Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations

2025-07-25 01:29:45

Book Review: Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

3.75/5 (Good)

Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979) charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

The Lay of the Land

The year is 1976. A massive heatwave rocks the UK.¹ However, a seemingly innocuous policy will be used to plunge the country into nightmare. The plan? The British government promises to implement “weekly payment to mothers” (5). The titular “benefits” would move some earnings from the wallets of fathers into the purses of mothers. The problem? Confronted by a powerful male-dominated trade union movement attempting to protect its male workers, the government “flew in the face of its commitment to women’s rights” and postponed the scheme (5). Women’s Liberation decides to go on strike.

In this political moment Lynn Byers, the novel’s main character (“thirty-two, short, red-haired and a journalist”), feels drawn to a group of feminists that live in an abandoned high rise complex called Collideane Tower (6). Drawing on Fairbairns’ own experience in communal living, the scenes at the Tower are some of the best. Byers will periodically return to the Tower, and its occupants, throughout the novel. Lynn attempts to juggle her growing feminist awareness (“she had felt complete sympathy with the movement insofar as she perceived it from Spare Rib and the women’s page in The Guardian“) (6), aspiration to be financially independent, desire for a family, and love (and respect) for her husband. She chaffs at the government’s refusal to guarantee abortion access and “withhold the tiny improvement that they’d promised to mothers’ financial position” (6). She feels drawn to the naive yet caring Marsha, another new member of the movement. While Marsha (as with Byers) doesn’t live at the tower, she uses her inherited wealth to help fund the Tower’s community. They take in single mothers fleeing domestic abuse. They educate and connect those in need with resources. Marsha (strangely) dates David Laing, a conservative traditionalist, who works in the Social Services Department. He emerges later as a leader of FAMILY. And there’s Posy, the mover behind the direct strike against the government the women plan to implement. The strike is a success. A compromise “benefit” passes Parliament. And Byers finally decides it’s time to have a child.

The year is 1985. UK’s political parties fixate on the lack of economic recovery from North Sea oil promised by their predecessors (38). UK’s economic position progressively erodes. Some perversely desire the appearance of an autocratic force to stamp out the “sexual permissiveness” and poor national morale that characterized the day (38). Unemployment grows. The government cuts back the welfare state. Cost of living rises. A fringe political movement called FAMILY proclaims that if women “would buckle down to traditional role and biological destiny” the nation’s problems would be solved (39). The movement is led by Mrs. Isavel Travers, Rashida Patel, and David Laing (who possessed a “passionate hatred of feminists”), one of its two MPs (39).²

In its crusade against the welfare state, FAMILY claims its had no quarrel with the poor or “socially inadequate” (40). Rather, the movement wanted to support the millions of men and women who lived “normal lives,” “swap [gender] roles, get divorces or abortions, become homeless” (40). The benefit scheme from a decade earlier returns as FAMILY’s tool to control women. They will be used to “encourage” families to abide by traditional roles. Women will be compelled to leave their jobs and have children to receive a “benefit” (56). And after a speech from David Laing about “the wrong rats are breeding” (a eugenicist catcall), its clear FAMILY means only certain families (48). FAMILY, with its homophobic and racist rhetoric all doled up as traditionalism, storms to power. A Government of National Regeneration is formed promising a technological paradise (55).

Marsha returns to the UK after separating from Posy, and her endless quest to organize feminist movements around the world. She meets up again with Lynn, who has long left her job to take care of her daughter, who requires daily medical assistance. It’s a changed world as the UK slips into an economic and political backwater. Companies from Europea (a more unified European Union) use England for cheap labor. Marsha and Lynn start to identify far more sinister ways the “benefit” is used by FAMILY to control women. A new resurgence of the movement must occur!

Final Thoughts

As with Marge Piercy’s (superior) Dance the Eagle to Sleep(1970), Benefits derives some of its power from the author’s personal interactions with second wave feminism and radical politics. Dance the Eagles to Sleep provided a glimpse into the rise and fall of a student movement which parallels Piercy’s own role with Students for a Democratic Society. Zoë Fairbairns likewise draws on personal experience. She relates that she joined UK’s feminist movement in 1969.³ She describes her deep frustration over the role of patriarchy in dictating women’s lives, personal experience living in a commune, and her changing views on marriage (she broke off her engagement after reading Germaine Greer’s 1970 bestseller The Female Eunuch).⁴ She took jobs connected to feminist advocacy including the Women’s Research and Resources Centre, Virago Press, and Spare Rib magazine. The culminating effect of these experiences, and the different voices across women (and men) she encountered, provide a sense of realism to the debates and her characterization of the fears within the movement itself. It feels like a into the zeitgeist of the 70s women’s movement.

As someone living in the United States as its social net collapses at presidential whim, I increasingly find myself psychologically trapped in a dystopian mire. Benefits manifests a similar sense of immediate terror extrapolated from specific contemporary events. While my knowledge of the UK’s social history pales in comparison to my knowledge of the United States, I assume early references in the novel to debates over abortion access relate to the 1976 Parliament Select Committee’s investigation which found “the Abortion Act (of 1967) was being interpreted in a way contrary to the intention of Parliament that it should not be lawful to permit abortion on demand.”⁵ Likewise, while Fairbairns wrote Benefits before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Thatcher was Leader of the Opposition from 1975-1979 and “became the face of the ideological movement opposing the British Welfare State.”⁶ The fear of her rhetoric put into action fills the pages.

Due to my recent obsession over older depictions of unions (and leftist politics) in SF, I couldn’t help but contextualize and examine the few references to unions in Benefits. First a bit of historical context: The late 1970s saw the highpoint of union membership across the UK and a slow increase in women’s activities and visibility within unions.⁷ However, male union leaders debated whether special organizations for female workers should exist in an “era of equal rights.”⁸ As the 70s were an era of recession, unions often put the concerns of their female members aside to focus on “saving members’ jobs and defending existing wages.” Counterintuitively, female workers suffered even further after the UK passed the Equal Pay Act in 1970 (with delayed implementation) as employers attempted to avoid lawsuits by “segregated the sexes at work to head off claims for equal pay for like work.”⁹

As Fairbairns deliberately narrows in on the gender struggle and sidelines other struggles based on class or race, she sees unions as instruments of patriarchy firmly against women’s liberation.¹⁰ Trade unions first appear in the novel attempting to make a deal with the government to “reduce their pay-demands if the government would reduce taxation” (5). This runs up against the push to create “benefits” for mothers who might not have their own incomes in order to provide for their children if men were unwilling to give up more of their earnings. The unions make no attempt to compromise or admit that wives had a right to some of “their [the organized males of the trade union movement] money” (6). All of Fairbairns’ references to unions assume male control and primarily male members who want to keep their earnings to themselves: “Men divide the working class. What about those right-on trade union brothers who don’t tell their wives what they earn?” (10). In another instance, a woman at a meeting shouts: “Unions! Instruments of male power!” (11). Conceptually, the union and its willingness to strike appeals to the women at Collideane Tower. Their model encourages them to take action into their own hands (14). After FAMILY comes to power, the unions continue to advocate for their male workers rather than attempting to retain female workers compelled to become mothers (84). Ultimately, Benefits parallels Sue Ledwith’s observation that many historical examples of unions encourage “class solidarity among men and women – but on men’s terms.”¹¹

Benefits succeeds in its ideas and realistically depicted, and deeply conflicted, characters, namely Lynn Byers. Benefits also succeeds in one of its structure choices — the looming mass of Collideane Tower, an abandoned low-income housing high rise. The building literally looms over the narrative and provides its beginning and end. Benefits starts with a description of building as “one of the last tower blocks to be built in the sixties for London families” (3). And as the “curtain came down on the era of affluence that had spawned and nurtured the British welfare state,” Collideane Tower becomes a refuge of those “with no choice” (4). As the decades pass and the movement struggles, fades away, and experiences rebirth, the Tower remains, even in its crumbling state, a safe house for those in need and a bastion for those who want to fight.

Despite Collideane Tower’s structural presence throughout the narrative, I found Benefits a deeply uneven read. As the decades course by, Fairbairns remains utterly dependent on lengthy expository passages to provide context to the political and social shifts that occur.¹² Often compelling characters like Lynn Byers become secondary to political and social exposition even when their lives, observations, and actions illustrate the same political and social processes. The novel achieves its polemical purpose and explores a range of perspectives. It is not a beautiful novel. It will not transfix with a turn of phrase. It is a powerful novel. And a terrifying one.

Regardless of its flaws, I would classify Benefits as an unjustly forgotten work of Second Wave feminism along with Marge Piercy’s Dance the Eagle to Sleep(1970), Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World (1974), and Elizabeth Baines’ The Birth Machine (1983).

Recommended (with caveats).

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Notes

1. I assume Fairbairns started writing the novel in 1976 as the heatwave is a real historical reference. Benefits was published after Thatcher came to office and thus was not in response to her as Prime Minister. ↩︎
2. While perhaps a fallacious comparison, in my mind I see Isabel Travers as the British equivalent of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016). ↩︎
3. See her personal website. ↩︎
4. As often happens when I review SF or sit down to write anything, I discover something else I should have read before I started writing. Alas. Copy ordered. ↩︎
5. See debate here. ↩︎
6. See Thatcher’s wikipedia entry. ↩︎
7. Sue Ledwith’s Vive la différence? Women and trade union (2009) ↩︎
8. Ledwith, in the late 70s “Some white-collar unions made vigorous efforts to disband the TUC women’s conference on the grounds that it was a ghetto and an anachronism and should be discontinued, chiefly because ‘the fact women can now claim equal rights with men’ (and) the trade unions’ opposition to discrimination and progress made towards fuller participation by women members in the general work and direction of the movement’.” ↩︎
9. Ledwith. ↩︎
10. This 2011 interview/article describes the origin of the novel: “Benefits was a response to some ‘leftish’ men who, although they were of course totally in sympathy with feminism, did feel it was a distraction from the main struggle, the class struggle: “I simply wanted to reverse that and write a story in which the main struggle is the gender struggle and all other struggles though important, were minor, were sidelined.” ↩︎
11. Ledwith. ↩︎
12. It has similar flaws to a fix-up novel. Some sections function well alone. Others require substantial introduction and explanation due to what’s happened in-between. ↩︎

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Vive la différence? Women and trade unions in Britain

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^{Ledwith, Sue}