstick. She was sitting with her legs tucked up under her on the sofa, wild curly hair pulled back. Like Stuart Feather’s, her small top-floor flat was immaculate: cream furniture, carefully preserved thirties windows, a view across a park. Perhaps there was something about people who had lived through revolutions that made them want orderly lives in the decades after. ‘I’ve got a whole cupboard of the seventies,’ she said. ‘I’m writing a memoir of it all now.’ And then, just as she had done in some of the photographs I had seen of the Spare Rib staff, she smiled an enormous, slightly intoxicating smile. ‘We just thought’, she said, ‘that we were making our own world.’
10
Get Out of the City
Not all the new political movements of the British seventies were optimistic. Environmentalism was sustained instead by a sense of impending doom. This feeling began to gather the decade before, in books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), about the damaging effects of pesticides on wildlife and the dangers of global population growth. It gained political traction in Britain in 1967 with the wreck of the oil tanker Torrey Canyon near Harold Wilson’s beloved Isles of Scilly, and his government’s costly struggle to clear up the toxic tide that followed. And it became an international intellectual fashion by the early seventies, generating further polemics such as Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Doomsday Book (1970), which predicted both a new ice age and global warming; weighty reports such as The Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth (1972), which would go on to sell 4 million copies and be translated into thirty languages; and even its own popular BBC1 drama series, Doomwatch (1970–2), about a fictional government agency set up to deal with ecological disasters.
Some of this eco-pessimism was scientifically rigorous; some of it was scaremongering: ‘The children of today’s affluent Western societies’, warned The Population Bomb, ‘will inherit a totally different world in which the standards, politics and economics of their parents will be dead.’ Often, the new thinking about the environment was a mixture of both. Either way, it found a receptive audience. After three decades of post-war growth, the cost to the planet – pollution, over-development, depleted natural resources – was increasingly hard to ignore. At the same time, the counter-culture and the rebellions of the sixties had accustomed many Westerners to questioning the values of industrial capitalism. Meanwhile, the disconcerting aspects of life in the late sixties and early seventies predisposed people to doomy thoughts: for America, where the new green politics, typically, crystallized first, there was the Vietnam War; for Britain, which soon sprouted an environmentalist movement of its own, there was the prospect of national decline.
As the brother of James, or ‘Jimmy’, Goldsmith, the restless, politically preoccupied British tycoon, Teddy Goldsmith grew up in the sort of circles where important men pondered the state of the world. The Goldsmiths were a cosmopolitan banking family who had diversified into public affairs and other businesses. Teddy and Jimmy’s father had been a Conservative MP and friend of the young Winston Churchill. Jimmy, exploiting the complacency of the British corporate world in the fifties and sixties, aggressively bought and sold companies. Teddy followed a more circuitous route to prominence.
After leaving Oxford in 1950, he set up in business with his brother, but he lacked the focus for it. What excited him was science, specifically anthropology and ecology, not approached in the careful, empirical way
he had been taught at university, but more expansively and intuitively. He read greedily. During the early fifties, he began taking notes for a book he titled The Theory of Unified Science, which would come to include over 200 words he had invented himself. He began travelling the world to see endangered species and what he reverently called ‘tribal peoples’. Rich from investing in his brother’s companies, he could afford to – and the obvious tension between where his money came from and his concern for the damage done by capitalism did not hold him back. Teddy, like Jimmy, had the ability of the very grand person to sustain a highly contradictory life.
However, his preoccupation with the disappearing natural world was a lonely one. In the West in the fifties and early sixties, economic growth was the orthodoxy, and his great book went unpublished. Then, during the late sixties, he became involved in a committee to ‘save’ the Brazilian Indians in the Amazon rainforest. Out of the committee came the idea of a magazine to popularize and develop his brand of environmentalism. Work on the publication started in 1969, and the first issue came out in July 1970. It was called The Ecologist.
Its story and significance would be almost as rich as Spare Rib’s, but in other respects the two monthlies were very different. While Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott’s magazine was essentially a grass-roots operation, run by and for ordinary women, Goldsmith’s was another important kind of seventies political initiative: a response to one of the era’s perceived crises organized, away from Westminster, by members of the British elite. Teddy invested £20,000 of his own money in The Ecologist; his brother contributed £4,500. More funds came from Teddy’s friend and companion on some of his environmental expeditions John Aspinall, the collector of endangered animal species, holder of extremely right-wing opinions and owner of the Clermont Club, the private gambling venue favoured by the more reckless alpha males of the London business world. ‘A few thousand came from other people,’ Goldsmith told me airily when we met. ‘Some of it came from the son of a well-known tycoon who wanted to be anonymous. There was a fund-raising party at the Clermont. Laurens van der Post spoke …’
