Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [46]
We were not sophisticated. We were northerners. We didn’t live in a big city like Manchester, and feminism seemed not to have reached us.
‘Battleaxe’ has always been a word used both for and against the strong northern working-class woman. That cleaver image split our identity too. Northern women were tough, and reckoned that way in the home and in popular comedy – all the seaside postcards were drawings of weedy little men and dominating women – and in the drunken working men’s clubs, stage acts like Les Dawson dressed up in headscarves and aprons, parodying, but also celebrating, the formidable women the men loved, feared, and were dependent upon. Yet those women who were supposed to stand at the door waiting to whack their men with a rolling pin had no economic clout. And when they had, they hid it.
The women I knew who ran their own small businesses, like the market stall I worked on, or the fish and chip shop that supplied me with many of my meals, pretended it was their husband’s enterprise, and that they just worked there.
When we had our one and only sex education lesson at school it was not about sex at all, but sexual economics. We should pay our own way, because that was the modern thing to do, but we should give the boy the money beforehand, so that he could be seen to pay. We were only talking bus fares and cinema tickets, but later, when we managed the household budget, we should make sure he knew that everything was his. Male pride, I think the teacher called it. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard; a flat earth theory of social relations.
The only women who were contentedly living the life they wanted without pretending socially were the pair who ran the sweet shop, but they had to pretend sexually, and weren’t able to be openly gay. People laughed at them, and one wore a balaclava.
I was a woman. I was a working-class woman. I was a woman who wanted to love women without guilt or ridicule. Those three things formed the basis of my politics, not the unions, or class war as understood by the male Left.
The Left has taken a long time to fully include women as independent and as equals – and no longer to enfold women’s sexuality into a response to male desire. I felt uncomfortable and sidelined by what I knew of left-wing politics. And I wasn’t looking to improve the conditions of my life. I wanted to change my life out of all recognition.
*
In the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher appeared, talking about a new culture of risk and reward – one where you could achieve, one where you could be anything you wanted to be, if you would only work hard enough and be prepared to abandon the safety nets of tradition.
I had already left home. I was already working evenings and weekends to get through school. I had no safety net.
Thatcher seemed to me to have better answers than the middle-class men who spoke for the Labour Party, and the working-class men who campaigned for a ‘family’ wage, and wanted their women at home.
I had no respect for family life. I had no home. I had rage and courage. I was smart. I was emotionally disconnected. I didn’t understand gender politics. I was the ideal prototype for the Reagan/Thatcher revolution.
I sat my Oxford entrance exam, coached by Mrs Ratlow, got an interview and bought a coach ticket to Oxford.
I had applied to St Catherine’s because it had a new modern feel, because it was a mixed college, and because it had been formed out of the St Catherine’s Society – a kind of sad satellite of the established Oxford colleges, founded for students too poor to attend Oxford proper.
But now it was Oxford proper. And maybe I could go there.
I got off the bus in Oxford and asked my way to St Catherine’s. I felt like Jude the Obscure in Thomas Hardy’s novel, and I was determined not