Shopgirls (30 page)

The teen magazine market was part of a bigger post-war economic transformation. By the late 1960s, 16- to 24-year-olds, were spending over £150 million each year on cosmetics, footwear, knitwear, coats, jackets and suits. And the customers were not just middle class – working-class consumer spending had begun to rise. According to an earlier
Financial Times
report from the mid 1950s, ‘the middle-class family of today spends £94 a year on clothes, while the average working-class family manages on £54’.
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The bigger point here, however, was that ‘the latter outnumber the middle class by more than 2 to 1’. Smart retailers, even small independents, would always look to find ways to tap into this mass market.

This spending spree was funded by full employment. In stark contrast to the biting unemployment of the interwar years, work had never been easier to find. In 1959 Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan came out with the famous line, ‘Indeed let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good.’ This was a new age of affluence, with rising wages, exports and investment. Unemployment had reached a historic low of just 216,000 in 1955 and then averaged around 2 per cent until the early 1970s. By 1966, retail was employing 1.3 million women or nearly one fifth of the entire female workforce. Many of this generation of shopgirls typically started as fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Saturday girls, most of them still at school. Stores found they needed part-time Saturday assistants once the traditional full-time working week was cut from six days to five, a gradual process that began in the 1930s but was much more widely adopted post-war. Needless to say, Saturday girls were paid a lot less than their weekday counterparts, but for many it was an exciting rite of passage.

Something else was beginning to change, too. Married women, many of them mums in their thirties and forties, began to return to work. Because of such historic low unemployment, many retailers were battling with staff shortages. And as during the Second World War, they turned to married women to fill the gap. Towards the end of that conflict, just as after the First World War, most women who had stepped up into men’s roles in shopwork had been required to step down again. But now, in the 1950s, shopkeepers made their job offer even more tempting to the working mother juggling domestic duties: the shopwork available was on a part-time basis and they had no intention of taking it away from women a few years down the line. Part-time work had been pioneered during the war, but this was now on a different scale altogether.

It was a historic and lasting shift. In 1957, only a quarter of shopworkers were part-time. A decade later, nearly a third were, and most of them were women.
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On the upside, it meant that mothers could fit in paid work around their children. The real downside, however, was that their pay, conditions and pensions were generally poor.

This was a sadly familiar cycle. Back in the 1850s and 60s, the original expansion of the retail industry had been based on the girling of shopwork. To a large extent, shopkeepers who wanted to grow their businesses began employing young women because they could pay them less. A century on, and Britain’s success as a maturing retail economy was again built on the cheap labour of its increasingly part-time, and mostly female, workforce. Young female art-and-design students like Quant, Hulanicki, Birtwell and Campbell were breaking exciting new ground through boutiques and everything they stood for. But other young women, including their own shopgirls, sellers and models, were sleepwalking into a lasting low-wage trap.

In the nineteenth century, many girls had opted for shopwork over domestic service because it was better paid. In the early twentieth century this continued to be the case. As their working hours were reduced and new kinds of professional qualifications, such as book-keeping, were introduced, female shopworkers’ wages had improved in comparison to other trades. But by the late 1960s, it seemed that these advances were being slowly but surely eroded. An Earnings Survey conducted in 1968 by the Department of Employment showed that for both men and women, the job of sales assistant was ‘one of the lowest paid in Britain’. Other researchers, writing in the
Industrial Relations Journal
, would go on to calculate that sales assistants’ earnings had actually fallen in relation to other low-paid workers, most of whom were part of Britain’s post-war servant class: ‘only gardeners, farmworkers and general catering workers, waiters and barmen earned less than salesmen, and only kitchenhands, hairdressers and barmaids earned less than saleswomen. If gratuities were included, the position of sales assistants could be even worse.’
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This was the world of the small private business – the countless shops, salons, pubs, restaurants and hotels that made up the sprawling service sector and which seemed so hard to reform. Unions worked behind the scenes to raise standards but the labour movement as a whole was much more concerned with the bigger beasts of British industry – notably car plants, coal mines and manufacturing. The shop assistants’ union, known from 1947 as the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, or USDAW, had seen its post-war numbers rise. But the number of female members remained fairly low and the number of part-time members even lower.

Hope for pay equality with men came from a different sector. In 1955, female civil servants had submitted mass petitions and marched in demonstrations trying to force a promise of equal pay. By 1961 they had secured this, as had most female teachers. Outside the private sector, this progress was taking longer – but would ultimately result in a countrywide shift. In 1968, a group of female manual workers fought a famous battle of their own, leading, ultimately, to landmark national legislation on equal pay. In June of that year the sewing machinists at Ford’s car plant in Dagenham, the European centre of the US motor giant’s global operation, walked out. The women worked on the specialised upholstery for car seats. They were incensed by Ford’s regrading of its workforce, which had put them on a lower, unskilled grade while men doing very similar work had been put on a higher, semi-skilled grade. Lower grades meant lower pay. When they walked out, no upholstery meant no finished product and no sales.

Ford’s entire UK production was brought to a halt for three weeks when women at their Halewood plant on Merseyside joined the Dagenham strike. Things might have ended very differently if anyone other than Barbara Castle had been the secretary of state for employment in Harold Wilson’s government. Castle was still only one of a handful of women to have served in the Cabinet. She held personal meetings with the Dagenham machinists and although she wouldn’t support their demand to be regraded as skilled workers, she did back their case for a pay rise. More importantly, she used the strike to win support for a momentous piece of legislation that was extremely close to her own heart: the 1970 Equal Pay Act. At long last, wages would – in theory at least – be determined by the nature of the tasks performed, not the body of the person performing them. Employers were given five years to make whatever changes were necessary to ensure that they offered equal pay for equal work. If bohemianism had been made in Chelsea, then equal pay – which was just as counter-cultural – was made in Dagenham.

1970 was proving to be a watershed year for British women in other ways. In February, an event at Ruskin College in Oxford would take the fight for equal rights well beyond women’s wage packets. Back in the nineteenth century, artist and social critic John Ruskin had celebrated the dignity of labour and sought to open up more opportunities for working-class men. Now the college named in his honour hosted a very different kind of meeting: Britain’s first National Women’s Liberation Conference.

The event had come about rather by accident. A few weeks beforehand, a mature student named Sally Alexander had booked college rooms for a conference on women’s history. Mother to a young daughter, and a former stage manager, she’d gone to university after her divorce in 1968. Like many others, however, she was increasingly frustrated by the way that history was written and taught. Traditional history books were still dominated by accounts of the power struggles of royal courts, politicians and parliaments. And while some social historians were starting to study the lives of ordinary people, or ‘history from below’, they were principally interested in writing the story of working men, rather than that of their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters – or, indeed, women who had proven themselves on their own terms. Sally had been particularly exasperated by the sidelining of women’s experience at a recent Ruskin history conference, not least because that event was run by the otherwise radical History Workshop group, at the vanguard of the new focus on social history. When young history lecturer Sheila Rowbotham had suggested the group’s next meeting might cover women’s history, the mostly male crowd had ‘roared with laughter’. Sally and Sheila were taken aback but, with the help of several others, got on with organising their own meeting.

It quickly became apparent to them that little had been written about the recent history of women’s working and social lives. Undeterred, they decided their meeting would address the position of women in the present day instead. With a small group of co-organisers, they invited some speakers, put out some leaflets and waited. Rowbotham recalls that they were expecting ‘perhaps a hundred people’. In fact, five hundred showed up, some with their babies and young children. ‘Everybody arrived with their sleeping bags on Friday night, which was turmoil.’ Somehow, they wrangled a rapid overspill from Ruskin into the Oxford Union’s hallowed debating chamber, described by Rowbotham as ‘an extraordinarily stiff environment that was meant to produce male orators who would become prime ministers’. She remembered ‘being really scared of speaking in that room’.
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Over three days, the National Women’s Liberation Conference debated a whole host of subjects, from the family, sex and motherhood to women’s work and pay. For them, these issues were inextricably linked. The reason why most women found themselves restricted to doing certain kinds of jobs – most of which, like shopwork, were quite poorly paid – was that at some point in their lives many would have to juggle earning cash with caring for kids. While some women relished that arrangement, others felt increasingly trapped.

From the outset, the organisers of the Ruskin event were acutely aware of the need to reach out to ordinary working women. To that end, they invited Audrey Wise, trade unionist at USDAW, to give a platform speech. Wise was then in her mid thirties. She had grown up in Newcastle and like so many of her generation, she ‘married young’, at the age of eighteen, and ‘just fitted in jobs mostly part time’ around her small children, working as a ‘shorthand typist, insurance agent, market researcher’, which she regarded as ‘going-round-knocking-on-doors type jobs – definitely not a career’. She had joined USDAW when she ‘got a job canvassing catalogues’. From then on things changed. She quickly rose to become branch secretary and then, long before the Ruskin conference, an active supporter of the Ford strikers. She would go on to become a Labour MP and a prominent voice in this new wave of women’s rights debates. Speaking at an equal rights rally in a rainy Trafalgar Square before all this, in 1969, she’d been struck by the quiet determination of the mostly female crowd: ‘These women on this wet day … tipping their umbrellas back so they could see you … drinking in every word.’ Many had travelled across the country to be there and Wise gleefully imagined the kinds of responses from husbands shocked to hear that their wives were ‘going to London’: ‘how can we afford it? What about the dinner, who will look after the children?’ A man, thought Wise, would ‘simply say, “I’m going on a demonstration.” Full stop.’
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Like Margaret Bondfield before her, Wise was a socialist first and a feminist second. She’d been invited to Ruskin to talk about women and trade unions and although she stuck to the brief, she argued that the only way of improving the lives of working women was to improve the lives of all working people. She remembers that many in the audience found her line ‘quite hard going’ and that the encounter certainly ‘wasn’t cosy’. But she ‘enjoyed the weekend’ and ‘went away very friendly to it all’, above all, ‘thrilled at the size of it’.
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She later took part in debates on the Working Women’s Charter – a set of proposals that proved too challenging for the TUC, among others.
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Back at Ruskin, the landmark conference had ended with a session that opened a whole new question: ‘Where are we going?’ All those attending voted unanimously to support four demands: equal pay; equal education and opportunity; twenty-four-hour nurseries; free contraception and abortion on demand. Inspired by the US civil rights movement, they also agreed to channel their energies into a new Women’s Liberation Movement. The ‘women’s libbers’ were roundly ridiculed by much of the press, many politicians and the wider public for wanting this kind of equality and freedom. They would attract outright hostility, however, when they pulled off one of their most audacious stunts. On 20 November 1970, around fifty demonstrators disrupted the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall. This was the television highlight of the year, watched by over twenty million viewers. Protestors, including Sally Alexander, heckled the startled-looking finalists as they disembarked from their coach, shouting, ‘Shame on you!’, ‘We’re not beautiful or ugly, we’re angry!’ and ‘Welcome to the world’s largest cattle market!’ They brandished banners declaring, ‘Beauty contests degrade women’ and berating the ‘Poor cows’ taking part. Inside the venue, they silenced equally startled hosts Michael Aspel and Bob Hope with football rattles and flour bombs.

At the time, many commentators saw the Miss World protest as clear evidence that feminists were sexually repressed men-haters. In fact, they embraced women’s sexuality. Many devoured the books of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Erica Jong and, even if they didn’t agree with every line, encouraged women to explore their own bodies and find their own sexual pleasures. What they objected to, very vehemently, was not only the continuing economic inequality that kept them dependent on men and marriage, but also their treatment as passive ‘sex objects’ who existed to please others. As one of their posters pithily put it: ‘YES to mini-skirts, NO to mini-wages.’ Many of those who disrupted the Miss World contest would happily wear bikinis on the beach and were devotees of Bazaar, Biba and art-school chic – and saw no contradiction in that. For them, there was a world of difference between women running their own businesses and creating styles that made their customers feel more visible and powerful, and a beauty contest in which women paraded in swimwear at the behest of men in bow ties.