Living the Split

History is neither a grand, linear story of inevitable progress nor a tiresome, depressing tale of futile repetitions. It is the study of change--and the almost inevitable resistance to it, as Sheila Rowbotham reminds us in “A Century of Women,” her scrupulously researched, remarkably far-ranging, decade-by-decade study of American and British women from 1900 to the present. “The long view of history presents a different way of considering what is happening by seeking to know how change arises,” Rowbotham writes. “The story that unfolds when we look at this century as a whole is neither a straightforward march of progress nor one in which debacle is ever absolute. There is too a story that surfaces and one that has to be gleaned.”

For Rowbotham, author of the influential 1972 book “Women, Resistance and Revolution,” history is both political and personal: “Women’s history in the twentieth century includes demands like the vote and equal pay . . . along with the glance of pleasure or the wild act of personal daring.” It is unpredictable: “[T]he gains of one era can turn into the problems of the next. Not all repercussions can be calculated.” It is simultaneously objective and imaginative, “a grappling between evidence and consciousness.”

For each decade, Rowbotham focuses on the categories “politics,” “work,” “daily life” and “sex,” and certain seminal questions emerge again and again--albeit in altered, even transmogrified, forms. Are women primarily producers or reproducers? Are women essentially different from--even better than--men? Do women need special protections, both legal and social, or is simple equality with men enough? Should feminists seek to pry open the existent society, or create a new and different one? Is the family a locus of power for women or a source of oppression? Do women share a common condition, or are they primarily defined by class, nationality or ethnicity?

“A Century of Women” makes clear that the answers to these questions, like the queries themselves, are never constant. Indeed, in Rowbotham’s narrative, context is (almost) everything. Take, for instance, the issue of birth control, which has been so hotly contested for the last 100 years. At the turn of the century, the demand for access to contraception (and contraceptive information) was shockingly subversive, suggesting then, as it does now, that women could--and, even worse, wanted to--separate sexuality from procreation and meld it to pleasure. During and after World War I, radicals like Agnes Smedley and Emma Goldman “were convinced that there was a connection between women’s feelings of sexual helplessness and the political and economic system. The campaign [for contraception] was part of a wider challenge to social hierarchy and repression. . . . The birth-control agitation thus linked personal and political self-determination.”

But wait. Throughout the century, support for birth control has reappeared in far different guises: as a way of maintaining white middle-class demographic supremacy; as a solution to poverty, crime and drugs; as a means of eliminating the underclass; and even, in the America of the 1950s, “as an alternative [to the redistribution of wealth] which would prevent the rise of Communism.” One era’s progressive, even revolutionary, demand is another’s backlash.

War, too, assumes complex dimensions. As World War I began, some socialists and feminists, in both Britain and the United States, expressed “a vehement revulsion against the hypocrisy of politicians and the carnage of militarism.” But in both countries, most women were stirred by sentimental patriotism and strident nationalism, and became enthusiastic supporters of that carnage. Yet it is also true that in both countries the war, hideous and futile though it was, catapulted women into the paid work force and vastly changed attitudes toward work, sex, marriage, social mores and religion. In Rowbotham’s dialectic, this war of reaction promoted women’s freedom.

And challenged, too, the then-prevalent notion of women as the gentler sex. Rowbotham reports how, in Great Britain, “[l]iberal politicians who had accepted the construct of a natural female disposition towards peace were flummoxed by angry working-class women during the peace negotiations . . . demanding revenge for the death of their loved ones. Meanwhile, in 1924 in Ireland, [independence advocate] P.S. O’Hegarty grumbled that the women of Dublin were the most implacable and hysterical participants in the civil war: ‘The Suffragettes used to tell us that with women in political power there would be no more war. We know that with women in political power there would be no more peace.’ ”

The handmaiden of social, economic and political change is anxiety, and women’s “proper” role has often become a major focus of the fears that result from these larger shifts: “A gender crisis has a habit of substituting for a knot of other social problems,” Rowbotham writes. Thus she notes that in Britain, the radical disruptions of World War I “polarized attitudes towards the sexual and economic independence of women. Amidst disturbed reports of moral decline there were calls for various forms of intervention. . . . The outcry about women’s sexuality was in fact part of a wider effort to secure social control.”

Similarly, she argues that in the United States, McCarthyism was in large part a reaction to the militant trade unionism that swept the country directly after World War II. Still, McCarthyism was never confined simply to political witch hunts or attacks on labor, but was, rather, always intimately entwined with “a tremendous emphasis upon social conformity and an ideal of the family.” (McCarthy opposed the construction of public housing, for instance, on the grounds that it bred both communism and divorce.) And when, by the early ‘50s, the American left was effectively silenced, “ideology, culture and daily life assume[d] a particular significance. Women’s role became a metaphor for a broader contest about social values. In the media debate about whether or not women should have jobs, it was really the desired shape of American society as a whole that was at issue. The emphasis on women’s essential difference from men struck a deep chord. . . . [T]here was a profound yearning for an ideal of ‘normal’ life.”

It is a tired, and false, cliche that there is nothing new under the sun, but it is also true that many of the social debates in which Americans (and, to a lesser extent, the British) currently find themselves embroiled have deep historic roots. For instance, Rowbotham is referring to the United States in the 1920s--not the last two decades--when she writes, “The extreme right took on the causes of social purity and the protection of women, giving them very different meanings from the progressive women social reformers. . . . The direct political challenge from the right was accompanied by a more insidious cultural stereotyping of feminists. . . . A conservative psychological assault was gaining popularity. It played on fears of spinsterhood and mannish lesbians, analysing a political commitment to feminism as maladjustment, neurosis or immaturity.” It was in 1927 that Harper’s magazine reported, “Feminism has become a term of opprobrium to the modern young woman.”

Similarly, those who think the personal-is-political link was discovered in the late 1960s might ponder a protest march in 1930 by the women’s contingent of Britain’s National Unemployed Workers’ Movement: “As they walked they sang--’Who Were You With Last Night?’ mingled with the ‘Internationale.’ ” Or the organizing song of the United States’ United Electrical Workers’ Union, in which “Betty Union” complains about the high cost of stockings and concludes, “The cost of clothes! WHY, HECK! / If we don’t get wage adjustments, / I’m going to look a wreck.”

Rowbotham documents, too, how middle-class alarm over the unregulated sexuality of unmarried, working-class girls is a far from recent phenomenon. In early 20th century America, she notes, “[t]he single, immigrant working girl was . . . the focus for evangelical rescue and progressive improvement alike. This perception of a sexual crisis of control converged with class, race and ethnic prejudices. . . . The effort to reassert social control expressed a fear that hierarchies were being subverted.”

It is extremely difficult to read “A Century of Women” without concluding that free enterprise, psychosexual repression and family values have constituted a holy trinity not just since the early 1980s but for the last 100 years. But Rowbotham is particularly adept at analyzing how, in our recent political lifetime (that is, Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the United States under Ronald Reagan), massive problems resulting from a global restructuring of production and a steep increase in income inequality were converted, at least perceptually, into a crisis of the endangered family--as evidenced by the near-hysterical debates on teenage sex, single motherhood, welfare, gay rights, the rising divorce rate and abortion. In both countries, a vast, complex transformation in modes of work and distribution “has been accompanied by efforts to shift the cost, both economic and psychological, away from the public domain to the private individual.”

Rowbotham shows how, in both Britain and the United States, when the right came to power on the platform of family values it immediately cut back social services--welfare, child care, health care, free milk, school lunches, maternity benefits. Liberals and the left have protested that this is a form of hypocrisy; I would argue (although Rowbotham doesn’t) that it is, rather, a logical implementation of family values. For in the right’s view, shoring up the traditional nuclear family rests precisely, as Rowbotham writes, on “reversing the claims to social entitlement and the very idea that society at large was responsible for individual citizens.” In both countries, the right has been guided by the “ideological conviction that families should bear all the cost and responsibility of children with no help from the rest of society.”

When conservatives (whether Tory or Republican) speak of the family, then, they are referring not to the real needs of actual women and children (much less to that thing called love), but to those of an institution that upholds (and reproduces) social authority. And such conservatives are correct when they posit that social isolation, sexual inequality, emotional repression and the economic dependence of women are conducive, if not integral, to the continued functioning of that institution--and to what Rowbotham calls the “constructed model of a lost innocence” that institution has come to represent. Where the right goes wrong, of course, is in its inability to admit that the unfettered free market it so enthusiastically champions is eroding the traditional nuclear family far more surely and inevitably than left wing, countercultural or feminist forces ever could. (When Marx wrote that “[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away,” he was referring not to the efforts of socialist revolutionaries but to the power of capital.)

Since the early ‘80s, liberals and the left (especially in this country) have insisted, loudly and quite impotently, that abundant social services, a more equitable distribution of wealth, sexual and emotional authenticity, reproductive rights, personal agency and the economic empowerment of women are all--or would all be--perfectly congruent with the nuclear family. But the evidence from Rowbotham’s book strongly points in the other direction. At the end of the 20th century, there is scant proof that human values and family values are synonymous. When the right insists that secular humanism is destroying the family as we have known it, perhaps it is onto something that the left would do well to ‘fess up to.

Rowbotham concludes with a series of short biographies of women mentioned in her sometimes eclectic book (under “M” we find Margaret Mead, Bette Midler, Kate Millett and Jayne Mansfield). And she scatters sprightly mini-essays on various cultural topics (the documentary photograph, the vamp, lesbian style, Barbie dolls, films, cars, clothes) throughout her study.

“A Century of Women” is, not surprisingly, filled with striking quotes from women of all classes and political persuasions. My personal favorite is from the American social activist Crystal Eastman; in 1920, she wrote that feminists, having won the vote, must now figure out “how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways.”

Despite certain important, even stubborn continuities, one comes away from “A Century of Women” with a respect bordering on awe for the transformative power of the 20th century. “Women have experienced the fracturing of feminine identity in the course of this century and somehow accommodated to living the split,” Rowbotham writes. “Both women and men grew up in one world and have found themselves in another as the century draws to its close.”