An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (18 page)

But if you are not going to yield to his entreaties to join him in bed, don’t just sit there and sulk. Give him a real lecture on your monumental respect for the act as a marital rite. Convince him, if you can, that you have stored up ardour and fire that will create a holocaust once you have a marriage certificate in your hot little hand …

Here is a programme that will help you in your struggle.

ONE: If, at the end of a date, your escort insists on a long session of kissing, engage his aid in the preparation of a little snack. Avoid being blunt. Men don’t like to be told firmly.

TWO: Plan your dates around people – card parties, cocktail parties, barbecues, stage plays, films, dancing, club activities, or just getting together with a group.

THREE: Try to achieve a real sense of affection and intimacy through conversation.

FOUR: No matter how badly you want to, don’t go on a trip with him, except possibly a weekend jaunt with a group.

Don’t yield cheaply, if yielding is what you are going to do. Don’t be grudging. Cry a little, but also bite his ear. Tell him that he has made you feel like a real woman for the first time. Tell him that this is what you were created for, and that you have found the ultimate happiness. He may have just wanted to sample the merchandise on a trial-run basis. But if you are smart, you can create such an emotional climate that he will be begging you to become his wife.
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The notions that copulation represented conquest for a man and surrender for a woman, that sex was a compounded sequence of discomforts for women, that they were weak, vulnerable creatures who were justified in using their ‘sexual favours’ to manipulate and take passive-aggressive control of men, were all implicit in ‘How to Get a Husband’. The article upheld codes of sexual decorum – differently nuanced between the classes – which acted as bulwarks against masculine sexual rapacity.

Women were demeaned, if not incriminated, when they showed lust. During the Profumo Affair and Ward trial, the following words were used synonymously: girlfriend, model, nightclub hostess, dancer, artiste, good-time girl, Society belle, party girl, gold-digger, short-term mistress, enthusiastic amateur, masseuse, call-girl, scrubber, adolescent drab, common tart, prostitute, whore. ‘Nymphomaniac’ – the epithet used by men to devalue women with a higher notch-rate than they had managed – became prevalent at this time (it had been popularised by reviewers’ descriptions of Justine, the voluptuous protagonist of Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
published in 1957–60). The notion that men were ‘naturally’ overpoweringly and excusably raunchier than women was pervasive. ‘Nothing can stop a bloke once he gets into that state,’ said a Hertfordshire man: ‘be a hell of a job to do that.’ ‘The biological urge to have her overcame everything,’ explained a barrister in extenuation of his client Harvey Holford who had married a woman fifteen years his junior, beaten and shot her dead. Dual standards abounded in 1963. When a night-watchman at John Bloom’s washing machine company found an ‘office girl’ attending to a salesman with his trousers down, the man was reprimanded but the woman was sacked.
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During the Macmillan years these attitudes covered the surface of society like a stifling blanket. A small boy was taken by his nanny, around 1961, for a meal at a Wimpy Bar – a chain of proto-Macdonald’s serving hamburgers in buns with onion rings and chips, in which his favourite treat was squeezing slurpy, sweetened ketchup from an over-sized, luridly red plastic tomato. On the wall there was a puzzling notice proclaiming that no ‘unaccompanied woman’, or pairs of women, would be served after 9.30 or 10 at night. He quizzed his nanny about this. ‘Oh, they might be up to no good, you see,’ she replied cryptically. It seemed a fixed public notion of the 1960s that any woman, or pairs of women, out at night in public spaces, without a man, were offering sex and contaminating their surroundings.

To challenge what many inwardly knew to be nonsense was simply not respectable. For all the talk of ‘Swinging London’, little changed in the sixties. ‘Women still can’t go alone where they want to without arousing adverse comments – it’s even socially difficult when two women, without male escorts, go somewhere together,’ Colin MacInnes reported in 1968. There were glares if a solitary woman went to a bar or restaurant: it was assumed that she was on the game. ‘The Ritz hotel is the only place in London where the chic
and the style are such that a lone woman is not frowned at in bar or dining room.’
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A splendid young journalist and features editor of
Vogue,
Siriol Hugh-Jones, browsed through the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
in 1961 to discover what male writers thought of her gender: ‘women wail for demon lovers; wake to love; are weak and feeble; like dewdrops, fountains and troublesome cattle; a dish for the gods; the last thing civilised by Man; small-souled; and have no characters at all. Byron hates them dumpy, and Meredith deeply regrets that their sense is with their senses all mixed in.’ Hugh-Jones recalled that when she was confirmed by a bishop, his address hinged on the memorable words: ‘My dear little daughters, don’t take yourselves too seriously.’ She resented an advertising campaign by the
Observer
in 1961, which praised the newspaper’s newly recruited film critic, Penelope Gilliatt, while insulting her gender: ‘She is also that unusual thing, a woman who is a wit.’ It made Gilliatt sound, thought Hugh-Jones, as outlandish as a woman with a green nose.
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The patronising mistrust of women was evident in a BBC television interview with Nancy Astor intended to celebrate her eightieth birthday in 1959. ‘Do you think, looking back, that women are as suited mentally to public life as men?’ she was asked. ‘I think they are more suited,’ she replied, ‘because they’re not so easily flattered as men are. I can guarantee any woman can get any man if she’s got enough flattery.’ The interviewer persisted in his belittling. ‘A lot of men say that women are emotionally unstable, and that their judgement is therefore a bit subjective?’ he asked again. Nancy Astor erupted at this vainglorious masculinity: ‘I guarantee you can get any man, and I’ll tell you how … [Bitterly] “Tell me about yourself,” and off they go!’ It was because of Nancy Astor that, when the introduction of life peerages was debated in 1953, Lord Llewellin wished to exclude women from the bill – not because they were ignorant, but because they were considered mouthy. ‘Political women,’ he declared, rummaging through his experiences with Nancy Astor in the Commons, ‘are inclined to be “bossy”’, with ‘a tremendous number of bees in their bonnets’.
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If women in the Macmillan years were not gentle daughters or dewdrops, then they were Wimpy Bar sluts or bossy-boots. During the debate on life peerages in 1957, Lord Rea suggested that the title of future life peeresses should be ‘Matron’ rather than Baroness. The innovation of women MPs had not been ‘a roaring success’, claimed twenty-eight-year-old Lord Ferrers, who was rare in saying publicly what untold men muttered among themselves. If one looked at women MPs, they were not ‘an exciting example of the attractiveness of the opposite sex’, he complained. ‘I hate the idea of your Lordships’ House becoming a repository for over-exuberant politicians … Frankly, I find women in pol- itics highly distasteful. In general, they are organising, they are pushing … Some of them do not even know where loyalty to their country lies.’ Ferrers believed that nature and custom had decreed that men were suited to some duties rather than women. ‘It is generally accepted that the man should bear the major responsibility in life … a man’s judgment is generally more logical and less tempestuous than a woman’s. Why should we then encourage women to eat their way, like acid into metal, into positions of trust and responsibility which previously men have held?’ If women were permitted to legislate in Parliament’s upper chamber, their emancipation might reach unthinkable extremes. ‘Shall we follow the rather vulgar example set by Americans of having female ambassadors? Will the judges, for whom we have so rich and well-deserved respect, be drawn from the serried ranks of the ladies?’ It would be a pollution to feminise the Lords: ‘We like women; we admire them; sometimes we even grow fond of them; but we do not want them here.’
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Not only were women excluded from the upper house of Parliament until 1958; married women’s signatures were seldom accepted without their husband’s endorsement so that they were unable to raise loans or make contracts independently. When, in 1961, the Cambridge graduate Jessica Mann underwent a Caesarean birth, it was her husband who was required by the hospital to give permission by signing the consent form. The social conservatism of this period, as entrenched in the Labour Party as in the Conservatives, created pent-up rebellion. Its archetypal heroine was the near-angelic housewife, always unselfish and patient, spreading harmony, and making decent men out of horny brutes and dutiful children from filthy brats. The delightful radio programme
Listen with Mother
, which provided happy hours of intimacy for children and their mothers, represented an ideal that was worth striving for. The distinctions between uplifting ideals and delusive fantasy are, however, easily blurred.
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In Wilfred Fienburgh’s autobiographical novel of 1959 about the Parliamentary Labour Party, an MP takes his young girlfriend on a Thames pleasureboat from Westminster to Greenwich. They sit together in the prow watching the Shell-Mex building and Somerset House slide past. He asks what ambitions she has had. ‘All the usual ones,’ she replies, ‘to be a netball captain, a film-star, the lot, all at once. It’s much simpler now. I want a home, a few round, bronzed, tow-haired children, a car in the garage and a sprinkler making music on the lawn.’ As the solicitor Michael Rubenstein lamented in 1963, ‘for young people today there is a tremendous build-up to the idea that marriage is bliss’. The make-believe that everyone should expect marital compati-bility made disillusionment inevitable, Rubenstein thought. He deplored the sham whereby couples pretended that mutual indifference, lit by occasional sparks of reciprocated impatience, represented mature content. ‘All over the country there are young and not so young couples, each partner bewildered, bored, miserable and lonely, but for the sake of the children, for the sake of public “face”, for fear of the soul-rotting alternative – pretending.’
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Increasing numbers of people recognised the imperfections of their marriages: women were less resigned to lifelong discontent. Divorce reform was recognised as a way of equalising the position of women; and the soaring of postwar marital unrest led to the appointment of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, with the judge Lord Morton of Henryton as chairman. After five years of deliberations, in the same year as the new Sexual Offences Act of 1956, Morton’s commissioners produced a vast tome, packed with inferences and laments, which was described at the time as ‘official humbug’. The lawyers who predominated as Morton’s colleagues were trained in precedent and the interpretation of statutes, and adept at musty, sententious altercation. They had no experience, though, in assembling or analysing social data. From fathomless depths of subjective ignorance they pronounced that the rising incidence of divorce arose from ‘a tendency to take the duties and responsibilities of marriage less seriously than formerly’. They upheld a view of marriage not as a contract between the two individuals who married, but as the two spouses’ contract with the state. Marriage was seen as a social institution rather than an emotional partnership. It served the greater good of society rather than individual happiness.
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Morton’s commissioners were unanimous that matrimonial fault – the legal fictions of guilt and innocence – rather than a breakdown of trust and sympathy, should be retained as the basis for divorce. If marriage was a contract between two people and the state, adultery was a breach of that contract, and therefore one party must be punished as guilty and the other rewarded as innocent. Morton’s commissioners had the mulishness of people fighting in the last ditch against insurgency. They even discussed abolishing divorce altogether as a way of curbing the renegades. Ultimately, they recommended that the abolition of divorce should be reconsidered if the divorce rate continued to rise. Just as the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 had to be amended in 1967, so the Commission’s mindset was overthrown by the Divorce Reform Act of 1969.

Marital disillusion and infidelities were the stock of English cinema. Tony Havelock-Allan, Valerie Hobson’s first husband, produced that classic film (scripted by Noël Coward)
Brief Encounter
in 1945. This tale of unconsummated adulterous passion between a physician and an unfulfilled housewife was first previewed in a cinema near Chatham dockyards. The reaction from the naval audience was so derisive that the director thought of burning the negative, but the themes of stilted cravings and emotional paralysis struck responsive chords among the married middle classes. Hobson herself had a succession of film roles in which she played a wife in a failed or disappointing marriage. Her characters were coddled economically, but left with meagre emotional rations. In
The Interrupted Journey
(1949) she had the part of a middle-class suburban wife whose husband is eloping with another woman when he is caught in a train smash. In
Voice of Merrill
(1952), Hobson played Alycia Roche, trapped in a loveless marriage with an overbearing husband whom (with her lover) she schemes to poison. In
Background
(1953) she played Barbie Lomax, who agrees with her husband that their marriage is dead, and would be better buried by a divorce. Though their decision is rationalised to their three children, the latter are so grieved by the prospect of parents living in different houses that the adults’ hopes of divorce are relinquished. In
Knave of Hearts
(1954) Hobson played the wife of a philanderer. In each of these films, the promise of conjugal trust and happiness was a trap, or source of frustration. Marriage in these celluloid versions connoted at best sterile security and botched compromises: at worst, humiliation.