Another voice
The dubbin factor
Auberon Waugh
'As in all congregations of God's people, women should not address the meeting. They have no licence to speak, but should keep their place as the law directs. If there is something they want to know, they can ask their own husbands at home. It is a shocking thing that a woman should address the con gregation.' (1 Corinthians XIV 34-5,
New English Bible) The law, of course, no longer gives any such direction, but I decided to avoid Sunday's Golden Gala at the London Palladium .to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, attended by Princess Margaret and Mr James Callaghan. No doubt the enfranchisement of women was a small and possibly unimportant step in the seemingly inexorable progress of the Women's Movement. But I do not see, with the benefit of hindsight, that we need rejoice over any past extension of the franchise or over any recent adjustment of roles between men and women in our society, at any rate since the Married Women's Property Act of 1882.
If Britain elects a woman Prime Minister in October, we will be only the fourth democracy in the history of the world to have done so, the other three being India, Ceylon and Israel. I disregard Yugoslavia because it has never been proved conclusively that Tito (who has been Prime Minister, among other things, since 1945) is a woman. Neither Mrs Bandaranaike nor Mrs Gandhi really counts, since they more or less inherited the post from husband and father respectively. It is surely significant that none of the Scandinavian democracies, for all their gruelling progressiveness, nor even Holland, for all its silliness and overexcitability, has ever contemplated such a radical step — and China, faced by no more than the distant threat of a woman leader, preferred to launch itself on another huge internal convulsion and blood-letting. Whichever way we look at it, Britain will be the first country in the history of the world voluntarily to have experimented with a right-wing lady.
Personally, I think it is all a great mistake. Mrs Thatcher would make an excellent match for Mr Benn and an intriguing match for Mr Foot; she might even score a point or two against Mr Healey. But she is no match for Mr Callaghan. If only the Tories had chosen William Whitelaw as! urged them at the time. With Thatcher and Joseph as his seconds he would surely have been able to see Callaghan off with the sort of majority which politicians only dream about. But it is no good harking back to all the disregarded advice one has offered the country. The chief trouble with Thatcher is that she has never been to a British public school. Several Labour leaders and contenders for the job have actually had to work with the people they represent at some stage in their lives, and even the terrible Grocer Heath (who is not, of course, a woman) must have been de-bagged and dubbined once or twice at Chatham House School, Ramsgate, when he got too uppity. An upwardly mobile shopkeeper's daughter sees nothing and suffers nothing of what her fellow-citizens can do to her. She did not even, like Tony Benn, serve in the armed forces. To have been de-bagged and dubbined may seem a frivolous qualification for a national leader, but there is an essential awareness of what one can get away with in life without being de-bagged and dubbined which is simply not available to female research chemists and banisters. Golda Meir, of course, never went to a British public school, but she was a leading member of the Haganah struggle and risked imprisonment as provisional head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department in Palestine between 1946 and 1948. This is much the same sort of thing. One has only to look at the careers of Mrs Gandhi in India and Mrs Bandaranaike in Ceylon to see exactly what I am frightened of in Mrs Thatcher. Selfrighteousness, sweet reason and occasional feelings of moral outrage are not enough in political leaders. They also need a healthy terror of the mob.
Of course it was this womanly fearlessness which got her the job in the first place, while Mr Whitelaw hopped around like the cat in the adage, weeping his oysterish tears over the abused Grocer. Perhaps he had been dubbined once too often at Winchester. Poor Enoch, of course, had been so covered with dubbin ever since he stepped out of line that one doubts if he will ever be visible again. But Mrs Thatcher, as I say, has never even been de-bagged. The Women's Movement has overreached itself.
I think we should distinguish between the political and social manifestations of this great movement, although our conclusions may be the same in both cases. It is now generally agreed that essential differences between men and women need not necessarily lead to economic or social inequality, and I certainly do not wish to join the debate over the extent to which such disparity of achievement as one sees is a consequence of social and cultural influences or biological inheritance: whether entrenched male prejudice is an important factor, or whether many women are genuinely reluctant to put their careers before their families. There is ample historical evidence for supposing that women's lesser strength and slighter build need not preclude them from being the carriers of burdens, or from taking on heavy agricultural work and other strenuous physical labour, but only so long as their child-bearing role is maintained. I should have thought that any society which organised itself in such a way as to disregard this essential role was heading for serious trouble. Every generation produces its quota of bad mothers, discontented wives, ugly, sour or mentally unbalanced spinsters — what Mr Heath might call the unacceptable face of womanhood — but a balanced society surely manages to keep these women in their place, just as it punishes the brutal or neglectful husband. I suspect that under recent and proposed social legislation marriage will soon go the way of employment under Bauer's law, whereby demand is not only regulated by supply but also by price.
The tragedy is that all this baneful and mischievous legislation will have been wished upon the country by a small minority of unsuccessful wives, embittered spinsters, selfish, ugly or unbalanced women who can't fit into the majority pattern. In the final resort, hundreds of thousands of women — soft gentle, loving creatures — are going to find themselves without husbands or a home to share or any prospects of a family as a result of agitation from a noisy handful of lesbians, sluts and harridans.
The drift may, of course, continue. Margaret Mead describes how, in the headhunting Mundugornor tribe, women deliberately reject their babies in order to perpetuate a line as ferocious and unpleasant as they are themselves. If! am right and it is an inalienable characteristic of decent women that they do not push themselves forward and let their opinions be known, then democracy offers little prospect of a change. Only the men can save them — men who are themselves suffering from an epidemic of effeminacy and ineffectiveness as their women become more agressive.
But I think I see a glimmer of hope, and oddly enough it is in the political sphere. The horrors and humiliations which will be visited on this poor country of ours under the undubbined Mrs Thatcher are at present known only to God, but I think it safe to assume that they will be followed by a period of reflection and reassessment. It is at that moment that a shrewd male politician might venture his arm by appealing to the spirit of modesty and self-sacrifice which remains such an agreeable characteristic of the average human female. In the light of the havoc caused by our first woman Prime Minister, might not the fairer sex voluntarily renounce any further voice in the government of this country, whether by standing for election or by voting? The question can be put to a national plebiscite confined to women — another British 'first'. As soon as a satisfactory answer is received, we men might take a long, hard look at the Married Women's Property Act of 1882.
Previous page
