Participants frequently spoke of their transgressions of heterosexuality and conventional gender roles as intertwined; the borders between them are blurred and indistinguishable. For some women, Minerva, Gina and Esther for example, early recognition of lesbian or bisexual feelings triggered new ways of being along with the refusal of marriage and motherhood. Others, such as Louise and Joan, transgressed the dominant gender role
expectations of their generation long before they acknowledged or acted on feelings of sexual difference. Some women, including Ivy, Kate and Robin, found a new sexual identity through feminist groups and politics. Two women, Shirley and Alison, gave up full-time housewifery reluctantly, an indirect consequence of their sexual identity being the financial necessity for full-time work, although this would have been the likely future for the
working-class women regardless of their marital status.
Several participants expressed frustration at the limitations of inadequate education, their lack of opportunity and the passivity wrought by marriage.
For some, awareness of these limitations served as a driver for them to deliberately negotiate a different kind of life where they could deploy individual agency and reflexivity. For others, they contributed to the
increasing sense of difference, which had emerged as they navigated their
‘upward trajectory’ through education. Mackinnon and Bullen (2005) comment on the deployment of agency noting that the articulation of both class and gender:
[V]ary considerably according to the context in which they are embedded. The changing context may provide the space in which some agency is possible, some politics can be engaged, some means of transcending the gendered and classed structures of our lives can be found. Or it may render agency, political engagement and transcendence less possible. (p.32)
Jacqueline’s early rejection of traditional gender role expectations pre-dates her engagement with the politics of women’s liberation, which made her later sexual and emotional relationships with women almost obligatory.
While her mother’s modest educational aspirations for her to be a secretary were grounded in her own limited experience and expectations, in relation to marriage and motherhood she urged Jacqueline ‘to travel! Not to make a home’:
[F]rom about the age of 14 onwards I hadn’t wanted to get married.
[…] As far as I could see, people were rabbits and they endlessly reproduced and there was no progress in society, of any kind, other than just reproduction. […] I also hated housework, didn't like
cooking, wasn't particularly attracted to babies, didn't like the idea of a home, particularly. None of that stuff interested me very much.
Jacqueline (born 1944) didn't marry or have children. She was single and lived alone.
For some participants, early awareness of their sexual and emotional preferences positioned them on an unconventional life course; others
reached this point later, in their thirties and forties. Regardless of when they occurred, transgressions including the rejection of the twin pillars of
hegemonic masculinity - heterosexual marriage and motherhood - or refusal to conform to codes of dress and appearance often set women apart from their parents, friends and siblings, creating a fracture between them that
remains into older age. Val, the eldest of the participants, recalled how familial expectations for her were centred on domestic life, marriage and children:
It was so drummed into us that what was expected was, you know, you couldn't be a proper woman without being married and having children. […] I didn't want that really. I had […] a single aunt but my twin got married at eighteen. Still married to the same chap! And so, you know, everybody… oh you next, you next. […] I still thought I'd have to do it. I'd have to do that. So when I was eighteen for
instance, I thought ‘well I suppose it’ll be alright if I married at twenty-three. But then when I got to twenty-three I thought ‘Oh. I wish I'd got this bloody husband and children.’ […] I didn’t want it. But I still tried, it’s crazy, I was so tied into that. I didn't see an alternative. So you know, I used to go out with these chaps and my mum used to say
‘you could have married him if you'd played your cards right.’
Val (born 1940) didn’t marry or have children. She was single and lived alone.
When Val discovered feminism, which she now describes as her religion, it became an integral part of her identity as a lesbian feminist. She is a qualified social worker, an articulate and committed activist; proud to have been instrumental in the setting up of the Camden Lesbian Centre and the London Older Lesbian Network. Yet, her acute awareness of her parents’
low expectations, combined with the fact that she left school in 1956 aged 15 having studied a ‘commercial course’, continue to impact her life now.
She described to me how she tries to ‘catch up in knowledge’ through reading and how, now in her 70s, she is positioned differently from her slightly younger contemporaries both materially and culturally:
You know, I don't have a computer - I don't want a computer in here because it’s a tiny space and I just feel it would take over – so I don't want that but I haven’t you know… I had a motorbike but never had a car. Never had a house, haven’t got a washing machine, you know.
And it doesn't matter to me as it might to somebody else because of my low expectations I think.
These ‘low expectations’ can be partially attributed to Val’s early habitus formation acquired within a particular set of social conditions; a female child born to a working-class family in Battersea ‘with the guns blazing away’. Her new experiences and interactions do not eradicate the earlier dispositions, which were cast on her inferior status as a third girl in the family and placed her social capital within femininity, marriage and motherhood. Friedman (2014) suggests that the concept of habitus helps us to imagine how:
[T]he mobile person’s past can shape their horizon of expectations in the present. (p.362)
Emily was another participant who recognised quite early on that her expected path of marriage and motherhood held no allure. In her interview, she described herself repeatedly as ‘different’:
Because there was always the expectation, you’ll get married. I kept moving to places where the marriage age was later and I was really pleased about it! Scotland you got married at seventeen and a half, eighteen in Canada they got married two or three years later in London, they seemed to get married even later – great! So it just didn’t appeal – nor having babies.
Emily (born 1949) didn’t marry or have children. She was single (civilly partnered and then widowed) and lived alone.
Awareness of gender injustice and the limitations on women’s role often started within the family. Like Val, Louise found solace in the feminist movement, and was active in the Greenham Peace Camp. Her impatience with the constraints of the traditional feminine role prevalent in her 1950s adolescence can be seen in this narrative, which reveals her palpable sense of frustration and desire for a different kind of life:
[T]he thing to do, the only thing to do was to have children and women didn't work. And I think the first thing I would remember about becoming a feminist, I must have been about 10 or 11 and it must have been the school holidays, I was at home all day and it was a windy day and when my dad came home from work at night, she
bedroom window, it’s a bit stiff and its been blustery all day and I haven’t been able to close it.’ […] I don't think I said a word, I just thought then, ‘Well why the hell didn't you ask me? I was in, I can close windows and what's more I am not going to grow up into the sort of person that has to wait all day to ask her husband to shut the window when he comes home from work. I think I was 10 or 11. And I felt that very strongly and I haven’t forgotten it.
Louise (born 1949) married, didn’t have children. She was now single and lived alone.
Although her (middle) class was a constant, as a single, lesbian woman who worked as a building surveyor, Louise’s sense of her own gendered and sexual difference from other women remains to this day. Following her divorce, she has lived alone for many years, now living in a suburb of Leeds, which she described as mostly middle-class but ‘mixed’. This more diverse environment was highly significant to her; she described how saying hello to passers-by connected her to the local community, helping her ‘to feel normal’ whereas her previous housing situation, in the midst of young heterosexual families, had made her feel conspicuous and out of place;
isolated by the intersection of her class and gender role choices:
It’s an odd thing to say isn’t it? I am normal. The last place I lived was a little terraced house in south Leeds in what was a mining village and became suburbia. And it was a place called R. Nearly everybody else in the terrace I lived in came from R, been brought up there, they'd married somebody from R, they'd moved into this little terrace and the estate agent advertised the terrace - every time a house came up for sale – it was ‘suitable for a newly married young couple’… How dare they! But anyway that’s what moved in; newly married young couples from R, working-class, they usually had a baby very quickly. […] And I thought, ‘Oh for goodness sake! I don't belong here!’
Jill: Ok. Whereas here you feel…
Yeah, they’re not all the same as me by any means, but just the fact that people are different and there's a bit of everything. […] At R people couldn't understand difference; I was just completely beyond the pale. I was certainly not out […] I mean being out as a woman living on your own was extraordinary to them. And then they,
probably some of them must have caught on that I was doing joinery work and they… they just couldn't relate to me at all.
5.3 Swimming against the tide: Recognition and transgression of