The Female Eunuch (18 page)

1969 the Whitley Council was awarding nurses £48 p.a. for their meals, in place of the iniquitous pay-as-you-eat scheme (it was im- mediately taxed), a mere twelve hundred hospital electricians did not scruple to strike for an extra shilling an hour, to bring them into line with outside labour. The point is clear. That nurses can be vic- timized by the essentialness of their work into accepting a shameful remuneration is an indictment of our society which is daring them to abandon the sick and dying, knowing that they will not do it. Must they wait until the sick and dying strike for them? It seems that the plight of academics will wait for attention until students support them in a strike and refuse to be qualified. Perhaps patients ought to refuse to recover? In each case the state exploits the recipi- ents of nurses’ and teachers’ services in order to oppress the nurses and teachers. New strategies must be devised. The recently awarded increase of twenty-six per cent sounds handsome until we consider what it is twenty-six per cent of: we have yet to see how the nurses will be forced to pay for their rise.

Nurses are skilled menials, and as such they fall into line with the dominant pattern of female employment. Salesgirls or ‘vendeuses’, waitresses, cleaners, packers, tea ladies, fill out the picture. The job of char is so tied to the female image that an amusing case was recor- ded in Vienna where one Alois Valkan, who needed to work for money to supplement his pension, had to disguise himself as a wo- man to find work as a char. Eventually he was arrested when he went to a ladies’ lavatory when he wasn’t disguised and was ques-

tioned by the police called to investigate thefts from the cloakroom.
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Even in the trades dominated by women, the important posts are held by men; whoever heard of a head waitress or a
maîtresse d’hôtel
? Cutters and designers in the clothing industry are most often male. The women’s branches of the armed forces are not soldiers in their own right, but clerical assistants and other kinds of handmaidens to the males. Even air hostesses, among the most envied of

female employees, are no more than glorified waitresses, and often presided over by a steward. The most shocking cases of the exploit- ation of females for cheap labour are the
outworkers
, who were the subject of a
News of the World
scandal. Ostensibly such women must be registered with local authorities, but in practice the
News of the World
found this regulation was not observed, as the Prices and In- comes Board discovered when it conducted a survey. Of the sixty unions who covered industries likely to employ outworkers, only one had any regulations relating to them. Superfoam Ltd of Skegness farmed out aprons to be machined at 5d. each. Brock’s fireworks paid housewives one shilling a gross for rolling and gluing cardboard cases. Women who made sponge bags at 11s. a gross had the satis- faction of seeing them retail in shops for 2s. 6d. each. To make the point clearer, Conway Stewart farmed out ballpoint pens which had to be assembled by putting in the refill, screwing a cap on, fitting the clip cap at the other end and packing in packets of six, for 8d. or 9d. (depending on the pen) a gross, to spastic centres, mental homes, prisons, detention centres and approved schools as well as house- wives. Mrs Pollard who can assemble a gross of plastic boats in five hours for eight shillings, answered the
News of the World
reporter innocently: ‘I regard it as a hobby to fill in my spare time…I like doing it.’ The women doing this work, who are also skilled in ma- chining in many cases, do not cost their employers anything in lighting, heating or safety precautions, and can demand no indem- nifications or overtime, and their number is unknown. In the clothing trade alone, it is believed that at least fifteen thousand women are so employed. The manufacturers justify their methods by pointing to competition from Japan and Hong Kong: an outworker is an

Angle-Saxon coolie.
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Girls who seek an alternative to ancillarism in a vocation often dream of acting as a way out. Most of the few women who shaped our century were actresses, if the
Sunday Times
is to be believed. Michael Croft,

director of the National Youth Theatre, warned girls not to seek this alternative. In new plays, he remarked, there are only two female parts to every five male parts. In the profession as a whole there is always four-fifths unemployment, and most of the unemployed are women. And yet, of 4,150 applicants for the Youth Theatre, which

had only 200 places to offer, two-thirds were girls.
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For girls who

want to exploit their beauty, modelling may seem to offer another way out, but even after training in deportment and the use of cos-

metics the aspiring model must get together a composite of good photographs, and hawk it around the agencies.
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The most successful

models have been taken up by photographers, a profession domin- ated by men with a few remarkable exceptions. A model in work will find that she is paid months after she has done the work, no matter how diligently her agency works to collect the money for her; most often she will find that she is not in work, and must resort to more ignoble expedients to make ends meet. Nude modelling for girlie mags pays very well, but the indignities are almost insupport- able. Bob Guccione of
Penthouse
boasts that his girls are put on the pill so that their breasts and buttocks swell, sent to Tangier to suntan, have their teeth capped, have moles removed, are clothed, coifed and manicured at the expense of the magazine, and then paid £200

a day for a week while they are photographed.
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They are persuaded

to pose by a mixture of flattery and gin. Ideally, film offers and fur- ther modelling ensue; if not, there you are, moleless, straight toothed, suntanned, and swelling, with a thousand pounds to lose through heavy taxation and further investment in the image.

Female entertainers are unionized, whether they be dancers, singers, or strippers,
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but it is a long row to hoe, and no amount of

unionization can guarantee work or regular recurrence thereof. Girls being appraised by prospective employers in these ‘professions’ have horrifying tales to tell, most of which are apocryphal, but I can remember humiliations myself which I had rather not

undergo. When I went recently to present myself to the producer of a well-known TV series at his request, or so I supposed, he sneaked in a wet kiss and a clutch at my breasts as an exercise of his power, a privilege which he could not have exacted from any of the men who have appeared on the same programme. I have since instructed my agent to turn down any offer of work from him, but most girls would not be in a position to do that. Nevertheless, a gamble is probably better for the soul than ignominious servitude: a girl who thinks she has real talent for entertaining has really no option but to try it. Most of them eventually acquire a husband at their backs to keep them when they are ‘resting’. The entertainment business has always been cheek-by-jowl with prostitution from the days when leading ladies of Drury Lane and the Comédie Française were also the leading courtesans. Many a prostitute, whether she calls herself a call-girl, a hostess, or a common whore, imagines that she is ex- ploiting the male sex, and perhaps she is as long as she can retain her emotional independence, but the role of the ponce, the impresario of whoring, is too established for us to suppose that prostitutes have found a self-regulating lifestyle. The master ponce of western society is Hugh Hefner, who invented brothels where the whores are only to be looked at, which are brothels just the same. Every Bunny is a B-girl. As an alternative to nursing or outworking, waitressing in rabbit ears and a scut is not conspicuously preferable. The female entertainer is so often exploiting her attractiveness as a sexual object that her situation is a parallel to these. In seeking protection from sexual exploitation she may often find herself more tyrannized over by a minder than she ever would have been by a boss. She may be more than ever a valuable property for someone else, so that even her genuine talent may be obscured in the bally-hoo of the sexual object. It still comes as a surprise to most people to learn that Marilyn Monroe was a great actress, most pitifully to Marilyn herself, which is one of the reasons why she is dead.

There are, there must be, alternatives to such exploitation. As an academic, I daresay I have found one. I do receive equal pay; I was appointed in preference to male competition and nothing can prevent me from being promoted in the natural course of events. Guiltily I must also admit that I did not toil particularly hard to attain what academic distinction I have. As a female lecturer at a provincial university I have to tolerate the antics of faculty wives, but they are fairly easy to ignore. Probably I had to attain more striking academic distinctions than a man would have had to be awarded my present appointment but I cannot prove this. Perhaps if I had been a man I would have been offered a fellowship at Cambridge. The odds against the average pubescent girl pursuing her education are long, however, because of the loss of enterprise and energy which accom- panies female puberty. The prejudice that academic women are neurotic is justified in actual experience if not in theory, but if a girl feels that she can make it there is no reason why she shouldn’t. Teaching in other institutions is still the avocation favoured by intel- ligent girls, but it is, as teachers will be quick to tell although they are slow to take action about it, a difficult and unrewarding life. Men following this woman-dominated profession found conditions and salaries intolerable and the predominantly female membership of the National Union of Teachers so inert and apathetic that they founded the National Association of Schoolmasters in order to take militant action to improve their situation. The NUT finally followed their lead and rejected the parity swindle, initiating a series of strikes in the winter of 1969—70. Needless to say, all the spokesmen for the union were male—of forty-four members on the executive only four were women.

A girl who studies medicine will qualify if she works hard enough—but it is true that women patients prefer male doctors and so do men. A girl may qualify as an architect or an engineer and if she can get employers to regard her seriously she may do well. Evidence is that

women who learn a trade like electrical engineering or radio operat- ing can find no employment.
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Female chemists and scientists can

win the Nobel Prize, if they are researchers, but they are unlikely to become heads of professional research establishments. In chasing all these asexual academic attainments a girl faces one relentless enemy—her family. The constant recriminations, the lamentations that she is missing out on what makes being a girl such fun, on dating and pretty clothes, that she will waste her training by getting married and so forth, the whole tiresome rigmarole, wears down her resist- ance from day to day. The pressure of home duties which are spared a boy in her situation is not relieved, unless she goes away to study at a distant university, an expedient which may meet with parental disapproval. A girl’s emotional welfare is so much a matter of the demeanour of men towards her that she may jeopardize her academic chances by emotional involvement. I can testify to the wasteful effects of emotional involvement on studying women from personal exper- ience as a tutor in universities. Men may take their pleasures how and where they will or not at all: girls feel rejected without male at- tention, and degraded by anything less than total involvement, and as long as this is the case they are highly likely to be academic casu- alties. Girls are seldom brilliant, and men sneak the top honours in the depressing majority of cases, while a girl who wants to enjoy equal opportunity with men in professional matters must not equal them but positively outstrip them because of the initial prejudice against her. If she feels that she must also retain her sexual identity by being feminine the conflict of desires can have radical effects.

There are success stories about women, and it is time, after such a depressing picture, to tell them. Asha Radnoti graduated with honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford, and was offered the usual female employment, teaching, by the Oxford appointments board. She turned down teaching, and jobs at IBM and other management consultants, for a position

as analyst in the investment research department of the Prudential. After eighteen months there she went to work for a Canadian invest- ment banking firm as assistant to the investment director, and is now Portfolio Manager for the Castle Britannia Unit Trust Group, with day-to-day responsibility for the investment of more than four million pounds. Miss Ishbel Webster spent twelve years working as a depilator in the Tao Clinic before she patented her own formula for an aerosol depilator called Spray Away. Jennifer Phillips sold her own comedy series
Wink to Me Only
. Turi Wideroe is the first woman pilot to be employed by a commercial airline. Mrs Nora Rotheroe began as a housemaid in Camden Town, talked her way into a job as a mobile supervisor finding cleaning work and estimat- ing costs for her firm, to the position of a director of Acme, Britain’s largest firm of industrial cleaners, and finally chairman of Multi- Office Services Ltd. Mrs Margot Newlands is first woman director of Thomas de la Rue International. Mrs Margery Hurst is a million- airess and joint chairman of Britain’s biggest secretarial agency, the Brook Street Bureau. Verite Collins invented her own firm of dem- onstrators and saleswomen for British goods overseas, the Union Jills, and became a company director of the agencies and firms that arrange such trade exhibitions. The clothing industry boasts many canny and creative women, like Mary Quant, Dorothy Tyoran, Sybil Zelker, Gina Fratini, Rosalind Yehuda, Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin, Fiona Browne (Spectrum), Janet Lyle (Annacat), Alice Pollock, Lee Bender, and the redoubtable Biba. Another field in which women have considerable success is journalism and writing generally; the number of female journalists and novelists who have achieved dis- tinction in our age is too great and they are too well-known to need listing here. In television, women have been well-represented, al- though the present tendency is towards male replacements for Grace Wyndham Goldie, BBC TV current affairs chief, Catherine Dove (Producer of Panorama), and Mary Somerville (Head of Schools Broadcasting). Female news