It's been a long journey - and we're not there yet

In 1970, the first National Women's Liberation Conference was held in London when a new generation of feminists were coming of age. Here, we bring together four well-known activists from that period to discuss the cultural changes they have seen over the last 40 years in feminism, sexuality, politics - and men. By Carole Cadwalladr
Femonist Pioneers
(l-r) Lynne Segal, Sheila Rowbottom, Fay Weldon and Susie Orbach in the Reform Club, London. Photograph: Andy Hall Andy Hall/Andy Hall

There's something satisfying about convening a gathering of 1970s feminists in what still feels like the heart of the British establishment - the Reform Club on Pall Mall, an august neo-classical structure that doesn't look like it's changed much since Gladstone's time.

It represents pretty much everything that Fay Weldon, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Susie Orbach once struggled against and to a degree succeeded in changing - the Reform Club was the first London gentlemen's club to admit women on equal terms, in 1981. They, each in their own way, were pioneers in what was then called the Women's Liberation Movement when the concepts of equal rights for men and women, equal pay, and equality of opportunity were still just that: concepts.

Fay Weldon was a writer not an activist, unlike Rowbotham, Segal and Orbach, who were younger and more radical. The oldest of the group, she was married with children and had a career in advertising (famously, she coined the slogan, 'Go to Work on an Egg') by the time the women's movement got under way, and had already written her first, sometimes called 'proto-feminist' novel, The Fat Woman's Joke.

Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Susie Orbach have always combined academia with activism. (Rowbotham is a professor at the University of Manchester; she was forcibly retired earlier this year but her students saved her with a Facebook campaign.)

The world is such a different place compared to when the first British National Women's Liberation Conference was held in 1970. And the changes that have been achieved for women, both politically and culturally, are in no small part due to Weldon, Rowbotham, Segal and Orbach and their colleagues and contemporaries. What becomes clear, though, over the two and a half hours we talk, is not just what's changed, but just how much hasn't.

The interview

You all grew up before the women's movement came of age, how different was it then, compared with now? What were the expectations for you?

Sheila Rowbotham: My destiny should have been secretarial college or what was called 'pudding' or cooking school. I grew up in a family that didn't expect you to go to university. But I just liked reading and was lucky to have two very inspiring teachers.

For a long time in the 1960s when I was in my late teens and twenties, there wasn't the language to describe these feelings of disappointment that we had. We didn't connect to things like the suffrage movement because obviously we'd got the vote. And since it was the Sixties we didn't accept old-style morality but men had quite contradictory attitudes, having been brought up in the Fifties. They thought girls were either good girls or not, and we got into terrible muddles.

Susie Orbach: I went to an elite school, which was founded by feminists, but I didn't know what the word meant although I knew it was a dirty word. We were pushed to get a decent education so that we would be extremely interesting to our husbands. And when I went to university, I got caught up in the civil-rights movement and anti-Vietnam demos. But I didn't know what feminism was. Like a lot of young women probably in those days, I just didn't identify, you know? We were used to reading novels and identifying with the male hero. With me, there was never a 'ping', it was a gradual dawning.

Fay Weldon: I'm from an older generation and we were brought up to be married. I was unusual in that I was brought up by a single parent. My mother divorced my father and supported us by working in a biscuit factory. She thought I was too plain to get married, and too clever... but I wanted to get married more than anything in the world, I'm sorry to say.

I thought you'd have a wonderful life, you'd have a man to keep you and you wouldn't have to earn anything, you know. I thought it was some sort of dream institution. My friends went off to finishing school to learn how to cook or to secretarial college, to have a job and then get married. This was the fate of a middle-class girl. I was rather different because I had not been in that kind of safe position.

Lynne Segal: I grew up in one of the many unhappy families of the 1950s who were tryin g to readjust to men coming home after the war. But my family was unhappy in its own particular way, because my mother was a full-time working doctor but also very unhappily married because of my father's quite visible philandering.

We were all expected to succeed academically, but after that there was nothing we were meant to do except make a successful marriage, but all we saw was the bitterness of my mother's marriage, so that made no sense at all.

I fell in with a group of cynical anarchists around Sydney who were against everything and believed in free sex. And I ended up pregnant in 1969 to a gay man, only with it being the Sixties he was a homophobic gay man. I had a gun held to my head and married a man who was so obviously unsuitable - and once I'd had the child he decided that yes, he really was homosexual. I was in this disastrous situation and just had to run away. I came to Women's Lib in the 1970s and it simply rescued me.

Was there a moment, a flash of realisation, when you realised that things could be different?

Fay: It came to me mostly through reading. I had no idea the world would ever be anything other than what it was. I had no sense that change was possible until I read The Second Sex [Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 treatise on the oppression of women], when I suddenly saw everything in its place. It was extraordinary, this discovery that there was an infinite world to be written about.

Susie: The time I thought things could be different was when the first women's liberation conference happened and there was suddenly this collectivity with people. I mean, it was men and women all coming together....

Was this was the first National Women's Liberation Conference in 1970, which Sheila organised?

Sheila: Yes, we'd organised it, but we didn't know how many people would come and suddenly all these people flooded in. I remember one young girl, she was about 17, still at school, and she was speaking into the microphone, so excited. Everybody felt we had this new connectiveness. Of course we then got into arguments, but it was amazing - joyous actually - at that conference.

Susie: There was a really strong feeling of a different sort of society. You didn't know there were people out there. I mean, just talking to somebody in the ladies' and discovering they felt the same was amazing. You did literally feel as though you were a bit mad. People used to say: 'Why are you grumbling? You're privileged, you've been educated. Some people have got real problems.'

Lynne: By the end of the Sixties, I had read de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing but there were no role models apart from them, and it was hard to know quite what to be. So that's what brought me to women's liberation: I was a single mother with a child and it simply rescued me. It gave me a grounding to rethink everything. So much of what we did was around how to make motherhood livable, beginning with the situation of childbirth, which was an utter nightmare. I gave birth all alone in hospital - no one was allowed in there with you - and all you could hear were screams. It was like a vision of hell. You'd hear a woman going along the corridor going: 'Be quiet, you're upsetting the other women.' That was childbirth. Everything about becoming a mother in those days was so difficult, and women's liberation changed that, and changed that for good.

Fay: The other great moment for me was when I was invited to be in the audience for Miss World. They arranged the audience into sections - for and against it. And they put me in the 'pro' section which was going to say anyone who's against is plain, neurotic, ugly etc and I suddenly felt total revulsion and walked from one section to another. I was a mother, married with two young children, and had a job, I was seen as a woman who was perfectly happy... when you could see that actually it was terrible.

Susie: I don't know whether you feel this, Fay, but we had the fantasy that we were changing the world. We thought we stopped the war on Vietnam, we thought we brought in the civil-rights movement. We had the notion that we had enormous impact.

What do you think are the great achievements of feminism?

Fay: One of them was the end of sexual neurosis. People used to be very unhappy. Childbirth was so terrible. I had a child in 1954 and it was as you describe it, Lynne. The midwifery staff took out this neurosis on mothers. There was a quietness that surrounded sex. And that's gone, although it has a downside. The other thing is choice. You don't have to have babies. You don't have to marry to have babies. The social pressure has virtually gone.

Susie: The issue of sexual neurosis is not over at all. The pornography of the culture... even 13-year-olds feel they have to fashion their sexuality to the demands of the outside world.

Lynne: My mother was ashamed to be a woman. Simply being born female was shameful, something to mourn. 'Better luck next time,' my father would say to his patients if they gave birth to a daughter rather than a son. That's the first thing that has changed.

Fay: Yes, in metropolitan areas, women now want to have girls. They're not so much trouble. They pass their exams. They don't kill themselves. Who would not rather have a girl nowadays?

Lynne: There's greater entitlement around sexuality now, but the body fascism of whether you're slim enough, blond enough, that's just as strong.

Susie: It's much stronger.

Sheila: We thought society would become more equal. We thought we'd all have more time, so that men and women would be looking after the children. In 1970 we had all this new technology and everyone said there was going to be 'a problem of leisure'.

Susie: They were crazy times around the sexuality of the body. There were loads and loads of struggles not to have women objectified and there probably isn't a girl alive now who doesn't feel it.

Lynne: Violence against women... the concepts of rape in marriage, and sexual harassment just didn't exist.

Susie: Also, children weren't on the agenda. Until women's voices were heard, children's couldn't be too.

In the 70s there were certain ideas about male-female conditioning. Did you ever try to counteract it by giving your sons dolls or your daughters tractors?

Sheila: My son had a black doll and a Wendy house. And he turned sticks into guns. Wehad this very literal idea that we could just reverse things in a very neat way. And then we modified these ideas when we had actual children. Friends of mine who had girls went through a lot of heart-wrenching about the fact that their daughters really likedBarbie dolls.

Fay: Now the idea that men and women are different is back. Once upon a time you couldn't afford to make this distinction because it could be used against women. But you should be able to say that the wiring in female brains is different and let society adapt to that.

Lynne: What there is, unquestionably, is sexual similarity. There is far more overlap between the sexes, between the genders, than differences.

Michèle Roberts says: 'Feminism made sex better.' Do you agree?

Fay: I think it was better before because it was so mysterious.

Lynne: You didn't describe it as better in your books!

Fay: You knew nothing and it meant you were always going to get pregnant because there was no birth control. That made it much more exciting.

Lynne: Feminism has been responsible for women being able to think about their bodies differently, and to think about pleasure differently. Women's sexual experiences are likely to be fuller and more enriching today.

Sheila: I was watching late-night TV with my son recently, and they had this thing called 'fuck buddies' and it explained that these were people who you weren't in love with but who you liked and who had sex with sometimes. And I thought: 'Oh that's interesting because we did that.' I then spoke to a friend who's in her mid-eighties, and I said to her: 'There's this thing I heard about called "fuck buddies",' and she said: 'Oh yeah, we had those.' So perhaps people always do certain things.

In what way are young women today different from how you were?

Sheila: They're much more confident. It's good that they seem to be able to look glamorous and don't feel that they have to organise things. And there are stirrings of a new feminist movement bubbling under the surface. There are groups forming at Manchester university and a group in Oxford I know.

Susie: I'm in groups with a lot of young women. But there's a terrible pressure on them, that they should have a series of accomplishments, the A-levels, the degree, the job, the partner...

There's still a lot of talk about the 'glass ceiling'. Does it still exist?

Fay: I'm not conscious of male discrimination anymore. I may be wrong. I think men feel really guilty.

Lynne: Of course there's still a glass ceiling! Only some women, who probably have to be childless or rich enough to afford a nanny, can make it to the top. The cost of making it to the top in the corporate world is probably to be childless... or to marry a rich man.

Susie: There is that problem that feminism got associated with having a career - not by us; we don't even like that word 'career'! I think that's something now pushed in the States which got picked up in the media in Britain.

Have men changed?

Lynne: They've changed a little. Women on the whole still organise domestic life.

Susie: Women still clean the toilet bowl. They still know when the child's dentist appointment, or the auntie's birthday is. They still hold in mind everything that has to be done. That is my experience.

Fay: I have four grown-up sons and they are all so involved with their children, in a way that was unthinkable before.

Lynne: But the absolutely unsolved problem is: who does that necessary caring work? Who looks after the children?

Susie: I think men who are brought in early aren't frightened of their babies. And they don't have to wait for them to speak or to toddle to get interested in them.

Fay: Yes, the mothers no longer have to say: 'Be careful, don't drop it.'

One of the things that feminism gets accused of fairly frequently is of contributing to the breakdown of the family. What do you think of that?

Fay: I think the family broke down as much as it has broken down because women could earn. Because when you can earn then you can choose whether to stay with a man or not. I don't think you can blame feminism for that; I think you could blame capitalism.

Lynne: We came out of those 1950s families when mothers were supposed to be at home with their children, and we know so many of those mothers suffered from depression, had breakdowns and so many of the children were unhappy also. There wasn't, oddly, a philosophy that mothers should spend more time with their children. The pram used to be put down the end of the garden and no one would be looking after it. Today there's an enormous attention to children, so you can't generalise that children are worse off today, not at all. If anything I think they're a lot better off.

Is fat still a feminist issue, Susie?

Susie: It's so much worse. For cohorts of younger women there is no such thing as a stable body. The situation is so highly disturbing at this point, that it makes what I wrote about in Fat is a Feminist Issue in 1978 seem almost like normal eating. Now there's a bigger insecurity about the body than ever. It's almost as if the body is your brand. That is very, very troubling to me, so fat is now a feminist issue to the power of 10. And for boys too. The beauty industry is huge. L'Oréal grows by 14 per cent a year. And then there's the food industry, the diet industry, the pharmaceutical industry. There's a terrible sort of panic about the body which is worse than ever.

What about the future?

Fay: Women need to earn more. As soon as women earn, men behave.

Sheila: Recession is very bad for women. In the 1930s it was very hard to raise any issues about equal pay or equal rights. Women are so much more integrated in every part of the economy now, but in the 1930s women came to be scapegoated, accused of taking men's jobs. It was also much harder to get social provision and that's a problem because women with children really need a welfare state.

Fay: You three did the work, you got equal pay, got equal rights. You did bring about the revolution. We've had the most extraordinary social upheaval and people have coped amazingly well and settled down to it. I remember when I got a promotion in my advertising agency, and a man came up to me and said: 'You mustn't take it, you know.' And I said: 'Why?' And he said: 'You'll be taking the bread out of a child's mouth.' Then everybody changed so fast. Suddenly you saw men pushing prams. It's amazing, really.

'They were crazy times': What they did in the seventies ...

Fay Weldon, novelist

As a novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist, Weldon has written about women and female experience for more than 40 years. Her writing often centres on women trapped within an oppressive society dominated by men. Her best-known novels include Praxis (which was Booker-nominated), Puffball and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which she says she wrote to show women could be not just good, but 'a little bit bad'. Her latest novel The Stepmother's Diary was published in September.

Sheila Rowbotham Writer, academic

Rowbotham published the groundbreaking pamphlet 'Women's Liberation and the New Politics' in 1969 and was one of the forces behind the first National Women's Liberation Conference in 1970, which set out a political agenda on issues such as equal pay, education and free contraception. She was recently appointed Simon Professor of History after a student campaign overturned her enforced retirement from Manchester University. Verso has just published her biography of Edward Carpenter.

Susie Orbach Psychotherapist, writer

Founder of the Women's Therapy Centre, Orbach also wrote the 1978 book Fat Is a Feminist Issue, which was one of the first texts to discuss women's relationships with eating, size and self-image. It became a runaway bestseller. She has also co-authored a number of well-received works including What Do Women Want?

Lynne Segal Writer, academic

Professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck, Segal co-authored (with Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright) the 1979 pamphlet 'Beyond the Fragments', which argued for closer links between feminism and left-wing politics. In 1987 she wrote Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism