Authors: Jenny Diski
The Sixties (10 page)
So it was a bit of a surprise when bombs exploded from 1968 onwards, at the homes of various politicians, on the threshold
of Biba, under a BBC outside broadcast van at the Miss World competition in 1970, as well as a hundred and more other places.
Various anarchist groups had promised havoc from time to time, but it being England, neither the establishment, the regular
Far Left or the counter-cultural types expected much actually to happen. Some of the bombs came with com-muniqués announcing
retributive justice by armed working-class revolutionaries, signed sometimes by ‘The Angry Brigade’. Finally, eight students
were arrested, four of them in a house where the police found a children’s John Bull printing kit with the words ‘Angry Brigade’
set up. It was enough, with some dubious forensics, to convict four of them, who were sentenced to ten years in prison. Bombs
still went off while the defendants were in custody, and it seems clear that ‘The Angry Brigade’ was more of a brand name
than a specific group of the eight people imprisoned, none of whom was convicted of actually causing explosions. But the press
rejoiced that the unpleasant business of the Sixties was now being cleared up, though there wasn’t long to wait before the
IRA brought to the British mainland some unpleasant business of their own. The Angry Brigade was as far as Britain got in
the Sixties towards
serious
resistance, even if it was by no means as organised as the triumphant forces of law and order wanted the country to believe.
The admirable David Widgery, lifelong member of International Socialism that he remained, later observed wryly of the radical
Sixties:
There was a general re-discovery of the Russian Revolution and of the various oppositional tendencies in the Soviet 1920s,
and a tendency to chuck lumps of Trotsky and the young Marx in with some Reich. At its best it seemed like a gathering of
post-electronic Renaissance people, passionately serious but intoxicated by LSD as well as alcohol and exponents of social
theory instead of sword fighting.
13
The division between the Underground and the Far Left was sharper than this suggests. The underground press,
IT
(
International Times
),
Oz
and
Ink
, certainly reported the street fighting, and gave space to some of the theorists of the Left, but usually in a wild variety
of overprinted colours and optically challenging patterns, which made it very hard to read if you weren’t actually tripping.
They imposed psychedelia over the assumed dullness of Marxist-Leninist theory, giving their readers something pretty to look
at without having to bother struggling through the prose. The counter-culture’s credo was rather different from the strict
discipline of the comrades:
It is living by what you believe, with a set of attitudes shared by, but not sacred to, a number of people intent on challenging
their society to live up to its promise... It is a movement of social liberation through individual liberation. Everyone must
be free to do their own thing. The Underground puts self at the centre of its spectrum. That is, no form of social or political
liberation, however desirable, can take place unless its first priority is to allow each individual to determine his own desires,
free from psychological, political or conventional pressures.
14
Like the forthcoming socialist paradise I had trouble believing in, this too required more faith than I was able to summon.
It was very clear, just from living communally in the Covent Garden flat, that being free to do one’s own thing became highly
problematical when one’s own thing clashed with someone else’s thing. Compromise was quite against the spirit of the times
and in any case a nonsense where the self was central. When someone else’s freedom seemed inimical to your own, the phrase
‘that’s your problem’ immediately reappeared.
In the Sixties we were reading all kinds of texts which dealt in large-scale, complete theories, but the actual living experience
was altogether more messy and fractured. It ought to have been immediately obvious that liberation and libertarianism were
not at all one and the same thing. To be liberated enough to put yourself at the centre of the spectrum and to determine your
own desires without reference to ‘psychological, political or conventional pressures’ should have made one helpless with laughter.
But it seemed, at first, to make complete sense. Or at least to be seductive enough to allow our intellects to slip away from
examining the words very thoroughly. One crucial truth about the Sixties is that the difference between Buckman’s set of beliefs
and those of Conservative government of the Eighties was, in practice, very much slighter than we imagined. We wailed during
the Thatcher era: ‘No, no, that wasn’t what we meant, at all.’ She was anathema to us, the very opposite of what we had hoped
for the future, but perhaps our own careless thinking gave the radical individualism of her government at least a rhetorical
foothold. Her founding statement that ‘There is no such thing as society’ could easily be derived from the ‘self at the centre’
that seemed to many of us in the Sixties so unproblematical. We do have some responsibility there, I think, but Widgery was
not merely indulging in the nostalgia of defeat when he refused to reject the values of the politically active Sixties, even
if, in a way, his words have a final ring of the inescapable self-centredness which may be all that the Sixties generation
are left with:
And despite the manifest lack of success in the larger tasks we have set ourselves, I persist in regarding the commitment
I acquired in 1968 as the most fruitful and rewarding of my adult life.
15
There were, of course, those, the great majority, doubtless, who, having finished with their wild youth, put on proper suits
come the mid-Seventies and went off to work and a regular life, becoming all their parents could have wished, having just
gone through a phase, as the more liberal of the grown-ups had always suggested. But some – these days called, derogatorily,
idealists – maintained their former sense that ‘society’ exists, and believe it persists, even beyond the strident years of
Margaret Thatcher and the officially approved decades of self-interest and greed that have followed. We are the disappointed
remnant, the rump of the Sixties.
As to the liberation of women – there’s no doubt that, like gay liberation, the second wave of twentieth-century feminism,
which had barely got under way by 1970, has had, and continues to have, a powerful influence. Certainly, most women who lived
through the early and late Sixties whether as political molls or psychedelic chicks can recall that they were mostly of ornamental,
sexual, domestic or secretarial value to the men striking out for radical shores. The Left was never known for its willingness
to embrace gender equality, but no more were the ‘heads’ or the entrepreneurs of the counter-culture. In a relatively public
way, in relatively specific parts of the world, things have changed for women. Domestic violence is more seriously policed,
rape is usually taken to be a major crime, and I would no longer (as I was in 1970) be asked for a (non-existent) husband’s
signature when I applied as a single woman to have the gas service turned on in my new flat. But like racial equality, women’s
liberation is honoured in legislation more than in the private attitudes of many individuals. Even in the wealthy West women’s
pay is on average substantially less than that of men doing equivalent work, and the difficulties and expense of childcare
often mean that women are going out to work to pay for childcare in order to work. I don’t think that personal inclinations
and opinions in general have changed very much in the vast majority of either the developing or the developed world. Get just
a little beyond the educated middle-class enclaves – read red-top newspapers, listen to men talk in bars – and the heart sinks.
Young women themselves, not all, of course, consider feminism nothing to do with them. A student standing for office at Newnham
College, Cambridge (one of the two last all-women colleges in the University) recently felt able to stand on the platform
of
not
being a feminist. To a Sixties observer, these days the liberation of women on a Saturday night in town looks very like the
freedom to get falling-down drunk. Perhaps it isn’t for earlier liberationists to have an opinion on what
kind
of equality women who now can choose should take – it may be just as impertinent as Western nations decreeing that only their
kind of democracy is acceptable for ‘liberated’ dictatorships. Women are, of course, much freer than they were in the Fifties,
when to be married with children often meant being trapped for life without the possibility of an independent income. But
I’m not sure that there aren’t many women who are in a similar position today. A woman in her mid-sixties (just a few years
older than me) told me recently that the problem with retirement was that now she had to think about what her husband was
going to have for lunch every day, as well as what to buy for dinner. She meant her husband’s retirement from the bank. She
had brought up the children and kept the fridge stocked. The Sixties, as I knew them, had entirely passed her by.
It started much earlier, and, as nearly everything does, in the US. Betty Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963 and founded NOW (the National Organization of Women). In the UK, Sheila Rowbotham wrote an article in 1968 that began,
‘The first question is why do we stand for it?’ in the
New Left Review
, and as part of the editorial collective persuaded
Black Dwarf
to follow 1968’s ‘Year of the Heroic Guerrilla’ with 1969’s ‘Year of the Militant Woman’. It wasn’t until October 1970 that
Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
came out, but by then there were already numbers of women’s consciousness-raising groups, talking about the limitations of
their lives, the need to find fulfilling work outside childcare, equal pay, their experience of men’s contempt and chauvinism,
discussing the nature of the female orgasm and helping each other with mirrors to take a first peek at the anatomy of their
vaginas (something men had always been doing). No one then thought that a woman prime minister would be in Downing Street
within ten years. No one then thought that if such a miraculous event could ever happen in a country where women weren’t even
allowed to read the news on television for fear of trivialising it, the situation of women (along with everyone else not grasping
at personal gain) would get worse. In the light of the resistance to women’s liberation in the Sixties (Black Power leader
Stokely Carmichael famously declared when asked the position of women that it was ‘on their backs’), it isn’t altogether surprising
that militant absurdities occurred such as the Sisterwrite Bookshop refusing to let the two-year-old son of a woman just arrived
in London into the café with his mother. I watched as she protested, ‘But I can’t leave him alone in the middle of Upper Street,
and I want to look at the noticeboard,’ and received a welcoming smile to her but no easing of the anti-male rule. There were
theoreticians and practitioners of lesbian S&M, girl-child-only crèches at women’s discos, and a feminist zoologist in Scandinavia
who proposed a change of name for the orang-utan – which means in Malay ‘Man of the Forest’
–
to the Malay for ‘Person of the Forest’. But it was difficult to laugh too much at the logical-conclusionists – say anything
in the early Seventies about the rights of women or men’s patronising attitudes, and there was an instant accusation that
you would be one of those women’s libber, bra-burning, unshaven lesbian girls. And aside from the Separatists there were women
who worked in unions and lobbied government for equal pay legislation, for childcare assistance, who men had to listen to
explaining to them what was wrong with even their liberal views of women’s rights. Right into the 1980s, when my ex picked
up our daughter from school two or three times a week, I was told by other mothers when I was in the playground waiting for
her how fortunate I was to have such a marvellous man.
