Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  What women like Anita Roddick and Steve Shirley represented was not just success but empowerment. Born of the individualistic culture of the 1960s and 1970s, empowerment became a central theme of political and social life under Mrs Thatcher. While the Prime Minister talked of ‘returning power to the people’ through privatization, feminists insisted that women needed to be ‘empowered’ to become equal citizens in a non-patriarchal democracy. It is not hard to see why. Touring the industrial North in the mid-1980s, the radical writer Beatrix Campbell met more than a few older women who had no money, no work experience, few friends, no opportunities and no power. In Wigan, she met an 85-year-old woman who would have liked to have worked, but had been forbidden by her husband. She had no money of her own, relied on her daughter for help and subsisted on crisps and cottage cheese. In Sheffield, Campbell met another elderly woman who occasionally went out to play dominoes in a community centre. This lady, too, had no money. In fact, she had never had any money. As a treat, her husband bought her an ice cream on Fridays and paid for her to have her hair permed once a year. ‘He says I should be thankful,’ the woman explained, and her dominoes-playing friends gave a hollow laugh. ‘Aye,’ one said quietly, ‘that’s how it is.’23

  This was an older Britain, settled and secure but also narrow and stifling, reassuring but also repressive; a world in which men worked and women cooked, men earned and women cleaned. By the early 1980s, though, it was passing into history. Younger women, in particular, were very conscious of their rights to equal pay, equal opportunities, financial independence, legal equality, sexual freedom and reproductive choice. Few people still believed that women should be chained to the kitchen sink: a poll for the Mail on Sunday in 1983 found that 86 per cent agreed that women should be able to work if they wanted to, and more than half thought that women could combine a full-time job with having a family.

  Indeed, the idea of equal opportunities had acquired an institutional momentum of its own, thanks to the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 and the creation of an Equal Opportunities Commission. But the most controversial example was the Greater London Council’s women’s committee, which was established after Ken Livingstone became leader of the council in 1981 and spent some £7 million annually on ‘women’s interests’. The tabloids howled with laughter, especially when the committee handed money to such groups as Babies Against the Bomb, the Black Women’s Radio Group and the Southall Black Sisters. But where London led, other Labour-run cities – Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham, Edinburgh – followed. ‘In future,’ the chair of the GLC’s women’s committee, Valerie Wise, promised in 1982, ‘every committee report will have a paragraph stating its implications for women.’ At the time, her critics thought she was deranged. But then they laughed at the word ‘chair’, too.24

  For obvious reasons, empowerment is often seen in terms of having sex and not having children. Thanks to the Pill, women were not only having fewer children but having them later, after beginning a career. Among women born in 1960, whose twenties coincided almost exactly with the Thatcher years, one in three reached the age of 30 without having children. But although sexual freedom got a lot of attention, the new financial freedoms were just as important. In 1974 only one in eight British women had a building society account and one in three had a bank account. Yet by 1983, almost half had building society accounts, while two-thirds had bank accounts. Women could now get mortgages, too: half of all women under the age of 34 either owned or co-owned their own homes. In the same year, Sonia Copeland, a Conservative member of the GLC, told the magazine City Limits that ‘the chequebook and the Pill have been very liberating and that’s probably among the reasons women can break from marriage and cope on their own’. The Pill gets most attention. For many women, though, what really mattered was the chequebook.25

  Women’s liberation had its limits. More women might be working than ever, but most were not prosecuting cases at the Old Bailey, running the Dudley branch of the Midland Bank or setting up their own publishing empire. The vast majority were cleaners, dinner ladies, shop assistants, secretaries, social workers, nurses and teachers. They still earned much less than men, and in the recession of the early 1980s their pay actually fell back from almost 76 per cent to about 70 per cent of men’s. Even in the unions, where women accounted for almost a third of the total membership, they typically held subordinate roles. When Beatrix Campbell interviewed trade unionists in the early 1980s, she found that a great gulf separated the women, who wanted to talk about childcare, maternity leave and equal pay, from their male representatives, who were more interested in pay rises and job losses. One woman, who worked in a Midlands engineering factory, asked the men when they had their branch meetings. ‘Why do you want to know?’ they asked suspiciously. It turned out the meetings were in another town. ‘How could I go?’ she said bitterly. ‘I didn’t have a car and I had kids.’26

  In more conservative quarters, opposition to working mothers died hard. Indeed, some senior figures in Mrs Thatcher’s own party seemed to forget that she was a working mother. ‘Quite frankly I don’t think mothers have the same right to work as fathers do,’ her social services spokesman, Patrick Jenkin, declared in 1977. ‘If the good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work he wouldn’t have created men and women.’ Even in 1981, after his boss had been Prime Minister for almost two years, Jenkin told a Conservative women’s conference that the government should not ‘give an unreserved welcome to the mothers of young children going out to work’. The best way to bring up children, he said, was ‘at their mother’s knee’. What small children really wanted was ‘the love, care and attention of a mother for most of their waking and sleeping day’.27

  Jenkin was not the only senior Conservative who seemed not to notice that his own boss was a wife and mother. In October 1981 Mrs Thatcher’s ideological soulmate Sir Keith Joseph told a teachers’ conference that he was a great believer in ‘young mothers being with their children’. It was not the government’s job, he said, to provide childcare for toddlers. Perhaps it is a shame that Sir Keith had not been on hand in Leicester a few months earlier. For that January, the teenage Adrian Mole was hit by a bombshell: his mother was going out to work. ‘I could end up a delinquent roaming the streets and all that,’ writes Sue Townsend’s disgusted diarist. ‘And what will I do during the holidays? … I will be a latchkey kid, whatever that is.’ A year later, having been sucked into a nightmarish world of feminism, consciousness-raising and Greenham Common-visiting, Mrs Mole invites her women’s group to use their house for meetings (‘No men or boys allowed in our front room’). At that, Adrian’s father mutters that ‘women ought to be at home cooking’. But he says it in a whisper, ‘so that he wouldn’t be karate-chopped to death’.28

  Not surprisingly, many women were outraged by what they saw as men’s attempts to put them back in their box. In the Daily Express, hardly a hotbed of feminist subversion, Helen Franks gave Sir Keith Joseph a blistering telling-off. Mothers worked, she wrote, not because they were careerist harridans, but ‘to provide cash that is needed to pay off the mortgage, keep growing children in clothes, or add a few luxuries to the weekly shopping basket’. When ‘the teachers, the secretaries, the shop assistants [and] the nurses’ left their children at home, they did so ‘with the strong sense of guilt that has been laid on them through generations of a totally male orientated society’. Clearly Joseph was too dim to understand why many women craved independence and stimulation, rather than ‘depression and isolation’. Many Tory activists would have agreed with every word. As Beatrix Campbell found when she interviewed Conservative women in the mid-1980s, many party activists were themselves working women, while Mrs Thatcher’s younger ministers were often married to professional women. Indeed, the Conservative women’s organization constantly pressed for policies such as equal pay, new rights for part-timers and better provisions for women juggling work and home.29

  For many women, the working day did not end when they wal
ked back through the front door. In 1979 a survey found that British men were keener on housework than anybody else in Europe, with 85 per cent saying that they were happy to wash up, 30 per cent to change their babies’ nappies and even 29 per cent to do the ironing. (By contrast, just 21 per cent of Italian men were prepared to wash up, 13 per cent to change the nappies and a pitiful 6 per cent to do the ironing.) Yet in every country surveyed, women insisted that their husbands actually did far less than they claimed. Indeed, another study five years later found that nine out of ten British women did all the washing and ironing, seven out of ten did all the household cleaning and five out of ten did all the shopping. In Romford, Carol Daniel spent her evenings stacking shelves at Tesco. But her days were not her own: far from it. ‘Up at 6.30, make breakfast for Doug (my husband),’ began a housework log she complied for Mass Observation. ‘Dress children … Take children to school … Wash up, put on washing, make beds … Tidy kitchen … Prepare tea … Wash up …’ It was a wonder that she found the time to write it all down.30

  Not all husbands were equally useless. By and large, the younger and better educated the husband, the more likely he was to help. ‘My own husband is a gem,’ reported Susan Gray from Darlington. ‘When we both worked full time the housework was divided equally.’ When their daughter was very young, ‘he probably did more housework and babycare than most husbands’, and he always did his share of the shopping. ‘This sort of attitude seems general among friends and acquaintances,’ Susan wrote, ‘and even the most Andy Capp-like man we knew became a changed character after his wife slipped two discs in her spine.’ Even the 56-year-old Mary Richards said that although she generally hated social change, she heartily approved of the new ‘relationship between men and women’. ‘They do seem to be better partners than when I was young,’ she wrote. ‘The interest my son and son-in-law take in their children amazes me. They change babies’ nappies, feed babies, take them walkies. My husband would not be seen pushing a pram and never changed a nappy in his life. “That was woman’s work.”’31

  Already struggling to juggle childcare and housework, many women found full-time jobs effectively impossible. By 1981 more than eight out of ten of Britain’s part-time workers were women, most of them married women who worked as cleaners, dinner ladies and so on. Not only were these jobs very poorly paid, they were very insecure. As the journalist Frances Williams noted, women were often ‘first in line for redundancy’ because many firms had ‘last in, first out’ rules, under which maternity leave counted against them. Firms were also keener to get rid of part-time workers, even though it was technically against the law. On top of all that, Mrs Thatcher’s spending cuts fell disproportionately on women because the services slashed by local authorities – ‘school meals, home helps, nurseries’ – relied so heavily on female staff, which left wives and mothers stepping in to fill the gaps.32

  It is remarkable, then, how rarely women appeared in the images of unemployment that defined the early 1980s. The official figures showed that women made up about a third of the jobless total, but since many unemployed women simply gave up looking for work, they were not counted. Photographers sent to capture the plight of working-class Britain typically took pictures of men, not women. Journalists talked to husbands, not wives. There are virtually no women’s voices in the protest songs of the era, while not one of the seven central characters in ITV’s Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983–4) is a woman. Even in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), the vast majority of the characters are men. It is true that there are some strong female roles, above all Julie Walters’s spirited Angie Todd, the only character who genuinely wants to fight back against the economic forces holding them down. For Walters, Angie was her great screen breakthrough. But it is Bernard Hill’s searing portrayal of Yosser Hughes, the embodiment of collapsing working-class masculinity, that has entered television legend. By contrast, Angie Todd, a woman surrounded by men, is almost entirely forgotten.33

  What about all those women who didn’t go out to work? Half of all mothers in 1980 remained at home, yet their stories never make it into the history books. A quarter of a century earlier, the housewife had been the mistress of the home, the cornerstone of the family, the ideal consumer, the ‘kitchen goddess’. But now portraits of housewives tended to be much more negative.

  On television, housewives were often lonely, repressed and frustrated, like Wendy Craig’s Ria in Carla Lane’s sitcom Butterflies, which ran from 1978 to 1983. Married to a reserved, unromantic dentist, with two feckless grown-up sons, Ria is the embodiment of suburban frustration. She is not a feminist, and still loves her husband. But she is bored. Daydreaming of another life, she falls into a platonic semi-affair with her friend Leonard. Her story clearly struck a chord with millions of viewers. ‘Most women are comforted to see that “Butterflies” is exactly like their own homes,’ Craig told the Express. ‘I share the same weaknesses, shout at my children, get upset by the monotony of life and the constant demands of a family, and I have a husband who comes back tired from work and unable to communicate.’ Later, she recalled getting letters from housewives who told her that Butterflies was ‘the story of my life’, and wondered if she was ‘looking in through my letter-box’.34

  For some observers, the fact that housewives still existed at all was a sad reflection of the limits of feminism. In 1980 the former editor of the Guardian’s women’s page, Suzanne Lowry – who described her own page, only half-jokingly, as the home of ‘pre-menstrual tension and post-natal depression, plus grim, humourless tracts on equality and man-hating’ – published The Guilt Cage, lamenting the ‘dreary and demeaning’ plight of Britain’s housewives. Why, Lowry wondered, was it ‘so difficult, even for women who recognise the restrictions of the housewife’s lot, to give it all up and strive, as the feminists so cogently urge, for a more independent life’?

  As she recognized, there was no simple answer. ‘Fear, lack of money and loss of confidence’ all played their part. But so did ‘male dominance’, as well as women’s reluctance to lose their ‘domestic power base’. Lowry barely considered the possibility that some housewives, at least, might find their lives genuinely enjoyable and fulfilling. But she was surely right to suggest that television commercials – the Persil and Fairy Liquid campaigns, for example, or the famous Oxo family – still pushed a conservative image of the ‘woman in the kitchen, serving her family as the perfect all-weather provider, addicted to washing-up liquid and obsessed by clean surfaces’. Even among working women, she wrote, ‘Mum in the kitchen is still at the centre of our dreams and nightmares, if not about ourselves, then about others.’35

  Yet many women who had chosen to stay at home bridled at being told that their existence was ‘dreary and demeaning’, and hated being written off as brainwashed slaves. When Mass Observation sent its correspondents a questionnaire about their health and well-being, they got a moving reply from a 29-year-old single mother who lived with her parents and her two children, aged 7 and 8. She had never had a permanent job and was not looking for one. In answer after answer, she denied that she felt frustrated and insisted that she found life happy and meaningful. But beside the statement ‘I sometimes feel that people are looking down on me’, she ticked ‘Completely agree’. And at the end, she let rip:

  I think success is graded to a large extent by how much you earn, have you a degree in sciences, have you been abroad?

  A person staying at home, in my opinion, to look after children should be considered just as powerful as a director in a company. Don’t they influence future workers? Aren’t they keeping the world from halting birth altogether? Life on earth would come to a standstill if women refused to have babies for the next twenty years.

  The point is, of course, nobody sees it that way. The housewife is seen, virtually, as a non-person – doesn’t get paid enough, if anything. She’s the world’s biggest doormat and yet she’s the most important cog in the machine.

  In almost every line, her
frustration and bitterness – not with her lot as a housewife, but with her declining status in a society that seemed to care only about work, earnings and individual achievement – were etched on to the page.36

  There was, however, one very prominent career woman who respected the work of Britain’s housewives – or claimed to. In the summer of 1982, Mrs Thatcher was invited to give a lecture in honour of the Liberal suffragist Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, who had died a year earlier. Yet to her audience’s visible displeasure, the Prime Minister went out of her way to present herself, not as the handmaiden of social change, but as the guardian of domesticity. ‘Women know that society is founded on dignity, reticence and discipline,’ she declared, adding that for Britain’s children, ‘much depends upon the family unit remaining secure and respected’. This meant that ‘the home should be the centre but not the boundary of a woman’s life’. Indeed, it was women’s experience in the home that gave them the ‘special talents’ they brought to public life. They had different skills from men, she explained, because ‘we women bear the children and create and run the home’.

  This might have been calculated to infuriate many of her listeners, who included several veteran Liberal feminists. But Mrs Thatcher was merely warming up. ‘When children are young,’ she went on, ‘however busy we may be with practical duties inside or outside the home, the most important thing of all is to devote enough time and care to the children’s needs and problems.’ This would have come as news to her own children, whose mother had relied on a nanny to handle the childcare. Then Mrs Thatcher turned to women’s rights, for which Dame Margery had campaigned so vigorously. ‘The battle for women’s rights’, she declared, ‘has been largely won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone for ever. And I hope they are. I hated those strident tones that you still hear from some Women’s Libbers.’37