2S - Society in the 1970s: progress of feminism
Learn how campaigns for equality and new social movements changed law and public debate in the 1970s, while economic insecurity and discrimination limited their effects.
Feminism beyond formal equality
Women entered the 1970s with voting rights and expanding opportunities in education and employment, but formal citizenship did not remove unequal pay, restricted career paths or assumptions about domestic responsibility. Many married women combined paid work with most childcare and housework. A woman’s freedom to take a job therefore depended on practical resources, such as affordable childcare, as well as an employer’s willingness to appoint her.
The Women’s Liberation Movement connected these everyday experiences to political demands. The first national conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970 helped organise calls for equal pay, equal educational and employment opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free round-the-clock nurseries. Later campaigns also addressed violence, legal and financial independence, and lesbian rights. These demands went beyond asking Parliament to declare men and women equal: they challenged the institutions and habits that made independence difficult.
Feminism
Ideas and action challenging inequalities connected with sex and gender. In the 1970s British feminists differed over methods, priorities and the relationship between women’s liberation, class, sexuality and race.
Consciousness-raising groups let women compare experiences often dismissed as private problems. Campaigns and publications, including Spare Rib from 1972, brought those arguments to wider audiences. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970 challenged restrictive expectations of women’s identity. Refuges and campaigning against domestic violence demonstrated that equality concerned safety inside the home as well as access to work.
There was no single feminist programme accepted by all women. Some favoured parliamentary reform; others believed deeper changes in family life and economic power were essential. Black and Asian women could face racial discrimination as well as sexism, while working-class women might prioritise wages and services over issues highlighted by better-off campaigners. These differences explain both the movement’s breadth and its difficulty sustaining a unified organisation.
Equal pay and sex discrimination
The Equal Pay Act 1970 took full effect in 1975. It addressed unequal contractual pay and conditions between men and women doing the same or broadly similar work, or work rated as equivalent. It mattered because an employer could no longer openly defend lower pay solely on the basis that the worker was a woman. Its original scope was narrower than later equal-value developments, however, and women’s concentration in different, lower-paid jobs limited its ability to close the whole pay gap.
The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 widened the legal challenge to inequality. It prohibited specified forms of sex discrimination in employment, education, and the provision of goods, facilities and services, and addressed discrimination against married people in employment. It covered discrimination against men as well as women and established the Equal Opportunities Commission. The original Act is the appropriate evidence for the law at the time; later amendments should not be projected backwards into 1975.
The distinction between direct and indirect discrimination made the Act significant. Refusing a woman a job because she was a woman was direct discrimination. A rule applied to both sexes could be indirectly discriminatory if it disadvantaged one sex and could not be justified under the Act’s conditions. This recognised that unequal outcomes might arise from apparently neutral arrangements rather than an openly prejudiced statement.
Legal protection changed the basis on which a person could challenge exclusion. Yet individuals still had to recognise discrimination and pursue a complaint; some occupations had exceptions, and the law did not automatically redistribute childcare or domestic work. A rise in women’s employment also did not establish that all women gained equally: many remained in part-time or low-paid work with limited promotion.
Race, immigration and belonging
Immigration policy and race relations were connected but distinct. Immigration rules decided who could enter or settle; race-relations law addressed treatment of people within society. Restricting immigration did not remove the discrimination experienced by British-born Black and Asian people, while an anti-discrimination law did not create an unrestricted right of entry.
The Immigration Act 1971, implemented in 1973, placed greater emphasis on the right of abode and a person’s connection to Britain, often called patriality. Commonwealth citizenship alone no longer guaranteed unrestricted entry. The rules reflected a move away from earlier assumptions that membership of the Empire or Commonwealth created equal access to Britain. They could distinguish people with British ancestry from other Commonwealth citizens, giving the policy a racial effect even when formulated through legal categories.
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