By Di Parkin
I had a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex when I was in sixth form in 1963.
Simone de Bouvoir: The Second Sex
The headteacher confiscated it because it had a naked woman on the cover; however not before I had read about the concept of woman as “other”.
I felt rather Other when I was in a pub with a boyfriend and his mates. The blokes were at the bar (buying me half of shandy) and they told me I shouldn’t be there with them, discussing the Young Socialists, but sat down with their girl friends drinking Babycham. I definitely felt Other.
So books were a way into feminism, or women’s liberation, as we called it.
Next up was Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970, which blasted my consciousness at university.
Germaine Greer: The Female Eunuch
However, for reasons now partly unfathomable, I was by then married with a child.
There were of course consciousness raising groups. But somehow the conversations among 18 year olds about oppression by their fathers didn’t resonate with me as a parent, struggling with washing nappies in a twin tub machine.
In 1972 I moved to Oxford. I was at the time a member of the International Socialists group; they sent me to “intervene” in the Oxford Women’s Liberation Group. One evening there was a discussion about the striptease act that was going on at an Oxford men’s college. I was the only person with a car. So about six women piled into my Renault 4. At the college we sat down on the floor near the front where the stripper was; one of us turned off the music while others shouted: “This degrades women”. Some of the men, enraged, moved to push us out, rather violently.
I faced up to one six footer and said into his face: “Aren’t you the big strong man, pushing women”. This surprisingly seemed to disconcert him.
We were very jubilant at the success of our direct action.