Ladies drink Babycham
Maeve Binchy reminds us what it was like before all this started

Now it all seems like a costume drama played out many years ago. A world of posturing, and pretending, and anxiety. A game played by rules which had been in place for ever.

A job was simply something to fill in the time between leaving school and getting married. A career? It didnt really exist apart from those few who fought for it.

They were called “career women”, with a sniff of disapproval and pity, women who had failed to get a husband, and therefore had to sublimate their lives as teachers, librarians, nurses.

These were the years when girls were watched carefully by parents, elder sisters, and relatives in case they might Go Too Far, and become Damaged Goods.

A girl had huge responsibility in those days, she had to make herself look good in order to attract a husband, but not too good for fear of attracting too much of the wrong sort of attention.

Women wore modesty vests then. This is true, not an imagined relic from the bad old days. The sight of a cleavage might inflame men, so a triangle of material was placed in the vee neck to avoid any accidental sighting.

And if such inflamation were to occur?

Whose fault was it? The girl’s of course. Men were born with a longing and eagerness to continue the species, it was the job of women to ensure that such continuance was contained within the bonds of Holy Matrimony. It seemed perfectly reasonable back then . . .

The 1950s and and 1960s were crowded with grateful wives, women whose men had Stood By Them when the unfortunate matter of pregnancy occurred, men who did not disappear.

Weddings were arranged hastily with bad temper by the bride’s family and the premature babies arrived two months early. These women were for ever in debt to husbands, who called in the favour long and often by keeping erratic hours and questionable company . . . but hey, they had been there on the day that counted, so they were entitled. If these marriages, strained to the limit, were about to end the woman had few sources of help.

Officially there was of course the Married Women’s Status Act of 1957, hailed at the time as a huge step forward for women. But in fact it didnt help women who wanted to make financial arrangememnts, take out or cash, insurance, or have a credit card without a husband’s consent. Small wonder that so many of them went to illegal money lenders.

People today don’t really believe that a woman’s domicile used to be where her husband lived.

If her husband was working on the lump in London under a series of different names what access did she have to him?

She couldn’t sue him for maintenance in this country since her domicile was, by law, Britain.

Women had much lower expectations in those days. They assumed that the boys in the family would get the university education if there was any going. After all, these were men who were going to have to earn money and look after a family of their own. Women would be subsumed into a husband’s care. A university education was a waste really.

There were a million irritating things, like a woman couldnt drink a pint in a bar. If ordered it came as two halves. Perfectly normal, sound men shook their heads and said it was unnatural to see a woman raising a pint glass.

In office canteens there were two kinds of meal. A gent’s lunch with two potatoes, a lady’s lunch with one.

Anyone coming to a house for any purpose asked the woman if he could speak to the man of the house.

People genuinely feared the notion of a woman bus driver, a woman surgeon, a woman president, a woman luggage handler. Being women they would have so much on their minds already, like crying children, and dishes about to burn in ovens . . . how could they keep their eye on the ball?

Of course they survived, this generation, and grew up to walk into the sunshine of what the Sisters had fought for.

For some it was too late.

They still felt safe in a world where a man doled out the housekeeping money note by note yet did not reveal his pay packet.

There were some who thought that supporting feminism might mean turning their backs on their own femininity which had served them so well over the years. They were happy to keep the old order.

There was no point in dragging them out kicking and screaming, women who had been brought up to be what they thought of as “ladies”, women who drank Babycham because the ads suggested that it was more feminine than belting back a gin, a whiskey, or, God forbid, a pint.

But still it was hard to see the lack of self-esteem. The women who apologised for being “just a housewife”.

In vain, you could tell them that they didn’t marry a house, they were people afraid to give their opinions and views in case it seemed pushy, timid about showing any area of expertise lest it look like ball-breaking.

But that was long ago.

Today’s women know that they can keep their names and keep their jobs after marriage without diminishing an equal relationship. Their husbands or partners share with them the business of looking after a family. It’s not tidied away as womans work.

There is no job or position too high for them to aspire to. The church, of course, has been slower than the State to realise this. But it will.

And we owe all this to the brave people who said it wasn’t enough to think equal we had to be equal and went out and fought for it. Forty years ago.