Rejoining the Women’s Movement & Activism
By Caroline New
I left my WLM-dismissive Maoist group in 1980 and came back to the WLM, to find it fracturing around race and class. There were now working class and Black subgroups which denounced white middle-class ignorance and indifference in Spare Rib. This was before intersectionality had really been theorized. These ‘sections’ were saying, you don’t represent us, you never have represented us, and it’s time that we spoke for ourselves. It was often personal, and not very pleasant, but probably necessary.
Now a mother of three, I joined the National Abortion Campaign and the National Child Care Campaign. With Miriam David, known to me as Miki, I published For the Children’s Sake: Making Childcare More than Women’s Business (Penguin,1985). It has several chapters by us and others by collaborators describing attempts at collective forms of childcare. I had recently done some research about parents’ need for an after-school club in part of Bristol and helped to set it up. Norm and I and some friends formed a group called the Baby Care Network to attempt some collective care for our third child. We were constantly being defeated by timings that didn’t work, so that members had to drop out and make individual arrangements. Eventually we had to settle for three families in which the mothers took turns looking after three babies together with a paid worker. A partial success, but the babies seemed to like it.
Caroline with a daughter
Clearly the WLM, the second wave, together with feminist struggle within trades unions and political parties, had an enormous positive impact. Think of the Family Allowances campaign and the campaigns for free contraception and abortion. In workplaces, equality legislation gives an invaluable basis from which to struggle. Yet women’s poverty, that Hilary Land, for example, wrote about, hasn’t basically changed in form despite changes in the benefits system and the labour market. Women do have more power to separate or divorce and are less likely to lose their children, but when they leave a marriage and when they’re old they are still far more likely to be poor.
The cultural changes are important nevertheless. People don’t so often assume that women are stupid. In Bristol in the mid-eighties feminists managed to set up an all-women radio programme for a week. It’s difficult now to imagine how exciting it was to listen to it, to know that one’s woman’s voice would be followed by another, and that some women’s music would be followed by a report on something creative or intelligent that women were doing. We no longer need that reassurance. It isn’t unusual to hear a woman scientist interviewed by a woman, or women talking about the news, or even football. Men are overwhelmingly the ones in power, who govern, who make billions, who and wage and fight wars, but there has been a massive shift for women in public life.
Caroline with her daughter
Yet sexism has taken new forms while the old ones are still going strong, often in disguise. I remember as a teenager being really embarrassed when, with some male friends, I put my hand in my pocket to get some money and instead brought out a tampon. I wanted to disappear. No one would care today. Taboo subjects, like menopause – I remember dreading discussing it in a course on gender – are now openly talked about, though with a patronising gloss. Adverts warn about stress incontinence showing images of dancing women wearing mini nappies and depilated women describing their yearning for certain creams… In some cultures they have FGM and lack of choice in marriage; in our ‘Western’ cultures we have gender reveal parties, sex positivity and Brazilians. Misogyny is organised and open. We have moved from Families need Fathers to the Incel movement. Sexual abuse is less hidden but no less hideous and common. I really understand why many Muslims hold onto their idea of modesty and feel protected by wearing a hijab or covering their bodies.
Enough ranting! The struggle must go on.
Read Part 1 (Durham – Bristol 1969-1980)