Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  The result of the trial was messy. The judge awarded the case to Sutherland, in seeming opposition to the wishes of the jury. This was overturned by the Court of Appeal, which was in turn overruled following an appeal to the House of Lords. Three of five Law Lords involved in the case were over eighty years of age and their decision was ‘scandalous’, in the opinion of George Bernard Shaw. Nevertheless, in the wider world of public opinion, it was clear that Stopes’s argument had triumphed. Birth control was discovered, and accepted, by the general population.

  The trial would be the high point of Stopes’s fame. Afterwards, she became increasingly vocal about her more reactionary beliefs. Birth control was a racial matter, she insisted. Inferior types were breeding faster than their betters, which was a situation that had to be reversed for the long-term survival of the white race. Mixed-race children should be sterilised at birth, as should all mothers unfit for parenthood. On the subject of eugenics Marie Stopes was as far right as Hitler, who began a programme of compulsory sterilisation of ‘undesirables’ in 1934. The forcefulness of her personality was accompanied by both an inability to admit mistakes and a need for praise. She made enemies easily, and it soon became impossible for her to work within the growing birth control movement.

  Stopes’s personality had touches of later radicals such as the psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary or the computer-hacker turned whistleblower Julian Assange. All three managed to place previously unthinkable ideas right in the heart of public debate. They were all, briefly, lionised for their efforts. Yet the single-minded, messianic nature of their personalities turned the public from them and made their names toxic. Others would gain applause for work in the territory that they staked out, but it took a rare psychological character to introduce the world to that new territory in the first place.

  For all that the name Marie Stopes has become tarnished over the years, she brought the concept of birth control to a wider public than anyone had previously managed. The value of sex, without intent of procreation, was finally admitted.

  This was one factor in a larger revolution. Individualism required women to redefine both their sense of themselves and their position in society. The possible roles for middle-class women, beyond the traditional wife, mother and housekeeper, had been extremely limited in the patriarchal imperial world. In her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, the modernist English writer Virginia Woolf recalled that ‘I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918.’

  Woolf’s essay examined the topic of women and fiction, and questioned why history had produced no female writers on a par with Shakespeare. She asked what would have happened to an imaginary sister of Shakespeare with the same innate talent as her brother. Shakespeare’s sister, she concluded, would have been stifled at every turn by women’s historical lack of financial independence and privacy, and the fixed expectations of hierarchical society. Female genius, Woolf believed, could not emerge until women were in a position to have a room of their own, where they could lock the door and remain undisturbed, and a personal income of £500 a year (just over £27,000 in 2015).

  As both men and women gained freedom from what was expected of them at birth, the competition for rewarding and worthwhile careers increased. For men, that competition was lessened when women were encouraged to remain in their previous positions. Woolf noted this unwillingness to accept women as equals in historically male professions. ‘The suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame,’ she wrote. ‘It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self assertion … When one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively.’ For Woolf, the belief that the female half of the world was inferior gave men a valuable boost of self-confidence, and allowed them to go forth and achieve great things.

  The pressure for women to remain in their historic roles became increasingly problematic as individualism grew. The American writer and activist Betty Friedan, who felt forced out of her career as a journalist when marriage and children turned her into a homemaker, wrote about the gnawing sense of undefined dissatisfaction that marked the lives of many housewives in post-Second World War America. This was the subject of her book The Feminine Mystique (1963), which examined how women could find personal fulfilment outside of traditional roles. ‘American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realise one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror,’ she wrote. As individuals, women needed a sense of purpose that was based around themselves, and not their husband or family.

  For Friedan, feminism was about ‘freeing both women and men from the burdens of their roles’. She went on to co-found the National Organisation for Women, and the success of her book triggered a new wave of feminist thought and activism. The acceptance of female sexuality, in post-Friedan feminist thought, was just one section of a broader conversation about the role of women in the age of individuals.

  The English poet Philip Larkin dated the arrival of an acceptance of sex in British culture to a very specific point. Prior to this moment, he wrote in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, sex existed only as ‘A shame that started at sixteen / And spread to everything’. The moment when everything changed was ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And The Beatles’ first LP’. This was the early Sixties, a time when press coverage of the Profumo scandal, when a government minister was revealed to have the same mistress as a Soviet naval attaché, reflected an increased sexual openness in the British public. Larkin, then in his forties, wrote that ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me).’

  D.H. Lawrence was not a writer who was accepted or admired by critics in his own lifetime. His novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was written in 1928, a couple of years before his death, had to wait decades before it was openly praised. It was initially only published privately, or in heavily abridged versions, due to its sexual explicitness and taboo language. To many people, these seemed all the more shocking because they were delivered in the broad rural Nottinghamshire dialect of Mellors, the Chatterleys’ gamekeeper. ‘Let me be,’ he says to Lady Chatterley after sex, ‘I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman’s a lovely thing when ’er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an’ th’ shape on thee, an’ th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv thee wi’ my bas an’ wi’ my heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma’e me say nowt.’

  Later attempts to publish the complete text led to obscenity trials in countries including India, Canada and Japan. In the United States, the Mormon Senator Reed Smoot threatened to read passages from it aloud in the Senate. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was, he declared in 1930, ‘Most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!’

  The 1960 British prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act that Larkin referenced in his poem followed an attempt by Penguin Books to publish the unabridged text. During the trial the chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked the jury, ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ This recalled the questioning during Marie Stopes’s 1923 libel trial, where the expert medical witness Sir James Barr was asked if he thought the book could be ‘read by your young servants, or, indeed, [would you] give it to your own female relatives?’ This comment was unremarkable at the time, but the country had changed between 1923 and 1960 and Griffith-Jones’s question came to symbolise how out of touch the British establishment had now become. Penguin were acquitted of obscenity and the publishing industry has had the freedom to pr
int explicit material ever since.

  The fact that Griffith-Jones’s out-of-touch remark about servants came to represent the trial is, in many ways, entirely fitting for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The novel tells the story of Constance Chatterley, the young bride of the aristocratic Lord Clifford Chatterley. Lord Chatterley was seriously wounded in the First World War and returned impotent and paralysed from the waist down. He was the last of his line. His inability to produce an heir and continue his dynasty weighed heavily on him, because he understood the world through the pre-First World War hierarchical model. As he tells his wife, ‘I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the function determines the individual.’ For Clifford, a person’s position was more important than who they were or what they did. ‘Aristocracy is a function,’ he said, ‘a part of fate. And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters.’

  D.H. Lawrence understood the change that occurred around the First World War in a way that suddenly irrelevant aristocrats never could. For all that the novel was portrayed as a threat to the social order due to its sexual frankness, the real threat came from its discussion of the upper classes’ inability to comprehend they were finished. Many novels attempted to come to terms with the irreversible change that occurred to the British ruling classes after the First World War, from Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1928) to L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), but they were not as brutally blunt as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The aristocracy’s attempts to carry on as before, in Lawrence’s eyes, made them into a form of zombie. They may have physically existed and were still moving, but they were quite dead.

  In order to escape the living death of life with her impotent aristocrat husband, Lady Chatterley begins an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Despite Lawrence’s frankness and the socially taboo nature of the relationship, the emotional heart of the affair was not dissimilar to the ideal Christian union described at length in the books of Marie Stopes. Lady Chatterley needed to be fulfilled sexually in order to become physically, emotionally and spiritually alive, just as Stopes advised. That fulfilment could only come by the shared willingness of her and Mellors to give themselves to each other entirely and unconditionally. Giving up their individuality allowed the pair to achieve a sense of union akin to the ideal spiritual love that was the focus of so much of Stopes’s poetry. Stopes would have been appalled by their marital status, but she would have recognised that the relationship between Chatterley and Mellors was loving, tender and emotionally intelligent – in a way that the coming sexual revolution would not be.

  The idealised spiritual union promoted by Stopes and Lawrence was no match for the incoming tide of individualism. A more typical attitude to loosening sexual mores can be seen in the work of the American novelist Henry Miller, whose first novel Tropic of Cancer (1934) was, as mentioned earlier, influenced by the sexual openness of Dalí and Buñuel’s surrealist film L’ge d’or. This semiautobiographical modernist novel records the aimless life of Miller as he drifts penniless around Paris, failing to write his great novel. Like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it was the subject of numerous obscenity charges before a 1964 US Supreme Court decision found that it had literary merit and could be freely published.

  Tropic of Cancer is a link between the novels of the early modernists and the Beat writers and existentialists to come. While its stream-of-consciousness approach and lack of interest in plot recall Joyce, the nihilism and self-centredness of the main character is emotionally closer to Sartre or Kerouac. Miller writes from a deeply misanthropic perspective. ‘People are like lice,’ he announces early in the book. As Anaïs Nin explains in the book’s preface, ‘Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium.’ It was this delirium that made Tropic of Cancer an important book, especially in the eyes of the Beats. But, as Nin warns, the overriding tone is cold-hearted.

  Despite occasional epiphanic moments, such as one triggered by the lack of self-consciousness of a Parisian prostitute, Miller has no interest in any romanticised notion of spiritual union. The sexual encounters he details are motivated more by anger and disgust than by love and affection. Lady Chatterley would have been deeply unimpressed by Miller’s performance as a lover. After having sex with his host’s maid Elsa, Miller remarks that ‘Somehow I feel sorry as hell for her and yet I don’t give a damn.’ It is a line with all the emotional intelligence and lack of self-awareness of a teenage boy. For Henry Miller, sex was about what he wanted. The needs of the other party were of little consequence. He originally considered calling the novel Crazy Cock.

  The sexual revolution that Miller wanted became mainstream with the arrival of the oral contraceptive pill in 1960, which made birth control easier and more reliable. Because the Swingin’ Sixties celebrated free love and is associated with great strides in civil rights, gay rights, vegetarianism and environmentalism, it is often assumed that it was also a period of female liberation, but this was not the case.

  The feminist movement of the 1970s was necessary in part because of how women were treated in the 1960s. Women were significant players in the hippy movement and enthusiastic supporters of the relaxed sexual climate, but they were largely viewed, by both genders, as being in a supporting role to their men. Women who were following their own path, such as the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, were treated with suspicion.

  In an era when any form of restraint on another’s individuality was deeply uncool, men were quick to view women as objects to do with as they wished. As Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead reassured us in their 1971 song ‘Jack Straw’, ‘We can share the women, we can share the wine.’ Or, as Mungo Jerry sang in their 1970 pro-drink-driving anthem ‘In the Summertime’, ‘If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal / If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.’

  Watching British television from the 1960s and 1970s reveals the extent to which the objectification of women became normalised, at least in the minds of the producers of comedy and light-entertainment programming. A common trope was an older amorous man running after one or more younger women in a prolonged chase. This was considered funny, even though the fact that the women were running away demonstrated fear and a lack of consent. An example of this can be seen in a 1965 edition of the BBC family science fiction programme Doctor Who. The time-travelling Doctor (William Hartnell) was in ancient Rome where he witnessed Emperor Nero chasing a woman he intended to rape. The Doctor, not realising that the woman was his companion Barbara, smirks and waves his hand to dismiss the incident. The ‘chasing women’ trope became so normalised that comedians like Benny Hill were able to subvert it by having young women chase the old man. This didn’t alter the fact that young women in Hill’s programmes rarely spoke, and existed only to be ogled, groped and to undress.

  Perhaps the nadir of the early 1970s objectification of women was the song ‘Rape’ by Peter Wyngarde. Wyngarde was a famous actor, best known for his portrayal of the womanising spy Jason King. With his bouffant hair, large moustache and flamboyant clothes, Jason King was a key inspiration for Mike Myers’s comedy character Austin Powers. Wyngarde signed to RCA records and released an album in 1970. This included a song where he suavely discussed the differing pleasures of rape that resulted from raping women of different ethnicities, over an easy-listening musical background and the sound of women screaming. This was a song released by a major record label and performed by a famous celebrity at the height of his fame. It highlights how different the period around 1970 was to the present day, and indeed to the rest of history.

  What made that era’s portrayal of women unique was that extreme objectification was placed front and centre in popular culture, while sexual abuse, though rife
, was hidden. Old hierarchical power structures meant that powerful men could abuse their positions with little danger of prosecution or public censure.

  In the early 1970s many power structures from previous centuries were still in place, but they now existed in an individualist culture where women could be painted as voiceless objects. In this atmosphere, and within these structures, extreme institutionalised networks of sexual abusers were able to flourish. The extent of organised abuse of children within the British establishment is only slowly coming to light, but the open existence of the campaigning organisation Paedophile Information Exchange, which was founded in 1974 and received funding from the Home Office, gives some indication of the situation. Child abuse on a horrific scale by members of the Catholic Church was prevalent in many countries, of which Ireland, the United States and Canada have done the most to publicly investigate this dark history.

  These institutionally protected networks of child abusers, clearly, had little concern for consent. They were not interested in the impact they had on their victims. The sexual life they pursued was a long way from the spiritual union sought by Marie Stopes or D.H. Lawrence.

  These are extreme cases, but there is a pattern here. From the abusers in the Vatican and the British establishment to the attitudes of musicians and light entertainers, the sexual revolution during the 1960s was frequently understood through the perspective of individualism: get what you want, it was only your own concerns that mattered. People were finally free to live a physically fulfilled life, but focusing on the self caused many to choose an isolated, soulless form of sex.

  Of all the key feminist texts that appeared in this atmosphere, the one that had the greatest impact was The Female Eunuch by the Australian academic Germaine Greer. Published in 1970, it has sold millions of copies and was translated into eleven languages. A scattershot mix of polemic and academic research delivered with more humour and plain speaking than many other feminist texts, it found an eager audience and became an immediate bestseller.