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Recently someone told me I don't give John Lennon enough credit for being a feminist success story. And, well. I might as well try to get my extremely torn feelings on the subject in written form, and explain why I am eternally "yes and no and yes and no and yes and no and yes and no" on the question of (post-getting-together-with-Yoko) John counting as a feminist.
On the pro side, and to give full credit where due: John, pre Yoko an unabashed male chauvinist of his time (and let's be clear, none of the other three wins any prizes for gender enlightenment, either; they were all as sexist as they come), was willing to change his entire ideological outlook on the subject. He went from writing songs like this to writing songs like this. (Given how hugely influential a star of his calibre was and is on young people, the later definitely is preferable.) His relationship with Yoko was unlike any of his previous romantic relationships with women; he consistently called her his teacher from 1968 to 1980, he changed his name from John Winston Lennon to John Ono Lennon, and when she took him back after their Lost Weekend period of separation in the mid-70s, it was on her terms. He famously was willing to become a househusband when their son Sean was born in October 1975.
Given all of this, why does the term "feminist" stick in my throat when applied to John? Does it really matter what else he did in his private life? After all, many people active in various causes have a less than stellar track record of applying said principles to themselves. But then again, John when arguing feminism used and brought up his own life frequently, and so I think it's fair to do the same.
So here's my problem: firstly, but not only, John's behaviour to his first wife, Cynthia. No, not during their marriage. (Well, I'm not crazy about that behaviour, either, but he didn't claim to be a feminist while married to her.) During the divorce and after, i.e. precisely the time when he was supposedly being enlightened and reforming. How he handled the divorce itself always reminded me of Charles Dickens. It's telling that of all the fictional presentations of John's life, not even Lennon Naked, which paints a pretty dark picture of John's behaviour towards people not Yoko during that time period (including Cynthia), is willing to show the full extent of what he did. In Lennon Naked, John during his last meeting with Cynthia (and her lawyer, and his lawyer) says "Take it, take it all, you've won the pool" re: the house and the money. It's what one wishes he had said; what he actually said was: "My final offer is seventy-five thousand pounds. That's like winning the pools, so what are you moaning about? You're not worth anymore."
(Just as a basis of comparison: the divorce terms of Ringo and his first wife Maureen, not five years later: Ringo gave Maureen a settlement of £500,000, bought her a £250,000 house in Little Venice and financially supported their children: £2,500 a year for each child, later increased to £10,000. His yearly payments ran to about £70,000. John settled with Cynthia for a total of £75,000, plus £ 25,000 for a house, and left Julian a trust fund of £100,000, which would be divided equally among any additional children. Since John only had Sean, Julian was entitled to £ 50,000 out of his father's £220 million estate.)
But actually the money is the least significant factor here. The way John let Cynthia find out about Yoko was to let her find them in bath robes (Cynthia had called ahead, so he definitely knew she was coming); that in itself was cruel but in a way understandable since he seems to have tried to signal to her the marriage was over for some time at that point, and she had refused to listen - the fact he insisted on telling her about all his infidelities on the flight back from India comes to mind; Cynthia was great with denial, and maybe there really was no other way than this drastic one. What followed, however, is unjustifiable. Cynthia (who hadn't been alone when she returned; she was with Jennie Boyd, Pattie Harrison's younger sister, and Magic Alex (aka Alexis Mardas), whom you might recall from the Maharishi saga, one of the more significantcon men hangers-on around the Beatles in their late period and pre-Maharishi described by John as his new guru. (That in itself will tell you why Alex wasn't keen on the Maharishi.) After the John-and-Yoko sight Cynthia fled, not surprisingly got completely drunk and was hit upon by Magic Alex but rebuffed him (according to her; everyone else at least confirms she never liked him) or had a one night stand with him to get back at John (according to him). A few weeks later John sues her for adultery, naming that as the reason for the divorce. (And Alex has a brand new white Mercedes.) When it turned out Yoko was pregnant (she later miscarried) his lawyers persuaded John to drop the adultery charge, and let Cynthia sue him instead, but he wasn't done behaving appallingly, no. He laid down what Peter Brown (that's Brian Epstein's former assistant, at this point steady trouble shooter and immortalized in The Ballad of John and Yoko with the lyrics "Peter Brown called to say, you can make it okay, you can get married in Gibraltar near Spain") called "the law of the husband" and forbade everyone in the Beatles circle to see Cynthia again, if they wanted to stay friends with him. Amazingly, the only one who didn't comply was Paul (see also: Hey Jude origin story); Cynthia had assumed at least the other wives would defy orders, but they didn't. (She made contact with them again in the mid-70s, but in 1968, she suddenly found herself completely isolated from nearly everyone in her social circle.)
Just to round things off, John next decided he would not speak with Cynthia again, either; all arrangements for visits from Julian should be made through Yoko, just as all dealings with Yoko's ex husband re: her daughter Kyoko should be made through him. (That brilliant brainwave contributed to Tony Cox dissappearing with Kyoko altogether.)
In his defense, you can say the following: 1) Heroin, 2) Inability to deal with guilt, so it must always be the other party's fault, and 3) did I mention he was on heroin in the late 60s?) I also suspect that somewhere in his subconscious, he might have wanted to punish Cynthia for getting pregnant with Julian in the first place. He had resented and felt embarrassed for being "the married one" in the early Beatles years (before Ringo and George followed suit). All of which doesn't make it easier to swallow that this same man, with the eagerness of the newly converted, lectured others on the evil of the patriarchy and how women should be treated as equals. (Not to mention the same man busily composing pain-filled songs on how his parents left him while leaving his own son, but that has nothing to do with feminism.)
Speaking of songs, though: just as Dickens in describing villain Edward Murdstone's behaviour towards his wife Clara, David's mother, in David Copperfield, gives an eerie portrait of his own behaviour towards his wife Kate, suggesting that at least on some level he must have been aware of what he did, John's most feminist song (linked above) has lyrics that entirely fit his behaviour towards Cynthia during and after the marriage: We make her bear and raise our children/ And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen/We tell her home is the only place she should be/Then we complain that she's too unworldly to be our friend/(...) We insult her every day on TV/And wonder why she has no guts or confidence/When she's young we kill her will to be free/While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb.
Now, outside the fantasy genre, transitions take time instead of happening overnight, so can we say John's divorce behaviour towards Cynthia were remnants of the old John, with the new, now feminist John not fully existing until the 70s? Or say at least that other than Cynthia, his behaviour towards women improved? There we get to my next problem. The only (only known, at least) more-than-a-one-night-stand relationship John had with a woman who wasn't Yoko in the 70s was with May Pang. Which started when she was his employee, had been for two years, and then, when Yoko and John temporarily split up, it was strongly suggested to her (to be fair, not directly by John, but by Yoko) she should agree to a sexual relationship with her boss. This, to put it mildly, is not feminism in practice to begin with. It's sexual harrasment, plain and simple. That May eventually agreed doesn't make it less so.
During the 18 months with May Pang from the summer of 73 to early 75 , he doesn't come across much different in her description than during the happier time of his romance, then marriage with Cynthia in hers. Which is to say: when in a good mood, he's witty, charming and attentive, but don't let him near the bottle, or he flies into a jealous rage, complete with verbally vicious taunts and once throat throttling. However, he apparantly did try to give May a more active role in the relationship than Cynthia had gotten (I can't remember an example of Cynthia managing to persuade John to change his behaviour towards somebody, whereas May did manage to persuade him to finally pick up the phone again himself and get back on visiting and calling terms with Julian). With mixed results; generally, she seems to have seen it not as an attempt at more equality but as mixture neediness and manipulation:
"I did not want to become John's new mother. He wanted me to be Mother, but I would not do it. I wanted John to stand on his own and I wanted to play straight with him. (...) John was a very frightened man. He dealt with his fear of women by allowing himself to be manipulated; he dealt with his fear of men by manipulating them. He could do it by pining them down with his piercing stare, by speaking to them in an unmistakably authorative voice. He could also do it by being the public John - a man of startling honesty and common sense. In reality John allowed almost no one to be a close friend; even though his truthful, direct style helped to create an illusion of startling intimacy, he used his directness as a way of keeping people at a distance. (...)Suddenly I was afraid. I did not want to think about the fact htat John could turn on a public voice whenever he wanted to. It would make me question his truthfulness and wonder if he was ever using his public voice with me. I decided to always believe him, no matter what he said. I had to believe him or I couldn't have stayed with him."
Believing him completely also meant that John called the shots as to where they were living, and being eventually out of a job once the sexual relationship (minus the occasional nostalgic night in later years) had ended. She was an adult, and we're all responsible for our own choices; I don't want to ignore that. But I think it shows John's 70s feminism still very much as a work in progress.
In John's narrative of his own life as given the press, the Lost Weekend is one last attack of bachelor behaviour before he finally settles down into domestic happiness and reformed behaviour with Yoko and Sean. The countermyth, as first put in print by Albert Goldman and then by various fired employees of the Lennon-Ono household (Fred Seaman, John Green) and people claiming to have read John's diaries (Rosen, Guiliano), is that he basically spent four of his five househusband years sitting in front of the tv and taking drugs while the staff raised Sean. My own guess is that the truth, as often, is somewhere in between. Even the hostile accounts (other than Goldman) do not dispute his love for Sean was real and doting. He renewed contact with his sisters and cousins in England at that point (i.e. when Sean was a baby) and they describe John as being at his best, witty, alert, and entranced with new fatherhood. (He also emphasized to his sister Julia how guilty he felt about Julian and how determined that made him not to make the same mistakes with Sean. Unfortunately, this did not stop the occasional visits by the actual Julian at the Dakota to be exercises in awkwardness. Accounts of them are pretty painful to read.) Later, there are plenty of photos and some soundclips online of John playing with Sean, where he sounds anything but catatonic or zoned out, so I do think that yes, he made that transition to active father and adult.
Otoh, "househusband" I have a bit of a problem with, or rather, in the way the term is usually used, which implies active domestic work. Of course I wouldn't expect John Lennon to iron shirts, that's what a multimilllionaire has housekeepers for. And never mind vengeful and/or profit minded ex employees, here's John himself describing an avarage day before he started to work again in 1980, for the Double Fantasy album (from this clip - around 4,50 John starts talking about watching Sesame Street with Sean):
I get up about six, go to the kitchen, get a cup of coffee, cough a little, have a cigarette, papers arrive at seven. Sean gets up seven twenty, seven twenty five. I oversee his breakfeast - don't cook it anymore, got fed up with that one. But I make sure I know what he's eating. Yoko, if she's not really really busy - sometimes I wake up and she's already down here, in this office - she might pass through the kitchen on her way to the office, and I'll make her a cup of espresso to get her down the elevator good. Then I hang around there until about nine when Sean sort of had his breakfeast, and him and his nanny Helen have decided what to do for the day, you know. I'll make sure he watches PBS and not the cartoons with the commercials. I don't mind cartoons but I won't let him watch the commercials. So I make sure that if he watches something it's gonna be Sesame Street. Then Sean and the Nanny will go off somewhere and do something. I'll go back to my room - the bedroom. I do everything there. I have instruments there and records. I used to say if you can't do it in bed you can't do it anywhere. Then I buzz down to see what Yoko's doing downstairs because we have the intercom between upstairs and downstairs. If the day is not too hectic we can meet for lunch. If not, I'll go back in at twelve to see that Sean gets a little lunch and be with him while he eats, 'casue I don't it. And then it goes on like that, because she's still in the office. After lunch, he usually goes and does something else with the Nanny - that's presuming they come in for lunch, generally they do. And then I have from one to five for myself doing whatever I want to do, stay in, go out, read, write, whatever. Five, five thirty I'm coming to see if Sean's got back again. If he's back from wherever he's gone, or if it's time for dinner. Six we eat dinner - usually Yoko is still down at the office. Then we have dinner. Seven o'clock, bath. This is Sean - my life revolves around Sean. Then Daddy watches Walter Cronkite. Seven thirty there's usually some kids stuff on, right? Seven thirty till eight he watches something, I take him to his bedroom, kiss him goodnight. The Nanny probably reads him a story, whatever they get up to in there, and he's in bed by eight. Then I give a buzz downstairs saying "What the hell are you doing down there, are you still down there?" If I'm lucky, she'll come up and maybe we can do something. But she's a workoholic, so she's liable to go on until - she'll sometimes come back at ten and take two hours at rest and then start working again at midnight!
Note it's the Nanny - whom you have to have the money to afford - who actually prepares meals, feeds, reads bed time stories and spends most of the day with Sean, while John takes what actually sounds like the traditional father role - supervising meals, meeting the kid during same, making sure Sean watches the right tv programs, a good night kiss. Otoh he definitely did the complete role switch with Yoko, who is firmly in the busy day/work role while John stays at home. So I would say later 70s John is the one with the closest claim to being a feminist in practice as well as in theory, but he still is so under privileged circumstances. Is this a far cry from the boy from Liverpool who told his girlfriend how to dress, whom to see or not to see etc? Definitely. Would many men of his generation have been ready to accept that turnaround? I doubt it. Why am I still not completely applauding, Nanny or no Nanny? You guessed it. He was still a bastard to Cynthia. When she sold the first version of her memoirs to a publisher, he tried to stop the publication and wrote an "open letter" to the papers to the effect that it was her fault he didn't see Julian in the early 70s and that she then came to the US to stalk him into marrying her again. (He might actually have believed that, saying as much to May Pang at the time, who thought he was being ridiculous because all this was based on was Cynthia, in casual conversation with John and May mentioning she'd have liked to have more than one child.) The published first version of Cynthia's memories goes out of its way to be inoffensive to John and Yoko (as opposed to the more recent book which goes into detail about the 70s), so it was allowed to go ahead.
So, John at the time of his death in 1980: as contradictory as ever. More grown up than he used to be. Still with some ways to go. A feminist? Yes and no and yes and no and....
On the pro side, and to give full credit where due: John, pre Yoko an unabashed male chauvinist of his time (and let's be clear, none of the other three wins any prizes for gender enlightenment, either; they were all as sexist as they come), was willing to change his entire ideological outlook on the subject. He went from writing songs like this to writing songs like this. (Given how hugely influential a star of his calibre was and is on young people, the later definitely is preferable.) His relationship with Yoko was unlike any of his previous romantic relationships with women; he consistently called her his teacher from 1968 to 1980, he changed his name from John Winston Lennon to John Ono Lennon, and when she took him back after their Lost Weekend period of separation in the mid-70s, it was on her terms. He famously was willing to become a househusband when their son Sean was born in October 1975.
Given all of this, why does the term "feminist" stick in my throat when applied to John? Does it really matter what else he did in his private life? After all, many people active in various causes have a less than stellar track record of applying said principles to themselves. But then again, John when arguing feminism used and brought up his own life frequently, and so I think it's fair to do the same.
So here's my problem: firstly, but not only, John's behaviour to his first wife, Cynthia. No, not during their marriage. (Well, I'm not crazy about that behaviour, either, but he didn't claim to be a feminist while married to her.) During the divorce and after, i.e. precisely the time when he was supposedly being enlightened and reforming. How he handled the divorce itself always reminded me of Charles Dickens. It's telling that of all the fictional presentations of John's life, not even Lennon Naked, which paints a pretty dark picture of John's behaviour towards people not Yoko during that time period (including Cynthia), is willing to show the full extent of what he did. In Lennon Naked, John during his last meeting with Cynthia (and her lawyer, and his lawyer) says "Take it, take it all, you've won the pool" re: the house and the money. It's what one wishes he had said; what he actually said was: "My final offer is seventy-five thousand pounds. That's like winning the pools, so what are you moaning about? You're not worth anymore."
(Just as a basis of comparison: the divorce terms of Ringo and his first wife Maureen, not five years later: Ringo gave Maureen a settlement of £500,000, bought her a £250,000 house in Little Venice and financially supported their children: £2,500 a year for each child, later increased to £10,000. His yearly payments ran to about £70,000. John settled with Cynthia for a total of £75,000, plus £ 25,000 for a house, and left Julian a trust fund of £100,000, which would be divided equally among any additional children. Since John only had Sean, Julian was entitled to £ 50,000 out of his father's £220 million estate.)
But actually the money is the least significant factor here. The way John let Cynthia find out about Yoko was to let her find them in bath robes (Cynthia had called ahead, so he definitely knew she was coming); that in itself was cruel but in a way understandable since he seems to have tried to signal to her the marriage was over for some time at that point, and she had refused to listen - the fact he insisted on telling her about all his infidelities on the flight back from India comes to mind; Cynthia was great with denial, and maybe there really was no other way than this drastic one. What followed, however, is unjustifiable. Cynthia (who hadn't been alone when she returned; she was with Jennie Boyd, Pattie Harrison's younger sister, and Magic Alex (aka Alexis Mardas), whom you might recall from the Maharishi saga, one of the more significant
Just to round things off, John next decided he would not speak with Cynthia again, either; all arrangements for visits from Julian should be made through Yoko, just as all dealings with Yoko's ex husband re: her daughter Kyoko should be made through him. (That brilliant brainwave contributed to Tony Cox dissappearing with Kyoko altogether.)
In his defense, you can say the following: 1) Heroin, 2) Inability to deal with guilt, so it must always be the other party's fault, and 3) did I mention he was on heroin in the late 60s?) I also suspect that somewhere in his subconscious, he might have wanted to punish Cynthia for getting pregnant with Julian in the first place. He had resented and felt embarrassed for being "the married one" in the early Beatles years (before Ringo and George followed suit). All of which doesn't make it easier to swallow that this same man, with the eagerness of the newly converted, lectured others on the evil of the patriarchy and how women should be treated as equals. (Not to mention the same man busily composing pain-filled songs on how his parents left him while leaving his own son, but that has nothing to do with feminism.)
Speaking of songs, though: just as Dickens in describing villain Edward Murdstone's behaviour towards his wife Clara, David's mother, in David Copperfield, gives an eerie portrait of his own behaviour towards his wife Kate, suggesting that at least on some level he must have been aware of what he did, John's most feminist song (linked above) has lyrics that entirely fit his behaviour towards Cynthia during and after the marriage: We make her bear and raise our children/ And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen/We tell her home is the only place she should be/Then we complain that she's too unworldly to be our friend/(...) We insult her every day on TV/And wonder why she has no guts or confidence/When she's young we kill her will to be free/While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb.
Now, outside the fantasy genre, transitions take time instead of happening overnight, so can we say John's divorce behaviour towards Cynthia were remnants of the old John, with the new, now feminist John not fully existing until the 70s? Or say at least that other than Cynthia, his behaviour towards women improved? There we get to my next problem. The only (only known, at least) more-than-a-one-night-stand relationship John had with a woman who wasn't Yoko in the 70s was with May Pang. Which started when she was his employee, had been for two years, and then, when Yoko and John temporarily split up, it was strongly suggested to her (to be fair, not directly by John, but by Yoko) she should agree to a sexual relationship with her boss. This, to put it mildly, is not feminism in practice to begin with. It's sexual harrasment, plain and simple. That May eventually agreed doesn't make it less so.
During the 18 months with May Pang from the summer of 73 to early 75 , he doesn't come across much different in her description than during the happier time of his romance, then marriage with Cynthia in hers. Which is to say: when in a good mood, he's witty, charming and attentive, but don't let him near the bottle, or he flies into a jealous rage, complete with verbally vicious taunts and once throat throttling. However, he apparantly did try to give May a more active role in the relationship than Cynthia had gotten (I can't remember an example of Cynthia managing to persuade John to change his behaviour towards somebody, whereas May did manage to persuade him to finally pick up the phone again himself and get back on visiting and calling terms with Julian). With mixed results; generally, she seems to have seen it not as an attempt at more equality but as mixture neediness and manipulation:
"I did not want to become John's new mother. He wanted me to be Mother, but I would not do it. I wanted John to stand on his own and I wanted to play straight with him. (...) John was a very frightened man. He dealt with his fear of women by allowing himself to be manipulated; he dealt with his fear of men by manipulating them. He could do it by pining them down with his piercing stare, by speaking to them in an unmistakably authorative voice. He could also do it by being the public John - a man of startling honesty and common sense. In reality John allowed almost no one to be a close friend; even though his truthful, direct style helped to create an illusion of startling intimacy, he used his directness as a way of keeping people at a distance. (...)Suddenly I was afraid. I did not want to think about the fact htat John could turn on a public voice whenever he wanted to. It would make me question his truthfulness and wonder if he was ever using his public voice with me. I decided to always believe him, no matter what he said. I had to believe him or I couldn't have stayed with him."
Believing him completely also meant that John called the shots as to where they were living, and being eventually out of a job once the sexual relationship (minus the occasional nostalgic night in later years) had ended. She was an adult, and we're all responsible for our own choices; I don't want to ignore that. But I think it shows John's 70s feminism still very much as a work in progress.
In John's narrative of his own life as given the press, the Lost Weekend is one last attack of bachelor behaviour before he finally settles down into domestic happiness and reformed behaviour with Yoko and Sean. The countermyth, as first put in print by Albert Goldman and then by various fired employees of the Lennon-Ono household (Fred Seaman, John Green) and people claiming to have read John's diaries (Rosen, Guiliano), is that he basically spent four of his five househusband years sitting in front of the tv and taking drugs while the staff raised Sean. My own guess is that the truth, as often, is somewhere in between. Even the hostile accounts (other than Goldman) do not dispute his love for Sean was real and doting. He renewed contact with his sisters and cousins in England at that point (i.e. when Sean was a baby) and they describe John as being at his best, witty, alert, and entranced with new fatherhood. (He also emphasized to his sister Julia how guilty he felt about Julian and how determined that made him not to make the same mistakes with Sean. Unfortunately, this did not stop the occasional visits by the actual Julian at the Dakota to be exercises in awkwardness. Accounts of them are pretty painful to read.) Later, there are plenty of photos and some soundclips online of John playing with Sean, where he sounds anything but catatonic or zoned out, so I do think that yes, he made that transition to active father and adult.
Otoh, "househusband" I have a bit of a problem with, or rather, in the way the term is usually used, which implies active domestic work. Of course I wouldn't expect John Lennon to iron shirts, that's what a multimilllionaire has housekeepers for. And never mind vengeful and/or profit minded ex employees, here's John himself describing an avarage day before he started to work again in 1980, for the Double Fantasy album (from this clip - around 4,50 John starts talking about watching Sesame Street with Sean):
I get up about six, go to the kitchen, get a cup of coffee, cough a little, have a cigarette, papers arrive at seven. Sean gets up seven twenty, seven twenty five. I oversee his breakfeast - don't cook it anymore, got fed up with that one. But I make sure I know what he's eating. Yoko, if she's not really really busy - sometimes I wake up and she's already down here, in this office - she might pass through the kitchen on her way to the office, and I'll make her a cup of espresso to get her down the elevator good. Then I hang around there until about nine when Sean sort of had his breakfeast, and him and his nanny Helen have decided what to do for the day, you know. I'll make sure he watches PBS and not the cartoons with the commercials. I don't mind cartoons but I won't let him watch the commercials. So I make sure that if he watches something it's gonna be Sesame Street. Then Sean and the Nanny will go off somewhere and do something. I'll go back to my room - the bedroom. I do everything there. I have instruments there and records. I used to say if you can't do it in bed you can't do it anywhere. Then I buzz down to see what Yoko's doing downstairs because we have the intercom between upstairs and downstairs. If the day is not too hectic we can meet for lunch. If not, I'll go back in at twelve to see that Sean gets a little lunch and be with him while he eats, 'casue I don't it. And then it goes on like that, because she's still in the office. After lunch, he usually goes and does something else with the Nanny - that's presuming they come in for lunch, generally they do. And then I have from one to five for myself doing whatever I want to do, stay in, go out, read, write, whatever. Five, five thirty I'm coming to see if Sean's got back again. If he's back from wherever he's gone, or if it's time for dinner. Six we eat dinner - usually Yoko is still down at the office. Then we have dinner. Seven o'clock, bath. This is Sean - my life revolves around Sean. Then Daddy watches Walter Cronkite. Seven thirty there's usually some kids stuff on, right? Seven thirty till eight he watches something, I take him to his bedroom, kiss him goodnight. The Nanny probably reads him a story, whatever they get up to in there, and he's in bed by eight. Then I give a buzz downstairs saying "What the hell are you doing down there, are you still down there?" If I'm lucky, she'll come up and maybe we can do something. But she's a workoholic, so she's liable to go on until - she'll sometimes come back at ten and take two hours at rest and then start working again at midnight!
Note it's the Nanny - whom you have to have the money to afford - who actually prepares meals, feeds, reads bed time stories and spends most of the day with Sean, while John takes what actually sounds like the traditional father role - supervising meals, meeting the kid during same, making sure Sean watches the right tv programs, a good night kiss. Otoh he definitely did the complete role switch with Yoko, who is firmly in the busy day/work role while John stays at home. So I would say later 70s John is the one with the closest claim to being a feminist in practice as well as in theory, but he still is so under privileged circumstances. Is this a far cry from the boy from Liverpool who told his girlfriend how to dress, whom to see or not to see etc? Definitely. Would many men of his generation have been ready to accept that turnaround? I doubt it. Why am I still not completely applauding, Nanny or no Nanny? You guessed it. He was still a bastard to Cynthia. When she sold the first version of her memoirs to a publisher, he tried to stop the publication and wrote an "open letter" to the papers to the effect that it was her fault he didn't see Julian in the early 70s and that she then came to the US to stalk him into marrying her again. (He might actually have believed that, saying as much to May Pang at the time, who thought he was being ridiculous because all this was based on was Cynthia, in casual conversation with John and May mentioning she'd have liked to have more than one child.) The published first version of Cynthia's memories goes out of its way to be inoffensive to John and Yoko (as opposed to the more recent book which goes into detail about the 70s), so it was allowed to go ahead.
So, John at the time of his death in 1980: as contradictory as ever. More grown up than he used to be. Still with some ways to go. A feminist? Yes and no and yes and no and....
