Caught in the Crossfire - Women's Liberation in the Seventies

In 1993, in an introduction to a book Mary Varnham and I wrote about women's liberation in the seventies, called Heading Nowhere in a Navy Blue Suit, Australian feminist Dale Spender asked an unsettling question; Would those of us who took part in the women's liberation movement of the seventies be remembered as the generation of women who had solved women's problems, she asked, or as but another wave of feminists who fought and campaigned and made some gains for women, but ultimately were buried as our foremothers had been. Would our movement disappear and become invisible, as the first wave of feminism had, until such time as future feminist came across our contribution in the course of documenting our herstory, she wondered?

So it is ironic that Sandra Coney, Anne Else and others are here today recalling our memories of women's liberation in the seventies, much like a bunch of old soldiers might recall an historic event like the Battle of the Somme.

Certainly we cannot claim to be the generation of women who solved women's problems, although we did make some very real gains and brought about a significant change in male/female relationships. And while most of the generation of women who spearheaded the movement are not yet buried (with notable exceptions like Sharon Cederman and Sharon Alston whose tremendous contribution I would like to acknowledge) the movement we helped to create is invisible to today's generation of women, some of whom have taken to calling themselves Third Wave feminists — implying that we belonged to an historic, 'second wave' of feminism which has well and truly run its course.

My first encounter with the women's liberation movement, as it was then called, took place in 1971 when I came across this book Sisterhood is Powerful, at Sydney airport and smuggled it back, past the censors who at that time prohibited any books which discussed sex from entering New Zealand. (The book had entire chapters devoted to the politics of the orgasm and female sexuality).

My friends and I were riveted by the book and spent hours devouring and discussing its contents. Every page of the book spoke directly to me, and through it I began to see the world through a new pair of lens. It suddenly became blindingly obvious that our entire society was organised to suit men's needs, at the expense of women. Men were in control of every institution in the land, including families; their lives revolved around work and they left their wives and children at home alone in the suburbs all day without a passing thought, and often all night as well while they went off with their mates to pubs or men's clubs.

Women put up with their long absences and lack of support uncomplainingly, as we had all been brought up to believe that our role and purpose in life was to please men and look after them and their children, and to put their needs ahead of our own. There was a clear, unspoken expectation that we would derive our satisfaction in life by getting married, and thereafter living our lives vicariously through our husbands, supporting them, sharing their triumphs, subjugating our hopes and dreams to theirs and exchanging our sexual and domestic services in return for their financial support. Psychiatric theory at the time assumed there was something wrong with a woman if she wasn't perfectly adjusted to marriage and motherhood, because getting married and having children was thought to be a naturally fulfilling state for all women.

After reading Sisterhood is Powerful I could see that this was all a massive con, and so I set off with evangelical fervour, to point out to women that the widely held notion that women were inferior to men was just a massive con to keep us in our place. I joined in consciousness raising groups, where we talked openly and freely about our experiences for the first time and quickly discovered that many — indeed most — of our problems were not personal ones arising from our inadequacy, but were caused by trying to conform to the rigid stereotypes and roles all women were expected to live by. I helped set up Auckland University women's liberation, and organise events such as a mock funeral service on Suffrage Day to mourn the lack of progress women had made since getting the vote in 1893. Donna Awatere wrote a song How Much Longer Must We Wait, and we marched in a funeral procession, complete with a coffin, to Queen Victoria's statue and gave out the first ever Suffrage Day awards. I spoke at meetings all over the country — to men's groups like Rotarians as well as women's groups, and liberated men's bars like this one where we liberated the Great Northern pub which excluded women. I took pleasure in informing the 1972 Labour party conference — it is not your penis we have been envying all these years, but your freedom. And in confiding in television British personality Alan Whicker that New Zealand men were hopeless sexually. They wouldn't know what a clitoris was, I said mispronouncing the word; their idea of sex was a thrusting penis — a slur on men's sexuality that caused outrage when the documentary was screened primetime in England and then back home here.

It was all exhilarating, heady stuff. Our agenda was simple, our cause was just. (We wanted to forge our own identities, have as many opportunities and choices as men, to be paid the same as men, have control of our own fertility.) We were convinced that all we needed to do was present our cause and our demands would be met. We even thought it would be easy. Once men saw how unjustly women were treated we naively assumed they would set about to change their ways.

But far from embracing our new message, men generally and the news media in particular, ignored or ridiculed the women's liberation movement and painted us as a marginal, unhappy bunch of lesbians with chips on our shoulder, whose message was irrelevant to most women's lives.

"The popular image labels women's liberation as a radical movement of man-hating lesbians who have burnt their bras, thrown away their cosmetics and taken up karate --a sort of female Vietcong set on inciting suburban housewives to rise up and dominate men."

But then word reached us that a stroppy Australian woman who was making waves in Britain was returning to Australia to promote her best selling book about women's liberation, The Female Eunuch. I had the bright idea of contacting Germaine Greer to see if she would pop across to New Zealand, and the rest as they say, is herstory. The New Zealand Sunday Herald agreed to sponsor her visit, and for the first time in New Zealand a radical women's liberationist was given the sort of news media coverage normally accorded only to royalty. And so too were her ideas. Suddenly the dangerously subversive ideas of women's liberation were being discussed on prime time television and on the front pages of the nation's daily newspapers, giving the movement a legitimacy it had never had and introducing thousands of New Zealanders to feminism. Dame Fiona Kidman was a young mother at the time and came along to hear her speak at Victoria University: I was bowled over by the whole experience, she said. The place was absolutely packed. People were literally hanging from the rafters and here was this absolutely electrifying woman speaking and it was someone opening a window into my life. 17 year old student Trevor Mallard also attended her lecture at Victoria University and said she started him thinking on a completely new track. "No doubt she changed my life, She made me question all my expectations about the male role." He was so impressed by Germaine Greer that he joined the spontaneous street demonstrations in Wellington to protest at her arrest for saying fuck and bullshit, and found himself embroiled in hassles with police.

Admittedly there were times during her whirlwind visit when her feminist message was drowned out by the controversy surrounding her sensational obscenity trial, which I was a witness at, and had to climb through a back fire escape to get into. And by rumblings within the movement as to why so much attention was being given to a white middle class heterosexual feminist.

An interesting aspect of her tour, most of which was organised by the New Zealand Herald, was that men chaired most of her public meetings, and television celebrity Brian Edwards took her out on a highly publicised dinner date and wrote about it afterwards. Interesting too, was the fact that men played a small role in the early days of the women's movement. A few were given roles the National Organisation for Women, that we set up in 1972 and Dr Fraser McDonald was a key figure in the early movement and given a Suffrage award, for coining the phrase suburban neurosis, and exposing the fact that that far from being fulfilled and content with their lot, one in four women at the time suffered from depression or psychiatric illness and were living on tranquillisers, or mothers little helpers, as they were called at the time.

Dr Fraser McDonald was a forthright and fearless supporter of women's liberation, a wonderful man who was way ahead of his time and who, as the Superintendent of Kingseat Psychiatric Hospital, gave legitimacy to our cause and credibility to our argument that that we were not creating problems, but simply articulating them. He argued that most married women were so totally at the mercy of their husbands, and in such a state of total economic, emotional dependence that they were effectively slaves.

So when I was approached by a young radical publisher, Alister Taylor, to write a book about women's liberation, it seemed only natural to co-author Sharon Cederman and I that we would interview men as well as women.

We took the view that men would inevitably be affected by women's liberation and changes in women's role, and that a radical change was needed in men's as well as women's lives. "Men are as unfree as women, we wrote, for slaves enslave their masters. Men and women keep each other in mutual enslavement and it would therefore only be together when both sexes recognised their mutual enslavement that they would be able to escape."

We pointed out in the book that there was a kind of barter at the heart of traditional relationships. Women were totally dependent on men financially and were passed on as a financial responsibility from father to husband. Women in turn took over the role a man's mother had played in adolescence and childhood, looked after him and nurtured him and provided him with emotional security. His power lay in her financial dependence upon him. Her power lay in his emotional dependence upon her. So each sex held each other in a mutually dependent grip.

What would happen to the traditional, mutually dependent relationships, we wondered, when women were no longer prepared to play second fiddle, to mother men or automatically sacrifice their needs to men? How would men react when women spoke back to them and demanded that they do their share of housework and childrearing.

We were aware that as women had begun to change, many relationships had become a battlefield; the last frontier or testing ground, of the revolution, and so we interviewed men and women about how women's liberation was affecting their relationships.

The interviews in Sexist Society and a book The Sexual Wilderness that I wrote in the early eighties, provide a rare glimpse of the resentment, anger, confusion and abandonment many men felt when their wives became involved in the women's movement, and became more assertive on the home front.
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"I was married in 1970 and feminism had reared its ugly head by then," Jim explained. It was around, and the first onslaught of feminism was as savage as anything. It was sort of like landing on D Day with all the shells and rockets and machine guns coming at you. We men were the perpetrators of all these terrible things through the ages and our generation was the first one that had the chance to try and make up for it all. But unfortunately we didn't know what we should do, so all we did was stand there and cop all the bullets. Here was this new idea, and men were being hammered and pilloried. Men were being told that they shouldn't play the traditional masculine role, making all the decisions and then putting their feet up. So now we were desperately trying to work out what the proper new role was supposed to be. And I think a lot of us ended up by being blubbering wimps in response, just because we bent over backwards trying not to be like all the other guys who used to order their women around.

Another man, David, blamed women's liberation for ruining his marriage. "My wife changed in the course of four or five years from being a very warm, sexy female who really liked men, into a woman who now spends most of her time with her women friends running men down and being jealous of the male role, David complained. What she did was create around herself a network of women which I couldn't penetrate. She was going off with her women friends two or three nights a week and talking and gossiping endlessly with them. I discovered later that while I was sitting at home raging because she was off talking with these bloody women again, the husbands of the other women were also sitting at home feeling as lonely and rejected as me.

What these women's groups did was blame everything on men and wallow in self pity. That's what makes me angry — the man hating aspect of feminism. They hear about the terrible things that have happened to their friends and they egg each other on: Get hold of that matrimonial property act! Don't let that monster do that. Get the children.

Personally, David concluded, I think most women and most men are worse off than they were before feminism. Twenty-five years ago when divorce was almost unheard of and the rules of marriage were fairly clearly defined, it was possible for two people to survive inside a marriage even though they might be unhappy in their relationship. The man would go off to work and to his club, and the woman kept the house neat and tidy, and they could just box on until they died. Now in a way I think we're all worse off. As a result of feminism women have got much higher expectations about what they can get out of life and quite frankly I don't think they'll ever be able to realise those expectations.

David was right about women's heightened expectations of men and their relationships. Whereas previous generations of women had been conditioned to be unassertive, masochistic and self sacrificing, to blame themselves for their problems and to put up with very little emotional sustenance in their relationships with men, many women in the seventies raised their expectations of themselves and their relationships to the point where they were no longer prepared, as their mothers had been, to be doormats anymore, or put up with relationships that were emotionally unsatisfying.

And whereas women in earlier generations who were totally dependent financially on men could ill afford the luxury of dwelling upon their dissatisfactions with men, women who were becoming financially independent of men could.

Personally I'm not prepared to settle for anything less than a totally nurturing person as a partner now, one of the women we interviewed called Anne explained. I'm looking for a completely different type of man than I was a decade ago. I'm looking for an emotionally liberated men, and I can you the field is really narrow.

Her search was made all the harder by the fact that many men, not having undergone a similar metamorphism, were still looking for traditional, non threatening women and traditional relationships. "Most of the men I meet, Heather complained, are still looking for women who fit the traditional role, who will move in and take over where their ex wife left off.

In our book Sexist Society, we predicted that once men realised how confined they were by the male role, that they would seek to be liberated from it too and would welcome more equal relationships with women. We would soon see the emergence of a serious men's liberation movement in New Zealand, we prophesied, and men would begin to communicate with one another just as women were.

Germaine Greer shared our optimism. If women liberate themselves, they will perforce liberate their oppressors, she predicted in the Female Eunuch.

How wrong we were. After the first few years of the women's liberation movement men were excluded from its ranks and thereafter from its consideration while women concentrated on women's issues, women's concerns. Scant attention was paid to how women's emerging independence was altering the balance of male/female relationships, and there was little interest in or discussion about how men were faring amidst all the changes and challenges to the traditional male role.

Nor did we give much thought to the obvious discrepancy — while women were getting together and sharing their experiences and scrutinising the female role, few men had even begun to question theirs. It simply hadn't occurred to most men that the changes the women's movement was provoking in women would call into question their lives or behaviour.

When I interviewed men and women for my second book The Sexual Wilderness in the early eighties, I found that while women had been busy growing and changing throughout the seventies, most men, in an emotional sense, had stood still. They had sat back, metaphorically speaking, with their feet on the table and a beer can in each hand, watching the rugby on television. The women's movement was about women's problems, they rationalised, not men's and if they could just keep their heads down, with a bit of luck, it would roll right over them and leave them unaffected.

Even if men were floundering, as a result of the new pressures and expectations on them, they had no support system, as women had. And they had an ingrained belief that confiding in other men about their personal problems would be tantamount to admitting failure. "If I told a mate my marriage was in big trouble and I thought my wife wanted to leave me, the mate would probably think, here's a chance — I must give her a call," Jim pointed out.

There were no books written about how men were coping with the changes women were making, and very few men's groups or role models of new, non traditional men either. Because men didn't talk about what was happening to them, they were unaware that the problems they were wrestling with were common to their entire generation of men.

Simple logic would suggest that if one sex changes and the other stands still, the relationship between them will lose its balance. Men's and women's traditional roles were so interdependent and so precariously balanced they were like an old fashioned pair of scales, so it was inevitable that if one sex changed and the other stood still, the scales would lose their balance.

This was what had happened in the course of the seventies, I concluded in the Sexual Wilderness. As women became more assertive and independent, and were no longer prepared to orient their entire lives around men and their needs, many relationships were thrown into turmoil and many broke up under the strain.

To be fair, some men responded well to the changes, and adjusted to more equal relationships. But many of the men we interviewed felt threatened by the new demands being made of them, and were clearly afraid of losing the power, privileges and control they had become used to in traditional relationships. As Heather observed in the Sexual Wilderness: "It would be wonderful if men would change, but I don't feel optimistic that they will because I don't see their motivation to change. The kind of change that women have been through is really difficult and very painful and a lot of us have gone through it only because it was better than what we had before. But that's not the way it is for most men. They're relatively comfortable the way they are so I don't really see them giving that up."

As a result of men's reluctance to change, many women who had metamorphosed into a new type of women found they were unable to find a new type of man they could relate to any more. "It's excruciatingly painful to have to face the fact that having done all this work on myself, there just aren't any men around I can relate to any more, Heather explained. "Every time I think about it I feel angry and cheated and let down and frustrated. I feel angry at men and sad for myself I don't want to be on my own for the rest of my life.

Another woman, Jessica, complained "I feel as if I am a woman out of my time. I imagine what I'm experiencing is similar to what many women experienced during the first and second world wards, when all the men were overseas. Come to think of it, there are a whole raft of women like myself who are living their lives like war widows, without men or any expectation of having them in their lives.

There is no doubt that the seventies were a painful transition time for many people and a time of change and upheaval in relations between the sexes. Women's liberation touched a raw nerve in society. It shook the emotional foundations of society, as women struggled to steer their way through the sexual minefield. Some women like Jessica and Heather found they had paid an extremely high price for their hard-won freedom and independence, on their own without any emotional support. Men like David and Jim, on the other hand, found themselves caught in the crossfire, confused and uncertain how they should respond as women sought to change the rules in relationships and make them more equal.

But despite all the struggles and the pain of the transition, looking back I believe that we are better off as a result of the women's movement of the seventies. And it's not just the practical gains that I am referring to here — childcare, equal opportunities with men, the right to control our own fertility, but to the psychological gains. The women's movement in the seventies did to relations between the sexes what Doctor Spock did to childrearing in the sixties. It enabled us to the shed the rigid sex roles and expectations that had constrained and frustrated previous generations of women and to some extent men, and in so doing it allowed a more equal, more tolerant and more flexible relationship between the sexes to emerge, one that was far more in keeping with our egalitarian ethos.

Sure the serious men's liberation movement that we looked forward to has never eventuated, and the jury is still out as to how much men have changed over the past three decades, but I do know that Jim and David and most of the men I interviewed have made huge strides since then.

Sure there is a lot of unfinished business and the changes have given rise to a new set of problems that we hadn't anticipated back then, but the gains were substantial nevertheless.

In an interview in the New Zealand Herald in January 1972 a reporter asked a group of young women's liberationists what was the ultimate goal of women's liberation. The ultimate goal, we explained, was the emergence of a New Woman, an autonomous, self-reliant female who will enjoy equality with men and be able to develop her potential in whatever direction she chooses. The New Women will have more confidence and therefore will much richer relationships with men as a result, we predicted.

The New Women will be executives as well as typists, pilots as well as airhostesses, doctors as well as nurses, depending on their ability and vocation, we explained. Some of the roles women vacate will be taken up by men. The gentler type of man, who isn't the pushy, aggressive type, will take on some of the nurturing kind of roles.

Men in turn will no longer be expected to shoulder the entire economic burden of providing for families and will be able to more involved with their families as a result. They would not have to fit into the role of being the aggressor, of being the one who takes the first steps in a relationship, of always being the one to initiate everything, always the decision-maker.

At the time this all sounded visionary and unrealistic. But looking back I believe we have in general terms achieved that goal.

So instead of mourning the passing of the second wave of feminism, I think we can justly be proud of the women who spearheaded those changes, and we can celebrate the fact that many, if not all, of our goals have been achieved.