The Stalled Revolution

Is Equality for Women an Impossible Dream?

Eva Tutchell, John Edmonds

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787149908
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Féminisme et théorie féministe

100 years ago women in the UK won the vote and 50 years ago the Women's Liberation Movement began a sustained campaign for equal rights. Eva Tutchell and John Edmonds draw upon historical perspectives and contemporary interviews to convey what it felt like to be in the heart of the campaigns—the excitement, the solidarity, the suffering and the humour.
The tragedy is that, after hard-won successes, the revolution has stalled and equality for women is still a distant dream. Today, men are paid more and occupy nearly 80% of the most powerful jobs across society. The Stalled Revolution poses a vital question about the future: Are women ready to draw inspiration from past successes and take a third leap forward towards equality?
The book's three-part approach traces clear pathways through historical successes and disappointments, teaching a new generation of campaigners how to confront the many challenges that face women in the modern world. The Stalled Revolution showcases how the wisdom from our collective struggles can help form the bedrock of a new and successful liberation campaign today.

1

The Two Great Anniversaries

In the spring of 2017, the government agreed to erect a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square.

The decision was well reported but many newspapers evidently did not expect their readers to know much about Millicent Fawcett. One newspaper ran the headline:

‘Who was Millicent Fawcett, the woman behind Parliament Square’s first female statue?’¹

The statue has considerable symbolic significance. It marks the hundredth anniversary of one of the most important events of the twentieth century. On 6 February 1918, the Royal Assent was granted to the Act that allowed women to vote in parliamentary elections. Later in that year over 8 million women voted for the first time in a General Election.

Millicent Fawcett led the Votes for Women campaign for nearly 30 years. In 1918 she and her allies won a glorious victory and, at the time, she was one of the most famous women in Britain.

But her fame has not lasted.

Emmeline Pankhurst, the other great leader of the campaign to secure votes for women, is rather better known.² Most people have heard of the suffragettes, whom she led, but they know very little about the nature of their struggle. When the film, Suffragette, was shown in 2015, the prejudice shown by the British establishment and the hardship suffered by the campaigners caused gasps in many cinemas.

This lack of knowledge is extraordinary. The campaign by women to secure the right to vote in parliamentary elections is one of the most momentous and inspiring stories of the last two hundred years. It changed the status of women in Britain and has a profound effect on the way we live today. Yet most people know less about the Votes for Women campaign than the marriages of Henry VIII.

The Second Anniversary

The year 2018 should also be commemorated for a second anniversary. It marks fifty years since the beginning of the great upsurge of feminist feeling that came to be known as the Women’s Liberation Movement.

The pioneers of the Women’s Liberation Movement have no statues to record their achievements and, although many of these pioneering women are still alive, they are even less well known than Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst. This is partly the result of modesty. The Women’s Liberation Movement was self-consciously egalitarian. It elected no leaders and rejected the cult of personality. But its achievements are all around us.

The Women’s Liberation Movement inspired the two great Acts of Parliament that were passed in the 1970s: the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act. Britain is far from being an equal society but many of the opportunities enjoyed by twenty-first century women can be traced back to the efforts of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

The movement aimed to transform the way women were regarded and treated. Changes in popular culture illustrate the extent of the Movement’s influence Pictures of nude women were taken down from workplace walls, the so-called Beauty Contests lost their popularity and eventually even the Benny Hill Show, with its cohort of young women squealing as most of their clothes were ‘accidentally’ removed, eventually disappeared from our television screens.

Surprisingly, the work of the Women’s Liberation Movement has fallen out of the popular consciousness. There appears to be an assumption that these changes in the role and status of women just arrived automatically as a matter of course. This is a dangerous piece of mythology. If we do not recognise the significance of the campaigns that won these important victories, we may delude ourselves into thinking that further improvements will come without effort.

There is also the need to establish a proper balance to the recollection of British history. It was said by a writer³ in The New Yorker, and repeated many times since, that the women’s movement was the most successful revolution of the twentieth century. Yet it is scarcely celebrated in this country. Indeed, unless they happen to sit on the throne, the achievements of women scarcely feature in popular accounts of our history. The coincidence of the two great anniversaries gives us an opportunity to restore these great victories, and the women who won them, to their proper place in the collective memory of Britain.

Extraordinary Women

We were able to interview many of the most committed members of the Women’s Liberation Movement. They all offered advice and encouragement to women campaigners.

Sheila Rowbotham told us that, ‘it is no longer enough to point out what we don’t like. We have to work out what sort of society we do want’.

Lynne Segal looked ahead: ‘We do not simply want equality with men; we want to change the value system… We have visions of a better life’.

Bea Campbell says we must persuade people to be open to change: They should “be prepared to be enlightened, enraged, amused and above all provoked’.⁴

Miriam David insisted that, ‘it is time for another women’s movement…. It seems to me that feminism is everywhere and yet nowhere (is it) influential or powerful’.⁵

For the suffrage campaigns we have relied on the autobiographies of the two leaders and the writing of their many supporters. Millicent Fawcett was an elegant and intelligent member of the British political class, demure when she wanted to be but with a turn of phrase that could skin an opponent. She was generous and often funded parts of the campaign with her own money. Everyone speaks of her warmth and humanity which inspired wonderful admiration and loyalty in her supporters. On her death one supporter wrote,

‘We were unspeakably proud of her.’⁶

Emmeline Pankhurst was a very different character, single-minded to an extraordinary degree, feared by the government and demanding unquestioning obedience from her followers. Slim and beautiful, Rebecca West called her, ‘a reed of steel’.⁷

She was an extraordinary public speaker although Ethel Smyth, Emmeline’s close friend, tells us that her other skills did not always match her soaring oratory. As part of the suffragettes’ campaign of militancy Emmeline Pankhurst recommended smashing the windows of the powerful. Unfortunately, during an afternoon of hilarious practice in Ethel Smyth’s garden, Emmeline Pankhurst failed to hit the target once. She had to leave the stone throwing to others.⁸

The achievements of the Votes for Women campaign and the Women’s Liberation Movement were hard-won. Emmeline Pankhurst was repeatedly jailed and frequently on hunger strike. However, perhaps because of her celebrity, she was never forcibly fed. Other suffragettes fared worse. The process was so gruesome that, after being forcibly fed for a fortnight, most prisoners were in a state of collapse. There are terrible stories of hardship. Emmeline’s daughter, Sylvia, was forcibly fed twice a day for five weeks. Constance Lytton had her health destroyed in prison and, like many others, she never fully recovered. Voting rights for women were earned by pain and suffering.

Members of the Women’s Liberation Movement did not have to endure prison and few were arrested but they had to take more than their share of abuse. Most of the press made little attempt to understand the movement’s motives. Instead of reporting the policies they preferred to libel the women. Supporters of the movement were portrayed as hairy, man-hating harridans with no sense of humour and no chance of attracting a man. It was a ridiculous, inaccurate and unworthy calumny but, in the way of such insults, it still hangs round the necks of female activists like a lead necklace.

Completing the Revolution

The suffrage campaigners believed, and the Women’s Liberation Movement hoped, that their victories would be followed by further progress towards a world where the needs of women would be given the same importance as the needs of men. It did not happen. Success was followed by disappointment. In each case the revolution stalled; in the late 1920s as a result of the Great Depression; in the 1980s with rising unemployment following Margaret Thatcher’s accession to power.

The work of the campaigners was never completed.

The question at the heart of this book is whether the time has come for a new liberation campaign and a third leap forward.

The need for improvement is very great. Violence against women is common in Britain. Each year, the number of rapes runs into scores of thousands and hundreds of thousands of women are assaulted in their own homes. Another terrible statistic: on average, two women are murdered each week by their partners. Too many women have to accept verbal and physical abuse as a normal part of their lives. Young women at many universities have had their student years ruined by the fast developing lad culture of disrespect for women.

Discrimination against women is much less obvious than the blatant injustice that was prevalent a generation ago, but women still face an accumulation of disadvantages. Perhaps they are not told of the best job opportunities, perhaps they get on the short list but never quite get the job and perhaps their best ideas are disregarded until a man says something similar, and takes the credit.

Women tend to occupy the worst paid jobs in our society and have little legal protection. Because most women are obliging, their compliance is taken for granted and their complaints are very often ignored. Even women with great talent and ambition find it difficult to navigate their way through to the top in a world that has been very obviously fashioned by men for the convenience of men.

Women in the finance sector, whom we quote in Chapter 7, have been taught by experience exactly how twenty-first century discrimination operates – below the radar and usually denied.

‘They tell us this place is a meritocracy but men are taken more seriously and always seem to get the best opportunities and the best jobs.’⁹

And when women have children the discrimination gets noticeably worse.

Some of this unfairness can be put right by enforcing the rights that are already on the statute book – for equal pay and for protection against discrimination. Making sure that more women are in positions of power in our companies and important institutions would also help. So would ensuring that the House of Commons contains as many women MPs as men. But these reforms, while valuable, will not – on their own – produce the new and better world that most women want.

Equality with men was the cry of the Votes for Women campaigners and it found an echo in the demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Achieving equality is necessary but many female activists through the ages have realised that equality with men is not enough. Because of the social and political failures of our society, many men lead cramped and depressing lives. There is no advantage in joining them in their misery. A new liberation campaign should have a loftier purpose. Women should not limit their ambition to what men have: they should focus on what women need.

Setting this higher and perhaps even utopian purpose means that it is not just the symptoms of inequality and discrimination that must be dealt with. As Veronica Jarvis Tichenor writes,

‘To strike at the heart of the gender structure, we must… aggressively disrupt and reconstruct assumptions that lie at the very core of who we think we are’.¹⁰

These assumptions about gender roles are often unhelpful but they buttress our sense of identity and are difficult to eliminate. Men are leaders and women are followers; men are self-confident and women are diffident; men are rational and women are emotional; women are good with babies and men are good with cars; women do the cooking and men go off to do something more important. Both sexes are trapped in stereotypes that limit our aspirations and make us fearfu...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Two Great Anniversaries
• 2 Days of Hope
• 3 Winning Votes for Women
• 4 The Women’s Liberation Movement
• 5 How the Revolutions Stalled
• 6 Lessons From Our History
• 7 Twenty-First Century Sexism and Inequality
• 8 Threats and Trepidation
• 9 New Writing on the Banner
• 10 Living the Impossible Dream
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Authors
• Index