Older Women and Feminism: A Note about my Experience of the WLM

Abstract

The sun has just risen from behind a Tuscan hill; sitting on the terrace of a crumbling farmhouse where I watched it rise, I finished the last three pages of May Sarton's A Reckoning. My lover is still asleep indoors; she arranged this beautiful place for our holiday. May Sarton wrote A Reckoning in 1978, a novel in which she explicitly discusses lesbian relationships. Without the Women's Liberation Movement, May Sarton would not have written that novel as she did, nor would I have been here with my lover. You asked me to write as a woman 'of an older generation . . . about the problems and possibilities the new feminism raised for women who had already struggled to find a place in the public world'. An old woman now, and proud of it, that personal liberation (I had a good marriage, raised five children and stayed married until I was widowed) was a most important and unexpected outcome for me of the WLM. As I understood it, I had always been a feminist. Brought up by a suffragist mother and a militant suffragette father and in a religious sect where God was equally Mother and Father, the equality of women and men was taken for granted in our household. My parents chose for my sister and me a girls school of late nineteenth-century foundation whose school song included lines such as 'Women of England, the half of the nation,/Here the full share of our birthright we claim'. It wasn't till I entered the world of work and, soon after, of marriage, that I realized just how little the world out there accepted these values on which I had been raised. When I followed my husband to a new place (not just out of wifely duty long years of war separation seemed enough) I did not find work available. Discriminated against less because I was a woman than because I was the mother of children, for ten years I was not gainfully occupied. Finally, when the shortage of qualified sociologists became Femini.st Review No 31, Spring 1989