Lindsey German reviews A Century of Women by Sheila Rowbotham (Viking £20)
The 20th century has already been described in sweeping termsthe American century, the people's century. But whatever else it has been, the changes it has wrought in women's lives are among the most dramatic and far reaching.
At the beginning of the century, middle and upper class women were still regarded as decorative and largely useless appendages to men. Independence in the form of work or higher education was for a tiny minority and was regarded as radical and dangerous. The job of such women was to preside over households run by domestic servants.
Working class women made up this army of servantsit was the biggest single female occupation in 1900. Their lives were hard and, although marriage often meant leaving such work, life in the home was hardly easier. Pregnancy and childbirth were frequent and difficult, contraception almost totally unavailable, abortion illegal and dangerous. Divorce was outside the reach of the poor.
Today, even for working class won in countries like Britain, expectations are for a life which in almost all respects has changed beyond recognition. Women no longer face a lifetime trapped in unhappy marriages. Fertility rates have fallen to such an extent that now one or two children are the normand by early next century it is estimated that a fifth of all women will be childless, the vast majority through choice.
Higher education has been opened up to women and this in turn has opened up all sorts of opportunities in their lives. Most importantly, women make up an increasingly significant part of the workforcenearly half of it in Britain, slightly over half in the US. Women now have access to financial independence on a scale undreamt of 100 years ago.
It was only after the First World War that most households had access to electricity, only in the 1950s and 1960s that most could afford washing machines, fridges or cars. Tampax, bras, make up, trousers, were all either unknown or socially unacceptable in 1900. No women could vote at the beginning of the century; most were not in unions; they had little or no say over public or political life. Women's place was regarded as being in the home.
How did the changes between then and now come about? Women's position has tended to advance in leaps forward. Ideas about women's role and social customs which seemed to stretch back into the far distant past were suddenly challenged by changes in circumstances. In the First World War women entered jobs they had never done before, such as working in munitions factories or conducting buses and trams. The social discontent from before the war spilled over during and after the war in the Glasgow rent strikes, the support for the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the huge strike wave of 1919.
After the war, women tended to be thrown out of the 'men's jobs' but already their work patterns had changed forever. Women would not go back into domestic service. Even in the 1930s at the height of the Depression, when Tory politicians bemoaned the servant shortage, most women could not be persuaded to take up such work. Instead they became part of the growing workforce in the new industries of the south east and west Midlands. They also became clerical workers in large numbers.
In the US the Depression years saw millions of workers lose their jobs as capitalism crashed; but the 1930s was also the decade where the biggest single number of women workers joined the workforce. Male unemployment meant that women were forced onto the labour market in much greater numbers.
This trend was well under way in Britain and the US with the onset of the Second World War, which must rate as the most dramatic change for millions of women in the century. Young single women were conscripted into work or the armed services. They were encouraged to leave their homes and children, and were provided with creches, communal restaurants and even shoppers to buy the rationed food so that they could work as long hours as possible. The huge US wartime economy employed women as shipbuilders and aircraft manufacturers.
Women could do the same as men, it was discovered, and under the same often dangerous conditions. But women who worked like this expected certain freedomsto be able to earn equal money, to have freedom to socialise, to be free from the constraints of 'feminine' virtues. They were helped by the wartime conditions: excessive care over home working was regarded as less necessary than before the war, clothes were much more utilitarian and practicalno frilly long dresses but short skirts or trousersand women were positively encouraged to do the things that only a few years earlier were frowned upon.
Attitudes changed: sex before marriage became much more common. Women often lived away from home and family and so developed independent lives. Young women had a freedom that had never before been available, certainly for working class or lower middle class women. My own mother described how on a wartime visit to her uncle in rural East Anglia she was told to get out of the house because she was wearing trousers, red lipstick and nail varnish.
Even the end of the war could not dampen down expectations. Although women were thrown out of many jobs, and encouraged to leave others, by the end of the 1940s women were back at work in unprecedented numbers.
This led to the expansion of higher education, opening up to a layer of women new jobs and increasing expectations. This in turn gave birth to the movement for women's liberation which shook the US and then Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Sheila Rowbotham, who wrote her first books on history in the early 1970s and can claim to be Britain's best known feminist historian, has written a major book which charts this story. A Century of Women describes women's lives in Britain and the US. There is a strong emphasis on history from below, so we are told about all sorts of women who have never become famous. Events are often described in their own words.
We learn all sorts of fascinating factsthat American women in the Depression shied away from families and children as they faced poverty and insecurity:
'"I don't want to marry. I don't want any children. So they all say. No children. No marriage." Women were buying jellies, suppositories and douches on a mass scale.'
Rowbotham reveals that the new look created by the Parisian couturiers in the late 1940s as a 'feminine' reaction against wartime austerity was not in fact new but an adaptation of the narrow waists and full skirts produced during the war for the wives and mistresses of the German occupiers. She also describes how American GIs in Britain during the war were puzzled at the common British habit of having sex standing up fully clothed in alleys and parks because it was believed pregnancy was impossible this way.
We learn about the class divisions in the suffragette movementfor example, in 1913 when the socialist Sylvia Pankhurst infuriated her mother and sister by allying herself with the locked out Dublin transport workers leading to Sylvia forming the East London Federation of Suffragettes. Class repeatedly rears its head, with descriptions of the very differing conditions between upper class and working class women and of the class struggles which so often involved working class women. So there are the Ford Dagenham machinists fighting for equal pay in the 1960s, the women's auxiliaries in the Flint sit down strikes in 1937, the women strikers in the years leading up to the First World War.
However, the book overall is somewhat less than satisfactory. One reason for this is stylistic and structural. A mass of facts from various sources come so piled on top of one another that important events and trivial ones battle for attention. Each chapter spans a decade and is subdivided into headings such as 'Work', 'Sex' and 'Daily life'. This might seem logical but in fact makes for both repetition and omission.
A more important objection lies in the book's way of telling history. It seems to me incontrovertible that the history of women in the 20th century is one of progress, whatever the setbacks. There have been attempts at reversal of women's gains, and there are very real shortcomings to women's advance within the confines of a society based on production for profit. But there are so many areas where women's lives have changed for the better that women's advance is a truly remarkable feature of the century.
Sheila Rowbotham seems to shy away from such a conclusion: 'Rather than the image of linear progress or of those soundbite hoops, the history of women this century can be interpreted as a complex, sometimes conflicting quest for both personal and social balance.' Seen this way, describing which songs were popular during the Second World War becomes as important as the equal pay strikes of the 1970s, the sit down strikes of the 1930s in the US, the 1960s civil rights movement in America's South or the suffragette movement before 1914.
A Century of Women certainly takes this approach, incorporating large amounts of cultural description. But the two are not equal: one is a reflection of the world as it actually was at the time, the other portrays attempts to change that worldto challenge the priorities of the system, not simply accept them. Sheila's attempt to give both equal precedence means that in practice there is little sense of the dynamic of history and how women were part of changing their livesjust the endless descriptions which are so common in history writing today.
Of course there is nothing inevitable about progress. There have been battles throughout this century over issues from the vote to abortion to equal pay. There have always been significant forces opposed to such changes and none were awarded and maintained without a fight. Yet the majority of these battles have been successful and it is unfortunate that a historian who is so much and so clearly on the side of those fighting for change does not give them greater priority.
This leads to other political weaknesses in the book. Why in the list of prominent women, whose biographies are included at the back, do we get Virginia Bottomley and Ann Widdecombe? Are these really going to be among the 400 most remembered women of the century? And why do we not get here the working class suffragist Selina Cooper, or Genora Johnson who led the women's auxiliaries in the Flint sit down in 1937? Why do we get Lady Olga Maitland and not Ethel Rosenberg, executed in the US during the McCarthy era? And why are some of the best women fighters from our own timesnight cleaners' organiser May Hobbs, Jayaben Desai from Grunwick and Ann Scargillall missing?
Perhaps it is because there has been a retreat in politics over the past two decades which has affected socialist and feminist history. As Sheila Rowbotham herself puts it:
'"Women's history" developed out of the women's liberation movement and, in the early heyday of hope and activism, initially focused on the obviousthe suffrage or workplace militancy. It was when things did not seem to change so fast that hanging on began to gain respect; studies of survival and women's culture followed.'
However, 'hanging on' is not going to solve the problems facing the mass of womenstruggles to change the priorities of class society will.
Despite its length and compass, those wanting to understand women's changing lives might do better to read some of Sheila Rowbotham's earlier books, such as Women, Resistance and Revolution or Woman's Consciousness, Man's World to see the dynamic of women's struggles.
