Author: Catriona Courtier Year: 1970s
Here we are, a dozen old women writing a history of women’s liberation. How did it start for me? I saw a notice in the 70s about a meeting to set up a women’s centre and I went along. We did set up that centre and it existed for a while and then it wasn’t there any more and it was as if it had never been. Now feminism is back but some people are fiercely critical of feminists of our generation. Can I talk about ‘then’ without talking about ‘after’ and ‘now’? It all seems too much.
On the other hand, when I look at the things I still possess from that time, it seems so little. There are a few badges in my sewing box: ‘North Paddington Women’s Centre’, ‘North Paddington Women’s Centre supports Greenham Common’, ‘Lesbian Strength 87’, ‘Fare Game — Women need safe, cheap public transport’, ‘Write women back into history’.
Our Women’s Centre badge has a women’s symbol on it — we had a big bag of them. I wonder if any are left other than this one in my sewing box. We did hire two coaches to go from our centre to Greenham Common on the day when thousands of women held hands around the perimeter fence and surrounded the base. It was an ecstatic moment. It felt as if the nuclear weapons would float up through the power of our collective will and dissolve harmlessly into the sky. On the way home in the coach a women’s choir led us in song —‘You’re not going to take my world away. Not while I’m watching.’ The Lesbian Strength badge in my box has two women’s symbols linked together.
People started coming to the door of our centre: local women looking for somewhere they could come with kids, or for help with housing problems or domestic violence; homeless women wanting a break from bed and breakfast hotels; feminists visiting London from other countries; television producers making programmes about ‘women’s libbers’.
Some of us were recruited by Channel 4 to take part in a programme on women’s self defence. I didn’t volunteer, but I did review the programme for Spare Rib. I still have a copy with a photo of Kaleghl Quinn, the teacher, a tall, handsome, Black American woman. She has her hands round an imaginary throat while her pupils look on. In my review I describe the classic image of a man strangling a woman. She is bent backwards, her throat exposed. I wrote that the image taught us helplessness and quoted Kaleghl saying, ‘Defence is 90% attitude’. One of the volunteers from our centre was my friend Chris, a woman who had had her face smashed again and again against a wash hand basin by her husband. She became a self-defence teacher herself.
I went along to the press release at Channel 4’s smart offices. For that day, at least, I was a journalist. That was a thing about the Women’s Liberation Movement. You could do or be anything you wanted. You could be a journalist, or an actor or a producer. You could play in a band or make a film. You could work in a manual trade. Women would run workshops to show you how. You could be a battered woman and become a self-defence instructor.
All over the country, women and girls, in small towns, in villages, in little groups or on their own, were reading Spare Rib, were being connected to a movement… were becoming feminists.
In the 1980s I went on to work for the Greater London Council (GLC) when it set up a Women’s Committee. I discovered that the top managers of London Transport, which was controlled by the GLC, never travelled on the tube but in chauffeured limousines paid for by the public, so I decided to show them what the tube was like. I sent a GLC photographer round the Circle line taking pictures. There was a poster on display based on a famous image of Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grating with her skirt blowing up around her waist. All the posters had been defaced with obscene drawings of male genitals. These pictures did persuade the Board of London Transport to ban sexist advertising, a first anywhere in the world. I always thought these posters had been defaced by men. I only recently discovered that ‘women’s libbers’ had drawn the obscene graffiti to get the posters taken down.
From being guerrilla graffiti artists, we seemed to be getting our hands on the levers of power. A heady feeling. But the GLC was abolished and I don’t know what happened to that ban in the years that followed. Did we make a lasting difference? I am not sure, but women’s liberation opened my eyes and I have never been able to close them again. The badge in my sewing box urges us to ‘write women back into history’. That is what we are trying to do here, now that we are so close to becoming history ourselves.
Reprinted with permission, Write women into history, Hackney Howlers