Progress of Feminism (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes
Progress of feminism
Women's political representation
Although women had been voting in general elections since 1918, they remained under-represented in parliament throughout the 1970s. In 1970, women made up just 4% of the House of Commons. Rather than improving, this proportion declined further, sinking to 3% by 1979.
This regression highlighted the persistent barriers preventing women from entering political life despite formal legal equality at the ballot box. Voting rights alone did not guarantee political representation or meaningful participation in governance.
Women's professional achievements
Several women became prominent across a wider range of fields than previous generations had managed:
Politics and government
- Jennie Lee and Barbara Castle served as notable members of Harold Wilson's governments
Science
- Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize for her scientific work
Literature
- Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing achieved fame as novelists
Arts
- Barbara Hepworth worked as a sculptor
- Bridget Riley gained recognition as a painter
- Thea Musgrave and Elizabeth Maconchy composed music
- Jacqueline du Pré performed as a cellist
The Limitations of Progress
Kenneth O. Morgan draws attention to important limitations of this progress. By the 1960s, women made up approximately a third of the workforce, yet they were largely grouped into a restricted number of jobs, particularly secretarial and clerical roles. The presence of women in public life, politics, law, universities, and the civil service remained limited, despite individual success stories.
Second-wave feminism and Women's Liberation
Radical analyses of society, economy and culture returned gradually to examining the position of women and its broader implications. When these analyses emerged, the language of discourse drew on well-established discussions of race and imperialism. Consequently, the term 'Women's Liberation' was widely adopted.
Women's Liberation described an international movement which campaigned and discussed a changing agenda of issues over an extended period. However, women's campaigning did not achieve mass membership comparable to political parties.
Movement Limitations
The discussions were largely confined to educated white women from prosperous families. Reaching women who were poorer, less educated, or from ethnic minorities proved difficult, and their concerns were not always recognised as being of equal importance. This limitation would remain a significant challenge for feminist organizing throughout the period.
Key intellectual influences
Women's Liberation drew on several important texts that shaped British feminist thought in the 1970s:
- Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)
- Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949)
- Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970)
In 1970, Australian-born, British-based journalist and later academic Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch. Inspired by earlier feminist writing, it became a best-seller and attracted extensive media coverage.
Key Arguments:
- Women were oppressed by men
- This oppression was exercised through the way society was organised
- Women themselves had internalised this oppression
The book's success demonstrated the growing public appetite for feminist analysis and helped bring women's liberation issues into mainstream discussion.
Different approaches within the movement
Education and communication
Some women decided that progress would come through education and communication. They established magazines that offered an alternative to 'consumer' publications, with their continual emphasis on cooking, knitting, shopping and personal appearance.
Alternative Publishing
Spare Rib launched in 1972, providing feminist perspectives on politics, culture, and women's lives. Publishing houses that specialised in women writers also emerged, including Virago (1973) and Onlywomen Press (1974). These initiatives created spaces for women's voices and feminist analysis outside mainstream media.
Direct action and protest
Others engaged in direct action. Women protested against the 1970 Miss World competition in London. The beauty contest, in which all competitors were women and all judges were men, attracted hostile critique. The numbers involved were small and public and press reaction was not altogether supportive.
The Miss World protest highlighted how feminists challenged traditional gender roles and the objectification of women in popular culture, even when such protests proved controversial or unpopular with the wider public.
Practical responses to domestic violence
In 1971, Erin Pizzey founded a refuge for women in west London. Chiswick Women's Aid provided a practical response to the problems faced by women whose partners were violent, or threatening to them or their children.
These were problems in which the criminal justice system was reluctant to become involved, as a widespread belief persisted that the state had no role in private lives. This reluctance to intervene in domestic violence cases reflected broader attitudes that treated family matters as beyond legal scrutiny.
Pizzey's work was praised, though her use of 'squatting' (occupying vacant domestic properties) proved controversial.
Legislative achievements
The 1970 Equal Pay Act
In 1970, women earned a little over half of what men earned. Both the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress had spoken in favour of equality of treatment and opportunity for women workers.
The Dagenham Strike (1968)
The 1968 strike by women sewing machinists at the Ford car factory in Dagenham centred on equal pay for different but comparable work.
Impact:
- The strike succeeded in its immediate aims
- Led to political discussion about equal pay
- Directly brought about the passing of the 1970 Equal Pay Act
This demonstrated how industrial action could achieve legislative change and showed the power of organized women workers to influence government policy.
By this time Britain had entered the EEC and the Treaty of Rome guaranteed equal pay for equal work, or work of equal value. The latter concept widened the understanding of equality, which mattered because men and women often performed different work.
Establishing whether different work demanded sufficiently similar effort, education, training or skill was inevitably a matter of judgement, rather than simple measurement. This complexity would create ongoing challenges in implementing equal pay legislation effectively.
The 1975 Sex Discrimination Act
The 1975 Sex Discrimination Act protected men and women against discrimination on grounds of gender or marital status. It affected education and work (though not in Northern Ireland). The Act created the Equal Opportunities Commission, to which individuals could appeal if they wanted to bring their cases before the law courts or Employment Tribunals, in matters affected by both the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts.
This legislation represented tangible progress towards gender equality, though implementation and enforcement would reveal ongoing challenges in achieving genuine equality of opportunity and treatment.
Key Points to Remember:
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Women's parliamentary representation declined from 4% (1970) to 3% (1979), demonstrating that voting rights did not automatically translate into political presence.
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Women's Liberation drew intellectual inspiration from writers including Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer, whose The Female Eunuch (1970) argued that women had internalised their own oppression.
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The movement employed diverse strategies: education and communication (magazines like Spare Rib, 1972), direct action (Miss World protests), and practical solutions (Chiswick Women's Aid, 1971).
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The 1968 Dagenham strike by women sewing machinists led directly to the 1970 Equal Pay Act, showing how industrial action could achieve legislative change.
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The 1975 Sex Discrimination Act created the Equal Opportunities Commission and protected against gender discrimination in education and work, though limitations remained in both legislation and enforcement.