Problem stories

In the first act of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982), Marlene hosts an evening in an expensive restaurant to celebrate her promotion to head of the eponymous employment agency. Her guests are women from art, literature, history and myth. The women are: the traveller Isabella Bird (1831–1904); the Japanese courtesan and Buddhist nun Lady Nijo (b.1258); Dull Griet, a character from a Breughel painting; Pope Joan; and Patient Griselda from The Canterbury Tales. Marlene comments that ‘We've all come a long way’ (Churchill, 1991, 13), and, at first sight, all of her historical women are high achievers. But as the evening progresses and the women tell their stories, it becomes clear that although they can behave like men – talking across each other competitively and getting drunk – they have all paid a price for their success within patriarchal societies. Churchill's play satirises the sexual politics of the Thatcher era but its opening act makes two other important points. First, that it is difficult to write a history of women that produces the modern woman. Second, that the history of women is susceptible to occlusions, elisions and ideologically driven distortions. Churchill's play may seem distant from the subject of this book but, in many ways, our study encounters similar problems in trying to describe its starting point of 1970 and the continuing story of women's experimental poetry in Britain. In this chapter, we will explore the difficulties involved in telling that story.

Anyone trying to write about the late 1960s and early 1970s encounters the problem of trying to say what really happened. Even as the 1960s ended, writers as different as Christopher Booker and Arnold Wesker were characterising the decade as, respectively, nightmarish excess and, in political terms, the production of little more than ‘the habit of discontent’ (Hewison, 1988, 179, 178). The dominant Thatcherite view throughout the 1980s was that the 1960s were the source of everything that had gone wrong with post-war Britain. The Left has been equally dismissive and Arthur Marwick's claim that ‘the much publicized activities of tiny minorities have distracted attention from a very genuine liberation of the mass of the people’ is fairly typical (Marwick, 1990, 10).