Thank a Boomer?

A while ago I saw a long Twitter thread aimed at young women whom its author accused of ‘ageism’ and of forgetting the sacrifices and struggles of previous generations of women, in particular the Baby Boomers born between 1945 and 1964. (Ageism normally means discrimination, usually against older people, on the grounds of age; among a certain type of feminist it has come to mean disrespect for elders.) The thread from January and February 2020 was hashtagged ‘#ThankABoomer’ and mostly consisted of clippings, mostly undated, from magazines in which women complained about sexism or discrimination of one sort or another; the more recent thread by the same individual that linked back to it was a response to a article in the Times by a 29-year-old woman who opined about “everything from LGBTQ+ rights and sustainability to violence against women and feminism - issues that older generations might not be as well versed in”. Of course, feminism was well-established when today’s older generations were young, so this quote does seem pretty ignorant. However, neither feminism nor the Boomers deserve all the credit for the achievements listed.

The term Baby Boomer refers to the period of high birth rate that occurred in the 20 years following the end of World War II; this ensued partly because people were starting families after the interruption of their lives that the war caused, and partly because the generation born during and before the war (the so-called Silent Generation born between 1927 and 1945, who lived through but were too young to serve during the war) were coming of age and starting families during this period also. It’s fashionable to attribute the social upheavals of the 60s to the Boomers, but that generation only started coming of age in 1966 (as the age of majority until 1969 was 21, not 18), although they started entering the workforce in 1961, and the youngest would not have been adults until 1982. Thus, for much of the 60s and into the 70s, the “Silent Generation” were young adults or in the prime of life, and many of the cultural figures of that time are from that generation: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, all of the Beatles and many others. The struggle for racial justice, for the end of legal and legally-enforced discrimination, had been going on for many decades by the mid-60s and key legislative landmarks were passed before most of the Boomers became adults, both here and in the USA. All of the well-known Black American women writers whose works have been studied in British schools and colleges since the 80s (Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison) were from the pre-Boom generation also (Walker was born in 1944, the other two in the 1920s).

In the UK, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, just before the Labour government lost that year’s general election. There had, of course, been campaigns for such legislation going back many years and at that time, the majority of Baby Boomers were still children or at least under 18. Much the same can be said of the later Sex Discrimination Act (1975), passed by the late 70s Labour government, although certainly the older Boomers may have contributed to the campaign for this. Generally, these were things the young people of that time benefited from that their elders had campaigned for and their elders’ elders actually passed into law.

Some of the examples she gives are just wrong. There are two tweets in her thread which pertain to women having to get higher marks than men in exams to pass. This was in fact the 11+, an exam taken to ration places in grammar schools, and girls’ pass marks were higher in order to equalise the number of places so that boys were not unfairly penalised by being less mature at age 11 or 12. This was one of many reasons why the 11+ came to be seen as unfair and was abolished in favour of comprehensive schools in many regions, including some run by Conservative councils such as the area where I grew up, Croydon; this process was already happening in the 1960s. In universities, where nearly all the students are adults, essays and exam papers are often marked anonymously, so that the examiner does not know the name of the student and thus does not know their sex or ethnicity (this was the case at my university in the mid-90s). Some universities did also discriminate in a similar way and for similar reasons, but it was the 11+ where girls were consistently required to achieve higher grades in a high-stakes exam that would influence the rest of their education (there were no second chances and no equivalent of clearing).

Earlier generations also deserve credit for some later achievements. She cites the fact that rape within marriage is no longer legal; it was a court judgement in 1991 that made rape within marriage a crime in the UK (or more accurately, clarified that there was no legal exemption for husbands to the fact that rape was a crime). While Boomers may have been involved in campaigning to get this perceived law changed (she uses an undated clipping of a letter by a 13-year-old girl), it was three separate sets of judges who actually clarified the law by refusing appeals by a husband convicted of raping his wife in a case known as R vs R (meaning the Queen versus a person left anonymous to preserve his wife’s privacy); all of them were born between 1918 and 1926, placing them in the generation that fought (or could have fought) in World War II; this is two generations before the Baby Boomers.

Finally, she credits the Boomers with getting repealed the law known as Section 28, part of the Local Government Act of 1988, passed under Margaret Thatcher, which banned local authorities (councils) in the UK from promoting homosexuality or “pretended family relationships” involving gay couples. The law has been widely blamed for contributing to bullying, as teachers told pupils who were being bullied on pretexts to do with homosexuality that their hands were tied by the law. The act followed a general election the previous year which was won by Thatcher’s Conservatives with a comfortable majority; the Tories had accused Labour councils of politicising education and stories were run in the Tory press accusing Labour councils of overzealously fostering diversity, giving grants to obscure niche gay-run groups with names like “Black Lesbians Against the Bomb”, and that you had to be a blind, one-legged Black lesbian to get any money out of a Labour council. If we remind ourselves that Baby Boomers were born between 1945 and 1964 and came of age no later than the end of 1982, by 1987 they would have all been between 23 and 42 years of age and would have been eligible to vote in at least two general elections or possibly many more. This law was repealed in 2000 in Scotland and in 2003 in England and Wales; by this time most of the following generation would have come of age and the older members of it would have been in their 30s, although there were more Boomers in parliament by this time. So it’s likely that Boomers had some role in campaigning to get this law changed, but so did the generation after and some would have supported Thatcher when the law was passed, by voting Tory in at least one general election or buying the newspapers that cheered it on.

This is not to say that the Boomers did nothing or achieved nothing, nor that they are solely responsible for all Britain’s problems now, but let’s not pretend that Boomers came of age at a time when women had no rights and achieved them through a big struggle: the major legal barriers were being removed just as they came of age. These “thank a boomer” threads are part of a trend among feminists who commonly accuse young women of ingratitude and demand that they defer to Boomer women’s opinions because they supposedly achieved every liberty today’s young women take for granted, when the reality is more complicated; people from generations older than the Boomers and some younger deserve some credit while some Boomers also supported the forces of reaction, both during the 1980s and more recently, in the UK, with Brexit. Anyone who was brought up in the 80s or 90s would have encountered Boomers with reactionary views on child rearing or education who doubled down on pointless and oppressive rules and who thought nothing of using violence against children if challenged or annoyed, however progressive those adults’ views on other matters such as redistribution of wealth or workers’ rights, and no doubt this goes for many women who grew up in that time as well as men. Every generation has its share of liberals like those described in the Phil Ochs song who seem progressive when it’s easy to be and are reactionary on matters that affect them personally and the Boomers are no exception.

Image source: Mexico City government (public domain) and Nancy Wong (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, version 4.0).

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