A Feminist Looks Back Over Half a Century

By Pat Caplan

I read Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique when I was in Nepal in 1969. On return to UK in early 1970 it was clear that it spoke to me and my situation. Pregnant with my first child, highly educated but unemployed and seemingly unemployable (‘How will you manage teaching and children?’, I was asked in one job interview), I soon joined locally with a group of women in similar circumstances (The Finchley WLM), and we began meeting regularly, starting by reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

I also helped set up the London Women’s Anthropology Group which was active throughout the 1970s and which resulted in several conferences and publications. Its members (including Annie Whitehead, Diana Leonard, Maila Stivens, Janet Bujra, Gaynor Cohen, Louise Lamphere, Olivia Harris) were all contributors to the development of feminist anthropology and wrote both books and articles, as well as giving talks and seminars to a variety of audiences.

Another important part of my life was the WRRC, which in the mid-1970s, occupied a small basement in Gower St, which is where I worked under Zoe Fairbairns’ direction. My work consisted of dealing with mail, assisting with the growing library of feminist literature, basically whatever needed doing. I attended the discussion group on women’s history (herstory) and met the likes of Leonore Davidoff, who became a friend and colleague, another group on language with Dale Spender, there was so much going on. I learned a great deal about running a small organisation and about feminism both academic and activist, and attribute to the WWRC my success in finally getting a ‘proper’ academic job.

In the 1980s, I joined the demonstrations at Greenham Common and was also active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

Because much of my research took place in Tanzania, East Africa, and in Chennai (then Madras), south India, I soon began to realise, along with other feminist anthropologists, that there was and is no one size fits all version of feminism. A feminist approach needed to take account of other factors such as history, cultural context, political economy including class. Above all it needed to listen to those participating in the research and learn from them.

Feminist work ceased to be homogenous: it included gay and straight, practising various forms of sexuality or none, and Marxists. At the same time feminist scholarship increasingly began to be accepted, at least in academia where new courses were set up and there was an increasing flow of books.

In the UK, the original ‘five demands’ continued to be the subject of much activism but there were also new demands and struggles. There was a growing number of different feminist groups and the launching of various magazines and newsletters like Spare Rib, and even feminist publishers like The Women’s Press and Virago.

I was involved with an academic journal The Women’s International Forum, editing some individual articles and a special issue.

In my academic work I not only taught a course on the Anthropology of Gender, but later also on sexuality. Furthermore, I tried, as did many of my colleagues of a similar persuasion, to integrate feminism into all aspects of teaching, which in my case included the anthropology of food.

The same applied to my research. My first research which I would designate as feminist was a study of middle-class women’s organisations in Madras city (later Chennai). This study showed the links between class and gender, and the ways in which women could exercise power through the performance of charity. Later I increasingly began to realise that men too should be a subject of study and tried to ensure that this was the case in my longstanding research in a rural part of the Tanzanian coast where, inter alia, I worked on the relationship between food, health and fertility and later wrote two oral histories of men.

During all of this time, I did feel that women were making headway in ways that had not been the case previously. In my academic sphere for instance, women were not only obtaining posts but were being noticed and promoted. Even so there was no cause for celebration because at the same time in many spheres women were still suffering from discrimination, gender-based violence and more.

One of my last major research projects took place ‘at home’ in the UK and it was about perceptions of food and health, asking why people eat what they do, even when often they know it is not good for them. As I already knew, food is an important entrée into people life histories, and it is also an excellent way of dissecting gendered power, both within the household and more widely.

After I had retired, I joined the Board of ActionAid UK, which gave me further cause for re-thinking feminism in all its manifestations, as I visited countries like Rwanda, Uganda, India and Nepal on behalf of the NGO. What did it mean to be an activist? How could the by-now pervasive NGO-speak on gender and rights be unpacked in a way that gave voice to the ‘victims’, even gave them agency?

Now aged 83, after many years in the feminist movement, I would say that women in some times and places have been able to achieve a great deal more than was thought possible when the Second Wave of feminism began in the UK in the 1960s. But there have also been many setbacks, as the Me-too movement, for example, demonstrated, and as abortion and diversity are abandoned, even criminalised in the USA.

What I have learned is that whatever we achieve, we cannot be complacent but need to keep feminist ideas alive and kicking!