The Persistence of Patriarchy Operation Yewtree and the Return to 1970S Feminism

The persistence of patriarchy Operation Yewtree and the return to 1970s feminism Victoria Browne On 30 May 2014 a conference was held in London the workings of male power, privilege, domination to discuss the work and legacy of Kate Millett, an and violence, but which has become something of American feminist who rose to prominence follow- an embarrassment or anachronism within contem- ing the publication of Sexual Politics in 1970, and her porary feminism. In light of the current sex abuse appearance on the cover of Time magazine later that scandals (and the continuing prevalence of sexual year.1 Elsewhere in London, on the same day of the violence against women and children), I propose conference, popular entertainer Rolf Harris was in that feminists engage in a strategic reappraisal of Southwark Crown Court being tried on twelve counts ‘patriarchy’, to recover a political interpretation of of indecent assault between 1968 and 1986. The trial sexual violence/abuse in terms of structural male was an outcome of ‘Operation Yewtree’, the police power, rather than individual aberration or an ‘abuse investigation tasked in 2012 with gathering evidence of power’ in more general terms. of ‘historic sex abuse’, in the wake of numerous alle- gations that various media personalities and stars of Returning to ‘1970s feminism’ the ‘light entertainment’ world engaged in regular Over the past decade or so, there has been an increas- sexual harassment and abuse of women and children ing level of interest among Anglo-American academic throughout their careers in the 1970s and 1980s. feminists in how ‘1970s’ or ‘second-wave’ feminism It is an interesting piece of timing: whilst a group is remembered (or forgotten) in mainstream public of feminist theorists and activists were gathered discourse, and within feminist discourse itself. On to ‘interrogate the politics and possibilities of the the one hand, ‘1970s feminism’ looms large in our second wave’ and ‘consider how [Millett’s] work is collective political memory in the sense that the situated in and amongst more contemporary feminist archetypal feminist fgure is the ‘1970s feminist’ – a concerns’, across the city a trial was going on which fgure so loaded with negative connotations that it had been concerned with a comparable set of ques- has become almost routine to preface any statements tions. How are the 1970s framed and situated in the that sound vaguely feminist with assurances that one public memory? What can historical resurfacings tell is not. On the other hand, however, many of those us about our present attitudes and situations, and actual feminists who attained reasonable levels of how might they enable new understandings or social fame in Britain and America during the 1970s no change? Sidestepping the relation between feminism, longer have a public persona. Whilst Germaine Greer the law and the police, in this article I want to use the remains ubiquitous in UK media, and Gloria Steinem strange convergence of Kate Millett and Rolf Harris and Betty Friedan also have a presence in US media, as an occasion to consider what the events and public Kate Millett, for example, has largely disappeared discussions surrounding Operation Yewtree reveal from the public eye. In 1998, she wrote an angry letter about the legacies of 1970s feminism, and the kind to the feminist magazine On the Issues, highlighting of feminist ‘return’ or ‘revival’ that is required within the fnancial and emotional difculties that many the conditions of the present. My main suggestion feminists active in the women’s liberation movement is that the silent or missing concept which mediates of the 1970s have faced as time has moved on. The between the unfolding of Operation Yewtree and letter paints a portrait of a ‘generation’ of women the return to 1970s feminism is patriarchy: a concept who, ‘having risked the promised (if not always developed by feminist theorists in the 1970s to name actual) safety of conventional life for a feminism RadicaL PhiLosoPhy 188 (N ov/dEc 2014) 9 they believed would transform society, have been left Essentially, the critical assault on the hegemonic to “struggle alone in makeshift oblivion”’.2 model of feminism can be construed as an assault The current desire to ‘return’ to 1970s feminist on a certain kind of historicism, which treats intel- thought and practice does in part stem from a sense lectual productions of an earlier era as ‘historical of indebtedness to those pioneering feminists, artefacts’ rather than as part of a living body of intermingled with a dose of academic feminist guilt work.8 In its most basic sense, ‘historicism’ refers for having ‘abandoned’ the activist feld, and also a to the idea that social and cultural phenomena are certain nostalgia or yearning for the seemingly more historically determined: a pretty standard article of vibrant, urgent political culture of the 1960s and faith within feminist theory. Yet ‘historicist’ thinking 1970s. This can be described in terms of ‘left melan- has also consistently embraced the idea that ‘each choly’, Walter Benjamin’s ‘unambivalent epithet for period in history has its own values that are not the revolutionary hack who is, fnally, attached more directly applicable to other epochs’:9 an idea which to a particular political analysis or ideal – even to the has supported the reifcation of epochal boundaries, failure of that ideal – than to seizing possibilities for and a concept of historical time whereby each cul- radical change in the present’.3 Such melancholic or tural production or theoretical contribution is ‘fxed despairing nostalgia has become a recurring feature to a linear time by a logic … that marks, seals, and within Anglo-American feminism, not only among divides each moment’.10 This, as Kathi Weeks argues, feminists who personally participated in feminist leads us to treat a given text or theoretical paradigm activism and intellectual production in the 1970s, but as ‘not only of its time – developed within a particular also among younger feminists in the form of a feeling political conjuncture and conceptual horizon – but as of being ‘born too late’.4 only of its time’.11 So, whilst it may seem that histori- The ‘return’ to 1970s feminism, however, is not cism would logically lead to a historical relativism, simply about indebtedness, guilt and nostalgia. It it has in fact been intimately linked with a progres- is also due to the realization that the conventional sive understanding of history, according to which way of constructing feminist history as a progres- the past is continually overcome and superseded by sive series of ‘waves’ or ‘phases’ has a constraining, a ‘knowing’ present. In the case of feminism, this debilitating efect upon feminist politics in the means that we rigidly divide feminism into bounded present. Feminism’s ‘great hegemonic model’, as historical phases or eras, and consistently project Chela Sandoval has termed it,5 relies upon a progres- all those aspects or characteristics from which we sive, teleological structure whereby diferent kinds of wish to disassociate ourselves – essentialism, racism, feminist theory are mapped out as successive stages universalism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, prudish- on the way to a theoretically sophisticated feminist ness, humourlessness, authoritarianism – backwards present, which has overcome all the problems created in time on to ‘second wave’ or ‘1970s’ feminism. As a by feminisms of the past, in particular the dreaded result, feminist work produced during the 1970s is ‘essentialism’. Consequently, certain feminisms, consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’, and frequently including Marxist, socialist and radical feminism, dismissed without even being read.12 are relegated to the status of ‘phases’ which have now This is not to say that the usual criticisms of been surpassed, by either poststructuralism or ‘new ‘1970s feminism’ do not contain grains of truth. materialism’. The radical feminism of the 1970s in Certain texts written in the 1970s, including Millett’s particular has become synonymous with everything Sexual Politics, abound with dubious universalizing ‘bad’ and ‘embarrassing’ about feminism: a phase that claims about what women experience and endure, feminism has grown out of. This not only leads to a and insistently proclaim the foundational status needless dismissal of feminist work written before and priority of sexual politics over racial and class 1990; it also leads to presumptions that the phase politics: for example, when Millett incongruously which comes out ‘last’ is the ‘best’.6 That is, there suggests that ‘the function of class or ethnic mores is an over-reliance on the temporal structures of in patriarchy is largely a matter of how overtly dis- arguments rather than the arguments themselves. played or how loudly enunciated the general ethic And, in turn, when we ourselves subscribe to a logic of masculine supremacy allows itself to become’;13 whereby feminism so easily becomes out of date, we or when Shulamith Firestone baldly (and bizarrely) are playing right into the hands of those who insist states that ‘racism is sexism extended’.14 However, it is a relic of the past, and has no relevance in the the concern is that in our eagerness to distance our- present.7 selves from the more problematic elements of radical 10 1970s feminisms, we have thrown the baby out with discussions surrounding Operation Yewtree demon- the bathwater and prematurely relegated valuable strate, a robust feminist analysis of sexual abuse and theoretical and strategic resources to a bygone era. violence is just as vital as it ever was. The case is also Moreover, when we insist that the ‘second wave’ was interesting for what it reveals about public attitudes ‘white’ and ‘middle class’, the presence of feminists towards the 1970s, feminist politics and investments in 1970s feminism who were not white or middle in the idea of social and moral progress.

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