Joan Smith: Men like Ted Kennedy got feminism off the ground

When the American feminist Betty Freidan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book offered startling insights into the discontent of a generation of women who appeared to have made "good" marriages. Jackie Kennedy, widowed only three months earlier, was one of them and her dignity after the assassination of John F Kennedy unified the nation; another was her sister-in-law Joan, whose husband, Ted Kennedy, had taken over JFK's old Senate seat in Massachusetts a few days before his murder. By the time Joan's marriage ended in divorce in 1982, some of the shine had come off the Kennedy clan, as a less deferential media revealed the scale of the private sleaze that made those ideal marriages a sham.

Some still claim it doesn't matter. The death of Senator Ted Kennedy has prompted an outburst of nostalgia for a supposedly superior age, when the private lives of politicians were off-limits. Much of the Washington press corps knew about the frantic "womanising", as it was euphemistically called, of JFK and his younger brother Bobby, but they wouldn't have dreamed of writing about it. The still-mysterious death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Ted Kennedy's submerged car at Chappaquiddick in 1969 crossed those limits but that didn't stop him challenging Jimmy Carter for the presidential nomination 10 years later.

The fact that Kennedy believed he was fit to run for president, despite leaving a young woman to drown, speaks volumes about the entitlement felt by the Kennedy brothers. While JFK is often feted as the first modern president, an image that owed much to his stylish First Lady, Ted Kennedy's funeral marks the end of a political generation that in significant ways failed to comprehend the modern world. They talked Left and supported great liberal causes such as civil rights and the minimum wage, but lived Right and serially abused women.

So did other political leaders of their generation, from François Mitterrand to Willy Brandt. Bill Clinton must sometimes have wished he had been born 30 years earlier, and to the kind of inherited wealth that used to buy immunity. It goes without saying that one of his biggest supporters, as his lies about Monica Lewinsky began to unravel, was Ted Kennedy.

Generations of elite men took it for granted that power bestowed sexual privileges. Silvio Berlusconi is still doing it, allegedly paying for sex at sleazy parties, but he's turned himself into a laughing stock and his wife certainly isn't suffering in silence. I'm not arguing for puritanism in politics, for senators and MPs sticking to their wives (or husbands or civil partners – this is the modern world, after all) like glue. But there is now a rejection of double standards, a critique of a generation of politicians who paraded trophy wives while groping female reporters and waitresses, and – in the case of the priapic JFK – ordering in prostitutes by the bus load.

Until he was sanctified by death, Ted Kennedy's political achievements were overshadowed by the self-indulgence that characterised his personal life. An American magazine once described him as a "Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque", while another saw him more compassionately as "the living symbol of the family flaws". More to the point, he and his brothers were liberal men who let down women so badly that they were instrumental in kicking off Sixties and Seventies feminism. In that sense, you could say the Kennedys played a key role in creating modern politics, where you can no longer champion equality and justice while displaying contempt for half the human race.