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Fifty years on, we look back at the year that signalled the beginning of the modern era
"Is this all?" That was the question that echoed around a generation of US housewives in the early 1960s. Theirs was the problem with no name, wrote Betty Friedan in her 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, and the symptoms were legion. They included creeping fatigue, tranquiliser and alcohol abuse, bleeding blisters that appeared suddenly on their arms, which doctors attributed not to the cleaning fluids they used constantly, but a deeper malaise. In the years since the war, women had grown smaller (department store buyers reported they had shrunk three or four dress sizes), more feminine (30% of women dyed their hair blond), and apparently much sadder.
That icon of femininity, Marilyn Monroe, had died of an overdose the year before, and Sylvia Plath– just as outwardly feminine, but with a hidden, crackling rage – killed herself in London in 1963. Her death came not long after she published her novel, The Bell Jar. It was the story of Esther Greenwood, who goes to New York to take up an internship at a women's magazine, as Plath once had, before finding she can never quite match her inner life to the perfect face she has to present.
A desperate, exaggerated femininity was being held up as an ideal for all women. In January 1963, Gloria Steinem, then a freelance journalist, packed her leotard in a hat box and auditioned to become a Playboy Bunny in an undercover assignment for Show magazine. Steinem exposed the low pay, sexual harassment and racism – black women were sniggeringly referred to as "chocolate bunnies" – and later, when she had become a feminist leader, wrote that all women were treated as bunnies.
A US debate that had started tentatively with President John F Kennedy's 1961 commission on the status of women blew up with Friedan's book, and continued, in 1966, with the creation of the National Organisation for Women, which Friedan initially led. These ideas began floating over to the UK – the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham has said she began hearing arguments for women's liberation from the US and Germany around 1967. It was an age of early marriage in Britain, and larger families. The average age of first marriage for women in 1961 was 23.3, compared with 30 today; the average woman in 1964 had 2.95 children in her lifetime, while now she has 1.95.
The contraceptive pill arrived in the UK in 1961, but was mainly prescribed to married women – it wasn't until 1974 that it became widely, freely available. In her memoir, Promise of a Dream, Rowbotham writes that as a student in the early 1960s, "not only were we all ignorant about contraception, but we had no idea who we could ask for advice … Abortion, an inconceivable horror of gin and screams, was still illegal." That changed in 1967, with the passing of the Abortion Act.
Women were yoked to men economically, not just because they earned much less – in 1970, for instance, women's earnings as a proportion of men's earnings were 54.8% – but because they often needed a signature from their father or husband to gain credit or buy bigger items. The economic debate sharpened suddenly in 1968, when women at the Ford plant in Dagenham went on strike for equal pay. That same year, the Observer reported on an official study that showed "a massive wastage of women's abilities and qualifications" and "at least four million women used virtually as slave labour". Half of Britain's working women were earning less than five shillings an hour. The Dagenham strike led to the Equal Pay Act in 1970, followed by the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. But with only 4.6% of MPs being women in 1964, much of the action to change women's lives naturally took place at the grassroots. (The proportion of female MPs actually came in below 4.6% in every subsequent election until 1987, when it rose to a paltry 6.3%.)
In 1970, women organised a protest at the annual Miss World contest in London; that same year, the first National Women's Liberation Conference formulated demands for equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand. The following years brought the first national women's liberation march, the magazine Spare Rib, the publishing house Virago, the first women's refuge, Rape Crisis centres across the country, and campaigning groups including Southall Black Sisters. A body of feminist literature followed The Feminine Mystique, including Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman, novels by Angela Carter, Marilyn French, Alice Walker, memoirs and poems by Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.
The world had opened up for women, but like the suffrage movement half a century earlier, the triumph was brilliant but partial. Fifty years on, the pay gap is smaller, but persists, parents are still stymied by the dearth of affordable childcare, it's estimated that 69,000 women are raped in England and Wales each year, two a week are killed as a result of domestic violence, and the paucity of women in public life continues: just over 22% of MPs are women; and only 17.4% of the cabinet. 1963 changed a lot, but the next 50 years starts now.