Paul McCartney Said The Beatles Could Be ‘Very Chauvinist’: ‘Women at That Time Got Sidelined’

In the early years of The Beatles, Paul McCartney said the band was incredibly tight-knit. They lived, toured, and wrote music together. While each of them had serious long-term relationships in the early years of the band, McCartney said their band relationships were more important to them. He admitted that this made them chauvinistic. 

Paul McCartney said The Beatles were so tight-knit they could be ‘chauvinist’

In 1963, McCartney met Jane Asher, an actor. The couple dated for five years and McCartney lived with her at her parents’ home for a portion of this time. While he said it was a “good relationship,” she was not his primary focus. His bandmates were.

“To tell the truth, the women at that time got sidelined,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “Now it would be seen as very chauvinist of us. Then it was like: ‘We are four miners who go down the pit. You don’t need women down the pit, do you? We won’t have women down the pit.’”

McCartney admitted that the band dynamic could not have been easy on their romantic partners.

“A lot of what we, The Beatles, did was very much in an enclosed scene,” he said. “Other people found it difficult — even John’s wife, Cynthia, found it very difficult — to penetrate the screen that we had around us. As a kind of safety barrier we had a lot of ‘in’ jokes, little signs, references to music; we had a common bond in that and it was very difficult for any ‘outsider’ to penetrate. That possibly wasn’t good for relationships back then.”

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr relied on each other in The Beatles

Ringo Starr agreed with McCartney’s assessment of The Beatles. He admitted that they grew apart as years passed. Still, he believed that they were closer than most bands.

“I don’t know of any other band who got that close,” Starr told Club Sandwich in 1997 (via The Paul McCartney Project). “And we got that close because we loved each other and the pressure that only the Beatles had. No other band has had that much pressure. So all of those factors come into play when we meet each other. We know what went on. Nobody else knows. Everybody thinks they know, and they have ideas, and they write books about it, but actually only the Beatles know how heavy that was.”

John Lennon said it was embarrassing to have a wife and child

To further prove McCartney’s point, John Lennon said he found it embarrassing to be married with a child. He wanted his first wife, Cynthia, to keep their relationship quiet and he saw her very little once the band began touring.

“I did feel embarrassed, walking around married,” he said, per the book John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman. “It felt like walking round with odd socks on or your flies open.”

He, like McCartney, preferred the company of his bandmates at the time.