Might the cleavage between the subjective and objective have been badly made; might the opposition between a universe of science—entirely outside of self—and a universe of consciousness—defined by the total presence of self to self—be untenable? And if realistic analysis fails will biology find its method in an ideal analysis of the psychomathematical type, in Spinozistic intellection? Or might not value and signification be intrinsic determinations of the organism which could only be accessible to a new mode of ‘comprehension’?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
‘The Structure of Behaviour’, p. 10
The intellectual pressure to make the whole world whole again has come from mystics like Lao-Tse, scientists like Whitehead and Needham and Merleau-Ponty, and as brilliant speculation from Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Borges. Their words were not specifically addressed to women, because all of them felt that the polarity of the sexes was the basic alienation of man from himself, but none of them would reject the idea that their words were a special encouragement to women to undertake the work of saving mankind. Perhaps my treatment of their highly sophisticated arguments has been brutal, but reverence before authority has never accomplished much in the way of changing things. In inventing a new mythology one must plunder all sources, letting the situation into which the ideas fall serve as their crucible. Most of the defects pointed out by critics of women are simply the results of their having been sheltered from the subtler and more effective types of enculturation which their society lavished upon its male leaders. The strengths they have are of sheer ignorance.
Dominant ideas need not always be so obvious for them to exert just as powerful an organizing influence on the way a person thinks and approaches a problem. Old and adequate ideas, like old and adequate cities, come to polarize everything around them. All organization is based on them, all things are referred to them. Minor alterations can be made on the outskirts, but it is impossible to change the whole structure radically and very difficult to shift the centre of organization to a different place.21
Facing this problem, Edward de Bono devised a series of exercises to develop the faculty he called lateral thinking. Lateral thought is the kind which produces ideas and inventions, rather than demonstrable solutions to specific problems. It is the kind of problem solving which would not get you good marks for method in an examination, and is nevertheless right. It cannot be duplicated by a computer, which only has to learn what it is fed and a method to deal with it. In fact lateral thinking is a one-dimensional analogue of the child’s modes of thought. A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.
The prevailing criticism of the female soul can best be explained by the male battle to repress certain faculties in their own mental functioning. Women possessed in abundance those qualities which civilized men strove to repress in themselves, just as children and savages did. The value of such criticism is in the degree to which it reveals the severity of the contouring of the ideal personality, that is to say, male criticism of the female mind is revealing only of the male himself. Men in our culture crippled themselves by setting up an impossible standard of integrity: women were not given the chance to fool themselves in this way. Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
For a Tear is an Intellectual thing,
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe
Is an Arrow from the Almightie’s Bow.
Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, pl.52
If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality? What will hold us back from Weininger’s fate? Most women who have arrived at positions of power in a man’s world have done so by adopting masculine methods which are not incompatible with the masquerade of femininity. They still exploit the sadomasochistic hook-up of the sexes, in which ‘we have only the choice of being hammer or anvil’.22 Wanda wore feminine clothes to add poignancy to her torture of Gregor, just as Mrs Castle made sure that she looked attractive when she went to berate the workers as a criminal and irresponsible element in society. It is up to women to develop a form of genuine womanpower against which the Omnipotent Administrator in frilly knickers cannot prevail.
There is much to suggest that when human beings acquired the powers of conscious attention and rational thought they became so fascinated with these new tools that they forgot all else, like chickens hypnotized with their beaks to a chalk line. Our total sensitivity became identified with these partial functions so that we lost the ability to feel nature from the inside, and more, to feel the seamless unity of ourselves and the world. Our philosophy of action falls into the alternatives of voluntarism and determinism, because we have no sense of the wholeness of the endless knot and of the identity of its actions and ours.
A. E. Watts, ‘Nature, Man and Woman’, 1958, p.12
Womanpower means the self-determination of women, and that means that all the baggage of paternalist society will have to be thrown overboard. Woman must have room and scope to devise a morality which does not disqualify her from excellence, and a psychology which does not condemn her to the status of a spiritual cripple. The penalties for such delinquency may be terrible for she must explore the dark without any guide. It may seem at first that she merely exchanges one mode of suffering for another, one neurosis for another. But she may at last claim to have made a definite choice which is the first prerequisite of moral action. She may never herself see the ultimate goal, for the fabric of society is not unravelled in a single lifetime, but she may state it as her belief and find hope in it.
The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist of this, that man and maid, freed from all false feeling and aversion, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbours, and will come together as human beings.23
Work
Women form thirty-eight per cent of the work force in England, which means that half the women between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four work outside their homes.1 The average wage of women in administrative, technical and clerical work is less than £12 a week; men in the same industries earn an average of £28 a week. Male manual workers average £20 a week, females £10. However, equal pay for equal work will not make as great a difference in these figures as women might hope. The pattern of female employment follows the course of the role that she plays outside industry: she is almost always ancillary, a handmaid in the more important work of men. Of two and a half million women employed in manufacturing industry in 1967, 750,000 were described by the Ministry of Labour as semi-skilled, and 700,000 were employed in administrative, technical and clerical work, mostly we may be sure in the last category. By far the largest number of men working in manufacturing industry are skilled operatives, or in training to become so. In only three trades do the skilled women outnumber others—clothing, footwear and pottery. Of the nine million women in employment in this country only two per cent are in administrative positions and only five per cent in professions. Only two million female workers are members of trade unions. Three times as many girls as boys leave school at fifteen: only one-third of A-level students are girls, and only a quarter of university students. Three-quarters of the eighteen-year-old girls in o
ur society receive no training or higher education at all.2 The pattern that emerges is that of an inert, unvalued female work force, which is considered as temporary labour, docile, but unreliable. More than half the working women in this country are married, and the assumption is that the family is their principal concern, that work outside the home brings in a little extra for perks, that they have no ambition. By and large the assumptions are correct, but they prejudice the chances of the other half, the women who have to support themselves. Even where women do exactly the same work as men, the rate is from five per cent to two per cent lower, but righting this inequity will do little to ease the lot of the majority of female workers.
Possibly because of the mute significance of the fact that 1969 was the fiftieth anniversary of female suffrage in Britain the annual Conference of the Trades Union Council rang with stirring speeches by female delegates, and pledged itself to prosecuting the struggle for equal pay for equal work, even to the extent of supporting strikes by female workers, and indeed striking on their behalf. The then Prime Minister pointed out that the country could not afford the estimated cost of such a raise, that it would have to be awarded gradually year-by-year, while his Cabinet racked its brains for a new kind of productivity deal to apply to this situation. The potential of female agitation had already been felt in the strike of women workers at the Ford Plant in Dagenham,3 which Barbara Castle dealt with by the disgusting expedient of having a cuppa with the women and talking it over heart to heart. The working women were too polite to point out that Mrs Castle’s £8,500 salary might have been equal to the pay of other Cabinet members but that women working in the House of Commons canteen were earning thirty shillings less than men doing the same work, but then nobody pointed out that the female clerks at TUC headquarters were earning less than the men. The TUC had the year before rejected the idea of a commission to investigate women’s status and opportunities in industry, while Mrs Joyce Butler’s private members Bill for a Sex Discrimination Board had failed in the Commons for ‘lack of time’.
The small influence of women in State leadership is in large measure due to women’s own inertia…Not only do women show little desire to win a place in political leadership, but the great majority of them accept the system of justification invented by men to rationalize their standing aside from it. Curiously, they sometimes seem to be more uncompromising than men in this regard, and more anti-feminist.
Maurice Duverger, ‘The Political Role of Women’, UNESCO, 1955, p.126
The TUC Conference was panting for legislation but its naïve confidence was not echoed by more detached analysts of the situation. They could see that equal pay might mean that where women did not have the advantage of being cheaper they might not be employed at all, and women’s work might become more and more segregated in the semi-skilled and unskilled categories.4 The effect of breaking down the distinction in male and female appointments in the advertising of jobs is ultimately to drive discrimination underground, so that women apply for jobs which are not designated according to sex but which they have no chance of getting. The sad fact is that prejudice and discrimination cannot be legislated out of existence. Certainly laws will not bring women with training and constructive interest in their jobs into being. By and large women themselves are not interested in the problem. Their failure to unionize themselves and the failure of unionized women to be active within their unions is partly attributable to the claims of home, claims admitted by the TUC which sought to institute safeguards against women being forced to work overtime and night shifts. The women argued that they were ready to accept the same inconveniences as men suffer but the men were unwilling to allow their own claims on the unpaid labour of housewives to be jeopardized.5 There was even mention of setting up nurseries to be run by management and unions cooperatively at factories. The intrusion of sex and children adds a tinge of frivolity to the arguments: in fact, an employer who faces problems of organizing his employees’ children as well as themselves might well be inclined to discriminate more and more, notwithstanding the sobering reflection that the mass rally of women workers organized by the national Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights on 18 May 1969 attracted no more than a thousand.6 The activist women are forced in such an eventuality to make up for their rareness by an increase in raucousness invoking the mockery and sabotage of their own sex. The case of gallant Mrs Lillian Bilocca springs to mind: because of her agitation, Hull trawlermen sent out in fishing boats into the freezing gales of the North Sea in winter grew to the status of national martyrs. Her handsome angry face graced every national newspaper, and her vulgar rhetoric supplied rousing copy which eventually forced action on her menfolk’s behalf. Nowadays Mrs Bilocca is unemployable, and the crowning insult was delivered on behalf of her sex by Skipper Laurie Oliver, secretary of the Hull Trawler Officers’ Guild:
I have been asked by the wives of some of my members to state that the action of Mrs Bilocca has not enhanced the image the public may have of fishermen’s wives. Women who have lost men in the three ships have had the least to say about it, which is what we admire. The idea of forming a women’s committee to fight battles for the men is, to my mind, completely ludicrous.7
Conventions 110 and 111 of the ILO Convention are to be ratified by the British government. They relate to equality of pay and opportunity for women. The Prime Minister excused this failure on the grounds that the government couldn’t ratify the convention knowing that it had failed to fulfil the conditions required by it. In such a chicken-and-egg situation what can happen? As if that were not enough in itself to fire indignation, it is unlikely that the ILO formulation will be accepted, for it stipulates equal pay for work of equal value: our rulers have leapt at the loophole supplied by the Common Market resolution that women should be awarded equal pay for identical work, which means that renaming a woman’s job can justify unequal pay. One of the most disheartening aspects of the situation for the feminist is the reflection that in those unions where women have won equal pay it has been awarded to them by men. At the 1969 TUC Conference which demanded equal pay there were only 51 women delegates and more than 1,200 men. Meanwhile, women working in banks have an incremental scale which stops at £800 p.a., while men’s rises to £1,100: hardly more than one woman in thirty earns even as much as the average man’s wage. Bus conductresses were lured into the industry by equal pay when staffing became a problem, but they cannot become drivers, garage managers or inspectors; when one-man buses come in they will be laid off or employed at lower wages in the canteens. And yet three thousand drivers are still needed. As long as Mr Wilson said that women workers could have equal pay if higher paid workers footed the bill he had the perfect formula for invoking male paranoia, and women will continue to labour at home for nothing and in industry for a pittance. We have yet to see what his decision to grant women equal pay for equal work by gradual stages will mean in real terms.
In speaking to women in paid employment I am not speaking of the greatest proportion of British women who are housewives: sixteen million of them. The house-wife is not paid at all, although Lady Summerskill’s Matrimonial Property Bill of 1964 established her right to keep half the housekeeping allowance. Such legislation could only benefit the affluent, for it could not of course constrain husbands to give an allowance which was double what the family actually required. The number of wives who actually do earn and save on their housekeeping allowance must be very small. In fact all divorce legislation for the protection of abandoned wives has the same curious character; it applies realistically only to the affluent, who seem to be by far the minority if the average wage of men and women in industry is anything to go by. The less than affluent have no choice but to stay married for their wives have no financial independence at all; cohabitation is all that they can afford. The Tory document ‘A Fair Share for the Fair Sex’ has hardly any useful application to the majority of wives, although the three thousand elegantly hatted delegates to the 41st Annual Women’s Confere
nce of the Conservative Party may have found it enthralling.8 Likewise the Family Law (Reform) Bill applies to a tiny minority, and the actions for Breach of Promise, Restitution of Conjugal Rights and Enticement and Seduction which it abolished were already anachronistic and rare. This effect of the Matrimonial Property Bill, which enables wives to demand a settlement and restitution of money invested in the conjugal home or business, was to make divorce even more the prerogative of the rich. The Law Commission has been investigating the possibilities of an abandoned wife claiming damages from the Other Woman: again in terms of hard fact it is a rare Other Woman who has the wherewithal to pay damages. Marriage could be more sordid than ever if such actions became at all common. Most likely a sued Other Woman would have to ask her husband to undertake payments for her, which would be no different to alimony in effect. Just as the nation cannot afford equal pay for equal work it cannot afford to redeem women from the financial feudalism of marriage. If a kind of national insurance for wives against abandonment were instituted it would be seen by the Sunday papers as a government sanction for immorality. In any case, despite the heavy taxation of middle-income groups in Britain, such a scheme is economically unfeasible. Housewives must remain economic casualties of the whole system, for all disproportion between the cost of living and real earnings must be buffered by them while they can expect no independence or freedom of movement to compensate.