By Hilary Land
The four demands of the second wave Women’s Liberation Movement, adopted at their first national conference at Oxford in 1970, were: equal pay, equal job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand and twenty-four hour nurseries for children under five. After the Second World War, marriage bars requiring women to resign on marriage from teaching and the civil service ended. However, the 1942 Beveridge Report, which became the basis of Britain’s post war social security system, was clear: ‘The attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and should not be the same as that of a single woman. She has other duties’.[1] A woman’s marital status determined her rights to social security benefits. In family law and the income tax system she was defined as a dependant of her husband.
The demand for financial and legal independence originated at the Women and Socialism conference in Oxford in 1974. I was not there, but when giving a paper[2] at the British Sociological Association’s 1974 annual conference Sexual Divisions and Society, I met Mary McIntosh. She invited me to meet others, including family lawyers, concerned to challenge the ways in which the state supports male breadwinners upon whom women as wives should depend. Following these early meetings which included Ruth Lister, Angela Mason and Katherine Gieve, women’s financial and legal independence was accepted as the Fifth Demand of the Women’s Liberation Movement at their national conference in June 1974. In 1975 we produced a discussion pamphlet The Demand for Independence with cartoons by Liz Mackie. In 1978 we abbreviated the campaign’s name to YBA Wife. We continued to work together with local groups, Claimants’ Union, the Working Women’s Charter, Rights of Women, trade unions, as well as writing to MPs and the press.
The Sex Discrimination Act 1973 enacted in 1975, had excluded social security, taxation and matrimonial and family law. Both the Labour governments elected in 1974 wanted to reform policies related to national insurance as well as means-tested benefits, state and occupational pensions, employment protection, lone parents’ benefits, and maternity pay and leave. Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for the DHSS, 1974-76, was a very experienced MP. The Equal Pay Act had been passed in 1970 when she was Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity. She was very aware that ‘women are treated as second class citizens entitled to third class benefits.’ This meant: ‘We had to get rid of Beveridge’s concept of women’s dependency, the idea that women only work for pin money and the husband was the main breadwinner.’ [3]
Under the Social Security Act 1975 a married woman’s entitlement to a state retirement pension in her own right was no longer restricted to those who had paid NI contributions for half their married life, while contributions paid prior to marriage did not count. (Not surprisingly 80% of married women had previously chosen to rely on their husband’s pension when he reached retirement age at 65 years.) Barbara Castle put an end to this ‘half-test’. Instead the new State Earnings Related Pension was based on their earnings averaged over twenty years. Annual up-ratings would be related to the higher of the national average increase in either earnings or prices.
She also introduced an Invalid Care Allowance (ICA) for ‘domestic spinsters’ who were not in the labour market because they were caring at least 35 hours/week for a relative. Married women were excluded until 1986 when the European Court of Justice ruled in favour of Mrs Helen Drake who had appealed against her exclusion from eligibility.
To claim the new non-contributory invalidity pension, the married or cohabiting woman had not only to be ill but also to be ‘incapable of normal household duties’. The claim form had questions not only about whether she could ‘plan, prepare and cook a main meal for yourself and family’ and ‘do the normal weekly washing and ironing for yourself and family’ but also about how much time it took.
The Supplementary Benefit Act 1966 stated: ‘Where husband and wife are members of the same household their requirements and resources shall be aggregated and shall be treated as the husband’s’. By 1973, the number of single mothers claiming means-tested supplementary benefits had nearly doubled since the mid sixties to 228,000. Were they cohabiting with a man? If so he should be supporting her. The implementation of the ‘cohabitation rule’ was controversial. An unmarried mother could make a claim on the father for the support of their children, but not necessarily for her own maintenance. As in the case of a married woman, evidence of an extra sexual relationship, however brief, removed the right to claim maintenance for herself. This was used as a justification for Supplementary Benefit officers prying into the relationships of single mothers. Widows of working age also lost their pension if they cohabited.
At this time, council house tenancies were usually in the husband’s name. If his wife left him because of abuse but she had neither reported to the police nor started proceedings for judicial separation or divorce, she was assumed to have made herself deliberately homeless. Until 1977, local authority housing departments were not responsible for re-housing her so she and her children could end up in grim Part 3 accommodation.
A married woman was almost invisible in the income tax system in her own right. Her husband had to include her in his tax return and her earnings were taxed at his marginal rate of tax. Her signature was not required on the tax return. Until separate taxation was fully introduced in 1990, the Board of Inland Revenue usually corresponded with him. He had to know everything about her financial affairs while she might know nothing about his. A married man received a higher personal tax allowance (in 1977 worth 54% more than a single person’s allowance) together with a tax allowance for each child. These continued until the child finished full-time education. If divorced he could also offset against his taxable income any maintenance paid to a former wife together with any dependent children from this relationship.
If a married woman wanted to get credit, take out a loan, have or keep her mortgage as my friend and colleague, Miriam David discovered, she required her husband to agree to be her guarantor. Single women also needed a male guarantor. In 1973, when I applied for a mortgage, I asked why this was necessary as my father was a small businessman about to retire. They replied that as I had ‘a good job with prospects’ I had no need for a male guarantor. I was more fortunate than most women of my age as I had been appointed to a permanent lectureship at Bristol University in 1970, after six years of short-term research posts at LSE. Unlike over 80% of women in my age cohort, I was also single and childless.
Women outnumbered men at the 1974 BSA conference. (Many senior male sociologists were at best uninterested in and at worst dismissive of the topic ‘Sexual Divisions and Society’). For me the conference was significant, in particular meeting historian Leonora Davidoff and French sociologist Christine Delphy. In general, becoming part of inspiring and supportive feminist networks in the UK and Europe gave us the confidence to make our presence and research more visible. We also learned more about policies which took achieving women’s equality seriously. In 1978, after Mary McIntosh and I had given evidence on behalf of the Fifth Demand Group to the Royal Commission on Low Income and Wealth, the Chair thanked us and commented on how ‘very well-informed’ we were. Perhaps he was a little surprised?
In Bristol we had to campaign hard to make changes in research agendas and teaching curriculums. Within the university we learned that ‘feminist’, used as a verb or a noun, would always be challenged. When a group of us including Miriam David, Jackie West and Liz Bird sought approval for a new Masters course in Gender and Social Policy in the early 80s, we were asked by a senior professor at Faculty Board if there was ‘respectable literature’ in this field? (My head of department had told me earlier that the titles of some of my articles such as ‘The myth of the male breadwinner’ had not helped my case for promotion)
The first national Women’s Liberation conference I attended was in Bristol in 1973. My research on the history of British social policies in general and family policies in particular, included learning about the life of Eleanor Rathbone, a pioneering and formidable suffragist. From 1917, she campaigned tirelessly for a national scheme of family allowances from both outside and, from 1929, inside Parliament as an Independent MP. During the House of Commons debates on the Bill to introduce family allowances in 1945 she rallied enough support to win a free vote to ensure they would be paid to the mother and not the father. Thirty years later, the Social Security Act 1975 replaced family allowances and fathers’ child tax allowances with child benefits paid to mothers for each child. Barbara Castle later described the outcry aroused by this ‘switch from the wallet to the purse’ as an illustration of ‘the deepest instincts of male chauvinism.’ [4]Once again women had to campaign hard to keep benefits for children paid to them, including having a sit-in in the Post Office in Trafalgar Square.[5]
Eleanor Rathbone addressing a crowd in Trafalgar Square
Eleanor Rathbone would have supported the Fifth demand of the second wave women’s movement because she fully understood that ‘women lived in a world created by men’. However I think she would have been sad to read this evidence that ‘the economic dependency of the married woman is the last stronghold of those who, consciously or unconsciously, prefer women in subjection, and that is why the stronghold is so hard to force’ [6]
[1] Social insurance and Allied Services: a report by William Beveridge, Cmd. 6404, HMSO 1942 p51
[2] Land, Hilary ‘Women: Supporters or Supported? ’ British Sociological Association, 1974 annual conference Sexual Divisions and Society.
[3] Castle, B 1993, Fighting All the Way, MacMillan 1993, p465.
[4] Castle, B The Castle Diaries 1974-76, 1980, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, p380 f/n 1
[5] Land, H ‘The Child Benefit Fiasco’ in K. Jones (ed), The Yearbook of Social Policy 1976 Routledge
[6] Rathbone,E Foreword to E Reiss ‘Rights and Duties of English Women,’ 1934, Sherratt and Hughes.