MNers who were woman-ing the barricades and burning bras to enable us to win the right to have oral contraceptives, rights at work and the rest - come and tell me about Feminism in the 70s and 80s!

[tabouleh]

What the thread title says really!

I've become aware that there are some inspirational MNers who were active in the 70s and 80s and I'd be really interested to know more.

Also are we (women) where you expected us to be in 2010?

What do you think of the recent revitalisation of the feminist movement?

Girls were allowed to wear trousers in my secondary school from the winter of '78. We must have been terribly progressive.

Wow, these is great reading, keep posting.

My DH has been reading it with me, and we've been really shocked at some of it. Really had no idea

(can you tell I'm quite new to all this)

Aye, there's no-one like the Free Presbyterians/FB Continuing/FP Schism'd again...

'My DH has been reading it with me, and we've been really shocked at some of it. Really had no idea'

Are you meaning about some of the restrictions, legal and social that were places on women and girls that are now history?

Goblinchild, I remember that puzzle. Seem to remember that the most common response (after much thinking) was 'The son was adopted?'

Or the surgeon was the wife's lover.

Societies are less equal in 2010 than I would have hoped (I'm 55, do your own sums.) I thought the glass ceiling would have been smashed - and honestly believed men would assist. Until women comprise 50% of FTSE100 chief executives, government ministers and Home Office policy makers, though, we're still polishing the glass not breaking it.

I would have found it incredible that the gender pay gap is still so wide; I thought it would be eliminated by the turn of the century. It's been interesting to see how well-paid career jobs, which attract women (like sales, perhaps), have become devalued so the status quo is subtly maintained. Didn't expect that.

There have been excellent advancements in social provision wrt childcare, education & vocational training, and disability concerns. Stuff like access ramps and doorways wide enough for a wheelchair/double buggy make a difference. But I didn't expect all these complicated social payments for childcare to be necessary. I thought there'd be more equality in terms of flexible hours, remote working and shared responsibility for family and home.

I like that 'social' sex carries no real stigma among young people. I like that abortion and the 'morning-after' pill are more freely used, and that condoms are readily available and deemed normal.

I like the confidence that makes it OK for young women to wear tiny clothes & loud makeup, and to get drunk/high. Despite the upsurge in 'mens mags' and porn, I think this speaks of greater respect for women and for themselves. I don't like the tide of plastic surgery, etc, but think it has little to do with sexism: ageism, yes, but also a simple effect of this more visual era.

The two things that most shock me are the glass ceiling - and other women's anti-woman attitudes, as so frequently voiced on mumsnet! Didn't expect that! But 30 years is only one generation. A lot has changed, in all areas of life, but attitudes tend to take longer.

I'll be reading this thread, btw, but not posting as I'm TRYING to use a couple of my brain cells for something else

Globlinchild, yes mainly about the work restrictions etc. but shocked I think that it was until quite recently.

I guess it's obvious that when legalisation comes in, then its needed, but unless you hear accounts of people experiences you don't REALLY know IYSWIM.

Had a rather secluded upbringing with singleish SAHM mother on council estate in a town with only WC jobs, so have a lot of educating to do. Up until recently my thoughts were more class based, but feel I've happy with how I feel on social interactions now (well on a class level anyway). Going to uni was a bit of a shocker that I've only just feel that I've recovered from.

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differetly there."

It is difficult to convey the mindset of another time. These days people are very quick to pick up on injustices and have the confidence to invoke law. Back then, you didn't rock the boat like that. Women had only recently been allowed equality and if we complained it would have looked like weakness, like we weren't up to it and the men were right after all.
We had to suck it up and try to be better than the men just to be seen as equal.

hi tallwivglasses(*) and other new names - this is really interesting thanks - keep the reminiscing(sp?) and observations coming.

(*) - although you did post already the other day re the book recommendation!

What a fascinating thread - I'll send a link to my mum as I knoiw she would be interested.

She was a single parent in the 1980s with me and my sister. It was much, much harder for single parents then than it is now, I think.

I remember her coming home from work exhausted, sitting down and falling asleep.

I was a feminist activist in the 80s. I was partly radicalised by my own mum's activism in the 70s (mainly around single parents' rights); she used to buy me copies of Spare Rib when I was a teenager. I was also radicalised by truly awful treatment when I had an abortion while still at school, and by family experiences of domestic violence and female poverty.

Mostly, though, I was drawn to feminism because I wanted to meet girls . Being a teenage lesbian back then put you so far outside the mainstream, so beyond the pale of society's approval, that it really transformed my take on all kinds of things. I think young people today (get me!) have very little understanding of how quickly our society has changed in its attitude to homosexuality, and how grim things were just 25 years ago.

So, I did Greenham, Reclaim the Night, Women Against Violence Against Women etc. Some of it was wonderful. Some of it was pretty ghastly: insular, sectarian, self-righteous. But I'm so glad to have been part of it. My style has changed a lot, but the substance of my beliefs has changed very little.

In recent years I've felt very despairing of how little progress we have made in some areas, particularly in the sexualisation of young girls and the widespread indifference to the commercialisation of women's exploitation. But I see more and more signs that a backlash is starting - not least in Mumsnet - and I'm quite hopeful for the future of my daughters. I'm sure young feminists won't do things in the way we would have, and I'm sure priorities will change, and I'll probably suck my teeth and criticise from the sidelines, but it will be wonderful to witness.

tabouleh, yeah, I'm getting braver. Thanks for the safest space on the topic!

How did I expect it all to turn out in 2010? Not bloody like this! I suppose I believed there'd be equal pay and political representation, decent childcare, we'd have reclaimed the night! Ha.

In the late 70's/80's there was an OUTCRY about women as sex objects in advertising. Even when it was more hidden (like in plumbers' trade mags, etc - a bikini-clad woman promoting, I dunno, wrenches or something) feminists exposed and ridiculed them. It's like it never happened.

There was a lot of humour actually. Anyone remember the Spare Rib April Fool's Penile Drip Catcher for those embarrassing, unsightly secretions?

I might send a link to this to my Mum too, I think she'd have a million stories.

In around 1975 she and her husband worked for the same company - an IT firm, she was one of the first computer programmers. She asked her boss for a promotion, because she was clearly outachieving everyone else, perfectly reasonable request, etc.

He told her he wouldn't promote her, because that would mean she was higher up than her husband, and create marital discord, and that was against his ethics.

She was like "um, I could call my husband to come in here and tell you he doesn't mind?". No dice, though.

Argh, tortoise! It was shortly after your mum's non-promotion when I gave up my ambitions in the catering industry. I couldn't get a pub of my own: I had to be married to a licensee!
Me: "But I've got my licence, yes?"
Them: "Yes, congrats, etc."
Me: "And a licensee can have their own pub, right?"
Them: "Yes, of course."
Me: "But a woman licensee can only have a pub if she's married to a male licensee?"
Them: "Look, we know we can trust you to run the business, it's just that you need a man for the heavy lifting."
Me: "But I do the cellar work here! I can do it no problem."
Them: "I'm sorry, it's the rules."
Me: "Ah."
I thought marrying for the sake of the job was a step too far.

"turkeys voting for Christmas" - lol, SMP, very apposite.

What a brilliant thread!
I remember as a teenage Doc Marten wearer in the 80s, thinking that by the time I had daughters, high heels simply wouldn't exist any more

Could I have been more wrong?

I was born in 1960, and many of the points on this thread resonate with me.

I wouldn't by any means count myself as an 'inspirational' feminist of the 70s and 80s. (I was more active in CND, Greenpeace, Amnesty and the like.) But in my teens I read The Female Eunuch, The Feminine Mystique and The Second Sex (struggled a bit with the last one when I was 19, I must admit). And at university (and afterwards) I mixed with a lot of like-minded people, among whom socialist/feminist principles were just taken for granted. These ideas were such a liberation for me.

I didn't enter the workforce till 1981, when the Sex Discrimination Act was already in place. Even so, there were problems compared with today. See the posts from OldLadyKnowsNothing and others - I remember a colleague in the early 80s counting down the days till she qualified for maternity leave, so that she could go ahead and get pregnant (if you see what I mean).

I also remember my bitter disappointment when (again, in the early 80s) I heard a former teacher (whom I respected a great deal) agreeing with her sister that one way of solving the unemployment crisis would be to forbid married women from working outside the home ...

But just because we now have a legal framework in respect of gender discrimination doesn't mean that people don't still have the same attitudes as before. Plenty of people still think women are 'just not up to the job' (to paraphrase ISeeGraceAbroad and her point about the glass ceiling).

SugarMousePink: '"I don't think that women of my Mum's generation would have ever thought that they hear young women of today saying things like "well of course I'm no feminist..."'. Yes, this saddens me too. In fact, I just cannot believe women who say these things. If I hear such words from a woman, I (the least confrontational of people) have to challenge her at what I think is the most basic starting point: "If you believe in the same wage for the same work performed by the same worker (male or female) - then you're a feminist."