Durham-Bristol 1969-1980
By Caroline New
I first came across the women’s movement in 1970. I was a graduate student, fancying myself a Marxist, and somebody told me about a protest at the Miss World beauty competition at the Albert Hall, London. I was so ignorant about women’s oppression that to me it sounded trivial. Men and women should unite around our common interests, I thought. Beauty contests were beneath our dignity to notice.
My consciousness was faintly raised by the early 70s, although the relationship between class politics and feminist politics remained an issue for me, and still is (in a different way). I had recently married and we were living in an ex-mining village in County Durham, where I was doing some sociological research with miners’ wives. They were very sceptical about feminism, seeing their men as the oppressed ones, saying things like, “I wouldn’t even step in the cage”, (the lift that goes down the pit). As we know, they became fervent and brave allies during the miners’ strikes, and apparently their courage and community leadership revolutionised many relationships, sometimes for better, sometimes for divorce.
Carline on her wedding day
A group of us started a women’s group in Durham in 1970. My friend and fellow-member Ruth Cohen (Judith Suissa’s mother) came with me to the Women’s National Coordinating Committee (WNCC) meeting in Scarborough.
There was a group of Maoists there who were campaigning for men to be allowed in. Separate spaces for women was just one of the principles that had to be fought for in the early days of the WLM. I remember finding it all so stressful that I went outside to Australian feminist Lee Sonnino’s car (she was later Lee Cataldi, the poet) to smoke a joint! These days I am far more robust.
Another early point of dissension was around class and trades unionism. At a conference in London a trades unionist I knew publicly disavowed the WLM as narrow and middle-class. She and many working-class women trades unionists were active, she said, in the wider women’s movement, and had no time for the WLM. That presaged the later splits in the early 80s.
I was pregnant when we moved to Bristol, in 1971-2. I was in a classic nuclear family situation. My husband was earning most of the money, and I was doing little bits of part-time work. I found out about the local women’s liberation movement (WLM), which was in Ellen Malos‘s flat in Apsley Road, before she moved to Waverley Road, where she set up the Women’s Centre in her basement. Her husband John, and my husband Norm, were allies in important senses, but their good intentions and support couldn’t undo the structural inequality within our families: they had more power.
As a newcomer to Bristol and a young mother I needed to make sense of my situation. When I first held my newborn daughter I had had the sudden, unexpected thought: now I am dependent. I briefly joined some sort of consciousness-raising (CR) group, but it wasn’t much help. I was breastfeeding, and I remember sitting next to a woman who said she thought the whole business was quite disgusting. Some aspects of separatist feminism bothered me. At a women’s liberation picnic there was a discussion of at what stage boys become men and should be banned from such events. I found the idea being mooted that by age boys became men and objects of suspicion, if not enemies, terrifying. I read Mary Daly’s Gyn/ecology and other feminist books that offended my socialist hope for a good society in which women and men would be real equals. Yet I loved the women’s discos and the exciting performance Sister Show and the new friends and ideas.
Finding socialist feminism was, of course, a bit of a relief. I liked its important analysis of the economics of women’s unpaid work, for instance by Jean Gardiner. I wrote a couple of things, still using my married name of Caroline Freeman at that time: ‘When is a Wage not a Wage’ in Ellen Malos’ edited collection The Politics of Housework, Allison and Busby, 1980, and ‘The “Understanding” Employer”’ in Jackie West’s Work, Women and the Labour Market, RKP 1982. I still believe it. I think we got it right.
With Hilary Land, Jackie West, Miriam David and others we formed the Working Women’s Charter Group. Jackie briefly worked in Wills Tobacco factory where there was a shop steward called Marge who joined us and encouraged us to attend a strike meeting. It was an education for us academics.
My Marxist persona won out. Influenced by a university friend who was in Hong Kong working with GIs on Rest and Recreation from the Vietnam war, Norm and I joined a Maoist group called the Communist Federation of Britain. After a year or so it moved from being a federation, which could include disagreement, to a proto-party. At that point Norm and I fell out over it, and nearly split up. Actually I had every sympathy with his criticisms, but it felt as if I would lose my comrades and my social hopes if I were to agree. In the end we didn’t split up: we called truce.
Once the group put all its energy into party-building it had no time for the ‘bourgeois’ women’s movement. Our line on women was initially drafted by a man, I even thought it was quite a good thing for someone to take a lead in thinking about another group’s oppression. Talk about cultural appropriation! The line was pure Engels with a bit of free homophobia thrown in, to oppose ‘political lesbianism’ (to do myself justice I did struggle against that bit).
These arguments are still going on. I recently argued with a trades unionist friend about whether trans women can represent natal women. In some respects they obviously could (well or badly, like any other representative), but if you aren’t raised female you are unlikely to understand women’s internalized oppression as fully as I would wish. You might to it very well in a work context, in an equal rights context. But there are a seemingly endless series of humiliating things that happen in women’s lives to produce our passivity in the face of the things that we ought to refuse and stop. You really have to You can do a certain amount with empathy, but there are limits.
Our Maoist group, which for the record became the Revolutionary Communist League of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), focused on building industrial bases. At one point the organization decided that everybody down to or towards the working class, even if they couldn’t actually get a factory job. My fellow-member Paul Abberley was a disabled man teaching sociology at Bristol Poly. He said that as a disabled person, he was damned if he was going to give up his job. His oppression wasn’t really recognised as relevant to the anti-capitalist struggle. But I was more obedient. I gave up writing my PhD, did bits of part time work and gave up any ambitions for a career. For several years I left the WLM. By the time I came back (having left the RCLBML) the WLM was very different.