In the 1970s, Lynne Segal’s big Victorian house in Islington, north London, operated as a commune, every room stuffed with leftists, every drawer and cupboard with their hand-printed pamphlets and slogan T-shirts. The inhabitants of Balfour Lodge ate together, brought up their children together and, most important of all, marched together, their causes ranging from squatters’ rights to women’s health. Only its owner held down a proper job: she worked as a lecturer at a technical college, her salary supplementing rather handily the benefits claimed by everyone else.
Forty years on, has anything changed? Installed at Segal’s kitchen table, I would say: a lot less than you might imagine. Granted, Segal is a university professor now and the author of a book about the pleasure and pain of ageing. But the module she’s currently teaching her students at Birkbeck, University of London, is “all about love”, which doesn’t sound to me as though it ticks many Michael Gove- shaped boxes. Plus, she still keeps a full house: not a commune exactly, but a collective of sorts. Two friends live upstairs, while in the basement there lurks a smiling Norwegian artist. The pamphlets are long gone – activists are mobilised by email and social media now – but if I twist my neck, I can see a couple of balsa wood placards (anti cuts, anti the Gaza blockade) and, on a sofa, a toppling pile of progressive texts. The room itself is straight out of Jill Tweedie – a hectic muddle of cereal boxes and newspapers. To be honest, even the temperature in here feels kind of 70s. I haven’t been this cold indoors since I wore my hair in plaits.
Outside, though, is the world, which has changed a great deal. In this part of London, houses such as Segal’s sell for millions of pounds, mostly to people who have made large sums in the City. Does she remember how much she paid? “Yes, I remember absolutely,” she says. “In 1973, it was £13,500. I was then earning £7,000, so the mortgage was easily achievable.” Beyond her gate, her neighbours’ spruced-up villas, with their glass extensions and their prissy little bay trees – in her garden towers a renegade eucalyptus – are a highly visible reminder, if such a thing were needed, of the way politics has changed, Thatcherism and the last Labour government having helped to usher in, according to Segal, the commercialisation of pretty much everything.
“Almost nothing remains outside the market now, up to and including family life,” she says. But there is a flip side: feminism is resurgent and, thanks to this, her younger voice – feminist, socialist and rather warm, despite its overdependence on gender studies jargon – stands a chance of being heard all over again.
Next month, Verso will republish as part of its Radical Thinkers series her 1994 book Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure, an account of female sexuality as informed by feminism in all its various (and variously conflicting) post-60s guises. Is she pleased about this? Her hands fly to the brightly coloured plastic splodges that hang around her neck (they make her look like a walking, talking artist’s palette). “Of course,” she says, looking completely delighted. “And it’s very interesting indeed to be in a position to see what has changed.”
Straight Sex was written against feminism’s increasing preoccupation with men’s violence. Segal wanted to reclaim the early confidence around sexuality that had come with the sexual liberation movement of the 60s. She disagreed profoundly with the idea that men were the enemy; that heterosexuality was bad for women; that straight women should feel guilty about their desires. The Manichaean, essentialist views of feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Robin Morgan were not for her.
“I didn’t, and don’t, believe there is a natural relationship between men and violence,” she says. “This idea that women are nicer than men. Women can be violent, too. For me and my feminist friends, men were absolutely part of what we were doing. We knew lots of pro-feminist men. I mean, Stuart Hall [leftist icon and founding father of cultural theory] ran the creche at the first women’s liberation conference!” At this last thought, she sounds awed even now.
Was there hostility to the book? “Yes. I was once swimming at Highbury pool and the lifeguard got down and shouted at me, ‘Are you Lynne Segal?’ I told him that I was. ‘Well, you’re too soft on men!’ he said. He was a student at Essex University, where he was being taught by some radical feminist that all men are rapists.” She laughs.
University campuses are rather quieter nowadays, politically speaking at least. Nevertheless, she thinks the book stands up pretty well. “A lot of the focus is still on violence against women, for understandable reasons: we’re living in a more violent and militarised world, a time of ethnic conflict, so of course violence against women is endemic. The first move of the London Feminist Network [a campaigning organisation established in 2004] was to revive the Reclaim the Night march, and of course it’s incredibly important to end that violence and to think about the institutions that encourage it.
“But gender hierarchy has as much to do with arrangements for care and the fact that women are still responsible for those. Violence is a very real way of policing women, but it’s not to be separated from underlying causes. Why should men want to be violent? Most men want to have good relationships with women and beating them up or raping them is not the beginning of a good relationship. It’s when men are at their most insecure that there is more violence against women.”
Straight Sex has a chapter entitled The Liberated Orgasm. Does she think that, in 2014, it is? Liberated, I mean. “Well, we’re more sex positive. But what we’ve also seen is the commercialisation of sex and the language of sex is still phallocentric. Show a woman having sex on the internet and this is a way of shaming her. Show a man and you’re just making him more of a man.”
Women have, she thinks, made net gains in terms of financial independence and contraception, but our status remains complex; with every advance, the ground shifts beneath our feet. “These mystical, mythical ideas of what a man or a woman is: the more we are in the same places, doing the same things, the more we reach for these blueprints.”
We talk about a recent documentary I saw – its subject: sperm banks – in which women spoke of childlessness with the horror they might once have reserved for spinsterhood. She nods. “That connects, I think, to what you might call liquid modernity, to insecurity in relationships: almost 50% of marriages break down and the emphasis is on choice. As it grows harder to maintain good permanent relationships, the possibilities have shifted towards children.”
Really? Is this her answer? How does such a view sit with the fact that so many parents are estranged from their children and vice versa? Her gaze is level. “No, you’re right. It’s not an answer. Or not much of one. In the 60s, we criticised women for living through their children. Yet we seem to be going right back to that.” No one, she accepts, could properly call this progress.
Segal, who was born in 1944, grew up in Australia. Her parents, who were both doctors, had a “loudly unhappy” marriage, and in the fullness of time, this became her engine, the thing that propelled her and helped her to escape. “I was aware of this terrible hypocrisy: the pretence that they had a happy marriage, when my mother was always telling me she hated my father. Abortions were illegal and she refused to perform them [her mother was a gynaecologist], but I knew perfectly well she’d had about five herself. The face you presented to the world was everything.” What about her mother’s career? It must have been unusual in the 50s. “I think it was slightly less so in Jewish families, where there was great pressure to succeed. But yes, it was. Not only was she a doctor, she had a higher qualification than my father.”
Did she find her work fulfilling? “She certainly found it more fulfilling than being at home with this man she didn’t respect, who had lots of affairs.” Some of these “affairs”, she has said in the past, were with his patients. (Her mother once told her that a patient had on one occasion sprayed the words PAY BY INTERCOURSE high on a wall of the family’s suburban house, which doubled as her father’s surgery.)
“She was never at home. I longed to see her. Anything I read about motherhood was always ridiculous to me; I’d no experience of it. But she was also completely conventional in her attitudes to women. She tended not even to notice them. She only talked to the men. They were simply more significant.” Once, many years later, someone referred, in conversation with her mother, to Segal’s brother, Graeme, a distinguished mathematician, as “Lynne Segal’s brother”. Her voice rises indignantly. “She couldn’t understand it! Her attitude was, ‘How could Graeme be seen as your brother?’”
Aged 17, Segal went to Sydney University, where she read psychology and fell in with a group of anarchists known as the Sydney Libertarians. “Yes, these outsider men who lived off money they’d made from gambling and racehorses. None of them had proper jobs because you were against any mainstream institution.” What plan did she have for her future? “I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t want to be any respectable thing at all. One thing we had to do was stay in education, so I got a Phd – the title of my thesis was Sexual Confusion in Experimental Psychology – but then I had no idea.”
It didn’t help that by this time she also had a baby, Zimri. She and his father, the artist James Clifford, had met at a Sydney gallery when he approached her and admired her “kinky” dress – though she later realised he was probably more in love with her boyfriend than with her. “I was blackmailed into marriage by my parents. My mother had the beginnings of Addison’s disease, my father had just had his first heart attack and they were saying: it’s all your fault. My mother told me: just get married, we’ll pay for the divorce. It was absolutely for show. They didn’t think I’d have a happy marriage because they knew the father of my baby was gay.” Did he know he was gay? “Well, this was pre-gay. He never acknowledged it and he was never out to his family. We separated when Zim was only 14 months old, yet I was the only relationship he ever acknowledged. He was homophobic. He saw it as a genetic disease. He told my mother: if our son is homosexual, I’ll kill myself. But he died of Aids in the 80s when Zim was only 13.”
At first, all was well. “We did have a good relationship, including a good sexual relationship,” she says. “We were fascinated with each other in certain ways. After Zim was born, there was no more sex, but he was fantastically jealous and upset at the thought of me leaving him even though he knew that, in a sense, I would have to one day.” She was his protection against all that he feared most about himself and when she ran away to England, hard on the heels of her brother and sister, he came after her. In the end, she was so desperate to get rid of him that she helped pay his air fare back to Australia.
It was 1970. Wasn’t she homesick, alone in London with a baby and all that rain? “The first year was tough. But the 70s was a brilliant decade for me; every job I applied for, I got.” She began teaching in the psychology department at Enfield Technical College (later to become Middlesex Polytechnic and, eventually, Middlesex University), a position she would hold for 29 years. She rented what had been Doris Lessing’s flat and, then, in 1973, she and her sister, Barbara, bought Balfour Lodge and the commune was born. Well, sort of. “My sister was rather different to me. She always had the same boyfriend and she never had a job – though she’s a baroque dancer now. So she had the top two floors and I had the bottom. Mine were open to all and sundry and hers weren’t. It was all OK until some friend of hers became fascinated with all of us downstairs and then fell in love with my sister’s partner. After that, she moved out.” She hoots. “She still says I owe her half of the house.”
Didn’t Segal resent the fact she was the only member of the household with a job? Wasn’t she tempted to stomp around of a morning as they all snored on upstairs? “No! I was made to feel guilty about it. Money was something to be ashamed of, so was owning a house. A working-class hero was the thing to be. But in any case, although dope was being smoked, they weren’t doing nothing. They were working at the women’s centre, or the radical law centre, or the community press, or they were writing newsletters or occupying factories.” Who looked after the children? “The men. They did all that. They were utterly committed.”
The cast of the house changed over time. At first, she lived with three women and their various offspring. But by the 1980s, she was living with four men. How does Zimri, who works in new technology, feel about his childhood now? Is he, like Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous, terribly straight and disapproving? “Oh, he thinks he had a wonderful childhood. He only has two complaints. He’s resentful about the school he went to, Islington Green, which turned out to be so bad. And he thinks that I prepared him for a world that doesn’t exist. He came into it expecting it to be caring and sharing and found Mrs Thatcher. He has no killer instinct.”
The election of Margaret Thatcher was not, for Segal and her comrades, the catastrophe you might think. First of all, her identity was entirely bound up with Islington, whose leftwing Labour council sailed on. “We were down there every week,” she says. The Greater London Council, too, was not dismantled until 1986. She did not join the Labour party until 1983 and only then to help with the election in Islington of the leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn. “This was the centre for his election, and when he won, we were cheering and just so happy.” Only in the 1990s did things really shift. The commune had come to an end and she was living with just one man, her partner, the philosopher, Peter Osborne, who was 12 years her junior. “It was a very loving relationship and we were together for 14 years. I suppose we just became more of a couple and I was less the activist because there was less to be activist in. It was at this point that I began to see some point in teaching and the idea of influencing people.” In 1999, she was invited to apply for an anniversary professorship at Birkbeck. “Seven hundred people applied,” she whispers. And thus she found herself where she remains today, the professor of psychology and gender studies in the department of psychosocial studies.
In 2000, Osborne left her for a younger woman; it was good to have a new job into which she could throw herself. But, still. Mention him and she flinches, even now. “It was very painful. It was terrible. I didn’t easily recover from it.” To be suddenly alone in your late 50s: this is not an easy thing and the sadness of it informs Out of Time: The Pleasures & Perils of Ageing, a study that, to her surprise, became the most successful of all her books when it came out in 2013. “Men are twice as likely to be in relationships over 60 as women, and women are far more likely to say, as Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir did: I’ve had quite enough sex, I don’t need it any more. This is to do with shame, the fear of rejection, of humiliation.” And no wonder. “Single friends of mine get set up to meet a man their age at a dinner party and then the man their age is busy trying to come on to the daughter of the house. Men, for whatever reason, remain fixated on the younger body.” What to do about it? She is rueful. It’s impossible. “You can hardly carry placards that say WE DEMAND THAT MEN STILL DESIRE US!”
Her partner now is Agnes Bolsø, a Norwegian academic (they met at a gender studies conference in Trondheim). They’ve been together for a decade. “It’s very difficult. We only see each other every six weeks. It’s a passionate friendship at a distance.” Is she surprised to be with a woman? “Yes, absolutely, though not as surprised as I was to find myself with a gay man.” She laughs, wildly. “Women’s sexuality does seem to be more fluid than men’s, and when the men withdraw from us, we do really value friendships with women, though a lot of lesbians would find that rightly offensive.”
As it happens, Bolsø is staying at the moment: “You must meet her.” She gets up, goes to the bottom of the stairs and calls out her name. No luck. She has disappeared, probably for a run. But the room fills up anyway. The Norwegian artist appears with a parcel for Segal – one of the eBay purchases to which she is addicted – and another visitor, whose name I don’t catch. As I put on my coat, the two of them gather round to look at Segal’s latest purchase, a mug decorated with a Celtic pattern in bright green. “I tell myself these things are presents,” she says, holding it up to the light. “But... it’s pretty.” Her eyes are bright, acquisitive, even as she shoots me a sheepish grin.
Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure is published by Verso (£9.99). To order a copy for £7.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Radical Thinkers will be launched at the Tate Modern, 9 February, with Lynne Segal, Grizelda Pollock and Sonia Boyce
