40 years on: was it all worth it?
Kathy Sheridan asks whether the struggles of the last 40 years have actually made women’s lives better

FEMINISM AT 40? Shouldn’t it be heading into the best years of its life about now? At ease with the family. Interesting social life. On top of the job. It might be equality – or (pursed lips, please) Having It All. Either way, all those years ago, feminism promised something a whole lot better than what had gone before.

But who would have predicted the confusion that would ensue? How the notion of choice and empowerment would become scrambled with “It” bags, Botox, boob jobs, baby-food diets and blow-jobs on demand. How education, talent and articulacy would be deemed inadequate in themselves; women would have to be overtly sexy too. How sitting through a little hard porn or doing a pole-dance for the lads would be classed as a bit of fun and, like, really empowering?

Some things were predictable. Building a career, sharing the mortgage, reliable contraception, would result in older first-time mothers and smaller families. But who forecast that children would become fetishised and motherhood a cult? Or that mothers would become each other’s nemeses, the weapon of choice being the latest Daily Hate headline about some study or survey. Or that the same mothers would morph into the “sandwich generation” – trapped between small children/needy teenagers and aging parents – and find themselves Doing It All. Or worse: pretending not to be Doing It All, lest they failed their daughters as role models or had to admit they needed help.

Having It All was turning out to be bloody hard, however you measured it. By way of encouragement, they were showered with brickbats. The hussies who still remembered the “deserted wives” and aspired to economic independence were even blamed for causing the housing bubble. The extended family unit – and the babysitting pool – was shattered as young couples moved away to the more affordable commuter counties. And study after study showed that women continued – and still continue – to do the bulk of the caring and cleaning, three times more than men, according to figures collated by the National Women’s Council.

Yet, in this new economic reality, it is the women who are keeping it together. In the western region alone, the construction crash accounted for 82 per cent of all job losses between 2007 and 2009 – almost all men, according to a study by the Western Development Commission. Who now would suggest that the little woman’s job is just a selfish indulgence?

So the emergence of woman as breadwinner is surely a triumph for feminism – or is it? “It’s no great victory,” says Orla O’Connor of the NWCI. “It just means that the pressure is on [working women], especially in lower-income families, to manage the burden of enormous personal debt and to bring in

the money”. In that context, it’s worth noting that even after adjusting for men’s longer working hours, women’s hourly earnings are still only 87 per cent of men’s. Is it any wonder that many women yearn for a simpler life?

The latest British TV advertising phenomenon, commissioned for retailer John Lewis, taps brilliantly into this, with its depiction of a woman moving serenely through life’s rites of passage, enveloped in a softly-lit, heart-warming domesticity, all to the soundtrack of a cover version of Billy Joel’s Always a Woman. The only concession to modernity is a glimpse of her tapping happily on a laptop in her living room, a madly engaged family behind her.

Many column inches have been devoted to analysing the impact of an ad that, laptop apart, would have been culturally appropriate 50 years ago. What, precisely, is being sold here? Is a John Lewis woman never conflicted about family demands, or reduced to baring her teeth at the offspring? Is the ad’s huge success a female version of Dad’s Army – a nostalgic homage to a mythically gentler, simpler time? Or is something deeper afoot?

What do we want from women? Any random footage of the British general election included startlingly old-fashioned images of the three leaders’ wives as shoulder accessories, applied as emergency diversity, colour and softening agents on the identikit suits. Random shots afterwards, of the so-called “biggest hitters” sent to thrash out a coalition agreement, showed a men-only line-up.

Are we any better here? The optimists counsel patience and focus on the fact that more than half of women aged 25 to 34 achieved a third-level education last year, 14 per cent more than men in the same age group. We have a woman President, a woman Tánaiste, a couple in various Cabinet posts. And lots more coming along presumably?

Well, no. Female representation in the Dáil – which has never exceeded 14 per cent – has actually fallen since 1990 and is now on a par with Djibouti. And despite the panting media (and party) focus on sexy, young female local election candidates last year, the number who made it actually fell to 16 per cent, from 17 per cent in 2004.

A look at the higher professions is no more encouraging. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ireland (ACAI) has been admitting men and women on equal terms for 20 years and last year more than half its student admissions were women. Yet research by Dr Patricia Barker suggests that while bright women are skating in, they are getting out just as fast. Her study of the Big Four’s boardrooms in the English-speaking world, including Ireland, shows that just 16 per cent of those who make it to partner level are women. In the legal professions, women entrants also outnumber men, but the ending is much the same. As for medicine, the relentless march by girls on limited college places was deemed so shocking that uncommonly swift and decisive measures were taken to restore the “balance”. Thus the new HPAT test.

The sub-text was clear, however. Women can’t be trusted to put in the hours or the hard graft, what with getting married and bearing babies and feeling a duty to put in a bit of time with them and all that womanly stuff.

Is it just some ghastly coincidence that this 40th anniversary has been marked by a procession of high-profile women – headed by the bright, successful Daily Mail columnist and novelist, Allison Pearson, author of I Don’t Know How She Does It – announcing their departure from the stage, crippled by depression? Pearson called it “the curse of my generation”.

Newspapers thrill to the happy sighs and 2,000-word valedictory pieces of high-flying career women bowing out of industry “to have a life”. The blame has fallen squarely on the pressure on women (often from other women) to excel in all areas, resulting in the fragmentation of their lives and the loss of their sense of self. Last year in a report entitled The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, US academics Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers concluded that while “the lives of women in the US have improved over the past 35 years by many objective measures . . . measures of subjective wellbeing indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men”.

Can it be that men are the real victors of women’s liberation? Is it possible that women really were happier with their lot back then ?

Should we throw in the towel and go back? Well, let’s see what that would look like. “We’ve come quite a way,” says Sandra McAvoy, head of women’s studies department in UCC. “At the beginning of the 1970s there was discrimination against women in law (and women did not sit on juries), education, employment and welfare. Contraception was prohibited under criminal law. It was not a crime for a man to rape his wife. A husband could sell the family home without his wife’s consent and a woman and children could find themselves out on the roadside with little come-back.

“There was a marriage bar in certain jobs, including the civil service and there were cultural expectations that women would give up work on marriage. With women perceived as dependents, there was an attitude that married women should not occupy a job that could go to someone who was unmarried. I was told that myself, by a headmistress who was interviewing me for a job, when I married and first moved to Cork”.

It all had the desired effect of leaving the jobs and control to the men. “In the early 70s, only about 25 per cent of married women worked outside the home and women earned about 55 per cent of men’s pay,” says McAvoy.

They were the lucky ones. “Unmarried mothers, widows and deserted wives could be left practically destitute. This was still the era of the Magdalene homes/laundries and of children in orphanages – many of them not orphans, but with a parent with an inadequate income to support dependents. Deserted wives had to wait six months before they could claim their allowance . . . and if a husband left the jurisdiction, until 1976 he could not be pursued for maintenance.”

Indeed, this writer has memories of her parents leaving food baskets outside the doors of such families.

Equal pay, rights in the workplace, one family per house, may seem a given now, but they certainly weren’t then. There was much to address for those early campaigners: rape, violence against women, access to contraceptives, divorce rights, rights to self-determined sexuality, abolishing the concept of illegitimacy.

How quickly we forget. And how self-deluding to imagine that there was ever a perfect John Lewis model of womanhood. How many older feminists were driven by memories of their mothers, women who lived lives of barely suppressed desperation, strung out on what was euphemistically called their “nerves”, tranquillisers, and the hidden gin bottle?

And never forget that feminism also envisaged a time when men would not have to carry the long, lone burden of providing for the family. Given a chance, women would lighten the load and do their share – and in the process, develop their own God-given skills and talents.

So after 40 years, what is it about politics, the corporate world, or the higher echelons of the professions that continues to elude most women? Is there something in the culture that militates against a third way for both genders, one that cherishes both career and family? Or is it – as Rod Liddle, that ubiquitous spokesman of the new sexism, once put it – that “a smaller proportion of women than men may wish to do certain jobs and this is a consequence not of discrimination, nor even of infant gender stereotyping, but because we are different creatures”.

So is that it ? A toss-up between biology and culture? Given that the workplace culture we inhabit was designed by men for men, does it follow that women have failed when they balk at the anti-family and therefore anti-social nature of the set-up? Are women inclined to the road of least resistance? Or do they simply see things more clearly?

The culture of “presenteeism” (being seen to be at your desk for long hours), the macho office politics, the notion that it’s suspect for a man to take family leave, the fact that part-timers and people who work from home are taken less seriously, are all traits of the male-centred workplace. No small thing when the benchmarks for success remain intensely male. Dr Pat Barker’s study of women in accountancy included a psychological test to assess whether the 19 women who had progressed to partner level in the Big Four firms here, possessed predominantly “male” characteristics. Twelve – or 71 per cent of them – had.

Whether these characteristics were innate or painfully acquired to meet the existing corporate culture is unknown. Whether it serves the common good is a larger question, bearing in mind that most whistleblowers – Enron, the EU, Irish Nationwide – have been women, never mind that over the past decade, women investment managers have outperformed men in their annual returns. It may seem glib to wonder what might have happened had Lehman Brothers been Lehman Sisters, but what if?

The difficulty is that until more men step up to take a decent share in creating a home and a family, and immerse themselves in the rewarding but relentless hurly-burly of home life, that fundamental question about the nature of women and power can never be answered. We know one thing for sure: women continue to storm the colleges and middle-management territories, yet when the summit is in sight, most take a look and say “I don’t like it”. The problem is that people have stopped asking why. It may amuse some of the “new sexists” to talk of biological determinism, to watch the old stereotypes of femininity return and confused young women turn their liberation into self-exploitation. But can society afford to be so blasé?