The Penguin History of the World

As for the papacy’s historic position within the Roman Church, that seemed to be weakening in the 1960s, some symptoms being provided by the Second Vatican Council itself. Among other things registering its work of aggiornamento or updating, for which Pope John XXIII had asked, it went so far as to speak respectfully of the ‘truths’ handed down in the teachings of Islam. But 1978 (a year of three popes) brought to the throne of St Peter John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in four and a half centuries, the first Polish pope, and the first whose coronation was attended by an Anglican archbishop of Canterbury. His pontificate soon showed his personal determination to exercise the historic authority and possibilities of his office in a conservative sense; yet he was also the first pope personally to travel to Greece in search of reconciliation with the Orthodox Churches of eastern Europe.

The changes in eastern Europe in 1989 – and especially those in his native Poland – owed a great deal to the activism and moral authority of John Paul II. When he died in 2005, after a pontificate that was the third longest in history, he left a mixed legacy: a staunch conservative on matters of doctrine, the Polish pope had grown increasingly concerned with the materialism that he saw as pervading the contemporary world, not least in the countries he had helped to break away from their Communist past. It would be hazardous to project further trends in the history of an institution whose fortunes have fluctuated so much across the centuries as those of the papacy (up with Hildebrandine reform; down with Schism and conciliarism; up with Trent; down with Enlightenment; up with the First Vatican Council). It is safest simply to recognize that one issue at least, posed by twentieth-century advances in the knowledge, acceptability and techniques of contraception, may for the first time be inflicting mortal wounds on the authority of Rome in the eyes of millions of Roman Catholics.

Some of the most influential changes of recent times have still to reveal their full weight and implications; after all, the issue of contraception affects, potentially, the whole human race, although we usually think about it as part of the history of women. But the relations of men and women should be considered as a whole, even if it is traditional and convenient to approach the subject from one side only. Much that settles the fate of many women can none the less be roughly measured and measurement, even at its crudest, quickly makes it clear that great as the level of change has been, it still has a long way to go. Radical change has only taken place in a few places, and is measurable (if at all) only in the last couple of centuries even there. Our recognition of the changes has to be very carefully qualified; most western women now live lives dramatically unlike those of their great-grandmothers while the lives of women in some parts of the world have been little changed for millennia.

Advances in women’s political and legal equality with men are one of the greatest revolutions of our times, and one that has set free enormous intellectual and productive power. Still, there is much that needs to be done, even if a large majority of members of the United Nations now accepts female suffrage and if, in most countries, formal and legal inequalities between the sexes have now been under attack for more than a generation. The range of legislation attempting to assure equity in the treatment of women has been steadily extended (for instance, into the recognition of disadvantages in employment which had long been ignored). Examples thus set have been noted and influential in non-western countries, even in the teeth of conservative oppositions. This has been a new operative force in changing perceptions and, of course, it has been all the more influential in a world where women’s labour has confronted growing opportunities thanks to technological and economic change.

Such matters continued to unroll in the interconnected, interlocking ways that had existed since industrialization began. Even the home was transformed as a place of work – piped water and gas were soon followed by electricity and the possibility of easier management of domestic processes, by detergents, synthetic fibres and prepared foods, while information became available to women as never before through radio, cinema, television and cheap print. It is tempting to speculate, though, that no such changes had anything like the fundamental impact of the appearance in the 1960s of the Pill. Thanks to its convenience and the way in which it was used, it did more than any earlier advance in contraceptive knowledge or technique to transfer power over their own lives in these matters to women. It opened a new era in the history of sexual culture, even if that was obvious only in a few societies three or four decades later.