by Peter Watson
Maya Angelou’s books are very different. Her message is that blacks are already free – not in the political sense, maybe, but in every other sense. It is her isolation of the political from the rest that is her more important, and contentious, point. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of her five-part autobiography, published in 1969, Angelou records her life until she has her first baby at the age of sixteen.42 We are treated to the richness of black life in Stamps, Arkansas, not a million miles from Little Rock, Cleaver’s birthplace and the scene of so much racial violence. Angelou re-creates brilliantly her childhood world ‘of starched aprons, butter-yellow piqué dresses, peanut patties, and games of mumbledypeg, with bathwater steaming on the cooking stove.’ When bad things happen, tears course down her cheeks ‘like warm milk.’43 But there is more to this soft-focus world than scoops of corn thrown to the chickens. Although her father is absent for much of the time, the emotional and intellectual life of the family left behind – mother, son, and daughter – is not much impoverished. William Shakespeare ‘was my first white love’ in a world where Kipling and Thackeray jostle with Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.44 Maya, or Marguerite as she then was, has a genuine affection for her brother Bailey and her mother, a strong, upright, beautiful woman who is not cowed by the system. As the children grow up, the adult world of work and discrimination encroaches on their idyll – for example, in the form of the dentist who would rather stick his hand in a dog’s mouth than a ‘nigger’s.’45 But this is not presented as tragedy. Maya and her mother retain their interest in the world, keep control of it, and keep thinking. Their lives remain rich, whatever changes fate has in store. Of course Angelou hates the system of discrimination, but her books emphasise that life is made up of two kinds of freedom: one big political freedom, and countless little freedoms that come from education, strength of character, humour, dignity, and thought. At one point her mother is asked, ‘You all right, momma?’ ‘Aw,’ she replies, ‘they tell me the whitefolks still in the lead.’46
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings fits as easily into a canon of works written by female authors as it does one written by blacks. Women’s emancipation, though not involving violence on anything like the same scale as the civil rights movement, offered several parallels throughout the 1960s. The decade saw major changes in almost all areas of sexual liberation. In 1966 the Kinsey Institute had begun its important early study of homosexuality, which found that 4 percent of males and 2 percent of females were predominantly or exclusively homosexual, and that no fewer than 37 percent of men reported at least one homosexual experience.47 In the same year, William Howell Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy showed that about half of all marriages suffered from one sexual problem or another (inability to maintain an erection or premature ejaculation in men, inability to achieve orgasm in women).48 A year after, in 1967, modern mass-market, hard-core pornography began to appear, produced by Scandinavian magazine publishers. In that year too Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, then selling 4 million copies a month, made the cover of Time.49 On 3 November 1968, Al Goldstein launched Screw, the self-proclaimed aim of which was to become the Consumer Reports of the ‘sexual netherworld.’ A year later Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, exploring the ‘agony and ecstasy’ of male masturbation, and Oh! Calcutta! was produced in London and off Broadway, with full-frontal nudity and explicitly sexual dialogue. Nineteen-seventy saw the first pubic hair to be shown in a commercial magazine, Penthouse. In 1970 the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography reported that there was no substantial basis for the belief that exposure to erotica caused sex crimes. Some kind of closure was achieved in this area in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court voted seven to two to legalise abortion, and in the same year, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual, declaring that gays and lesbians did not suffer from a mental disorder.
Whereas the publishing/pornography revolution, and gay liberation, were chiefly about sexual freedom (many states in the United States still outlawed homosexuality), the women’s liberation movement was about far more than the new sexual awareness of women. Though that was important, the change in women’s thinking about themselves, set in motion after World War II by Simone de Beauvoir and developed by Betty Friedan, was much more fundamental and far-reaching. In 1970, slap in the middle of the sexual revolution, three books appeared almost simultaneously, each of which took an uncompromising look at the relationship between the sexes.
Germaine Greer was an Australian who had settled in England as a graduate student and had drawn attention to herself in Suck magazine, decrying the missionary position (she thought women were more in control and had more pleasure if they sat on men during intercourse). Her book The Female Eunuch did not neglect women’s economic condition, though only one of the thirty chapters is devoted to work. Rather, it drew its force from Greer’s unflinching comparison of the way women, love, and marriage are presented in literature, both serious and popular, and in everyday currency, as compared with the way things really are. ‘Freud,’ she writes, ‘is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.’50 From Jane Austen to Lord Byron to Women’s Weekly, Greer is withering in her criticisms of how men are presented as dominant, socially superior, older, richer, and taller than their women. (Greer is very tall herself.) In what is perhaps her most original contribution, she demolishes love and romance (both given their own chapters) as chimeras, totally divorced (an apt verb) from the much bleaker reality. In fact, she says, ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’ A chapter headed ‘Misery’ recounts the amount of medication women take, the paraphernalia of sexual aids, leading to the resentment that she argues many women feel at being saddled with such things.51 Her diagnosis is unstinting, and her solution demands nothing else than a radical reassessment by women not just of their economic and psychological position vis-à-vis men but, more revolutionary still, a fundamental reappraisal of what love and romance really are. Greer has the grace to admit that she has not herself entirely shed the romantic notions she was brought up with, but makes it plain she suspects they are entirely – entirely – without foundation. As with all true liberation, this view is both bleak and exhilarating.
Juliet Mitchell’s Women’s Estate was hardly exhilarating.52 A fellow immigrant to Britain from the Antipodes, this time from New Zealand, Mitchell also studied English at a British university, though she subsequently transferred to psychoanalysis. Mitchell’s account was Marxist, claiming that although socialist countries are not very nice to women, socialism does not require the subjugation of women as capitalism does, with its ideology of ‘the nuclear family,’ which succeeds only in keeping women in their place, acquiring consumer goods and breeding ‘little consumers.’53 Mitchell went on to argue that women need to undergo two revolutions, the political and the personal, and here she took the black experience as a guide but also psychoanalysis.54 At the same time that women regrouped politically, she said, they also needed to raise their level of self-consciousness as the blacks had done, especially as in America. Women, she insisted, have been taught by capitalism and by Freud that they are the repositories of feelings, but in fact there is no limit to their experience. She favoured small groups of six to twenty-four women joining in ‘consciousness-raising’ sessions, taking a leaf out of the book of the Chinese revolutionaries’ practice of ‘speaking bitterness.’55 Together with her survey of what has been achieved by women in other countries around the world, Mitchell’s aim was to bring about a situation where women did not feel alone in their predicament, and to spread the psychoanalytically inspired function: ‘Speaking the unspoken is, of course, also the purpose of serious psychoanalytic work.’56
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was, like Greer’s book, essentially an examination of literary texts, equally erudite, equally readable, and even more thorough.57 As her title implied, the focus of her interest was the power inhere
nt in the relations between the sexes, though she queried whether it really is ‘inherent.’ She had herself been molested when she was thirteen and held on to her secret for a decade until, in a women’s group, she found that almost all the other members had gone through similar experiences. This had fired her up. In her book, after brief excursions into sociological, biological, anthropological, and even mythological explanations for gender differences, she reverted to late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, to John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, moving on to Friedrich Engels’s and Thorsten Veblen’s theories of the family, its relation to the state, private property, and revolutionary theory. Domestication, prostitution, and sexuality are discussed, in Christina Bronte, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde (Salome), where Millett found some grounds for hope before the ‘counterrevolution’ of Nazism, Stalinism, and Freudianism. Few would need convincing that Nazism and Stalinism were bad for women, but by including Freudianism along with these two, Millett’s argument succeeded on shock value alone, as did her call to abolish the family. Millett’s full ire was reserved, however, for three writers – D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, who she compares and contrasts with a fourth, Jean Genet. In his novels D. H. Lawrence, she says, ‘manipulates’ women, Miller has only ‘contempt’ for them, and Mailer ‘wrestles’ them.58 The force of her argument lies both in her close textual reading of the books and in the way she shows how certain themes run through several works by each author (patriarchy and employment in Lawrence, for example, murder in Mailer). In contrasting Genet with the other three, her aim was to show that the idea of femininity can exist in man, and she approved of his linking sexual and racial roles.59 Ultimately, Millett was concerned about virility per se, the part it plays in Realpolitik as well as sexual politics. Perhaps most valuably, she pointed out that ‘alienation’ was no longer a vague word used by philosophers and psychologists; it had been revised and refined into a number of specific grievances felt by women, blacks, students, and the poor. That refinement was in itself an advance.60
This line of thinking culminated in the work of two women, Andrea Dworkin and Shere Hite. Dworkin, who described herself as ‘an overweight ugly duckling,’ had a father who was a teacher and instilled in her a love for ideas, but in 1969 she married a fellow left-wing radical who turned out to be a ‘vicious rapist’ and frequently beat her to the point of unconsciousness.61 Eventually finding enough courage to leave him, she became a writer, taking up where Millett left off. In 1974 she published Women Hating and addressed a New York ‘speak out’ organised by the National Organization of Women, giving her talk the title ‘Renouncing Sexual “Equality.” ‘She was given a ten-minute ovation, and many of the eleven hundred women in the audience were left ‘crying and shaking.’ Dworkin concentrated on pornography, which she argued was motivated by a hatred of women, and she countered by developing a radical man-hating ideology. She herself set an example of what she saw as the only way out for women: she lived in a sexless open nonmarriage with a male homosexual.62
The Hite Report appeared in 1976. Born Shirley Gregory in Saint Joseph, Missouri, Shere Hite kept the name of her husband, whom she divorced after a brief marriage. Intending to pursue a master’s degree in cultural history at Columbia University, Hite quit early and turned to a variety of jobs to survive. A Pre-Raphaelite redhead, she worked as a model and posed nude for both Playboy magazine and Oui. The real change in her life took place when she was asked to pose for an ad for Olivetti, the Italian typewriter company, where the photograph showed a secretary in front of a typewriter, with the legend, ‘The typewriter that’s so smart she doesn’t have to be.’ After posing for the ad, Hite read in a newspaper that a women’s group planned to picket the company. She joined in, and soon after embroiled herself in the women’s movement. One of the things she learned from this, which drew her particular attention, was that the medical profession at the time regarded a woman who could not achieve orgasm through intercourse as having ‘a medical problem.’ Over the next few years, she amassed enough funds to send out 100,000 questionnaires to women to see how they really felt about orgasm. She received over three thousand replies. When her Report appeared, it was a revelation.63 Her most important finding was that most women did not orgasm as a result of vaginal penetration; moreover, they found that this unrealistic expectation placed a great psychological burden on women (and on men). This was not the same as saying that women did not enjoy intercourse, rather that what they enjoyed was the intimacy and the touching. Second, she found that these same women achieved orgasm fairly quickly when masturbating, but that there was a strong taboo against women touching themselves. The Hite Report made Shere Hite a millionaire virtually overnight, as its findings hit a chord in women, who found its message liberating, if only because so many women discovered that their own situation, predicament, problem – call it what you will – was not unique to them but, statistically speaking at least, ‘normal.’ Its findings carried the implication that women were much like men in sexual behaviour.64 Hite’s statistics turned out to be a form of emancipation, a practical response to one aspect of ‘alienation.’ There was a certain amount of cynicism in Shere Hite’s work – a compendium of statistics on orgasm and masturbation was bound to be a commercial success. Even so, the report marked the end of a phase in women’s liberation, reflecting a view that genuine independence, sexual as well as economic, was available for those women who wanted it.
Not everyone was happy with this wholesale change. A 1963 report, Beyond the Melting Pot, by Nathan Glazer (a junior colleague of David Riesman on The Lonely Crowd) and Patrick Moynihan, unveiled ‘middle America,’ which they described as a ‘unifying state of mind,’ ‘characterised by opposition to civil rights, the peace movement, the student movement, “welfare intellectuals” and so on.’65 It was against this background that President Johnson sought to launch his great experiment. He set out his agenda in a series of speeches where ‘the Great Society’ became as familiar as Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream’: Medicare for the old, educational assistance for the young, tax rebates for business, a higher minimum wage for labour, subsidies for farmers, vocational training for the unskilled, food for the hungry, housing for the homeless, poverty grants for the poor, clean highways for commuters, legal protection for blacks, improved schooling for Indians, higher benefits for the unemployed, pensions for the retired, fair labelling for consumers. Countless task forces were set up, as often as not with academics at their head. Legislation was hurried through, Johnson insisting that the Great Society would fill all the hopes and more of the New Deal.
It was, perhaps, the greatest experiment in social engineering outside the Communist world.66 Between 1965 and 1968, when Johnson declined to stand for reelection, when the war in Vietnam was beginning to divide the nation and its cost to have a marked effect on the economy, some five hundred social programs were created, some more successful than others. (Johnson’s biographer, Doris Kearns, concluded that medicare and voting rights succeeded admirably, for example, model cities less well, and community action was ‘self-defeating.’) But the real battle, which would last for years – and is, to an extent, still with us – was the fight over education, the idea that blacks and other disadvantaged minorities should be given access to better schooling, that equality of educational opportunity was what counted above all in a society where to be free meant to be free of ignorance, where democratic attitudes of fairness and individualism meant that men and women ought to be given a fair start in life but after that they were on their own, to make of their life what they could. These ideas spawned thousands of socio-psychological studies in the 1960s and afterward, exploring the effects of a person’s economic, social, and racial background on a variety of factors, by far the most controversial of which was the IQ. Despite repeated criticisms over the years, that it did not measure what it purported to, that it was biased in favour of middle-class white children and against almost eve
ryone else, the IQ continued to be used widely both as a research tool and in schools and the workplace.
The first major study of the issues the Great Society was meant to help rectify was Equality of Educational Opportunity, by James Coleman and others, released through the U.S. Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., in 1966.67 The Coleman Report, the most thorough study of naturally desegregated schools in America, concluded that the socioeconomic level of a student’s school had more effect on his or her achievement than any other measurable factor except the socioeconomic level of his or her home. In other words, blacks were better off in desegregated schools because, in general, those schools were more likely to be middle class. Blacks were not better off if desegregation merely meant they transferred to schools where the whites were as poor as the blacks. British thinking had followed American ideas and created, in the mid-1960s, what were called Educational Priority Areas; as their name implied, these aimed to boost disadvantaged groups in disadvantaged socio-economic areas. However, in one study, All Our Future, by J. W. B. Douglas and others and published in 1968, their conclusion was that the gap between middle-class and working-class pupils had not been reduced, in any appreciable way, by such social engineering.68
