Daring to Hope

Daring to Hope

My Life in the 1970s

Sheila Rowbotham

First published by Verso 2021

© Sheila Rowbotham 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-389-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-391-5 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-390-8 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rowbotham, Sheila, author.

Title: Daring to hope : my life in the 1970s / Sheila Rowbotham.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: ‘In this powerful memoir, historian and feminist Sheila Rowbotham looks back at the women’s liberation movement, left politics, and the vibrant, creative culture of a decade in which freedom and equality seemed a hair’s breadth away. It is a riveting personal history of second-wave feminism from the front line’ – Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021016503 (print) | LCCN 2021016504 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839763892 (hardback) | ISBN 9781839763915 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Rowbotham, Sheila. | Feminists – Great Britain – Biography. | Feminism –Great Britain– History – 20th century. | Second-wave feminism – Great Britain.

Classification: LCC HQ1595.R69 A3 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1595.R69 (ebook) | DDC 305.42092 [B] – dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016503

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016504

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1. January to June 1970

  2. July to December 1970

  3. 1971

  4. 1972

  5. 1973

  6. 1974

  7. 1975

  8. 1976

  9. 1977

10. 1978

11. 1979

Abbreviations

Notes

Index of Names

Index of Organizations

List of Illustrations

1. Sheila Rowbotham at Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970 (© Liberation Films ‘A Woman’s Place’)

2. David Widgery, early 1970s

3. Annie Freud speaking at Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970 (© Sally Fraser)

4. Sally Alexander and Gareth Stedman Jones at Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970 (© Sally Fraser)

5. Sheila Rowbotham in Amsterdam summer 1970 (© Jaap van Ginneken)

6. Demonstration against Tory Bill to curb trade unions, December 1970 (© Sally Fraser)

7. Jean Wright pouring tea on night cleaners’ picket, 1970 (courtesy Humphry Trevelyan from an original photograph in the Marc Karlin Archive, British Film Institute)

8. International Women’s Day demonstration in the snow, March 1971, Sheila Rowbotham is behind the placard ‘Equal Pay is not enough. We want the moon’ (© Sally Fraser)

9. Members of Essex Road Women’s Centre, 1975 (courtesy Lisa Vine)

10. Paul Atkinson, 1973

11. Street Party in Villa Road Brixton, 1975 (© James Swinson)

12. Ros Baxandall, 1975 (courtesy Phineas Baxandall)

13. Liz and Lucy Waugh on Women’s Liberation Abortion Demonstration, June 1975

14. Dave Phillips and Sue Sharpe with Spare Rib badges, mid-1970s

15. Nigel Fountain in the garden at Montague Road, mid-1970s

16. David Widgery and Marsha Rowe in the kitchen at Montague Road, mid-1970s

17. Raphael Samuel in my study, mid-1970s

18. Hackney Branch of the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) demonstrating in Hackney, mid-1970s

19. Jo Bock and Patrick Kodikara in the Hackney NALGO contingent mid-1970s

20. Gloden Dallas, Blackburn’s Yard, Whitby, mid-1970s

21. Temma Kaplan in her garden, Los Angeles, 1976

22. Linda Dove and Bruce Green getting married at Hackney Town Hall, 1977, flanked by witnesses Anna and Vic Seidler (courtesy Bruce Green)

23. Paul Atkinson feeding Will, 1977

24. Sheila Rowbotham at Victoria Park, East London with Will (© Paul Atkinson)

25. Sheila Rowbotham pondering with Paul Morrison amid cooperative child care in Victoria Park, East London (© Paul Atkinson)

26. Trouble at t’Mill, 1979 © Jo Nesbitt

27. Dialectical Unity, 1979 © Jo Nesbitt

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the staff of the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, and most especially to Gillian Murphy, for sustained help in consulting my papers which are deposited there. While some of these are generally accessible, others have yet to be catalogued. I also looked at material in Marilyn Porter’s papers, Feminist Archive South in Special Collections at the University of Bristol, and I thank the staff there too for help and permission to quote from the material. Emilyn L. Brown, Archivist at the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, kindly arranged for copies of my letters to Rosalyn Baxandall to be sent to me. I am indebted to her and to those who copied them. Ros Delmar gave me vital assistance on the contents of Red Rag, which is now online.

I thank Leo Hollis for all the hard work he put into editing the manuscript and for his many helpful comments. Thanks also to all the workers at Verso who assisted in its production and to my wonderful copy editor Tim Clark. Paul Atkinson, Lola Dickinson, Nigel Fountain, Riley Linebaugh and Stefanie Pixner read the first draft and sent valuable feedback. Faith Evans, my agent, played a crucial role in encouraging me to persist and has given me unstinting help with the manuscript. My loving comrade Mike Richardson listened to countless stories and lived amid much tumult as I tussled with the writing. He also played a vital part in assembling the photographs.

I consulted the following to check details: Sally Alexander, Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, Phineas Baxandall, Yvonne Beecham, Joanna Bock, Caroline Bond, Stella Dadzie, Rosalind Delmar, Sue Finch, Linda Gordon, Bruce Green, Catherine Hall, Hermione Harris, Roberta Hunter-Henderson, Temma Kaplan, Helena Kennedy, Radha Kumar, Alex May, Sue O’Sullivan, Ursula Owen, John Pipal, David Phillips, Hugo Radice, Janet Rée, Jo Robinson, Dione Rowbotham, Marsha Rowe, Ann Scott, Lynne Segal, Sue Sharpe, Laureen Shaw, Barbara Taylor, Carole Turbin, Lisa Vine and Hilary Wainwright.

I thank Juliet Ash for sending me correspondence with David Widgery, and Carole Turbin for returning my letters to her. I am also grateful to Gillian Slovo for permission to quote from the letters of Ruth First, to Harriet Ward for those of Dora Russell, to Phineas Baxandall for those of Ros Baxandall, and to the other correspondents I could trace whose letters are also cited from my archive at the Women’s Library, LSE.

For permission to reproduce images I am grateful to Paul Atkinson, Phineas Baxandall, Chandan (Sally) Fraser, Bruce Green, Jo Nesbitt, James Swinson, Humphry Trevelyan, Jaap van Ginneken and Lisa Vine, also to Tony Wickert for his shot of me laughing at the 1970 Women’s Liberation Conference and to Julian Richman, who made the still from Liberation Films’ A Woman’s Place.

Every effort has been made to find all copyright holders. The author and publisher will be glad to recognise any holders of copyright who have not been included above.

Introduction

In 1970 I was twenty-six and working on my first book. I was a socialist and part of the emerging British women’s liberation movement, supporting gay liberation, revolt in the trade unions and resistance to racism. Demands for economic and social resources and claims for recognition and respect were being asserted by many groups who had been either sidelined or outcast. The term ‘liberation’ extended democracy beyond voting; it meant opposing all forms of inequality and hierarchy. It carried too a fragile vision of what else might be – a fusion of collective and individual freedom.

My socialism had been greatly influenced by two historians, Dorothy and Edward Thompson, whom I had met when I was nineteen. After the Soviet suppression of the uprising in Hungary in 1956 they had been involved in the New Left, an international network of groups that broke with the Communist parties. Among the many books and papers in their home I found old copies of the ‘socialist humanist’ journal The New Reasoner. I was drawn to its ethos of cooperative creative potential, and squirrelled away Edward’s phrases in my head: ‘Enduring militancy is built not upon negative anxieties, but upon positive aspirations … It is always the business of the Left to foster the utmost aspiration compatible with existing reality – and then some more beyond.’¹

We hopeful younger leftists, having not experienced travail or defeats, were inclined to seize upon this ‘more beyond’. The seventies saw a great surge of rebellion and dissent that spanned politics, culture and personal life. By 1979 these idealistic hopes were beleaguered, yet still resilient.

Subsequent defeats were to occlude the radical impetus of the seventies and to caricature its aims and intentions as wild, wacky and wrong. In retrieving what I remember from the time and disentangling the threads of my own thoughts and feelings, my intention is not to nudge towards nostalgia for the past. Without idealizing what those of us on the left and the women’s movement did, I simply want to reassert the depth and scope of what we attempted, in the hope that future generations will be able to uncover these strands and go beyond them.

A conundrum in writing history is how to convey what tends be taken for granted because it is not mentioned. Yet what is implicit is vital for comprehending how things come about. Thus it is important not only to uncover what happened, but to look at how circumstances were inwardly perceived and regarded. In writing a personal testimony I have tried to express how it seemed at the time, using the terms and ideas current in the seventies. I have drawn on what I and others said or wrote during the decade and have correlated my own memories with letters as well as printed evidence.

This is my second trip backwards. Daring to Hope picks up where my memoir, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, ended.² During the late nineties, when I started to write on the sixties, I was frustrated by the way in which celebrations of the decade were obliterating the interactions between left politics and alternative forms of culture. In exasperation I set out to show just how strong the links had been by telling my own story.

Promise of a Dream charted my transition through a Yorkshire Methodist boarding school to beatniks in Paris and then on to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, the Young Socialists in Hackney’s Labour Party and the hippies’ Summer of Love in 1967. The following year, shocked by Enoch Powell’s racist ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, I became a somewhat uneasy member of the Trotskyist group, International Socialism (later the Socialist Workers Party). I also identified enthusiastically with the revolutionary left paper, Black Dwarf. Edited by Tariq Ali, it caught the exhilaration of the 1968 student and workers’ rebellion wafting across the Channel from France. Tariq and I had become friends at university in the early sixties, when neither of us could have foreseen that within a few years, barricades in the streets of Paris would send ripples around the world.³

The spirit of ’68 flowed into diverse strands of resistance. Towards the end of 1968, crouched on a little stool near the gas fire of our communal house at 12 Montague Road in Hackney, East London, stretching towards words that could shape incipient feelings of discontent, I had written an article for Black Dwarf about women. It appeared early in 1969 and later that year led to a pamphlet, Women’s Liberation and the New Politics.⁴

At this time women’s liberation groups were just beginning to surface in Britain. In place of certainties handed down from the past, or abstract theoretical disputes, ideas drawn from young radical women’s experiences were sprouting. Trying to express the uncustomary understandings these evoked was painfully difficult for it still felt as if we were wrapped within a ‘language of silence’. Simply talking with other women helped to break through the silence, bringing vital encouragement and fostering the resolve to revolt. I reflected, ‘Movements develop in the process of communicating themselves. The forms of communicating consequently define considerably their shape and direction.’ Yet the odds against us seemed overwhelmingly powerful:

Communication for people who have no name, who have not been recognized, who have not known themselves, is a difficult business. For women it is especially difficult. We have accepted for so long man’s image of himself and ourselves and the world as his creation we find it almost impossible to conceive of a different past or a different future … Borrowed concepts are like passed down clothes: they fit badly and do not give confidence. We lumber awkwardly about in them or scuttle shamefacedly into obscurity wondering whether we should do our/their flies up for us/them.⁵

I was trying to depict an incipient rebellious consciousness, still muffled by what seemed like an impermeable blanket of male-dominated culture. I gleaned insights from Black Power writings, from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and from a lecture Edward Thompson had given in 1968 in Leeds entitled ‘Education and Experience’. In this he stressed how much was to be learned from working-class experience, while warning of the danger of simply pitting the ‘riposte’ of ‘anti-intellectualism’ against the arrogant upper-class appropriation of ‘culture’.⁶ I read the published version again and again, distilling the words through my own observations.

Convinced it was not sufficient to retaliate defensively, and that subordinated groups somehow needed to make leaps of transcendence, I began to search for clues by looking at what women had said and done in the past – discovering rebel mystics and revolutionary Puritans, and, of course Mary Wollstonecraft.

Reading Leon Trotsky’s Problems of Life (1924), I came across his description of women in the Soviet Union complaining to the men, ‘You only think about yourselves’. His reaction surprised me: ‘It is quite true there are no limits to masculine egotism in ordinary life. In order to change the conditions of life, we must learn to see them through the eyes of women.’⁷ I ended Women’s Liberation and the New Politics with Trotsky – a hint that I was beginning to recognize that perhaps absolutely everything I was trying to say was not entirely new.

The intensity of the response to my pamphlet inspired me to write at greater length. An early scribbled plan proposed a book beginning with ‘silence’, proceeding to Christine de Pisan, Marx, Engels and global revolutions, before culminating in the contemporary women’s liberation movement. In the summer of 1969 a commission from Penguin enabled me to elaborate; the result would be two books, Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973).

As I learned more, the significance of specific contexts in shaping the forms and content of protest gradually became apparent. It was evident that women’s economic, social and cultural circumstances had changed and changed again over time, and that there was no such thing as a universal immutable condition of women.

Over the course of 1969 some of the revolutionary razzmatazz of the previous year had subsided, but working-class women as well as men in Britain were in rebellion. Women car workers at Ford were demanding equal pay. Women conductors on the buses were claiming the right to become drivers. Tenants and squatters were demonstrating, and school children, picking up on the French lycée protests, were organizing through the Schools Action Union. What Jim Radford from the Family Squatting Campaign called ‘do it yourself politics’ was combining with a radical shift in the attitudes of those trying to help the socially vulnerable.⁸ Moreover, inspired by the participation of artists, writers, filmmakers and actors during the events of May ’68, radical creativity along with ideas about sexual freedom were bursting out all over.

News of extreme turmoil also reached us from the United States. Sections of the black movement were in armed conflict with the police, women’s liberation was expanding rapidly, while in June 1969 gays and lesbians in New York rioted outside a bar called the Stonewall Inn. In Britain a women’s revolt assumed visibility less dramatically, though with consequences that went far beyond anything we had expected.

Raphael Samuel, one of the fifties New Leftists, had started holding ‘History Workshops’ in 1967 at Ruskin, Oxford’s trade union college where he was teaching. These brought his mainly male trade union students together with a host of young radical historians. Raphael was an inspirational force and gave his time unstintingly, not only to his students but to enquirers of all kinds – me included. He had drawn the term ‘Workshop’ from earlier left cultural ventures.⁹ It indicated a cooperative, egalitarian approach to ideas. In contrast to the history from the top that prevailed in most Oxford colleges, the History Workshops at Ruskin took a radical perspective that encouraged the expression of subjective experience and went beyond the organized labour movement to look at the lives of outcasts of all sorts.

Like many others, I was excited by ‘history from below’, but it was not without discord. At the History Workshop meeting in November 1969, I remember disagreeing with a trade union man’s comments on women workers, and then being annoyed by male laughter when I announced a meeting to talk about women. When a little group of disgruntled young women crammed into one of the trade union student’s bedrooms, we considered calling for a History Workshop conference on women’s history from below. Instead, prompted by an American socialist and feminist, Barbara Winslow, we decided we needed to organize a conference on women’s liberation.

We were aware that shifts were occurring. Two magazines, Socialist Woman and Shrew, had started up and women’s groups were beginning to form. Women’s strike action had stimulated the formation of the trade-union-based National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACCWER). Some women blamed inequality on the ruling class, while others insisted its roots lay in male domination. Along with other feminists on the left, I argued that all women experienced subordination, but that this affected women in different classes in dissimilar ways. Rather than isolating one aspect of oppression, we needed to understand how its various forms overlapped and interacted.

By the end of the year I had resigned from the Black Dwarf editorial board and from International Socialism. Close friendships made leaving both painful. But there was also a tremendous sense of release. It felt like the symbolic burning of ideological bras, a break with my sixties political past. Henceforth I resolved to focus on women’s liberation.

Then – to my surprise – I fell in love.

1

January to June 1970

An unexpected letter dated ‘Horrible Friday’ arrived at 12 Montague Road in Hackney, enthusing about Women’s Liberation and the New Politics. It came from a member of the International Socialism group, David Widgery. Our previous encounters during the late sixties had been scratchy; indeed I had marked him out as an arrogant, dismissive male chauvinist. So how come he was expressing such empathy with my observations on women’s undercover communication through gossip and my conflicted feelings about wearing mascara? Perhaps all was not as it seemed. This was evidently not a normal Trotskyist.

I should have been peering more resolutely through the colourful nude montages of the ‘Underground’ magazine Oz, in which David’s articles appeared. I would then have noticed how David clutched at words for signs the eye often passed over. Impatient with the conventional casings of communication, his appetite for inspiration and ideas was unbounded. I had recoiled at the sardonic, staccato style, but had overlooked a laconic Romantic lyricism that was also there in his rhythmic prose. At the core of both idioms, anger and compassion melled.

The letter was addressed to ‘Dear Shelia’ – David’s spelling was somewhat erratic and especially so with my name. After the beguiling praise came a lightning flash through Wilhelm Reich, William Wordsworth, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, before David, then a medical student, exited with ‘I must go and remove wombs and embryos.’¹

Next I was invited to a meal at the flat David rented with his friend Dave Phillips, up several flights of steps at 2 Chapel Market, Islington. David and Dave had met because they had both been in love with the same woman, and had ended up as flat mates because Dave had nowhere to live in London. While David combined his medical studies with vehement literary sputtering in one room, Dave, in the other, was reserved and self-contained, wrestling with a PhD at LSE in which he sought to critique the foundational theories behind social psychology. Despite the contrast in temperament, or perhaps because of it, they became staunch friends. Their shared first name caused confusion, which sometimes led to them being addressed by their surnames; David became ‘Widgery’ or ‘Widg’ while Dave was ‘Phillips’.

The entrance to their flat was in an alleyway by the Salmon and Compass pub. Though the market bustled by day, when I arrived at night it was deserted and somewhat desolate. I am not sure whether I was invited in order to discuss my pamphlet or my departure from the International Socialism group. Nor do I recall what we ate, though I suspect it was something spaghetti-like. But we talked and talked first in the tiny kitchen and then in David’s room, which consisted of book shelves, his bed, a desk and a large, old-fashioned filing cabinet with many small drawers containing crucial thoughts and potentially useful information for future articles. Its brown wood offset David’s bright flowery shirts hanging from a shelf in a corner.

Hours passed, night fell and the last bus had long gone when a chivalric David walked me home to Montague Road and then turned round and walked all the way back to Islington. When I got to know him better I learned that he did not usually opt for six-mile treks. One of his legs had been permanently damaged by childhood polio, leaving him with a limp and a tense refusal of pain – or at least the overt acknowledgement of pain.

In turn I invited him to dinner in the somewhat chaotic communal house where I lived. I had settled in Hackney by chance in 1964 and had bought the house near Dalston Lane two years later. We all paid into a communal fund that covered its running costs but not repairs, which thus tended to be postponed indefinitely. In the late sixties, neighbours called us ‘the hippy house’.

When David came round I was living in the basement in a room with a deep red wall. Though books lined the long white corridor which led to the kitchen, wooden orange boxes – scavenged from our local market, Ridley Road, when I first came to the area – were piled up precariously with the overflow. I had replaced my old purple curtains with some seconds from Ridley Road – William Morris Liberty designs, which, miraculously, have survived.

This time there was less talk, chivalry went out of the window, and as we rolled from bed to the floor I flashed into ecstasy and an intense moment of realization. This was not just a sexy encounter; it was love.

During January 1970 David missed his medical lectures and my research in the British Museum Library stalled. I even stopped updating the journal in which I sporadically chronicled various states of misery. This new wild happiness was far more difficult to express. Only terse notes on scraps of paper hint at how I danced my way into his body and his face wrinkled with pleasure and an elaborate gentleness. Enveloped by his body I felt invulnerable.

Nevertheless I could not evade every aspect of external reality. My material circumstances were precarious. Aware that my advance from Penguin was dwindling and that the Workers’ Educational Association classes I was teaching were coming to an end, I scanned the columns of the Evening Standard and found several small advertisements for night-club hostesses. True, these contrasted with the part-time teaching I had done so far, but at twenty-six I considered myself an adaptable woman of the world well able to pick up new skills. The prospects looked favourable; I could read in the library by day and earn money by night.

My first interview was discouraging – far too old for the job. I tried another telephone number. At the second interview the place looked more seedy, and to my dismay I learned they did not actually pay wages. Earnings depended upon persuading men to buy champagne. This was a serious blow. I have never been any good at persuading anyone to do anything they were not inclined to do. Moreover I was likely to lapse into unconsciousness before I earned any pay at all, since one pint of Tetley’s bitter was my alcohol limit. Remembering old films in which heroines slipped their champagne into convenient pot plants, I looked desperately around. No pot plants. It also occurred to me that going home at two or three in the morning presented a problem. Then there was David. When would we meet if I had to spend my nights plying random men with champagne? That decided it.

Neil Middleton, my editor at Penguin, rescued me from an uncertain fate with an advance on my advance, and by February David and I had managed to disentangle ourselves – during the daytimes at least – so I was back in the British Museum reading about the French women who had participated in the revolutions of the nineteenth century. I was preparing my talk for the first ever British Women’s Liberation Conference, which was due to be held at Ruskin College at the end of the month.

The French historian Edith Thomas had been an exciting revelation. I had come across her account of women in the 1871 Paris Commune, The Women Incendiaries, in translation and been surprised to see that in 1963 she had observed not only that history was largely written by men, but that ‘the history of half the human species, which has almost always been enacted on the fringes of History, raises its own questions, peculiar to itself’.² I found a copy of her Les femmes de 1848, written as a tribute to women in the French Resistance, in the British Museum Library, and this led me to the newspaper library at Colindale. Travelling there on the Northern line, I used to lower my gaze to examine the big black boots of the police trainees heading off to their Hendon College.

Colindale was a desolate spot, especially in winter, and the library itself emitted a spare austerity, as if to inculcate would-be scholars into the rigours of archival sacrifice. But there, bound in brown leather, to my great delight, I discovered copies of the newspapers the insurgent French women had produced in 1848 demanding social and economic rights for working women.

Even as I was making the long journey from Hackney to Colindale, in my home city of Leeds around thirty thousand clothing workers, mostly women, were going from factory to factory in spontaneous mass pickets bringing workers in the clothing factories out. I was astounded to read of such militant direct action in Leeds. After the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers had agreed to an increase of 5 (old) pence an hour for women and 6 for men, the Leeds workers rejected this and demanded an extra shilling (12 old pence) for everyone. A pent-up anger against the employers and the trade union had erupted onto the streets, and crowds of women were photographed waving joyfully outside the factories. A small, astute clothing worker, Gertie Roche, along with her husband Jim, played a key role once the unofficial strike began.

I had been introduced to Gertie the previous year at a gathering of the left-wing Institute for Workers’ Control, by my friend Ben Birnbaum, a trade unionist in the clothing industry.³ Born in 1912, Gertie had learned her Marxism in the vast garment factories and the anti-fascist movement of the thirties and had joined the Communist Party. Committed but questioning, she had come to know intellectuals in the CP, including Dorothy and Edward Thompson.

In 1956, after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Joseph Stalin and Moscow’s subsequent suppression of the Hungarian uprising, Gertie’s outraged dissidence had resulted in her expulsion from the Communist Party, whereupon she became part of the attempt to create a New Left, in Yorkshire. The Thompsons observed that the Communists had lost many thoughtful working-class members like Gertie in 1956, though predictably it would be mainly the intellectuals who were remembered. As a trade unionist, she identified particularly with women workers, describing herself proudly as a ‘shop stewardess’.⁴

Gertie was adept at expressing complex ideas in direct language, a skill she shared with Audrey Wise, then an official in the shop workers’ union, and both women inspired many of us in women’s liberation. I had come to know Audrey through Dorothy and Edward, and she, too, used to attend the Institute for Workers’ Control conferences. Audrey was twenty years younger than Gertie and her early political awareness had been shaped by Trotskyism before she became active in the Labour Party. She once told me that Gerry Healy, the bombastic leader of the Trotskyist group, the Socialist Labour League, had admonished her when, as a young woman, she had decided to marry – ‘You’ll be lost to the socialist movement.’ Audrey resolved to prove him wrong and to work out her own political views.

Inspired by the Ford women’s strike at Dagenham for equal grading, from 1968 she had been involved with other trade unionists in the National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACCWER).

Audrey’s great skill lay in translating assumptions she heard around her into far-reaching aspirations. When I had asked her to write about equal pay in the 1969 issue of Black Dwarf I edited on women’s liberation, she had turned the idea of women’s rights into something much bigger. ‘We must ask ourselves … equality with what? Do men have such idyllic lives that we want the same for ourselves? In a world where people are valued as economic units rather than as people, to be an equal economic unit must not be the height of our ambition.’⁵ Audrey remarked how women workers often emphasized the importance of human needs at work over pay.⁶ Instead of dismissing this, she dug down to the radical implications it held.

At our planning meeting in London for the forthcoming Ruskin Women’s Liberation Conference, I pressed for Audrey to be a speaker and for us to reach out to trade union women organizing through NJACCWER. We had no clear idea who exactly would turn up, nor indeed how many.

Over the course of 1969 small groups had been springing up in London, loosely linked through the Women’s Liberation Workshop (WLW), which had acquired an office. Local groups started to send a representative to a central meeting there and we agreed that each of these would take turns in producing our paper, Shrew – an arrangement that worked fine until there were too many of us! We used the term ‘Workshop’ because, like the Ruskin History Workshop and other left cultural groupings who adopted it, we sought a non-hierarchical approach. Reacting against the vanguardism of the small left groups of the time, we wanted everyone to contribute equally and were wary of direction.

Scattered clusters of women’s liberationists had also cohered in several towns and cities, and the Trotskyist-influenced Socialist Woman magazine, based in Nottingham, had appeared. I was in touch with the Leeds Women’s Liberation Group, through a friend from university, Gloden Dallas, who always used to laugh when socialist men asked her how she had ‘recruited’ members. ‘They just appeared’, she would reply. And it was true, groups emerged simply through women talking with one another. While many of us had been affected by left ideas, women also came along because of immediate dissatisfactions in their daily lives. We gathered in one another’s homes, listing addresses and telephone numbers in Shrew or other local publications.

We had heard about ‘consciousness raising’ in the US radical movement and were committed to talking about personal life. This enabled us to explore how we were oppressed and to think through what to do about it. It also helped to secure an atmosphere of mutual trust. No longer isolated, private hurts found collective expression in the small women’s liberation groups. Feelings of inadequacy, and the all-consuming rage that left a sullen exhaustion in its wake, were not simply relieved by being communicated. Startling realizations arose from the fusion of energy that could result.

Initially, consciousness-raising groups seemed to offer an alternative type of politics open to all women. They appeared to me as definitely preferable to either Labour Party or International Socialism meetings, where personal life was allocated to talking in the pub after the ‘official’ meeting ended. However, I wanted to help make material changes as well as alter consciousness. Many women shared a similar impatience, but we were not sure how to combine internal and external transformation.

In 1969 I had joined a women’s group meeting in Islington where we mixed consciousness raising with going about giving talks on women’s liberation and attempting to secure more nursery provision. On returning from my summer holiday I learned that the group, having been forced to move from their regular meeting place, had transferred to my bedroom in Hackney.

During 1970 this group kept growing in numbers and, as new women piled in, we ‘veterans’ found ourselves destined to repeat over and over again what women’s liberation was about. This was frustrating on two counts: ideas could not develop further, and it smacked of a hidden hierarchy in which those ‘in the know’ appeared to resemble the dreaded ‘leaders’. Steeped in the clear certainties of the pamphlets circulating from American women’s liberationists, it took us a while to realize that consciousness raising, rather than being the answer, was simply a different form of organizing which had both strengths and snags. But events were moving faster than theoretical ponderings.

On 26 February, several hundred women converged on Ruskin College, Oxford for our first Women’s Liberation Conference. The weather was cold and we were bundled up in the scraggy fur coats we had rifled from grannies’ mothballed cupboards or bought second hand. Several maxi-length coats were also in evidence, some acquired in Army and Navy surplus stores. Many of us still had long flowing sixties scarves and hair too. But the mood had changed; we were not standing on the sidelines, or on display. A year afterwards, I recalled:

I’d never seen so many women looking so confident before. The night we arrived they kept pouring into Ruskin College with bags and babies. The few men around looked rather like women look at most large predominantly male meetings – rather out on a limb.⁷

Far more people came than we had anticipated. I recorded around 500, approximately 400 women, sixty children and forty men, but some other estimates put the numbers even higher.

As I sat listening to the introductory session in the familiar hall that evening, I found the reports on groups and activities electrifying. This was unlike any conference I had ever known. It was not just the words I was hearing women say, but how they were expressing themselves. I watched in amazement as a young woman took the microphone. She was in her early twenties and speaking with profound passion, without any hesitancy, tossing her dark wavy hair to emphasize her words. Despite being several years my junior, she appeared so confident. Many years later I learned that her name was Annie Freud, and she became a skilful poet.

Because of the numbers, on the Saturday and Sunday we had to move to the austere Oxford Students’ Union building. Geared to training elite young men for political power, its very structure felt alien. Indeed, when I arrived as a student at St Hilda’s College in 1961, women were not even allowed to be members of the Students’ Union. After a campaign mounted by a student in my year, Judith Okely, women were somewhat grudgingly admitted.⁸

Before I was due to speak, paralysed by anxiety, I withdrew into the Ladies to regain my composure in privacy. The title of my talk was ‘The Myth of Inactivity’. I stood in the daunting conference hall and declaimed: ‘Women, like other oppressed groups, figure only incidentally in history. They are amongst the silent people, the people of “no name” who are rarely heard because they don’t go on record.’⁹

I set about exposing the neglect of women’s voices, actions and ideas through the reading I had been doing for Women, Resistance and Revolution on the French revolutions of the nineteenth century. Describing revolutionary women’s collective action in the crowds, their role on the barricades, the creation of their own clubs and journals, I explained how the violent hostility towards them from the right was expressed in sexual as well as political terms.

I sought to convey the relevance of these women from long ago, explaining that there were broader questions behind my interest in what they had said and done. I wanted to discover ‘What contacts and common interests existed between women of differing classes’, and how to distinguish between forms of feminism that sought ‘improvements for women within the existing society’ and those that wanted also ‘to question the economic and social basis of society as it is’.¹⁰

I noticed one particularly intent listener, neck craned with her eyes fixed upon me. I later realized this was Selma James, who I had heard speaking at a meeting on race. Selma had gained experience of left politics in the American Trotskyist movement and, writing under a pseudonym because of McCarthyism in the early fifties, had published a pamphlet called A Woman’s Place on the oppression of women in the home and at work. On coming to Britain she had married the Trinidadian historian and Marxist, C.L.R. James, whose book The Black Jacobins (1938) had anticipated the approach of history from below.¹¹

Jo O’Brien from the Nottingham Socialist Woman group followed with an outline of British working-class women’s protests around food, work and political reform during the nineteenth century.¹² So both historical talks focused on women’s participation in rebellions. I am not sure whether the bulk of people at the conference shared our passion for womanizing history from below, but they heard us out attentively.

The main focus during the two days was, of course, on the present. Audrey Wise argued that feminism alone was not enough because other forms of oppression affected both women and men. She also stressed the need to go beyond claiming ‘rights’ within capitalism in order to challenge how workers and work were seen and valued.¹³ A similar interrogation was extended to life in the home by Jan Williams, Hazel Twort and Ann Bachelli, from the Peckham Rye Women’s Liberation Group. ‘Our window on the world is looked through with our hands in the sink and we’ve begun to hate that sink and all it implies – so begins our consciousness.’¹⁴ A new politics was being expressed through women’s daily experiences.

The family and motherhood were central concerns in this innovatory transposition. Sheli Wortis, an American psychologist, questioned the prevailing assumption that mothers were uniquely suited to be carers of small children. She made the case for men’s involvement both at home and in nurseries. Sheli, who was a member of one of the first London Women’s Liberation Workshop groups at Tufnell Park, stressed that we needed to determine our own social emancipation and to change our own personal circumstances.¹⁵ This not only made practical sense for us, it was a crucial theoretical tenet in the founding of women’s liberation groups. But it went against the grain of how politics was seen at the time.

We went against various other grains that weekend. An amusing photograph taken by Sally (later Chandan) Fraser records one of the busts of famous men discretely veiled by what appears to be a tea towel. In a startling precedent, men took responsibility for the conference crèche, and another of her pictures reveals Sheli’s husband, Henry Wortis, an anti-Vietnam War organizer from a group called ‘STOP IT’, and a weary Stuart Hall, later to become a well-known left cultural theorist, surrounded by toddlers. A copy of the Guardian newspaper lies abandoned on the floor. A group of radical film-makers, Ellen Adams, Sue Crockford and Tony Wickert, also interviewed several other harassed-looking men in the crèche – a hint that the ‘new politics’ in the midst of a crowd of young children could come as a bit of a shock.

The film group had experienced some difficulty in gaining permission to cover the conference. Because the mainstream media had ridiculed what they labelled ‘Women’s Lib’, we were inclined to suspect any attempt to portray us, even from the well intentioned. It is fortunate that an eloquent and decisive Sue Crockford was able to argue their case, for the film they made, called A Woman’s Place, preserves a glimpse not just of some of the speeches, but of the animated interactions between little clusters of women.¹⁶ It also contains flashes of humour. They caught me off guard, sitting at a stall selling Shrew and shaking with mischievous laughter, as a Maoist woman derided members of women’s liberation groups for sitting around contemplating our own vaginas.

Once my talk was over, though exhausted, I wafted through the conference in a wave of sublime communal happiness. It was reassuring to spot some familiar faces. They included Sally Alexander, whom I had met in the late sixties through the founder of Black Dwarf, the literary agent Clive Goodwin. Along with an impressive Swiss historian, Arielle Aberson, who was studying a radical student movement that had preceded the Paris Commune of 1871, Sally had secured Ruskin for the conference. A close friend, Roberta Hunter-Henderson, who had appeared in my life through Dorothy and Edward Thompson, was also in Oxford doing an MA in anthropology when the conference was being organized. But she had been in contact with German measles and was closeted up in the gallery of the Union building.

Juliet Mitchell, author of the influential article, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, in the New Left Review in 1966, was there too, as was Anna Davin from the History Workshop, who chaired the history session. Both had been involved in the London planning group. I knew Sue Cowley (later O’Sullivan) from my visit to the pioneering Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation Workshop Group to speak on women in the Paris Commune. Like Sheli and Henry Wortis, Sue was in touch with the early American New Left as well as the women’s movement; her husband John Cowley also helped to organize the conference crèche.

A few other personal relationships went back to the early sixties. I had studied with Janet Rée at St Hilda’s College. In 1970 she was pregnant and unmarried, though living with her partner – still not an easy situation before the solidarity provided through women’s liberation. David Widgery accompanied me to Ruskin and we sat through some of the conference with two historians who had befriended me when I was a student, Christopher and Bridget Hill. They had been in the Communist Party and during the mini-McCarthy purge in Britain Bridget had lost her academic job. When I went to university she was working as the bursar at St Hilda’s and became my staunch defender when I did so badly in my preliminary exams that I was in danger of being chucked out. They both encouraged me to write on women’s history.

While it was exciting to meet up with people I knew at the Ruskin conference, the event was revelatory and memorable because it revealed there were several hundred women wanting change. After that weekend we were no longer just a clutch of little networks. It was then that I realized I was really part of ‘a movement’.¹⁷

As a result of the conference a National Coordinating Committee was set up and four demands were hastily proposed. We arranged to meet again that June at Sheffield to discuss these demands: for equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free twenty-four-hour nurseries. The latter was intended to address shift working, but it was to be consistently misunderstood as a heartless abandonment of feminist offspring.

While I believed such reforms would be an improvement, I regarded them as very basic. Surely capitalism could deliver these in no time! I worried that once they were achieved, women would still remain oppressed. The reforms did not address the underlying inequalities affecting working-class women that Audrey Wise had highlighted, nor the diffuse sense of oppressed social dislocation which many young university-educated middle-class women like me were experiencing. Nor, indeed, did they touch upon the blatant manner in which women’s bodies were being utilized to increase the consumption of products. I could discern that capitalism employs us to sell ourselves as commodities in order to sell other commodities. But how to stop this? And how to translate such perceptions and feelings into specific wants? I puzzled over this disconnect. Women clearly needed specific reforms, but how would these further a personal and social revolutionary transformation?

As I read more on the subject of equal pay, I was interested to discover from the recent Women’s Trades Union Conference Reports a much broader underlying critique of inequality. Working-class women in the unions referred to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and to ideas coming from the black movement in America. Aware of the problems of being both responsible for the home and earning a living, they linked their subordination as women with exploitation in the workplace. Their testimonies, combined with the Peckham group’s description of housework and child care, started me thinking about labour as both a material and a psychological activity, parts of which had been artificially zoned off into the ‘economy’. It was an approach that eventually found its way into my second book, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World.

Immediately after the conference, I was still finding it hard to focus. The Women’s TUC Reports were jostling for space with what I called in my journal the ‘folie of togetherness’ I shared with David. There was no ‘taming’ of the desire that bound us, I announced decisively that March.¹⁸ We were connected through myriad enthusiasms. As well as being a loyal Trotskyist and a medical student, committed to workers’ struggles and an end to poverty, David also loved poets like William Blake, Rimbaud and Mayakovsky. He was an eclectic who admired the films of Ken Loach and the beat novels of Jack Kerouac. Indeed one of his claims to fame was ‘getting off’ with Allen Ginsburg after the 1965 poetry reading at the Albert Hall. His hero within the International Socialism group was the quixotic Peter Sedgwick, who translated the works of the dissident Bolshevik, Victor Serge, and wrote insightful essays on the contemporary left. Peter provided a model of how to be at once committed and critical at the same time. An added attraction was his humour and an archaic bohemian style which David likened to ‘a Basque beatnik’.¹⁹

Though David used to write in Oz magazine energetically berating hippies for their lack of revolutionary zeal, he was a close friend of one of its editors, the fun-loving Richard Neville, impersonating him in an interview for Harlech TV after Richard’s book Play Power came out in February 1970, and surprising fellow panellists with a resounding plug for the International Socialism group.²⁰ Some aspects of David’s anti-establishment bravura belied belief. He kept a watercolour sketch he claimed was by David Hockney in the bathroom at Chapel Market, where it slowly perished – a fading gesture against the art market.

Nonetheless I found his wit, word-spinning and delight in cultural and political subversion irresistible and our interests interwove. Because of David I started reading Serge’s novels, clear-sighted and humane, despite the tragic distortions of the revolution in Russia, and we were both drawn to Alexandra Kollontai, who I had discovered through writing my chapter on the Soviet Union in Women, Resistance and Revolution. In the early years of the Russian Revolution, Kollontai had supported direct forms of workers’ democracy along with women’s emancipation and sexual liberation. In her fiction she explored the hidden dilemmas revolutionary women, active in the public political sphere, confronted in their personal lives. I identified with her understanding of ‘complexities’ and her rejection of ‘comfortable stock solutions’ in personal relating.²¹

A renewed economic crisis in my life that spring was solved by my doctor, Michael Leibson, taking me on as his receptionist. Michael was a Jewish scholarship boy from East London who had managed to study medicine. His time in the army during the Second World War had left him unshockable; his long lugubrious face, sculpted with deep indentations, twisted into ironic mirth over human foibles. Many years as a doctor in Bethnal Green had made him profoundly conscious of the hidden injuries of class. Cautiously cynical about the possibilities of social transformation, he was nevertheless resolutely ‘agin’ the establishment, resisting all proposals for cuts in the health service and expressing a wry sympathy for student rebels.

Working with Michael I quickly learned who were his favourites at the Bethnal Green surgery. Mrs Grocock was a formidable figure who acted as an informal health adviser and shop steward for the patients, alerting him to any brewing discontents. Michael explained how she was proud of having been the first woman to give birth to a baby with an Afro-Caribbean father in Notting Hill, a claim that was difficult to verify because no sensible person would mess with Mrs Grocock. I felt more at ease with Philomena, an Irish woman who lived with an African man and was closer to my age. Their relationship did not fit into my women’s liberation lexicon. They used to get drunk, argue and beat one another up, both arriving in the surgery, sober and affable, to be patched up. Neither seemed to bear any malice. If anything, Philomena seemed to come out victorious. She was a woman of few words, but communicated an inner resolution with a sideways look and smile in my direction that implied ‘A woman’s got to do what a woman’s got to do.’

I occupied a wooden box during morning and evening surgeries, surrounded by rows of frayed, bulging fawn files. Patients sat on a cream bench around the wall of the surgery chatting about their lives and the doctor’s mood. When they knocked on my box I would open the sliding hatch, take their names and pass their records through to Michael via a connecting internal door. My other responsibility was making us both cups of tea.

Being a doctor’s receptionist meant I earned £10 a week, just enough for survival. It proved to be an excellent job for writing. After the morning surgery I used to leap onto the Central line and head off to the blue and brown round reading room at the British Museum in Great Russell Street. Some days I stayed in the box and wrote what were to become the first few chapters of Women, Resistance and Revolution.

The surgery was only a few steps away from the Tube so it was also a convenient place to meet people. Bea Campbell, then in the Communist Party and living in the East End, came to interview me in a café for an article she was doing for the Morning Star about women’s liberation. Like many left women at the time she was sceptical about the emphasis on personal life and feelings within the women’s liberation groups. When I read the article she eventually wrote, I felt sad that I’d failed to convince her that in order to transform relationships in society we needed to combine examining subjectivity with action.²² But Bea changed. Two people whose opinions she respected, both in the CP, told her she was wrong: her mother up in Cumbria, Catherina Barnes, who worked as a nurse in a geriatric care home; and her husband, the sports journalist and folk musician, Bobby Campbell. When Bobby died in 1997, Bea recalled how, when she ‘wrote a daft, mean-minded critique’ of women’s liberation, Bobby ‘was astonished. “But it’s a great movement”’, he said.²³

In May, David was attacked walking home from a pub in Euston. We were apart that night and I found him the next morning bruised and still bleeding in his room at Chapel Market. Though unclear about exactly what had happened, he was convinced his assailants had objected to his bright pink bell-bottom trousers from the cheap and trendy store, Lawrence Corner in Euston. The Royal Free Medical School was not going to let one of its own expire for a pair of pink trousers and he was quickly whisked into hospital where I found three consultants pacing round his bed. He was being treated for a broken nose.

Our fervent closeness had started to come under pressure and I was troubled because David seemed to be setting up situations devised to push me away. He proved adept at this. At first I found these signals of a slackening in the hold of love unbearable; then I became impatient and irritated. ‘I can’t imagine sharing my life with any man, I feel so much to do inside me,’ I announced grumpily in my journal on 1 June, adding, ‘But I think about having a child.’²⁴ Ironically I had been writing about how Kollontai wrestled with dependence and independence in her own sexual relationships as well as her novels, while experiencing the same contrary pull in my own life.

Meanwhile, women’s liberation groups were proliferating. Women in International Socialism also began meeting, and Socialist Woman groups, loosely connected to the International Marxist Group, were growing. I was invited to give talks, journeying to Hull, Chesterfield, Sheffield, Teeside, Bristol, Essex and Southampton, among other places. En route from London to Hull University, which I had last visited during a student occupation in 1968, my head was spilling over with the ideas I wanted to communicate. But I nursed some vainglorious fantasies too, imagining myself as an heroic woman revolutionary like my heroine, Alexandra Kollontai, travelling on trains to rouse the nation.

With excited zeal I addressed students in their lunch hour on Kollontai’s life and ideas and overran the time. Bathos and humiliation. In the bar afterwards the student who had chaired the meeting remarked how polite they were in Hull: ‘In London,’ he observed, ‘boring speaker, everyone would just walk out.’ I hid a tear of shame behind my beer mug, and banished notions of myself as an orator for ever.

Meetings with Chesterfield beauticians at the Further Education College and with the Sheffield Women’s Liberation Group went rather better. I stayed with Jean McCrindle, who had helped to start the Sheffield group. A few years older than me, she had been part of the New Left in the late fifties. After reading Simone de Beauvoir, she had argued fiercely for feminism in the Glasgow socialist movement well before a women’s liberation movement existed. Jean wanted to connect feminism and socialism, but commented wryly that it was not easy to take the intimacy of small consciousness-raising groups outwards. When the Sheffield group delivered leaflets on contraception at a factory gate at six in the morning, the women workers teased them mercilessly: ‘Sex at this time of the morning? You must be joking.’²⁵

To my alarm, the people who came to my talks seemed to expect me to be all-knowing. I noted in my journal on 1 June, ‘I am afraid sometimes when people listen to me.’²⁶ I could see certain things clearly and could sometimes find ways through when discussions became muddled at meetings, but this did not mean I could pronounce on everything. I was beginning to be aware that I was in the uncomfortable position of being a semi-public figure in a movement in which we were trying desperately not to have leaders. I really did not want to be a leader.

I sought to recover my bearings by going to stay with Dorothy and Edward Thompson in Leamington Spa. I cast them in the role of ‘grown ups’, possessing the enforced wisdom of belonging to the generation who had lived through the Second World War. Their home was far from being a suburban slipper zone. On 11 February, students occupying Warwick University had discovered files that revealed not only the power of business interests, but undercover surveillance of students and staff. They took the evidence to Edward, who was teaching labour history there. One file included an account of a talk given to the Coventry branch of the Labour Party by his American colleague, Professor David Montgomery.²⁷ Edward exposed the surveillance in an article on ‘The Business University’ in New Society.

Despite a gruff crustiness about the vagaries of ‘youth’ – which, ‘if left to its own devices, tends to become very hairy’²⁸ – Edward helped the Warwick students produce a Penguin book at high speed, documenting the contents of the files and questioning the direction of higher education. He concluded with the question, ‘Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management?’²⁹ Unfortunately, the election of a Conservative government under Edward Heath on 19 June was a gloomy reminder that left critiques, however prescient, remained marginal.

When I visited Leamington, Dorothy was in the process of editing and annotating a collection of documents, The Early Chartists (1971). To my regret, she remained reserved and wary about many aspects of the women’s liberation movement. Born in 1923, Dorothy had become politically active during the thirties, when class inequality, unemployment and fascism had been foremost. From a Labour family, she had joined first the Young Communist League and then the Communist Party, finally leaving, like Edward, in 1956.

Older women of her generation on the left were more alert than we were to the dangers in women’s liberation’s focus on dissolving the boundaries between personal life and politics. They had, after all, witnessed how both Hitler and Stalin had sought to control personal life in the family. Though firmly committed to the emancipation of women, Dorothy was also critical of perspectives like Simone de Beauvoir’s that disregarded motherhood and child care. In contrast, she saw improving conditions for women as mothers as being at the crux of emancipation and viewed the experience of mothering and relations in the family as potentially vital sources of positive values for social change.

Nevertheless, she agreed to speak on women and the Chartist movement at the 27 June women’s liberation meeting in Sheffield. Dorothy argued that at the beginning of the movement, when whole working-class communities participated in direct action against high prices or harsh laws, poor women had played a more significant part than they could in the subsequent more formal political movement. Like Jo O’Brien and myself at the Ruskin conference in Oxford, Dorothy highlighted the need to acknowledge the differing forms women’s radical protest had taken historically, rather than simply the rights of women as a sex.

The Sheffield gathering agreed that the National Coordinating Committee should disseminate information and organize conferences. It also discussed the four demands, leaving some of us restless about wrapping our wants up so tidily.³⁰ I was unconvinced by the didactic style of a leading figure from a Maoist group, Abhimanyu Manchanda, who sought to instruct us on the importance of demands. Little did I know then that he had long been active in opposing racism and that one of his formative influences had been the Afro-Caribbean Communist thinker and organizer, Claudia Jones, who was forced into exile in Britain from the US during the McCarthy era. Not only did she found The West Indian Gazette and help to start the Notting Hill Carnival, the connections she made between race, gender, class and imperialism were to have an important impact upon the black feminist groups which later formed in Britain.³¹ Moreover, she and Gertie Roche had been friends.

For me Sheffield was a more relaxed occasion than the Ruskin conference, though I was concerned about Roberta Hunter-Henderson’s acute panic about giving a paper. Someone took a photograph of us both that day by some railings outside the meeting hall. I appear giddy and carefree in my black mini skirt, while Roberta, her thick brown hair cascading over a shawl and a fashionable long dress, turns towards the camera with the air of natural grace that had aroused elaborate chivalry on our hitchhiking escapades in Spain two years earlier. In retrospect I can see a cloud of apprehension in her face.³²

She was indeed more troubled than I then realized, because some other women’s liberationists had criticized her talk harshly. At the time I saw this as an aberration. Theoretically I did not hold with the notion that because we were women we would wipe away political conflicts, but emotionally, like many other feminists, I was attached to a vision of us birthing a new politics of harmony. The outcry that Roberta faced was a sign that even in those early days, blissful sisterhood could fray somewhat at the edges.

2

July to December 1970

In July 1970 I went to the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) Summer School at Seale-Hayne, in Devon. Jim Fryth, who worked in the Extra-Mural Department at London University, had recruited me as a part-time tutor in 1968.¹ He used to give me lifts down to the red brick, ivy-covered agricultural college in Devon, telling me stories about his life.

Growing up in Dorset he had been influenced by two unconventional women who lived nearby: the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who was a poet. Through them he had gained a strong commitment to women’s emancipation and also joined the Communist Party. Both women went to Spain in 1936 during the Civil War as medical auxiliaries, and campaigned vigorously for the Republic.² Jim used to talk about the impact the Spanish Civil War had had upon him, of his arrest and imprisonment at the beginning of the Second World War and his memories of later serving in the army. He would remain a loyal CP member all his life, but was utterly non-sectarian and open to new social movements.

Our friendship led me to ruminate on the incongruence of an international organization that had such a bitter and brutal history and yet contained so many kind individuals within it dedicated to serving others. Jim and other Communist Party friends presented a paradox that inclined me to look beneath particular affiliations in left politics; I came to see that there were people you could work with and learn from in every group.

The WEA Summer Schools were intellectually stimulating and hard work, enlivened by Jim’s puckish sense of humour and love of outings to the sea or the moors. Our students were an interesting mix of alert, militant trade union men, printers, engineers, train drivers and thoughtful, questing lower-middle-class women.

I was happy and preoccupied for the first few days, but became increasingly perplexed because I could never reach David on the telephone. Nor did he reply to my letters. David, the assiduous communicator had, it seemed, vanished. Telephoning from a call box at Seale-Hayne involved preparation and time. In a distraught letter I wrote, ‘I accumulate sixpences in piles. I walk down brown polished corridors endlessly, perpetually, and whenever I have off moments, which is rare, telephone. You are never there to answer.’³ Petrified by incomprehension, I enquired into the void, ‘Would you come to me my love when the night was dark in my imagination.’ In desperation I scribbled messages to myself, late at night, on torn bits of paper. Filled with foreboding, I jotted, ‘Acquaintances can be misleading, love is there but not always lasting.’⁴

After two long weeks I returned home to discover what I must have known but still could not inwardly fathom. David had left me. An embarrassed and distressed Marc Karlin, a radical filmmaker Roberta Hunter-Henderson had brought to live at 12 Montague Road, looked after me as best he could.⁵ Other friends rallied round, including Roberta, but I was in bits, vulnerable and consumed with self-doubt.

On 8 August, David wrote a stilted letter in red ink on red paper stating that he had met someone else.⁶ Spinning in perplexity, I wrote to myself

I am so confused

You send me back my belongings

In red parcels to the wrong address

With false messages

And somebody else’s apologies

In various colours

Of my own delusions.⁷

On the 20th, David visited. ‘Seeing him tonight it was as if it had never existed.’ Yet being with him had seemed so vivid and undeniable. ‘It’s frightening how completely little I can know about someone who affects me so much.’ I was troubled by loss but also about my own judgement. ‘The world had suddenly turned contrarywise and onto its head.’ Or was it just my own ‘willful blindness’.⁸

I had penned ‘A Song for Roberta to Find a Tune’ when she had been so distressed earlier that summer, by August it might just as well have been my own.

Where are you going girl?

It’s getting very dark.

You can’t see your way now

You can only feel the hurt.

Don’t lose your head girl,

It’s the only thing you own.

The clouds are clearing now,

Your eyes are seeing now.

You can face it and be calm.

The clouds are clearing now,

And soon it will be light.

The grass is rising now,

The days are changing girl.

Don’t lose your head girl,

You’re walking through the night.

And soon it will be light,

And soon it will be light.⁹

The light at the end had come to sound like a tenacious wish, rather than a firm conviction.

Amid my intense introspective gloom, any messages of hope from the world outside became important. I was heartened when Adam Hart, who had lived at Montague Road for a while, visited full of schemes for building domes. I called these ‘psychedelic domes’ in my journal because I had heard of Californian hippies propagating them. Adam was excited because some radical architects and designers were envisaging ‘dome homes’ as sustainable housing. I was intrigued, despite wondering where I would put all my books. Like many sixties visionary schemes, the domes were recast, appearing in gardens or turning into vast conference centres, while Adam’s interest in alternative forms of housing eventually led him to work in Hackney on cooperative housing.

The eloquence of an African American, John Watson from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, also made a strong impression. I heard him at a showing of the interesting film Finally Got The News. The meeting was chaired by Sid Harraway, the convenor from Ford’s Dagenham, a Communist with an internationalist outlook, who in 1969 had been an active force among rank-and-file car workers from several British firms.¹⁰ Finally Got The News portrayed resistance led by black car workers in Detroit, showing class consciousness intertwining with an awareness of racial oppression in ways I had not yet seen in Britain, where all the Ford workers and shop stewards I had met were white. Unfortunately the League, like many other inspirational left initiatives in America, was later to break up as a result of sectarian infighting. Yet John Watson’s emphasis on the interrelating sources of subordination remained with me.

I was still trying to write my book for Penguin, but as chapters kept dividing in two, it was beginning to seem like a labour of Sisyphus. So, when a Dutch women’s liberationist, Dee van Ginneken, invited me to stay in Amsterdam in order to do interviews about the women’s movement there, I made an impulsive decision and said yes.

Shortly before leaving, I paid a visit to Clive Goodwin. We had met through Tariq Ali and become friends through the left paper Black Dwarf. He was then a literary agent, but had worked in theatre and television. Being a mere nine years my senior, Clive was not quite one of my ‘grown up’ friends but he possessed a tough practicality which was restorative in an abrasive kind of way. It concealed grief. His wife, one of the early Pop artists, Pauline Boty, had died only a few years before.¹¹

By chance, that day, Richard Neville, David’s Oz friend, was also visiting, along with the poet Michelene Wandor, who I knew from women’s liberation, and the dazzling Caroline Coon, who had founded Release to help people arrested on drugs charges. I had not been sleeping well, I looked exhausted and scruffy, having borrowed a pair of Marc Karlin’s corduroy trousers and an old vest. In the kitchen, Clive tried to dispense worldly advice about there being ‘a pattern’ in my love affairs. I must have glowered. He gave up and proffered an ice cream.

Unable to converse, I immersed myself in eating the ice cream. In an effort to include me, Clive suddenly asked, ‘Why doesn’t David stop his medicine and concentrate on his writing?’ Richard put his head on one side and looked attentive. My neck and throat seized up. It was inapt for me to be expected to reply on David’s behalf. How could I explain to them? I gulped and started to cry. Everyone carried on politely.

I fled home in a taxi – an act of wild extravagance. Too late, the answer to Clive’s question dawned – ‘Perhaps because he could be a good doctor.’ With it came a mood of resigned detachment. Realizing how much I missed talking with David, I was nonetheless able to distance myself sufficiently to accept the reality of our separation. For whatever reason he had done what he must.¹²

For several years before I fell in love with David I had been involved in what is probably best described as a non-relationship with Steve Balogh. It was a non-relationship because Steve appeared only rarely, erupting out of nowhere like some intense magic mushroom. But it had survived because Steve, despite abjuring any norms of practicality, would come up with surprising insights at moments of distress. ‘Why are you frightening yourself? Why do you want to be afraid?’ he once asked me. And I had thought, ‘Quite so. He’s right’, discerning some ‘flame in him’ that could illuminate ‘what was essential’.¹³ Over time, annoyance at never knowing when we were meeting prevailed over such elliptical perceptions. Meeting David had settled things. No more sex with Steve; he then started visiting more often and genially communed.

There he was when I tumbled from the taxi into my basement room at Montague Road. For some reason he appeared to be even more strung out than I was. We made a surprised kind of love, after which Steve announced his intention of visiting me in Amsterdam. I had arrived at some remote spot that enabled me not to mind either way. I proclaimed to my journal in self-possessed triumph, ‘I’ve managed to occupy myself again. No more binding.’¹⁴

Steve did reach Amsterdam, in a strange shiny green suit. He was being closely tracked by a young woman complaining how he had left her on a leaky barge somewhere. She and I formed a feminist alliance and I recorded in my journal that Steve went ‘growling and humping off’.¹⁵ They were about to embark on an expedition to the Sudan, which was in political upheaval. That, I thought at the time, was that.

My impulse to go to Amsterdam proved to be a good one. Dee and her husband Jaap put me up and provided the names and addresses of Dutch feminists. I interviewed members of a mixed research group, the Man Woman Society, and left a note for the women’s liberationists, ‘Dolle Mina’, saying I would like to learn about their ideas and actions. They had taken their name from an early twentieth-century Dutch feminist called Wilhelmina Drucker. It meant ‘Mad Mina’.

The Dolle Mina embraced a zany playfulness. While in Britain we were suspicious of the media, in Holland they sought it out as a means of communicating their counter-intuitive rebellion, burning a black corset by a statue of Wilhelmina Drucker, tying pink ribbons round a men’s urinal in protest at the lack of women’s lavatories, and carrying enormous paper flowers to a home for unmarried mothers. They even ‘kidnapped’ a man who wanted to organize a beauty contest – all in ‘fun’.¹⁶ Their non-violent forms of direct action followed earlier Dutch anarchistic traditions of symbolic protest.

When I visited Amsterdam’s International Institute of Social History, I felt privileged to be sitting in a place that contained the papers of Marxists such as Luxemburg, Engels and Trotsky as well as the anarchists Bakunin and Goldman, to name just a few. Miraculously the collections had been secretly preserved from the Nazis during the Second World War, so, advised by the knowledgeable archivist Wilhelmina Schroeder, I was able to read the papers of Sylvia Pankhurst and the East London Federation of the Suffragettes. I still have my much-fingered notes in faded pencil. Dwelling among all these socialists, anarchists and feminists from long ago rallied my spirits. I cheered up. But a photograph taken on that trip by Jaap reveals dark rings of exhaustion around my eyes.

Back in London, Marc Karlin conjured the healing powers of warmth and sun in a beguiling image of a beautiful white house he had once visited in Majorca, in a place called Deià, where the sea shone with a strange luminosity and the calm brought solace. Jenny Moss (later Natasha Morgan), who was involved in women’s liberation, had recently moved into Montague Road and we decided to hitch there together.

Marc was proved right about the beauty but not the solace. By the time we reached the white house in Deià, I had realized I was carrying Steve’s child. As I stood looking down over the cliff at the blue and turquoise waves, I wanted to fall softly into nothingness. I was crying. The beauty of the sea, the rocks, the trees and the white houses melted into an overwhelming sadness. The pressure of my breasts against the rails pulled me back to an abrupt decisiveness. I had to leave for Formentera, a smaller island I had visited before. I needed to be alone in a place I knew. When I told Jenny I must go, a man who was staying in the house pronounced sonorously, ‘Deià accepts and Deià rejects.’ I listened in silence, thinking, ‘What a creep.’

The next day I lay on the tarpaulin as the small boat, its deck bleached with sun and scrubbing, drew slowly away from Majorca. Released, my mind floated off at random towards the peculiarities of men. I had previously assumed they were more or less rational beings, recognizably similar to myself. Now I was not so sure. Then I started wondering why it had come to be accepted that women wore men’s clothes, while such a taboo persisted against men wearing women’s. In women’s liberation we wore jeans while critiquing ‘manliness’, yet if a man wore women’s clothes or sprayed on perfume, it provoked embarrassment. Was this incongruity a hidden signal of the contempt in which women were held?¹⁷ By declaring the personal to be political we were bringing much that had been obscured into view, but amid all this sweeping into the open, obdurate obscurities still tucked themselves into unobserved niches.

In Formentera I hitchhiked up to La Mola where, in 1968, Roberta and I had stayed with a kindly old woman. She welcomed me without any apparent surprise. Settled in my small room upon the hill I found peace and could absorb myself in immediacy, following an old Roman track down to swim in a cove. The only real source of anxiety was the sun. Despite covering myself with suntan lotion, my red hair and freckles meant I turned pink, much to the distress of my solicitous landlady. When it was time to leave she presented me with a glass of sherry and two tall conical hats she had woven with raffia and lined with soft cloth.

On my return I was caught up in a succession of political and personal whirlwinds. Women in International Socialism were supporting the efforts of May Hobbs, who was trying to unionize night cleaners.¹⁸ They asked me to contact members of the Women’s Liberation Workshop. A group of about twelve women turned up and we sat in my bedroom listening as May, a charismatic and spirited speaker, described the low pay and lonely stress of women cleaning office buildings through the night.

May had had to struggle her whole life. Born in 1938, at the age of two she had been evacuated from East London and then fostered. Her husband Chris was low paid, so, like many other women, she was doing cleaning to help support their family. I was determined to do what I could. But even then I could see it would not be easy.

The contract cleaning companies had started as small firms without much capital. Despite growing larger, they operated on the edges of the formal economy, employing a workforce of poor women, some of whom were African, Caribbean, Cypriot, Spanish or Irish immigrants. With a friend from our Women’s Liberation Group, Liz Waugh, I started to go out into the City just before ten at night handing out our leaflets with blue, white and yellow forms from the Transport and General Workers’ Union (now Unite).

A long-legged Liz in bright green hot pants had amazed Marc Karlin when she first turned up to a women’s liberation meeting at Montague Road with her mother, Lucy. Liz came from Walthamstow. She had been raised to think and to question by Lucy, a working-class member of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, who had briefly worked for Sylvia Pankhurst. They shared a zestful defiance of the powers-that-be, including a shadowy figure known as ‘Dad’. After Liz and Lucy read hostile newspaper articles about ‘Women’s Lib’ they resolved to contact us, and both became committed to the night cleaners’ attempts to unionize.

London women’s liberation groups took a collection so that May could go to rally support for the cleaners at the Birmingham conference of the Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC) on 26–27 October. The IWC conferences brought together left-wing trade unionists and newly radicalized students, providing a non-sectarian forum at a time of rising working-class militancy. While their composition was overwhelmingly male, we had some staunch allies, including one of the Institute’s founders, the labour historian Tony Topham, who in 1969 had suggested that we should hold a women’s meeting.¹⁹

I wrote an account in the Women’s Liberation Workshop Newsletter of the 1970 women’s meeting at the IWC conference, quoting one speaker as saying, ‘A woman has to be better than a man to get anywhere’, along with a woman car worker’s response to a single mother in the Claimants Union: ‘We ought to try and get nurseries at work so unsupported mothers have a chance.’²⁰ When a woman bus worker thought this would tie women to jobs, I said campaigning for both workplace and state nurseries would give people a choice. Complaints about the conference chairman’s dismissive comments about women led Audrey to raise ‘the connection between talking about equality at work and talking equally to women’.²¹ It took a long time to get this ostensibly obvious message over, nevertheless the resolve among left-wing women trade unionists was heartening.

At least the women at the IWC were unionized. The cleaners’ position was far more vulnerable, and although we members of women’s liberation might be in unions, few of us had acquired much knowledge of their inner workings. Moreover, as Liz and I roamed the City at night, looking for cleaners, I could not help but be aware of the contrast between their lives and our own. The gulf was one of class and, quite often, of race or ethnicity too.

When I interviewed my neighbour, Barbara Marsh, for the October issue of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop magazine, Shrew, she gave me a stark insight into how race, class and gender interacted in her life. In the early sixties she had come from Jamaica, where she worked in a shop, but in England she became a factory worker and a cleaner; racism was endemic and she confronted it contemptuously: ‘If you’re coloured they say get back to Africa. English women are very sheepish.’ But she had no time for black supervisors either – ‘just little puppets’. Her husband Tex worked nights on the railways; a gentle, dreamy man, he played with the children, but did not help her at home. Barbara grumbled that the weight of practical existence fell on her, ‘Housework is work. Shopping’s work.’²²

We argued frequently. For while Barbara acknowledged that men had wrongly got the idea they were superior to women, she did not agree with women’s liberation which she regarded as pushing a man around. Moreover she was adamantly opposed to abortion, drawing not simply on her Catholic faith, but on her grandmother’s adage ‘that the stone the builder refuses always becomes the most important stone’.²³ We had become good friends, but liking one another did not alter the actual differences in our circumstances. I did not have a family, or go out to work as a cleaner. Nor did I encounter racial abuse as I stood waiting for a bus in Hackney as Barbara did.

David returned that autumn after sending several conciliatory missives. I was glad, though I recorded in my journal how by the time he came to see me, I was so wrapped up in workers’ control, night cleaners’ organizing and women’s liberation that I felt distant.²⁴ We found our way back to one another; our connections were manifold. I delighted in the span of his interests, his humour and his resolute, resistant socialism. Our relating felt stronger now we could link in a more everyday way and not only through passion. Yet, while I still loved him and wanted to be together with him again, doubt lingered from those months of distress and left a wariness. A hesitation had entered intimacy. This time around I retained a protective screen.

Disregarding the admonition of Barbara’s grandmother, I was unreservedly relieved to be able to have an abortion. I still had to pay, but it was legal and that change in the law assumed a vital personal meaning – control over my own destiny. Yet covert attitudes towards women’s sexuality survived. When I awoke from the anaesthetic, a man was slyly fiddling around with my breasts. Later a doctor automatically inserted the coil. Having failed to use my diaphragm on that one occasion, I was now automatically classified as fallen and feckless. I felt a jubilant relief when I was able to leave the clinic.

Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch came out that October and I reviewed it in Oz, chortling at her graphic caricature of a woman adapting to the male-defined status quo as ‘The Omnipotent Administrator in frilly pants’.²⁵ I liked the verve with which she asserted the active vagina and the joy of sex as part of her celebration of the independent freedom-loving woman. But I knew about the flip-side and sneaked in a personal reservation.

It is still terrible when all the walls are down and you’re completely defenceless and he turns away. Women who break away from the established framework of things are left still very exposed and there’s a high casualty rate. There have been many women who have shared the hope of self-reliance, who have struggled against dependency, but have suffered terribly for it.²⁶

In The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer advocated emancipation as an individual act of will and disdained involvement with a movement of women for liberation. This allowed her a sublime freedom for stylistic iconoclasm. Yet it also caused problems. In the early women’s groups we were seeking to allow for the expression of women’s diverse wants, but Germaine, the fierce proponent of liberty, presented a self-defined format for how a liberated woman should be. This set up a needless dichotomy predicated on being for or against her version of an individualistic stereotype of ‘emancipation’. Moreover, I was acutely aware that any isolated emancipated woman writer could so easily be extracted as an exception to the rest of womankind and be absorbed as ‘a sophisticated brand of titillation on the media’.²⁷

Richard Neville, who came from the Australian counter-culture like Germaine Greer, and was similarly insouciant about the perils of celebrity or any hitches in a self-propelled freedom, persistently teased David and myself for being heavy traditional leftists. This was absurd, though it was true that I remained uncomfortable about the visual aesthetic assault mounted by Oz against the establishment. Its style of hippie porn was too evangelical to be offensive in the manner of the sleazy or prurient commercial stuff; the difficulty for me was that the Oz perspective on sexual freedom was still male-determined. That November, Richard invited David and me to meet the American Yippee Jerry Rubin, the author of Do It. He had organized large anti–Vietnam War demonstrations and dared to mock the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had spread such fear among the left in the States, but personally he struck me as a bumptious show-off. David and I ducked out of Rubin’s Yippee cannabis smoke-in on the David Frost TV show. However when women’s liberation members broke up the Miss World beauty contest, armed with tomatoes, flour bombs and plastic mice, I shared their anger against the constant commercialized visual images of women’s bodies that we found so demeaning. The media responded to the protest with outrage. ‘Missiles at the Miss World Final’ reported The Times on 21 November, abandoning any nod to sobriety.²⁸

It seemed so apparent to us that women’s beauty was being merchandised and objectified through the spectacle of the contest, but this was not the prevailing view. At the time it was not possible to make clear the reasons for the disruption. As one demonstrator was dragged away, she tried to explain to the women in the contest that the protest was against the entertainment firm, Mecca, not them. But it could appear as if the hostility was just women against women.

My heart sank when I heard that another group called the ‘Angry Brigade’ had placed a small home-made bomb under a BBC van parked outside the Albert Hall in the early hours the night before. Not only did the bomb further confuse the aims of the women’s liberation protest, I worried that it could affect the charges brought against the women arrested at the Miss World contest. Presumably the Angry Brigade thought they were exposing media bias, but their actions were ill thought out and could have hurt people. The consequences too were severe for those eventually accused and declared to be guilty.

That autumn the cleaners’ organizing intensified. Early in November the cleaners at the Sanctuary Building in Smith Street, Westminster, struck over the sacking of two shop stewards. Liz Waugh and I went with other members of women’s liberation, International Socialism and the London Socialist Woman group to support their picket. Marc Karlin and his friend James Scott also came along to film. This was to be the beginning of the long exploratory film, Nightcleaners, which they were to make with Humphry Trevelyan and the artist Mary Kelly.

The contract system operated through exploitation without any veneer. Consequently the cleaners were familiar with circumnavigating contempt and intimidation. But I was not. When men in a red sports car drove straight through our picket one night forcing us to scatter, I was so enraged that I foolishly rushed forward as if to attack the car with my body. Fortunately I missed.

Within a few days cleaners at Companies House, employed by the same contractors, came out in support. May had recruited Jean Wright who worked there, and Jean’s strong sense of fairness meant she was one of the rare supervisors prepared to defend the cleaners. A photograph shows her sitting on the picket holding a tea flask, a thin gauze scarf around her grey curls. She became a good friend to Liz and myself.

The cleaning contractors met with the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the two shop stewards were reinstated. But within a few weeks their hours at Companies House were changed from nights to mornings and evenings, so, in effect, the women lost their work. Further picketing followed. But the setbacks were dispiriting and the International Socialists dropped out around this time. Nevertheless, the cleaners’ cause started to gain sympathetic publicity.

Women cleaners were becoming active as resistance mounted within the trade unions and the Labour Party to the Conservative government’s Industrial Relations Bill. This sought to outlaw closed shops, ensure ballots before strikes and control the unions through an Industrial Court. The aim was to break the power of shop stewards and the militant rank and file within the unions. On 8 December I joined cleaners and women’s liberation members on the trade union march from Tower Hill to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. Over the next few months women’s liberation groups went on a series of protests against the proposed legislation, and May Hobbs spoke at one in Hyde Park on 12 January 1971.²⁹

The Institute for Workers’ Control wanted to foster international labour links and I was asked to go with the IWC to a socialist conference in Rome called by the Italian lawyer Lelio Basso. I agreed, encouraged by a friend, the economist Stephen Bodington. Stephen had joined the Communist Party and then served as a lofty civil servant in the Admiralty during the Second World War. He had left the CP without bitterness and become a great supporter of movements and initiatives from below. In 1970 his enthusiasms included workers’ control, the radical possibilities of new technology, democratic planning and women’s liberation.

Arriving at the conference, I surveyed the vast hall in amazement. The only other women I could see were the translators. A nascent women’s liberation movement was stirring in Italy, but they were certainly not in evidence at this event. The discussion was exclusively about male paid work. I stood up to argue the importance of making direct links between rank-and-file workers internationally – a lesson I had learned from Sid Harraway and other shop stewards in the car industry in 1969, when their national and international grassroots networks were starting. On hearing the French translation of ‘shop stewards’ being turned hilariously into ‘garçons de boutique’, I interpolated with a correction which got a laugh. But when I went on to describe how women’s liberation was connecting employment and conditions in the family, I sensed my listeners were looking bemused. Then, as I sought to explain that the reproduction of life was material and social, my translator dried up completely, overcome with embarrassment. She clearly had not read her Engels and thought I was likely to offend the gathering by raising such intimate matters! I carried on regardless in a mixture of English and French, hoping the Italians would manage to understand.

It was an unnerving experience and I was moved when, after the session ended, two men came to express their support. One was a left-wing member of the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), a gardener called Claude Huissard. He explained that he and his wife were living in a commune in Lyon, where housework and child care was shared. The other was Lucio Magri, who had recently been expelled from the Communist Party and was part of the group producing il manifesto which also included several left-wing Italian women intellectuals.

After the conference I persuaded Stephen Bodington to go to a fun fair because, though I could not drive, I loved bumper cars. Ineffably polite, he consented. Stephen was the kind of person who grew younger and younger as he got older. Indeed he seemed like someone my age, whose memory happened to stretch back much further. In retrospect I feel bad about the bumper cars. There must have been other things that he would have preferred to do in Rome!

I was still intent on my grandiose project of writing the revolutionary history of everything and set off at the end of December to investigate women’s liberation in France and Germany. I felt tremulous and lonely when I left David, berating myself for being so intimidated by arrangements and timetables. Luckily I was with Liz and Lucy Waugh in Paris, staying with Liz’s sister and family. I happily baby-sat the children who shared my liking of Rupert Bear, falling back on my copy of Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev once they were asleep.³⁰

I had been there only a few days when I woke up in horror to find the sheets soaked in blood. I had been told that my first period after the abortion would be heavy, but I had not expected such a deluge. Desperately I soaked the sheets in cold water, nobly helped by Liz.

I managed nevertheless to interview participants in the French movement, learning from Monique Wittig – a striking, intense woman with dark hair and a broad-brimmed hat – how in Paris they did not form small groups like us, but met in large meetings. She was connected to an early group arguing for an autonomous women’s movement and was soon to become well known as a feminist theorist.

I was surprised to discover that an anarchical form of Maoism in France included women who identified as ‘sisters’ with ‘prostitutes, thieves, women who have had abortions, housewives, unmarried mothers, homosexuals, heterosexuals, demonstrators, militants’. They declared, ‘Every time we are ourselves, we are outside the law.’³¹ They were anarchically ‘spontax’ and clearly very different from the Maoists I had met in Britain – yet another indication of the need to examine the insides of political terms and groupings rather than just accepting their surface nomenclature.

My closest affinity politically and personally, was with a fellow historian, Françoise Barret-Ducrocq. We had a friend in common, Raphael Samuel, the ardent proponent of history from below, and had already met one another briefly at a Ruskin History Workshop. But this was our first chance to talk in any depth. I was particularly interested in Françoise’s account of the Crèches Sauvages at the Sorbonne which she had helped to organize. In July 1969, students in the Beaux Arts faculty had taken over a room as a free crèche which was open not only to students, but to working-class families. Incredibly, the police had charged the building, which was defended by parents and toddlers.³² Françoise handed me a folder containing the records she had kept. The Crèches were open twenty-four hours a day and the children were cared for by men as well as women. True to their name, they were influenced by left-libertarian approaches to child development.

My meeting with Françoise resulted in a long-term friendship. We shared more than our interest in history. I loved her down-to-earth intelligence, her quick irony and, most of all, her intriguing mix of innocence and savoir faire. I remarked with awe to David how her flat was ‘very old’. Indeed, 24 Rue Visconti was so old that Racine had died in it in 1699.³³

Being in France connected past and present. I had just finished a chapter I called ‘Bread and Roses’ in Women Resistance and Revolution with quotes from the women connected to the revolutionary paper, La Voix des Femmes. On 23 March 1848, they too had demanded ‘total and complete liberation’. And, on 28 March, in response to men who asked them what they were trying to do, they had declared: ‘We want to reconstruct a new world with you, where peace and truth will reign, we want justice in every spirit, and love in every heart.’³⁴

Marc Karlin, who was also in Paris, took me to see William Klein’s documentary, Eldridge Cleaver: Black Panther; I contrasted Cleaver unfavourably with John Watson and the Detroit car workers, but was interested in Klein. Like Marc, he had been among the radical filmmakers documenting the rebellions in May 1968. Around a thousand of them had gathered together as the ‘Estates General of French Cinema’ to call for public ownership of the industry and a complete restructuring under workers’ control. Inspired by the iconoclastic director Chris Marker, when Marc returned to London he had joined the left-wing Cinema Action group, before setting up the Berwick Street Film Collective with James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan.³⁵ In December 1970, Marc and I visited his friend Théo, who worked with Chris Marker. Marker had given workers cameras so they could control how they were represented and we sat and watched a flickery film made by a Renault worker. Unfortunately the sound didn’t work very well. Taking over the means of communication was evidently harder than it might appear!

Early in the new year my next stop was Berlin. I had the address of a friendly German called Hartmut who had drifted, like so many other visitors, to 12 Montague Road. To my amusement, he had left rapidly for a hotel because of our lack of central heating. Nonetheless he had urged us to contact him. Now I was about to take him at his word.

3

1971

I arrived in Berlin in a blizzard. When I came out of the station I was dazed by the unrelenting cold and blinded by the falling sleet. The journey from Paris had been a disaster: I had got into a train that went on a roundabout route and I was sitting in the wrong carriage for Germany. They held the train up for me at a small station and I had to run through the snow with Comrade Tulayev and my bags, still bleeding profusely. I failed to take food or German currency, so had to be sustained by fellow passengers with cups of coffee. Worst of all I had not reckoned with the East German regime and was fined by an implacable woman guard because I was travelling with a temporary passport which was not valid in the East. I handed over the vast sum of £30 – my fare home and upkeep for a week.

All I had was Hartmut’s address and telephone number. But how to reach him? I spotted a young man walking on the other side of the road. He had longish brown hair so I thought perhaps he would be friendly. I hoped he could speak English. Incredibly he turned out to be English; even more incredibly he did translations from German for the New Left Review and thus knew people I knew. He took me to a café, rang Hartmut and handed me over. I noted that Hartmut was far more sensibly dressed for the weather than I was, with a vast furry coat and headgear.

Hartmut was reassuring and matter of fact about my practical predicament, kindly feeding me German breakfasts of bread, ham, salami and cheese that seemed to be several meals in one, while telling me about the Berlin left. My impression was that unlike in Britain where the edges of thought and alignment were somewhat fluid and fuzzy, the German left students were more concerted, explicitly conscious about Marxist theory and what they were doing. This precision of purpose tended to accentuate the gulf between the sexes. Some of the men viewed themselves as the embodiment of a higher objectivity and dismissed the women’s protests as subjective and peripheral. The resulting clash had been dramatic.

My information on the German women’s movement was limited, but in September 1968 subversive rumours had reached Britain about a German Student Movement Congress in Frankfurt. I had heard that a tall pregnant young woman with auburn hair, standing at the back of the hall, exasperated by the men’s refusal to acknowledge the women’s complaints, had reached down and taken tomatoes from a bag on the floor. The first tomato hit a loquacious male theorist on the neck. He carried on. The second got him full in the face and threw him off track. To my anarcho-surrealist-feminist self this woman had assumed a mythic power, akin to Marie, the despised one who embraces total defiance in Nelly Kaplan’s film La Fiancée du Pirate.

At the same Congress, Helke Sander, a member of the Action Committee for the Liberation of Women, had berated the men for being oblivious to the growth of the new radical movement among the women: ‘We don’t particularly like the helplessness and arrogance with which we have to appear here. We are helpless because we actually expect progressive men to recognize the actuality of our conflict. We are arrogant because we see what blockheads you are.’ Her assertion that when working to change society it was necessary to sustain those who participated resonated, as did her depiction of feminist guerrilla raids against the men’s hold over theory as ‘frontiers trespasses’.¹

By the time of my visit in January 1971, the intense activism of the German radical student movement had been met with violent and repressive reprisals not only from the police but also from the extreme right; many radical Berliners were seeking simply to recover. I regretted having missed that earlier impulse to connect personal life with public politics. Instead I found women’s groups focusing exclusively on personal issues, others studying Marx’s Capital and others trying to reach out through community action. The movement for ‘kinderladen’, children’s centres that combined psychoanalytic ideas with anti-authoritarian versions of Marxism, interested me most, but they had their critics. I was told how they absorbed an enormous amount of labour which tended to be taken on by women.²

I liked Hartmut who, as a single father, was interested in alternative ideas of child-raising. A few years my senior, as a teenager he had rejected the Soviet regime and migrated as a refugee before settling in West Berlin. After training as a telecoms engineer, eventually he was able to become a journalist and a puppeteer.

But when he pulled out a photograph of his father in a Nazi uniform I winced inwardly – a father dressed in evil. It jabbed me into realizing that only a generation before we would have been at war. As a child growing up in the fifties I had hailed the heroic Dambusters and pored over paperbacks about POW tunnels. Life in a defeated post-Nazi Germany, East or West, must have been unimaginably different. The photograph enabled me to glimpse the convoluted estrangement my German New Left contemporaries had experienced. In refusing to blank out the past they were utterly isolated, in combat with their own parents and with many others in their own country.

It was only when I began to retrace my memories in order to write this book that I discovered an even darker shadow had been cast over Hartmut Topf’s life. Topf and Sons, run by his uncles Ludwig and Ernst, had produced the crematoria and gas chambers of the Holocaust. Shortly after the war, Hartmut’s father Albert Topf would die in a Soviet prison camp. Hartmut was to spend several decades revealing, investigating and documenting the role of the Topf firm and ensuring that its site in Erfurt became a memorial with a museum – a place for remembering and reflecting how an ordinary wealthy family came to collude with the Holocaust.³ He and a society of supporters have marked it as a warning of how the nether extremes of cruelty were normalized by the Nazis as a component of the business of war.

A letter from Edward Thompson was waiting for me when I returned to London. He and Dorothy had read my manuscript of the first five chapters of Women, Resistance and Revolution and their response was extremely critical. Edward saved me from several mistaken assumptions, but to my distress it was the gist of the book that he found flawed. This was partly because it foregrounded radical concepts over understandings that developed through daily life, being largely based on other books rather than on archival research. His main objection, however, arose because he detected a unilinear perspective heading towards an idealized abstraction of ‘women’s liberation’.

Both he and Dorothy had rejected both Whig and Marxist interpretations of history as being driven by a hidden momentum, and Edward was dismayed that I seemed to be crafting a new version of this. Over time, he relented somewhat on several sections and I came to understand the reasons why he and Dorothy stressed the need to look at what working-class men and women themselves were doing and thinking in specific contexts. But in January 1971 I crumpled into despair.

David’s ebullience helped me to recover my confidence. I was busy too. I had just started complementing my adult teaching in the WEA by working part-time at a girls’ comprehensive school, Starcross, which was conveniently close to the Chapel Market flat David shared with Dave Phillips. A stall holder who sold household goods with a deft patter and a voice that predated microphones used to bellow bargains in the alleyway outside, so there was no need for an alarm clock. When I was not teaching I spent the first few months of 1971 perched in the turret-like room at Chapel Market, writing and answering the phone when David was at medical school. Members of International Socialism frequently telephoned for advice on their ailments, and seemed to regard me as the doctor’s receptionist.

The scope of my manuscript was becoming wider and wider and I was plunging into confusion in my efforts to theorize reproduction and the family. I wanted to assert two key elements. Firstly, they were sites of women’s labour as well as personal relationships. Secondly, they were both symbiotic with and distinct from production in the workplace. It was not easy to iron dialectical thinking into everyday language without leaving creases; borrowing somewhat owlishly from Marxist writings on imperialism, I proposed that housework and child care in the home could be regarded as a separate mode of production. Friends on the left and in women’s liberation pointed out that this obliterated the obvious interconnections between the reproduction of life in the home and production in capitalism. Jean Gardiner, a socialist and feminist economist, sensibly suggested to me that rather than imposing Marx’s theories, domestic activity needed to be thought through ‘in its own terms’.⁴

I encountered a different kind of problem in relation to recent global movements. Women’s participation in National Liberation Movements had inspired many of us, but there was a lack of in-depth information. Hermione Harris, a close friend from university, was doing a PhD in anthropology about an African spirit-possession church in Hackney; while I was in France that December, she had attended a meeting in London addressed by a Vietnamese women’s delegation, so I was able to scour her notes. I also drew on the December 1970 issue of Shrew which focused on women and National Liberation.⁵ Eventually I wrote accounts of Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria. Calling the chapter ‘Colony Within the Colony’, I extemporized from Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Octave Mannoni and the fierce poetry of Aimé Césaire. Even at the time, I was aware I was in danger of oversimplification.

If I had too little to go on with some topics, I was wrestling with far too much material in other ways. Not only was I intending to include chapters on the emergence of women’s liberation in various countries, I wanted to show how innovative ideas and approaches to organizing were arising that could change the scope of politics. My efforts to catch actuality while it was happening proved abortive, for, however fast I wrote, events kept occurring that raised new perspectives. I was frantically chasing flocks of new insights, trying in vain to wrap them up into words that could sit between two covers.⁶

A notable example was the Miss World demonstration and its repercussions. On 21 February 1971 the Women’s Liberation Newssheet reported ‘Beautiful court scenes’ at the trial of the Miss World protesters.⁷ I was more troubled, writing pages and pages in an attempt to work out what I thought. The Miss World demonstration had forced me to struggle with the significance of the image:

In the market of the spectacle, consumption passes beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs and starts to consume the imagination itself. In the act of consumption our projected fantasy is caught and contained in the image which is then projected back to us as packaged, deep frozen fulfillment…

The demonstration had shifted the scope of what I had known as ‘politics’ by exposing this ‘consumption of human-beings themselves as commodities’.⁸

Yet it seemed to me that while absolute defiance of the law certainly gained publicity, individuals in rebellion were likely to suffer more than the ‘system’. Nor was control of the messages transmitted ensured. I continued to worry that women’s liberation’s attempts to defend women could be twisted into a kill-joy caricature that made it appear as if we were attacking other women’s beauty.

I missed an important undercurrent. Despite unsympathetic coverage, the Miss World protests were communicated to millions of people and among these were some ornery ones who identified with ‘women’s lib’ regardless of the press. It is true that awareness is not necessarily ‘raised’ by direct action. But in this case it was. The dramatic challenge to the commercial beauty machine has continued to resonate and the Miss World demonstration lived on in popular imagination over the decades, imprinting the idea that body and image are significant political issues.⁹

My apprehension about countering hostile perceptions was being tackled through activity rather than rumination. The American women’s liberation movement had revived International Women’s Day on 8 March, an event previously celebrated by the Communist Party.¹⁰ We too demonstrated in London that March, in high spirits despite the dreadful weather. ‘Fantastic happiness in the snow’, I wrote in my journal.¹¹ In a year we had multiplied from several hundred at the first conference to several thousand.

Our demands for equal pay, for equal educational and job opportunity, for contraception, abortion and nurseries, were displayed on the banners. Sally Alexander, who only recently had been on trial over the Miss World demonstration, defied the hail and snow in her Afghan coat, carrying one pole of a large banner that read ‘WOMEN UNITE FOR WOMEN’S LIBERATION’. Someone improvised ‘WOMEN UNITE YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR KITCHEN SINK’ on their placard. Still uneasy about the limits of our demands, I pitched in with utopia and mine read, ‘EQUAL PAY IS NOT ENOUGH. WE WANT THE MOON’. The night cleaners’ contingent, led by May Hobbs, carried ‘CLEANING ALL NIGHT FOR 5/-AN HOUR. NOT US’ and ‘BEYOND THE PAIL’.

Spontaneously, symbols as well as words appeared – a cleaners’ mop, a mock bride and a woman in a cage, labelled ‘MIS-FIT’ ‘MIS-USED’. Val Charlton, who later worked on special effects for Monty Python and the Holy Grail and many other films, had made a float in the form of a bright yellow shoe. It carried the poor woman in the nursery rhyme who had so many children she did not know what to do, along with a cluster of rather oversized women’s liberation ‘children’. Most dramatic of all was the naked torso of a clothes mannequin strapped onto a cross from which hung a washing line with a nylon stocking, a shopping bag and a pinafore.

These visual messages were caught in still photographs in the media and, best of all, in motion in the film A Woman’s Place, which records women exuberantly dancing against the sleet and singing along with ‘Keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved’ belting out on an old wind-up gramophone. Passers-by shook their heads in amusement, smiling ironically. The dancers were led by the Women’s Street Theatre, in which the Communist, Buzz Goodbody, a director from the Royal Shakespeare Company, was a driving force. Their aim was to communicate outwards and it really did work. Humour gets to parts political rhetoric cannot reach, and so, indeed, does dancing.

Val Charlton’s shoe proved versatile, and the old woman was later to be mobilized for free contraception, abortion, nurseries and family allowances. It was part of a wider creative upsurge. Women’s theatre groups, film groups, bands, magazines and publishers proliferated over the course of the seventies, part of a burgeoning radical counter-culture that spread out beyond the women’s movement into community and trade union activism. Over the course of the decade this spilled over into the mainstream as feminist ideas started to have an impact in education, medicine, law, religion, art and the media. Nodes of resistance gathered in all kinds of cultural crannies.¹²

After the International Women’s Day demonstration women’s liberation groups multiplied in London and elsewhere. At a Women’s Liberation Conference in Leeds that April, I listened to groups’ reports on leafleting council estates, speaking in schools, and organizing with trade unionists and with the Claimants Union, an organization that mobilized around benefits. However, several unforeseen organizational quandaries were surfacing. From Bradford to Bristol came common refrains: consciousness-raising groups were struggling with a rapid turnover – as new women arrived others dropped out, and as groups expanded they were dividing up in order to stay small enough to speak personally and build mutual confidence. But if groups then closed they tended to be suspected of elitism.¹³

A worried discussion about our being too middle class followed, and Gloden Dallas, who had started the Leeds women’s group, suggested that we should hold our next conference at the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp in Skegness so we would be at a place used by trade unionists. This was greeted as a good idea.

By 1971 the merged Islington–Hackney group had seriously outgrown my bedroom; there were now around forty of us and we were finding it hard to even find space to sit on the floor. Ursula Owen, later to be involved in the feminist publishers Virago, recalls us discussing ‘work and children’, but I have no memory apart from an anxiety about what to do about so many women.¹⁴ When we decided to divide into three groups, I went to meetings at the home of Hermione Harris. Because Hermione lived near the Arsenal tube station we became the Arsenal Women’s Liberation Workshop Group.

When the group started we knew we wanted to examine questions in depth, but I recorded that we ‘had only an implicit understanding’ of what these questions were to be and what exactly we were searching for.¹⁵ Some Marxists maintained that women’s subordination was created by capitalism. I did not believe this was so and had an ill-defined notion that anthropology might perhaps help in understanding precapitalist societies. We decided to begin with Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family but then became entangled in definitions of production and reproduction and headed off into the history of anthropology.

When we later turned to Simone de Beauvoir we faced more confusion. While she was convinced that all forms of society had been patriarchal, other feminists argued for matriarchy in precapitalist times. Hermione explained that ‘matrilineal’ lines of descent in some present-day societies could not be equated with matriarchies. After several weeks I realized I was hazy about the dates when either matriarchies, or indeed precapitalism, were meant to have existed.

At the time I felt thwarted because it seemed as if we had left so many dilemmas hanging. In retrospect though I can see these bemusing debates were fruitful because they stimulated me to try and get behind them. I eventually decided that inferring what forms of relationships existed in the past before written records was necessarily speculative. I saw Marx and Engels’s approaches to women’s emancipation as valuable in stressing the social nature of women’s subordination, thus implying that women’s relations to men could be changed. But they had underestimated the specific tenacity of female subordination in differing types of society and downplayed the need for women’s collective action to change this.

I was excited to find that Ursula Owen shared my interest in the early sex psychologist, Havelock Ellis, and in Edward Carpenter, the socialist who had defended same-sex love in the 1890s. We followed up our discussions of them by taking it in turns to give talks on Ibsen, Bebel and the South African novelist Olive Schreiner. Those early months in Arsenal reinforced my fascination with a group of late nineteenth-century writers who had sought to change personal as well as social relationships between the sexes.

Far too much was going on during 1971 for Arsenal to remain purely a study group. Practical issues like an anti-sexist community nursery project in Camden, along with women’s militancy in the recently formed Claimants Union, also preoccupied us, while Liz Waugh and I raised the problems we faced while helping May Hobbs’s in her efforts to unionize night cleaners.

While women’s liberation as a movement continued to grow, it was proving far harder to recruit night cleaners into the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G). Our linchpin May Hobbs had spoken valiantly at the International Women’s Day demonstration, but had then been rushed into hospital for a hysterectomy and was now convalescing. A dismal note in my journal on 15 March summed up our recruitment campaigning as ‘disastrous’.¹⁶

Every Tuesday evening just before 10 p.m. Liz Waugh and I used to set out into the deserted streets of the City. The cleaners we approached on behalf of the ‘Cleaners’ Action Group’ were hastening to work, clutching flasks of tea and sandwiches in their bags. They were bewildered when we stopped them to say, ‘Excuse me, are you a night cleaner? Would you be interested in joining a union?’ This might have been the era of working-class militancy, but unions were remote from the day-to-day existence of most of the cleaners. The women we harried were overburdened with work and domestic responsibilities. Several had large families and their working lives had left many of them fearful of joining a union. The dangers were real – contract cleaning companies tended to find ways of dismissing women they regarded as troublemakers.

We began to supplement the T&G’s blue and yellow union recruiting forms with our own handwritten propaganda reproduced on duplicators (ancestors of the photocopier). ‘Why do cleaners do night work for such low pay? Work on understaffed buildings? Get no Sunday bonus? Often no holiday pay? Have no security? Can be sacked without notice?’ The assertive answer to all these questions was ‘lack of a union’.¹⁷

But the women who did join found it hard to relate to the bureaucratic structure of the union. Nightcleaners, the film made by Marc Karlin, James Scott, Humphry Trevelyan and Mary Kelly, contains a memorable scene of a meeting in a pub with women cleaners from the Shell building where Sally Alexander and Mary Kelly were leafleting. The cleaners’ eyes are engrained with weariness as they struggle to concentrate on the lugubrious monotone of the union official. The camera reveals the concern on Mary Kelly’s face, and one of the cleaners drifting away into the music of the Supremes playing on the juke-box.

It was difficult for the cleaners to attend meetings and when Bernadette Devlin (later McAliskey), who had been re-elected as an MP at Westminster in 1970, agreed to speak, we went to herculean efforts to get them to it. May’s husband, Chris, transported some in his battered car. Liz had acquired a motorbike and went back and forth bringing women in on her pillion. They had my sympathy. On one occasion when Liz had given me a lift, it dawned on me that we were travelling down a one-way thoroughfare in the wrong direction. I shouted to her to stop but she could not hear through her helmet. In cowardly desperation I jumped off when she slowed down round the corner at Holborn tube. Luckily Liz noticed and stopped the bike.

This time all was well. The cleaners arrived and Bernadette Devlin sat on a table in a mini skirt, crossed her legs, flicked back her hair and got straight into speaking with knowledge and fervour about women’s working conditions. As she explained why cleaners needed a union and why the Conservatives’ Industrial Relations Bill threatened workers’ rights, I reflected on the painful divided loyalties and violence women like her faced in Northern Ireland. Not only was there a historic split between socialism and nationalism, the early twentieth-century feminist movement had also conflicted over the Republican and Unionist causes. More immediately, instead of gaining civil rights, Catholics were being killed by the British Army. It was hardly surprising that, while an awareness of the wrongs done to women existed, women’s liberation groups had been slow to take off in the North.

The Cleaners’ Action Group’s problems were compounded by confusing communications from the T&G. It seemed that we could not have a branch until we had the requisite number of recruits. But precise numbers were difficult to ascertain because women would join, pay subs and then be moved to another building, whereupon we lost track of them. We were told the cleaners had to be in the window cleaners’ branch, but Liz’s mother Lucy Waugh was finding it hard to pin down actual individual window cleaners.

We kept on, sustained by May Hobbs and a small band of cleaners, particularly Jean Mormont at the Shell building and Jean Wright, the former supervisor from Companies House. The two Jeans did not possess May’s fiery, charismatic power, but they had other complementary strengths. Jean Mormont, thoughtful and resolute, was a small slender woman whose face had an angular beauty. She was from a very poor family of eighteen. During the war she had joined ATS, the women’s branch of the army, and did office work for the War Office. She started night cleaning when she had a family. She became angry at the disregard for cleaners’ working conditions in the Shell building, where the lack of air conditioning during the night left them breathless. Meeting Sally Alexander, Mary Kelly and ‘the girls that belonged to Women’s Liberation’ led her to protest, but she described how she was then called a ‘Communist’ by the contractors.¹⁸

Jean Wright, from the Isle of Dogs, was round and reassuring in her thick coat and glasses. As a supervisor she had acquired a logistical understanding of the workings of the contract system, while an expansive empathy enabled her to persuade other women to join the union. They knew they could trust her. After Companies House, she moved to a travel agents in the City, where her husband, a dustbin man, and her teenage son came along to help so she could get home by the early morning. Liz and I used to drop in, discussing ideas while we wiped and polished alongside them.

Coming into contact with the Cleaners’ Action Group convinced Jean that women’s liberation should ‘make women stand on their own two feet’. She told me that then they could ‘try and get it over to other women to do the same, in the nicest way possible’. This was indeed Jean’s approach towards agitating and it made her an adept union organizer; even so, she reflected, ‘I think it’s going to take years and more heartaches.’¹⁹

It was becoming evident to me too how organizing even the already organized could be exceedingly complicated. In February 1970 I had been amazed and thrilled to read the press reports of the clothing strike in Leeds. So while I was there during April 1971 I went to interview Gertie Roche. She described how, after the Colliers workers had marched from factory to factory to get the others out, a strike committee with many women on it had been set up at a mass meeting. But this degree of participation did not last and Gertie recounted a sombre sequel. After the strike the men had reverted to organizing on their own. The women felt betrayed and their anger turned towards the men rather than the employers. When men who had been militant in the strike were sacked, the women would not support them. Rancour led to division and Gertie, having played a leading role in the strike, was isolated. She had given many years of her life to organizing in the union and it was a devastating blow. She was tight-lipped and bitter as she spoke about the repercussions of the strike.

As we sipped tea by the fire talking about the women’s liberation movement, Gertie, who spoke mildly in the flat accents of Leeds but had the eyes of a tigress, fixed me firmly with her gaze. ‘And you. Are you emancipated in your own life?’ I was impressed but taken aback by such frankness from an older woman. In my twenties I was under the illusion that our generation had a unique take on scrutinizing sexual relations. I mumbled a reply because I was not entirely sure how to answer.

I had certainly become more self-assured by participating in the women’s liberation movement, but when it came to love and sex I felt puzzled. When Anne Koedt’s pamphlet Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm appeared in Britain, I was in a romantic minority who thought that measuring orgasmic vibrations did not necessarily clock the intensity of feeling. As sex became more openly discussed, I was becoming aware that theories and emotions did not fit neatly together. David and I tried changing stereotypical male and female roles. I kept tabs on the pleasure I could feel in passivity and abandonment, wondering whether these indicated a furtive desire for coital subordination. But marking erotic responses did not eradicate them. They just sat tight in some remote corner of my being. Our commitment to an explicit frankness seemed to lead into hidden folds of ambiguity.

Ostensibly David and I were once again happy and at ease, nevertheless I still worried away. In my journal that March, a jumbly mix of emotions tumble out onto the pages. I mention our ‘hatred of leaving each other’, adding, ‘With him everything is as though we first glided into being together.’ Yet anxiety persisted, I feared being dependent and making demands on him. Our love was undeniable but I was saddened at how he seemed to ‘reserve his privacy’. The memory of him vanishing still affected me. ‘I never know if he will be with me when we’re apart.’ I decided that David, being four years younger, was resenting meeting me. I pronounced on my extreme old age: ‘I feel time closing in. When will I ever have a child – 28? And no time. I wonder if I ever will?’ We were both under pressure; David had medical exams and my book was getting out of hand. When he described my work on it as ‘consuming’ this sparked another spasm of anxiety.²⁰

Although we were committed to translating the personal into our feminist politics, such half-formed, contradictory intimations were hard to discuss even in small groups. Instead Liz Waugh and I used to muse over these matters, along with the pros and cons of plucking eyebrows, in a kind of one-to-one consciousness-raising group as we wandered through the City streets looking for night cleaners.

Oblique doubts about matching up all the private bits of desiring with a publicly articulated politics had to be deferred, for overt hostility still had to be contested. In June, David and I went to the International Socialist Women’s Conference held in London. It was a real breakthrough, for male allies like David were in a minority and feminism was often dismissed in IS as ‘a bourgeois diversion’. Val Clarke, one of the early rebels, told us of a more bizarre accusation. An IS man had denounced her for being ‘a feminist, a whore and a middle-class sociologist’. Quick as a flash Val had retaliated, ‘I may be a feminist, a whore and a sociologist but I’m definitely not middle class.’ We laughed over her great response, but it was tedious to have to think up witty replies to ridiculous insults from those who were meant to be socialists.

Outside the confines of the left, an unquestioned sexism remained which was far, far worse. I caught a glimpse of this at a medical party I went to with David. A consultant became very drunk and suddenly started to tell me to put a penny in my ‘arse’. I thought I was in some nightmare and decided to ignore him. This only made him angry and to my horror he started advancing upon me aggressively waving his wretched penny. No one tried to deter him.

Outraged and cornered, I used the only weapon available – the wine in my glass went all over him. I can still see the disbelief on his face and the shock of the people around us as they backed away. One woman’s expression remains with me – it was as if I had violated some godhead. The prevailing acceptance of double standards in male and female behaviour combined with the misogynist medical hierarchy to exonerate powerful men. But I had not been conditioned into these medical mysteries.

Such arrogance and contempt could leave you shaking with rage and hostility as an individual. But this was destructive and paralysing. The existence of the women’s movement, and the knowledge that some men had always supported us and others had changed over time, countered the negativity.

Contact with the ideas of feminists in other parts of the world was fortifying. The radical communications group Agit Prop had started to reproduce some American pamphlets; I liked one in particular by Meredith Tax, Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Daily Life (1969) because it linked personal experiences to politics. When I later met Meredith I learned how she had helped to start the Boston ‘Bread and Roses’ feminist group. They had taken their name from the slogan that appeared during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It had inspired a poem which was set to music and revived by the American women’s movement. Like Helke Sander, the ‘Bread and Roses’ group believed in trying to change both individual relationships and capitalism as an economic and social system.

News also travelled because visitors from women’s liberation movements in many countries started arriving in London and seeking us out. Direct, personal internationalism was very much part of sisterhood. That summer I met Carole Turbin from New York at a Women’s Liberation Workshop meeting. She was carrying a bagful of copies of Notes from the Second Year, a pamphlet produced by the New York Radical Feminist Group, which in 1971 was a broad umbrella grouping. Anne Koedt had heard about a British movement and asked Carole to make contact. When Carole spread out the pamphlets, they were eagerly seized. Every new publication felt like an urgent communiqué of crucial insights.

I invited Carole to meet me at the British Museum Library in Great Russell Street. Across the road in the Museum Tavern we discovered a common interest in women’s and working-class history. When she and her husband Bill Miller came for a meal in Montague Road, I cross-questioned her on American women’s groupings and she scribbled the names down for me on a napkin. The napkin is no more, but our friendship has persisted through the decades.

Having been through times of conflict followed by chaotic creativity during the late sixties, the Hackney house had entered a phase of remarkable order that still left space for considerable individual idiosyncrasies. Apart from myself, Marc Karlin was the sole remainer from earlier days. Full of talk and visions of utopian possibility, in 1971 he was utterly immersed in filming the night cleaners. Being Polish-Russian Jewish, raised in France by his grandmother and then sent to an English boarding school, Marc found the English a bizarre if beguiling people.

For my part, I found Marc full of enigmas. I never understood his custom of placing his shoes on the window sill outside his room each night. Only years later did I learn this was because he only owned one pair. Ever the outsider, he disdained house rotas, contributing a gourmet-style anarchism to communal life by returning once a week from the Berwick Street Film Collective’s Soho office with absurdly expensive roast beef and petits pois in a tin, which he then cooked with great aplomb.

The rest of us submitted to the rota and took turns each week to shop in Ridley Road Market with a big plastic wheelie bag. Nigel Fountain, David’s friend from International Socialism who had recently moved in, was the great upholder of the rota and undoubtedly the most accomplished cook. When I first met him early in 1970, he had prepared a surprisingly elaborate lunch of roast lamb with flageolet beans for David and me in his seedy bedsitter. Its extreme deliciousness has persisted in my consciousness over the decades. Nigel delighted in recipes almost as much as in writing and talking.

Irreverent humour permeated Nigel’s take on everything. Listening to the founder and leader of IS, Tony Cliff, explain to his young intellectual recruits that, instead of foreign words like ‘bourgeois’ which put off the working class, they must say ‘employers’, Nigel quipped, ‘You mean like that well-known employers’ novel Middlemarch?’ Like me, Nigel came from a Tory family. But his parents were conviction Tories, whereas mine were simply the habitual kind.

On the top floor was Caroline Bond, a teacher. A mix of calm conviction and dry humour made her a reassuring commune dweller. In contrast to Nigel and me, Caroline’s family were London Communists. Her father, Ralph Bond, had an impressive political CV, having been sent off at the age of eighteen to address workers in the 1926 General Strike and later making documentary films during the thirties. When Caroline went to university he had warned her against the Trots. So inevitably she had eventually found one – Julian Harber, who was not simply an IS member, but the son of a Trotskyist. I think that made him a relatively rare statistic as, before the sixties, English Trotskyists were hardly numerous. Both Caroline and Julian were involved in the pioneering Forest School Camps, a radical educational organization which encouraged children to connect with nature.

Susan Sharpe, known as Sue, came from Stanmore and from a family that was ostensibly totally normal – though I suspected her father of a streak of eccentricity because he was such a fervent advocate of cider vinegar as a cure for all ailments. Sue had arrived in my life via David Phillips. And, like David Widgery and myself, they too migrated between Chapel Market and Montague Road, before Dave Phillips eventually moved to Hackney.

Along with Caroline, Sue became a member of Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group. She was one of the first people I met working with the large old-style computers on statistics, an activity that I regarded with awe. She was soon to start researching for her book Just Like a Girl: How Girls Learn to Be Women (1974), which included an early study of young black and Asian women in Britain.

I have fond memories of Sue’s fish pies, which despite many efforts I have never been able to emulate, and of her cooked apples. Sue and the apples eventually went into a poem.

My friend

cooks sweet

apples

far into

the night

A gift

of gentleness

through time,

country kitchens

in the sun

perfume

the dark

still.

Their fragrance

lingers

until

light.²¹

As for me, my culinary speciality at that time was Shaker pie, a recipe from one of my WEA students that consisted of wholemeal pastry, peppers, onions, tomatoes and a cheese sauce. It was exceedingly filling. Food was served on a trestle table in the small extension kitchen at the back of the house. House inhabitants and any visitors would sit on a couple of old school benches painted bright red. These had survived from 1966 when I moved into the house; we were still young enough not to notice how uncomfortable they were. Apart from eating, talking interminably about politics, going to meetings and marching on demonstrations, some members of our agreeable communal house could be found in the Norfolk Arms (now flats) playing darts or bar football while listening to singers emote over ‘My Way’ or ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.

Another source of my new-found stability was Starcross Comprehensive School in Islington. Starcross had been opened as a girls’ school after the closure of the mixed comprehensive Risinghill. Risinghill’s democratic and enlightened head, Michael Duane, who rejected corporal punishment, opposed all forms of discrimination and advocated frank sex education, had been driven out in 1965. But Starcross retained elements of his visionary educational idealism, albeit in a more moderate guise; after two months of working there I noted in my journal, ‘Teaching at Starcross very involving’.²² It was indeed an absorbing and fulfilling place to work, its ethos emanating from the liberal approach of its head, Kathleen Mitchell. She was personally committed to every pupil, keeping an open door for them and their parents.

Despite being relatively progressive, the school functioned with a greater degree of formality than I had known in my Further Education and adult teaching. This seemed unnecessary and irritating to me and at my first staff meeting I complained about the custom of the class standing up when the teacher entered the room. My pupils were all Islington working-class girls and a few were from immigrant Caribbean and Cypriot families. There would be vacant seats in the classroom during busy times in the small clothing workshops when daughters stayed away to help, nevertheless the numbers in each class were far larger than those in Further Education groups. So I did eventually come round to seeing that some rituals had their advantages as devices for securing peace. They could be calming and sometimes the class enjoyed them. Before we went on to read a play, a novel or have a discussion, I used to start with spelling bees – a dubious way to teach spelling, but mysteriously popular. Eventually I gained a teaching assistant which meant we could give personal help to everyone in the class.

My time at Starcross reinforced the conviction I had already formed from teaching in Further Education – that most pupils categorized as ‘non-academic’ would have been able to succeed educationally if they had been taught in small groups. I noticed that another obstacle to study was undoubtedly the onset of adolescence. My fourth-year history class on the Industrial Revolution happily read original documents for half the year, but by spring they were gazing dreamily out of the window at building workers. I decided that in my future utopian society young people should depart from education for a few years to fall in love, returning when their hormones had calmed down a bit.

I was attached to the Social Education wing, teaching the ‘non-academic’ pupils. This was the domain of Gladys West – red-headed, straightforward and fun, she was always happy to discuss any problems as she munched the hard-boiled eggs she used to bring in for her lunch. Yvonne Beecham joined us in Social Education that year. Brought up on a council estate, with right-wing parents, initially she was wary of women’s liberation, though passionately committed to working-class education. She became a feminist and went on to work at the Institute of Education.²³

Social Education offered great scope for experimenting. I took classes out, not just to museums and historic sites, but to interview local squatters or members of the Claimants Union on social problems. Friends came along to give talks, among them the criminologist, Jock Young, who lived in Hackney and was part of a group of left-wing sociologists contesting assumptions of ‘deviancy’. The solicitor Michael Seifert, a friend from university, also spoke to my pupils on the law. Mike was a stalwart member of the Communist Party, but completely non-sectarian in his friendships. He was involved in the campaign supporting the African American Communist Angela Davis, when she was in prison, and several of the girls accompanied me to a huge rally in her defence. After her acquittal in 1972, she visited Britain and Mike invited me to the celebratory party for her at his parents’ home. I watched her parrying endless overwhelming expressions of admiration, too shy to approach her with my own.

Mike and his colleague Stephen Sedley were part of an emergent radical support network of lawyers who defended a mélange of defiant trade unionists, Irish Republicans, black militants, immigrants, squatters, editors of alternative papers, drug takers and feminists. They also sought to reduce elitism within the profession itself. When a former pupil from Starcross was later employed to work in Mike’s office, she revealed that my nickname at the school had been Miss Rosebum. Like other Southerners, young Islingtonians clearly failed to recognize that up North dwelt hordes of bottoms and bothams. I smiled ruefully; it could have been worse.

I was so focused on the school I only dimly registered that a Conservative called Margaret Thatcher had become Secretary of State for Education and Science that June, earning the sobriquet ‘Milk Snatcher’ when she ended free milk in junior schools. I had, however, continued writing, and the manuscript I finally delivered to Neil Middleton at Penguin had elongated into a large, unwieldy concertina. Neil was an experienced editor with a steely eye for the extraneous, while I was convinced every word was vital for the cause of liberation. We compromised by sculpting out two books which were to be published as Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973).

The material that was dumped definitely made the two published books more broadly accessible. The immediacy of my observations on events such as Miss World was being overridden by the passage of time, while the lengthy sections on consciousness, strategy and organizing mainly addressed debates and dilemmas internal to the movement.

With hindsight, however, these discarded remnants do reveal a series of puzzles I would muse upon from different angles over the years ahead. How to critique sexual imagery without falling into a new kind of prudish censure? How to stretch beyond the immediate common sense of needs nurtured within capitalism? How to combine making demands on the existing state with alternatives that could prefigure a better future? How to devise ways of acting effectively that also strengthened and sustained us? How to find ways of snatching happiness from the future so as not to be consumed by our own bitterness against circumstances in the present?²⁴

Snatching happiness from the future assumed a particular relevance at the Skegness Women’s Liberation Conference that autumn. Predictably the weather was blustery when we arrived at the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp. But, thanks to Gloden Dallas, there we were gazing out at the bleak grey vista of the North Sea, and large crowds of women, along with a few men who supported women’s liberation, were turning up.

My best memory of the Skegness conference was a small workshop discussion with lesbian women. Though I supported gay liberation, privately I was still nervous about lesbianism, harbouring fears that derived partly from frightened prejudices and partly from memories of being sexually attacked by a girl at school when I was eleven. By 1971 lesbian women were shifting from gay liberation and beginning to assert a distinct identity within the women’s movement. I particularly remember Elizabeth Wilson and Angela Weir talking calmly and firmly about their feelings, while explaining that being attracted to other women did not involve condemnation of women who desired men. Their reassurance enabled me to realize how fear can make you clam up on other people’s difference, sexual and otherwise. Over the years I was to remain grateful for their forbearance and empathy.

Otherwise Skegness did not go well. At one of the plenaries, a tall, bearded Hemel Hempstead Maoist, Harpal Brar, caused a fracas. I had already seen him in action at an early meeting on women’s liberation at Essex University in 1969, where he had provoked rage by addressing us as if we were idiots, and I groaned inwardly as he took the microphone. His manner was authoritarian, his certainty was inflexible and he spoke at length. After a while, restlessness gave way to anger. A vote was taken. The whole conference apart from a tiny group of Maoists had their hands up for him to step down. Harpal Brar ignored this trivial interference and continued his lecture. A woman sought to detach him from the microphone, but he fended her off. Only the arrival of security men finally halted his flow. That was to be the end of men coming to women’s liberation conferences and the demise of the National Coordinating Committee set up in 1970. A decentralized regional structure was to replace it. The hope was that this would prove more difficult for members of small left groups to nobble.

A further clash occurred because a tabloid newspaper had tipped off some members of women’s liberation that the miners, who were holding their conference at the same time as us, were watching a woman doing a striptease. A group of women invaded the striptease and were thrown out by the miners.

I was in the bar showing a short film about the night cleaners that Marc Karlin had given me to take to Skegness. It had been produced under pressure from May Hobbs and the leafleters anxious for propaganda for union recruitment. After the film finished I became involved in a long discussion with the barmaid, a woman in her fifties, who was upset by a leaflet she had been given criticizing the family. While we were talking, a woman rushed in shouting, ‘They’re violating the sisters.’ When the barmaid learned that women had tried to break up the striptease, she shook her head. ‘They shouldn’t have done that.’ I sank into gloom. She accepted it as a male preserve. Too late I could see that tactically we should have picketed the striptease; attacking a picket would have been far more challenging for the miners.

Women’s liberationists and miners alike were lodged in chalets, and through the night boozy bands of miners roared against ‘Women’s lib knicker-knockers’. This particular onslaught was based on a newspaper report about Germaine Greer, which alleged she had announced she did not wear knickers. Why striptease watchers should find this so offensive was unclear.

The following morning the miners were sheepish and sober. I attached myself limpet-like to small groups of men, arguing and explaining why women had stormed their strip club. My grandfather had worked in the mines, and my father had been an electrician in the mines in the thirties before becoming an engineering salesman selling cables for pit lifts. He was a right-wing Tory but he respected miners because he knew the work they did. I had rejected my father’s politics, but we agreed on the miners.

Through my American socialist feminist friend, Barbara Winslow, I had learned about the violent attacks miners had faced in organizing in the United States. And, through Dorothy and Edward Thompson, I had met Lawrence Daly, who, like them, had left the Communist Party in 1956. An imposing, thoughtful NUM general secretary and member of the Labour Party, he shared Dorothy’s love of music and had sung folk songs from his Fife heritage one night when I was visiting. No way was I giving up on miners.

Nevertheless, Skegness tore me in two, making it impossible to deny the contradictory pulls between my feminism and my socialism. For me the two causes might be theoretically and emotionally inseparable, but I had been forced to confront an opposing reality. On returning home I became physically ill, retching, in pain and slightly delirious. Perhaps I had munched a dodgy Skegness sausage roll, but at the time I was convinced the cause was my psychological distress at the political sundering of sisterhood and comradeship.

Early in November 1971, I received a terrible phone call from my sister-in-law. My brother Peter had died in a car accident after having a heart attack. At first her words rotated around my head. Sudden deaths belonged to the news and I was unable to take in what she was saying. As the months passed, gradually I had to internalize the abrupt termination of his life. My brother and I had not been especially close; he was seventeen when I was born and during my early childhood had been working as an apprentice in an engineering factory up in Consett and was then in the RAF in Germany. Later he worked with my father selling pit motors and our interests had diverged. Though both my parents had died in the late sixties, his death so young was especially hard to accept. I was concerned for my sister-in-law and her two children, and grew closer to them.

Practical tasks were a relief and I helped put together the Night Cleaners’ issue of Shrew which came out in December 1971. Concessions of small pay increases, along with Christmas bonuses, one week’s notice and a reduction of hours on specific buildings had been won, and organizing had spread to Birmingham, Lancaster, Manchester and Norwich.

But support in London was flagging. Despite there being over fifty women’s liberation groups in the Workshop, we were desperately short of leafleters. I remember looking round the room as we laid out Shrew one day and counting six of us. Not only had the International Socialists gone, only one member of the Socialist Woman group remained. By default, a small group from the Women’s Liberation Workshop had become the mainstays supporting what was being referred to as the ‘Night Cleaners’ Campaign’.

May was clamouring for less talk and more leafleters and ‘action workshops’. But even May, who always had a ready answer, had to acknowledge the cleaners’ campaign was not exactly a mass movement! Embroiled in arguments at her local baker’s about women’s liberation, she summed these up concisely: ‘Their attitude is it’s all bra-burning and no drawers. I explained you mustn’t believe all you read in the Press.’²⁵

A new and encouraging mobilization of women working on underground papers was, however, emerging. I went to one of their meetings, called by Michelene Wandor from Time Out and Louise Ferrier from Oz, both of whom I knew and liked. Through Louise and Richard Neville, I also met Marsha Rowe, who had recently arrived in London from Sydney, and took to her immediately. She was bouncy and smiley and had a great shock of brown curls which she shook assertively. Marsha had read about American women taking over an underground paper called Rat and told me she was intending to try something new – a glossy popular magazine that would reach out beyond the underground and the women’s liberation movement. I gulped, thinking, ‘Oh dear! It’ll fail.’ I underestimated Marsha and the practical knowledge she had gained from working on Australian Vogue. She and Rosie Boycott launched Spare Rib in June 1972. This represented a significant marker – it was to be the beginning of the end for the underground press of the sixties. Instead new hybrids were in the offing.²⁶

David and I went on holiday to Morocco over Christmas, travelling from Tangiers on local buses down to the Atlantic. Our destination was Agadir, which had been rebuilt after a devastating earthquake. We found the buses through an old guidebook David had acquired. I had already tried hitching through Morocco in a mini-skirt during the sixties, and this time wore a long green hippie-style dress and a Chelsea Girl shop imitation of an Afghan coat. The coat attracted perplexed glances, but the dress made me more or less acceptable. The buses were cheap, crowded and eventful. I watched in amazed apprehension as a man with a trussed sheep over his shoulders walked effortlessly up a ladder and placed it on the roof.

After swimming and tagines in an eerily modern Agadir, we returned by bus and got into conversation with a young Moroccan man who spoke with evident emotion about his mother. His father had taken another wife and she had been cast off. He explained how she had no power and no legal recourse. I was touched by his feeling for her and his vivid account impressed upon me how significant the reforms I took for granted actually were. What if I were to be in her circumstances? How would I survive? In women’s liberation we used terms like ‘male chauvinism’ and ‘patriarchy’, but he was describing a very different degree of subordination from anything we experienced. The encounter stayed with me.

A Woman’s Place © Liberation Films 1971

Me laughing during a speech by a Maoist denouncing women’s liberation groups for sitting round contemplating our vaginas at Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970

© Sally Fraser

Annie Freud speaking at Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970 with left to right Sheli Wortis, Sally Alexander, Anna Davin

David Widgery early 1970s

© Sally Fraser

Sally Alexander and Gareth Stedman Jones are in the foreground with Arielle Aberson and Juliet Mitchell seated behind them at Women’s Liberation Conference, Oxford, March 1970

© Jaap van Ginneken

Me in Amsterdam, researching Women’s Liberation in Holland, summer 1970

© Sally Fraser

Demonstration against Tory Bill to curb trade unions, December 1970. I am in the foreground wearing a long mac and clutching leaflets about the cleaners. By my side is a duffle-coated Lois Graessle who brought her experience in the US Civil Rights movement to the early structure of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop. Historian Raphael Samuel in long scarf and glasses is in the same row. Sue O’Sullivan in a woollen hat is just behind him. Night cleaner Jean Wright in scarf is carrying the placard ‘Dec 8th Only the Beginning’. Marching just in front of the Women’s Liberation Workshop banner is Robin Blackburn from New Left Review with a shock of white wavy hair.

Jean Wright in scarf pouring tea on cleaners’ picket 1970

© Sally Fraser

International Women’s Day demonstration in the snow, March 1971. I am hidden behind the placard ‘Equal Pay is not enough. We want the moon’.

Members of Essex Road Women’s Centre outside the front window, Alison Fell seated right; Lynne Segal standing third from right; Lisa Vine standing sixth from right.

Paul Atkinson 1973 in Nottingham

© James Swinson

Villa Road Street Party in Brixton, 1975

4

1972

Early in 1972, a last-minute call came from Neil Middleton. He needed an introduction and conclusion for Women, Resistance and Revolution at top speed. In haste, I declared that the book traced the historical fortunes of an idea – ‘the liberation of women necessitates the liberation of all human beings’.¹ I added that what I had written was a tentative first step and part of a wider, ongoing process. Reflecting on the awkward cohabitation of Marxism and feminism, I rejected arguments deferring changes we were demanding until the ‘revolution’. Ending exploitation, changing how work was divided between the sexes, redefining culture, ‘the upbringing of children, the shape of the places we live in’, needed to begin in the present. My hope for their realization rested with movements of working-class women, including women of colour.²

Neil had made me do what I am inclined to avoid, sum up explicitly what I am saying. This is partly because I tend to assume that what I can see must be evident to everyone and, unwilling to labour meanings, want the words to speak for themselves. Also, because I think slowly and accumulatively through history, everything is in process and thus tends to be implicit. Edward Thompson once observed that I approached ideas like a crab, moving sideways.

Lengthy meditations on method hardly seemed appropriate, for the manuscript went out of my hands amid mass upheaval. Unemployment had increased, while taxation was reducing workers’ take-home pay and inflation was mounting. Suddenly miners seemed to be all over the place, staying with sympathetic students and trade unionists around the country. Their wages had stalled during the sixties and, after negotiations with the Tory government collapsed, the National Union of Mine-workers (NUM) had called the first official strike since 1926. The flying pickets were doing what Gertie and the clothing workers had done in the Leeds strike, but on a national scale. And they were seeking solidarity action not simply from other miners, but from transport and power workers.

On 3 February a picket was killed by a non-unionized lorry driver. On the 9th the government declared a state of emergency. From the 16th power cuts began. Whereupon several thousand miners, led by Arthur Scargill and joined by workers from other industries in Birmingham, were able to prevent coke leaving Saltley depot. The lesson seemed to be clear: direct action by rank-and-file workers could be effective against the power of the state. After secret attempts to recruit drivers failed to break the long strike, the government finally made a new pay offer which was accepted on 19 February.

The strike not only showed the potential strength of workers, it also extended into communities: ‘OUR FIGHT IS YOUR FIGHT’ declared placards held up by women from mining areas. Members of women’s liberation supported them. In a letter to Carole Turbin in New York, I announced with pride that the London Women’s Liberation Workshop had collected a donation of £70, though I added that some radical feminists had opposed this because they saw miners as ‘male chauvinist’.³

The term ‘radical feminism’, which in the US had initially signalled opposition to the ‘liberal feminism’ of claiming rights within the system, was beginning to mean putting women’s oppression first and foremost in an absolute sense. While I could see that many women did not desire men or simply wished to live apart from them, I did not believe that focusing on women’s relationship with men alone was sufficient to change women’s position in society. Other kinds of inequality and subordination such as race and class affected women’s circumstances. Nor did I regard women’s relations with men as exclusively antagonistic. I was convinced that demonizing one sex and idealizing the other distorted reality and led to a political dead end. So I did not accept the arguments for separatism that were being made by some women in the American movement.⁴

The distinction between a separatist view and working in an autonomous women’s liberation movement was crucial. The latter asserted women’s oppression because this was frequently overlooked or denied and we needed space to work out our own perspectives; it did not imply abandoning other radical causes which involved men. Indeed, in the early seventies rebellion was appearing from so many sources that detaching oneself in the abstract was not even feasible. The evidence was all around us.

During the same period, the violence in Northern Ireland had been escalating tragically. In August 1971 any pretence that the British Army was there in order to preserve peace had been blown when troops killed civilians in Ballymurphy. On 30 January 1972 they shot thirteen dead on a Civil Rights demonstration against internment in Derry. The Provisional IRA responded with bombings in Belfast, while on 22 February the Officials (the older wing of the IRA) took the fight to England by bombing the army barracks at Aldershot. Seven civilians were killed.

David and I were awakened early one morning to loud banging on the door downstairs. Two plain clothes police officers were outside with search warrants. They began asking questions about the Irish civil rights group in Islington. This had been started by the two Davids, Widgery and Phillips, in solidarity with socialists and Republicans in Ireland. Dave Phillips was not there that night. Nevertheless they set about examining all the files, books and photograph albums in both rooms in the flat.

At first it was unnerving, but as time passed the search became a tedious routine. Photographs of Sue Sharpe on the beach elicited oafish remarks and they fastened on a name they recognized in my address book – the Marie Stopes Clinic. I decided they clearly needed a lecture on the history of birth control and explained in some detail who she had been. They departed around lunchtime carrying the photo albums and my address book. When I enquired whether they were intending to copy it, they explained they were just correlating names. Their intrusion had yielded only some overdue library books. We later learned that many other left-wing people had been raided at the same time. Trade unionists were also under surveillance. I suspect that they were gathering information on radical networks outside the older left parties.

The industrial militancy continued throughout 1972; nearly one-and-a-half million workers went on strike, and though miners, dockers and building workers made up the large battalions, women were also involved.⁵ In some places the strikes continued for many months. At Brannan Thermometers in Cleator Moor, Cumbria, women as well as men had come out in 1971 against the dangers they faced in working with mercury and held on until the summer of 1972. Spontaneously, support for strikes and occupations converged, connecting diverse types of dissidents. May Hobbs spoke at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, when an exhibition, ‘Strike at Brannans’, by a founder of the Artists’ Union, Conrad Atkinson, was shown.⁶ One of the men from the Brannan’s strike stayed in our communal house while campaigning for support.

In spring 1972 women shoe workers in Fakenham, Norfolk, having been made redundant, decided on a ‘work in’ to try and save their jobs. A collection was taken for them at the Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester and they were supported by socialists and women’s liberation groups not just in Britain but from other countries. In May I went to a meeting organized by the London Socialist Woman group to hear two of the workers, Nancy McGrath and Eileen English, speak about the cooperative they had set up at Fakenham. They were making decisions collectively, breaking down divisions within the workforce and sharing and extending their skills. They had started by doing handbags and gone on to clothes; skirts first, then trousers.⁷

The Conservative government’s measures to curb industrial action resulted in economic discontent spilling over into opposition to laws and state repression. Not only did these further politicize the labour movement, they brought in supporters from social movements. Gay liberation as well as women’s liberation banners appeared on the marches against Heath’s Industrial Relations Bill.

In the Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group we switched from discussing the family and radical feminism to trade unions. When five dockers were imprisoned in Pentonville, we decided to express our solidarity with them. Ursula Owen accompanied me to the heaving trade union demonstration outside the jail with our letter of support and a donation. These were received with polite ceremony by a somewhat bewildered official – I suspect he was trying to work out if we were connected to the football team.

That May, rebellion spread to the schools. In the late sixties I had met some of the founders of the Schools Action Union (SAU). Aware of the movement among French lycée students, several came from left-wing socialist families and were exceptionally articulate and politically savvy. But they had been a relatively small grouping. By 1972 a change had come. On 17 May the SAU called a demonstration against caning and for greater democracy in schools. I went to cheer them on. Standing in the road as they headed down to County Hall, I watched as serried cohorts of children marched towards me. It was curious to see demonstrators who made me, at five foot three inches, seem a veritable giant. They may not have been very tall, but they were ebullient and they made my heart lift. Somehow, the spirit of Paris 1968 had journeyed through time, assimilated the defiance of working-class parents and landed in British comprehensives. They brought London to a halt.

I was even more amazed when girls of fourteen at Starcross took over the microphone in assembly and declared a strike. For once our head, Kathleen Mitchell, was looking ruffled and nonplussed. She asked me to talk to them, pointing out that corporal punishment had been abolished long ago at the school. The vanguard were fourth years who explained thoughtfully that it was up to them to do something because the fifth year had exams. They had heard of the strike from boys they knew at a neighbouring school. Aware that at Starcross they were not directly affected, they wanted to support the boys. ‘Ah!’ I exclaimed, ‘You can show solidarity.’ I had never seen them seize hold of a new word with such enthusiasm. They wrote their ‘solidarity’ leaflet at speed, and I duly bore it to our tolerant head, who nodded, but insisted I correct their spelling. Smiling at her insistence on upholding educational standards in all circumstances, I did this and showed the girls how to make copies. Then, cock-a-hoop, the fourth-year students of citizenship departed to leaflet the boys’ school.

How lucky we were with our Mrs Mitchell. Caroline Bond was teaching in a less amiable comprehensive in South London where the strikers were severely punished.

The political, industrial and social militancy of the early seventies was accompanied by the emergence of pressure groups and organizations focusing on what were beginning to be called ‘community’ issues. Some were lobbies like the Child Poverty Action Group, formed during the previous Labour government, under pressure from social investigators surveying income and housing. Others sought to mobilize specific constituencies to defend themselves. In 1970, Joe Kenyon, a former miner with a disability, who could remember the Unemployed Workers’ Union, had set up the Claimants and Unemployed Workers’ Union.⁸ He was keen on the grassroots but definitely ‘old left’ on formal procedure. When I went to see him in Barnsley, he presented me with the former TUC general secretary Walter Citrine’s rules for conducting meetings, The ABC of Chairmanship.

The Federation of Claimants Unions was more anarchical. It adopted principles of collective self-management, similar to women’s liberation, and stretched out beyond unemployed workers to people in the community, the elderly, the sick and people with disabilities, as well as unsupported single parents whose numbers were growing.⁹ Its Unsupported Mothers’ Handbook was intended to be a ‘weapon’ to enable its users to assert their claims to social resources.¹⁰ Single mothers were very much part of women’s liberation and several women’s groups were defending women claimants.

The Claimants Unions’ rejection of the authoritarianism that often characterized dealings with the poor, along with the power and secrecy surrounding welfare provision, was shared by many of us in women’s liberation, though we placed a particular emphasis upon the biased assumptions displayed by the state’s dealings with women claimants.

The welfare state had been in existence as long as members of my generation could remember. Like many other young leftists we regarded state provision as an entitlement that should be equally available to everyone. We did not just want more welfare provision to be handed down from on high, we aimed to democratize the relationship between the state and those dependent on its services.

But an implicit tension remained about how to challenge the existing order while recognizing that women needed resources from the state. Since 1970 this had made it very difficult for women’s liberation to develop a nursery campaign, as some women supported demands for state nurseries while others insisted on voluntary collective forms of child care. Val Charlton’s account of the project initiated by Camden Women’s Action Group, for a participatory and anti-sexist children’s community centre funded by the council, convinced me that this combination of users’ control and state resources could indicate a way through.

Paradoxically, too, many members of left groupings, and indeed of women’s liberation, had not just been beneficiaries of the state through education, but were employed within the state as teachers, social workers and lower-grade civil servants. They included myself, many friends, and some of the students I was then teaching for the Workers’ Educational Association. So we were challenging an institution of which we were a part.

In autumn 1971 I had started a WEA evening class in Euston on ‘Revolutionary Thought’. It proved to be extremely popular and, unlike my more sedate suburban classes, attracted a great swathe of radicalized young public sector workers who were prepared to take militant action through their unions. We began with Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and then headed onwards into the nineteenth century. By winter 1972 we were going through Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Kollontai, Gramsci, Reich and moving on to Sartre, Fanon and the 1968 student and workers’ rebellion in France. I learned from teaching these classes, not simply from the thinkers I researched but from the students themselves. They were critical not just of their pay and conditions, but of what they were expected to do in their jobs. Not only was there dissatisfaction among many recipients of state resources, dissidence existed within sections of the state’s workforce. It was becoming evident to me that the state could not be treated as a bloc.

In the spring of 1972 a series of issues around the state, the family, women’s position as workers and their relationship with unions became entangled in escalating strife. At the March Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester, Selma James, who was in the Notting Hill group, spoke on ‘Women, the Unions and Work, or what is not to be done’. Among the proposals she put forward was one for ‘wages for housework’. Early in April her talk was circulated as a duplicated pamphlet by the Notting Hill Women’s Liberation Workshop Group. They stated that while many of them had ‘minor or major disagreements’ with it, nonetheless they felt the discussion it generated was important, adding that it was intended to ‘mobilize women’ and to provide ‘a perspective’.¹¹ Over the next few months Women, the Unions and Work was indeed widely discussed at women’s liberation meetings around the country. I came back from one of these in Faraday Hall, Ladbroke Grove on 25 June troubled by its tangle of false premises, partial truths, scapegoats and paranoia about nobbling.

When we went through the pamphlet in the Arsenal group, we decided the term ‘wages’ put a misleading gloss of militant power onto creating a state allowance for women to do housework and child care at home. Also housework and caring for children were conflated. Removing your hands from the washing up might well be possible, but how were women to strike against their young children? A further ambiguity was that though Selma put a guaranteed income for women and men in her concluding list of demands, throughout her paper she referred simply to women or to the housewife.

Along with many other women’s liberation groups, Arsenal wanted to know how women were to cast off the role of primary homemakers if they were to be paid to work at home by the state. We felt that Selma disregarded the dilemmas of the increasing number of women in Britain who were going out to work; moreover, her demand served to confirm the isolation of the woman at home.¹²

In an article, ‘The Carrot, the Stick and the Movement’, I also criticized Selma’s assertion that trade unions fragmented the working class; the divisions derived from within capitalist society itself. Instead of scapegoating unions and rejecting organizing around paid employment, I argued that women’s liberation raised the possibility of combining resistance in the labour force with life at home and in the community.¹³

The disputes over these muddled claims for wages for housework were personally painful for me. In March, a small press in Bristol, Falling Wall, had published the bibliography from Women, Resistance and Revolution as a pamphlet. The initiative had come from Suzie Fleming, with whom I had cooperated in reissuing a pamphlet by Alexandra Kollontai, called Women Workers Struggle for Their Rights.¹⁴ The link with Falling Wall was to be weakened because Suzie and I held conflicting views on wages for housework. Neither of us wanted the distancing, but it occurred nonetheless. Selma’s Women, the Unions and Work was a classic ‘intervention’ pursued on the old sectarian lines and it led to a sharp divide among left-wing women whose politics had previously been implicitly connected. Our ‘new politics’ of women’s liberation was acquiring its own fissures.

I had been especially pleased by the publication of the bibliography, because, during 1972, I was feeling as if I’d been writing forever with very little appearing in a form anyone could read. Moreover, that spring I had done a short book for Penguin Education based on my teaching. I enjoyed both the writing and the close collaboration with my editor, Kathy Henderson, but owing to internal changes within Penguin, the manuscript stalled and, despite vigorous protests, the innovative Education Division was eventually closed down.

During my Easter holidays from Starcross I finally finished putting together the chapters that became Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. I was still shuffling Marx’s modes of production about, but had also adopted and adapted the term ‘patriarchy’, which Kate Millett and others were using. I saw it as a form of male power rooted in the ownership of women’s persons in the family, a power which was being both eroded and readjusted by capitalist society.

I asserted, ‘A feminist movement which is confined to the specific oppression of women, cannot, in isolation, end exploitation and imperialism’, arguing, ‘We have to keep struggling to go beyond our own situation. This means recognizing that the emphases which have come out of women’s liberation are important not only to ourselves.’¹⁵ Instead of confining our efforts to a separate zone of women’s issues we had to contest male bias in the very definition of what constituted politics.

‘What’s it about?’ asked Bea Campbell, as we sat together on a double-decker bus in London. I struggled to summarize. It was Bea who came up with the title on the bus.

I was still puzzling away about how to conceptualize what was distinct and what was similar about women’s labour at home and in the paid workforce. Early in the summer, Joan Smith’s talk on ‘Women’s Production and the Family’ at an International Socialism women’s meeting, triggered a series of half-formed questions and a delineation of ‘patriarchy’ as ‘the power of men as a sex to dispose of women’s capacity to labour’. I was aware this appropriation did not have ‘a direct and simple relationship to class exploitation’.¹⁶ But I wanted to think through how it connected to exploitation at work and how women of various classes had articulated their grievances at different periods.

Edward Thompson, meanwhile, was posting me material. He had come across an indignant poem, ‘The Woman’s Labour’, written in 1739 by a washerwoman and household brewer, Mary Collier, and he sent me a copy of the manuscript. In response to a poem by a thresher, Stephen Duck, who had made light of women’s labour in the fields, a sardonic Mary Collier refutes his sneers about how they chatted and prattled. Her poem graphically details how she, and women like her, were doing agricultural work, then cooking for their families, while also being expected to help with cleaning and brewing in the households not only of their Masters, but their Mistresses.¹⁷

It seemed that the nature and scope of women’s material lives had changed over time, along with the relationships between work for wages, domestic labour and family structures. I thought a clear pamphlet outlining these shifts historically would provide a context that could help sort things out. Pluto Press offered to publish it and I decided to dash something off quickly.

This was not wise. During the summer of 1972 I was already embroiled in correcting the proofs of Women, Resistance and Revolution and writing and rewriting what eventually became Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. On 2 June, in a blue airmail letter to Carole in New York, I announced, ‘My book is to be published in England in November & in U.S. 2 and ½ months later, January 1973, I suppose. Then I’ve done another one which is about more modern stuff & that’s coming out in a year from now.’¹⁸ The supposed pamphlet was turning into another book, Hidden from History (1973).

The proofs of Women, Resistance and Revolution and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World were to pursue me to the WEA Summer School at Seale-Hayne in Devon. ‘I am thinking of starting to correct proofs before the bar opens’, I wrote to David optimistically.¹⁹

As usual the Summer School was both demanding and interesting because the WEA students brought a great wealth of experience to their studies. One of the older students had been involved in the Unemployed Workers’ Movement in the thirties and turned out to be a friend of Ralph Bond, Caroline’s father. An engineer spoke movingly about work and family life in the North East working-class community in which he had grown up during the thirties. I remember being shaken by his account of how domestic violence had been endemic and almost ritualized.

Sally Alexander, who was starting to teach in the WEA, came along that year for the first week. I wrote to David describing how after work in the mornings we were sitting in the sun, dancing, organizing a beach party, and going to the local pub which was frequented by very polite Hells Angels. ‘I like the mix of people here’, I declared, cheerily.²⁰

Adult education teaching was to attract more feminist tutors, but in 1972 we were still a new phenomenon. Despite being strongly backed by Jim Fryth, we were regarded as bizarre by others. Indeed, Sally and I seemed to merge in people’s minds; as I related to David in a letter: ‘People get me & Sally muddled up. She got asked if she was Sheila Rowbotham today.’ It was as if we were being typified as ‘feminists’, regarded warily by some of the women as well as some of the men. I felt uncomfortable with this ‘W.L. notoriety’. Not only did I dislike being singled out, I joked to David that it meant my every move was being scrutinized for anything of ‘special gossip value’.²¹ I was relieved when a meeting I did on women’s liberation went well, but thwarted because the projector lamp went pop and I could not show Esther Ronay’s Women against the Bill (1972), a short film in which trade union women calmly outlined why they opposed the government’s Industrial Relations Bill. The intimacy of the filming made you feel as if you were sitting there with them in the room.

While in Devon, David forwarded letters to me from the feminist Dame Margery Corbett Ashby. Then ninety, she had been campaigning much longer than Sally and I. Both her longevity and her sparky wisdom about movements were imposing. We had first met in Highbury when she had come to speak to an early women’s liberation meeting at the home of my friend, Janet Rée. The dignified white-haired woman dressed in black, who had travelled some distance to our meeting, had been in the constitutionalist suffragist wing. When we asked her how she had responded to the suffragette militants’ direct action, she replied with a smile that when the men complained about them she would say, ‘Give us the Vote and you will no longer have any problem.’

Unaware of her subsequent political history as a feminist, a Liberal and an opponent of fascism, I had started diligently sending her articles and pamphlets. She firmly put me in my place, remarking how she did not need convincing about the importance of women joining unions as she had been saying it for years. She was, however, enthusiastic about Audrey Wise’s speech at the 1969 Conference for Workers’ Control, which I had posted to her in pamphlet form as Women and the Struggle for Workers’ Control.²² I liked it too, because Audrey engaged with the impact of language and how women were regarded and treated as well as working conditions.

I felt especially encouraged by Margery Corbett Ashby’s approval of the reawakened interest in feminist history, and her reference to having been a friend of Margaret Bondfield, the socialist trade union organizer in the shop workers’ union, jolted my assumptions. It made me recognize that the kind of overlapping personal links I knew from my own activism had existed in the past, and strengthened my resolve not to take formal political affiliation at face value but to explore inner networks.

I was busy at Seale-Hayne so the two weeks passed quickly. The memory of 1970 was, however, still close enough for a brief flicker of dread in a letter to David: ‘Perhaps you’ll start some great romance next week & not want to know me when I come back.’ But I had become far more secure in my relationship with David; our love had acquired the ballast that comes from shared interests, and I had grown especially close to his mother, Margaret Widgery, a warm and humane Christian Socialist. Perhaps just a frisson of revenge can be detected in my commiseration, ‘I do hope life gets more cheerful for you. It must be dreary working all the time & only coming out with nothing to do except for meetings.’²³ David was frantically assembling a voluminous and idiosyncratic record of the left from 1956 to the late sixties, drawing on the leaflets, pamphlets and newspapers he stored on the wooden shelves in his bedroom. This was subsequently to be published by Penguin as The Left in Britain (1975).

After the Summer School, I took the proofs of both Women, Resistance and Revolution and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World with me on holiday to the Scottish island of Arran. David was not able to come so Sue Sharpe drove Dave Phillips and myself there in her VW Beetle. We had considerable difficulty getting Dave into a bed and breakfast en route and later onto the ferry, for he had started to experience panic attacks and had been diagnosed as suffering from agoraphobia. Sue and I decided beer was a good remedy and it did seem to work.

On arriving in Arran, by coincidence, we spotted two friends, Chris Rawlence and Marian Sedley from the Red Ladder Theatre Group in Leeds, one of the many alternative cultural groups that had sprouted. They were looking purposeful in climbing gear. Next sighted was a pink-faced Nigel Fountain on a bicycle. I related to David that he proceeded to hold forth on Scottish feudalism and seemed to have acquired the demeanour of a Scottish laird during his short stay on Arran.²⁴

A blissfully happy Nigel had recently formed a relationship with a radical social worker, Joanna Bock, and they had arrived a few days before us. We joined them at Goat Fell Cottage, High Corne, and began to explore the hills and beaches. Arran delighted me, not simply because of the varied beauty of its fields and wild hills, but because the weather changed from one part to another, as if we were in a country rather than on an island. The long walks made me feel ravenously hungry – I remember a lot of porridge and the best potatoes I have ever eaten.

Nigel nobly read my proofs after I had gone through them, his beady-eyed subbing finding mistakes I had missed. I also managed to write an article on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication for Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott’s newly launched magazine Spare Rib, and to prepare material for our Arsenal Shrew, which was to be on women and work. Separated once again from David, I sent him letters trying to express, in the spirit of frankness we espoused, contradictory feelings of estrangement, sexual restlessness and contented connection. I dreaded being removed from him. I felt lonely, yet I worried still about dependence. ‘I feel so inturned physically in the hollow of your body that it’s as if I had no more daring any more.’²⁵

When the time came for me to meet David in Dublin, I set off to Belfast from Ardrossen on the mainland. On the boat I looked around in amazement. Never before or since have I seen such a concentration of ginger people. I was surrounded by people with the same hair colour as me, though some had green or blue eyes rather than brown. I had no way of knowing if I had found a lost tribe of distant ancestry or whether this surprising encounter was just a bizarre chance.

I had been nervous about passing through Belfast, partly out of physical fear, but also because emotionally I could hardly bear to face up to the actuality of what was happening to people in Northern Ireland. I shared a taxi with a woman to the station and when I heard a great bang, jumped in alarm. I felt ashamed until I looked and saw she was as terrified as me. Being in the North, even briefly, made me comprehend the stressful toll upon people living there during the Troubles.

Dublin, Tralee and finally Dingle were not that geographically distant, but they felt like another universe. In Dingle we stayed with a friendly woman who ran her home as a tiny guesthouse; I bought a beautiful brown speckled woolly beret she had knitted. David and I both shed our customary obsessive work habits and relaxed into happiness there. I even lured him into the sea in a lonely cove – his polio-marked leg made him self-conscious about beaches.

Echoes of conflict drifted over the border. In a pub by the boats I heard a man sing the song about the old woman who had four green fields, one of which had been taken by strangers. To David’s embarrassment I was overcome by the story of the poor woman, the death of her sons, the loss of the green field, or perhaps by the delicious silky Guinness. As tears started to stream down my face, I detected a tiny twitch of satisfaction on the face of the singer.

When we returned, London was bristling with action. After reaching an impasse with the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the Night Cleaners’ Campaign had revived as a result of backing from the Civil Service Union (CSU). During August, cleaners at the Ministry of Defence, the Empress State building in Fulham and the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall went on strike supported by the Civil Service Union. Not only did the CSU make the strike official, they paid £10 a week strike pay.²⁶ Because the cleaners’ wages were so low this was equivalent to ‘wages for striking’.

Picketing had to be mounted day and night. The Fulham picket was reinforced by the cleaners’ husbands and children, along with local trade unionists and supporters from women’s liberation, the Socialist Woman group and left organizations. It was profoundly strengthening to see the power of solidarity as drivers of huge lorries backed away at the sight of the picket. Great cheers greeted each turnaround. Welcome rumours started to reach us of a crisis developing inside the Empress State building – the bar was said to be running out of beer!

The picket at Fulham acquired the atmosphere of a creative carnival. Although the Berwick Street Film Collective had stopped doing the filming for Nightcleaners, they did take footage of the picket. Moreover, Marc Karlin persuaded a nearby Italian restaurant to provide the electricity for Harold Biberman’s masterpiece Salt of the Earth to be shown, and the filmmakers rigged up a screen outside. Its depiction of a strike in a New Mexican mining community in which women play a crucial part had made it a target during McCarthyism, causing Biberman to be blacklisted and the actor Rosaura Revueltas to be repatriated to Mexico. Rediscovered in the late sixties and shown over and over again at meetings, it assumed a new meaning on the cleaners’ picket line. The cleaners won union recognition and a significant pay increase. Whereupon night cleaners at the Home Office building in Horseferry Road went on strike over the sacking of a supervisor.

I was torn between picketing and writing the pamphlet that was turning into Hidden from History. I wanted to scamper along with it, yet my conscience tugged. So I kept on going back and forth from Hackney to the various pickets. On one lonely night some men arrived saying, ‘You have to let us through, we’re responsible for the tunnels.’ ‘What tunnels?’ we asked in surprise. Whereupon they became most mysterious and authoritative, muttering about ‘security’. It was dark and there were more of them than us. In they went and I never saw them reappear. Nor did I ever hear of any tunnels again.

The success of the strikes that summer was wonderful. However, there remained severe problems. The gains won by the cleaners on government buildings were lost later when the time came for the renewal of the contract. Harold Wilson’s Labour government had put cleaning on government buildings out to contract in 1968, an early privatization that restricted the CSU’s efforts to improve conditions. Under British employment law an agreement made between a union and a contractor was no longer valid if the company changed.²⁷

Moreover we leafleters did not have the resources for continuing the in-depth contact and help the cleaners needed after the settling of disputes, though the Berwick Street Film Collective did go on to make a second film, 36 to 77, with one of the Ministry of Defence cleaners, Myrtle Wardelly, a cleaner from a Hindu family in Grenada.

That autumn I was again journeying around the country doing talks. One in Barton-upon-Humber, on 21 October for the Workers’ Educational Association, was particularly memorable. Rex Russell, an historian of agricultural labourers’ trade unionism, had invited me to speak on women’s liberation. My history teacher from school in East Yorkshire, Olga Wilkinson, was an old friend of his and came to hear me. She had opened up so many vistas, from the history of Methodism to the architecture of eighteenth-century stately homes, teaching us always with an edge of sharp humour. Fiercely independent, but always sceptical, she was dubious about ‘liberation’.

Rex Russell gave me a precious gift: the trilogy by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair, perceptive novels about the life of a left-wing Scottish woman, Chris Guthrie, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the thirties. Their settings were harsh, but the poetry of Grassic Gibbon’s style coiled through them and captivated me. When I tried out an extract on my Starcross pupils, however, I was dismayed to find his words failed to communicate. London ears closed up at the Scottish rhythms.

The Arsenal Shrew appeared that October. We had agreed that its overall theme was to be ‘work’ and that we would all participate. It had consequently been long in the making. My own lack of design skills meant that I had spent two whole weeks laying out a double-page spread listing women’s strikes since 1968. I took great pride in my efforts.

Our issue included articles on trade unions, the position of black women in the labour market, equal pay and motherhood. Instead of wages for housework, we argued for a shorter working week for both men and women with full pay so that both could care for children, along with a wide range of child-care facilities, and tax concessions for people who were caring for children (including nonbiological parents).²⁸

Over the course of the autumn, opposition started to mount when Edward Heath’s government proposed to do away with family allowances as weekly cash payments and replace them with tax credits for the male wage earner. Resistance extended into the Labour Party and even aroused the ire of the usually conservative members of the Women’s Institutes.

In women’s liberation we divided on whether family allowances should be paid to the mother or to the person mainly responsible for caring for the children. Arsenal was in the latter camp because we wanted to avoid reinforcing mothers’ roles. We started leafleting for a local meeting on family allowances and Ursula Owen and I traipsed up and down the tower blocks on the Queensbridge estate carrying leaflets and a petition.

Many people in the Hackney council estates had become fearful of answering the door even early in the evening. Frequently people just opened their door on the chain, so we had to deliver our message through the crack. Ursula proved a great asset. She possessed a reassuring voice and naturally gracious manner which so amazed some residents that a few actually opened their doors to talk. Ursula’s majestic and empathetic presence did the rest and we collected signatures for our petition, though one woman retorted, ‘I’m not going to sign so all those unemployed men can have more babies. Dirty buggers.’ Whereupon, opportunistically, I switched to suggesting that perhaps she might like to support the campaign for abortion.

Though the Arsenal group gave out one thousand leaflets, the resulting meeting was a damp squib. One Hackney working-class woman turned up and she wanted to talk about her divorce not a family allowance campaign. I was accustomed to such failures, having been in the Hackney Labour Party Young Socialists in the sixties, but others were nonplussed and discouraged. Nevertheless, we took part in the campaign to influence MPs in Parliament in which the anti-poverty campaigner Molly Meacher played an important role.

The issue of family allowances acted as an impetus to connect more closely with women’s liberation groups in our area. A coalition evolved: the North East London Women’s Family Allowance Campaign, in which Arsenal combined with women’s liberation groups in Stratford, Ilford and Walthamstow. Liz Waugh’s mother, Lucy Waugh, who was in the Walthamstow group as well as the Night Cleaners’ Campaign, won a prize at a carnival when she appeared in Val Charlton’s giant yellow shoe, now adapted for family allowances. Retaining family allowances was a unifying cause that linked us with Communist Party women in Tower Hamlets, with the IS Women’s Voice and with left-wing libertarian women who were active in squatting, the Claimants Union and women’s health.²⁹

These local networks were to be revitalized and extended in subsequent campaigns, and when 1,700 women turned up at the Acton Conference in London that November there was hopeful talk of women’s liberation becoming a mass movement.³⁰ To my relief, arguments against the demand for wages for housework were coming from all sides.³¹ But a small group remained convinced, perhaps because on the surface Selma’s demand seemed to short-circuit the complexity of rebalancing and transforming personal and public existence. I began to find out more about the roots of Selma’s proposal. It had surfaced in the early twentieth-century American left and more recently had been resuscitated by the Italian Marxist feminist group, Lotta Femminista. From 1969 the focus of the new revolutionary left in Italy had been on the tumultuous wave of factory workers’ uprisings. Italian left feminists’ rebellion arose partly because they sought to extend the scope of revolutionary transformation to wider aspects of daily life. But the demand for wages for housework inadvertently did the opposite. It transposed wage relations in the factory into the family, reducing all aspects of human experience to the cash nexus.

Women, the Unions and Work continued to generate confusion among Selma’s adherents and opponents alike. Discussions went in circles. Who was to pay these ‘wages’. Was it the state? Or should it be employers? Why would they agree? How would payment from either affect women and children at home? There was so much about it that made no sense. Eventually I concluded that while Selma’s thinking seemed to spring from recent strands within the libertarian left, another aspect remained securely tethered to an older Marxist tradition which assumed that consciousness could be conceptualized and ‘raised’ in orderly notches by making demands. ‘Wages for housework’ was not meant to be realized. It was a ploy to mobilize the innocent. No wonder she landed us in a hall of shape-changing mirrors, so that it now appears as if a demand voiced by a small minority characterized the opinions of the majority.

In contrast, when Audrey Wise spoke to a packed women’s liberation meeting in London that December, she stressed how consciousness changed in subtle, interconnecting ways. Drawing on her experience as a trade unionist she put the emphasis on ‘trying to stay human’. Reflecting on how women workers often cared about conditions and respect, rather than simply pay, she again argued that these concerns could have radical implications. She proceeded to describe a Gloucester Trades Council meeting, where she had put the case for equal pay and the extension of protection for women workers. A male trade unionist had dismissed this by saying the ‘economy’ could not afford it. Audrey interposed, ‘Up got a woman – beautiful creature – and said, “If the economy wants me to work night shifts THEN I WANT A DIFFERENT ECONOMY.”’ Audrey recognized that women’s subordination at home and at work could result in a capacity to question not simply male domination in the unions, but also capitalism’s hold over the exploitative valuing of labour. Her talk was later published in the new socialist feminist magazine Red Rag, with ‘Unions, Orgasms and More’ spread enticingly across its front cover.³²

Women, Resistance and Revolution finally came out at the end of 1972. On the day of publication, instead of celebrating, I took refuge in the launderette in Hackney. Safely padded and sound-proofed by washing rotating around and around, I sat contemplating the exposure having a book published might entail. Though we were intent on creating a movement that was non-hierarchical, the media persisted in creating celebrities and labelling individual writers as ‘leaders’. The destructive consequences of this were already evident in the United States and it was the last thing I wanted.

I believed so strongly in the collective process of organizing – and indeed of thinking. Nevertheless, I could see that if you wrote a book you hoped people would read it. So, while I was aware of a dilemma in becoming a name known to people who had not met me, there did not seem to be an alternative if you were a writer. I was later to be criticized by some women for putting my name on my books, on the grounds that this was individualistic, but this seemed utterly daft. Without any names how could anyone be held to account for their words?

I was never to develop a coherent and principled policy about how to publicize while avoiding publicity. I mainly just carried on trekking around giving talks. This was tiring, but its compensations were learning what women’s groups around the country were thinking and doing while meeting many warm and supportive people. I developed strong personal bonds with women in Bristol, Leeds and Sheffield, which made me aware of the need to counter London’s greater visibility. When I went to conferences, I started collecting leaflets and newsletters from around the country so a record might survive.

I rejected media interviews I knew I could not cope with, like an invitation to be on the horror star Vincent Price’s BBC radio show in which I suspected I would be cast as the vampire. But I did talk about Women, Resistance and Revolution on a sedate afternoon television programme, envisaging my political credo being relayed to the masses. To my dismay, the barmaid in David’s local pub, The Salmon and Compass, seemed to have missed out entirely on the socialist and feminist theorizing. Her response to my TV interview was simply to express approval of how tidy my hair had looked.

Despite my lack of potential as a media star, women heard about Women, Resistance and Revolution by word of mouth, and because the book was translated into many languages, it travelled well beyond the English-speaking world, first in Europe and then further afield. Over the years, information percolated back. I was touched when Christmas cards started to arrive from the Vietnamese women’s organization in the North. The Spanish translation reached Latin America and eventually I learned that it had penetrated into Cuba. In the late eighties at the United Nations University Institute, WIDER, I met socialist women from Afghanistan who had read it in French. The French version was illegally translated into Arabic and I was told by members of Les Femmes Maghreb that this version was read in North Africa.

I think Women, Resistance and Revolution struck a strong chord among left-wing women internationally because, despite our differing circumstances, we were juggling our commitments to socialism and to our own emancipation as women.

5

1973

My fears of fame proved ill founded; becoming an author had little immediate effect on my life. It was good to receive a letter congratulating me from Kathleen Mitchell, the head at Starcross, and I was pleased by two good reviews from journalists I respected, Jill Tweedie and Mary Holland.¹ But otherwise my routines remained the same. I leafleted cleaners, went to meetings, and circulated by bus, tube or train, from Hackney to Starcross in Islington or to my WEA classes in Euston, West Wickham and Stanmore.

I had been sent to West Wickham because the students had rejected their former tutor. I was amused by rumours that he had been a ‘Marxist’, but discovered the cause of his unpopularity was that he had made them read Charles Dickens’s Hard Times for a whole term. My course there on social history through literature, being somewhat broader in scope, went down better, and I have fond memories of the warm support from the women in the class and also of a twinkly pensioner, Mr Reardon, who could remember early twentieth-century syndicalism. But I acquired a stern critic when another male pensioner was annoyed by my view that the Fabians took a top-down approach to socialism.

Never an early riser, getting from Hackney to West Wickham by 10 a.m. could be problematic. If I missed the train I arrived ten minutes late and some members of the class, incited by my Fabian adversary, rumbled and grumbled. I survived because I was staunchly defended by the women who, regardless of their politics, were put off by his manner.

I did not challenge the existing structure of the WEA, being simply relieved to be paid to do work that I found fulfilling. But more radical ideas about education were surfacing. I used to go to the recently opened left bookshop Centerprise in Hackney and chat with the visionary Glenn Thompson, an African American who was inspired by the Brazilian educationalist, Paulo Freire. The encouragement of voices from below was part of the radical libertarian ether. The schoolteacherpoet Chris Searle had published poems by one of his pupils in Stepney in 1971, and a teacher in Hackney, who had attended the Ruskin History Workshops, Ken Worpole, approached Centerprise to do a pamphlet of poems by a young boy from the West Indies, Vivian Isherwood. It was to be the first of several pamphlets and led to an adult education project based on people’s autobiographies. Meeting at Centerprise they embarked on a working-class history of the borough by mixing tape-recorded interviews with written material.

Anna Davin, who was involved in both women’s liberation and the History Workshops at Ruskin, was an enthusiastic proponent of this kind of oral history as a means of understanding women’s ‘ordinary life’.² I, too, was interested in collecting oral life stories. I heard from my Stanmore WEA class that a former suffragette, Florence Exten-Hann, lived locally. My class secretary chuckled that I might also be interested in talking with her husband, Maurice Hann, who had been a left-wing socialist before the First World War, though she added slyly, ‘You might be a bit old for him!’

On 28 March, Florence Exten-Hann and I sat facing one another on armchairs in the front room of their suburban house in Stanmore. She was eighty-two when we met; her white hair was swept up on her head, but her bright blue eyes belied her age. She had heard tales of Americans burning bras and her first remark on women’s liberation was, ‘Of course, you don’t believe in trade unions like we did.’ We stared at one another in mutual incomprehension. Of course we were interested in trade unions – but this was not the prevailing perception of women’s liberation as a movement. Nor was it how I had seen suffrage.

My understanding of the suffrage movement, however, was beginning to deepen. Not only had I looked at Sylvia Pankhurst’s papers when I visited Amsterdam, I had also come across several accounts by women like Florence who had been active socialists and trade unionists in the suffrage movement. It was becoming evident to me that we were by no means the first to link our feminism with a broader vision of social egalitarianism and democracy.

Florence came from a working-class socialist family, and, like her mother, had been an ‘advanced’ woman who cycled in bloomers, with a skirt to cover up when they reached town. She was a trade unionist as well as a suffragette at a young age. Both she and Maurice opposed the First World War and kept the records of the South East No-Conscription Fellowship hidden in a biscuit tin in their garden. In 1919 they had assumed it was safe to dig it up, only to be raided by the police who were collecting information on ‘subversives’. My account of her life was to appear in the fifth issue of the socialist feminist magazine Red Rag. By the time it was published, sadly, Florence had died.³

I stayed in touch with Maurice Hann. He was in his nineties and used to wear a rather natty brown knitted early twentieth-century-style waistcoat. Maurice had been on the left of the Independent Labour Party. Disillusioned after fellow socialists supported the First World War, he had gradually moved to the right as an official in the shop workers’ union, but in 1973 he still enjoyed a vigorous argument about workers’ control.

He gave me permission to write about Florence, while admonishing me, ‘Do not link her too closely with women’s lib.’ Unbeknown to Maurice, when I met Florence she had whispered that he was ‘a terrible male chauvinist’, and later warned me that her husband was not interested in any women’s movements. Still, I was grateful to Maurice, for he passed on several of Florence’s books, including one about an early twentieth-century campaign for housing homeless women.

Red Rag had been started in 1972 ‘by a group of Marxists in the women’s liberation movement’. The cover of its first issue reproduced Eugène Delacroix’s Romantic painting from the 1830 Revolution against King Charles X, of a statuesque, bare-bosomed ‘Liberty on the Barricades’.⁴ The initiative for Red Rag had come from women journalists arguing for women’s emancipation within the Communist Party. Among them was Bea Campbell, who brought in other young Communist women sympathetic to women’s liberation, including the artist Val Charlton.⁵ By no means an official CP publication, the magazine quickly extended beyond the Party.

Red Rag’s appearance coincided with our incipient awareness of being socialist feminists within the women’s movement. Most of us still identified as women’s liberationists, but a radical feminist meeting had been held at the conference in 1972, and in March 1973 we socialist feminists gathered for our first conference. So political differences were emerging, though the boundaries remained fluid and friendships cut across them. Michelene Wandor, the poet who had edited the pioneering collection of writings from women’s liberation, The Body Politic (1972), had nudged me to go to Red Rag meetings. But my life was somewhat over-meetinged and it took me a while to get to Red Rag’s. A note in my 1973 diary records one on 29 May.⁶

Bursting with ideas for interviews and articles, I still possessed little ability to lay out a magazine. I remember with fondness Val Charlton’s patient encouragement regardless of my clumsiness, at a meeting one warm summer day, when we assembled to help her. And I was chuffed when my jokey drawing of cartoon stick people confronting capital, the state, male chauvinism, racism and bourgeois ideology – ‘DO-IT-YOURSELF ORGANISATION’ against ‘BUREAUCRATIC LEADERSHIP’ – appeared over two pages in Red Rag No. 3, and later, to my surprise, made it into Radical America, an exciting left journal which emphasized both history from below and thought through action.⁷

By the summer of 1973 the Red Rag editorial group, which fluctuated somewhat over time, had expanded to include socialist feminists like myself who belonged to what I was coming to see as the ‘non-aligned left’, a constituency which was increasing rapidly and was far larger than any left group, including the CP.⁸ I felt that the editorial group shared a desire to think through how being feminists affected our dissimilar perspectives on socialism; and there were some familiar faces. I liked Bea and Val as well as Michelene; moreover, two close friends, Sally Alexander and Roberta Hunter-Henderson, were involved in the magazine. So were Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, who had been voices of calm wisdom on lesbianism in the chaos of the Skegness conference. I had met Rosalind Delmar from circles around the New Left Review and the left paper 7 Days, and Sue Cowley (later O’Sullivan) through the Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation Group and Camden community politics.

There were also women from the Islington libertarian left, bringing a new mix of anarchism and socialism: Alison Fell and Lynne Segal. I remember seeing Alison, who was from Scotland, sitting on the floor at a Red Rag meeting, her stark, arresting face, surrounded by wild blonde curls, turned upwards as she spoke. She had studied art and been an anarchist in Leeds before working on the underground paper Ink, where she had clashed with Felix Dennis from Oz. She wrote for the local community paper, the Islington Gutter Press, one among several local papers sprouting in the early seventies with the help of offset litho techniques. Alison was a poet as well as an artist and could write about feelings of love with overwhelming tenderness, while using language like a razor.⁹

Lynne was there next to her, with a similar mane of curls that I envied, this time auburn rather than blonde. A further source of envy was that though she had left her native Australia long ago, somehow she managed to sunbathe in Islington and stay suntanned. Like Alison, Lynne was also part of the network around the Islington Gutter Press, and, like me, was involved in the family allowances campaign.

Along with many other alternative papers, The Gutter Press’s politics were ‘libertarian left’.¹⁰ I was intrigued because instead of looking for Leninist antecedents as did the Trotskyists and Maoists, the libertarians’ left politics concentrated on the ‘now’ of daily living. They focused on local community action as well as workers’ struggles. Through Lynne and Alison, I met libertarian left feminists in Islington who were defining women’s issues in terms of mutuality, social entitlement and sexual politics. Their activism spanned gender, class and race.

I continued to correspond with Carole Turbin and with Barbara Winslow, who had prompted us to organize the first Women’s Liberation Conference back in 1969. She sent news from the US about having a ‘fight with Betty Friedan’, because the well-known author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW) was hostile to lesbians.¹¹ Several other long-lasting American friendships were to be added in 1973. Linda Gordon, a socialist feminist historian in the Boston ‘Bread and Roses’ group, made contact through Sheli Wortis who was back in Boston. They had seen Red Rag, and Linda wrote saying that she agreed with my critique of wages for housework in ‘The Carrot, the Stick and the Movement’.¹² Through Linda, I was to come into contact with the socialists and feminists around Radical America.

Women, Resistance and Revolution had made its way across the Atlantic in January and received short notices in a wide range of local papers. The most amusing response came from the Vassar College magazine, which pronounced from a grand height that ‘Rowbotham’ was ‘a scholar and a virtual nonentity in the world of Feminism’.¹³ The Vassar reviewer was not to know that the status of ‘a virtual nonentity’ constituted a veritable badge of honour in the British women’s liberation movement.

In May, a long review of Women, Resistance and Revolution by Ros Baxandall appeared in University Review. Ros responded to the book at full throttle – both as a Marxist and as a feminist, acknowledging a ‘sense of discovery’ and the ‘personal meaning and revelation’ it held for her. Despite my lack of knowledge of American women’s history and insufficient emphasis on the everyday lives of rank-and-file women, she was urging her friends to read the book so they could discuss it.¹⁴

The Americans had started organizing several years ahead of us. In the late sixties, Ros had been involved in the New York Radical Women’s demonstration at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City, where bras, girdles and curlers had been thrown into the Freedom Trash Can, as well as the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), a guerrilla theatre group that invaded a Madison Square Garden commercial bridal fair. Dressed as brides and festooned in chains, they performed an un-wedding ceremony and released white mice. After a political rethink about ridiculing other women, Ros gravitated to a group called Redstockings, where the emphasis was on understanding and strengthening women’s strategies for survival. She participated in their first abortion ‘Speak Out’ in 1969 and worked as a community activist, doing welfare rights work and helping to start one of the many women’s liberation day-care centres.

A period of exhilarated militancy was followed by self-interrogation and historical reflection. Ros comprehended the uneasy cohabitation of feminism and Marxism with a subjective acuteness. Her parents had been members of the Communist Party, which made her a ‘red diaper baby’. She could remember growing up with the paralysing fear that accompanied the McCarthy witch-hunt. Like other New Left women active in the US feminist movement, Ros was influenced by the opposition to hierarchy which had appeared in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, wrestling with how to create a new political synthesis. She was also researching the life of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. As a young woman Flynn had been a passionate fighter in the Industrial Workers of the World, for whom the legendary Joe Hill had written the song the ‘Rebel Girl’, later joining the Communist Party and rising through its ranks. Throughout these shifts in her left politics, Flynn was consistent in defending the emancipation of women.¹⁵

Ros’s response to Women, Resistance and Revolution was an early indication of a questing political mood among many American feminists, influenced by the New Left. Reading her review, I felt close to her, even though she was far away across the Atlantic and we had never met. My awareness of cooperating in a collective international project of historical discovery and rediscovery was heightened by making contact. In an early letter to Ros, I reported with great excitement how we had held a women’s history meeting in Oxford and added, ‘Women, Resistance and Revolution will be superseded completely with any luck.’¹⁶

Having been introduced through my book, Ros and I were to become really close friends. We both dwelt within dichotomies, being rebel women who yet longed for the communality of sisterhood, especially with feminists like ourselves who identified (despite expostulating) with the left.

In Britain the anti-abortion Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child was gaining support, accentuating an awareness of the need to take feminist ideas beyond women’s liberation’s existing networks. Spare Rib was showing that this was possible and a new women’s publishing venture, Virago, also emerged. Having seen an opening, the enterprising Australian, Carmen Callil, conferred with the two founders of Spare Rib, Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott, and later started working with Ursula Owen, who also had experience in publishing. Carmen’s home became Virago’s initial base; their fold-over catalogue announced themselves with brio as ‘The first mass market publishers for 52 percent of the population – women.’¹⁷

Whether we were active in campaigns, local women’s groups or in areas like the media, medicine, psychology or street theatre, most of us wanted to reach out to women widely and in a variety of different ways. But movements have an awkward tendency not to move in one direction at a time. During the summer of 1973 an underlying sense of unease was discernible. The fifth National Women’s Liberation Conference in mid-July was large and very well organized by the Bristol group, but I felt a discomfort because it was as if being a feminist was associated by some women with adopting a particular appearance and style of dress. I was uneasily aware that in marking ourselves out so decisively we were in danger of divorcing ourselves from women outside the movement.¹⁸

I sensed too a slightly edgy mood, as frissons between radical and socialist feminists as well as disagreements between supporters of family allowances and the group demanding wages for housework surfaced.¹⁹ This atmosphere of wariness did not tally with our initial confident utopia of a feminist politics that had broken with sectarian division. We had assumed harmony; when conflict arose, it left us uncertain what to do. Moreover, an unforeseen aspect of connecting the personal with the political proved to be that when ruptures appeared these proved all the more painful.

Convinced of the need to communicate outwards, I continued to plod doggedly off to speak at meetings of church groups, women’s literacy classes, trade unions, schools, Workers’ Educational Association groups and the rest. I can remember returning from a talk for a Townswomen’s Guild in South London in utter gloom. Though their origins had been in twenties feminism and they sought to educate women as citizens, my talk seemed to evoke only a blank bemusement. When I enthusiastically waved women’s liberation publications at them it was to no avail and I departed with the lot, humping my heavy load back with me to the Tube. Long afterwards I happened to meet a woman who had been at the meeting and she reassured me that it had subsequently had an impact. But such feedback was rare.

After the end of the summer term, unable to combine all my diverse commitments, I regretfully dropped my part-time work at Starcross. In my final year I had been teaching a small group sociology O level – a subject I had never formally studied. My desire for them to gain an historical perspective had amusing consequences. When the class was inspected by the Inner London Education Authority, one of the girls casually pulled Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the English Working Class out of her bag. The inspector was so amazed by this that he mentioned it to Kathleen Mitchell and gave us a rave report.

None of my pupils were from the school’s exam stream, and I had adamantly resisted selecting who should be entered for the examination because I regarded that as potentially demoralizing. My commitment to non-selection was not just a political principle. It was personal. When I was young at school I had often been near the bottom of the class, until I was able to select subjects for A level. Initially seen as a dim-wit, I was then hailed as a brain-box. Yet I knew I was the same person despite the opinion of others, and came to regard the grading of intelligence with scepticism. All of my students were entered for the exam, and to my great joy, when the results arrived, they had all passed. The reasons they got through were simple; they were motivated and the group was small. Credit was also due to Dave Phillips who I had enlisted as my adviser on sociology.

I liked the impossible pupils too, searching long and hard for some positive truths that could be written in reports. One feisty girl in particular was a tough proposition because she seldom turned up. A few years later I met her on the 38 bus in Islington and enquired sweetly in a teacherly manner what she was doing. Without as much as a blink came the reply, ‘Going with fellers’. A decade on, by coincidence, our paths crossed again. There she was in Hackney, a stalwart of the parents’ association at my son’s primary school.

David was working as a houseman during 1973 and was thus rarely to be seen. Entries in my diary read alternately ‘Widg in’ or ‘Widg out’. During one of his ‘out’ stretches at the end of June and early July, I was co-opted to help him work on Pluto’s first Big Red Diary. Several people had contributed entries but we had to edit and add to them in a rush in Chapel Market.

The diary’s ‘DO IT’ pages (a David Widgery borrowing from Jerry Rubin) explained how to fight rent rises, or to squat. Information on ‘sex-pol’ ranged from contraception to cervical cancer, and the Diary was also helpful on what to do if you were arrested. However, our editing sessions in summer 1973 caused me sleepless nights, as inaccuracies and omissions pounded away in my head. For instance the Diary was far stronger on the International Socialist rank-and-file publications than on the politics of feminism, gays and race. Indeed, a mysterious blank column followed two entries on women’s liberation. Fact-checking became fraught and, to my intense annoyance, I discovered that David had surreptitiously popped speed into my cup of tea to increase my productivity.

The Big Red Diary for 1974 nevertheless conveys how a new activist left was growing in Britain, with a reach that extended into Europe. The end result was much enhanced by the architect and designer Dave Wild, who had been responsible for the startling flag bags we had carried to mark our opposition to the Vietnam War.²⁰ Somehow he combined early Bolshevik iconography with the street art of the May ’68 events, adopting the fluidity of contemporary underground design and yet retaining a clarity hippie art often lacked.

When the first Big Red Diary was published, David penned my name above the first heading in the contents, ‘WHAT YOU’RE UP AGAINST’, predictably spelling it ‘Shelia’, but by then our personal tectonics were in seismic shakedown and nothing was predictable at all.²¹

That summer at the annual WEA gathering at Seale-Hayne, Jim Fryth told me that a squatter from Brixton called Paul Atkinson was coming in the second week. When I saw an uneasy-looking dark-haired man in light blue jeans at the meal table, I thought, ‘Hmm, squatter’. The squatter turned out to be studying medieval peasant land ownership and was interested in Habermas. He told me about the community-based networks in Brixton which provided practical help for poor families as well as lobbying the council around housing. His account was both familiar and yet distinct from the left political world I knew in Hackney.

Paul also explained he was in a group in Brixton that was close to ‘Big Flame’. Inspired by Ken Loach and Tony Garnett’s 1969 film about a dockers’ occupation and influenced by the Italian leftists in ‘Lotta Continua’, Big Flame was a relatively new revolutionary group which had formed in Liverpool in 1970. Part of the broader movement of the non-Leninist libertarian left, by 1973 Big Flame members focused on car workers, community organizing and sexual politics. I vaguely knew they were somehow linked to the Islington Gutter Press. I was curious.

We went for a walk still talking. The truth was I was rather more than just curious. The attraction I felt towards him was not bounded by words or even by thought. Indeed thought should have annihilated it. After all we were both with other people and the Summer School was about as private as a goldfish bowl on a station concourse. I was too desirous to be chary. As we walked I stopped thinking.

When I came back to London I longed to see Paul again, but it was inconceivable for me to leave David, our lives and thinking were intertwined. In theory, since David and I had got together again we were in an open relationship. This had not been too disturbing when confined to occasional flash in the pan comminglings when there was no likelihood of long-term consequences. But I felt quite differently about Paul. I did not want an affair on the side, I wanted an equal relationship. Lengthy conversations ensued between David and me.

It is true that discussions of feelings are not able to assuage them, and at certain points it seemed that we might split up. But the connection between us remained too strong and we didn’t. Instead, in September, we went on holiday to Barra. This was my idea. Having been to Arran, I was curious to explore a Scottish island protruding so far west into the Atlantic. I was intrigued too to learn that planes landed on the beach. David was more interested in its literary fame as the island that featured in Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore.

Our journey there was emotionally stormy. Though we argued about politics rather than sex, I felt Paul’s presence travelling with us and was shaken by the strength of my feelings. I was fearful too because nothing was clear. I was uncertain whether I would see him again. Words twisted together awkwardly, ‘How will either of us ever make any resolving of things?’ I asked in a letter to Paul I was already writing as the boat took David and me to Barra.²²

We stayed in a bed and breakfast, pretending to be married in order not to offend our hosts, but fooling no one including our fellow guests – two welders called John and Archie who were involved in building a grand new hotel looking down on the Atlantic. Like David, they were fans of Barra’s famous whisky. On one hungover Sunday, I listened to John reminiscing about landing arms for Yugoslavian partisans in the war and wondered about the searching manner of big Archie who seemed to peer out towards the unknown.

Our fellow guests had time on their hands as they were waiting for the work they’d done to be inspected. Archie imparted advice garnered from years of skill. When you finish a job, he told us, always leave an obvious mistake. When someone comes to examine it they feel they must find something wrong and if you do it deliberately it will be straightforward to correct. Then you will be left in peace. I marvelled at such wise craft craftiness and his observation remained stamped on my memory. But some inner conscience from seven years at a Methodist school meant I have never really been able to do it when I write, even though sometimes I have wished that I could.

I loved gazing out at the Atlantic and walking around bleak Barra searching for traces of inhabitants from long ago, some of whom had no doubt arrived from Ireland or Scandinavia on small boats. I went on quests for burial bumps or standing stones and, coming across the remains of a crofter’s hut, envisaged it being abandoned by some migrant fleeing from poverty. But David was miserable on the island. His leg caused him pain he would not admit, the only sign being a tautness of expression. I marched off alone, and then felt bad about deserting him.

Worst of all, by casting ourselves away from the customary cycles in which we connected to one another, we were thrown back on the existential nub of our relationship. This was not a comfortable spot. Both of us had defied the restraint of rituals, we had sought ecstasy and despised domestic compromise. Yet, regardless, those rejected continuities had grown and had assumed a sinuous significance. We were stranded.

I wrote ‘Outer Hebrides’ that September in Barra:

Loving and hurting

have become for us

inextricable,

like the unspoken words

we persistently share,

until I can no longer

settle in my own space

without the pang

of your desire.

There is so much of me

in you

nestling, easy, playing, caressing,

a slow deep passion with belongings.

Now you are strangely vulnerable.

No longer proudly covered,

you have willed yourself

beyond

the western extremities

of our island.

I’ve watched your face

over months

drawn in the effort of curing.

The commitment tight,

a mask melting in the shambling, trembling release

timed between bleeps,

to set again

cut by the black rage against exhaustion

pressing me into isolation.

Part of me had crept quietly away

before my desertion.²³

David fell ill on Barra and diagnosed himself as suffering from a life-threatening disease with a long medical name. He told me we must hasten to the mainland. Who was I to be arguing; he was the doctor. We took off on the little plane, speeding across the natural runway of the startling white sands, guided by an impressive woman, Katie McPherson, who had been responsible for the small airport since 1950. Barra vanished beneath us. We arrived, both anxious, at Leeds Infirmary and I sat waiting for David to come out from being examined. It was flu. Misdiagnosis.

Back in London that autumn I imposed a rigorous ban on Paul and me meeting one another for several months. Officially this was in order to annihilate passion. Instead I sent contradictory messages by letter. More long talks and telephone calls ensued. The ban did not hold. We resumed meeting and I wrote:

Two men slip through my hands,

with each one the other looms.

Gently, in the dark

we lie exhausted

in the warmth of loving.

And my heart pours itself out.²⁴

In retrospect, the amount of inner tumult and elaborate timetabling – not to mention bus and tube travelling – required to secure equality and democracy seems utterly exhausting and barely comprehensible. Nevertheless, while openness and the application of political reason certainly did not abolish jealousies, they did dampen down its manifestations. This might not have been as absolute as the change we envisaged, but it was not to be sniffed at either. Given that much in our culture exalts possession and its concomitant violence, I think the experimenting we tumbled into circumstantially was not just delirious folly. It was unknown, often bewildering and emotionally contorted, but not, as it turned out, unique to us.

Though we did not know of them, all kinds of attempts to overcome owning others personally as well as economically were appearing around that time in diverse forms and places. Years later I sat listening to an account of a utopian community created by hippies who had walked out of San Francisco in the late sixties. They set up an alternative society in the wild, which lasted for several years. Eventually, conflicts arose and many left, while those who remained transmogrified into local environmental activists. I went up and asked the speaker what had caused the unresolved splits. ‘Sexual jealousy’, he replied. That was it, in seeking to alter how we related by an effort of will, we underestimated the psychological power of feelings. Anger that is suppressed is liable to fester.

Pluto Press brought out Hidden from History in September. On David’s brief periods away from the hospital I recorded him as reading it ‘between snatched Guinnesses’, and acknowledged his ‘patience and sustained interest in my outpourings’.²⁵ Others had helped me in vital ways, including Val Clarke and Ann Scott, who had typed the handwritten manuscript and made comments. I was grateful to my editor Richard Kuper, who, like Neil Middleton, had the ability to enter into what I was trying to say and suggest how to express it more clearly. Women friends, Gloden Dallas in Leeds, Hermione Harris in Arsenal, Anna Davin from the History Workshops and many more, had talked with me on topics ranging from socialism and feminism in Leeds, to witchcraft and women’s work. Some, like the American socialist feminist, Barbara Winslow, had given me copies of material they had written. And the women with small children in my Workers’ Educational Association classes were responsible for the short chapters – they had grumbled that those in Women, Resistance and Revolution were too long.

I did cover, as planned, changes in work and daily life at home, but my own interest in women’s participation in political and social action is most evident. By concentrating on Britain I was able to look in greater depth at issues such as class and the suffrage movement as well as attitudes on the left to sex, love and birth control. I had discovered more about Communist and Labour sex reformers like Stella Browne and Dora Russell, and, through Bill Fishman – who had been the principal of the Further Education College in Jubilee Street, Stepney, where I’d taught during the sixties – was learning about anarchist women who lived in free unions because they opposed both religion and the state. Like Edward Thompson, Bill used the nickname Christopher Hill had given me at Oxford: ‘Tiger Tim’.²⁶

That autumn Jill Tweedie contrasted me with Arianna Stassinopoulos (later Huffington), who was maintaining that ‘women’s lib’ crushed the individuality of emancipated women. Though I was nervous about the exposure, Pluto Press were delighted by the publicity for Hidden from History. I emerged relatively unscathed except for Jill Tweedie’s reference to my ‘apricot’ hair, which led to much teasing; Edward threatened to abandon ‘Tiger Tim’ for ‘Apricot’.

Edward and Dorothy both liked Hidden from History, but Edward raised some intriguing doubts about my sketchy references at the end of the book to what happened to feminism and socialism in the thirties, forties and fifties. Recalling how many of the preoccupations with sexual equality had persisted among women in his generation, despite the rise of fascism and the war, he urged me to look more deeply under the surface of what seemed to be apparent in this period. I never really did this, though I learned exponentially from particular women active in radical causes about their lives in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Most remarkably, given that she was in her nineties, that October I received a long, reflective letter from Margery Corbett Ashby in response to Hidden from History. She observed how it was far more difficult to change emotional responses than intellectual ones:

Having taken part in feminist and liberal campaigns for over 70 years I have seen advance and retreats … but I fancy all progress in society is like the incoming tide, only the seventh wave gets really any further … The women’s freedom movement is so young historically that I am sure we have to do a lot of experimenting before we get a society which has completely accepted sex equality … I am sorry I shall not see future development. But it is wonderful to have seen such immense advance …²⁷

I must have written to her describing the formation of men’s groups, for she said she was ‘much interested’, comparing them to the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in her ‘young days’. She added, ‘They took a subordinate role, not interfering in policy making but being stewards at meetings, distributing pamphlets and very useful in the background at open air meetings.’²⁸

Bill Fishman had often spoken about two rebel women from London’s East End, Milly and Rose Witcop. On 9 September, I attended the centenary commemoration of the birth of Rudolf Rocker, the German anarcho-syndicalist who, in the early twentieth century, had organized in the mainly Jewish clothing industry. He had greatly upset the Ukrainian Jewish Witcop parents by living in a free union with their daughter Milly. Even worse, her younger sister Rose, who later was to campaign for birth control, had then done the same with the anarchist-communist, Guy Aldred. And there at the commemoration was none other than their son – also named Guy Aldred. With dour mirth Guy Aldred Junior remarked, ‘Rose and I had a problem in common, Guy Aldred.’

Briefly I found myself sitting on a bench with Lilian Wolfe, then in her late nineties. I knew something of her life from an article in Shrew, and a few weeks later I went off to find out more. When we met at the War Resisters’ International in Kings Cross she told me of her participation first in the Women’s Freedom League, campaigning for the vote, and then in the anarchist and anti-war movement. I was interested by her account of an anarchist community in Mecklenburgh Street, Bloomsbury, during the First World War, where domestic work was shared. She described how youngsters from Rudolf Rocker’s East End group used to come to dances on Saturday nights there. Envisaging wild rag-time, I enquired what kind of dances and was firmly told ‘waltzes’.²⁹

In 1916, Lilian and her partner, the anarchist compositor, Tom Keell, had both been imprisoned for printing a leaflet against the war. This was particularly harsh for Lilian, who was pregnant and a vegetarian; in gaol she begged to be given the cabbage water because she feared the prison diet would be harmful for the baby she was carrying. She and Tom Keell later went to live in the Cotswolds at the Tolstoyan community Whiteway Colony; then, after his death, she ran a health-food shop.

In the early sixties, when non-violent direct protests were coordinated through the Committee of 100 in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Lilian had been arrested for sitting down. This was the period in which I had become interested in left ideas and I could remember anarchism as a strong presence, as well as pacifism and socialism, in CND.³⁰ Lilian seemed not too bothered that I was not an anarchist, but was shocked to hear I was not a vegetarian. We parted as she mounted a bus, heading off to an exhibition of Chinese archaeo-logical finds at the Royal Academy.

Compared with Lilian Wolfe, the socialist feminist Dora Russell was a youthful seventy-nine when I made contact in autumn 1973. I had read her book, Hypatia (1925), and identified with the defiant assertion of sexual pleasure she had expressed so bravely. I was aware too that, like Rose Witcop and Stella Browne, she had campaigned for birth control during the twenties.

We corresponded and met on several occasions in London. Dora was initially wary, but we both quickly realized we had so many overlapping interests. She was particularly enthusiastic about Red Rag: ‘it seems to me that for the first time I find women talking their own language, not an appropriation to male language, which is what I have hoped all my life to see.’³¹ Before long I discovered that Dora was far more up front and frank than I was about sexual liberation. On one unforgettable occasion, over tea in a café by the London School of Economics, she declaimed in stentorian tones, ‘The trouble with men is that they just don’t understand women’s orgasms.’ Silence fell. The moment hung motionless as all eyes turned towards our table.

During October, Jeff Weeks, who I knew through a shared interest in radical history, invited me to a talk on Edward Carpenter at the LSE by Graeme Woolaston, a member of the Gay Culture Society. He was critical of Carpenter’s stereotyping of masculinity and femininity and of his idealization of the ‘Intermediate Sex’, but acknowledged his significance as a pioneer homosexual reformer.³² I was delighted that the gay movement was reviving an interest in Carpenter, but convinced that his sexual radicalism should be seen in the context of commitment to socialism and anarchism. I later spoke on Carpenter and the ‘simple life’, and Jeff gave a talk on the sex psychologist, Havelock Ellis. Jeff and I were both intrigued by the radical circles in which Carpenter and Ellis moved, and the Gay Culture Society planted the seed of our subsequent study of the two men’s lives and times, Socialism and the New Life (1977).

That autumn, along with Faith Evans and Ann Scott, I was enthusiastically encouraging the South African exile Ruth First to write on Olive Schreiner, the novelist with whom Ellis fell in love as a young man. Ruth was then uncertain about how to approach Olive Schreiner’s interest in transforming personal life and wanted to discuss this with me. Although I knew Ruth had been active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, I had only a sketchy grasp of her trial and subsequent imprisonment and was unaware of the extraordinary political courage of the woman who was seeking reassurance about her writing. She was far too modest and circumspect to disclose it. In collaboration with Ann Scott, Ruth’s Olive Schreiner: A Biography was to be published in 1980.³³

I went to Leicester to speak with Bea Campbell early in November, amicably disagreeing on Leninism and the Communist Party. I was aware that Bea, like her husband Bobby Campbell, was among those arguing within the CP for a more open attitude towards social movements like women’s liberation. Like all the left groups, (and indeed the women’s movement) the CP was far from homogeneous.

Though my attendance at Red Rag meetings had lapsed for a while, I felt connected to it and in November sent a letter with proposals for a pamphlet on socialist feminism and more historical articles. However, those at the core of the magazine were struggling with a fluctuating editorial collective and needed a committed band of doers. Sue O’Sullivan posted me the minutes which detailed ideas for a firmer structure.³⁴ Red Rag faced a dilemma which came up in many women’s liberation groups: how to remain open and non-hierarchical organizationally, while making democratic decisions and ensuring accountability when a course of action was adopted.

Each week I was going to meetings of the Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group. We had been writing a paper we delivered at the second socialist feminist conference that September, arguing that obscure Marxist language on one side and ‘anti-male’ attitudes on the other were making it difficult for the women’s movement to expand. We also made a plea for strategic direction. ‘Over the wide range of women’s activities – abortion, the family, women’s centres, claimants, equal pay, Trade Union involvement, anti-sex discrimination bill, night cleaners etc. isn’t there an area where Socialist Feminists could concentrate their action?’³⁵

We never did attain such coherence, for in practice socialist feminists did not operate like a party. We were a mixed bunch, having incorporated new adherents among women from left organizations. I privately nicknamed us the ‘Mrs Marxes’, because we tended to be less creatively adventurous than early women’s liberationists, if more polite than sections of the revolutionary left. Nevertheless, at socialist feminist meetings certain fundamental starting points could be taken for granted, and, as women’s liberation became increasingly disputatious, socialist feminism provided a more stable base for those of us who believed in wider social change.

Arsenal remained connected to the London Women’s Liberation Workshop despite growing worries about a prescriptive atmosphere within it. At one meeting a defiant Janet Rée talked personally about how she liked going shopping in Biba and choosing a lipstick. Janet crystallized doubts about how the impulse for changing ourselves personally, which had been a revelatory element in the early politics of women’s liberation, seemed to be somehow shifting into a new moralism about the feminist lifestyle. We began to question whether the aim was to create a movement of liberated women or a movement for the liberation of all women.

The need for a movement that could extend outwards was assuming an undeniable urgency. In August I had written an article for the New York Times headed, ‘The Renewed Militants’, describing the ways UK employers were evading the equal-pay legislation and giving some examples of women’s participation in strikes and occupations.³⁶ I drew on the material I had gathered for Arsenal’s Shrew and a subsequent list of women’s strikes compiled by Dave Phillips and Margaret Edney, a friend of Lynne Segal’s in Islington.³⁷

While none of the members of the Arsenal Group were economists, our political activism meant we had many questions about the effect of trade unions’ wage demands, about growing inflation and an increase in unemployment. There appeared to be an impasse. Edward Heath’s Conservative government had been forced to give up its attempts to control working-class militancy through legislation. Within the Labour Party, Tony Benn, radicalized through workers’ occupations, contact with shop stewards and the Institute for Workers’ Control, was stressing that the economy needed more than Labour’s proposed economic modernization and state investment. A shift of both power and wealth was required for these to have an equitable effect.

There was little theoretical clarity on a left alternative. From the early seventies the Conference of Socialist Economists had provided a vital forum for left-wing economic discussion, but tensions were appearing within it over the extent to which this meant following what Marx said or using his general approach in an empirical fashion.³⁸

In a muddle about how to understand the consequences of alternative left economic policies for women, Arsenal decided to call on two Bobs, Bob Sutcliffe and Bob Rowthorn. Both were economists influenced by Marxism and committed to looking at what was going on in the capitalist economy. While Bob Sutcliffe thought that workers’ resistance to the profits squeeze could lead to the collapse of capitalism, Bob Rowthorn was trying to think through how, if the Labour Party were to be elected, it might avoid a historical tendency to abandon, under pressure from capital, the promises it had made to working-class people.

Both speakers were clear, but their perspectives differed and I was left feeling flummoxed because I lacked sufficient background knowledge to assess critically what either had said or to form any view on the possible implications for women. I was relieved when Jean Gardiner, a former student of Bob Rowthorn’s, who had advised me so sensibly on reproductive labour in the family and Marx’s ‘modes of production’, came to speak on the economic crisis from an explicitly socialist feminist perspective.³⁹

With international oil prices soaring, the miners, whose pay rises of two years before were rapidly diminishing in value because of inflation, started to picket power stations. The prime minister, Edward Heath, was not prepared to compromise. Announcing a grave emergency, he promised us a harder Christmas than any since the war. In such extreme and dramatic industrial and political circumstances the ongoing needs of low-paid women workers were in danger of being passed over.

I had become painfully aware that it was far more tricky to change circumstances than to write about them. Though the Civil Service Union (CSU) had been able to negotiate increases for the cleaners these could not be continued if the contractor was changed. Women’s liberation leafleting was once again petering out in London, while May and Chris Hobbs were under severe pressure from non-stop agitating. Each week I had been collecting dues for the CSU from night cleaners in a building in the City to which they had asked me to go. Then, in December, May informed me that the cleaners in my building could not be recruited by the CSU. There had been a muddle. I was mortified; by mistake I had been fraudulently taking money for several months from low-paid women. In distress I added up the total amount I had collected and passed on to the union. Then I went to the bank and took it from my account. I divided it up, placed it in envelopes and wrote the names of the cleaners on each one.

I stood nervously in the foyer to wait for the women. They clustered round me as they arrived and, shamefacedly, I confessed the mistake. To my surprise, they showed little interest in my explanatory details. In contrast, my envelopes, though they contained relatively small sums, were greeted with jubilation. Slowly it dawned on me that while the women had not had any previous contact with unions, they were all familiar with turkey clubs, informal ways of saving for Christmas. They regarded me as the turkey lady and the union as a kind of distant turkey club.

Defeated, I gave up leafleting. Our attempt to unionize night cleaners had succeeded in raising awareness about their conditions, but lasting gains had proved elusive. Sporadic efforts were made elsewhere and other strategies would be adopted in the future. We were not to know that their circumstances as contract workers which made them seem so exceptional were to set a pattern that would gradually pervade more and more conditions of work. It was not, however, the end of a connection between the women’s movement and the unions. Instead, over the next few years, the links actually became much stronger, though in quite different ways.

6

1974

At the beginning of January Dora Russell sent a delightful letter pronouncing on Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, which had been published at the end of the previous year. ‘We need books written by women out of their own thought and experience.’ She then announced, ‘If you will allow me, I would like to adopt you as my “feminist granddaughter” – I am afraid it will not carry any advantage to you, other than my regard and affection.’¹ I read this with a chuckle of pleasure. I had no living grandparents and I felt a close affinity with Dora and the other women I had been meeting whose memories reached back so much further than mine.

Such positive approval from a feminist veteran was especially welcome because two quite different friends did not like Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World at all. Bea Campbell dismissed it as outdated, while Edward Thompson thought I was addressing a narrow group of people who shared my views. Edward’s letters in the early seventies were dense and convoluted, mixing encouragement and help with a diffuse sense of dismay. Now I suspect that he was aware of the endangered fragility of the socialist humanism that had inspired Dorothy and himself from the mid-fifties. But at the time it felt simply as if he was trying to communicate something unstated, some elusive sensibility that left me guessing. I was living at such a breathless pace and could only partially comprehend what he was trying to say. I consequently evaded responding and Edward was distressed that I failed to engage. We did not become estranged, but a troubling disconnection had arisen within our friendship.

In contrast, Dorothy wrote cheery letters about their daily doings. In one of these she urged me to go to see Trevor Griffiths’s new play at the National Theatre, The Party. It was set in 1968 and Laurence Olivier played John Tagg, a fictional leader of a small Trotskyist group. Other characters included non-aligned leftists including one from Agit Prop, a radical cultural communications network I had helped to form. I had never heard such dialogue spoken in actuality, but watching them spinning around one another on the stage was sobering. It was as if Trevor had caught a barely perceptible drawing of breath that belonged to the immediate present; the momentum of the late sixties was fading into ‘the past’.

In a letter to Carole Turbin in New York on 8 January, apologizing for my delay in responding, I explained tersely, ‘Can’t keep up with things I have to do.’ I was gloomy that the labour movement had not been able to mobilize ‘against the imprisonment of Shrewsbury 3’.² The three building workers had been arrested five months after the first ever national building workers’ strike had been won in September 1972. Although police had been present during the picketing in Shrewsbury and had laid no complaints against them at the time, the charges were serious: conspiracy to intimidate, unlawful assembly and affray. All three were sent to prison, an injustice only admitted in 2021 after a long campaign.³

The government was resorting to draconian measures. On 31 December 1973, Heath had introduced the three-day week and power cuts were leaving people working in semi-darkness. It was curiously reminiscent of my early childhood just after the war, when frequent cuts accustomed us to oil lamps. I reported to Carole how everything closed at odd times. Squashing my summary of the state of the nation into the last bit of the letter, I declared, ‘the whole thing is being so played up by Heath that it feels unreal. Troops round Heathrow doing mysterious exercises….’⁴ I ended with a reference to a feeling of impotence and ‘undefined anxiety’ on the left.⁵ The Evening Standard relayed the official government explanation for the armed police, troops and Scorpion light tanks prowling around the airport as being a public relations manoeuvre, designed to accustom us to troops on the streets! This implied that adjusting to the presence of tanks and soldiers was a new norm and did little to assuage disquiet.

The miners were soon to go on strike and, along with other socialist feminists, I joined with women in the International Marxist Group and International Socialism to support women in mining communities.⁶ Two elections would follow in 1974. Labour was in power from February, but on the defensive because it lacked a decisive majority.

When the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) called a ‘Women’s Rights Conference’, Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group decided to support it.⁷ We researched and wrote a collective paper, ‘The Further Education & Training of Girls’. Several members of Arsenal – Caroline Bond, Jean McCrindle, Janet Rée, Liz Waugh and myself – had all worked in schools or in Further Education, and the group agreed with the NCCL’s criticisms of the Anti-Discrimination Bill for ignoring how girls’ low expectations were reinforced and maintained by the prevailing culture. That February Sue Sharpe and I took the group’s paper to the conference as delegates.

The NCCL, which included women from the Labour and Communist parties, constituted a strategic bridge between the old left and women’s liberation. The conference attracted 500 delegates, bringing older women trade unionists from the bakers’ union, as well as from the engineering, printing, textiles, clothing and tobacco industries, into direct contact with younger women’s contingents, the majority of whom were in white-collar unions. I recognized a few of these, including Glad West from the Starcross National Union of Teachers’ branch and Marian Sedley, last sighted on Arran climbing Goat Fell with Chris Rawlence.

Betty Harrison, ex-Tobacco Workers’ Union, ex-member of the Independent Labour Party and a Communist Party stalwart, paid tribute to the great contribution of women’s liberation in tones of resounding gravitas, and we, for whom fuss was alien, fluffed out our chests in pride. Unlike my generation, who were profligate in our expenditure of political energy, sections of the old left had learned over the years that ‘cadres’ blossomed with a bit of honouring. The trade union women, for their part, were glad to find a forum in which they could grumble about male chauvinism in a political context and describe women’s problems outside, as well as within, the workplace.

The NCCL conference was followed through on 19 March by a London Trades Council conference which was open to non-trade-union women. Here, too, the interaction between work and daily life in communities surfaced. As a result of pressure from feminists and women in the trade unions, the Working Women’s Charter was set up to campaign for greater equality in pay, job opportunities and training, along with abortion rights, improved maternity leave, increased family allowances and more free child care.⁸ Its demands thus spanned women’s personal and social needs as well as conditions and pay at work.

I could recognize the significance of these connections, yet I felt uneasy; claiming rights tended to eclipse the emphasis in the early seventies on going beyond existing aspirations which had been carried in the word ‘liberation’. A cartoon in Shrew had put it in a nutshell. ‘Hey lady – Do you want to be equal with me?’ barks a male chauvinist. ‘Actually we were hoping for something better’, replies the women’s liberationist.⁹

Because women’s liberation was a movement, it contained divergent strands. While the campaigns were making demands upon the state based on women’s immediate needs, many feminists were critical of the manner in which state welfare bolstered the existing structure of the family, encouraging dependency and conformity and leaving women who did not ‘fit’ in a despised and subordinate position. There was similar suspicion of the male bias in the medical profession when it came to women’s health. As a result a wariness existed about state funding. Socialist feminists extended criticism of the state to the use of force in Northern Ireland, repression in response to strikers, the persistence of racism in the police force, immigration controls and the extension of state surveillance – all of which affected women as well as men.

However, in practice not all feminists went along with these anti-state sentiments completely. We took part after all in campaigns for family allowances, free contraception, abortion and anti-discrimination laws. We also sought state funding for Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis Centres as well as for child care projects. These contradictory responses, which arose from divergent experiences, continued to coexist. They resulted in sporadic disputes and could thwart attempts to make broad alliances for social reforms. I was particularly troubled by Val Charlton’s account of how they had stymied a much-needed nursery campaign.¹⁰

I had puzzled away about how to break the log-jam to no avail, but by 1974 I was able to detect signs that the dichotomy was starting to shift. Community groups were seeking to gain resources from the local state, while retaining control over projects. A resolve to democratize state services was evident among some trade unionists, and grassroots links between workers and users were appearing. Thus state services were being contested from within as well as from without.

In the spring of 1974, when left-wing women social workers produced an impressive issue of the rank-and-file paper Case Con, they revealed from personal experience how coercion – albeit covered in heavy-duty gloves – was applied in dealings with unsupported mothers, teenage girls, battered women and women prisoners. An article by Elizabeth Wilson and Angela Weir analysed the historical role and implicit values of casework, and Myra Garrett, a member of the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO), stressed the importance of unionization.¹¹ Myra was in my Central London WEA class near Euston and it was she who made me aware of this critical consciousness among social workers, many of whom were women. They were dissatisfied not simply about their own conditions but about what they were being expected to do in their jobs and because the social value of care was being threatened.

They marked out the contours of a sustained resistance that was to intensify in the second half of the seventies. We socialist feminists were to live within this dissident rebellion without a phrase to encapsulate it, until in 1979 a group associated with the Conference of Socialist Economists, called ‘The London to Edinburgh Weekend Return Group’, summed it up as In and Against the State. Instead of approaching the state in capitalism as an entity to be simply seized, substituted or circumnavigated, they regarded it as composed of multiple relations of power which had to be contested. They drew on an extensive body of direct experience.

The women’s issue of Case Con appeared amid an extraordinary rebellion among members of NALGO. London typists, architects, housing officers, telephonists, administrators and social workers were demonstrating, while some social service workers in Islington adapted the tactic of flying pickets. I heard about this not only from members of my WEA class but from the Hackney social worker, Joanna Bock, who was frequently at 12 Montague Road with Nigel Fountain.

In the early months of 1974, Paul too was in the midst of tumult as conflict mounted between the squatters’ organization in Brixton and the local council. This led to innumerable meetings. On top of these wrangles, Paul was doing his electrical wiring, WEA classes and leafleting at Ford, not to mention taking part in demonstrations.

Yet somehow we were managing to snatch intense patches of time together. On occasions I was incorporated in the wiring, pushing cables through holes in the floorboards. In February I visited his WEA class in Epping and he came with me up to Lancaster when I spoke at Keele University. I have no memory of what I was speaking about, only of us sitting on a bench in a shopping centre and feeling benignly happy.

On this trip we carried on to Leeds and York and then visited Paul’s parents, George and Norah, in Nottingham. They welcomed me warmly from the start. If either of them thought my arrival in their lives was peculiar, they never showed it. They just took me as they found me – possibly because more or less everything Paul had done was strange to them, from studying classics at grammar school to reading about medieval monks and peasants at university.

George was a skilled electrician, and it was he who had trained his eldest son. A staunch republican, he would embarrass Norah by refusing to stand for the national anthem when it was played at his working men’s club. His time in the navy during the war had left him with a deep loathing of war. Politically he veered sometimes towards Tony Benn and Labour, but at others would remember he was a self-employed businessman and turn into a Tory. The one constant factor was an underlying cynicism about the intentions and behaviour of governments and their establishment accoutrements.

Norah, in contrast, as far as I could see, was cynical about nothing at all. In her childhood she had been very poor after her father left her mother, and the house George had eventually been able to buy in a Nottingham suburb was a source of great pride to her. She was a keen gardener and a resolute organizer when it came to getting George to help her with frequent redecorating.

Though ostensibly a normal housewife, Norah was an undercover dreamer, evading observation under a smokescreen of conformity. She glided away into Hollywood films, gossip about royals, and dancing. George did not enjoy dances, so she used to go off in her ball gowns with her women friends. While George used to talk about topics of the day, Norah could chat long and hard about nothing in particular. I liked chatting with her. But I still referred to them formally as Mr and Mrs Atkinson.

Paul was tussling psychologically over the impact of his transition as a working-class boy in Nottingham via teachers at Mundella Grammar School to university. While I had thought about and studied the implications of class and education historically, Paul’s personal experiences registered emotionally, permeating a review I did for Spare Rib of Nigel Gray’s book about the Angry Young Men of the late fifties and early sixties. The cultural context differed, but I could see similar dilemmas remained, asking, ‘how an oppressed group can express and recognize its own perception of itself and at the same time break out of the circumstances which impose silence. These are problems of language and history but they are ultimately political and confront not only working class but women and black and gay people too.’¹²

Snatching happiness in spasms took its toll. One of the drawbacks of what I had named our ‘duogamy’ was proving to be a lack of any continuous calm time. This was further exacerbated by the round of work and meetings. Towards the end of March I was weary of teaching and giving talks, muttering to Carole Turbin about ‘complex emotional & sexual complications which really absorb so much energy’.¹³

For several months David and I had been planning to spend part of the summer in the United States. I have no memory of this being a conscious quest to discover if we wished to be together, it was rather an unspoken recognition of a need for space. Characteristically, instead of venturing towards a period of inner meditation, we started filling our diaries with things to do. David had been asked to speak at the American International Socialist Rank and File Conference by Barbara Winslow and her then husband Cal. I had some talks lined up at American universities for which, to my amazement, I was to be paid. Heretically, I was beginning to grasp that sometimes it was better to be paid for getting exhausted than limping around for nothing.

Our trip had become more complicated because David had recently formed a relationship with Marsha Rowe, who was busy producing Spare Rib. Hence departing for both of us involved separating ourselves from someone else. We had stumbled into yet another unforeseen consequence of duogamy.

Before David and I left for the US, Paul came up with the idea of a week’s holiday over Easter in a van touring around Cornwall and sleeping out close to nature. I thought it sounded very romantic. We drifted off southwards, stopping at Glastonbury en route – I scanned the horizon but no hippies or Holy Grails appeared through the mist. The weather was damp, but Paul, a former Queen’s Scout, was undaunted. He had packed a tube tent – a kind of elongated see-through plastic bag open at each end. I bowed to his expertise and woke up drenched – not from rain but from condensation. I protested vehemently and insisted on abandoning nature for the van. No further adversities struck and I spent a week of rare calm and contentment exploring Cornwall. Paul had learned to read history from the landscape and could spot ancient field systems from signs of ridge and furrow; I peered in awe at bumps in the grass, half expecting some medieval peasant to rise out of the earth.

We travelled along the coast to Porthcurno and, after some difficulty, found our way to Dora Russell at Carn Voel, a house in a windy spot lurching out towards the Celtic Sea. She welcomed us effusively, especially Paul. While Dora animatedly extolled to a bewildered Paul the wonders of cooperative greenhouses growing fruit and cucumbers on a mass scale in Albania and Bulgaria, I noted snidely to myself, ‘So much for all that socialist feminist granddaughter stuff.’

I cast my eyes around. I was used to scruffy communal houses but Dora’s, in contrast, was a scruffiness that had settled upon an antiquated shabby elegance. One large brown leather sofa seemed to be disgorging its contents as if in protest against being disregarded. I rebuked myself inwardly for being petty and mean. Dora might be lonely and finding domestic upkeep difficult as a pensioner without much money. After all, how would I mend a leather sofa? And, even if she was flirting with Paul, I still loved her frankness.

Upon leaving, Paul and I walked down to the white beach nearby and I began to understand how Dora had come to attach herself to the house. Later I would read her forthright account of her life, The Tamarisk Tree (1975), and reflect what tales of the radical intelligentsia Carn Voel could add if walls had ears and a pen.¹⁴

Meeting Dora had intensified my interest in the movement for sexual freedom between the wars. I also gained an insight into the personal networks of the women involved, for Dora had met both Alexandra Kollontai from the Soviet Union and the iconoclastic Canadian, Stella Browne, who was an early campaigner for abortion as well as birth control. I had come across Stella Browne while writing Hidden from History and had started to read everything I could find by and about her. Encouraged by Jeff Weeks, I had also started to research Edward Carpenter’s life and writings in more depth. As I followed these trails I became more and more interested in the history of ideas about sexual freedom and the left. The more I learned, the harder it became to sum up. I wrote ‘History’ in the early seventies:

I cannot quite get hold of history

I take it around with me,

bags and parcels

I never quite explore.

One day I’ll go right through.

One day I’ll really know

exactly what

I lug about.

But somehow I never find the time

to settle down

and search.

I often want to fling the lot

out

into time,

jump

on a moving bus

and steam into the future

driving a red double-decker.

Instead, I stand

sniffing the dust

my parcels wrapped around me

bolstering the night.¹⁵

Hidden from History had been bought by the innovative radical publisher André Schiffrin for Pantheon in New York. Not only had André published Women, Resistance and Revolution, he had fought hard for it to go into paperback, whereupon it had sold in thousands mainly through word of mouth. When Neil Middleton had introduced me to him in London I was puzzled by André’s tweed jacket and elbow patches, popular among academics when I was a student; it gave him an air of studied Britishness. I learned later how André’s family had been forced to flee from France in 1940 because of the Nazi occupation. While being brought up in America, he retained a close cultural attachment to Europe, and indeed to Britain where he had studied.

André wanted an explanatory introduction to Hidden from History for American readers. Instead my ‘Introduction to the American Edition’ went way beyond the scope of the book itself, whizzing along through Marxism, labour history and the early women’s history pioneered by Alice Clark in Britain and Mary Ritter Beard in the US.

It was driven by my excitement about ‘a living relationship’ with questions raised from participating in women’s liberation.¹⁶ Aware that politics alone was too constricting, and searching for a broader impetus, I wrote, ‘Our history strengthens us in the present by connecting to the lives of countless women. Threads and strands of long lost experience weave into the present.’¹⁷ I knew that this shared process of discovery could enable us to uncover and articulate a new ‘cultural sense of what it is to be a woman in a world defined by men … We are heaving ourselves into history.’¹⁸

It was much harder to explain quite how my own fascination with the past had arisen. It had been there from early childhood, but quite why remained a befogging mystery. I do, however, describe a figure who made me see that past and present politics might connect – my history teacher Olga Wilkinson. When I was thirteen in 1956, she had taught us about Palmerston bringing out gunboats to protect British prestige, while poking fun at Anthony Eden for going into Suez. That jokey aside under-cut my Conservative upbringing, ‘The Nation and Empire, … began to stagger before my eyes.’¹⁹

Olga came from a farming family in East Yorkshire, she was a Methodist and a staunch Liberal. I describe her as disdaining fanaticism, along with all manifestations of enthusiasm, while opting for ‘baroque architecture and classically tailored clothes’.²⁰ She later told me how she had read my account of her with a ‘horrid fascination’, adding that she remembered me as a ‘stimulating bundle of enthusiasm, rather obscured by a curtain of hair which was always falling over your face’.²¹ She was not simply an exacting history teacher, but the first intellectual I had ever met.

My ‘Introduction’ is dated May 1974, but I added to it at proof stage, quoting at length from a beautiful autobiographical article by Alice Walker, ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, published that June. She describes her mother’s ceaseless labour in the fields as well as for her family, along with her stories and the artistry she expressed through her plants.²²

Luckily my editor, Susan Gyarmati, wanted only minor changes, including one that was amusing – an explanation of who Nell Gwyn was. Because she featured on British marmalade jars, I had assumed she was known in the US. But Americans did not eat much marmalade, nor were most of them conversant with King Charles II’s mistresses.

David and I left for New York on 13 May and the next seven weeks were passed hospitably with friends and people who became friends. We both had felt gloomy as the plane took us away from London, and I was exceedingly glad to be greeted by Carole Turbin and Bill Miller, who had come to feel close and familiar.²³ It was also good to meet up with Juliet Mitchell, who was visiting New York for a TV debate with Stassinopoulos. Juliet’s Woman’s Estate had been published in the States and she was friendly with André Schiffrin.

I was nervous about going to Pantheon, a division of the much larger publishers Random House, but found an office full of friendly women, the men being away. I told Paul that I met all the secretaries and the ‘person who puts reviews in envelopes who is from Denver, Colorado’.²⁴ Unfamiliar with New York offices, ‘I congratulated them on the speed of their lifts, which they seemed to find very funny. In fact they seemed to find me very funny altogether.’ Perhaps they had expected some European monster woman, for they remarked on how young I looked and thought I ‘talked very cute’.²⁵ I was surprised that they seemed strangely curious to meet me. The visit to Pantheon made me comprehend that because of my books, my name was known to people across the Atlantic who had never seen me. I was simultaneously gratified and startled, writing apprehensively to Paul, ‘I appear to be famous here which is embarrassing.’²⁶

When we moved on to stay with Ros Baxandall and her husband Lee, introductions were a little strained at first. I had imagined her as frighteningly intellectual and serious; while Ros, a tall, blonde and funny New Yorker, was inclined to suspect English socialist visitors of being ‘snotty’. But once we started to talk, overlapping enthusiasms and humour melted the stiffness on both sides. Ros had been notified that David and I were a ‘devoted couple’ and ‘roared’ with laughter when ‘duogamy’ was ‘revealed’.²⁷

Ros’s passionate engagement with left causes, radical culture and history was without end. She was full of gossipy stories about people ranging from surrealist women to left-wingers like Henriette Roland Holst and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, as well as countless contemporary leftists and feminists. I remarked to Paul that, rather like me, she was ‘Always connecting people to people & learning about what’s going on.’²⁸

But Ros was far more demonstrative than I was, moving around quickly and flailing her arms about to emphasize points. Our backgrounds were very different too. In contrast to my Conservative Yorkshire family, she was a ‘red diaper baby’ with parents who were prominent Communists, and her great uncle was Meyer London, a Russian Jewish immigrant who had been a Socialist Party Congressional Representative. She and Lee had become active in the New Left while students at Wisconsin.²⁹

Lee said less. He was more serious and considered than Ros, beaming from time to time with slightly abstracted flashes of warmth. We learned (from Ros) that a Baxandall grandfather had migrated from Bradford, and that Lee had grown up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in a Republican family. She informed us that he was interested in Wilhelm Reich, the German sex psychologist, and was also writing a book on Marxist aesthetics, which aloof Polish theorists came to discuss with him.

Lee and Ros lived in a flat at 79 St Mark’s Place, a rickety old building in the East Village, with their son Phiny, short for Phineus, who I described to Paul as ‘very nice & very reassuring. He sells shells he paints on the doorstep and buys his own fancy shirts and jackets.’³⁰ This was, after all, the Village in the early seventies. David and I were impressed to learn that the flat was next to a print shop that Trotsky had used. The brown-stained bath in the flat looked very old, so old I imagined that Trotsky himself could have sat in it. When I came to know more about Americans I would learn that baths were rare, they apparently favoured showers. Ros it seemed was unusual.

I enjoyed going to speak to Ros’s class at Old Westbury, a college that attracted both white and black working-class students. As usual I bore bundles of publications, and presented a woman machinist with Audrey Wise’s pamphlet, Women and Workers’ Control. In my talk I mentioned that many of us had become interested in women’s liberation in an effort to overcome our sense of dependence on men. A young working-class African American woman sliced through my assumption that this was a shared predicament: ‘For those of us who have never had any of this dependence we would like to see some more of it. Then we might be rejecting it.’ I did not forget what she was telling me. Entry points to women’s rebellion come from differing circumstances.

I had been asked to speak at colleges in New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts, including in Northampton by the recently formed Valley Women’s Union, and so David and I departed on a tour. Already surprised by the response to me from the women at Pantheon, I was uncomfortable about speaking and meeting people, being abashed by the open praise that came so naturally to many Americans. When a young woman stood up and thanked me warmly for Women, Resistance and Revolution, British reserve, Yorkshire embarrassment about effusive sentiments and the dangers of ‘side’, blended with my women’s liberation horror at individual celebrity. I reacted with a series of dismissive grunts. I must have appeared begrudging and churlish. We might speak the same language but I was discovering unexpected gaps of mutual incomprehension. I would later learn from Ros that low-key restraint just made Brits seem dissembling and ‘tight arsed’.

Cambridge, where the weather was grey and damp, was reassuring. Sheli and Henry Wortis, who had left Tufnell Park, were back in Massachusetts and familiar with the down-beat ways of the British left. When they took us on historical outings to Plymouth and Salem I was overcome by the early privations of the Americans’ Puritan rebel forebears, before sternly reminding myself that they and their descendants had proceeded to decimate native Americans and prosper from the labour of slaves from Africa.

We stayed at the home of Margery Davies, who was just beginning her study of the impact of technology, through the typewriter, upon women’s clerical employment. Along with Linda Gordon and Allen Hunter, she was part of the group producing Radical America. The journal had originated in the Wisconsin student New Left and had carried on developing oppositional ideas and radical cultural inspiration from a mix of working-class and new social movement politics. I loved its open-ended Marxism and its combination of a resolute American energy with internationalism.

In Cambridge I discovered a gang of soulmates committed to making a democratic new left, while being absorbed in learning about the history of radical ideas and organizing in the past. This was my first meeting with Linda Gordon, though we had corresponded. She was researching her first book, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976), and I bonded with her instantly, thrilled to learn she had come across letters between Stella Browne and the American socialist birth control activist, Margaret Sanger.

I also tracked down Marian Leighton, whose work I had seen in the anarchist journal Black Rose, discovering that not only was she interested in the French Communard Louise Michel, she was also part of a network who had followed in the steps of the early collectors of American folk music, travelling around to listen to Appalachian singers. They had then founded Rounder Records.

I had become interested in British folk music during the mid-sixties. But by 1974, with the exception of the Glaswegian Communist musician, Bobby Campbell, most people I knew saw it as passé, while country music was dismissed as reactionary. Now, through Marian and Rounder Records, I heard American women singers like Aunt Molly Jackson from the thirties, her younger sister, Sarah Ogan Gunning, and also two more recent Bluegrass ones, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. So records joined the books that David and I were acquiring. Among them was Mountain Moving Day, with The Chicago and New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Bands belting out sisterhood.

We went to New Haven to visit Ros’s sister, Harriet Fraad, a psychotherapist, and her husband Rick Wolff, a Marxist economist at Yale. While we were there I read the papers of a radical friend of Edward Carpenter’s, John Harrison Riley, in the archive and busied myself blocking up the toilets with paper in solidarity with the university cleaners who were on strike.³¹

Our next stop by bus was Barbara and Cal Winslow’s home in Cleveland, where Barbara played me Loretta Lynn records and I became a fan of ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ and ‘A Honky Tonk Girl’. They also took us to Detroit for the International Socialist Rank and File Conference, where I gazed with a mixture of horror and wonder at the tenacious industrial sprawl of the River Rouge Ford plant and met my first woman truck driver – American women were ahead of us in Britain on taking ‘male’ jobs. David and I both spoke at this IS gathering.

The conference was no sooner over than we were going down south on a two-day journey to Kentucky in the back of Barbara and Cal’s Volkswagen. It was crushed and I was relieved when we finally stopped for the night, though everyone else was in deep distress as we had landed in a ‘dry’ county, with not a drink to be had. Our destination was Brookside, Harlan County, where miners were striking for the right to join the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in order to gain better safety conditions, along with medical and pension benefits. The owners, Eastover Coal Company, a subsidiary of the big Duke Power Company, had refused to recognize the UMWA, and in July 1973, after a month of negotiating, the miners had walked out.

I was familiar with British colliery areas but nothing had prepared me for Brookside. Amid the beautiful green hills, the miners, white and black, mainly lived in small wooden houses with inch-thin walls; they had no running water and no indoor toilets or bathrooms. Only a minority had corrugated iron homes or trailers. I was shocked to see women in their thirties with worn faces and often few teeth because they had no affordable health care. This was the ‘other America’, hidden from view.

Eastover had hired tough security men and scabs who drove through the pickets. They had also secured a legal injunction restricting pickets to three at a time, and some of the strikers were arrested and imprisoned. We heard from the Brookside women how they had organized a protest march and then stood on the picket line themselves. When the state police arrived, Betty Eldridge told us, ‘We realized we couldn’t fight the state police, so we just lay down in the road.’³² They had been arrested and taken to the jailhouse with their children, where the floor was infested with bugs. For seven days, they defied their jailers’ orders to mop it and resisted attempts by welfare workers to take their children from them. When they appeared in court, Mary Widener observed, ‘They didn’t call us ladies or women or mothers, they called us females. Ladies don’t stand on picket lines.’³³

Afterwards, they formed the Brookside Women’s Club, raising money by making coffee and doughnuts for a fund to buy medicines and Christmas presents for the children. Meeting together sustained their courage to resist and they continued to picket. But the strike had been long drawn out, and Betty Eldridge acknowledged that their numbers had dwindled. She explained that having lived in the North for twelve years, she was aware of very different conditions. She had returned partly because her parents were growing older, adding wistfully, ‘I love these mountains.’ She reflected bitterly, ‘The operators really don’t care, the men are expendable.’³⁴

Minnie Lunsford put it more bluntly, ‘The operators, they don’t think as much of a miner as they do a dog.’³⁵ She explained that, despite being in her seventies, she had kept going on the picket line in all weathers because she could remember strikes in the thirties and the much-hated sheriff ‘J.H. Blair’, whose brutality had moved Florence Reece to write, ‘Which Side Are You On’ to the tune of a Baptist hymn. According to Minnie Lunsford, ‘Age and looks don’t count one bit. It’s what you feel and what you have got in you and what you want other people to have – things we never had – and what you believe in.’³⁶ The older woman’s resolution kept Betty Eldridge going on the picket line when she longed to stay at home. People were happy to talk to us, the women sitting on the steps of their homes as the children played in the river. They had seen the film Salt of the Earth, and Minnie Lunsford remarked, ‘We’ve met people we didn’t hardly know existed.’³⁷

Houston Elmore, the young organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, drove us to meet the Union Committee. He looked like a militant Elvis Presley, and introduced himself with a disarming smile as ‘half Welsh and half Cherokee’. Nervously, I noticed a gun in a holster in the back window of the car, and he said that he carried it for protection. Harlan County, Kentucky was still a dangerous place in which to support a strike. Indeed at the end of August, just before a settlement was negotiated, a striker was shot dead.³⁸

The Committee men had become accustomed to visitors, recounting how Joe Gormley from the British NUM had preceded us. He had upset one young miner called Gerry by drinking warm beer. The miners of Harlan County would have been even more put out had they known that Gormley was an informer for the Special Branch in Britain at the time.³⁹ I told Paul that, having visited Boston to campaign for support, Gerry was ‘sassed’ about women’s liberation.⁴⁰ He and the other men were, however, amazed to hear of squatting in Britain. ‘You mean they’re not shot!’ they exclaimed.

On our way back we stayed in the Holiday Inn at Cumberland Gap. A motel was a mythical American movie event for me and, even better, this one had an outdoor swimming pool. Barbara took a colour photograph of me grinning in the blue water. I managed to write to Paul on Holiday Inn note-paper, but corresponding felt like plopping stones into a pond. Although a letter from him had reached me when I was in Boston, our wanderings meant I was never to be in any place long enough to have a postal address. Eventually we arrived at Ros and Lee’s house in Truro, Cape Cod, to find bundles of letters waiting.

David and I were grateful to be able to rest. The ocean and many lakes were within easy reach and the house was an intriguing mix of old and new. Originally a corner store, it had retained its wooden floors and panelling. Ros’s room was perched up steep old stairs that led from the living room and contained a bed, a wardrobe and her desk.

Truro turned out not to be entirely restful. Ros and Lee were in conflict and denounced each other with alarming vehemence. Phineas (Phiny) was fed up and did not welcome our arrival, hurling hairbrushes and other missiles designed to deter English guests over the top of the partition dividing our rooms downstairs. Despite these unpropitious circumstances, I was able to make my peace by moulding heads of papier mâché puppets with him. In a letter to ‘All’ at 12 Montague Road I commented approvingly, ‘Phiny is just a really pleasant person to be with who happens to be 8.’ Spending time with Ros was a delight. Not only did so many of our interests overlap, so did our beings. ‘She’s very funny,’ I wrote, ‘gets involved in far too many things at the same time, knows loads of people and accumulates immense sexual complications.’⁴¹

David did not share my love of swimming in the sea and was less happy at the Cape, reporting to Paul, ‘Everything is rather tempestuous here – rows & lovers and things.’ He quipped too about being ‘hegemonised’ by my celebrity treatment, grumbling that he ‘got a bit squashed – even IS here were more interested in S.R. than me’.⁴² He’d decided that he and Paul should see more of one another and wondered about playing squash. I never did see either of them playing squash.

Ros recalled many years later how David and I used to scurry down anxiously to the post office, hoping for letters from Marsha and Paul. Missives were still arriving after we left for Britain and were sent on by Ros early in July, with a letter about her difficulties in finishing an introduction to her collection of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s writings.⁴³ A card came too, saying ‘I feel real warm & friendly & would like to see you again.’ She had enjoyed meeting David a lot as well, commenting how he had not lost ‘his zest and spirit’. The problem for many men she thought was that ‘somehow once they got over their chauvinism their life leaked out’.⁴⁴

The visit to America had been revelatory for me, I learned so much and made deep friendships. After overcoming my initial apprehension, I gained the confidence to speak in public in another country. Yet touring around also placed David and myself in stressful circumstances which we had not envisaged.

In the weeks that Paul and I were apart, despite everything I was doing, I had continued to miss him. Absence had created a mental haze of expectation around being together again. But when I returned to London I could see his life had filled up. As well as the squatters’ organizing, he was going to meetings against fascism and a Freud reading group. There was also an incipient men’s group. In one of his letters to me in America, Paul had described how they were talking about relationships, adding how important it was for him to ‘connect intellect and emotion, it’s the latter that evades articulation for me’.⁴⁵ Paul and his friends in Brixton and East London had started to discuss the impact of women’s liberation upon them. They were beginning to try and trace how their masculinity had been shaped from childhood. The men’s group was to lead him towards Radical Therapy, which stressed mutual aid and linked psychology with outer changes in society.

It used to be me who was the frantically busy one, now it was Paul. But more worryingly I perceived not just an external shift but an inward one.

This is how I felt that summer:

A love

fitted in

between

outposts,

split strong

over margins.

Its unworded

sureness

prising

the hub

of me.

Until I left you,

and returned

to find

a dark stranger

loath and uneasy

in my arms.

When you flinch

from me,

my love

turns inward

and consumes

me.⁴⁶

The unease hovered between us, but so did the powerful impulse for connection.

After going through about fifty letters waiting for me on my return from the States, I described myself to Carole Turbin on 11 July as ‘curiously unoccupied’.⁴⁷ Though I was not teaching during the summer, the lull was not to last. I was soon absorbed in writing up the visit to Brookside in an article which eventually found its way into the union paper, The Miner, while doing yet another for Spare Rib, called ‘Mountain Women Blues’, on the music of Aunt Molly Jackson, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. They sang of the contempt of city people for the rural poor as well as the longings of the ‘custom-made woman’ caught between old and new ways of being. Their music communicated yearning and a sense of loss, and the words of their songs tingled on the edge of my fingers as I wrote.⁴⁸ Spare Rib illustrated it with wonderful photographs from Cecil Sharp House.

These American women’s voices flowed into discussions with Jean McCrindle and we decided to co-edit a collection of oral interviews with working-class and lower-middle-class British women, which later became Dutiful Daughters: Women Talk about Their Lives (1977). Pursuing their life stories would take us all over the country; when we stayed with Gloden Dallas in Leeds, I remember her teasing us as London softies because, on reaching the North, we shivered in our London summer clothes. Summer stops earlier as you head northwards.

For some time, Gloden too had been interviewing women who had been active in both the suffrage and socialist movements. She had acquired a veritable fount of knowledge about women whose political and individual lives had indeed been ‘hidden from history’, and was hoping to write on Isabella Ford, a late nineteenth-century Leeds socialist and feminist, who had been a friend of Edward Carpenter.

Gloden and I had come to realize that women active in the movement for the vote had often also been involved in other causes, and we used to talk excitedly about the interweaving political and personal trails we were intent on pursuing. With Suzie Fleming, Gloden had interviewed Jessie Stephen, a former domestic servant, who in her youth had been a suffragette in Glasgow and then a member of the Workers’ Birth Control movement.⁴⁹ Gloden chortled over a humorous aside, delivered sotto voce about Ramsay MacDonald, ‘Best pair of legs in the labour movement.’

On a short holiday in Whitby that summer with Gloden and her family, I rediscovered a place filled with childhood memories – smugglers, sand, Captain Cook, climbing the abbey steps. When we spotted a small cottage for sale in Blackburn’s Yard, off Church Street, we began to fantasize about buying it. Although my parents had both died in the sixties, their wills had only recently been settled; this, combined with Gloden’s grasp of the practicalities of house purchasing, meant the holiday dream became a reality. My old university friend, the Communist solicitor Mike Seifert, advised us to draw up a formal arrangement of co-ownership. I paid the money I had inherited, around £4,000, and Gloden agreed to pay me back half over time in instalments. The house in Blackburn’s Yard became a cooperative holiday place, visited by countless friends and friends of friends, and Whitby re-entered my life.

I arrived back in London in September to the grim news of an American-backed coup against the socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile and a new round of meetings. On 14 September, I was the Arsenal Group’s representative at a meeting organized by Hackney Trades Council women’s subcommittee.⁵⁰ It established a basis for the formation of a local Working Women’s Charter group. I found its formality somewhat worthy and stuffy, but it was definitely less stressful than the one attended by other members of Arsenal on the same day about the role of the central office of the Women’s Liberation Workshop in London.⁵¹ As the number of groups had expanded so rapidly, it was difficult to fall back on our original face-to-face democracy and suspicions arose that the informational role of the centre was becoming too directional.

The depressing disputes within the Workshop convinced me of the importance of strengthening the local networking developed through the family allowances campaign. Along with other members of the Arsenal Group, I gravitated towards meetings at the Essex Road Women’s Centre, which had opened in March 1974. During 1973, two socialist feminists, Lisa Vine and Joan Curtis, had laboriously cleared and refurbished an old shop in which they lived at 108 Essex Road, Islington. They were supported by a loose collective of women in the borough, which included Alison Fell and Lynne Segal.

The Essex Road Centre aimed to provide information and advice for local women as well as fostering community action, especially on housing, work, child care, women in prison and women’s health. The Centre also served as a key feminist meeting place and the slightly dank basement with its resolutely lumpy arm chairs nurtured many strong friendships.

I was not part of the founding collective but came into its orbit through Lynne Segal; I also knew Jane Barker who was responsible for the Centre’s women’s health group which did pregnancy tests. The first explicit note in my diary of attending a meeting there is dated 2 October 1974.⁵² The atmosphere that autumn at Essex Road was invigorating. Not only was the Centre involved in the Islington Working Women’s Charter Group, it was also opposing the closure of the local Liverpool Road hospital, campaigning for nurseries and in touch with schools in the area.⁵³ One of these was Starcross. On 7 November, Sue Sharpe and I went to speak there on ‘The History of the Women’s Movement’, and I would return for several years afterwards to talk on feminism.⁵⁴

A few days later Lynne and I went off together to speak in Harlow New Town on women’s liberation.⁵⁵ Whatever we said I cannot remember, only the giddy hilarity of the expedition, more like an outing than a dutiful meeting. Although I had been with Lynne at meetings, this was the first time I realized what good fun was to be had in her company. Harlow New Town clinched our friendship.

Like Paul and his friends in Brixton, Lynne was part of the libertarian left in Islington and I liked their innovative approach to politics with its radical cultural spin-offs like the Islington Gutter Press and a music workshop, mixing protest songs with folk. When David and I went to see Chris Rawlence, Marian Sedley and others from the Red Ladder Theatre Group perform a new play at Camden Town Hall, a jovial Lynne was there.⁵⁶ Red Ladder were old friends of mine who had started doing street theatre in the late sixties. By 1974 they were based in Leeds and doing scripted plays which still communicated socialism and feminism with humour, but in deeper and more emotional ways. Watching Lynne enjoying Red Ladder perform, I felt as if stray parts of my disparate political and social worlds, old and new, were fusing together.

That November, the Arsenal Group and the Essex Road Women’s Centre organized a local meeting of socialist feminists to report on what they were doing. Encouraged by Rachel Peto, who was in the Highbury women’s group as well as Holloway Housing Association, I sent out a ‘personal is political’ plea to attend, signed, ‘Love from Arsenal Women’s Liberation Workshop and Essex Road Women’s Centre.’⁵⁷ We were astounded when women from around sixty groups came to it. This led to the idea of monthly Sunday meetings at Essex Road for new members in North East London, at which local groups could report on what was going on.

These gatherings were popular at first and I found it illuminating to hear what was happening, not simply from the consciousness-raising groups, but from women organizing around health, housing, child care, as well as the abortion campaign, the Working Women’s Charter or Women in Manual Trades. I carried on doggedly for nearly two years ringing around to get women to come along, but the numbers attending eventually went down. Hackney and Islington feminists were going to so many meetings, I suspect they did not want yet another one.⁵⁸

I was able to send a donation to Essex Road during the autumn because, to my surprise, my books had started to bring in significant royalties. This was partly because of translations in Norway, Sweden, Holland, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, along with sales in America and other English-speaking countries like Canada.

The American hardback edition of Hidden from History was published at the end of 1974 with a photograph of me by Fay Godwin, wrapped in a large scarf with a limp smile, peering out blearily from Islington’s Chapel Market. I had been ill with flu and shivering miserably when she took it. Regardless of this lacklustre image, Hidden from History too went into paperback and was to sell widely in the US.

An invitation came to speak at the annual conference of the Modern Languages Association in New York that December; they offered to pay my expenses and I seized the chance to meet friends in the US again. Strangely the meeting was on Boxing Day and turned out to be an event unlike anything I had ever experienced. The first shock was to be collected in a limousine driven by a young African American chauffeur who looked as if he was having a bad day. The next one was gazing up at the enormous chandeliers in the large hall of the New York Hilton where the conference was being held. Women’s studies had been developing in a small way in Britain over the previous two years, but not with chauffeurs and chandeliers! I briefly considered flight before gathering an invisible eiderdown of gravitas around me. Ros was seated near the front amid the sea of faces. She was wearing a colourful striped crocheted hat and was crocheting another, looking up at me and grinning from time to time, as if this bizarre setting was perfectly normal.

Somehow I managed to deliver my paper and then treated a cluster of feminists to afternoon tea, leaving a mammoth tip for the waitress in a personal attempt at relocating wealth from my expenses. Hopefully, if the revolutionary spirits of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and illustrious heroic others were looking down at the time, they were placated by the enormous smile of that amazed waitress.

Ros had said I could stay with her, and this trip was our first chance to talk alone together at length. Not only did we have many interests in common, she had a capacity to empathize without any barriers. I may have resisted rules, but Ros simply ignored them. She also possessed an inner confidence that she could impart to others and knew an inexhaustible number of people. Ros urged me to go and visit the director, Barbara Kopple, who had spent several months with a film crew in the Brookside mining community. Shyly, I walked round to her home in a converted old building, and who should open the door but Gerry, the miner who had bemoaned British warm beer. He was helping with the film which became Harlan County (1976).

I was never to return to Ros’s flat at 79 St Mark’s Place, for a fire devastated the old building. Ros wrote saying she was having ‘disaster nightmares’. I had given her a present of Keith Thomas’s historical study of witch persecution in Britain, and she added with characteristic stoicism, ‘Happily Religion and the Decline of Magic didn’t burn.’⁵⁹

7

1975

That winter I was immersed in teaching three Workers’ Educational Association classes each week in Stanmore, Harrow and Central London, all on different topics. Despite having been a WEA tutor for several years, I was never able to predict their compass. Stanmore had yielded up Florence and Maurice, while Harrow produced another surprise when an elderly student recounted his childhood in Russia’s Jewish community during the Bolshevik Revolution. Word had gone around among the poor families that a new Messiah had arisen; he was called ‘Lenintrotsky’ and was coming to deliver them.

The Central London group in Euston absorbed the most energy because they had opted to move on to the recent history of the left in Britain. There was a lack of sources and coming up with balanced accounts proved tricky. David was compiling a lengthy volume of documents for Penguin, The Left in Britain (1975), with an exhaustive glossary on the lineages of small left groups, accompanied by a useful chronology compiled by Dave Phillips, but it was skewed towards International Socialism.

Seeking to be fair to everyone, I set about interviewing people I knew from the Communist Party and the Trotskyist groups. Knowing less about the anarchists, I conferred with the journalist Nicolas Walter, who had done a long interview with me when he still worked for the Times Literary Supplement, because I knew he possessed an exhaustive knowledge of anarchist history. I was unaware then that he had been one of the ‘Spies for Peace’ who had exposed the Regional Seats of Government set up to preserve the elite in the event of nuclear war. In 1963, upon hearing about them, about a thousand of us had broken off from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s Aldermaston march and headed into the woods to expose one near Reading.¹

In March, Bill Fishman took my Central London class on one of his anarchist history tours of East London. Bill, later to be a history professor at Queen Mary College, had learned open-air speaking in the Labour League of Youth. Combining erudition with irony, he would chuckle with delight as he stood in front of a former synagogue describing how, in the early twentieth century, the irreverent young Jewish anarchists had deliberately eaten their ham sandwiches outside it. He spoke so vividly, he conjured them back into being – I could almost detect a defiant clutch of secular rebels munching away.²

The recent libertarian left proved particularly difficult to define since, apart from Big Flame, they consisted of networks with semi-permeable boundaries and did not adopt clear-cut positions. Also I was undecided about them myself. I disagreed with some libertarians who opposed all aspects of the state or were totally against work and existing trade union structures, which I regarded as necessary defences. I thought others pressed the critique of the oppressive aspects of the family to extremes, whereas I had come to see it as contradictory, characterized by both authoritarian control and the expression of loving personal feelings.

Nevertheless I could recognize a kinship with women’s liberation in the libertarians’ awareness of the interconnections between work and communities and between personal life and politics. Moreover, I shared their rejection of hierarchical party structures. On 20 April when I talked with Lynne and Paul about libertarian left ideas, I could see that as with all the left groupings they contained differing emphases.³ This fluidity was especially marked, because like women’s liberation, libertarian networks were primarily shaped by experience and activity.

The class on libertarianism was one of the most difficult I had ever given; the subject matter was elusive and I was undecided myself. I was too deeply influenced by assumptions culled from the post-1956 New Left and the Thompsons to feel part of this new libertarian left. Yet, through entangled discussions with students on the course, I came to the conclusion that even if I was not exactly a ‘libbo’, I was closer to them than to any other grouping on the contemporary left.

Though Paul and I continued to meet, that intimation about the flinching had proved accurate. Despite all our elaborate efforts at total honesty, along with the frank avowal and democratic sharing of emotions, I found that chunks of our feelings remained mysteriously hidden and impenetrable. At first it seemed as if, in barely perceptible ways, Paul was withdrawing from me. Then, during the winter, he proposed celibacy and historical outings. I was not keen on the celibacy, but I reasoned to myself that sexual freedom surely included such a choice and, after all, while duogamy did not exactly constitute ‘settling down’ in a conventional sense, Paul was six years younger than me. Perhaps he had changed his mind. My personal moral code, combined with a residual Yorkshire no-nonsense gruffness, left me bereft of strategic options. I had long ago rejected the traditional ploys of female seduction as dishonourable and debasing. So I concluded I must respect a man’s right to choose.

Needless to say this was not just a principled stance. Regardless of the unwanted strictures of celibacy, I did love seeing Paul and historical outings were a potent inducement. So this is how I found myself on Wednesday, 5 February in the old electro-plating works that housed Birmingham’s Museum of Science and Industry, in front of an ancient steam engine, while Paul carefully explained how it worked.⁴ No mechanical genes had reached me from my engineer father, and despite screwing my face up in an effort to follow its mysteries, his words drifted hopelessly over the tips of my ears to fade into the smoke of long ago. I definitely preferred ridge and furrow, even if I remained indecisive about spotting it myself.

Around this time, Bobby Campbell came to dinner one evening with Nigel. Regardless of one being a Communist and the other a Trot, they were comrades through left journalism, a shared wit and bantering bonhomie. Bobby and Bea were in the process of splitting up, though remaining close friends – in Bea’s words their relationship ‘changed but never ended’.⁵ I was glum and lurking in bed with a sore mouth after back teeth had been extracted. Bobby came in to cheer me up. He was not interested in celibacy and caution went out of my basement room window.

Bobby was a lovely man, full of external joie de vivre – whatever inner demons were there he tackled with a whisky and chaser. The lack of overt introspection was a relief after so many months of turning myself inside out probing possible reactions to just about everything. As I came to know him better I perceived the depth of inner reflection under the jollity. When Bobby was overpowered by his feelings he resorted to music. Bea describes how ‘He would be silent, hold that fiddle under his chin and play poetry.’⁶

I was soon listening to his stories of working as an apprentice in the Clydebank shipyards, of the anti-Polaris demonstrations and the crucial encouragement that came from the musical socialists, Janey and Norman Buchan, who I had already heard about from Jean McCrindle’s time in Glasgow. Regardless of their subsequent political affiliations, I had noticed how an implicit bond persisted between the working-class Glaswegian leftists of my age in London; Bobby was no exception. Deeply serious about his music and his left politics, he was a loyal non-sectarian friend. He also possessed a tough vein of sardonic humour.

David, Dave Phillips and Nigel had started to go to the Dalston Men’s Group, which briefly produced its own publication with a drawing on the cover of Superman with a baby on his knee. But Bobby was not interested in signing up to become a ‘new man’, observing wryly that it had taken him so long to get his manly frontage adjusted, he was not prepared to start demolishing it. He had done a convincing job: not only was he a tall, burly, bearded man, he possessed a carefully controlled solidity. I remember one evening sitting waiting for him with Gloden Dallas in the Duke of Wellington pub on Essex Road. Bobby was delayed at work and a man began to chat us up. On arriving Bobby effortlessly occupied some unstated space, and in an instant our admirer melted away. Afterwards Gloden remarked with a chuckle that Bobby was one of the few men either of us knew who could have that effect without appearing to notice anything.

The structure of the women’s liberation movement was shifting nationally. Although we continued to meet in small local groups, numerous women’s centres and women’s aid refuges were also appearing, along with collectives that mixed creativity with practical propaganda, through theatre, film, music, art, photography, design or publishing.

That year, having decided to desert the West End, we planned to assemble for our International Women’s Day demonstration in St Mary’s Churchyard and then march down Whitechapel High Street to Victoria Park in Hackney. One of the recently formed design collectives, the See Red Women’s Workshop, produced our poster ‘Solidarity with Women’s Struggles All Over the World’, but there had been a hold up with the leaflets and stickers.⁷ Early in March an SOS telephone message came through to Montague Road – could someone collect them? No one had a car, but Nigel volunteered to go on his bike to the press in the furthest reaches of South London, thirteen miles there and thirteen miles back with a big box – an act of heroic service to the women’s cause that I never forgot.

1975 was the United Nations’ International Women’s Year.⁸ But from the beginning of the year feminists in Britain were on the defensive because James White’s Abortion Amendment Bill was attempting to restrict access to abortion.⁹ Members of the Working Women’s Charter had initiated the National Abortion Campaign (NAC), so once again the Arsenal Group was out leafleting, this time covering local markets and parks as well as going door to door. We linked up with women’s groups throughout East and North London, including the Essex Road Women’s Centre.

The threat from White’s Bill also united many feminists with left Labour MPs like Renée Short and Jo Richardson, who had campaigned for abortion in Parliament. Although we were campaigning on parallel lines, our lack of formal organizational structures tended to make us invisible, and I smiled when Renée Short expressed surprise at the size of the May meeting in Hackney Town Hall. She assumed it was a spontaneous upsurge, little did she know that we had been gathering support for weeks.

I ruminated on how an apparent spontaneity was so often really the result of work on the part of people who were not noticed by already established groupings. It reminded me of Trotsky’s observation that the tram drivers’ refusal to drive any further at the onset of the Russian Revolution had been preceded by a long process of political thought and struggle.

I was still preoccupied with tracing the elusive courses of how radical ideas are communicated and then translated and transformed in everyday usage. Such spoors are easy to miss. But when Paul’s mother, Norah Atkinson, wrote thanking me for renewing her Spare Rib subscription that June, adding, ‘I sometimes feel as though I am in a world of my own – till I read about other women’s interests’, I knew she was describing just that sense of recognition which could signal new ways of seeing.¹⁰

On 21 June, when thousands of us (estimates varied between fifteen and thirty thousand) demonstrated in defence of abortion rights, we became suddenly a visible presence.¹¹ Both the reformist and the revolutionary left blinked at our numbers and we were as startled as they were. The sun shone brightly down that day and our habitual dour jeans and denim bib and bracer suits were offset by sun dresses and long flowery skirts. I marched along with Hermione Harris and Marsha Rowe, who carried the Spare Rib banner, spotting both Jo Robinson, one of the Miss World protesters, and Ursula Owen, from Virago, in the crowd.

Feminists kept up the pressure within the unions. The leaders tended to dismiss abortion as a personal matter, but over the next few years, throughout the country, determined feminists gradually persuaded trade union branches to support abortion rights. So, ironically, James White’s efforts to restrict legal abortion inadvertently contributed to its entry into a public political sphere.

Since 1970 the women’s movement had grown in numbers, impact and outlets, alongside economic and political tumult. Unsurprisingly, many women had started to question whether feminism alone was sufficient and, despite disputes, connections to the left were strong. At the end of 1974, when Geoffrey Sheridan did a survey of our national publications for the Guardian, Spare Rib, with by far the largest circulation, had declared itself ‘Socialist feminist’, Red Rag was ‘Marxist feminist’, while Women’s Report was ‘Feminist, aligned to the left of the women’s movement’. The Communist Party issued a national women’s journal called Link, the International Marxist group was closely aligned with Socialist Woman, and Women’s Voice, produced by women in International Socialism, included articles by sympathizers as well as members.¹²

However, though significant numbers of us might declare ourselves to be ‘socialist feminists’ or ‘socialist women’, this did not necessarily enable us to act in harmony, or, indeed, to overcome basic organizational problems. The theme of the socialist feminist conference in March at Queen Mary College, London was ‘Perspectives for Building Women’s Liberation as a Mass Movement’.¹³ Arsenal’s somewhat pessimistic paper there went down badly. Despite regarding ourselves as possessing a new kind of politics, members of the women’s movement, along with politicos in general, preferred good tidings to gloomy ones.

We struggled womanfully with how to structure our large-scale gatherings in a non-authoritarian manner. The rejection of alienating rules of procedure had been initially liberating, but in some circumstances it could have paralysing consequences. At one socialist feminist conference, when a member of a tiny left sectarian group contrived to prevent us discussing anything on the agenda by calling for us to declare for a general strike, no reasoning about the absurdity of such a demand coming from a meeting like ours outside the trade unions would satisfy her. Finally, Bea Campbell stood up and released us with the magic formula, ‘I move that we vote not to vote.’ I grinned with gratitude and a certain wry amusement – there were evident advantages in Communist Party cadre training.

At a meeting of London socialist feminists, Bea would make another memorable intervention – this one had nothing to do with the CP, but was an expression of her own desire for directness. Our theme was sexuality, but we were going round in ever more abstract circles about a subject that was vital in our lives. Up she got again with a plea to get down to ‘the nitty gritty’. Needless to say we never did. It was one thing to declare the personal to be political but quite another to discuss personal intimacy in large public meetings.

Since the Edinburgh 1974 Women’s Liberation Conference we did have a demand which related explicitly to sex. This was for ‘An End To Discrimination Against Lesbians & The Right Of Women To A Self Defined Sexuality’.¹⁴ The assertion of lesbianism was important and overdue. In the mid-seventies lesbian women faced both overt discrimination and an implicit sidelining within mainstream culture. But I puzzled over ‘self-defined’. It seemed only part of what those of us in the women’s movement were trying to communicate, for surely sex involved another person rather than being a matter of solitary volition.

I was aware of a paradox. Despite all the talk about personal politics, we were often now campaigning about abortion without mentioning sexual pleasure or the need for women not to be constrained by fear of an unwanted pregnancy, even though both were in practice so important in our personal lives. Many of us still wanted to extend access to abortion and link this demand with an assertion of women’s sexual freedom, but we were being forced onto the defensive. This was partly due to a pragmatic paring down of slogans for straightforward campaigning. But I thought other less tangible factors also contributed.

A complex reticence was growing within the women’s movement. Regardless of all our efforts to be frank and open about our desires, heterosexual relationships were beginning to be cloaked in silence. Imperceptibly, open expression of the convoluted responses aroused by attempting to nurture equal relationships between women and men without possession or jealousy was starting to be shuffled back into the private sphere. It was as if discussion of such feelings had become tacitly taboo. This implicit banishment of contradictory emotions would subsequently spill over into relationships between women and women too. A further complication ensued because while some women saw lesbianism as necessarily more democratic and egalitarian, others in same-sex relationships resented what they regarded as the imposition of moralistic political strictures.

So while we might demand a ‘self-defined sexuality’, personal transformation was proving far more complex than we had imagined. The strenuous attempts of both lesbian and heterosexual women to break with ingrained attitudes and habits of dissemblance, dominance and possession were taking us into uncharted terrain.

Indeed, in my own life any comprehension of Bea’s ‘nitty gritty’ kept slipping away into ever more puzzling lacunae. On 1 May David wrote from Whitby to say he was missing me and that Marsha was missing Chris Rawlence, the actor and writer from the Red Ladder Theatre Group with whom she was now in a relationship. He noted too a different dynamic – with Marsha he was more able to be himself as they had rows which cleared ‘the air, like thunder on a sultry sullen day’.¹⁵ So maybe my dread of upset and conflict meant that my efforts to be perfectly frank ended up being unconsciously equivocal. Indeed, the more I tried to understand what was happening, the less I could express things with any clarity.

Strains in my sexual relationship with Bobby were evident by April. Paul’s celibacy regime had nose-dived that spring, leaving me torn between ecstasy and knotted anxiety because of Bobby. However, Bobby and I had arranged to join Dave Phillips and Sue Sharpe in Whitby for a few days in mid-May and, loath to cause a disruption, I evasively drifted on thinking ambiguities would sort themselves out. They did not.

Upon arriving in Whitby on Friday 16 May, one thing suddenly became evident – I could not have a sexual relationship with Bobby. We were good friends and that was how it should have remained. But it hadn’t. Bobby received this information in ominous silence. The next morning he turned on his heel and was off back on the long, awkward journey by train to London. He later told me that he had felt sad but not surprised, being already aware that things were not going well between us.

Wretched at allowing such a destructive muddle to arise and remorseful for both hurting Bobby and for dragging him up and down the country, the next day I found some calm, fossil-hunting and walking along the beach to Sandsend with Dave and Sue. Fossils signified a long view on life, even though I was useless at actually finding and identifying them.

After Dave and Sue’s departure on the Monday, I was alone, wrapped in a dulled depression, shot through with spasms of relief at achieving clarity. Disconcerted by these contrary responses, I mulled them over indecisively in a letter to David. Even more confusion ensued, for David had unpredictably suggested that we should have a child. On that topic at least I drew on Yorkshire gumption, ‘I don’t know about babies but if you have one you have to be prepared to have it for a long time as they take so much time growing up.’¹⁶

Accustomed to the wordfulness of my relationship with David, in contrast, I was perplexed by ‘the wordlessness’ of my love for Paul. He was struggling to connect intellect and emotions in ways he found hard to articulate, had given up his thesis on medieval peasants in Cheshire, and was becoming more and more involved in the Radical Therapy popular within sections of the libertarian left. Bewilderment and intensity seemed to keep spinning around us so that fathoming how I loved him was to be forever somehow beyond my ‘grasp’.¹⁷ It was just there, and remained there come what may.

As for Bobby and me, we remained friends, meeting for lunch in a Greek café in Islington where he would try and explain football to me by correlating teams with left political tendencies. I found this as incomprehensible as Paul’s steam engine, for I was and still am woefully ignorant about football, having never been able to understand why people get so worked up about kicking a ball about on a pitch. But I loved his music, especially two songs: ‘The Fair Floure Of Northumberland’ in which a daughter, seized by marauders, is welcomed back by her family, and a romantic song, ‘I’ll Lay You Doon Love And Treat You Gentle’, though a sceptical Bobby remarked that it sounded more like a threat than a promise.

In the world beyond these muddled microcosms, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front had finally triumphed over the Americans, who left Saigon that April. It was an extraordinary victory, though we knew little at the time of either the extent of devastation in the North or the costly strategic mistakes made by the Vietnamese Communists. Conflict still raged in Northern Ireland. We went on Troops Out demonstrations but they were becoming like reflex responses and I could see no end to the killing. The high hopes of revolutionary transformation, indeed even of securing basic rights and reforms, were beginning to wobble.

On 28 June, Gerlin Bean and Althea Jones-LeCointe spoke on ‘Black Women in Britain’ at a conference I attended on Women and Politics at the Polytechnic of Central London.¹⁸ Both had straddled divides of race and gender, challenging white feminists for ignoring race as well as men in the black movement who sidelined women’s issues. Gerlin Bean had been at the first Women’s Liberation Conference and had helped to start a black women’s group in Brixton. In 1970 Althea Jones-LeCointe had been arrested when police in Notting Hill charged a demonstration protesting against persistent racism in policing. The two women were both committed community activists and educators.

The problems they confronted were myriad. The majority of Afro-Caribbean and Asian women immigrants and their children growing up in Britain were clustered among the poorest sections of the working class and experienced the most extreme social and cultural inequalities because of racism. Though African immigrants were likely to be from highly educated backgrounds, women from those families often had to take unskilled low-paid jobs. Women of African and Asian descent who resisted racism came to see a shared predicament through a series of mobilizations against racism and fascism, which included conflicts with the police and around laws particularly on immigration. Through the seventies they were also becoming active in both unions and the community. Taking action often meant confronting issues of race, class and gender. For instance, in 1974 Asian women workers on strike at Imperial Typewriters had formed a group to air their grievances.¹⁹

By the mid-seventies several years of struggling simultaneously against inner as well as outer bondages had led to a more intensive look at differing psychological traditions. While I was aware that changing one’s perceptions by an effort of will was problematic, and that alternative desires did not pop up on decree, unlike Paul I had no wish to be either psychoanalysed or go to Radical Therapy groups. Nevertheless, I would staunchly defend those who did against what I saw as a dismissal of subjectivity on the left.

Some socialist feminist friends, influenced by Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), turned to Freud and Lacan, but another group drew on Radical Therapy because they sought a more democratic mutuality. They included Sheila Ernst, Lucy Goodison and Joanna Ryan, who I already knew slightly through her brothers Adam and Charlie Hart, both of whom had lived in the Montague Road communal house.²⁰ Paul and two friends in the men’s group – Paul Morrison, from the Newsreel Film Collective, and the irrepressible Vic Seidler, who loved spinning social theories about personal life – had also become deeply involved in Radical Therapy. Vic later explained he found it helped him in unpicking the sources of male power and in envisaging new kinds of relationships without becoming paralysed by guilt when personal feelings did not automatically follow political convictions.²¹

I liked visiting Paul’s squat, where he lived with the artist and photographer, James Swinson, and Mark Nash, a film theorist. None of them had any money, and because James’s mother worked as a cook, he became the food person in the all-male household. I remember servings of extremely bony mackerel that James insisted were very healthy. I always felt comfortable chatting with James, but it took me longer to get to know Mark, who was more reserved and a little remote. The stiffness melted one day when his mother arrived to reconstruct the squat’s garden, which she proceeded to do with remarkable briskness and efficiency.

Though Paul and James were both good at things like carpentry, plumbing and doing the electrics, having learned these from their fathers, no one ever seemed to tackle the washing up. It waited hopelessly in mounting piles. The reproduction of daily life in the men’s squat was definitely more hit and miss than in our Hackney collective dwelling with its rotas and house meetings.

I made a new friend in Linda Dove, a filmmaker who had worked with Newsreel. In 1970 she had been the first woman to be accepted on the BBC’s training course for film editors. Linda was always modest about her accomplishments at a time when women with technical skills in film were very much in a minority. She was one of the founders of the London Women’s Film Group, who were working on a film called An Egg Is Not a Chicken, advocating women’s right to choose whether to have an abortion. Our friendship persisted after she went to Los Angeles with her partner, Bruce Green, where she continued to be active in left politics and work in film before she died in 2001.

I also took to Pat from Brixton Women’s Aid, which provided shelter and support for women who had suffered domestic violence. I held her in some awe, because not only was she running the Women’s Aid Centre, she was also in a women’s football team, neither of which I could ever have done. I was chuffed when I was invited to go along with Pat and some of the women from the Centre to hear Barry White sing at the Royal Albert Hall in May. Though his big hit in 1974, ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe’, was vaguely familiar, I did not know what to expect. While the others all seemed to enjoy him booming out promises of insatiable love ad infinitum, I found the music unpleasantly gushy-slushy. I was in a minority. Later that year Pat came north and we went to Starcross School, where she spoke about her work in the Women’s Aid Centre.

There was a strong communality among the Brixton squatters. It was James’s responsibility to collect the peppercorn rent squatters paid to cover the cost of materials for repairs. The convivial greetings he encountered en route meant that by the end of the round his head was often reeling. The rent covered various practical cooperative services. Because Paul could do electrics he was attached to a squatter who was a trained electrician from the Caribbean. The qualified tradesman initially viewed his long-haired, hippy-looking assistant with disdain, before tersely granting Paul craft recognition by declaring him to be ‘OK’.

When I had first visited Paul in Brixton my eyes had widened in horror at the local grocer’s on seeing packets of broken eggs for sale; the borough seemed even poorer than Hackney. But Brixton, where left politics had a different, more exploratory feel than in Hackney, grew on me. It was bursting with creative energy, squatters held frequent street parties, and in Brockwell Park you could hear music of all kinds. The radical impetus of these festivities extended far beyond the small groups of committed white leftists to include teenagers from Afro-Caribbean families. Children were very much part of Brixton’s radical community politics and I was impressed to see how safe crevices were secured within it for them to play.

By 1975 attempts were being made in London to improve pre-school children’s lives through the Under Fives Groups which encompassed playgroups, one o’clock clubs, crèches, toy libraries and adventure playgrounds, along with community nurseries, like the one started by the Camden Women’s Action Group, and state nurseries. There was still no national nursery campaign but a range of scattered initiatives were propagating communal approaches to caring for young children.

A new development was militant trade unionism among nursery workers. I heard from Myra Garrett, who was in my Central London WEA class, that around eighty Hackney nursery nurses had taken industrial action against the council for higher pay and shorter hours, gaining support from trade unionists, socialists and feminists. On 18 June, another trade unionist, Jane Maple, rushed into a Working Women’s Charter meeting in the Co-operative Hall in Islington with an update on the nursery nurses’ negotiations. I reported in the Islington Gutter Press how this was followed by discussion of conditions in Islington’s nurseries and small clothing sweatshops, while representatives from Islington Community Law Centre highlighted gaps in the Anti-Discrimination Bill.²²

This convergence of community and trade union activity was exciting, and was accompanied by the eruption of grass-roots arts groups. One of these, the Broadside Mobile Theatre Group, performed at the Islington meeting. As well as acting out sketches about events in the news, like the evasion by employers of equal pay legislation and the Law Lords’ tendency to side with men in rape cases, they sang two of my favourite songs, Peggy Seeger’s ‘I Wanna Be An Engineer’ and Sandra Kerr’s ribald and funny ‘Maintenance Engineer’. Utterly unable to sing myself, I admired those who could, acknowledging in the Islington Gutter Press, ‘Songs can make you realize things that talking cannot.’²³

The Broadside Mobile Theatre Group, like Red Ladder, was one of the many touring theatre groups travelling the country; these included CAST, 7:84, Belt and Braces, General Will and many more. In film it was the same. Some collectives were overtly agitational, like Cinema Action and Newsreel, others were radical but experimental in form, while a ‘non-directive’ group called Inter-Action went around in a mobile van encouraging people to make their own videos.²⁴

Women were part of these radical arts networks, and some, like Linda Dove and the London Women’s Film Group, had decided to focus on working with women. Similarly in 1975, Mary Kelly, along with Margaret Harrison and Kay Fido Hunt, put on an exhibition together, ‘Women and Work: A Document of the Division of Labour in Industry’. I was excited by this radical impetus to link artistic expression to social change and could see how it connected with earlier traditions within socialism, anarchism and feminism.

My socialist feminist politics were rooted in a commitment to listening for voices silenced within the mainstream. But I was conscious that working-class women can be marginalized even in excavating experience from below. Jean McCrindle and I had sought to counter this in the interviews we had done for Dutiful Daughters: Women Talk about Their Lives (1977). We had drawn on consciousness raising in recording our interviewees’ life stories, and the women’s recollections echoed in my head as we played back the tapes over and over again. Brief remarks, terse asides and stranded reflections communicated most keenly. Paul’s mother, Norah, graphically described the difficulty of washing her three small boys in a tin bath. Janet Daly, a Fyfe factory worker at fourteen, recalled thumpings and the humiliation of having to wear ‘tackity boots’, condensing the harshness in a tight phrase of pain, ‘I was hard brought up.’ My former neighbour, Barbara Marsh, explained that when she first went looking for work after migrating to England, ‘I didn’t know anything about coloured then, because I did just know that I was me.’ A canteen worker, Linda Peffer, related how as a white Hackney working-class girl she had been punished at school for reading Oscar Wilde’s poetry. The teachers made her feel ‘I was interested in things, really, that I shouldn’t have been interested in.’ She ‘just didn’t fit in’.²⁵

The accounts Jean and I had collected resonated with the personal life stories that were appearing through community publishing, while oral history was gaining a foothold in academia. But Neil Middleton, my editor at Penguin, remained sceptical about Dutiful Daughters and kept pressing me to do a ‘big book’. I was uncomfortable about the prospect for several reasons.

Historically, I was keen to focus more deeply on Edward Carpenter, the socialist sex reformer who had fascinated me for many years, and my more recent discovery, the early twentieth-century socialist feminist, Stella Browne, who had spoken out so defiantly about women’s sexual desires. I had managed to weave her into my talk at the 1975 Ruskin History Workshop on ‘Free Love and Feminism in the 1920s’, and was pleased when I was asked to speak about her at Essex Road Women’s Centre during the summer because it helped to bring the historical and the political parts of my life together.

Politically, I wanted to explore the relationship between socialism and feminism, and sketched out a proposal for Penguin arguing that the two interacted when a strong autonomous feminist movement coincided with a socialism ‘concerned with questions of control, consciousness and changes in everyday life’.²⁶ Neil, however, wanted me to write on the women’s liberation movement as a whole. He was unaware just how complicated this was, partly because we were producing innumerable new cultural offshoots, but also because marked disagreements were appearing among us.

My wariness also derived from my visit to America, where I had seen how writing ‘big books’ could have a destructive impact on feminist writers who were subjected to a glare of publicity and thrust into a false role of being ‘leaders’ simply because they were recognizable names in the media. My impact was obviously on a lesser scale, but nonetheless I was still experiencing problems in coping even with this.

In August, Ruth First wrote to say she was about to go to teach in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and praised my ‘iron resolve’ to keep on writing.²⁷ It was not so much a resolve as an inner compulsion. I found it easier to think through writing than speaking. However, combining writing, activism and going around giving talks, as well as responding to my voluminous correspondence, meant I would often bleat in desperation because I could not keep up. I was bad at relaxing, and meeting up with Lynne or Marsha to go swimming constituted my main physical leisure activity – it was Marsha who taught me the backstroke. She and David kindly applied themselves to solutions and Marsha suggested that I should adopt the Spare Rib practice of allocating a day a week to admin.

On one of my ‘admin days’ that summer the pile of letters yielded an intriguing surprise, a letter from Marion Federal Penitentiary in the United States. A member of the Black Culture Society, Kamau na Mwando (Gordon L. Faust), wrote to say he was interested in a review of Hidden from History by Abigail McCarthy in the New York Post. I later discovered he was connected to a prisoners’ magazine, Black Pride. At the time I knew nothing about the harsh conditions at Marion or the years of campaigning by the prisoners against the Solitary Unit there. Still, I posted him a copy and always wondered if it reached him and what he thought about it.

Another unexpected contact was with Yoshiko Miyake in Tokyo, who liked Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. The influences upon her were very recognizable to me, as she had grown interested in women’s liberation after being active in the anti–Vietnam War movement and organizing poor women in the countryside. My letters might have been a chore but nevertheless they linked me to people internationally.

During 1975, the Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group decided on a series of meetings in which each member would speak on a personally chosen topic. One of our recent members, Ann Scott’s mother Joan, had helped me with material on the Soviet Union when I was doing Women, Resistance and Revolution; she had also attended the WEA Summer School in 1973, where we had long conversations about feminism. In 1975 she had been diagnosed with cancer and needed twenty-four-hour care. In September we moved our meetings to her flat and became part of a rota of people who stayed with her. Joan’s illness returned me to overwhelming memories of my mother’s death from cancer a few years before.

When it was my turn to choose a topic I decided upon women’s songs. I had accumulated quite a collection of records and it was enjoyable to be able to dwell with others on music that I mainly listened to alone. I selected a mix of songs: folk laments from Britain and the US such as ‘Blackwaterside’ and ‘Girl of Constant Sorrow’, blues like ‘I Used To Be Your Sweet Mamma’ and ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’, along with a mix of rock and folk recorded in Nashville by two of my favourite musicians, Toni Brown and Terry Garthwaite, from Joy of Cooking, ‘Done My Cryin’ Time’, ‘Going Isn’t Easier’, ‘Come To Me Now’.

I also played the commercial country music of Loretta Lynn, in which deserted wives fight for their men, and drunken men are warned not to come home with loving on their minds. I could well imagine the sense of release in ‘Hey Loretta’, when she swings in fantasy on a chandelier after escaping to the big city. Her songs made me smile but I also thought that underneath the glitz they spoke of a reality many women continued to experience.

Joan, however, was horrified because she saw these songs as simply reactionary and rebuked me. I was embarrassed about distressing her and unable to explain that I thought sentiments might come out in a reactionary form and yet contain a thwarted kind of rebellion within them. Having grown up with conservative attitudes all around me, I had come to oppose them, but could inwardly empathize with where they were coming from.

This was a painful conflict, but indicative of the arguments appearing in diverse contexts about radicalism and culture. Throughout the seventies, fierce disagreements occurred among filmmakers, actors, artists and musicians about how to combine agitation and aesthetics, along with disputes about whether it was possible to accept state funding and still be ‘alternative’. Differing perspectives surfaced within the women’s movement as well as the left.

Berwick Street Film Collective’s Nightcleaners caused much controversy when it finally appeared in 1975. The filmmakers had chosen forms that startled audiences into probing their preconceived perceptions. May Hobbs was angry because it had taken so long to finish and felt it showed her in a bad light. However other cleaners liked the film. Leafleters and audiences were similarly divided over how the film was structured. Left audiences tended to want clear-cut propaganda in a realistic style, but I thought its focus on the inner dimensions of the cleaners’ work and daily lives revealed the human consequences of exploitation more profoundly than if it had overtly stated a left message. I continued to fret over notions of there being some exclusively correct manner of expressing opposition to the existing state of the world.

Regardless of the conflicts over artistic form and content, workers’ resistance, combined with the growing strength of social movements, contributed to an ethos in the mid-seventies that sustained a vigorous ‘alternative’ left culture. Moreover, this interacted with the mainstream. In 1975 Paul and I went to see Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians at the Playhouse in Nottingham. Both of us came away full of admiration for the play in which jokes became an area of contestation not simply through their subject matter but in how to be funny. Instead of stripping down opponents from without, Comedians presents a humour that unearths buried realizations. The play is rooted within, and yet pushes against, a popular idiom. Through it, Trevor reveals the potential of comedy as a formidable source of alternative creative power.

Despite valiant attempts by groups in the seventies to take plays to more people, it was, of course, television that attracted mass audiences. Though left plays had been aired in the sixties, they had tended to focus on specific issues. In the autumn of 1975, a four-part television series, Days of Hope, written by the Manchester socialist Jim Allen, directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, was more ambitious for it challenged capitalism as a system of society. The series covered the years 1919 to 1926 from the perspective of workers whose militancy was honed by war, poverty, betrayal and physical attacks from the authorities. It was rare indeed to see these years of sharp class conflict in British history scrupulously portrayed through the contradictory circumstances of the characters.

We bought a television to watch Days of Hope in Montague Road, and I remember hurrying home from classes and meetings to catch each instalment. It appeared at a time when I was beginning to wonder about the possibility of significant social transformation, but watching the series you could hardly help thinking that if an older generation had gone through all that, the least we could do was to keep at it.

We were not aware of Tony Garnett’s tremendous battles as the producer to get the series shown. It was greeted with hostility from right-wingers who tended to assume it was influenced by the Communist Party. In fact the perspective of the carefully researched series derived not from the CP, but from a thoughtful and critical form of Trotskyism.

A long-term consequence of Days of Hope in our communal house was that henceforth the television became a permanent feature. It found its way into Nigel Fountain’s room, amplified by a coat hanger he poked into it to encourage reception. In the past I had tried to rent a television in Hackney, only to be sent away for a man’s signature. The Sex Discrimination Act, passed at the end of 1975 with the Equal Pay Act, rendered such lack of trust illegal, which was undoubtedly a gain. Whatever the obvious shortcomings of our equal rights laws, at least some basic beginnings were under way.

But an oxymoron now opined on our television set: a woman leader of the Conservatives, Margaret Thatcher, chosen with the backing of the right-wing of the Party. At the time I did not regard her politics as a dangerous threat, partly I think because on the left we tended to think in terms of dramatic fascist coups. We underestimated Margaret Thatcher.

I spent ‘Xmas Day’ 1975 catching up on letters. I complained to Carole Turbin about books I never finished, about flu, bronchitis and bombs which were giving rise to ‘anti-Irish feeling and general reactionary glumph’. I added:

I am bomb scare prone. I just walked into my sixth! If I hit a real one I can be carted off declaring unconditional critical support and affirming my faith in a Workers’ Republic. David is working as a full time casualty officer in Hackney – all night shifts often. Has been hit on the head once already!²⁸

I wished her and Bill Miller a Happy New Year.

Ros Baxandall, 1975

Liz and Lucy Waugh on Women’s Liberation abortion demonstration, organized by the National Abortion Campaign, June 1975

Dave Phillips and Sue Sharpe with Spare Rib badges, mid-1970s

Nigel Fountain in the garden at Montague Road, mid-1970s

David Widgery and Marsha Rowe in the kitchen at Montague Road, mid-1970s

Raphael Samuel in my study at 12 Montague Road, mid-1970s

Hackney Branch of the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) demonstrating in Hackney, mid-1970s

Jo Bock and Patrick Kodikara in deep discussion on the NALGO march

Gloden Dallas, Blackburn’s Yard, Whitby, mid-1970s

Temma Kaplan in her garden, Los Angeles, 1976

Linda Dove and Bruce Green getting married at Hackney Town Hall, 1977, flanked by witnesses Anna and Vic Seidler

Paul Atkinson feeding Will

© Paul Atkinson

Will and me on a slide in Victoria Park, East London 1978

© Paul Atkinson

Me pondering with Paul Morrison amid cooperative child care in Victoria Park

‘Trouble at t’Mill’

© Jo Nesbitt 1979

‘Dialectical Unity’

8

1976

Towards the end of 1975 David had told me that he and Marsha were going to spend several months in Australia. The prospect of a long absence scared me. Not seeing David seemed inconceivable. Slowly the panic subsided, but the months before they were to depart felt strained. One day, for no apparent reason, I chopped off my hair. I looked terrible and several visits to the hairdressers could not redeem it. I remained like a shorn sheep. At the beginning of the new year David and I were able to spend a few days in Whitby. Both of us remained tense and apart. It was as if I was shielding myself before he went.

Paul meanwhile was marking changes in Nottingham. The house in Sutton Street where he had spent his early childhood was about to be demolished in a slum clearance. He went to photograph the area in black and white and converted the brass rubbing he had learned from medieval history to recording generations of children’s initials carved into the entry walls. He had taken to sending me mystical Blake postcards, but the material world was impinging; he, James and Mark had been threatened with eviction by Lambeth Council.¹

David and Marsha left on 10 February. As I made my way back to Hackney after seeing them off, I experienced a peculiar floating sensation that I assumed must be a sign of psychological disorientation. The next morning I woke up aching all over and realized it was simply flu. Caroline and Sue were also ill in bed. I described the house to David and Marsha in a letter dated 11 February as ‘rather stricken and quiet’.²

At first I used to think I could hear David’s voice talking about International Socialism in the bathroom. Returning from classes or meetings, I still imagined that he might be in the Norfolk Arms or that I would see him after the Dalston Men’s Group meeting.³ When a telegram arrived and the boy delivering it asked for ‘Alan’, I was mystified. When I realized it was from David and addressed to ‘All’, I explained. But the telegram boy kept it tight in his hand, enquiring if ‘All’ lived at this address! He was either a very dozy or an ultra punctilious boy. Telegrams denoted disasters, and, exasperated, I stood on the top of the steps booming down in a voice from on high, ‘We are All!’ Whereupon he finally handed it over.⁴ The telegram was from David announcing his arrival on the other side of the world.

Our ‘All’ was further depleted when, towards the end of February, Sue went for a long stay in Mexico. Caroline had to rise early as she was teaching in South London, but I would stay up late talking with Nigel, Marc and Dave Phillips, who had moved over from Chapel Market.⁵ There was gloom among socialist feminists because separatists were trying to ban men from the International Women’s Day March. The organizing meetings kept making contrary decisions depending on who turned up.⁶ Impatient with internal wrangles, women who were coming into the movement were gravitating towards the practical campaigns.

There was no denying the immediate urgency. James White’s Bill to restrict abortion had gone through its second reading and was before a committee. A group of left Labour MPs including Renée Short, Jo Richardson and Audrey Wise were staunchly opposing it in the House of Commons, while the National Abortion Campaign was organizing marches and meetings. Resistance to the cuts in welfare services was also mounting. When a women’s ‘Stop the Cuts Conference’ was announced by the Working Women’s Charter organizer, Michele Ryan, they were overwhelmed by the response.⁷ Of course I supported both campaigns, but I still hankered after the personal sisterhood of the early seventies women’s liberation movement.

On the sidelines, I was entering a period of unaccustomed calm, focusing on my classes, listening to Joan Armatrading, cooking Shaker Pie in Brixton as well as Dalston and contemplating upon how to make chilli con carne. My relationship with Paul had taken a poetic turn. He was reading W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice to me and even sent a poem from Brixton in the early hours of the morning.⁸ I, meanwhile, had discovered the poetry of John Clare, a favourite of Dorothy and Edward Thompson’s.

David’s anthology The Left in Britain came out while he was away. Nervous about potential inaccuracies, I was pleased to be able to send reports of enthusiastic responses from friends and a fairly positive review in the Guardian. However, by 22 February I was aware all was not well. ‘Your letters seem very far away’, I wrote. ‘Perhaps you are in a daze & it’s all so different upside down. Or perhaps you left a bit cross & disconnected. I feel a bit cut off from you.’⁹

Communication was partly impeded because David had left a jumbled itinerary of his movements and thus my letters were rambling all over Australia before reaching him. Even so, I kept sending descriptions of meetings, WEA classes and my efforts to cut the manuscript I had written on Edward Carpenter for the book with Jeff Weeks who was now involved with Gay Left, until David wrote expressing irritation over their banality.

The emphasis upon the mundane in my letters formed a smokescreen; something that I could not express was occurring. Paul’s long-term relationship was ending and we could now just encounter one another without all the elaborate arranging. Suddenly everything seemed unexpectedly easy. It was as if we had been released.

Early in March, Paul hired a car and we set off on a meandering peregrination northwards. We were heading first to his mother Norah’s fiftieth birthday party, followed by a talk I was to give in Liverpool. Two founders of the radical bookshop, News from Nowhere, Bob Dent and Maggie Wellings, a Liverpudlian of Chinese heritage, had invited me to talk on the history of the struggle for abortion in Britain. On the way we made a detour because Paul was keen to see the Cluniac Priory and the castle walls at Castle Acre in Norfolk.

The day after Norah’s party we took her with us, on what for me was the equivalent of a pilgrimage, to Edward Carpenter’s home in the hamlet of Millthorpe, near the Cordwell Valley. The day was damp and foggy, but we found the pub that Carpenter’s lover George Merrill used to frequent, and St George’s Farm at Totley. This had been John Ruskin’s utopian project, which included the radical, John Harrison Riley, whose papers I had seen at Yale. A friend of Carpenter’s, George Pearson, had later run it as a small farm and, when Paul and I arrived, his grandson still lived there.

I was later to write an article about the visit, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, in which I described having to ‘pinch myself’ to remember that Carpenter was not going to be sitting at Millthorpe to greet us, adding, ‘It is one of the sadnesses of history for me – this loving intimacy with ghosts.’¹⁰ My fascination with Carpenter and his enormous circle of friends came partly from an affinity with the kind of socialism they embraced:

They did not reduce what they wanted to economics because capitalism had forced us all into the cash nexus. They were against not only exploitation but the waste of human creative capacity which is the result of exploitation … Socialism was to release the creativity and artistry in everyone. It was to heal the breach between the heart, the body and the mind.¹¹

When we eventually reached the meeting in Liverpool, it was quite an effort to summon up energy for the history of abortion. Fortunately I was billed with the impressive campaigner, Dr Sheila Abdullah, who dealt with the contemporary movement. Our meeting was held in Liverpool’s left club which met above a disco, so we two Sheila speakers had to perch on a ledge under purple lights, facing an enormous neon sign that read ‘DOLLIES BAR’. The music from below, and much stomping of feet, rose in competition, so we had to bellow above it. In the discussion that followed several men stood up to say that their criticism of the women’s movement was that it was not doing enough about men. As if we did not have enough to do! DOLLIES BAR was certainly the strangest site for the propagation of socialist feminism I ever encountered, but undeterred, I commented to David, ‘The club is a good idea don’t you think.’¹²

By March, David was experiencing a certain dislocation without the familiar reference points of his life in London. He described himself as growing away from International Socialism, yet still needing a connection to ‘the kind of bisexual, working class, socialist party’ that he wanted it to be.¹³ I puzzled somewhat over ‘bisexual’ Trotskyism, but change was certainly afoot. On 15 March, I told David that Richard Kuper, who had helped me so much with Hidden from History, had become involved in what was described as ‘a loyal opposition’ and Nigel had gone to one of their meetings.¹⁴ The International Socialists were in the throes of transmogrifying into the Socialist Workers Party, which was set up the following year.

I had never defined myself as a ‘Trotskyist’, though along with anarcho-syndicalism, Trotskyism had been one of the prongs in a broad revolutionary umbrella I had tucked into a metaphorical pouch. By early 1976 I was discarding prongs and pouches alike. It felt as if I had to work things out without relying on any already existing conceptual cover.

Adrift in Australia, David complained resentfully that I was not missing him. This was not quite true. The problem was it had turned out that once we were actually apart, the way I missed him was not as he wished. To my alarm he again proposed that we should have a baby. Jolted into frankness, I wrote on 15 March, ‘I don’t want to have a baby with you at the moment.’¹⁵ I then tried to reassure him by explaining the deep affection I felt for him and my continuing fascination with his responses to life and politics.

David’s extemporaneous response arrived in six remarkable pages of densely typed airmail paper, written in a stream of consciousness on 25 March. He had traced my lost letters through the Australian postal system and was puzzling over them like a jigsaw puzzle. Regretting ‘the staccato questioning and rather high and mighty tone’ of his previous letter, he was experiencing a sense of ‘isolation’. Struggling with a fear that both I and Marsha would leave him, he regretted the postponement of a baby, along with the ‘emotional division of labour’ which had allocated poetry and passion to Paul and stability and comradeship to him. He described how he was questioning his assumption that somehow he had more right to my company than Paul and reflecting too on his ‘old habit of associating passion with pain and suffering’. David observed, ‘I’m always demanding change of you but get terrified when you start taking decisions without me and I get more than I bargained for. Self-examination is exhausting and I don’t like it very much.’¹⁶

The visit to Australia with Marsha had been stormy at times but had brought a new and most significant confidence. At last David had been able to swim without self-consciousness, ‘I’m virtually over my leg/beach phobia.’ He was imagining transporting me and Chris Rawlence to Australia and estimated we might be able to afford it by 1979. David signed this churn of a letter, ‘Much love in some trepidation’, and made a carbon copy.¹⁷

Even from so far away David sensed what I was unable to reveal in a letter. I did love him but I was in love with Paul. A long stretch apart from him for the first time had eventually enabled me to recognize that I just wanted to be with Paul. On 4 April David arrived at Heathrow and I blurted out the truth at the airport. It was brutal to reject him in this way but it would have been worse to dissimulate. I sat on the airport bus to London without him and in turmoil. I had separated from David, but was uncertain what would happen in my relationship with Paul.

At the end of April I was in Whitby with Lynne and Ralph Edney from the Islington Gutter Press. Lynne and I were going to the Women’s Liberation Conference in Newcastle. It felt uncanny being at the house in Blackburn’s Yard and knowing I was no longer with David. I wrote a letter wishing him ‘Happy Birthday’, though I remained unsure how we could ‘find another kind of closeness and trust’.¹⁸ I was anxious about him because Marsha had left London to be closer to Chris in Yorkshire and her relationship with David was unclear. I was fearful too because, when something bad happened, he had a tendency to make it worse, as if he could find redemption only in accentuating the extremes of feeling.

Over several years we had sought so strenuously to diminish assumptions of ownership and its complement jealousy. But I was to learn that upon the absolute loss of a loved one, the pain flares regardless. Time can lessen the hurt, but does not necessarily completely assuage it. That August David wrote, ‘Think about you a great deal, mostly with unhappiness … I miss being happy with you.’¹⁹

Raphael Samuel’s History Workshops were multiplying in 1976, spilling out into a series of enormous gatherings of the left around Britain. On 8 May, Jean McCrindle and I spoke at one on ‘Socialist Autobiographies’ at Aberdeen University, drawing on some of the material from our interviews.²⁰

At the end of May I was back again at the History Workshop in Oxford, where the theme was ‘Workers’ Education’. I was transfixed by one of the speakers, a short, stubby man called Harry McShane, who at eighty-five years old could remember the revolutionary left in Glasgow in the early twentieth century. He had been one of the thousands of young workers influenced by the compelling Marxist teacher, John Maclean, who was charged with sedition and imprisoned during the First World War.²¹

I knew about the part played by women in the Glasgow rent strike during the war and, through Annie Davison’s contribution to Dutiful Daughters, had heard about the circles around the Independent Labour Party – the Socialist and Anarchist Sunday Schools, Workers’ Esperanto and the Clarion Players. But Harry McShane communicated another Glaswegian left with a profound sense of import. After hearing him speak, I wrote:

An old man

Speaks with precision

of a lost revolutionary tradition.

He tells of John Maclean

weaning Marxism

out of the pain of 1914.

Unfamiliar with a microphone,

accustomed to speaking

with his own voice,

honoured to be asked

to talk again,

conscious of the responsibility

of proletarian education,

he studies his notes.

A weariness in his shoulders

passes as he takes his bearings.

Standing,

he draws strength

from comrades long ago

and the young

who surround him now.

Remembering so many meetings

and John Maclean speaking,

sixty years or so

passing in between.

He is still learning,

assessing consequences

analyzing fragmentation,

still considering the odds

for and against

working-class emancipation.

He loves Marxism

and nods to an earlier tradition

of Scottish hairsplitting disputation.

Remembering so many meetings

and John Maclean speaking,

sixty years passing in between.

He knows we need more than economic argumentation,

more than political education,

more than The State and Revolution.

‘Communism,’ he says,

‘is only the beginning!’

He is pushing possibilities,

bringing reality to bear on longing,

bearing an earthly basis for the dream,

holding

the dialectic

respectfully

in two hands.

Remembering so many meetings

and John Maclean speaking,

sixty years passing in between,

an old communist

conceives an embryo of longing.²²

I had no knowledge then of Harry McShane’s own life, which, like that of his mentor John Maclean, had been harsh, but inspired by ideals and a love of learning. After joining and leaving the Independent Labour Party, the British Socialist Party and the Communists, in older age he had been impressed by the Marxist humanism of a small group led by Raya Dunayevskaya, a former secretary of Trotsky’s, who stressed the dialectical interconnection of action and thought. She had worked closely with C.L.R. James, and both had had an impact on the formation of the International Socialism group. I later drew on the Marxism of Harry McShane and on Annie Davison’s account of the left in Glasgow’s Independent Labour Party, when I came to write a play set in the First World War in Glasgow, called Friends of Alice Wheeldon.²³

In the summer of 1976, the History Workshop gatherings gave birth to the History Workshop Journal, edited by a socialist collective that included Raphael, Anna Davin, Sally Alexander and the rural historian and folk singer, Alun Howkins. In the essay I wrote for them, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, I was able to express my excitement about uncovering neglected aspects of a socialist and anarchist past which prefigured contemporary sexual politics. The released emotion is evident in the writing which is imbued with a joy and certainty.²⁴

That same summer happened also to be the time that Paul and I decided to have a baby and to go on a long trip to California. A note in my passport records that I took out £298 from the bank on 12 July and we left London in a baking heatwave. When we stepped off the plane in Los Angeles on 13 July, I was in a second-hand dress with a pale lilac flowery pattern, which had been someone’s school uniform long ago – alternative chic in London and just plain peculiar in LA.

My fashion mishap was the least of our problems; the friend of Myra Garrett’s who was to meet us was not there. We waited, jet lagged and anxious, until I phoned the only other number I had. Temma Kaplan answered the phone and offered to put us up. She arrived to collect us, a small dark-haired woman, radiating an exuberant warmth, and transported us to Sunset Boulevard up in Pacific Palisades, where she lived with her then husband, the radical journalist Jon Wiener. The journey and the stress of the wait at the airport had left me too exhausted to talk much. I was puzzled to discover that I was bleeding slightly and, wondering if it could be the onset of a miscarriage, went to bed. I awoke after a few hours to rest in the sun in a beautiful garden of rocks and trees.

I still feel a surge of gratitude towards Temma, especially as she was then busily correcting the proofs of her first book, a social and economic study of the anarchists in Andalusia.²⁵ We quickly discovered shared influences in Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels and Edward’s The Making of the English Working Class; Temma was to go on to study women’s role globally in radical social movements.

Clasping Temma’s precious copy of the revelatory 1939 Works Progress Administration Guide for California, which revealed a suppressed topography of race, ethnicity and class, Paul and I headed north by bus to San Francisco to stay on the floor of Chris Rawlence’s friend, Richard Seyd, who in the late sixties had helped Chris form Red Ladder’s immediate ancestor, the Agit Prop theatre group. I froze in blustery San Francisco. We walked all over the city and I covered my retro dress with an enormous second-hand woolly sweater. Sitting contentedly together one day in the graveyard of the Mission Dolores church, both happy to find a connection to the past, we peered at the names on the graves and I struggled to imagine what their lives had been like.

Through Myra Garrett I went to meet women from the newspaper Union Wage, smiling at their description of how it had started in 1971. The paper’s three founders, Ann Draper, Jean Maddox and Joyce Maupin, came from differing strands of the left and the trade unions. After a chance meeting at a ‘NOW’ liberal feminist conference, they had discovered they were all fed up with the lack of discussion of working-class women’s predicament.

Union Wage was an impressive paper. It put a greater stress on rank-and-file democracy than the national trade union organization the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), and I agreed with its policy of demanding equality and protections for women and men at work. But Ronald Reagan as Governor in California on one side, and the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment on the other, made this a difficult combination to negotiate politically.

Paul and I went to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform Joan Holden’s False Promises in a park. The witty play was set in an 1890s Colorado mining town when America was extending its imperial reach in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. This history was not familiar to me then, but the dialogue was sharply ironic and the plot was full of fast-moving twists and turns. It included Mexican and American miners, black and white dance-hall women and a black American soldier, all of whom were oppressed. But instead of being virtuous cut outs, False Promises subtly revealed how each character also harboured prejudices towards the others.

The performance made me laugh, but the truth of its message remained with me. It convinced me that any possibility of unity was predicated on admitting our part in a system of multifarious inequalities, rather than simply affirming one subordinated identity.

We hitched up the coast passing through Mendocino to Eureka, where the houses were painted in pastel shades and I felt I had reached the tip of the known world. By then nausea was overwhelming me when we were travelling in the lorries, confirming my suspicion that I must be pregnant. Everyday discomforts started to become physically distressing; I remember one nightmare night in the home of a friend of Myra’s in Reading when the temperature was around 100 degrees.

Paul hired a small Ford Pinto car and we became tourists, visiting Yosemite, where he effortlessly strode ahead up a mountain while I puffed along behind him. Two kind left academics in Berkeley, Chandler and Natalie Zemon Davis, had loaned us a sleeping bag and a tent, but neither of us were familiar with American nature parks or the exigencies of pregnancy and I had to emerge frequently in the night, filled with terror I would bump into a bear.

Paul was entranced by the ancient meadow hollowed into the mountain, meanwhile I ravenously ate our food supplies, hooked high up on a tree away from bears, longed for coffee and needed prune juice. After Yosemite I decided that Paul definitely appreciated nature more than I did. I preferred visiting Shasta, an old mining town with a museum which contained a suffrage banner. Regardless of minor hardships and unfortunate mishaps, I had made a lasting friend in Temma, who visited London later that year.²⁶

Upon returning to London in September, I went to Mile End Hospital with a socialist feminist friend from Hackney, Juliet Ash, whose baby happened to be due just two months before mine. Juliet would become animated about ideas, yet remained cool and composed when she was in conflict with bureaucracy. She was also irreverent and fun, a good ally against the conventions of commercial maternal goo. We had been meeting for a while, but became closer when by chance we were both pregnant at the same time. I have a memory of us sitting on a bench in the graveyard of St John’s Church, off Lower Clapton Road, making a pledge to see one another through our pregnancies. Juliet has no recollection of what to me was an intense symbolic moment. Yet we did it anyway, pledge or no pledge.

I had first encountered Juliet when I went to speak to the sixth form at her school in Camden. Subsequently she studied at York University, where we had friends in common, and she invited me up to talk on women’s liberation. A few years later she was in Hackney, living in a communal house with Jock Young, one of the radical criminologists challenging prevailing classifications of ‘deviancy’, which was being applied to anything from taking drugs to seeking an abortion. Juliet, along with her friend Michele Ryan, was a member of the International Socialism group and involved in both the abortion campaign and Stop the Cuts.

Juliet and I were both lucky to land amid the crowd of pregnant women sitting in the vast waiting room at Mile End, where the enlightened Peter Huntingford had recently been appointed Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. He was unusual in believing not simply in women’s right to decide whether to have a baby, but in listening carefully to pregnant women’s wishes about giving birth. Influenced by the critiques coming from women’s liberation about hierarchical and technologically led models of medical practice, he pressed for empathetic care. He was joined at Mile End by the imposing Wendy Savage, and both combined their considerable professional knowledge with a commitment to feminist ideas. Their innovative practices were, however, viewed with scepticism not only by doctors, but also by some midwives who believed in the old ways of relating to pregnant women.

Peter Huntingford had been welcomed by my GP, Michael Leibson, into his awkward squad of East London medical dissidents. But regardless of this local clutch of rebel doctors, much went on the same in the East End NHS. At that time many feminists were arguing for home births and I had toyed with this option. In 1976 I was thirty-three and thus viewed as a veritably ancient mother-to-be by the local midwives. Their alarm about my age was compounded when the midwife who inspected our communal house discovered my bed consisted of a mattress in a wooden box. It was a well-made box, constructed by Bob Rowthorn in the sixties. Bob had applied his mathematical abilities and O level carpentry skills learned at school in Newport, rather than his expertise as an economist, to this solid construction which worked perfectly well. But it did not correspond to a conventional definition of a suitable bed and the horrified midwife decreed against a home birth.

A small group of radical midwives was forming within the women’s movement in Hackney. Among them was the former Miss World protester, Jo Robinson, as well as Jane Grant, and both took a prominent part locally in community activism. Grateful for their fortifying support, I felt abashed when Jane congratulated me on deciding to have my baby in hospital because we needed to take the struggle into the medical institutions. How could I explain it was just timidity and a disinclination for risk? I opted for Mile End because I trusted Peter Huntingford and was anyway bothered enough about giving birth without seeing it as a site of struggle.

Though I was absorbed in my pregnancy, I was aware that in May, women at Trico, an engineering factory in Brentford, had gone on strike for equal pay. They had picketed right through that long hot summer of’76 – the Women’s Theatre Group’s play supporting their strike was called ‘Costa del Trico’. In October the Trico workers won, by which time South Asian women workers at Grunwick’s, a photo processing plant, were striking against the dismissal of a fellow worker and for the right to join a union. Their resolution was so profound that the strike was to continue for nearly two years and gain widespread support.²⁷ The composition of trade unionism was shifting and a ground-floor coalition was forming. There seemed hope for a new trade unionism.

I was in Whitby during October, once again cutting my Carpenter manuscript, interspersed with outings on our days off. After Paul located a direct line between a Roman signal station and the site of a Roman camp on the Ordnance Survey map we found its traces under a field through the giveaway bumps. Off I went to Whitby Library to learn more about this distant past and came across the Urn People who had been locals long before the Romans had arrived. We visited one of their stone circles and I communed on what seemed like the shepherd’s stone seat, before having my first driving lesson on a sheep track in the new Morris Traveller we had bought. By this time I was protruding noticeably and my womb got in the way of the steering wheel. Faint-heartedly, I decided to defer learning to drive. It proved to be my one and only lesson.

Pregnancy released me from efforts for coherence and I let my mind flit and wander without explicit purpose. It also brought with it a pronounced receptivity. When we returned to London, Barbara Kopple’s film Harlan County evoked vivid visual memories, while the voices of Hazel Dickens, Florence Reece and Sarah Ogan Gunning moved me deeply.²⁸ Harlan County was to win an Academy Award and, most unusually, broke from the documentary slot into the mainstream.

When Bill Fishman conducted another of his convivial anarchist history tours of East London, I drifted away to join early twentieth-century anarchists in the Sugar Loaf pub in Hanbury Street, meeting up with my two Jewish anarchist heroines, Milly and Rose Witcop. Before long I had zoomed forward to the twenties and Rose was chairing Margaret Sanger’s talk on ‘Birth Control for the Workers’ in Islington’s City Road.²⁹

I was still working for the WEA and earlier in the year had taught a new course on radical movements at Essex Road Women’s Centre. That autumn, I became a student myself in Barbara Taylor’s class at the Centre. She had begun the research on the women influenced by Robert Owen’s cooperative socialism in the first half of the nineteenth century which inspired her book, Eve and the New Jerusalem (1983). She told us that not only had they defended trade unions, cooperative production and secularism, they had also asserted women’s right to education, including knowledge of their own bodies. Barbara described how the Owenite women had proposed marriage reform and communal child care, imagining new kinds of relationships in society between women and men. I enjoyed not having any responsibility for the course apart from playing my records of early nineteenth-century radical protest songs. Barbara later recalled how cold it was in the Centre that winter, but my chief difficulty was in settling comfortably in those ancient lumpy armchairs as my own lumpiness increased.³⁰

Aware that the women’s movement now contained innumerable pressure groups, study circles and creative workshops, each dwelling in their distinct spheres and only randomly engaging in any wider communication, I embarked on organizing a new type of monthly meeting at the Women’s Centre. The first was on Women in Media, the second on Women and Anthropology and the third, on 12 December, was on Women and Music. Sandra Kerr made this a special occasion by coming along not simply to talk on women and folk, but also to sing her ‘Maintenance Engineer’.

Sitting in Essex Road Women’s Centre that winter, I felt an inchoate sense of time pending, as if what I had known as ‘women’s liberation’ seemed to be shape-shifting into some as yet unknown form. And this, in turn, was shadowed by an intimation of urgent contingency for the left. I refused to decipher either perception as deriving from carrying the being moving within me. I was not going to allow my flickering thoughts to be determined by biology. Now I wonder if perhaps the dramatic changes within were combining with my spasmodic glimpses of what was happening externally. For whatever reason, I was beginning to sense, in some blurry way, a pressure for rethinking and change.

Some things were absolutely clear. As the year came to an end, I sent a joyous postcard to Carole Turbin, ‘I’m having a baby (with Paul) and I’m so happy.’³¹

My preoccupations were certainly changing. Formerly removed and somewhat dutiful causes were about to become immediate and material ones. At a meeting of Hackney Under Fives at Centerprise Bookshop, I was now seriously pricking up my ears at discussions between parents and child-care workers about how to improve provision for children in the area. Just how this new alertness was going to manifest itself remained veiled in ambiguous obscurity.

9

1977

During the New Year Paul and I went off in the Morris Traveller to stay with his brother Mark and his sister-in-law Sonia in the Scottish Trossachs. Mark worked as a labourer for the water board there and dwelt on esoteric forms of spirituality; Sonia meanwhile coped with life as it presented itself. They had two children; Adam, aged four, who was intrigued by us as new arrivals, and Karl, who was still a young baby and blithely oblivious. I suspect Sonia must have decided that was going to be it, for I inherited from her a huge stash of baby clothes. When we returned home I proceeded to dye them all purple, my favourite colour, but not at all customary for baby gear at the time.

As my girth grew larger in the final two months of pregnancy I was beginning to tire of the one old second-hand dress that fitted me, and came to regret my utilitarian dismissal of buying any maternity clothes. I recalled meeting a group of Parisian feminists in a women’s bookshop when Françoise Barret-Ducrocq’s translation of Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World had come out. They had gone on about ‘jouissance’ and extolled maternity. At the time I had dismissed all this as far too gushy, but by January 1977 I was wondering if perhaps I could have done with a bit more gush.

Dora Russell had been writing to me, admonishing rest and calm, but instead I had a wodge of other bothers that extended beyond mere attire. In December 1976 the papers from a conference on ‘Patriarchy’ had been printed as a pamphlet. It included one from the ‘Dalston Study Group’ which criticized the overarching use of the term ‘Patriarchy’ and expressed doubts that it could ‘include the idea of changing social relations between the sexes’. They linked this to a broader disagreement with the assumption that structuralist approaches to knowledge epitomized ‘Theory’. ‘We think it’s important to try to learn to communicate at the same time as building up knowledge, rather than having a two-step process of theorise first and popularize later (i.e., an intellectual vanguard).’¹ I shared their unease. A member of the Dalston Study Group, Stef Pixner, lived nearby. She had come to my WEA classes in Euston, encouraged my interest in women’s poems and songs, and was involved in Essex Road Women’s Centre. Early in 1977 we started talking about patriarchy, theorizing and socialist feminism. ‘Patriarchy’ became even more bothersome than alternative pregnancy garb.

Next came the rabbits. The first one was sighted in our garden in Dalston on 13 January.² Fresh from nature in the Scottish lochs and mountains, I beamed to myself, inwardly welcoming an unusual arrival in the inner city. The next rabbit sighting was somewhat troubling as its leg was wounded. Having no idea what to do about a wounded animal, I walked down to Dalston police station to report it to the state, hoping for instructions about who to contact.

When the big bushy eyebrows of the officer at the desk went up in irate disbelief, I realized this was a mistake. The police, imported into Hackney from the outlying suburbs, considered themselves to be on the front line of a battleground, rather than helpers of afflicted creatures reported by concerned citizens. Without any glimmer of compunction, he emphatically denied any responsibility for rabbits. ‘What did you expect!’ exclaimed Nigel Fountain, his hard-bitten-journalist hat firmly in place.

The rabbit died; but other healthy though extremely hungry ones appeared. ‘How sweet, how spring like’, I thought, bumbling about in my very old dress. More and more rabbits joined them. They were big and tough and glared if you approached. Our cat backed off before them. Those rabbits ate and ate the garden until every green blade and shoot was devoured, only then did they pass on to pastures new. We eventually worked out they were coming from a neighbour a few doors down, who bred them to eat.

Finally there was the relation between Leninist vanguard parties and feminism to try and sort out. I had come to the conclusion that the preoccupation with Lenin on the left was mistaken; not only did our circumstances differ markedly from the time of the Russian Revolution, it was questionable just how committed those supposedly all-knowing Bolsheviks had been on women’s liberation.

In an article for Red Rag, ‘Leninism in the Lurch’, I pointed out that far from the ‘vanguards’ in present-day left groups possessing a supposedly superior consciousness, the reality was that most of them had only come to a belated awareness of women’s oppression because of pressure from ‘an autonomous feminist movement’ and ‘the militancy of working-class women’.³ With a nod to the rabbits I observed that we socialist feminists had found ourselves consigned to ‘guerrilla burrowing’ between the women’s movement and Leninist organizations.⁴ Instead I argued that the women’s movement was ‘playing an important part in earthing ideas about new forms of socialist organisation’.⁵ Opposing the presupposition that the ‘Party’ constituted the vanguard, I saw that a social movement could take an active rather than a subsidiary role practically and theoretically.

‘Leninism in the Lurch’ was written in a rush and I only just managed to get it to Red Rag a few days before giving birth in March. What with one thing and another, some more conventional pregnancy activities were skimped. I had started making a patchwork quilt, but managed only a small, ragged, buckled piece of cloth with a lot of messy stitching at the back. Paul and I had been attending birth classes of an alternative kind, where we did a lot of deep breathing and thigh squeezing (to prepare for the containment of labour pains). In a gesture of wild irresponsible abandon, we played truant from the final class and went to see Charlton Heston in Ben Hur. After I experienced strange stirrings during the chariot race, Andy Metcalf, a member of Paul’s men’s group, who had studied medicine, assured me this was not the imminent onset of labour.

The following day we went to Mile End Hospital, where, for the first twelve hours, all went as planned. Wendy Savage was on duty and had me walking briskly around: ‘I was doing a ward round when I was at your stage of labour.’ The midwives during the rest of the day were jovial and reassuring, but that night the pain became unbearable. A detached young midwife gave me gas. I was semi-conscious by the morning, sporadically perceiving Paul’s large dark anxious eyes looking down. A momentary awareness that giving birth was not the kind of activity in which it was possible to change your mind midway flashed into my head. Then I was on a drip and Peter Huntingford’s lighter brown eyes came into view, as he counted my breathing reassuringly.

I had no sense of time, but suddenly there was a big rush and a light above me. I rued missing that last class which no doubt would have enabled me to know what to do. A young doctor was telling me to push. My son, Will, was born at 4:12 p.m. I had been in labour for over thirty hours and was somewhat dazed. Later I was touched to hear that Nigel had been ferrying food to Paul by bicycle and pleased that evidently we had convinced the medical team it was a good idea to have partners present. It was one of Peter Huntingford’s welcome innovations.

I was soon to grasp that the democratization of birth was more complex than I had assumed. According to the old hospital routines new babies were cared for apart from their mothers; I was relieved this had been reformed and that I could breastfeed Will. However, I heard other mothers in the ward grumbling and realized that for working-class mothers, probably with other children at home, the rest was vital. Propped up on my hospital bed I pondered these unexpected gaps between theory and practice. Tensions between differing interpretations of needs apparently ought to be added to my perplexities.

We were given lessons at Mile End on pelvic exercises, breastfeeding and bathing babies. I, who knew nothing, feared I would forget all the verbal information and so took notes. I could not resist recording some less formal instruction too. An older Afro-Caribbean midwife laughed and declared, ‘He’s crying because you are holding him too much like a bebby and not like a man.’ Later she admonished, ‘Don’t spoil him.’⁶ This contrasted with the approach I had imbibed from feminist friends influenced by alternative health ideals of just going with a baby’s needs.

So I simply played it by ear. Even in the first few hours of our association I suspected I was in some symbiotic negotiation with this tiny being. I started to ad lib in my notebook, ‘If he gets in a bad mood he goes bright red and roars & won’t feed until he’s in a good mood. He is very determined.’⁷

I was duly grateful to the hospital, though I loathe being in an institution of any kind. Thanks to Peter Huntingford, Will and I were able to escape after forty-eight hours. Paul came to collect us and, as he drove along Cambridge Heath Road towards Hackney, an incongruous thought occurred to me. Two people had gone, three were coming back; we had altered the population statistics.

When we got home any such grand sociological notions were obliterated. I was in bed recovering from stitches and following an amalgam of advice: salt and water from the NHS and a brown seaweed brew recommended by alternative-health feminists. My knowledge of baby care was limited. When Paul and Will disappeared for a long stretch, I wondered what they were doing. ‘I’ve given him a bath’, Paul declared. I was appalled: ‘You can’t do that. I’ve got notes on how to do it.’ But I had to acknowledge that Will had survived.

Paul, who had been brought up with two younger brothers, used to joke that he had imagined if I had a baby I would put it on my in-tray and forget about it while I was writing. Instead, of course, we were both assiduous and obsessed, amazed by each new development, a grin, a hold, the touching of toes.

We were not exactly isolated, for quite apart from the communal household I estimated that in the first month Will met around a hundred different people. One of the earliest was Janet Rée from the Arsenal women’s group, who had two daughters and was impressively confident around babies. We had chosen ‘William’ after Paul’s uncle and William Morris and initially thought of shortening this to ‘Billy’ or ‘Bill’, but the daughter of Janet’s cousin, Lisa Vine, was already named ‘Billie’. As Janet held him, she observed the determined neck and declared that he should be ‘Will’. We added ‘James’ in honour of James Swinson, who I appointed as ‘Marxfather’.

Another memorable visit was from Juliet and baby Jesse Ash. Jesse had been born in January, and at the celebratory party I had found it so strange to see Juliet engrossed in holding him. I had gazed at the two of them as if they belonged to some sphere apart, while I watched from a threshold I could not cross. By March everything had changed. Deciding that the two babies’ first meeting should be recorded, I took a photograph of them perched on the bed; Jesse a veritable giant of two months and Will a tiny creature of just a few days.

Marc Karlin, who had left Montague Road after falling in love with Hermione Harris, arrived to take Will and me out for a ceremonial walk. I knew we were being honoured as he rarely stopped working on his films, but I was wickedly amused to see how quickly he became tired from carrying Will strapped around his front in the brown corduroy pouch that Paul had sewn. No wonder I had been weary.

Letters came too. ‘Babies are something’, declared Ros Baxandall, adding, ‘They are wonderful but take everything.’⁸ Michelene Wandor, who, upon hearing I was pregnant, had penned stern questions about how we were planning to divide child care, wrote to say well done, making me feel proud of doing what women had, after all, been doing from time immemorial. She then set about knitting Will a green sweater emblazoned with a beautiful red women’s liberation sign on the front.

That March, Edward sent me the revised Merlin edition of his book William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. I had read the original when I first met the Thompsons in the early sixties and been inspired by the passion and hope of Morris’s socialism. This time it was Edward’s Postscript for the new edition which captivated me. Morris’s question, ‘How Shall We Live?’, had been sidelined and buried in twentieth-century socialism but Edward placed it in the foreground. He posited that the ‘inability to project any images of the future’ within Marxism had resulted in it falling back ‘in lieu of these upon the Utilitarian’s earthly paradise – the maximisation of economic growth’.⁹ I was to read and reread these words over and over again, linking them to all those fragmented, transformative endeavours at work, in communities and in personal life in which I, and so many others, had been involved. Edward’s affirmation of utopian ‘desire’ – not simply wanting more but wanting differently – resonated so powerfully. I wanted to scoop up the words, make them tangible and magnify them so they would not dissolve. The post-1956 New Left may not have achieved its aim of establishing a lasting political and social movement, but the impetus to create a new kind of society had persisted.

The Essex Road Women’s Centre meetings on feminism and culture had carried on into the spring, covering topics such as ‘Science’, ‘Political Economy’, ‘Film’, ‘Literature’ and ‘Therapy’. Regardless of divisions within the movement itself, feminism was fast extending its reach through challenges on a wide range of cultural fronts where a well of creative energy was being released. The closure of the Centre later in the year was a great loss, but friendships survived. I came to regard one of its founders, Lisa Vine, as my adviser on alternative motherhood. Lisa, whose daughter Billie was eighteen months older than Will, mixed pragmatism with principles and was a fount of decisive knowledge.

The ethos of sharing child care saved me from isolation. An East London Men’s Centre had been opened near Whitechapel tube and Paul used to go to meetings there. They helped to organize crèches for events and set up a publications collective and an introductory therapy group.¹⁰ I breastfed in public with bravado, in meetings, on buses, even between the stacks in the Marx Memorial Library, where Jim Fryth organized a week’s course on the documents it held. But one such foray did not go well. I took Will to hear an American academic who read a learned and lengthy paper on seventeenth-century political thought. We were seated on the floor in a hot, packed room, unable to leave without causing a major disruption. Will awoke and I fed him to prevent him crying. Meanwhile a member of the audience fell asleep and gently snored. The voice of the speaker was thus backed by contrapuntal snores and the sucking of an infant. Afterwards I could see the surreal humour, at the time I was just exceedingly uncomfortable.

In those early months of motherhood I felt a curious remoteness from my former self; it was as if submerged selves were spurting forth and taking me by surprise. Despite my much regretted inability to sing, I had become acutely conscious of rhythm, playing the songs of Kate and Anna McGarrigle over and over, dancing with Will to ‘First Born’ and being swept up in a transmuted yearning I could not fathom in ‘Talk to Me of Mendocino’. It was the micro world of baby life that seemed real, while venturing outside assumed a misty, dream-like quality. And this is how that time has settled into my memory.

Escaping from London and the piles of letters asking me to do all kinds of impossible things was a relief. At the end of April, en route for Whitby, Paul, Will and I visited Dorothy and Edward Thompson who were living outside Worcester in a large old house at Wick Episcopi. But rest proved elusive. The garden was protected from neighbouring sheep by an old ha ha and, to my exasperation, I discovered myself waking at the bleat of the lambs – as if they were my responsibility.

Blackburn’s Yard in Whitby made child care easier than in London. It was full of young children and the older ones entertained the younger. Some lived in the yard or nearby, others arrived with members of the Whitby women’s group. Its existence was an achievement, for Whitby was conservative with a small, as well as a large, ‘C’. The group was an interesting amalgam of Labour Party women, environmentalists, Buddhists and a single mother from the council estate on the hill. I felt instantly at home with them, rediscovering the open, non-sectarian spirit of early women’s liberation.

However, the fusion of personal relating and politics in women’s liberation could lead to an unexpected awkwardness. The Whitby feminists were puzzled by a problem of silence at meetings. Because no one wanted to dominate, they tended to just say nothing at all. This was an extreme example of a reluctance I recognized. It arose because of our desire to eradicate any sign of hierarchy, but the result could sometimes be paralysing.

When the Whitby group asked me for advice, I did not know exactly what to say, apart from suggesting that a familiar difficulty in a movement which has resolved to do without leaders is the fear of appearing to be one. Once this was discussed openly, ways around it could be found of initiating without dominating. The women’s movement had demonstrated that differing aspects of leading could be distributed rather than concentrated in the person of a single individual. When I had first visited the pioneering Tufnell Park Group I’d noticed the difference in atmosphere this created. There was something else too in how an individual handled responsibility. I had watched how, at our Arsenal meetings, much animated chat would ensue before Hermione would say, ‘Shall we begin?’ She had a particular skill of guiding without prodding, which enabled us to make the transition between life and meeting.

Paul, Will and I went back to Whitby again during the summer. The arrival of my no-nonsense sister-in-law and niece was a good antidote to my habitual state of dreamy, sleepy contemplation. On the beach, one sunny afternoon, a group of about eight young miners began an over-optimistic chat-up routine, until I discombobulated them by feeding Will, whereupon the banter started to turn hostile. An older companion quickly intervened to rebuke them, ‘Women always used to do that outside the pub.’ Thus normalized, we invited them back for tea, disrupting Paul’s stretch of peace and filling up the bottom room of the cottage. The resourceful older miner confidently held Will flat on his chest to stop him crying and they all departed in good humour.

A luxurious Pullman train proved a more discreet setting than the beach. With our expenses paid by Granada Television, during July I travelled in state to Manchester with Hermione Harris and Will. Joan Bakewell was compering the innovative programme, ‘Pandora’s Box’, a series of panels comprised exclusively of women. Our topic was working mothers and child care; the producer wanted me to talk with Will on my knee, but television was too daunting so instead he went off with her. I admired Joan Bakewell’s quick, calm intelligence and was impressed by an incisive, vivacious Scot on the panel who spoke brilliantly in defence of women and the powerless in general. I had come across the lawyer and writer Helena Kennedy through Dorothy and Edward, but the trip up to ‘Pandora’s Box’ gave us an opportunity to really meet.

1977 was the Queen’s 25th Jubilee, so we were subjected to doses of gush and drool in the media accompanied by her celebratory pink hat. The Jubilee was an absurd fandango. When her car drove through Hackney a partially demolished church in Dalston Lane was deemed too distressing for royal eyes and thus was concealed by billboards. Labour was in power, but the new leader, James Callaghan, was more royal than the royals, and I was aware that a new right lurked among the Conservatives, deploying a rhetoric of freedom while backing the suppression of trade unions as well as gays.

For years those of us on the left had grumbled about Harold Wilson, but now Callaghan was prime minister and Merlyn Rees home secretary, the government was adopting a markedly less suspicious approach towards the Security Services. Edward Thompson, alerted to secret surveillance and covert nobbling, was among those who protested against the deportation of two American critics of the CIA, Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball, and then the arrest of Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell under the Official Secrets Act of 1911. Berry, a social worker in North London, had been a corporal in Signals Intelligence in Cyprus; Aubrey and Campbell were journalists investigating interchanges between American and British electronic intelligence for Time Out. The information existed in specialist published sources, but was unofficially withheld by newspapers. In 1978 they were to be found guilty, but not given custodial sentences. The protest around the ‘ABC’ trial, as it was known, redrew the lines on what the public could know about defence. Crispin Aubrey later became part of Hackney’s child-care network.¹¹

By the summer of 1977, the pickets in the Grunwick strike had grown exponentially. Tom Durkin and Jack Dromey, the leaders of the local Brent Trades Council, rallied support from local trade unionists. The Special Patrol Group (SPG), a tough unit in the Metropolitan Police, was brought in, and as news of the aggressive policing of the long strike spread, supporters rallied. They included anti-racist groups and feminists, among them members of the first black women’s group in Brixton, as well as Arthur Scargill and a contingent of miners. Audrey Wise, now a Labour MP, was arrested while picketing and Mary Davis, who I knew slightly from Red Rag, was among those badly injured.

Hostility from James Callaghan, along with the ambivalence of the TUC leadership, anxious to comply with the government’s Social Contract, eventually contributed to the strike’s defeat.¹² Nevertheless the publicity it received represented a watershed. Women of Asian, Afro-Caribbean and African heritage had participated in many strikes during the seventies, making sacrifices that had often been overlooked. After Grunwick they were far harder to disregard. The first Asian women’s group, Awaz, formed in 1977; its members supported Asian women strikers and also campaigned against deportation, racist policing and violence against women.¹³

Also, at last we had a London Nursery Campaign combining demands for nursery places for all children under five with better pay and conditions for all workers looking after small children. This campaign, linked to the Working Women’s Charter, Women’s Aid and to the TUC’s nursery sub-committee, stressed the need for child care to be a shared responsibility.¹⁴

I found it exceedingly difficult to write anything that summer, managing only a review of the moving American film about three women active in the early thirties, Union Maids, for Spare Rib.¹⁵ However, during 1977, Pluto published two books written before Will had arrived. My essay on Edward Carpenter appeared alongside Jeff Weeks’s study of the early sex psychologist Havelock Ellis, in Socialism and the New Life.¹⁶ Writing about Carpenter enabled me to outline his ideas on same-sex relationships, as well as those between women and men. I stressed too how his socialist politics were permeated by an emphasis upon inward as well as outer change and influenced many people of differing classes during his lifetime. I was proud that the book impressed Edward Thompson. Praise from Edward, who knew so much about the late nineteenth-century socialist movement, was praise indeed. At the time I wrongly assumed that I had done what I could on the prophet of sex, socialism and the simple life; many years later I was to return to Carpenter and his circle of friends.¹⁷

Socialism and the New Life was followed shortly afterwards by Stella Browne: A New World for Women.¹⁸ I had become interested in the unflinching agitator for birth control, abortion and the free expression of women’s sexual desire when I wrote Hidden from History, and had spent several years learning more. In 1977, Stella Browne was all too relevant, as the National Abortion Campaign was confronting yet another attempt to restrict abortion in William Benyon’s Bill. And, when I spoke on both books, the memories of women in the meetings indicated how much more there was to be said on sex and socialism. In one, Zelda Curtis described sitting reading Ellis in a Communist Party branch in the thirties, while Daphne Morgan said that when she joined the Battersea CP in the mid-thirties the secretary had whisked her, along with other women recruits, off to the local birth control clinic.

Dorothy Thompson joked that in Stella Browne I had found the missing link between Carpenter and Alexander Kollontai, and it was true that I was realizing how the ideas about women’s sexual freedom that Dora Russell had described to me had been internationally influential. Fortunately I was not alone; Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, which I reviewed for the History Workshop journal that autumn, brought deeper insights about the debates around birth control and reproduction in the US.¹⁹ When Linda had read my introduction to the American edition of Hidden from History, she had reflected, ‘It was uncanny to me how you were saying the things I think.’²⁰ Now it was my turn to reciprocate an equivalent sense of connection. I was not sure how it was that I had found women so far away treading such recognizable paths, but I knew that the links we were making as socialist feminist historians were vital ones.

In the autumn, when I began to move back into the outer world of teaching and meetings, I was now able to cover American as well as British radical history in my WEA classes. In September I also ventured out to a meeting to save the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson women’s hospital and then went down to speak on ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement’ at a conference in Southampton during October.²¹

In one of the workshops I attended at the Southampton event, a woman denounced men as inherently violent. I was startled and dismayed, for she was not attacking the violent actions of particular men towards women, but branding all men. Friends had mentioned hearing similar assertions of a contorted logic – some men rape women therefore all men are potential rapists – accompanied by dehumanizing slogans which were non-sensical and offensive, but might spuriously appear militant and clear cut.

They gained adherents partly because change occurred so slowly, while their implacable emotional charge was fuelled by the horrific unsolved ‘Ripper’ murders of women occurring in the North of England, along with the anti-women prejudices among the police and media these had revealed. But their longer-term implications were reactionary. Condemning people simply for being born into a particular sex leads to a biological determinism – a dead end that demolishes any hope in human beings creating social or personal intercommunication as equals. Such attitudes were utterly alien to me.

I had been sheltered by my preoccupation with pregnancy and mothering from a newly emergent strand of separatist feminism. This was not the radical feminism that simply preferred women’s spaces, it was a virulent political mood I had not come across before. In that Southampton meeting, thrown off guard by the assumption that all men were ‘the enemy’, I caught the empathetic glance of one other woman in the workshop, as she slowly raised her eyes upwards in mute despair. It was as if we had been turned into underground dissidents in the movement we considered ourselves part of.

I was to be flummoxed too the following day at an event in London, though it could hardly have been more different. Laura Mulvey, who I had known at university, had made the film Riddles of the Sphinx with Peter Wollen, and had asked me to speak at its launch in the Other Cinema. Merdelle Jordine, who played ‘Maxine’ in the film, was there too. We had become friendly through Agit Prop and street theatre during the late sixties. They both exuded a joyous celebration of aesthetic pleasure. Though I was not familiar with the film theory informing Riddles of the Sphinx, I intuitively understood its interrogatory theme – a mother’s loss and search for identity. I was compelled by the film’s imaginative effort to shift and reconfigure familiar words and images in order to reimagine women beyond a male-defined culture.

When it was my turn to speak I managed to mutter something on the male gaze, before spotting Paul standing in the right-hand back corner of the room with Will in his arms. They had just come in. At that moment it was not the male gaze but the possibility of the infant male howl that caused me to falter. I froze. And whatever I said afterwards has faded into time. Mothering and identity were beginning to look more tricky than I had bargained for.

Although I managed, I was forced to admit that researching, preparing and speaking for meetings as well as for my WEA classes on the history of women and socialism did seem much more of an effort than they had been before the arrival of Will. It was not simply the interrupted sleep, but the switch into an external mode of consciousness when I was so intensely preoccupied by the cadences of babyhood.

Dutiful Daughters appeared on 24 November. It received some enthusiastic reviews but I felt unsure whether the tentative reflections of the women Jean McCrindle and I had interviewed would resonate. Their personal complexity did not tally with the desperate campaigning in defence of abortion, the rage of the separatists against men as a sex, or an abstruse theorizing that was beginning to engage some socialist feminists.

However, in movements there are always countervailing pulses, and there existed a strong desire for a feminist culture that could encompass women’s varied experiences. In 1977 Virago had begun doing its historical reprints, starting with an illuminating collection of life stories by Co-operative working women, Life as We Have Known It. In her introduction Anna Davin stressed the significance of ‘personal testimony’ and paid generous tribute to the ‘research and ideas’ of Gloden Dallas.²²

The original had appeared in 1931, edited by the social reformer Margaret Llewellyn Davies, who highlighted the economic and social projects devised and conceived by women cooperators amid austerity. She also persuaded her friend Virginia Woolf to write an ‘Introductory Letter’ – a remarkable probing of class and gender inequality which deserves to be better known.

Neil Middleton had rejected my proposal for a book on British socialist feminism and was still urging me to write about the women’s liberation movement as a whole. I felt the internal schisms were too raw for an historical account. However, I had been systematically saving ephemeral material for an archive and decided that it would be possible to chronicle ideas within the movement through specific areas in which we had taken action, such as work, maternity and child care. That autumn I was uneasily aware of having made little progress, explaining to Carole Turbin in November that this was partly ‘because my head wants to go out to roam, partly because I am always rather dozy with waking up & breast feeding’.²³ Conceiving, planning and writing a book felt impossible, especially when its subject matter was rapidly transmuting.

Instead, having a baby was leading me to muse upon both my parents and my own early memories. Until the age of seven my home in Leeds had been in Harehills Avenue. While I might scream at the monsters in the bedroom shadows at night, by day I had been an organizer of a gang of small children, playing in a den behind the roses that ran up the back garden wall, and jumping over logs in the park. Alone, I would puzzle over the books gathering dust in the attic. They had arrived at random in auction lots, along with second-hand furniture.

Mixed with these visual memories were innuendoes about class and race in the conversations of adults, which I heard but could not comprehend. In 1950, when we moved up in the world to middle-class Roundhay, I was ostracized as ‘common’ and missed my friends. Years later my mother told me how they had walked from Harehills to see me, but my father had turned them away at the garden gate.

My poem ‘The Years Before Eleven’ was published in Michelene Wandor and Michele Roberts’s collection Cutlesses and Earrings in 1977.

Looking at a marigold

My mind goes back

To early summers on the lawn,

There is a lost fragrance

A texture I can’t touch again.

The taste of tomatoes in the sun,

Cream, soft grass,

The darkening shadow of his wrath,

Broken glass

My screams at night

Her knotted string

And reassuring light.

Earlier, walled dens in roses.

In between two churches

Large boys attack

Without your gang

Blushing once with one.

The kids with runny noses,

The mystery of crab apples,

The journey to allotments.

Whispers as ‘the blacks’ move in.

The game on logs

Between the gaps

Slippery surfaces

Slithering in socks

Mud-pies,

Dusty book lots

Of the Egyptian dead.

You could have used those

After they’d gone

He said.

Some kind of differentness

Taught, on rote, built in

A certain bewilderment.

Some children wore white plimsolls

In the snow.

Stayed by pubs

At night,

Played with toads

In gutter streams.

Some houses had bare boards

And holes.

It was explained

Their parents

Didn’t care about them

Not like you.

But when you moved

The neighbours tried

To keep their children

Safe.

Said you were common

Said you screamed

Made them dirty

And afraid.

You listened to the wind

Alone.

And learned to sense the rain.

You played your stories in your head,

A boy,

Until breasts

Came

With blood

And pain.²⁴

I remained acutely responsive to the imaginings of others. Whenever I could, I snatched time to read novels, wrapping myself up in Ursula Le Guin’s exploratory fantasies. Through Bruce Green, Paul and I went to a preview of Star Wars and I loved the strange creatures in the pub, the sensible Princess and Harrison Ford’s twinkle as Han Solo. Bruce, who had worked with the Newsreel Collective, had done some of its special effects, and Jean McCrindle’s father, the former Communist, Alex, played General Jan Dodonna. These links surprised me; Bruce explained that the film had been a gamble for George Lucas. The tight budget had led him to be inventive. No one could have known then that the film would become legendary.

My grief was sharp when Clive Goodwin, the astute dream dealer who had started Black Dwarf and, with Tariq Ali, had enabled me to begin writing articles, died tragically in Los Angeles that November. He was visiting with Trevor Griffiths, who had done the script for the film Reds, in which Warren Beatty played the revolutionary journalist John Reed. Clive went out for a walk and collapsed. The police were called and took him to the cells, rather than a hospital. He died of a brain haemorrhage.²⁵ His memorial on 4 December testified to the innumerable people he had affected and encouraged. I sat remembering Clive’s rage against the con of privileged arrogance, concealed tautly behind his brown, screened eyes.

That Christmas the firefighters (still known as ‘firemen’) were on strike. The Arsenal Group collected toys for their children which we delivered to the Hackney fire station. I remember that they seemed surprised, but whether it was the dolls and teddy bears or our militant-sounding name again I could not determine.

10

1978

When I had complained of exhaustion during pregnancy, a forthright Lisa Vine had responded, ‘If you’re tired now, just wait until the baby is born.’ She was right, for as the months went by, my weariness seemed to accumulate. I went to support women hotel workers picketing at the Hotel Metropole in London, but sorties like this felt somehow more daunting.

I was lucky to hear from Stef Pixner about a new consciousness-raising group meeting nearby. It had formed through the discussions about the Patriarchy Conference and it focused not on ‘patriarchy’ as an abstraction, but on our own relationships with our fathers. As well as Stef I knew Alison Fell, but soon felt at ease with the others because there was a strong atmosphere of honesty and trust in the meetings. Our impetus came from a shared search to understand personally and politically. The ‘Fathers’ Group’ helped me to pattern the whirl of inner reverie that I was dwelling within and fostered an inner strength.

Each meeting revealed an intriguing diversity. Some had fathers like mine who believed their word should be final, while others had ones who simply retreated behind newspapers. A particularly exciting rebel father had taught his daughter how to poach; another daughter only met hers when she was eighteen because he had vanished when she was a young child, leaving two women pushing their prams up the same hill in the same neighbourhood.

The Fathers’ Group helped me to reimagine my father as an individual, rather than simply as an oppressive authority figure. Our shared exchanges gave me a capacity to get behind my antagonism and reach out to the frustrated pain he must have experienced because he could only express the love he undoubtedly felt through futile efforts to dominate me. The talk I gave on him for the group became the basis for a longer essay, ‘Our Lance’, which was later to be published in Ursula Owen’s Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.¹

I was uncomfortably aware that much remained in abeyance between David and myself. Starting a journal again that February, I reflected that this made it impossible for me to acknowledge to him the ‘warmth and value’ in our relationship. When we met, ‘We freeze together.’ Unable to reengage with the pain of the previous year, I decided it had ‘to rest until distance eases it’. Our lack of communication left me with a dull sadness. Yet I had no regrets, writing elliptically, ‘With Paul love’. Despite the exhaustion after nearly a year of Will’s babyhood, I could perceive a way of ‘being so vital in each sliver of existence’, while mentally ideas were stirring again.²

On 17 February I went to speak at Brixton Socialist Club on ‘Socialism’.³ Like the Liverpool Left Club, this was one of several non-aligned gatherings springing up in various parts of the country, where it was possible to talk in an open-minded way. I was ‘exhilarated’ to be given a chance to formulate my thoughts but still noted that it took an ‘effort of nerve’ to articulate them. Before the onset of acrimony, the collectivity of the women’s movement had made it possible to test and develop ideas through sharing experiences. Yet, despite having been a socialist for sixteen years, I still felt inhibited when expressing what I thought about left politics. Instead I kept sorting through the ideas of others. That February it seemed as if I was constantly ‘clearing until I forget what I might want to start once the world is cleared’.⁴

This was not just a metaphor. In Montague Road I had moved up from the semi-basement and now inhabited a bedroom on the middle floor, divided by wooden doors from my desk and workplace. Paul had a small study downstairs next to the tiny kitchen and, in order to read, had devised a bottle-holding contraption with a coiled-up coat hanger so Will could sit in his yellow deck chair and swig his bottle like an accomplished boozer. But regardless of gadgets, the arrival of Will had made the space we inhabited suddenly feel crowded.

Moreover, an unforeseen consequence of sharing child care was that neither Paul nor I were economically viable. The electrical wiring he did with James Swinson was sporadic and my book royalties had dwindled. That left the WEA and freelance journalism. Although I was reviewing fairly regularly for Tony Gould at New Society, both Paul and I were more likely to be asked to do things for no money. While motivated to do these, time vanished, little money came in and we were both always tired.

Will had already acquired a social circle through the children of friends like Juliet Ash’s son Jesse, and Lisa’s daughter Billie. Then, from Paul’s men’s group, there was Paul Morrison and his daughter with Lucy Goodison, Corey. After a ‘babies meeting’ on 10 February, Carla Hughes, from the US, and Jessie Tappenden, a Hackney teacher, along with their twins, Abie and Daniel, connected up with this loose network.⁵

In theory a babies’ group was meant to generate more time, but assembling infants and transporting them took considerable effort. The good days were fun and I loved watching them discovering the world and one another. But they did not always take to collectivity. On 18 March I reported a bad day when ‘the babies were ill & tired & cramped & howled & clung’.⁶ Before having a child I had not recognized that small beings have opinions long before they can converse.

Whenever a space opened, I kept returning to the preoccupations I was discussing with friends: my father, fathers in general, feminist and socialist challenges to assumptions and culture. I had found Marc Karlin’s copy of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, discarded when he moved out to Hermione’s, and became intrigued by Benjamin’s admonition to brush the past the wrong way – against the grain. That March, I again began brushing away at Leninist and Trotskyist emphases on the vanguard party, while being chary too of syndicalism, versions of which were being resuscitated by some on the libertarian left.

In rejecting existing ideas of transformation and agency, I was uncertain how alternatives could take hold. I accepted the pivotal position of the working class, created and yet subordinated by capital. But my feminism had alerted me to the gradations within the working class. Historically, the skilled male craft tradition had indeed produced proud, thoughtful workers who had opposed the power of capitalists, but unfortunately their rebellion had also been predicated on excluding women and ‘unskilled’ workers.

On the other hand, I knew that individual craft workers on the left had repudiated such exclusion, while Ben Birnbaum, a trade union friend in the clothing industry, observed that the libertarian dismissal of skill as inherently elitist was oversimple. Ben insisted that craft skill could contribute to a critical strategic consciousness in the workplace.

By the late seventies, technological change meant that regardless of politics, this craft elite in the workforce was becoming an endangered species, while the Green left was pointing out the negative consequences of elevating qualities of mastery and control over the material world. So how was a new social vision to infuse socialism? I had no idea, but having experienced the innovative collectivity of the women’s movement I was hopeful. Moreover, I had glimpsed, amid the chaos and weariness of my new-found baby world, the nurturing of ‘sensual life’ and a powerful aspiration to cherish the creative value of play.⁷ I did not regard socialism as a fixed entity, I wanted it to be open to radical social movements, and to absorb wider aspects of understanding.

Low-paid workers were still resisting and working-class communities were protesting against welfare cuts. Expectations that daily life could be changed for the better had been battered, but not beaten down. Yet such assumptions were now laced with apprehension. For the fascist right was becoming an aggressive presence. In East London they had long stirred up hatred against the Jews, now they were physically attacking Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants and their families. Local anti-racist groups combated the fascist National Front with demonstrations, but our marches in Hackney still tended to consist mainly of white leftists versus the fascists, who had taken to throwing acid at us along the route.

A cultural intervention transformed opposition to the right. In 1976 racism among musicians had led David and other friends in, or close to, International Socialism to form Rock Against Racism (RAR). By 1978 David was producing RAR’s magazine Temporary Hoarding with the innovative designer Ruth Gregory and the photographer Syd Shelton, whose stark pictures capture the disintegratory feel of the late seventies.

David also helped to set up the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), which on 30 April, along with RAR, organized a march and carnival in Victoria Park.⁸ It was enormous – estimates range from 80,000 to 100,000. I went to visit my former neighbour, Barbara Marsh, who was now living near the park, to try and persuade her to come along. Barbara was a trade unionist and had been opposing racism with every fibre of her being as long as I had known her, but she was also a respectable Catholic mother for whom marches and rock concerts definitely held no appeal, so I went alone to join the crowd listening to Tom Robinson, The Clash and the reggae music of Misty in Roots.

The assertive stand of the Anti-Nazi League and RAR established a broader public presence through demonstrations and concerts which were reported in the media. Over the next few years RAR and Rock Against Sexism helped to bring together a younger generation of black and white rebels. However, things were more complicated because locally non-aligned groupings were already active. Gloden Dallas, for instance, complained angrily that in Halifax the SWP-backed Anti-Nazi League had taken over the broad anti-racist group there. My subsequent distrust of what I saw as the ‘front-like’ aspects of the ANL angered David.⁹

If I was worried by the rise of the right and sectarianism in the left, I was really troubled about the scornful rage towards all men, and indeed towards women who disagreed with their views, driving a small group of extreme separatist feminists who defined themselves as ‘revolutionary’ rather than radical feminists. Ever since 1969, despite disagreements and conflicts within the women’s movement, we had held together by stressing what united us. So while radical feminists put more stress on an alternative female culture, they could establish common ground with socialist feminists through sisterhood. A flexible consensus to live and let live had tacitly developed and had withstood previous divisions. The revolutionary feminists shattered this. Believing that they alone held politically correct views, they denigrated their opponents as ‘bad’ women. Moral imperatives hardened into an authoritarian rhetoric. I remember an exasperated Lynne Segal returning from an encounter at a conference protesting that ‘You could be denounced for saying you lived with your cat.’ She was joking, but the grim humour encapsulated a pervasive mood. Somehow we had moved far away from the earlier stress on women being able to choose how they lived.¹⁰

Large-scale gatherings were particularly prone to agro, and the lack of any formal structure in women’s liberation made resolving strongly held positions impossible. A decision made at one meeting could be simply reversed at the next and thus a determined minority could dominate. These organizational impasses were exasperating, but it was the attacks on men and particularly an overt hostility to male children which proved really destructive. The distress it caused was visceral and ineradicable; 1978 was to be the last general Women’s Liberation Conference.

Evicted, many of us sought ways of being feminists in differing contexts, working in campaigns, the unions, education, the media, community groups, women’s studies and much else besides. While these flourished, politically we lost a more comprehensive impetus. Sensing that the women’s movement as a collectivity was beginning to dissolve led me to crystalize its positive aspects and consider how these might be transplanted. I was to mull away over how to do this for several months. Meanwhile daily life took over.

Early in May, Paul, Will and I departed for Whitby, which Nigel Fountain had started to call our ‘summer palace’. Nigel recalled Will’s face, looking out from the car window as we left, ‘as a magnificent example of fury in full spate’ because he ‘was being carted off by obstreperous adults to have an unwanted good time’.¹¹ We stayed in Whitby for three months and, through Will, I revisited the town I had loved as a small child on holiday in the late forties. Will played for hours with local children in Blackburn’s Yard; it was like having a playgroup just outside the front door.

During May, when Paul had to return to London to work, Will and I visited Gloden Dallas in Halifax and Caroline Bond in Leeds. Caroline was living near Harehills Avenue so I decided to visit my former home, only to find it was being rented out and noticeably neglected. On being shown around inside, recognition and disorientation swept over me. I could still recall the structure of the rooms, though they were no longer painted in forties greens and browns. But to my adult eyes they seemed smaller. So did Potter Newton Park, where I used to clamber over the fallen tree trunks. I told David that it had ‘mysteriously shrunk’.¹²

When Paul and I first took Will out onto the North Yorkshire moors, we expected joy amid space. Instead he was appalled by his first awareness of the wild, bursting into tears as he surveyed the heather and observing miserably, ‘Big garden’. We had apparently reared a Cockney son. Before long however, he became accustomed to toddling around ancient settlements and rambling contentedly while I hunted in vain for Mesolithic tools at Scar Carr, once an ancient lake. Not only did I lack skill in identifying them, the archaeology books I borrowed from Whitby Library indicated that interpreting the distant past was hazardous indeed. Only the film of an intrepid Asterix the Gaul fighting Romans in Scarborough countered such indeterminacy.

Many friends came to stay with us, including Marsha, Chris Rawlence, Lynne and Chris Whitbread, from the Islington Music Workshop, and we made new ones, especially Laureen Shaw and Pete Gannarelli from the United States, who had recently settled opposite and were trying to set up a pottery in an old wash house in the Yard. Their first son, Che, was a few months younger than Will. Laureen’s mother had been born into a Whitby fishing family and she, along with Laureen’s grandma, used to squash into their tiny kitchen with Che and give us tea.

Paul and I became almost residents, sharing child care with Whitby women’s group and attending the Whitby Labour Party’s meeting on battered women. These small red bases were to be engulfed at the beginning of June when Prince Charles came to Whitby for the 200th anniversary of Captain Cook’s arrival in Hawaii. Cook had been born in a village near Whitby and a surge of excitement greeted the Prince when he landed on 1 June in a helicopter by the Abbey, just above the Yard. Scouts and union jacks occupied the town while we republicans huddled together, like eighteenth-century radicals, surrounded by Church and King patriots. I reported in our Whitby visitors’ book that Paul had managed to find an Irish Republican car-park attendant and an opponent of monarchy in the museum.¹³ Otherwise it seemed that we were isolated. Even Kaye, the sole resident left in Blackburn’s Yard with a genuine proletarian fishing lineage, was an adoring fan of the Prince and made the headlines by jumping over the barrier and kissing him. I could not devise an appropriate response, so remained silent, smiling weakly as she regaled us with the thrill of their brief encounter.

Despite all the visits, historical outings and a royal invasion, I contrived to fill a large red notebook with notes on American, British and Canadian socialist feminist books and articles on patriarchy, matriarchy, the family, the household, kinship, biology, reproduction and theories of the origins of women’s subordination.¹⁴ I was trying once again to get to the bottom of everything.

Back in London, on 19 July I went to the annual Communist University event (which conveniently had a crèche) and met up with a vivacious Indian socialist feminist, Radha Kumar, who was interested in the history of women’s resistance in India. Edward and Dorothy had put us in contact with one another. They had visited India during 1977, returning full of praise for the independently minded young left-wing people they met there who had been bravely opposing the undemocratic consequences of Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule.

Radha made me understand the effects of losing basic democratic freedoms. More personally, along with other friends from South Asia, she revealed a continent that had figured in my imagination from childhood, through my mother’s stories of my father’s work as an engineer in the mines in Bihar during the twenties and early thirties.

To my shame, despite being ten years younger than me Radha was aware of far more about British society and culture than I understood about India. It was a revelation to discover how many discussions in both the women’s movement and the left were running parallel in the two countries. Mirthful and incisive, she could be hilariously funny about sectarian left factions in both India and the UK. Underneath the humour was a deep seriousness of intent based on her own experiences.

In 1978 the Communists internationally were in ideological upheaval. Radha and I went to listen to a talk by a young woman who was sympathetic to the reforming Eurocommunist wing of the Party. Ostensibly I was closer to the Euros than the more traditional group, especially in relation to feminism and race. Moreover they were critical of Stalinism. On the other hand, the old guard were staunch defenders of workers, and I knew thoughtful feminists in both sections of the Communist Party. Despite sharing many of the speakers’ views, a wariness niggled away at the back of my mind.

Radha and I both emerged from the meeting with this indefinable unease and talked together intensely trying to pinpoint its source. It was a relief to be able to turn around intimations I could barely articulate. Though the Communists were certainly far more tactful than the Trots, I could nonetheless detect a familiar division of labour. After nearly a decade of hassle within the CP the feminists had finally occupied the ‘women’ slot. And this was good. Yet despite the Party being wrenched apart by its opposing factions – the modernizing ‘Euros’ and the hardliners, nicknamed ‘Tankies’ – it seemed to me that a constant remained. The ‘Party’ kept hold of ‘politics’.

Talking with Radha jolted me into confronting suspicions I had sidelined. It was not possible to graft the new politics that had developed through the women’s movement onto existing left political organizations without eclipsing the autonomous energy and creative space which had made such a movement possible. Somehow we had to alter socialism itself.

This first meeting was the beginning of a long friendship. Like me, Radha was somewhat absent-minded and thus prone to minor disasters when travelling with timetables and luggage. But in other aspects of practical life she was full of surprises. When Radha described being in a ‘Women in Manual Trades’ group while doing her MA at Cambridge, I was amazed, since I had not detected any noticeable practical craft skills in her whatsoever.

I would learn that the nonchalant humour, the studied vagueness and the apparently effortless elegance concealed Radha’s actual psychological and intellectual toughness. Knowledgeable about social history, she had been involved in grassroots movements in both countries and could negotiate with the powerful without either deference or fear. Our shared friendship with Edward and Dorothy Thompson constituted a strong bond between us. Edward’s background, through his scholarly missionary father, was steeped in India, and his historical writing and polemics on left theorizing had a considerable impact there as well as elsewhere.

In 1978, Martin Eve at Merlin Press published Edward’s The Poverty of Theory, in which he assailed the then influential French Communist, Louis Althusser, as a Marxist reincarnation of Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind.¹⁵ Its origins had been lectures in New Delhi as well as in Britain and the US, and while elaborating on these for the book, Edward groaned mightily that writing this long discursive essay was pulling him away from his beloved archives. A heavy burden of duty, acquired, I suspect, from a Methodist childhood and schooling, kept him toiling on.

Reading the tortuous text of The Poverty of Theory made me recall going to a Communist fête in Paris, while staying with Françoise Barret-Ducrocq in 1976. As I wandered past a fire-eater, and stalls selling bric-a-brac, young men with tidy, pointed beards had politely indicated the intellectuals’ zone where the works of Althusser were displayed on trestle tables. Having an allotted place for intellectuals provided Marxist theorists with a degree of deference on the French left. But such discreet containment was anathema to Edward’s being. He valued respect for ideas, but not this kind of formally accepted separation, redolent of a remote superiority. He was not, of course, opposed to theory – he was always theorizing – he just got huffy when it donned a capital ‘T’ and dumped the action of actual people.

I smiled to myself when I read his description of pursuing ‘phenomena which are always in movement, which evince – even in a single moment – contradictory manifestations, whose particular evidences can only find definition within particular contexts’.¹⁶ It was not that he was unaware of the need to grasp these phenomena in order to define them, but he regarded the momentary order thus imposed, not as a closure, but as a formulation from which historians would venture yonder. He concurred when I suggested as a metaphor the still from a film, which could enable consideration, while recognizing it was not the flickering, moving film itself.

When he reached ‘section vii’, Edward declared ‘a brief intermission’ proffering ice cream for historians, and suggesting philosophers and sociologists might wish to depart for the bar.¹⁷ A break was advisable, for there was still a great deal to follow. Edward transported readers onwards to ‘section xvii’, announcing, as he came to the end, a firm intention to ‘return to my proper work and to my own garden’.¹⁸ This proved wishful thinking, for The Poverty of Theory caused much contention among adherents of Althusser.

Dorothy meanwhile was resolutely writing up the research she had been doing for many years on Chartism. When I reviewed her essay on ‘Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics: A Lost Dimension’, I stressed how her account of women’s collective action undercut narrow historical perspectives focusing on the rise of a female elite. It went further. Dorothy had a special gift for expressing complex historical processes with absolute clarity, and in the process reconstituting the assumed scope of politics. I included her ‘Lost Dimension’ along with Barbara Taylor’s study of a female messiah called Joanna Southcott, and Jill Norris and Jill Liddington’s revelatory book on working-class suffragists, One Hand Tied behind Us.¹⁹ In differing historical contexts, they each described women’s resistance from below arising from diverse sources and taking a variety of forms, demonstrating not only that poor women’s achievements had been obscured, overridden and obliterated from memory, so too had their nuanced realizations and understandings. An observation by Selina Cooper, a working-class suffragist who was also a socialist, quoted in One Hand Tied behind Us, is apposite. When one of the middle-class campaigners urged her to abandon working for the labour movement in order to concentrate on votes for women, she responded, ‘I may have a good voice, but my power would finish if I came over.’²⁰ She was straddling a dual allegiance.

Black feminists had articulated a similar awareness of contrasting perspectives and conflicting loyalties, but I did not realize how these had been evident also in the 1890s. I had yet to read Anna Julia Cooper’s declaration in A Voice from the South (1892), when faced with a white women’s suffrage movement concerned with mollifying the South and a male-dominated black movement: ‘Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, … then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”’²¹

Whitby was wonderful but the North Sea was discouragingly chilly for swimming. When Françoise Barret-Ducrocq suggested a visit to her parents’ house at Le Touquet at the end of August, I decided to take Will across the Channel. I clutched him tightly on a hovercraft to Calais, musing on the superiority of the French word ‘aéroglisseur’ in describing our slide through the water. This was to be Will’s first ever contact with the French seaside and he proved alarmingly quick at ‘glissing’ himself across the flat expanse of beach. Françoise and I had long talks as we took him and her two young daughters on walks through woods or wandered through the town, where I gazed in amazement at a children’s clothes shop with elegant outfits at astronomical prices. New children’s clothes were rare in Hackney communal households, being usually inherited from friends or bought second hand. Indeed, despite my lack of needlework ability, I had become adept at patching.

Although Françoise’s mother was an excellent cook, I began to dread meal times because we English guests became a source of great distress to her. Will, who still subsisted mainly on milk, rejected the delicious food and, impatient against confinement, wriggled in his high chair throughout lunch and dinner. I tried to cover up his ingratitude by slipping bits of food surreptitiously onto my plate, but this was spotted and provoked remonstrance. What kind of mother would take the food from her child!

After a few days, when Will appeared to be thriving despite his peculiar diet, Madame Ducrocq explained the source of her anxiety. Her children had been born during the German wartime occupation when food had been scarce and she had lived in terror of being unable to feed them. Babies evoked memories that haunted her still.

We were redeemed by breakfasts, for Will did like porridge and Françoise’s mother for some reason assumed that being an English woman I must have a particular skill as a porridge maker. Sweetly, she heaped praise upon me as I stirred, leaving me with a lasting pride in my porridging prowess.

This visit transmuted a ‘cosmopolitic’ connection with Françoise as a socialist feminist historian into a strong personal bond. I understood exactly what she meant when she reflected how she wished that babies would not forget about everything they had done with us when they were little. I left with warm feelings towards her and her mother as well as her young daughters, who affectionately called the blonde-headed Will, ‘Boucle d’or’. Françoise wrote saying she had been sad to see me disappearing so quickly after a week but also glad that we had reconnected.²²

Hair (my own) and Lenin were causing trouble for me during the second half of 1978. Hair had not been a problem in the sixties – it was simply left to grow. Then, in the early seventies, I had seen Jane Fonda in the film Klute with a style I called the ‘lion cut’, but have subsequently discovered was officially known as the ‘Shag’. Like many feminists, keen to emulate the impressive Fonda, I had my hair layered. A hairdresser subsequently gave me a kind of basin cut with poky bits over the ears. When I chopped the bottom bits off the shorn-sheep, disaster ensued and I remained thwarted by layers. It was still uneven in 1978, when one of the new curly perms provided a complete transformation of self. At last I had achieved the hair my mother had sought every evening with cloth rags and Shirley Temple lotion – the naturally coiled locks I had so envied upon the heads of Alison Fell, Marsha Rowe and Lynne Segal.

I had no sooner found a temporary solution to the hair dilemma than Lenin loomed large. Attacking him was proving time-consuming. Trots enthusiastically invited me to speak because they were keen to expose me, and so did left libertarians, worried by the darkening political climate and anxiously searching for solutions. Emboldened by an observation made by Edward that Lenin was not relevant in the Britain of 1978,²³ I delivered my critique of Leninism at the Socialist Unity Symposium organized by the International Marxist Group paper, Socialist Challenge, on 17 September.²⁴

I was most definitely in a minority, though it brought me together again with Hilary Wainwright, who was also starting to reflect upon the broader relevance of understandings we had gained through the women’s movement. Hilary had been at the meeting in the student’s bedroom at Ruskin History Workshop in 1970. Initially a Young Liberal, she had been active in the women’s movement at Oxford and joined the International Marxist Group. By 1978 she was no longer in IMG, but was involved in the Tyneside Socialist Centre. Opened in 1975 by Harry McShane, the Centre discussed ideas, as well as mobilizing help for strikers and community groups.

Shortly after the Socialist Unity Symposium, Lynne asked me to give a talk with her at the Islington Socialist Club. Lynne was thinking through several years of intense local activism. Influenced by libertarian ideas of direct action, in 1972, along with hundreds of other feminists, she had participated in the occupation of the Post Office at Trafalgar Square in support of family allowances as cash payments.²⁵ Then she had worked in Islington women’s groups, centres and campaigns. Taking feminist ideas outwards, she had supported strikers and participated in protests about Holloway Women’s Prison, along with housing and squatting struggles. We had been together at many meetings in Essex Road Women’s Centre, but now it had closed, her considerable energy was going into the Islington Socialist Club.

The Club had started in 1977, after a local Socialist Conference initiated by the Islington Gutter Press. However, given the strength of the right and the indifference of the Labour Party in office to the impact of their cuts in social provision, Lynne had started to search for a politics that could have a broader national impact and had joined the libertarian grouping, Big Flame.²⁶

When people at the crowded meeting complained of being confused about what I said, Lynne suggested that I should write it down for clarity. Will was going to a babyminder two days a week and Paul and I were now doing a swop with Carla Hughes and the twins, so I had three days when I could write.²⁷ I kept writing and writing through the autumn in yet another large red notebook with stiff covers, breaking off to do a puppet show at the birthday party of Lisa Vine’s daughter Billie, and meeting up with a young Melissa Benn to discuss the dissertation she was about to begin.²⁸

That autumn I was tentatively mulling over what I was writing with friends I saw frequently, such as Lynne, Sally Alexander and Jean McCrindle, and of course with Paul. He was part of the men’s group producing the magazine Achilles Heel, which included Andy Metcalf, Paul Morrison, Vic Seidler and James Swinson. Rather than simply supporting the women’s movement in opposing sexism, they were trying to think through its broader personal and political implications for men on the left.

The book for Penguin kept being shelved. A hapless note in my diary on 30 October announced ‘begin stuff on family with any luck’.²⁹ Instead I was back with Lenin and reading through the eclectic assortment of other books that had set me thinking, from Fernando Claudin’s illuminating but hefty tome, The Communist Movement, to Edward’s The Poverty of Theory. I also scoured articles in feminist and left journals, finding one by Carl Boggs in Radical America on the need for our resistance to partially prefigure alternatives to capitalism.³⁰ This rang bells, for I realized we had been doing this implicitly in women’s liberation.

Uncertain how to compress such diverse sources, and dubious about coming up with yet another neat, intact ‘Theory’, I remembered how in the late sixties, when it had been so difficult for us to voice inchoate discontents as women, we had done it by first sharing experiences. So I drew on my own cumulative understanding of taking part in the women’s movement, describing how we had sought to allow for ‘vulnerability and openness’ through consciousness raising and rejected ‘hierarchical structures and a leadership’. I described how instead we had developed variegated forms of connecting through ‘regional networks, women’s centres, conferences, publishing groups, theatre groups, folk and rock bands, film collectives, trade union caucuses, food co-ops’.³¹

Regardless of the conflicts within the women’s movement, for nearly a decade I had been part of a sustained effort to enhance collective participation in decision-making by linking personal experience to political, social and economic change. Because we faced so many practical and psychological obstacles to active engagement in a movement, we had recognized the need to prefigure something of the desired future in the daily processes of organizing. I was convinced some of this must be of use to others.

Hilary Wainwright was to become the missing link. Hilary had been researching the shop stewards’ combine at Vickers Armstrong, working closely with the sociologist Huw Beynon, at Durham University. His path-breaking study Working for Ford (1973) had presented a grounded perspective on industrial relations and Hilary adopted the same approach, interviewing the shop stewards in depth about the structure of their combine and becoming friendly with the convener, Jim Murray, an imposing working-class intellectual who was a member of the Tyneside Socialist Centre. She had realized that the growth of workers’ combines demonstrated the possibility of coordinating horizontally.

Contact with the stewards had also made her aware that they too felt exasperated when self-appointed left vanguards told them what they should be doing without listening to their opinions. She observed a parallel with the similar resentment in the women’s movement and, like me, she had been reading Fernando Claudin’s challenge to the tendency within left organizations to arrogate political understanding and action. Hilary saw how the plan devised by Lucas Aerospace workers for developing socially useful alternatives rather than weapons extended the concept of direct control at the workplace beyond pay and conditions to challenging what was produced. Through the Newcastle community activist Kenny Bell, who was involved in the local tenants’ movement, she also came to understand the effectiveness of establishing direct links between tenants and the council building workers who did their repairs. Participatory democracy clearly went beyond existing definitions of ‘workers’ control’. Hilary began to consider that a combination of specific movements for widening democracy might well go deeper and be far more innovative than simply seeking unity among the fissiparous socialist groupings.

So, towards the end of 1978, Hilary, Lynne and I came to similar conclusions from distinct, if overlapping, experiences. External events were pressing all three of us to rethink, for, exasperated by cuts in social welfare and by the Labour Party’s attempts to prevent workers defending their pay, trade unionists were mobilizing once again. In September, Ford workers, aware that the company’s profits had risen, demanded a wage increase, and a Women’s Action Group was formed, supported by socialist feminists. They won the pay rise, but the company imposed restrictions on their subsequent capacity to resist. Through Hilary, I was soon to meet John Bohanna, a thoughtful and strategic steward at the Halewood Ford factory, who was bitterly aware of the longer-term consequences of this agreement.

Hilary started to work out how to get me up to speak at the Tyneside Socialist Centre, and Ruth First, who was about to finish working at Durham University, also wanted me to talk there. They were both redoubtable women and not to be gain-said, so, early in December I went first to Newcastle for the Socialist Centre meeting and then over to Durham the next day to Ruth’s seminar. The memory of my words and the responses of my listeners on both occasions has faded, but being with Hilary and Ruth has remained with me.

Although I had met Hilary at meetings this was the first opportunity I’d had to spend time with her. We went to support a bakers’ picket, which included many women. Like other members of the low-paid workforce, the bakers were driven by their worsening circumstances to go on strike, only to be castigated by the media as greedy disrupters of the status quo. Those harsh months of 1978 and 1979 were to be caricatured under the negative thumbnail heading of the ‘Winter of Discontent’. That discontent arose from desperation.

Bizarrely, I also recall Hilary cooking me a lamb chop and her shock when I asked her if she had any HP sauce. Adamant that the Wainwrights (Quakers/Methodists that they were) never had brown sauce, though a Granny had been known to serve it with sausages, she told me most emphatically this was a very decadent request. I was perplexed.

We were from diverse strata of Leeds’ middle class; Hilary’s father was a Liberal MP and shadow spokesman on economics, while mine was a Conservative-voting engineering salesman. Nonetheless we did have some surprising influences in common. Though six years apart in age, we subsequently discovered that as small girls we had both attended the same dancing class conducted by Miss Cooke-Yarborough garbed in her grey ‘Grecian’ dress. The intention to impart feminine graces had misfired in both our cases, but perhaps we absorbed an inner commitment to that culture of Isadora Duncan–style free expression which still lingered, for some unknown reason, among Northern dancing teachers.

We yattered late into the night about Lenin, Trots, the Labour Party, unions, shop stewards and feminism. I fell asleep on a mattress surrounded by back copies of the Financial Times, popular with Marxists intent on taking the pulse of capital.

The following day, Ruth First bought us breakfast in Durham before the seminar at the university, and then drove me home to Hackney. For over five hours we talked non-stop. She was thinking through differences between political generations of women and described growing up with Communist parents in South Africa. She was unsure about what paths her daughters would take and questioned me searchingly about consciousness raising, socialist feminism and men’s groups. She was interested in Paul’s involvement in psychotherapy. Unlike some older left women, she was not hostile to sexual politics, but, as with her research on Olive Schreiner, she was curious and puzzled. My political habitat was strange to her, and though I had now read more about Ruth’s courageous political life, which included imprisonment, I was still unable inwardly to comprehend what she had confronted in opposing apartheid.

It was the last time I saw Ruth, who was about to leave Durham for a post as director of research at the Centre of African Studies in Mozambique. In 1982 she was assassinated by a parcel bomb delivered to the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. The bomb was made by Jerry Raven and sent on the orders of the South African security agent Craig Williamson. When tried in 2000, both men claimed not to have seen the name on the envelope. The amnesty they were granted was described by Victoria Brittain in the Guardian as ‘neither truth nor justice’.³² An English Heritage plaque on a house in Camden Town records of Ruth and Joe Slovo, ‘South African Freedom Fighters lived here’.

In the eye of my mind an enduring image persists of that animated, attractive, dark-haired woman in her fifties, holding the wheel with resolute confidence and probing me on the personal and the political.

11

1979

In the New Year, Lynne, Hilary and I met in Lynne’s communal house, filled with children playing and copies of the Gutter Press piled high, and decided to do a pamphlet together. We shared a conviction that our experiences of organizing in the women’s movement carried understandings for the socialist project as a whole and that people from other movements possessed similar vital perceptions. A letter from Hilary after our meeting was characteristically positive. ‘Though a pamphlet is a modest beginning I think it’s really exciting to be exerting some control and influence over issues which are normally so entirely male determined.’ She then apologized for scurrying away like ‘the white rabbit’.¹ I was soon to learn that the scurrying was as characteristic as her optimism. Hilary’s tendency to over-commit far exceeded mine.

The pamphlet transmogrified into a 100-page booklet entitled Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism. Its appearance was thanks to offset litho and to its printers, the musician Chris Whitbread and the poet Ann Zell, at Islington Community Press. They were to be thanked for typesetting ‘our scruffy and constantly changing text’.² Production costs came to £200. Hilary and Lynne, who had jobs, agreed to put this up between them. We thought we might be able to sell 100 copies to members of our overlapping socialist feminist networks, socialist centres, community newspapers and magazines like Red Rag, Achilles Heel and Gay Left. I was never much good at making money, but assiduous about not losing other people’s, and pushed for a run of 200, charging £1 and taking care to collect all the money. At the time I feared it was a wild gamble.

Our publishers were the Islington Community Press and the Tyneside Socialist Centre. Lynne had been working closely with the Press in Islington, so they were familiar with our discussions. Up in Newcastle, I suspect they were more bemused. Hilary assured me that she had told the committee of the Tyneside Socialist Centre ‘roughly what we’ve decided & they seem very interested and keen to support, although not quite sure what to expect’.³ Kenny Bell, who had observed the empowering impact of communication between council tenants and Direct Labour building workers, remained a staunch ally.

The original pocket edition of Beyond the Fragments, with its small print and yellow cover, appeared in the spring. To our surprise the 200 copies soon sold out and we got back the costs of production. Whereupon Dave Musson, who was then at Merlin Press, offered to do a second edition, and Lynne and Hilary began work on expanding their contributions. I made some corrections to mine, but it was already quite long enough.

While we shared the conviction that more open and cooperative forms of organizing were needed, the question was how to make this happen. In Beyond the Fragments, we argued that insights arising from movements could change how socialism might be conceived. Our proposition that specific forms of oppression could reveal general political understandings, did not simply apply to sexual politics, but was equally relevant to other types of grassroots mobilization, for instance among rank-and-file workers or against racism.

We did not want to claim precedence for our own ‘entry point’, and as a consequence were wary of speaking for others because we thought this constituted a form of appropriation. So, in the tradition of women’s liberation, we described our own perceptions, in the hope that others would add theirs. Instead of social movements grumbling in isolation about being nobbled by the intervention of left groups, we assumed that new syntheses would come from differing outlooks. Our ‘beyond’ promised a much-needed release and renewal which could strengthen democratic participation. Quite how this could be realized we did not know.

All three of us were aware that circumstances were not propitious. Lynne referred to the desperate attempts by working-class people in Islington to stop the closures of hospitals and schools. She feared that in such defensive conditions, efforts for greater personal democratic interaction in left organizations could be submerged.⁴ Hilary, too, wrote with a sense of urgency: we had to create an alternative otherwise we faced the choice once again of campaigning for Labour ‘without illusions’ or ‘the appalling prospect of a Tory government’.⁵

Beyond the Fragments was launched into social turmoil. In the early months of 1979 all kinds of low-paid and disregarded workers, many of whom were women in the public sector – school meal workers and cleaners in hospitals, carers in nursing homes, even laundry workers servicing hospitals – had rebelled. The NHS had recruited nurses from Commonwealth countries, especially the West Indies, as State Enrolled Nurses whose tasks were more unpleasant and whose status was lower. They played a prominent part in the ‘discontent’ that winter. Along with the striking gravediggers, all these workers who cared for the welfare of others were reviled by the popular press as heartless disrupters.⁶ I was outraged that low-paid workers, picketing in blizzards and snow, were being rebuked by journalists and politicians enjoying much higher salaries, for not meekly accepting that they should bear the brunt of the long-term problems of the British economy. Under a Labour government they had been hit by several years of cuts in social services and harried by the fear of mounting unemployment. Instead of belated respect, apologies and thanks for the vital work they had been doing, hatred against those on strike was stacked up in hysterical headlines.

Thus a powerful myth that a crisis was being fuelled by the selfishness and treachery of trade unionists was being generated. The leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, so adept at sanctimony, was led to wonder, ‘What sort of society is this that breeds such callousness.’⁷ The depressing reality was that the Conservatives were able to sleekly follow the moves a right-wing Labour government had already initiated.

The contrast when I went to speak in Barcelona that spring was invigorating. I was invited there by Judith Astelarra who was teaching at the Universitat Autònoma. The trip presented me with an unforgettable glimpse of the left and of socialist feminism in the transition to democracy after Franco’s dictatorship. Here too controversy was raging about the relationship of an autonomous women’s movement with the Socialist and Communist parties, but instead of the frayed morale that prevailed in Britain, I encountered a whirl of energy and an awareness of tremendous possibilities, shot through with a recognition of serious obstacles.

I felt as if I was in an utterly different city from the Barcelona I had visited only a few years before as a tourist, yet when I asked a young socialist feminist MP how she had been drawn to the left under the dictatorship, it became evident how much had not been formerly visible. Without hesitating she responded, ‘the historical memory’. She spoke as if it was self-evident; thoughts could persist covertly.

Though socialist women like herself were being elected, she was already coming to the conclusion that gaining the position of MP was a Pyrrhic victory. She remarked that she found the debates so tedious she had resorted to taking her knitting in with her. An image of Ros Baxandall intently crocheting that brightly coloured hat in the New York Hilton flashed before me.

There was much that was recognizable, even though the social and political context was so different. Many feminists were highly critical of the inadequacies in the 1978 Constitution, especially on issues of sexuality, including abortion. These articulate young feminists in the intelligentsia were in a distinct minority and several women, including Judith Astelarra, expressed anxiety about a growing rift with the more traditionally minded working-class women who were struggling for improved social provision in local communities. In order to develop cooperation between the two wings of the movement a campaign for health clinics with advice on birth control and unwanted pregnancy was being mooted.⁸

Judith was a thoughtful guide; as an Argentinian who had been living in Chile at the time of the coup against Allende, she brought an extra dimension of discernment to the Spanish transition. In Chile she had been working on a rural participatory project with agricultural workers, and her husband, one of Allende’s economic advisers, had been out of the country when the coup took place. They both escaped, but the subsequent torture and slaughter of radicals in Chile had left Judith acutely alert to the dangers of the extreme right. She was passionate about preserving democratic freedoms in the widest sense, hence her alertness to the divide between the neighbourhood women and the feminists. The parallels with socialist feminism in Britain were apparent, though the overall situation was dissimilar.

I was moved by the internationalism of the welcome I was given when I spoke at a large meeting in Barcelona, but most of all by the mutuality of an exchange afterwards. Women came to sing Catalan folk songs as a tribute to me for my talk. I listened in mute delight. For one who was utterly unable to sing, it felt like a truly cooperative exchange of gifts far, far preferable to the competitive culture that prevailed in North America and Britain of inventing individual media celebrities and then reviling them for being gobblers of glory.

When our Beyond the Fragments booklet appeared, I sent Judith a copy. She told me that while there was much she liked about it, she did not think we had understood the context and importance of the Eurocommunist critique of Stalinism. This was the view too of British Eurocommunists, while people in other left groups and radical movements also criticized us for ignoring their predicaments and thoughts.

It was hard to convince them that we had simply written an account based on our own experiences and that we wished to share and compare these with others, rather than conjuring an overarching analysis. Another recurring criticism came from some feminists who suspected that we were trying to co-opt the women’s movement into an already existing socialism, whereas we were conceiving an interaction in which both socialism and feminism would be changed in relation to other radical social movements. All three of us had become accustomed to thinking about our politics dynamically through action and tended to ignore the fact that many others accepted a fixed body of assumed ideas. But at the time this was difficult to explicate as multiple conundrums were converging.

The Socialist Feminist Conference on the weekend of 24–5 March was held in London at Starcross School – a testimony to the bonds that had developed over the years.⁹ The lack of any general women’s conference meant that it was much larger than usual. We discussed women’s position in relation to the economy, reproduction and sexuality as well as the media, but floundered when we attempted to develop any concerted strategy as socialist feminists.

There proved to be too many cross-currents of conflict in relation to the women’s movement as a whole, and the conference ended in an atmosphere of exhaustion and confusion. Less overtly, an incipient fault line could be detected between socialist feminists like Lynne, Hilary and myself, who wanted to combine with other radical movements to create an alternative approach to left politics as a whole, and others who seemed to regard socialist feminism as an already existing political tendency which could operate in the manner of a left group. This was to be left unsettled. Though as individuals we continued to see ourselves as ‘socialist feminists’ and continued to be active, there was a sense of disorientation. In London the undercurrents of distrust were particularly evident.

During April I was in Whitby again where such rumblings were remote and I was back canvassing ‘without illusions’ for Labour with members of the women’s group. It was noticeable how few posters for the Labour candidate there were on the housing estate, usually an isolated stronghold. I tramped about with a heavy heart; I was defending a Party we had been ceaselessly opposing on cuts, housing, unions, immigration policy and policing. But the alternative was a woman who had fuelled racism with talk of the country being ‘swamped’ by immigrants.¹⁰

In Hackney, outside the padding of the communality that we incomers had developed around us, I was aware that the atmosphere was changing; the police tended to be unfamiliar and ill at ease, and their contacts with young black men, especially, were often aggressive. Not only were many police racist, rumours of corruption were already circulating. Indeed, one raw recruit from Aberdeen, who came round to investigate when my wallet was pick-pocketed, frankly complained of his fellow officers at the station, ‘They even steal from one another.’ This was not reassuring, though I kept reminding myself that the police did vary as individuals in their outlook and behaviour.

On 24 April the right-wing National Front held a meeting in Southall, an area in the west of London where many Asian families had settled. The confrontation that ensued resulted in the arrest of many young Asian demonstrators and intensified bitterness against the Special Patrol Group within the Metropolitan Police. As the marchers were preparing to go home, Blair Peach, a school teacher from New Zealand, active in the Socialist Workers Party and the Anti-Nazi League, was killed by a blow to the head, but no police officer was ever charged.

One positive outcome from the anti-racist protest was the creation of the Southall Black Sisters. They proceeded to challenge racism and religious fundamentalism, while at the same time asserting and defending the social needs and personal freedom of Asian women through national campaigns and local community action.¹¹ Though black women’s groups had emerged in Islington and Brixton in the early seventies, they had remained a minority within women’s liberation. Nevertheless, along with Asian women in Awaz, these small groups were developing perspectives on the interconnecting subordination of race, gender and class, which challenged the power of the British state and the acceptance of inequality in the economy, as well as the power of men as a sex.

In February 1978 a small group of women of African and Afro-Caribbean descent had formed an organization prioritizing their specific issues as women. Initially this was called the Organisation of Women of African and Afro-Caribbean Descent (OWAAD). Numbers increased after its first conference in March 1979 attracted around 300 women, and in response to clamour, by August it had expanded to include Asian women. It published a national newsletter, FOWAAD.¹²

Despite differences in approach, these groups exposed the implicit prejudices in how feminist demands were framed, arguing, for instance, that because abortion had been imposed on women of colour for eugenic reasons in the past, genuine ‘choice’ must also involve access to education, housing, health provision and child care. While asserting the need to create autonomous structures, they were thus extending the recognition that women’s issues could not be isolated from political, social and economic circumstances in general. The emergence of these distinct voices, opposing on several simultaneous fronts, articulated and theorized a profound and many-layered injustice. The extended formation of these women’s networks around race, gender and class was to be of great significance in the decade that followed.

Unfortunately, they coincided with the arrival of a new kind of right-wing Conservatism – Margaret Thatcher defeated Labour on 4 May 1979. Immediately after she became prime minister I was aware that something exceedingly bad had happened, but the full import was slow to sink in.

Like many other socialists and feminists I focused on local action. That spring we supporters of Under Fives marched into a Hackney Council meeting, angry at the continuing lack of adequate provision. As we surrounded the Labour councillors, the large gang of women, so stroppy on our usual ground, faltered. It was left to a young man in the Euro wing of the local Communist Party to put the case for child-care provision. I was glad he spoke, but I was inwardly kicking myself that we had not decided in advance who would make some specific points more carefully. The leader of the council, briefly nonplussed before a spontaneous and largely female invasion force, looked visibly relieved to be dealing with an identifiable figure and urged our ‘spokesman’ to put himself forward for the council and argue from within.

On 18 June I took Will in his pushchair from Hackney to the London Nursery Campaign demonstration at the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition ‘Who’s Holding the Baby?’ This included photographs taken by women in the community arts group ‘The Hackney Flashers’, and one of the Flashers kindly looked after Will while I zoomed inside. We were agitating not simply about the lack of nurseries, but the inhospitable structuring of daily life in the city generally: the banning of pushchairs in museums and galleries, the difficulties of travelling on public transport, and indeed the lack of priority given to small children in the design of communities. The London Nursery Campaign had links with similar groups in Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Oxford and Bournemouth as well as with trade union branches.

When I came out I met up with the dogged heroine of child-care campaigning, Myra Garrett, and attached myself to a group from one of Hackney’s community nurseries, Beatty Road, for the journey back home. Having decided to travel down river by boat, no bus was to be found when we alighted. I reported in the non-aligned socialist magazine, The Leveller, how ‘we trekked on foot like the Children’s Crusade to Aldgate, twenty children, five adults and a dog’. It was, indeed, like ‘a mobile object lesson in what we had been demonstrating about’.¹³

The Nursery Campaign and our journey back to Hackney got me thinking, as did a meeting the following month, ‘What’s Left for Hackney?’ This was inspired in part by members of the local Communist Party who were active in community politics, but it attracted many non-aligned activists. I came away from it excited by the grounding of the alternative vision in a locality, but uncomfortable because the organizers still seemed to assume a ready-made ‘socialism’ was there waiting in the wings.

From 1976 the Labour left, the Communists and to a lesser extent the Trotskyists had been debating various versions of an alternative economic strategy. These transitional discussions were running parallel to, and sometimes interacting with, the more utopian commitment to meeting needs through prefigurative ‘alternatives’. I began to think through how the small diverse forms of resistance and creative projects springing up locally around specific needs might begin to converge into a radical alternative. Through the Under Fives I was aware how the community nurseries had come about through a mix of direct action and self-help because of the woeful lack of state provision. But they also embodied a commitment to grass-roots control, being run and managed by parents and nursery workers.

I could see too that Hackney’s Centerprise Bookshop comprised a vital resource, not simply because of the books and pamphlets it disseminated, but because of the place it occupied within the community. It acted as a key site in the area where ideas could be exchanged, exemplifying the power that could be released by democratizing their expression. What other examples were there? I started to confer with Charles Foster, who produced our local radical community paper, the Hackney Peoples’ Press. Charles knew far more than I did about the wide range of grassroots action in the borough. His approach was realistic and sometimes critical, but not at all sectarian.

While I was committed theoretically to discovering, understanding and helping alternative social projects and policies from below, being a mother gave rise to new insights, entangled with new uncertainties. In the summer of 1979 I was riveted by a present sent by Ros Baxandall – Jane Lazarre’s frank exploration of joy and desperation, The Mother Knot (1976).¹⁴ I charted my own contradictory feelings through her autobiographical account of a mother overwhelmed by love of offspring and yet yearning to write. I had seen an imposing sculpture by Wendy Taylor called Brick Knot at the Hayward the previous year, in an exhibition organized by women artists, and adopted it as my visible metaphor.

My Song Is My Own: 100 Women’s Songs by Kathy Henderson, Frankie Armstrong and Sandra Kerr proffered respite, combining saucy old double entendres, cobblers’ ‘long pegging awls’ and a besom-maker rattling and grinding the millers’ mill, with moving songs of protest. I already knew the lullaby from the Dundee jute mills, ‘O dear me the world’s ill divided / Them that work the hardest are the least provided’, by the Communist, Mary Brooksbank. But so much was new to me, including the haunting lament, ‘Must I be bound and you go free.’¹⁵ I admired the clarity of the resistance in these songs and longed to express thoughts with such precision and directness.

Yet a multitude of mixed feelings, knots and unintended consequences tangled me up. Before becoming a mother I had accepted an over-simple input/output approach to anti-sexist alternative child raising. Now I had become a close and vigilant observer, it was evident that small children were far more complicated. Moreover they learned from one another, not just from adults. Regardless of our strenuous efforts at gender-neutral collectivity, when Will went off to the anti-sexist Men’s Week at the Laurieston Hall community in Scotland, a big boy of four, who became his friend, taught him how to turn a stick into a pretend rifle. Watching them charging about in the garden when they came back, I bit my tongue remembering how as a child I had practised drawing revolvers from my belt in front of the mirror in an ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ outfit. I was relieved when Dorothy Thompson told me her eldest son, Ben, had liked guns as a child, yet he had grown up to be active in the peace movement.

I was wondering about the alternative society too. In the early seventies I had shared the contemporary left-wing understanding of socialism which emphasized extending democratic control and economic equality.¹⁶ I still acknowledged both were vital, but I had become considerably less enamoured of meetings, while diverse visions floated towards me from being with small children. Infused with feelings of tenderness and nurture, when I found any space for contemplation I exalted in the slow wandering of fancy and the realms of inner exploration. I had come to a new awareness of dwelling within existence.

My quest for these other dimensions of perception made me return over and over again to Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974). In this a personally gifted individual thwarted by utopian cooperation discovers a meritocracy, only to reject competition for an attempt to combine individual with egalitarian social freedom. Le Guin’s description of a dissidence within an apparently utopian society played on my imagination. It planted a seed of realization – revolutions (and indeed movements) were not static but ever in flux. In Le Guin’s writings utopias are overridden and recreated; they go back into the making. More recently I had come across her short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973). This too was revelatory; for a minority refuse to live in a ‘city of happiness’ where one child continues to suffer.¹⁷ Every individual is connected one to another.

Stray thoughts like these, some of which crept into articles I wrote in left papers or reviews commissioned by Tony Gould for New Society, were possible because I received help from others. Though I never quite abandoned that anarcho-individual revolt of the outcast Marie, in Nelly Kaplan’s film La Fiancée du Pirate, one big lesson of motherhood for me was the lived experience of the need for mutuality. I was able to think and to write because Paul was sharing the caring and we had help not simply from the part-time child minder but from friends in 12 Montague Road. This also meant we had one evening a week off to go out. In an emergency, if Paul was away and I was worried that Will was ill, Vic Seidler, who was as personally kind as he was voluble on Marxism and sexual politics, would give us a lift down to Michael Leibson in Bethnal Green, where invariably I would be reassured and sent on my way.

In the autumn of 1979, Will, at two and a half, was able to go to Market Nursery, one of Hackney’s community nurseries near Broadway Market and London Fields. Its early history is recorded in a wonderful pamphlet called ‘not so much a nursery…’, with photographs by the Hackney Flashers. A truly cooperative venture, it was started by a small group of feminists and left community activists in 1975 as a playgroup. After persistent agitation, helped by Under Fives and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), its indefatigable founders had wrenched some funding for it from the council.¹⁸ I had put Will’s name down for Market Nursery when he was born and it was the first institution I was ever to feel real love for.

Run by the parents and workers and administered by an elected committee, our participation was not just about casting a vote and paying a small weekly fee. Instructed by Paddy Russell, a parent who was a builder, we maintained it too. Paddy had a gentle Irish voice combined with undeniable authority, and, on his instructions, I obediently mounted scaffolding to paint the high hall. Being called in to prepare over a hundred meals because a cook was ill was only marginally less challenging, though at least on that occasion I was on firm ground. On my stint I stuck to quiches, acquiring an ingrained respect for any nursery cook who did this every day.

Food was one of the most controversial issues in the nursery in the three years Will was there. A chips and burgers traditionalist was followed by an alternative cook who served cucumber and yogurt; both met with opposition from differing groups of parents. I remember one meeting, when feelings ran high, trying to mediate, only to be attacked by all sides. After the meeting, one of the workers, Kathy Jenkins, from Under Fives, remarked sagaciously how whatever kinds of food the children were given they always left some of it.

Kathy, a Londoner, and Hermine Anderson from the Caribbean, were mainstays of the nursery. Both were firm, genial and stalwart pragmatists who contrived to be open to parents with contrasting convictions. Kathy used to laugh because the minority of under fives from middle-class leftie homes always asked why they were being told to do things. She was exceedingly persuasive, influencing not just the children, but Hackney Council which was moving leftwards. Eventually the Whitby cottage not only served as a part-time crèche for the local women’s group, thanks to Kathy it also came to be used by Hackney Council for holidays for the children of single mothers.

Despite strong community networks, an awareness of danger began to impinge upon life in Hackney in the late seventies. When a woman I knew was raped walking across London Fields, it made the defiance of the ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches very real. It was a shock because I had never felt fear there myself. Ironically perils had impinged when Paul and I left the inner city. The previous year in Whitby, Paul had taken Will off in the car while I painted the stairs. Hours passed; I painted on. Initially I was absorbed, then began to wonder and finally to worry. Eventually a white-faced Paul returned, carrying Will. The car had been caught in a flash flood. On another occasion, Will scampered out beyond the yard when someone left the gate open. Paul ran faster than I could and caught him in his arms almost in front of a car in Church Street. I accumulated a whole pack of horrifying ‘what ifs’ around Will.

Trying to be an activist, a writer and teacher as well as a mother, even with much mutual aid, gave rise to all kinds of dilemmas about how to combine personal and political living, not to mention basic matters of material survival. Paul and I managed because living communally was cheaper than being a couple with a child. Nevertheless we lacked space and this gave rise to everyday practical strains. Paul’s efforts to seek meditative calm were thwarted by Nigel in the kitchen next to his room, steadfastly seeking health and vitamin C by grinding fresh orange juice in a machine he had won by saving cigarette tokens. Upstairs I was writing amid nappies and toys and pushing hard for us to move in order to have a room for Will.

Then there was the bulge. I was worried that one day this bulge in the back wall from bombing in the war would cause the house to buckle and bury us all under bricks. Nigel was oblivious to bulges. When Sue and I expressed anxiety in house meetings, the bulge would be duly measured by Paul and Dave Phillips with a spirit level in their official capacity as the maintenance committee, and declared not to be moving.

Measuring the bulge enacted a ritual that resembled an offering to fate, as we were not able to repair it. Although we all paid into a fund for bills we had no money for large-scale building work. So the bulge had lodged itself as one of my residual worries, and the spirit level glided from my unconscious to become a metaphor that slipped into Beyond the Fragments.

When Merlin brought out the revised edition of Beyond the Fragments it was a fatter book and more accessible, with larger print and a big red women’s liberation sign on the cover. Moreover it was enriched because Lynne and Hilary had added to their contributions.¹⁹ This second edition was to be widely reviewed in left publications. Reprinted twice in 1980, it gained an international readership. Given that it had emerged from a tiny network, the impact of the book was remarkable. It also proved to be exceedingly contentious; none of us had anticipated quite such a furore.²⁰ To our amusement, one left paper even ran two opposing reviews because of internal disagreements over the ‘Fragments’. Paul chuckled that because the book was the work of three women with slightly differing perspectives, our opponents had a harder time contesting it. He compared us to the carved figures at the prow of a boat, three female heads facing the waves and storms in three directions.

It is curious how, at certain times, exploratory thoughts which seem hard to express can strike far-reaching chords. One reason this occurred in 1979 was probably because unease about the relationship of left groups to social movements was already simmering, both within as well as without organizational markers.

News spread to other countries and, one day, a group of breathtakingly elegant Italian socialist women arrived in Montague Road accompanied by the New Left theorist Chantal Mouffe. They aimed to interview me about Leninism. It happened to be a day when I was looking after Will as well as Paul Morrison and Lucy Goodison’s daughter Corey, so, accustomed to thinking through frequent interruptions from two-year-olds, I responded to their questions when the toddlers permitted a lull. I perceived that my guests looked somewhat uncomfortable, but I was acclimatized to a degree of chaos and just carried on. Several years later a deftly humorous Chantal delineated the political disjuncture that had ensued. Horrified by Hackney, the communal house and the libertarian-left children, the Italians evidently had gone away convinced that if circumstances like these attended going beyond the fragments, Leninism was a far preferable option.

Luckily, such incomprehension was unusual. The enthusiasm of Eleni Varikas, a Greek socialist feminist who came that autumn to invite me to speak in Athens, made for easy communication. Paul, Will and I had accompanied Lynne and Chris Whitbread to Greece that summer and, as Eleni sat on my bedroom floor, talking animatedly, the Mediterranean seemed to lap into the room with her. She recounted with irony how her father had been a prominent Greek Trotskyist who in the late forties had been on the run from the Fascists, the Communists and the Americans. Eleni possessed an irrepressible jocundity, even as she spoke of the most serious topics, and I felt an instant affinity with her ability to theorize through practice, as well as being impressed by her knowledge of the history of left movements and ideas.

Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World had been translated in Greece in 1974. Now the Women’s Press in Athens was planning to do Hidden from History. Despite not really being able to cope with any more external commitments, rashly that autumn I agreed to go and speak the following year in Athens, telling myself it was a long time ahead. It proved to be the first public meeting of the women’s movement there.

I cleaved to these personal international links with socialist feminists. With defeat and doubt surrounding us in the new Tory Britain, I greeted the publication of Zillah Eisenstein’s collection of socialist feminist essays, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, in the New Statesman on 21 September. I agreed with Zillah on the need to redefine both our socialism and our feminism and, because I saw the women’s movement, and socialist feminism in particular, as challenging multiple hierarchies of circumstance and culture, I liked Nancy Hartsock’s assertion that we all were theorists, articulating what we knew from our lives and practical activity. I particularly admired the clarity of Linda Gordon’s distinction between birth control and population control, and the African American Combahee River Collective’s commitment to a non-hierarchical distribution of power. This had an added force because of the conflicting pulls they faced as black socialist feminists, some of whom were lesbians fighting on several fronts.²¹

I tend always to become absorbed in what I am writing and stave off thoughts of consequences. So I was not really prepared for the controversy caused by Beyond the Fragments. The letters and requests to speak at meetings kept coming. One was particularly hard going. On 26 October the social philosopher Philip Corrigan invited me to defend the book to a small group of left intellectuals, which included a formidable opponent, Teodor Shanin, the expert on Russian peasant movements, who proved much tougher than the Trots. If I had known more about his life as a Jewish child in the war when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, then as a Zionist in Israel and eventually an independent leftist, I should have guessed this would have been so. He subsided out of decorum, but smouldered away throughout what proved to be a somewhat brittle meeting.

Just two days later, on 28 October, I was on a huge march, around 50,000 strong, against the Corrie Bill, yet another attempt to restrict abortion. Feminists campaigning for abortion had succeeded in gaining support in the Labour Party and in the trade unions, and this historic march was the first time the TUC had ever backed a demonstration on such an issue. Many feminists in the unions understandably resented the lack of acknowledgement that it had been because of their agitation that the trade union leadership had finally acceded. Nevertheless, the big October demonstration opened up longer-term possibilities of extending beyond the workplace to social issues, including sexual politics.

Shortly after the abortion march, our household transferred to a corner house in Powerscroft Road, just off Lower Clapton Road. For nearly a year we had been going on desultory expeditions to look at houses until we had spotted this one in Clapton. We had agreed a sum with friends who wanted to buy 12 Montague Road, but prices were rising, so I had to obtain a mortgage for what seemed like a vast sum, £7,000. This presented a difficulty. I might be a writer of books and articles, but to the financial world I was both jobless and a woman. Hence, in order to obtain a mortgage I had to pay money to a man I decided resembled the ‘broggers’ denounced in the Tudor and Stuart documents I had studied as an undergraduate. He secured a loan on awful terms, but at last we could move and Will had a separate room.

Much cleaning and renovating followed. Decked out impressively in mask and overalls, I squirted protective spray over the wooden beams in the semi-basement which became a wash room, a store room as well as a study for me. I was probably appointed by the maintenance committee to this particular task because of my lack of manual skills, but it became a source of much boasting on my part to Women in Manual Trades folk like Radha Kumar (who batted not an eyelid).

I had no sooner moved, when on 3 December, in response to the interest in Beyond the Fragments, I signed a joint letter with Lynne, Hilary, Jean McCrindle and Kenny Bell which was to reverberate upon my life during the next few years. We called for a meeting to think through the kinds of activism that could contribute to a wider socialist awareness, how single-issue campaigns might combine, and how to change internal structures and relationships within left groupings. Our aim was to deepen and broaden the debates around the book, though we were wise enough to add that we recognized that simply meeting would not somehow produce ‘the solution’ to all these questions.²² Our initiative was to result in the conference on ‘Beyond the Fragments’ in Leeds the following summer.

The History Workshop gathering that December was on ‘Peoples’ History and Socialist Theory’, and it saw a fierce clash between Edward and two Marxists from Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson.²³ A large crowd huddled in a freezing old church while Stuart spoke ‘In Defence of Theory’ and Richard rebuked Edward for ‘culturalism’. Both pronounced with a studied politeness, whereupon Edward erupted in fury. I could understand why: not only was his political and historical writing infused with thought, he explicitly rejected the misleading divide between material life and culture. He must have felt he was being deliberately misconstrued.

Behind the ferocity of Edward’s mood during this conflict was, I suspect, a buried argument about how ideology had been defended and challenged in the Communist Party during the fifties. Though Althusser was engaged in internal arguments, he was still embedded within the French Communist Party. Watching Althusser’s works being taken up so reverentially by a new generation of intellectuals, most of whom were not part of any internal CP conflicts, must have seemed like a Stalinist Groundhog Day. For Edward, an appropriation was under way; independent thought was being transposed into a new code, ‘Theory’, and regarded with the reverence previously reserved for dogma.

The meeting was distressing to many in the audience who had no idea why he was so angry. I shared Edward’s exasperation at the way in which questioning Althusser’s particular interpretation of Marxism was frequently equated with being opposed to theorizing, but found the schism painful because I liked Stuart personally. Moreover, History Workshop meetings constituted a precious non-aligned space for discussion which had previously been searching and generally cheery. I never found the gatherings quite the same afterwards, though I continued to support them.

In the last week of December the New Statesman carried my article ‘The Trouble with “Patriarchy”’. Following Simone de Beauvoir, initially I, like many other feminists, had adopted the term and assumed it to be universal. I had been alerted to ‘trouble’ by the critical discussions following the Patriarchy Conference in 1977, by a paper circulated by the social theorist Veronica Beechey, and by an article by Paul in Achilles Heel, ‘The Problem with Patriarchy’.²⁴ I had also been following debates in the US on similar lines.

After going round in circles trying to fathom ‘precapitalist’ relations, I had eventually concluded that it was exceedingly difficult to determine what form relationships between men and women had assumed in distant times.²⁵ I had also gradually come to see that the common usage of ‘Patriarchy’ to describe a constancy of male power in Europe, stretching from medieval through to modern times, was delusive. Zillah had circumvented this by twinning ‘Capitalist’ with ‘Patriarchy’, but I remained uneasy.

‘Patriarchy’ not only misled us; it disarmed us. As an historian I rejected a concept which made it well nigh impossible to examine how variations in women’s position had made effective resistance possible. And, as a socialist feminist activist I regretted the imposition of a fixed category that returned us to the repetition of an enraged, helpless female complaint against the male sex as a whole.

By positing an unchanging structure of domination through societies and historical periods, ‘Patriarchy’ obliterated how these had come to alter. In contrast, analysing the consequences of historical shifts in women’s position constituted a key element in developing any strategy for future action for change.

While direct, ‘patriarchal’ forms of male control over women persisted, modern capitalism and liberal democracy had weakened many aspects of these. Some of the resulting permutations had left women more isolated and exposed, others had allowed scope for independence. Our present predicament was contradictory because new manifestations of male power in society had transmuted into the competitive commercial values that predominated in capitalist culture. Indeed, this was one of the factors which had contributed to the rise of women’s liberation as a movement.

Like other critics of the concept of ‘Patriarchy’, I also pointed out that part of the confusion arose because the word was assumed by differing proponents to have a series of dissimilar definitions. Some of these were ballasted simply by moral outrage, others by interpretations of Marx’s views on the production and reproduction of life as structures operating on distinct axles. The moralism of the first obfuscated the specific possibilities of differing courses of action, while the emphasis upon abstract structures in the second put too great an emphasis on determinism and also set up a misleading split between material, social and cultural circumstances. Human beings after all do not experience these in tidily delineated zones. I argued instead that relationships of hierarchy and power, being between groups of people and negotiated by individuals, do not operate in distinct spheres but constantly interact. We encounter one another in a ‘kaleidoscope of forms’.²⁶

In ‘The Trouble with “Patriarchy”’, I had adopted the neutral phrase ‘sex-gender relations’ from American feminism, while conceding it was cumbersome. The cartoonist Jo Nesbitt’s sharp eyes spotted it and she drew an illustration of two nineteenth-century male workers standing on the corner, watching women in shawls and clogs heading off to work. One observes to the other, ‘Women working at t’mill? Say what you like, lad, it’s bound to cause a revolution in sex-gender relationships in t’ home.’²⁷ Jo had evidently read my previous review of Zillah Eisenstein’s collection of essays on ‘Capitalist Patriarchy’ because her second drawing portrayed a swotty-looking socialist feminist, sitting with tomes by Marx, Engels, Eisenstein and Hartsock piled on the floor, thinking, ‘That’s what we need … a dialectical unity of transience and moment.’²⁸

It might appear odd that despite a strong desire for a quiet life, I had plunged into so much controversy in 1979. I was urged on by a recognition of the need to salvage precious insights gained through a creative social movement. I could see that the momentum of women’s liberation in Britain was faltering, and, as a consequence, a simplistic ‘them versus us’ rhetoric was narrowing the scope of our feminism. The presumption that we were opposing an abstraction of absolute evil stymied strategic thinking, and the use of the term ‘Patriarchy’ accentuated this.

I wanted to stress how resentment and anger against injustice and domination are only the beginning. Understanding what was actually happening and seeking out routes and alliances for change needed to follow. This was what movements for women’s liberation had initiated in many parts of the world.

I had an inkling too that our initial awareness within women’s liberation of enhancing the capacity of individual women within and through a dynamic collectivity – sisterhood – was also being lost. This combination had been a vital source of empowerment driving our movement, providing us with the strength and generosity of spirit to connect with other subordinated groups. I wanted to reassert the emphasis in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World upon the importance for women as a group and as individuals to ‘keep struggling to go beyond our own situation’.²⁹

The play I had seen performed by the San Francisco Mime Troupe back in 1976 had dramatically expressed why going beyond a specific oppression was so crucial. Each subordinated group, and every individual within such a group, carries both possibilities of liberation and a contrary potential to oppress others. Paul had signalled the positive complement – people are also potentially more than any ascribed category, whether this be class, race, gender or whatever other kind of subjugation. ‘Each of us lives these conditions but is at the same time more than them.’³⁰

Earlier in the year, struggling with theories of the origins of women’s subordination, I had imagined a TV panel game in which ‘a raging chimera, part lion and serpent, confronts an expert on radiocarbon dating, and a group of mother goddesses hold forth on the appropriation of surplus labour’. Whereupon I had then abandoned them to ‘slope off over the bleak and heath-like margins into modern times’.³¹

But instead of alighting upon Jo Nesbitt’s exquisitely desirable ‘dialectical unity of transience and moment’, I was to discover that some very bleak and heath-like margins were fast encroaching into ‘modern times’. While I was preoccupied with all this ‘beyonding’ in the left and the women’s movement, I paid little attention to the new force at the helm of government. It was as if the arrival of a distinctive form of right-wing rule in the person of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister was still so abhorrent and unbelievable to me that I found it impossible to assimilate. In those early years I persisted in thinking that soon she would become so unpopular she would be voted out. How wrong can you be!

The new amalgam of right-wing politics Thatcher came to embody was voiced in the modulated tones of the conscientious lower middle class and it proceeded by an accretion of legislative measures. Congealing into a mindset, it was to take more and more ground, not just by assailing trade union power, but also by undermining the hopes of social equality and of extending democracy into daily life, which had driven women’s liberation groups, community politics, radical cultural endeavours as well as workers’ strikes and occupations. And, eventually, the short-term certainties of ‘Thatcherism’ demolished whole sections of the welfare state, extending the market and its values into many areas of life.

The plenitude of hopes carried by women’s liberation in Britain during the seventies generated multitudinous repercussions, but, like previous ‘waves’, we did not accomplish what had been anticipated. In Britain, as the decade ended, we no longer had an identifiable ‘movement’ nationally, nor had we achieved that less tangible intimation of ‘liberation’. Nonetheless, the eighties saw continuing resistance by socialists and by feminists, along with practical creativity in devising cooperative alternatives which involved many more women of African and Asian descent as well as other ethnic minority women. Different kinds of feminisms were to flourish, and indeed ideas of basic ‘rights’ became partially embedded within everyday culture, inspiring women in many parts of the world.

So, in unexpected ways, the hoping extended further and reached more deeply into many more aspects of experience than we could have conceived during the seventies. Yet the transformatory resolve of the early seventies in Britain, and indeed in many other countries, was to be forced back onto the defensive from the early eighties. Socialist feminists like me did not give up on hope, but some of the daring was diminished. None of this was known to me in 1979, and thus belongs to another remembered story.

Several decades of new right hegemony were eventually to narrow the ground and compress possibilities, leaving a few of us hanging on to memories of struggling for liberation, while expressing bewilderment that we kept on growing ineluctably older and older. Suffice it to say that as I write, time, and the wasteful contradictions in capitalism, throw up many surprises, including a rippling mood of rebellion among many young women worldwide, whose hopes are higher and whose confidence is far stronger than anything I could have imagined in 1970.

Abbreviations

7SHR   Sheila Rowbotham Papers, Women’s Library, LSE

SR   Papers in personal possession of Sheila Rowbotham, to be added to collection at LSE

Notes

Introduction

1. E.P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, The New Reasoner, No. 9, Summer 1959, p. 13.

2. Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, Allen Lane, London, 2000 (republished by Verso, London, 2019).

3. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 72; on the international risings see Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets, Bloomsbury, London, 1998.

4. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women: The Struggle for Freedom’, Black Dwarf, 10 January 1969; Sheila Rowbotham, Women’s Liberation and the New Politics (pamphlet), May Day Manifesto Group, London, 1969; reprinted by Spokesman, Nottingham, 1971.

5. Rowbotham, Women’s Liberation and the New Politics (1971), pp. 4–5.

6. E.P. Thompson, ‘Education and Experience’, Fifth Annual Albert Mansbridge Memorial Lecture, Leeds, 1968; reprinted in E.P. Thompson, The Romantics, Merlin, London, 1997, p. 25.

7. Leon Trotsky, Problems of Life, Methuen, London, 1924, p. 99, quoted in Rowbotham, Women’s Liberation and the New Politics (1971), p. 30.

8. Jim Radford, ‘The Point of the Battle Is to Win It’, in Helene Curtis and Mimi Sanderson (eds.), The Unsung Sixties: Memoirs of Social Innovation, Whiting & Birch, London, 2004, p. 1.

9. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Raphael Samuel’, Independent, 11 December 1996; reprinted in Raphael Samuel 1934–1996, Tributes and Appreciations (privately published booklet). On the first two History Workshops in 1967 see Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 123–4, 156–7.

1. January to June 1970

1. David Widgery to Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Horrible Friday’, no date, SR.

2. Edith Thomas, Les Petroleuses, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1963; translated as The Women Incendiaries, Secker & Warburg, London, 1967, p. ix.

3. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 229.

4. See Ursula Huws, Gertie Roche (pamphlet), Policy Research Unit, Leeds Polytechnic, 1992; Diane Gold, ‘Gertie Roche: Obituary 1912–1997’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 45, No. 1, Spring 1998.

5. Audrey Wise, ‘Equal Pay Is Not Enough’, Black Dwarf, 10 January 1969.

6. Audrey Wise to Sheila Rowbotham, letter, no date, quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973), Verso, London, 2015, pp. 100–1.

7. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Beginnings of Women’s Liberation in Britain’, in Michelene Wandor (ed.), The Body Politic: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, 1969–1972, Stage 1, London, 1972, p. 97.

8. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 50.

9. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Myth of Inactivity’, 1970 Conference, Anna Davin Archive, Papers relating to 1970 Conference, 7ADA/01, Folder 1, Women’s Library, LSE, and Notes for Talk at W.L. Conference, SR.

10. Rowbotham, ‘The Myth of Inactivity’ and Notes for Talk, SR.

11. Selma James, A Woman’s Place, published by Correspondence, February 1953.

12. Jo O’Brien, Women’s Liberation in Labour History, Spokesman, pamphlet, no date.

13. Audrey Wise, Interview in Michelene Wandor (ed.), Once A Feminist, Virago, London, 1990, pp. 208–10.

14. Jan Williams, Hazel Twort and Ann Bachelli, ‘Women and the Family’, in Wandor (ed.), Once A Feminist, p. 228.

15. Rochelle (Sheli) Wortis, ‘Child-Rearing and Women’s Liberation’, Conference, 1970, Anna Davin Archive, Papers relating to 1970 Conference, 7ADA/01, Folder 1, Women’s Library, LSE; on the background to the Tufnell Park group see Celia Hughes, Young Lives on the Left, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2015, pp. 144–82.

16. The film A Woman’s Place (1972) is on YouTube, London Community Video Archive. Thank you to Julian Richman, Liberation Films, for this information.

17. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Beginnings of Women’s Liberation in Britain’, in Wandor (ed.), The Body Politic, p. 97.

18. Sheila Rowbotham, Journal, March, no date, 1970, SR.

19. David Widgery, Preserving Disorder: Selected Essays, 1968–88, Pluto, London, 1989, p. xiii.

20. Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, Bloomsbury, London, 1995, pp. 184–5.

21. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Alexandra Kollontai: Women’s Liberation and Revolutionary Love, Part 2’, The Spokesman, No. 5, Summer 1970, p. 31.

22. Beatrix Campbell, ‘Feminists and the Organised Left’, Morning Star, 29 July 1970.

23. Beatrix Campbell, Obituary of Bobby Campbell, Guardian, 30 September 1997; 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 4 of 9, LSE.

24. Rowbotham, Journal, 1 June 1970, SR.

25. Jean McCrindle quoted in Rowbotham, ‘The Beginnings of Women’s Liberation in Britain’, in Wandor (ed.), The Body Politic, p. 97.

26. Rowbotham, Journal, 1 June 1970, SR.

27. E.P. Thompson, ‘To All Academic Staff’, in E.P. Thompson (ed.), Warwick University Ltd., Penguin, London, 1970; republished by Spokesman, Nottingham, 2014, pp. 124–5.

28. Thompson, Warwick University Ltd., p. 155.

29. Thompson, Warwick University Ltd., p. 166.

30. Women’s National Coordinating Committee (WNCC), Meeting, Sheffield, 27 June 1970, Marilyn Porter, Feminist Archive South, DM2123/FA/Arch/Box32, Bristol University Library, Special Collections.

31. See Diane Langford, ‘Abhimanyu Manchanda Remembered’, weebly.com; Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, Virago, London, 1985, pp. 136–40; Rosalyn Baxandall, ‘Re-Visioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 225–45.

32. ‘Me and Roberta Hunter-Henderson at the Sheffield Women’s Liberation Conference, 1970’, illustration in Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, Fig. 19.

2. July to December 1970

1. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 200.

2. Maroula Joannou, ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1930s’, in Andy Croft (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, Pluto, London, 1998, pp. 95–8; Jim Fryth with Sally Alexander, Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War, Lawrence & Wishart, London, pp. 288–96.

3. Sheila Rowbotham to David Widgery, Tuesday–Wednesday, no date, July 1970, SR.

4. Rowbotham, Notes inserted in Journal, no date, July 1970, SR.

5. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 244.

6. David Widgery to Sheila Rowbotham, 8 August 1970, SR.

7. Rowbotham, Notes inserted in Journal, no date, August 1970, SR.

8. Rowbotham, Notes inserted in Journal, 20 August 1970, SR.

9. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Song for Roberta to Find a Tune’, Summer 1970, SR.

10. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 248–9.

11. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 174–9; see Sue Tate, Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, 2013.

12. Rowbotham, Journal, 24 August 1970, SR.

13. Rowbotham, Journal, Steve 1970, SR.

14. Rowbotham, Journal, 24 August 1970, SR.

15. Rowbotham, Journal, Steve 1970, SR.

16. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Account of Visit to Amsterdam’, 1970, Mss., SR.

17. Rowbotham, Notes inserted in Journal on Spain, no date, 1970, SR.

18. Margaret Renn, ‘Interview with May Hobbs’, Socialist Worker, 12 September 1970.

19. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 228.

20. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Islington-Hackney Group, Report, Workers’ Control Conference, October 26–27, 1970’, Women’s Liberation Workshop Newsletter, no date, November 1970, in Porter, Feminist Archive South, DM2123/FA/Arch/Box 32, Bristol University Special Collections.

21. Rowbotham, ‘Islington-Hackney Group, Report, 1970’.

22. Sheila Rowbotham, Interview with Barbara Marsh, Handwritten Mss. for Shrew October 1970, SR.

23. Rowbotham, Interview with Barbara Marsh, SR.

24. David Widgery to Sheila Rowbotham, no date, Autumn 1970; Rowbotham, Journal, no date, Autumn 1970, SR.

25. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Review of Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch’, Oz, Autumn 1970, SR.

26. Rowbotham, ‘Review of The Female Eunuch’, SR.

27. Rowbotham, ‘Review of The Female Eunuch’, SR.

28. ‘Missiles at the Miss World Final’, The Times, 21 November 1970, SR; see Sue Finch et al. (eds.), Misbehaving: Stories of Protest Against the Miss World Beauty Industry, Merlin, London, 2020.

29. Berwick Street Film Collective, Night Cleaners Chronology – rough notes, Sun. 13 July 1975, pp. 1–2. Reprinted with box set of films Nightcleaners, 36 to 77, Raven Row, Lux, Koenig Books, London, 2018; original document is in ‘Night cleaners’, 7SHR/D/01 and D02, LSE.

30. Sheila Rowbotham to David Widgery, Paris, 2nd night, December 1970, SR.

31. French women’s Maoist Group, quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women’s Liberation in France’, Typed Mss., SR.

32. Françoise Barret-Ducrocq in Rowbotham, ‘Women’s Liberation in France’, SR.

33. Sheila Rowbotham to David Widgery, Train to Berlin, 1 pm, Tuesday, no date, January 1971, SR.

34. La Voix des Femmes, 23 and 28 March 1848, quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972), Verso, London, 2014, pp. 132–3.

35. See Michael Chanan, ‘Common Endeavours’, in Holly Aylett (ed.), Marc Karlin: Look Again, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2015, pp. 25–6; Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Interview with Marc Karlin’, in Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon (eds.), Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class, Rivers Oram, London, 2001, pp. 144–5; on the film collective see Dan Kidner and Humphry Trevelyan, in Nightcleaners, 36 to 77, booklet in box set of films, pp. 41–57; 83–94. Documents relating to the campaign and the film are in ‘Night cleaners’, 7SHR/D/01 and 02, LSE and in the Marc Karlin Archive, British Film Institute.

3. 1971

1. Helke Sander, speech, 1968, translated by John Birtwhistle, quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women’s Liberation in West Germany’, January 1971, Typed Mss., SR.

2. See Authors’ Collective, Storefront Day Care Centres: The Radical Berlin Experiment (1970), translated by Catherine Lord and Renee Neu Watkins, Beacon Press, Boston, 1973.

3. Karen Bartlett, Architects of Death, Biteback Publishing, London, 2018, pp. 260–71.

4. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women’s Liberation and the Family, The Political Implications of Organisation at the Point of Reproduction’, Institute of Race Relations Conference, 6–7 February 1971; Jean Gardiner to Sheila Rowbotham, no date, 7SHR/A1, Box 1, Folder 1, LSE.

5. Shrew, December 1970; Hermione Harris, Handwritten Notes, December 1970, SR.

6. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘New Areas of Political Resistance’; ‘Now’, Typed Mss., SR.

7. Women’s Liberation Workshop Newssheet, 21 February 1971, Marilyn Porter, Feminist Archive South, DM/2123/1/32, Blue Folder, Bristol University Library, Special Collections.

8. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Miss World’, Typed Mss., SR.

9. See Finch et al. (eds.), Misbehaving.

10. See Liliane Kandel and Françoise Picq, ‘Le Mythe des Origine’, La Revue d’en face, No. 12, 1982, pp. 67–80; Temma Kaplan, ‘On the Socialist Origins of International Women’s Day’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring 1985, pp. 163–71.

11. Rowbotham, Journal, March 1971, SR.

12. See British Library, ‘Changing Culture and the Arts, Feminism and After’, bl.uk; Margaretta Jolly (ed.), Sisterhood and After, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019; John A. Walker, Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain, I.B. Tauris, London, 2002; Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics, Serpents Tail, London, 2007, pp. 108–13; Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The 1970s’, in Century of Women, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999, pp. 398–401, 408–10.

13. Sheila Rowbotham, Handwritten Notes, Reports at Women’s Liberation Conference, 17–18 April 1971, Leeds, with typed programme, SR.

14. Ursula Owen, Single Journey Only: A Memoir, Salt Publishing, Cromer, 2019, p. 235.

15. Sheila Rowbotham, Arsenal Notebook, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9, LSE.

16. Rowbotham, Journal, 15 March 1971, SR.

17. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Jolting Memory: Nightcleaners Recalled’, in Maria Ruido (ed.), Plan Rosebud: On Images, Sites and Politics of Memory, Xunta De Galicia, 2009, p. 214; Night Cleaners’ leaflet, 7SHR/D/01, Box 8, LSE.

18. Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham (eds.), ‘Interview with Jean Mormont’, in Dutiful Daughters: Women Talk About Their Lives (1977), Pelican, London, 1979, pp. 142, 155.

19. Jean Wright, Interviewed by Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Night Cleaners’, Shrew, December 1971.

20. Rowbotham, Journal, early March, 1971, SR.

21. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘My Friend’, in Maura Healy (ed.), Women, Longman, London, 1984, p. 145.

22. Rowbotham, Journal, March 15, 1971, SR.

23. Yvonne Beecham to Sheila Rowbotham, email 20 April 2020.

24. Questions raised in Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Miss World: Changing an Image’; ‘New Areas of Political Resistance’; and ‘Now’, Typewritten Mss, SR.

25. May Hobbs, ‘Night Cleaners’, Shrew, December 1971.

26. See Nigel Fountain, Underground: The London Alternative Press, 1966–74, Routledge, London, 1988, pp. 95–108.

4. 1972

1. Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution, p. 11.

2. Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution, p. 247.

3. Sheila Rowbotham to Carole Turbin, no date, Spring 1972, SR.

4. On the US see Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon and Astrid Henry, Feminism Unfinished, Liveright Publishing Corporation, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014, pp. 84–106.

5. Department of Employment, British Labour Statistics, Year Book 1972, HMSO, London, p. 305.

6. Conrad Atkinson, Strike at Brannons, ICA, 1972, SR.

7. Fakenham Meeting, 16 May 1972; Sue Shapiro and Tessa van Gelderen, ‘Fakenham. Danger Women at Work’, Socialist Woman, Summer 1972; see Judy Wajcman, Women in Control: Dilemmas of a Workers’ Cooperative, The Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1983.

8. Tony Gould and Joe Kenyon, Stories from the Dole Queue, Temple Smith, London, 1972, pp. 169–78.

9. Hilary Rose, ‘Up Against the Welfare State: The Claimants Unions’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds.), Socialist Register, Merlin, London, 1973, pp. 179–203.

10. Unsupported Mothers’ Handbook, Unsupported Mothers’ Union, no date, SR.

11. In Selma James, Women, the Unions and Work, pamphlet circulated by Notting Hill Women’s Liberation Group, London, 1972, SR.

12. See James, Women, the Unions and Work; Sheila Rowbotham, Arsenal Notebook, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9; Rosalind Delmar, ‘Introducing Red Rag’, Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust, banmarchive. org.uk.

13. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Carrot, the Stick and the Movement’, Red Rag, No. 2, 1972, reprinted in Ellen Malos (ed.), The Politics of Housework, Allison and Busby, London, 1980, pp. 196–201; see also Delmar, ‘Introducing Red Rag’.

14. Sheila Rowbotham, Women’s Liberation and Revolution, Falling Wall Press, Bristol, March 1972; Alexandra Kollontai, Women Workers Struggle For Their Rights, translated by Celia Britton, Falling Wall Press, Bristol, November 1971.

15. Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, pp. 123–4.

16. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History, Pluto, London, 1973, p. ix.

17. See E.P. Thompson (ed.), Stephen Duck, The Thresher’s Labour, and Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour, Merlin, London, 1989.

18. Sheila Rowbotham to Carole Turbin, 2 June 1972, SR.

19. Sheila Rowbotham to David Widgery, Thurs. 5 o’clock, no date, SR.

20. Rowbotham to Widgery, Thurs. 5 o’clock, no date, SR.

21. Rowbotham to Widgery, Thurs. 5 o’clock, no date, SR.

22. Audrey Wise, Women and the Struggle for Workers’ Control, Spokesman pamphlet, No. 33, no date, early 1970s.

23. Rowbotham to Widgery, Thurs. 5 o’clock, no date, SR.

24. Rowbotham to Widgery, Arran, no date; on Red Ladder see Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 179–82, 192–5.

25. Rowbotham to David Widgery, Arran, no date.

26. Anon, ‘Something to Smile About’, The Whip: The Civil Service Journal, September 1972, p. 1; James Scott, ‘Nightcleaners Diary’, June–August 1972, in Nightcleaners, 36 to 77, booklet in box set of films, pp. 115–16.

27. On the Cleaners campaign see Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman and Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History, Virago, London, 1994; Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Cleaners’ Organizing in Britain from the 1970s’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Vol. 38, No. 3, June 2006; Rowbotham, ‘Jolting Memory’, in Ruido (ed.), Plan Rosebud.

28. Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group, Shrew, October 1972.

29. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women How Far Have We Come?’, Hackney People’s Press, November 1979, reprinted in Sheila Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, Virago, London, 1983, pp. 89–90.

30. Bonnie J. Morris and D-M Withers, The Feminist Revolution: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation, 1966–1988, Virago, London, 2018, p. 43.

31. Wanda Maciuszko, ‘4th National Women’s Liberation Conference’ (November 1972), Socialist Woman, February–March 1973, SR; see also Malos (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to The Politics of Housework; and Lynne Segal, Is The Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism, Virago, London, 1987, pp. 46–8.

32. Audrey Wise, ‘Trying to Stay Human’, Red Rag, No. 3, reprinted in Lee Comer (ed.), Conditions of Illusion, Feminist Books, Leeds, 1974, pp. 278–88; see also Red Rag online, banmarchive.org.uk.

5. 1973

1. Kathleen Mitchell to Sheila Rowbotham, 27 February 1973, 7SHR/A/1, Folder 1, LSE; Jill Tweedie, ‘Matters of Birth and Death’, Guardian, 22 February 1973; Mary Holland, ‘Liberty, Equality and Sorority’, Observer, 22 April 1973.

2. Anna Davin, ‘Women and Action – Past and Present’, in Wandor (ed.), The Body Politic, p. 218.

3. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Interview with Florence Exten-Hann – Socialist and Feminist’, Red Rag, No. 5, no date, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 223–8. A slightly revised version is available online at the Bristol Radical History group website, brh.org.

4. Red Rag, No. 1, 1972.

5. Val Charlton, Interview in Wandor (ed.), Once a Feminist, pp. 164–5.

6. Sheila Rowbotham, Diary, 29 May 1973.

7. Red Rag, No. 3; reprinted in Radical America, Vol. 13, No. 5, September–October, 1979.

8. See Delmar, ‘Introducing Red Rag’, banmarchive.org.uk, for a chronological list of the editorial group.

9. Fountain, Underground: The London Alternative Press, pp. 152–3.

10. See Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics, Serpents Tail, London, 2007, pp. 92–108.

11. Barbara Winslow to Sheila Rowbotham, 23 May 1973, 7SHR/A/01, Box 1, Folder 1, LSE.

12. Linda Gordon to Sheila Rowbotham, 23 April 1973, 7SHR/A/01, Box 1, Folder 1, LSE.

13. Review of Women, Resistance and Revolution, Vassar College magazine, 9 March 1973, 7SHR, Box 37, Blue Folder, LSE.

14. Rosalyn Baxandall, ‘Women, Resistance and Revolution’, University Review, May 1973, SR.

15. See Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, ‘Catching the Fire’, in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (eds.), The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1998, pp. 208–24.

16. Sheila Rowbotham to Rosalyn Baxandall, 28 May 1973, Rosalyn Baxandall Papers (RBP) in Schlesinger Library (SL), MC 887, Box 7, 1.

17. Owen, Single Journey Only: A Memoir, p. 168.

18. Sheila Rowbotham, Interview in Wandor (ed.), Once a Feminist, p. 39.

19. Bristol 5th National Women’s Liberation Conference, 13–15 July 1973, Marilyn Porter Papers, Orange File, Box 32 Women’s Liberation General, Bristol University Special Collections.

20. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 170.

21. Big Red Diary 1974, Pluto, London, 1973.

22. Sheila Rowbotham to Paul Atkinson, Boat to Barra, 6 pm, Weds, no date, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

23. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Outer Hebrides’ (1973), in Michelene Wandor and Michele Roberts (eds.), Cutlasses and Earrings, Playbooks 2, London, 1977; reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 85–6.

24. ‘Two Men’, Autumn 1973, Typed Mss., SR.

25. Rowbotham, ‘Acknowledgements’, Hidden from History, p. vii.

26. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 73.

27. Margery Corbett Ashby to Sheila Rowbotham, 9 October 1973, 7SHR/A/3, LSE.

28. Corbett Ashby to Rowbotham, 9 October 1973.

29. On Lilian Wolfe see Sheila Rowbotham, ‘She Lived Her Politics’, Wildcat, No. 6, March 1975, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 235–9.

30. See Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 66–70.

31. Dora Russell to Sheila Rowbotham, 4 December 1973, 7SHR/A/3, Box 1, Folder 3, LSE.

32. Graeme Woolaston, LSE Gay Culture Society, 19 October 1973, 7SHR/A/2, Box 1, Folder 2, LSE.

33. Ruth First to Sheila Rowbotham, 12 November 1973, 7SHR/A/3, Box 1, Folder 3, LSE; see also Ruth First, 117 Days, Penguin, London, 1965; Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner, Andre Deutsch, London, 1980.

34. Sue O’Sullivan to Sheila Rowbotham, 28 November 1973, with Minutes of Red Rag, 27 November 1973, 7SHR/A/2, Box 1, Folder 2, LSE.

35. Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group, ‘Notes on Class and the Women’s Movement’, Typewritten Notes, SR.

36. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Renewed Militants’, New York Times, 22 August 1973, SR.

37. M. Edney and D. Phillips, ‘Striking Progress’, Red Rag, No. 5, no date, updated version reprinted in Comer (ed.), Conditions of Illusion, pp. 332–48.

38. See Hugo Radice, ‘A Short History of the CSE’, Capital and Class, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1 March 1980, pp. 43–9.

39. Sheila Rowbotham, Loose Notes on Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group, January 1974, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9, LSE.

6. 1974

1. Dora Russell to Sheila Rowbotham, 2 January 1974, 7SHR/A/3, Box 1 Folder 3, LSE.

2. Sheila Rowbotham to Carole Turbin, 8 January 1974, SR.

3. Eileen Turnbull, ‘How the Shrewsbury 24 Were Vindicated’, Tribune, 27 March 2021.

4. Rowbotham to Turbin, 8 January 1974, SR.

5. Rowbotham to Turbin, 8 January 1974, SR; see Evening Standard, 8 January 1974.

6. Sheila Rowbotham, Handwritten Notes on Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9, LSE.

7. Women’s Rights Conference, February 1974, 7SHR/A/1, Box 1, LSE; Arsenal Paper for NCCL Conference on Further Education and Training of Girls, 16 February 1974.

8. ‘The Working Women’s Charter’, London Metropolitan University archive online.

9. Cartoon in Shrew, Vol. 3, No. 7, reprinted in Wandor (ed.), The Body Politic, p. 90.

10. See Val Charlton, ‘The Patter of Tiny Contradictions’, Red Rag, No. 5, no date; Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Review of An Author’s Collective (eds.), Storefront Day Care Centres: The Radical Berlin Experiment’, in Women Speaking, January–March 1974, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 94–8.

11. See Women’s Issue, Case Con 15, Spring 1974, SR.

12. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Working-Class Heroes’, Spare Rib, No. 21, no date, 1974, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 306–9.

13. Sheila Rowbotham to Carole Turbin, 25 March 1974, SR.

14. Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, Paul Elek/Pemberton Books, London, 1975; on Dora Russell’s life see also Harriet Ward, A Man of Small Importance: My Father Griffin Barry, Dormouse Books, Debenham, Suffolk, 2003.

15. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘History’, early 1970s, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 165, and Feminist Archive South, What Can History Do?, Hammer/On, Bristol, no date, c. 2013, p. 32.

16. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Introduction to the American Edition’, Hidden from History, Pantheon Books, New York, 1974, p. xviii.

17. Rowbotham, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxiii.

18. Rowbotham, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxiii.

19. Rowbotham, ‘Introduction’, p. xi.

20. Rowbotham, ‘Introduction’, p. xi.

21. Olga Wilkinson to Sheila Rowbotham, 2 February 1975, 7SHR/A/3, Box 1, Folder 3, LSE.

22. Alice Walker, ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, Radcliffe Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2, June 1974, quoted in Rowbotham, ‘Introduction’, p. xxx.

23. Sheila Rowbotham to Paul Atkinson, Weds, no date, May 1974, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

24. Rowbotham to Atkinson, Weds, no date, May 1974, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

25. Rowbotham to Atkinson, Weds, no date, May 1974.

26. Rowbotham to Atkinson, Weds, no date, May 1974.

27. Sheila Rowbotham to All in House and Arsenal, Tues. 21 May 1974, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9, LSE.

28. Sheila Rowbotham to Paul Atkinson, 20 May, 79 St Mark’s Place, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

29. See Ros Baxandall, ‘A Socialist in Congress: My Great Uncle, Meyer London’, jewishcurrents.org; on the Wisconsin left see Paul Buhle (ed.), History and the New Left, Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990, pp. 127–40.

30. Rowbotham to Atkinson, 20 May, 79 St Mark’s Place.

31. On John Harrison Riley, see Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, Verso, London, 2008, pp. 66–8, 81, 195.

32. Betty Eldridge quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, Handwritten Notes from Visit to Brookside, Harlan County, June 1974, SR.

33. Mary Widener, quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Ladies Don’t Stand on Picket Lines’, The Miner, September 1974, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 264–6.

34. Eldridge in Rowbotham, Notes, SR.

35. Minnie Lunsford quoted in Rowbotham, Notes, SR.

36. Lunsford in Rowbotham, ‘Ladies Don’t Stand on Picket Lines’, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 263.

37. Lunsford in Rowbotham, Notes, SR.

38. The Harlan County Daily Telegraph, 30 August 1974.

39. Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Gormley and Buckton Named as Special Branch Informers’, Guardian, 24 October 2002.

40. Sheila Rowbotham to Paul Atkinson, Motel, Cumberland Gap, Weds. no date, June 1974, 7SHR, Box 37 (in folder with reviews), LSE.

41. Sheila Rowbotham to All of you (at 12 Montague Road), Cape Cod, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9, LSE.

42. David Widgery to Paul Atkinson, 21 June 1974, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

43. Rosalyn Baxandall to Sheila Rowbotham, 3 July 1974, 7SHR/A/5, Box 2, LSE.

44. Baxandall to Rowbotham, no date, 1974, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

45. Paul Atkinson to Sheila Rowbotham, Thetford, Norfolk, no date, 1974, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

46. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘When You Flinch From Me’ (1974), in Wandor and Roberts (eds.), Cutlasses and Earrings, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 86.

47. Sheila Rowbotham to Carole Turbin, 11 July 1974, SR.

48. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Mountain Woman Blues’, Spare Rib, No. 27, no date, c. 1974, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 254–61.

49. Suzie Fleming and Gloden Dallas, ‘Jessie’, Spare Rib, No. 32, February 1975, reprinted in Marsha Rowe (ed.), Spare Rib Reader, Penguin, London, 1982, pp. 553–61.

50. Rowbotham, Diary, 14 September 1974, SR.

51. On the history of the organizational and political problems besetting the London Women’s Liberation Workshop towards the end of 1974, see Sally Alexander and Sue O’Sullivan, ‘Sisterhood Under Stress’, Red Rag, No. 8, February 1975, pp. 16–18.

52. Rowbotham, Diary, 2 October 1974, SR.

53. Reports from Groups, Essex Road Women’s Centre, Birmingham Socialist Feminist Conference, 2 November 1974, 7SHR/A/1, Box 1, Folder 2, LSE.

54. Rowbotham, Diary, 7 November 1974, SR.

55. Rowbotham, Diary, 13 November 1974, SR.

56. Rowbotham, Diary, 2 December 1974, SR.

57. Invitation to meeting on activities at Essex Road Women’s Centre, 23 November 1974, 7SHR/D/3, Box 8, Folder 2 of 2, 24 November, LSE. First meeting 5 January 1975, 7SHR/A/2, Box 1, Folder 2, LSE. Rachel Peto’s papers are in Feminist Archive North, University of Leeds.

58. Rowbotham, ‘How Far Have We Come?’, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 91.

59. Rosalyn Baxandall to Sheila Rowbotham, 1 March, no date, 7SHR, add 1, 2011, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

7. 1975

1. See Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 67–9.

2. Rowbotham, Diary, 16 March 1975, SR.

3. Rowbotham, Diary, 20 April 1975, SR.

4. Rowbotham, Diary, 5 February 1975, SR.

5. Beatrix Campbell, Obituary of Bobby Campbell, Guardian, 20 September 1997.

6. Campbell, Obituary of Bobby Campbell.

7. See Red Women’s Workshop, Feminist Posters, 1974–1990, Four Corners Books, London, 2016.

8. International Women’s Day leaflet, SR.

9. Lesley Hall, National Abortion Campaign Archives, Wellcome Library, online. The library also holds the archives of the Abortion Law Reform Association.

10. Norah Atkinson to Sheila Rowbotham, 1 June 1975, 7SHR/A/2, Box 1, Folder 2, LSE.

11. Rowbotham, Diary, 21 June 1975, SR.

12. Geoffrey Sheridan, ‘Survey of Feminist Magazines’, Guardian, 11 December 1974, SR.

13. Women and Socialism Conference, 22–23 March 1975, Queen Mary College, London, Women and Socialism File, Marilyn Porter Collection, DM 21 23/1, Archive Box 32, Bristol University Special Collections.

14. See Morris and Withers, The Feminist Revolution, p. 43.

15. David Widgery to Sheila Rowbotham, 1 May 1975, SR.

16. Sheila Rowbotham to David Widgery, Monday morning, no date, May 1975, SR.

17. Sheila Rowbotham to Paul Atkinson, Friday, no date, 1975, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

18. Leaflet, programme of ‘Politics and the Women’s Movement’, Polytechnic of Central London, 27–29 June 1975, 7SHR/A/2, Box 1, Folder 2, LSE.

19. Beatrix Campbell and Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women Workers and the Class Struggle’, Radical America, Vol. 8, No. 5, September–October 1974, pp. 65–7.

20. See Jo Ryan, Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality, Routledge, London, 2019, p. 4; Jo Ryan, Obituary of Sheila Ernst, Guardian, 24 March 2015.

21. See Victor J. Seidler (ed.), The Achilles Heel Reader: Men, Sexual Politics & Socialism, Routledge, London, 1991; Hannah Procter, ‘Mad World: Radical Psychiatry and 1968’, Verso Books blog, June 2018.

22. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women in Islington’, Islington Gutter Press, No. 21, June–July 1975, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 115–18.

23. Rowbotham, ‘Women in Islington’, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 116.

24. Walker, Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain, p. 153.

25. Norah Kirk (Atkinson), Janet Daly, Barbara Marsh and Linda Peffer, in McCrindle and Rowbotham (eds.), Dutiful Daughters, pp. 216, 10, 258, 364.

26. Sheila Rowbotham, Typewritten proposal for Penguin, SR.

27. Ruth First to Sheila Rowbotham, 9 August 1975, 7SHR/A/2, Box 1, Folder 2, LSE.

28. Sheila Rowbotham to Carole Turbin, 29 December 1975, SR.

8. 1976

1. Paul Atkinson to Sheila Rowbotham, 3 postcards, no date, 1976, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 8 of 9, LSE.

2. Sheila Rowbotham to David Widgery, 11 February 1976, SR.

3. Rowbotham to Widgery, 17 February 1976, SR.

4. Rowbotham to Widgery, 17 February 1976, SR.

5. Rowbotham to Widgery, 19 February 1976, SR.

6. Rowbotham to Widgery, 24 February 1976, SR.

7. Rowbotham to Widgery, 24 February 1976, SR.

8. Rowbotham to Widgery, 17 and 24 February 1976, SR.

9. Rowbotham to Widgery, 22 February 1976, SR.

10. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, History Workshop Journal, Spring 1977, p. 121, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 255.

11. Rowbotham, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, p. 121, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 255.

12. Rowbotham to Widgery, 15 March 1976, SR.

13. Widgery to Rowbotham, 25 March 1976, SR.

14. Rowbotham to Widgery, 15 March 1976, SR.

15. Rowbotham to Widgery, 15 March 1976, SR.

16. Widgery to Rowbotham, 25 March 1976, SR.

17. Widgery to Rowbotham, 25 March 1976, SR.

18. Rowbotham to Widgery, April, no date, 1976, SR.

19. Widgery to Rowbotham, 10 August 1976, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9, LSE.

20. Rowbotham, Diary, 8 May 1976.

21. See Henry Bell, John Maclean, Hero of Red Clydeside, Pluto, London, 2018.

22. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Harry McShane’, in Wandor and Roberts (eds.), Cutlasses and Earrings, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 314–16.

23. See Harry McShane and Joan Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter, Pluto, London, 1978; Annie Davison in McCrindle and Rowbotham (eds.), Dutiful Daughters, pp. 56–84; Sheila Rowbotham, Friends of Alice Wheeldon: The Anti-War Activists Accused of Plotting to Kill Lloyd George (1986), Pluto, London, 2015.

24. Rowbotham, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 239–56.

25. Temma Kaplan to Sheila Rowbotham, 19 June 1976, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 3 of 9, LSE.

26. Temma Kaplan to Sheila Rowbotham, 10 October 1976, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 3 of 9, LSE.

27. See Sally Groves and Vernon Merritt, Trico: A Victory to Remember, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2018; Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson, Striking Women: Struggles and Strategies of South Asian Women Workers from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2018; Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014.

28. Rowbotham, Diary, 3 November 1976, SR.

29. See Rowbotham, Hidden from History, pp. 150–1.

30. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, Virago, London, 1983, second edition, 2016, p. vii.

31. Rowbotham to Turbin, postcard, December, no date, 1976, SR.

9. 1977

1. Dalston Study Group, ‘Was the Patriarchal Conference “Patriarchal”’, in Papers on Patriarchy Conference, London ’76 (pamphlet), Women’s Publishing Collective, Lewes, Sussex, no date, pp. 78–9.

2. Rowbotham, Diary, 13 January 1977.

3. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Leninism in the Lurch’, Red Rag, No. 12, Spring 1977, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 123. In Dreams and Dilemmas I link the article to my WEA class and note that it was the core for my contribution to Beyond the Fragments.

4. Rowbotham, ‘Leninism in the Lurch’, p. 119.

5. Rowbotham, ‘Leninism in the Lurch’, p. 123.

6. Sheila Rowbotham, Notebook from Mile End Hospital, 1977, SR.

7. Rowbotham, Notebook from Mile End Hospital, 1977, SR.

8. Rosalyn Baxandall to Sheila Rowbotham, 2 May 1977, 7SHR/A/6, Box 2, Folder 6, LSE.

9. E.P. Thompson, ‘Postscript’, in William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Merlin, London, 1977, p. 806, reprinted 2019, p. 559.

10. East London Men’s Centre, 7SHR/E/1, Folder 1 of 2, LSE.

11. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, Penguin, London, 2010, pp. 663–9. On the ABC trial see Crispin Aubrey, Who’s Watching You?, Penguin, London, 1981; Geoffrey Robertson, ‘Ferrets or Skunks? The ABC Trial’, cryptome.org.

12. Anitha and Pearson, Striking Women, p. 128.

13. Amrit Wilson, Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain, Pluto, London, 2006, pp. 161–3.

14. ‘Nursery Action Campaign’, Islington Gutter Press, No. 38, June 1977.

15. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Union Maids’, Spare Rib, No. 62, September 1977.

16. Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism and the New Life, Pluto, London, 1977.

17. Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love; Sheila Rowbotham, Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States, Verso, London, 2016.

18. Sheila Rowbotham, Stella Browne: A New World for Women, Pluto, London, 1977; ‘Feminists Against Benyon March’, Spare Rib, No. 62, September 1977.

19. Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, Grossman/Viking Press, New York, 1976, review mentioned in Rowbotham to Turbin, 24 November 1977, SR.

20. Linda Gordon to Sheila Rowbotham, 14 January 1975, 7SHR/A/3, Box 1, Folder 3, LSE.

21. Rowbotham, Diary, 22 October 1977, SR.

22. Anna Davin, ‘Introduction’, Co-operative Working Women, Life As We Have Known It, Virago, London, 1977, pp. vii, ix.

23. Rowbotham to Turbin, 24 November 1977, SR.

24. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Years Before Eleven’, in Wandor and Roberts (eds.), Cutlasses and Earrings, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 221–3.

25. John McGrath, ‘Clive Goodwin, 1932–1977’, History Workshop, No. 5, Spring 1978, pp. 234–7.

10. 1978

1. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Our Lance’, in Ursula Owen (ed.), Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, Virago, London, 1983, pp. 203–16.

2. Rowbotham, Journal, no date, February 1978, SR.

3. Rowbotham, Diary, 17 February 1978, SR.

4. Rowbotham, Journal, no date, February 1978, SR.

5. Rowbotham, Diary, 10 February 1978, SR.

6. Rowbotham, Journal, 18 March 1978, SR.

7. Rowbotham, Journal, 18 March 1978, SR.

8. See Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge, Picador, London, 2017; David Renton, ‘What’s Going On Eric?’, London Review of Books, 22 November 2018, pp. 17–20.

9. Sheila Rowbotham to David Widgery, Sat. no date, c. May–June 1978, SR.

10. Arsenal Group, Letter to Women’s Liberation Workshop Newsletter, no date, 7SHR/B/1, Box 4, LSE.

11. Nigel Fountain to Sheila Rowbotham, 9 May 1978, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 3 of 9, LSE.

12. Rowbotham to Widgery, Sat. no date, c. May–June 1978, SR.

13. Sheila Rowbotham, Prince Charles in Whitby Visitors’ Book, SR.

14. Sheila Rowbotham, Note Book, 1978, SR.

15. Mr Gradgrind pops up in footnote 144 in E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Merlin, London, 1978, p. 394.

16. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 230.

17. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 229.

18. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 384.

19. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women and Radical Politics in Britain, 1820–1914’, Radical History Review, No. 19, Winter 1978–79, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 190–8.

20. Selina Cooper quoted in Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 197.

21. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892), Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, p. 31.

22. Françoise Barret-Ducrocq to Sheila Rowbotham, 15 October 1978, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 1 of 9, LSE.

23. Terry Illott, Interview with E.P. Thompson, ‘Recovering the Libertarian Tradition’, The Leveller, No. 22, January 1978.

24. Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, ‘Acknowledgements’, in Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, first edition, Newcastle Socialist Centre and Islington Community Press, 1979 (second and third editions, Merlin, London, 1979 and 2013).

25. See Segal, Making Trouble, pp. 97–8, and Lynne Segal, ‘A Local Experience’, in Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments, first edition, pp. 91–3.

26. Segal, ‘A Local Experience’, pp. 99–100.

27. Sheila Rowbotham to Carole Turbin, 29 December 1978, SR.

28. Rowbotham, Diary, 18 October 1978, SR; Melissa Benn to Sheila Rowbotham, 31 October 1978, 7SHR/A/4, LSE.

29. Rowbotham, Diary, 30 October 1978, SR.

30. Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, Peregrine, London, 1975; Carl Boggs, ‘Marxism, Prefigurative Communism and the Problem of Workers’ Control’, Radical America, Vol. 11, No. 6, November 1977, and Vol. 12, No. 1, February 1978. My notes for Beyond the Fragments are in Red Notebook on Beyond the Fragments, 7SHR/C/2, Box 7, Folder 2 of 2, LSE.

31. Rowbotham, Beyond the Fragments, first edition, p. 19.

32. Victoria Brittain, ‘Outrage Over Amnesty for Apartheid Killer’, Guardian, 13 June 2000.

11. 1979

1. Hilary Wainwright to Sheila Rowbotham, no date, early 1979, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 3 of 9, LSE.

2. Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright, ‘Acknowledgements’, Beyond the Fragments, first edition, no page number.

3. Wainwright to Rowbotham, no date, early 1979, 7SHR, add 1, 2011/25, Box 3 of 9, LSE.

4. Segal, ‘A Local Experience’, Beyond the Fragments, first edition, pp. 99–100.

5. Hilary Wainwright, ‘Introduction’, Beyond the Fragments, first edition, p. 1.

6. Tara Martin Lopez, The Winter of Discontent, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 126–76.

7. Margaret Thatcher, quoted in Jeremy Seabrook, ‘Winter of Resentment’, New Society, 19 April 1979.

8. On the background see Monica Threlfall, ‘Feminist Politics and Social Change in Spain’, in Monica Threlfall (ed.), Mapping the Women’s Movement: Feminist Politics and Social Transformation in the North, Verso, London, 1996, pp. 118–21.

9. Socialist Feminist Conference, 1979, 7SHR/D/3, Box 8, Folder 2 of 2, LSE.

10. Margaret Thatcher, Interview for Granada, 27 January 1978, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Archive, margaretthatcher.org.

11. Southall Black Sisters, Against the Grain: A Celebration of Survival and Struggle, 1979–1989, Southall Black Sisters, 1989.

12. Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, The Heart of the Race, pp. 164–76.

13. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Who’s Holding the Baby?’, The Leveller, No. 29, August 1979, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 127–8.

14. Jane Lazarre, The Mother Knot, McGraw Hill, New York, 1976.

15. Kathy Henderson with Frankie Armstrong and Sandra Kerr, My Song is My Own: 100 Women’s Songs, Pluto, London, 1979, pp. 26–7, 154–5, 34.

16. See Sheila Rowbotham, ‘DO-IT-YOURSELF-ORGANISING’, stick drawing, Red Rag, No. 3, 1973.

17. Ursula Le Guin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Panther, London, 1978, pp. 112–20.

18. Market Nursery, Not So Much a Nursery, pamphlet, London, c. 1977, SR. I am grateful to Sue Finch for sending me a copy of this.

19. See Segal and Wainwright in Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments, second edition, Merlin, 1979, pp. 157–209, pp. 211–53.

20. Rowbotham, Red Notebook on Beyond the Fragments, 7SHR/C/2, Box 7, Folder 2 of 2, LSE.

21. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Dissolving the Hyphen’, New Statesman, 21 September 1979.

22. Joint letter, Beyond the Fragments, 7SHR/C/2, Box 7, Folder 1 of 2, LSE.

23. See Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2011; Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (eds.), E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2013.

24. Veronica Beechey’s circulated paper became ‘On Patriarchy’ (1978), Feminist Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1979, pp. 66–82; Paul Atkinson, ‘The Problem with Patriarchy’, Achilles Heel, No. 2, 1979.

25. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘When Adam Delved and Eve Span’, New Society, 4 January 1979, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 207.

26. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Trouble with “Patriarchy”’, New Statesman, 21–28 December 1979, pp. 970–1, reprinted in Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 209.

27. Jo Nesbitt, first cartoon, in Rowbotham, ‘The Trouble with “Patriarchy”’, p. 970.

28. Jo Nesbitt, second cartoon, in Rowbotham, ‘The Trouble with “Patriarchy”’, p. 971.

29. Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 124.

30. Atkinson, ‘The Problem with Patriarchy’, p. 22; see also Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, ‘In Defence of Patriarchy’, in Alexander, Becoming a Woman, pp. 271–4, and Anna Pollert, ‘Gender and Class Revisited: Or, The Poverty of “Patriarchy”’, Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 4, November 1996, pp. 639–59.

31. Rowbotham, ‘When Adam Delved and Eve Span’, in Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 207.

Index of Names

Abdullah, Dr Sheila 203

Aberson, Arielle 21

Ackland, Valentine 33

Adams, Ellen 21

Agee, Philip 230

Aldred, Guy 133

Alexander, Sally 21–2, 62, 67–8, 100, 117, 209, 258

Ali, Tariq 3, 37, 239

Allen, Jim 195

Allende, Salvador 167, 269

Althusser, Louis 252, 253, 286

Anderson, Hermine 279

Armatrading, Joan 201

Armstrong, Frankie 276

Ash, Jesse 225, 243

Ash, Juliet 213, 225, 243

Ashby Margery, Corbett 100–1, 132

Astelarra, Judith 268–70

Atkinson, Conrad 91

Atkinson, George 147–8

Atkinson, Norah 147–8, 179, 190, 202

Atkinson, Paul 125, 154–6, 162, 163–5, 175, 177, 183, 184, 186–7, 188, 195, 199, 201, 202, 205, 209–12, 222–4, 226, 234, 243, 248, 249, 258, 280, 281, 286, 289

Atkinson, Will 223–5, 226, 227, 228–9, 234, 243, 248, 254–6, 258, 274, 277, 278, 280, 282, 284

Aubrey, Crispin 230

Auden, W. H. 201

Bachelli, Ann 20

Bakewell, Joan 229

Bakunin, Mikhail 40

Balogh, Steve 38, 40

Barker, Jane 168

Barnes, Catherina 27

Barret-Ducrocq, Françoise 51–2, 219, 252, 254–6

Baxandall, Lee 155–6

Baxandall, Phineus 156

Baxandall, Ros 119, 155–6, 225, 269, 276

Bean, Gerlin 185

Beard, Mary Ritter 153

Beatty, Warren 239

Beauvoir, Simone de 29, 30, 65, 286

Bebel, August 65

Beecham, Yvonne 78

Beechey, Veronica 286

Bell, Kenny 260, 266, 285

Benjamin, Walter 244

Benn, Melissa 258

Benn, Tony 137, 148

Benyon, William 232

Berry, John 230

Beynon, Huw 259

Biberman, Harold 105

Birnbaum, Ben 14, 244

Blair, J. H. 161

Blake, William 24, 199

Bock, Jo 102, 147

Bodington, Stephen 49, 50

Boggs, Carl 258

Bohanna, John 261

Bond, Caroline 74–5, 93, 143, 200, 248

Bond, Ralph 75, 99

Boty, Pauline 37

Boycott, Rosie 85, 103, 121

Brar, Harpal 81

Brittain, Victoria 263

Brooksbank, Mary 276

Brown, Toni 194

Browne, Stella 131, 134, 151, 158, 191, 232

Buchan, Janey 177

Buchan, Norman 177

Callaghan, James 230–1

Callil, Carmen 121

Campbell, Bea 27, 98, 116–17, 135, 141, 176, 181–2

Campbell, Bobby 27, 135, 158, 176–7, 183–4

Campbell, Duncan 230

Carpenter, Edward 135, 151, 159, 166, 191, 202–3, 209, 215, 231

Césaire, Aimé 60

Charlton, Val 62–3, 94, 108, 116–17, 146

Clare, John 201

Clark, Alice 153

Clarke, Val 71, 130

Cleaver, Eldridge 52

Cliff, Tony (born Ygael Gluckstein) 74

Collier, Mary 98

Cooke-Yarborough, Miss 262

Coon, Caroline 37

Cooper, Anna Julia 254

Cooper, Selina 254

Corrigan, Philip 283

Cowley, John 22

Cowley, Sue (later O’Sullivan) 22, 118

Crockford, Sue 21

Curtis, Joan 167

Curtis, Zelda 232

Dallas, Gloden 16, 64, 80, 130, 166, 177, 235, 246, 248

Daly, Janet 190

Daly, Lawrence 83

Davin, Anna 22, 114, 130, 209, 235

Davis, Angela 79

Davis, Mary 231

Davison, Annie 206, 209

Delacroix, Eugène 116

Delmar, Rosalind 117

Dennis, Felix 118

Dent, Bob 202

Devlin, Bernadette (later McAliskey) 67

Dickens, Hazel 158, 165, 216

Dove, Linda 187, 190

Draper, Ann 211

Dromey, Jack 230

Duane, Michael 77

Duck, Stephen 98

Dunayevskaya, Raya 209

Duncan, Isadora 262

Durkin, Tom 230

Eden, Anthony 153

Edney, Margaret 137, 205

Edney, Ralph 205

Eisenstein, Zillah 283, 287–8

Eldridge, Betty 160–1

Ellis, Havelock 65, 135, 231–2

Elmore, Houston 161

Engels, Friedrich 5, 40, 50, 64–5, 123, 288

English, Eileen 91

Ernst, Sheila 186

Exten-Hann, Florence 114–6, 173

Fanon, Frantz 4, 60, 95

Fell, Alison 118, 167, 241, 256

Ferrier, Louise 84

First, Ruth 135, 192, 261–3

Fishman, Bill 131–2, 174, 216

Fleming, Suzie 97, 166

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley 120, 155, 163, 170

Fonda, Jane 256

Ford, Harrison 239

Ford, Isabella 166

Foster, Charles 275

Fountain, Nigel 74, 102–3, 147, 176–8, 196, 200, 204, 221, 223, 248, 280

Fraad, Harriet 159

Franco, Francisco 268

Fraser, Sally (later Chandan) 21

Freire, Paulo 114

Freud, Annie 18

Friedan, Betty 119

Fryth, Jim 33, 125, 227

Gandhi, Indira 250

Gannarelli, Che 249

Gannarelli, Pete 249

Gardiner, Jean 60, 138

Garnett, Tony 125, 195, 196

Garrett, Myra 146, 189, 210–12, 274

Garthwaite, Terry 194

Gerrard, Alice 158, 165

Ginneken, Dee van 37, 39

Ginneken, Jaap van 39, 40

Ginsburg, Allen 24

Godwin, Fay 170

Godwin, William 95

Goldman, Emma 40, 170

Goodbody, Buzz 63

Goodison, Lucy 186, 243, 282

Goodwin, Clive 21, 37, 239

Gordon, Linda 119, 157–8, 232, 283

Gormley, Joe 161

Gould, Tony 243, 278

Gramsci, Antonio 95

Grant, Jane 214

Grassic Gibbon, Lewis 106

Gray, Nigel 149

Green, Bruce 187, 239

Greer, Germaine 45–6, 82

Gregory, Ruth 246

Griffiths, Trevor 142, 195, 239

Grocock, Mrs 26

Guthrie, Chris 106

Gwyn, Nell 154

Gyarmati, Susan 154

Hall, Stuart 21, 285–6

Hann, Maurice 115–16

Harber, Julian 75

Harraway, Sid 37, 49

Harris, Hermione 60, 64–5, 130, 179, 225, 228–9, 244

Harrison, Betty 144

Harrison, Margaret 190

Hart, Adam 36, 186

Hart, Charlie 186

Hartsock, Nancy 283, 288

Healy, Gerry 15

Heath, Edward 30, 91, 107, 137–8, 143

Henderson, Kathy 97, 276

Hill, Bridget 22

Hill, Christopher 22

Hobbs, Chris 139

Hobbs, May 42, 49, 62, 66, 68, 82, 91, 139, 194

Hobsbawm, Eric 210

Hockney, David 25

Holden, Joan 211

Holland, Mary 113

Holst, Henriette Roland 155

Hosenball, Mark 230

Howkins, Alun 209

Hughes, Carla 243, 258

Huissard, Claude 50

Hunt, Kay Fido 190

Hunter, Allen 157

Hunter-Henderson, Roberta 22, 32, 34, 117

Huntingford, Peter 213–15, 224

Isherwood, Vivian 114

Jackson, Aunt Molly 158

James, C.L.R. 209

James, Selma 19, 95–7, 109

Jenkins, Kathy 279

Johnson, Richard 285

Jones-LeCointe, Althea 185

Jones, Claudia 31

Jordine, Merdelle 234

Kaplan, Nelly 56, 278

Kaplan, Temma 210, 212

Karlin, Marc 34, 38, 40, 42, 47, 52, 67, 73, 82, 105, 225, 244

Keell, Tom 133

Kelly, Mary 48, 67–8, 190

Kennedy, Helena 229

Kenyon, Joe 93

Kerouac, Jack 24

Kerr, Sandra 189, 217, 276

Khrushchev, Nikita 14

King Charles II 154

King Charles X 116

Klein, William 52

Koedt, Anne 70, 73

Kollontai, Alexandra 25, 28, 95, 97, 151, 232

Kopple, Barbara 171, 216

Kumar, Radha 250–2, 285

Kuper, Richard 130, 204

Lazarre, Jane 276

Le Guin, Ursula 239, 277

Leibson, Michael 25, 214, 287

Lenin, Vladimir 95, 221, 262

Liddington, Jill 254

Llewellyn Davies, Margaret 235

Loach, Ken 24, 125, 195

Lucas, George 239

Lunsford, Minnie 161

Luxemburg, Rosa 40, 95

Lynn, Loretta 159, 194

MacDonald, Ramsay 166

Mackenzie, Compton 126

Maclean, John 206, 207–9

MacNeice, Louis 201

Maddox, Jean 211

Magri, Lucio 50

Mannoni, Octave 60

Maple, Jane 189

Marker, Chris 53

Marsh, Barbara 44, 191, 246

Marx, Karl 5, 57, 60, 65, 97, 138, 224, 227, 288

Maupin, Joyce 211

Mayakovsky, Vladimir 24

McCarthy, Abigail 192

McCrindle, Alex 239

McCrindle, Jean 29, 143, 165, 177, 190, 206, 235, 239, 258, 285

McGarrigle, Anna 227

McGarrigle, Kate 227

McGrath, Nancy 91

McPherson, Katie 129

McShane, Harry 206–7, 209, 257

Meacher, Molly 108

Merrill, George 202

Metcalf, Andy 222, 258

Michel, Louise 158, 170

Middleton, Neil 12, 79, 87, 130, 152, 191, 235

Miller, Bill 73, 154, 197

Mitchell, Juliet 22, 154, 186

Mitchell, Kathleen 77, 92–3, 113, 123

Miyake, Yoshiko 193

Montgomery, David 30

Morgan, Daphne 232

Mormont, Jean 68

Morris, William 11, 224, 225

Morrison, Paul 243, 258, 282

Moss, Jenny (later Natasha Morgan) 40

Mouffe, Chantal 282

Mulvey, Laura 234

Murray, Jim 259

Musson, Dave 266

Mwando, Kamau na (Gordon L. Faust) 192

Nash, Mark 186

Nesbitt, Jo 288, 290

Neville, Richard 25, 37, 46, 84

Norris, Jill 254

O’Brien, Jo 20, 31

Ogan Gunning, Sarah 158, 216

Okely, Judith 18

Olivier, Laurence 142

Owen, Robert 216

Owen, Ursula 64–55, 91, 107, 121, 179, 242

Paine, Tom 95

Pankhurst, Sylvia 40, 42, 115

Peach, Blair 272

Pearson, George 202

Peffer, Linda 191

Peto, Rachel 169

Phillips, Dave 10, 59, 75, 90, 102, 123, 137, 173, 177, 183, 200, 281

Pisan, Christine de 5

Pixner, Stef 220, 241

Powell, Enoch 3

Presley, Elvis 161

Price, Vincent 111

Prince Charles 249

Queen Elizabeth II 229

Radford, Jim 6

Raven, Jerry 262

Rawlence, Chris 102, 144, 168, 182, 205, 210, 249

Reagan, Ronald 211

Reardon, Mr 113

Rée, Janet 22, 100, 136, 143, 224

Reece, Florence 161, 216

Reed, John 239

Rees, Merlyn 230

Reich, Wilhelm 10, 95, 156

Richardson, Jo 178, 201

Riley, John Harrison 159, 202

Rimbaud, Arthur 24

Roberts, Michele 236

Robinson, Jo 179, 214

Robinson, Tom 246

Roche, Gertie 14, 31, 69

Roche, Jim 14

Rocker, Rudolf 132, 133

Ronay, Esther 100

Rowbotham, Peter 83

Rowe, Marsha 84, 103, 121, 150, 179, 256

Rowthorn, Bob 138, 214

Rubin, Jerry 46, 124

Ruskin, John 202

Russell, Dora 131, 134, 141, 150, 220, 232

Russell, Rex 106

Ryan, Joanna 186

Ryan, Michele 201, 213

Samuel, Raphael 6, 51, 206, 209

Sander, Helke 56, 73

Sanger, Margaret 158, 216

Sartre, Jean-Paul 95

Savage, Wendy 214, 222

Scargill, Arthur 88, 230

Schiffrin, André 152, 154

Schreiner, Olive 65, 135, 262

Schroeder, Wilhelmina 40

Scott, Ann 130, 135, 193

Scott, James 48, 53, 67

Scott, Joan 193

Searle, Chris 114

Sedgwick, Peter 24

Sedley, Marian 102, 144, 168

Sedley, Stephen 79

Seeger, Peggy 189

Segal, Lynne 118, 137, 167–8, 247, 256

Seidler, Vic 186, 258, 278

Seifert, Michael 78, 166

Serge, Victor 24, 25, 51

Seyd, Richard 210

Shanin, Teodor 283

Sharp, Cecil 165

Sharpe, Susan 75, 90, 102, 144, 168, 183

Shaw, Laureen 249

Shelton, Syd 246

Sheridan, Geoffrey 180

Short, Renée 178, 201

Slovo, Joe 263

Slovo, Ruth 263

Smith, Joan 98

Southcott, Joanna 254

Stassinopoulos, Arianna (later Huffington) 131

Stephen, Jessie 166

Sutcliffe, Bob 138

Swinson, James 186, 224, 243, 258

Tappenden, Jessie 243

Tax, Meredith 72

Taylor, Barbara 216, 254

Taylor, Wendy 276

Temple, Shirley 256

Thatcher, Margaret 79, 196, 268, 273, 290

Thomas, Edith 13

Thomas, Keith 171

Thompson, Dave 10

Thompson, Dorothy 1, 14, 22, 29–31, 58–9, 82–3, 141–2, 201, 227, 229, 232, 250, 252–3, 277

Thompson, Edward Palmer (also E.P.) 1, 4, 10, 14, 22, 29–30, 58–9, 83, 88, 98, 131, 141–2, 201, 227, 229, 250, 252–3

Thompson, Glenn 114

Topf, Hartmut 58

Trevelyan, Humphry 48, 53, 67

Trotsky, Leon 5, 40, 95, 156, 179, 209

Turbin, Carole 73, 88, 119, 142, 149, 154, 165, 197, 217, 236

Tweedie, Jill 113, 131

Twort, Hazel 20

Varikas, Eleni 282

Vine, Billie 224, 226, 243, 258

Vine, Lisa 167, 224, 226, 241, 258

Wainwright, Hilary 257, 259–61, 265–7, 271, 281, 285

Walker, Alice 154

Wandor, Michelene 37, 84, 117, 225, 236

Wardelly, Myrtle 106

Warner, Sylvia Townsend 33

Watson, John 36, 37, 52

Waugh, Liz 42, 47, 50, 66, 68, 71, 108, 143

Waugh, Lucy 50, 68, 108

Weeks, Jeff 134, 151, 202, 231

Weir, Angela 81, 117, 146

Wellings, Maggie 202

West, Gladys 78

Wheeldon, Alice 209

Whitbread, Chris 249, 265, 282

White, Barry 187

White, James 178, 180, 201

Wickert, Tony 21

Widener, Mary 160

Widgery, David 9–11, 12, 22, 34–5, 38, 44–5, 46, 50, 52, 59, 70–1, 72, 74, 75, 85, 90, 99, 100, 101–2, 103–4, 124, 126–9, 130, 149–50, 154–63, 173, 177, 182–4, 192, 199–200, 201, 203–6, 245–6

Widgery, Margaret 102

Wild, Dave 124

Wilde, Oscar 191

Wilkinson, Olga 106, 153

Williams, Jan 20

Williams, Raymond 10

Williamson, Craig 262–3

Wilson, Elizabeth 81, 117, 146

Wilson, Harold 106, 230

Winslow, Barbara 7, 82, 119, 130, 149, 159

Wise, Audrey 14–15, 20, 23, 43, 101, 110, 156, 201, 230–1

Witcop, Milly 132, 216

Witcop, Rose 132, 134, 216

Wittig, Monique 51

Wolfe, Lilian 133–4

Wolff, Rick 159

Wollen, Peter 234

Wollstonecraft, Mary 5, 95

Woolaston, Graeme 134

Woolf, Virginia 235

Wordsworth, William 10

Worpole, Ken 114

Wortis, Henry 21, 22, 157

Wortis, Sheli 20, 21, 22, 119, 157

Wright, Jean 48, 68–9

Young, Jock 78, 213

Zell, Ann 265

Zemon Davis, Natalie 212

Zemon Davis, Chandler 212

Index of Organizations

7:84 Theatre Company 190

Action Committee for the Liberation of Women 56

Agit Prop 72, 142, 234

Angry Brigade 47

Anti-Apartheid Movement 135

Anti-Nazi League (ANL) 246, 272

Arsenal Women’s Liberation Workshop Group (see also Women’s Liberation Workshop) 64–6, 75, 91, 96, 107, 108, 136–8, 143, 167, 169, 178, 193, 240

Artists’ Union 91

Awaz 231, 272

Belt and Braces 190

Berwick Street Film Collective 53, 74, 105, 106, 194

Big Flame 125, 174, 258

Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 285

Black Culture Society 192

Brannan Thermometers 90–1

‘Bread and Roses’ (Boston feminist group) 52, 72–3, 119

British Museum Library 11, 12, 13, 27, 73

British Socialist Party 209

Brixton Socialist Club 242

Broadside Mobile Theatre Group 189–90

Brookside Women’s Club (US) 160

Camden Women’s Action Group 94, 189

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 133–4, 174

CAST 190

Centerprise Bookshop 114, 217, 275

Centre of African Studies (Mozambique) 262

Child Poverty Action Group 93

Cinema Action 53, 190

Civil Service Union (CSU) 104, 106, 139

Claimants Union 43, 63, 66, 78, 93–4, 108

Claimants and Unemployed Workers’ Union 93

Cleaners’ Action Group 66, 68–9

Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) 211

Colindale Library 13

Combahee River Collective 283

Communist Party (also CP) 14, 22, 27, 30, 33–4, 49, 50, 62, 79, 83, 108, 116, 120, 135, 144, 180–1, 196, 232, 251, 274–5, 286

Communist University of London 250

Companies House 48, 68–9

Conference of Socialist Economists 137, 146

Dalston Men’s Group 177, 200

Dalston Study Group 220

Dolle Mina 39

Duke Power Company 159

Durham University 259, 261

East London Federation of the Suffragettes 40

East London Men’s Centre 226

Eastover Coal Company 159–60

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital 233

Essex Road Women’s Centre 167–9, 178, 191, 216–17, 220, 226, 257

Falling Wall (publisher) 97

Fathers’ Group 241–2

Federation of Claimants Unions 93–4

Ford 260–1: Dagenham 3, 15, 37, 147;

Detroit 159; Halewood 261

Forest School Camps (FSC) 75

Further Education College (Stepney) 29, 131

Gay Culture Society 134–5

General Will 190

Granada Television 229

Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories 215, 230–1

Hackney Council 274, 279

Hackney Flashers 274, 278

Holloway Women’s Prison 257

Hull University 28

Ilford Women’s Liberation Group 108

Imperial Typewriters 186

Independent Labour Party 116, 144, 207, 209

Industrial Workers of the World 120

Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC) 14, 43, 49, 137

Inter-Action 190

International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) 40

International Marxist Group 28, 143, 180, 257

International Socialism (IS; see also Socialist Workers Party) 3, 7, 9–10, 17, 24–5, 28, 41, 47, 59, 74, 98, 108, 124, 143, 159, 173, 180, 200, 203–4, 209, 213, 245

International Socialist Women 71

Institute of Contemporary Arts 91

Islington Community Law Centre 189

Islington Community Press 265–6

Islington Music Workshop 249

Islington Socialist Club 257

Keele University 147

Labour League of Youth 174

Labour Party 3, 15, 17, 30, 48, 83, 107, 137–8, 228, 249, 257, 260, 284

League of Revolutionary Black Workers 36–7

Leeds Women’s Liberation Group 16, 63–4

Liverpool Left Club 242

London to Edinburgh Weekend Return Group 146–7

London Nursery Campaign 274–5

London Women’s Film Group 187

Lotta Femminista (Italy) 109

Lucas Aerospace 260

Man Woman Society 39

Marie Stopes Clinic 90

Market Nursery (Hackney) 278–9

Marx Memorial Library 227

Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage 132

Merlin Press 225, 252, 266, 281

Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group (SPG) 230, 272

Mile End Hospital 213–14, 222–3

Miss World beauty contest (protests) 46–7, 60–1, 80, 179

Modern Languages Association (New York) 170

Mundella Grammar School 149

Museum of Science and Industry 176

National Abortion Campaign (NAC) 178, 201, 232

National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) 146–7

National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) 143–4

National Front 245, 272

National Liberation Front (Vietnam) 184

National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACCWER) 7, 15

National Organization of Women (NOW) 119

National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) 83, 88

National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) 278

National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers 13–14

National Union of Teachers (NUT) 144

New York Radical Feminist Group 120

News from Nowhere (bookshop) 202

Newsreel Film Collective 186

Night Cleaners’ Campaign 84, 104, 108

North East London Women’s Family Allowance Campaign 108

Notting Hill Women’s Liberation Workshop Group 95

Organisation of Women of African and Afro-Caribbean Descent (OWAAD) 273

Oxford Students’ Union 18

Pantheon Books 152, 154–5, 157

Peckham Rye Women’s Liberation Group 20, 24

Penguin (publisher) 5, 12, 30, 37, 79, 97, 102, 173, 191, 258

Pluto Press 99, 124, 130–1, 231

Polytechnic of Central London 185

Post Office 257

Queen Mary College, London 174, 180

Rape Crisis 145

Red Ladder Theatre Group 102, 168–9, 182, 190, 210

Redstockings 120

Release 37–8

Rock Against Racism (RAR) 245–6

Rock Against Sexism 246

Rounder Records 158

Royal Free Medical School 27

Ruskin College 6–7, 13, 17

Ruskin History Workshop 16, 51, 114, 191, 257

San Francisco Mime Troupe 211, 289

Schools Action Union 6, 92

See Red Women’s Workshop 178

Sheffield Women’s Liberation Group 29

Shell (cleaners’ protests) 67–8

Socialist Labour League 15

Socialist Workers Party 3, 204, 246, 272

Socialist Woman 20, 47, 84, 91, 105

Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child 121

Southall Black Sisters 272

St Hilda’s College, Oxford 3, 18, 22

Starcross Comprehensive School 59, 77–8, 79, 92, 107, 113, 123, 144, 168, 188, 271

Stratford Women’s Liberation Group 108

The Other Cinema 234

Townswomen’s Guild 122

Trades Union Congress (TUC) 231, 284

Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G, now Unite) 42, 48, 66, 68, 104

Trico (engineering factory strike) 215

Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation Workshop Group 20, 22, 118, 157, 228

Tyneside Socialist Centre 257, 259, 261, 266

Under Fives 189, 217, 273, 275, 278

Unemployed Workers’ Movement 99

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 159, 161

United Nations University Institute for

Development Economics Research (WIDER) 112

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 268

University Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique) 262

Valley Women’s Union 157

Virago (publisher) 64, 121, 179, 235

Walthamstow Women’s Liberation Group 108

Warwick University 29

Whitby Library 215, 248

Women in Manual Trades 169, 251, 285

Women’s Aid 145, 187, 188, 231

Women’s Cooperative Guild 42

Women’s Freedom League 133

Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) 120

Women’s Liberation Groups (see also specific groups) 3, 16, 20, 21, 27, 29, 42, 49, 63, 64–6, 68, 75, 91, 96, 107, 108, 118, 136–8, 143, 167, 169, 178, 193, 240

Women’s Liberation Workshop (WLW) (see also specific Workshops) 15–16, 20, 22, 42, 44, 64, 73, 84, 88, 99, 136, 167

Women’s National Coordinating Committee 23, 31, 81

Women’s Press 282

Women’s Street Theatre 63

Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) 12, 33–4, 59, 95, 99, 100, 106, 113, 114, 122, 125, 131, 146, 147, 173, 189, 193, 202, 216, 220, 233, 235, 243

Working Women’s Charter 144, 167, 168, 169, 178, 189, 201, 231

York University 213

Young Socialists (Hackney Labour Party) 3, 108