If anyone still doubts the disadvantage that women live under in our society, the first chapter of Kenneth Hudson's book will introduce them to the most obvious.
The book is a collection of grievances: a state education system in which girls are treated as a species of inferior boys; and inadequate provision of day nurseries for married women workers (during the war there were 70,000 nursery places, in 1967 there were only 21,000; women used as cheap, unskilled labour; and the mystique of "femininity" still cultivated to paralyse women into inactivity.
He has recognised the symptoms of anti-feminism, but has not coped at all with its cause or possible cures. The old lies occur again and again: "Since war and preparation for war is at the centre of the philosophy of the nation-state; and since Britain's expansion overseas was based on the unfeminine qualities of violence and aggression, the Victorians and Edwardians had some incentive to keep women from public affairs where they were likely to threaten the priorities and values held by so many men." In "Women as Force in History", Mary Beard's analysis of the role women took in the growth of Hitler's nation-state disproves any generalisation about women's natural non-aggressiveness. Kenneth Hudson talks of "women" without taking into consideration differences of race, or the social philosophies of the society in which they live.
Man's oppressiveness towards woman is explained in Freudian terms of memories of mother-reproof. A "laissez-faire" society which encourages exploitation of one class by another apparently has nothing to do with it. Women's present and future struggle is to reject the role assigned to her by man. Unfortunately, "the evidence suggests that a large proportion of English women during the past two centuries and more have been willing to accept the inferior role so plainly emphasised in the Old Testament and by St. Paul". I wonder, how can women who worked in mines, factories and mills, and who were half, and sometimes all, the economic strength of their family, be described as taking an inferior role to their menfolk?
Kenneth Hudson may have a sure sense of the frustrations of the life of middle-class woman, but his apparent ignorance of the history of the British working class woman causes him to misinterpret her situation. Her struggle is not to be allowed to work; it is to be allowed to work with dignity. Her status is not that allowed her by her husband, but that dictated by her class.
Judge the political in sexual terms and you produce half-truths and cliches. One of them is feminism or [illegible]?
* "Men and Women - Feminism and Anti-Feminism today" by Kenneth Hudson, David and Charles, 35/-.