By Frankie Green
Enthusiasm combined with critical thinking – what more could we ask of ourselves? – Rosa Luxemburg
In 1971, I became involved in Women’s Liberation and London’s Gay Liberation Front. Islington was significant in our lives: GLF’s office, Peace News and Housmans radical bookshop were at 5 Caledonian Road; the Women’s Group left GLF in 1972, meeting as Gay Women’s Liberation at an Upper Street pub; the Crown and Woolpack saw one of the first women’s discos, which were DIY alternatives to the Gateways and a far cry from subsequent commercial clubs. The squatting and left wing community was huge: the Squatters Advisory Service, Islington Gutter Press, Essex Road Women’s Centre. Communal childcare, playgroups and food co-ops proliferated.
I first squatted in Caledonian Road, in a row of houses occupied by women. Ours became a Women’s Centre, with a notice board advertising free pregnancy testing, meetings, helping other women stuck in substandard council housing. We challenged evictions in courts, defending ourselves using ‘McKenzie Friend’ lawyers*, then moving on to squat other council property which was boarded up and left empty: an exciting process involving crowbarring corrugated iron from doors, changing locks, posting notices declaring occupation, doing our own plumbing, wiring and decorating.
This direct action bypassed the powers that be, issuing our own demands and defying pressure to be well-behaved or accept gradual reforms – ‘Go Slow’, as Nina Simone put it in the context of Civil Rights. We upheld the human right to housing as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself (sic) and of his family, with a feminist dimension.
Squatting was then a legal, age-old practice, with evictions supposed to follow due process. We undertook it for political and personal reasons: to provide independence, homes and workspaces for ourselves, reject the nuclear family, live collectively, and challenge compulsory heterosexuality, making spaces to organise campaigns and analyse how women’s oppression intersected with others.
Some had left heterosexual marriages and come out, and could be deemed unfit mothers and lose custody of their children; Lesbian Mothers’ groups campaigned for legal and social change. [The alternative theatre archive, Unfinished Histories, has information on the play Care and Control dramatising this: http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/gay-sweatshop/care-and-control/]
Some younger lesbians might find it hard imagining a time when we were regarded as deviant monsters, subjected to stigmatisation and incarceration in psychiatric institutions. We experienced violence, unemployability, loss of homes. That still obtains in many places, which is why international solidarity is crucial, and establishing material conditions which uphold our right to self-determination, sexual and reproductive rights.
While not criminalised like gay men, lesbians were not considered legitimate. By our very existence we threatened male control over women and children and heterosexism, the ideology based on viewing masculine and feminine roles as natural and complementary, a cornerstone of patriarchy. [1970’s ‘Woman-Identified Woman’ by Radicalesbians is an interesting manifesto from the time http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/wlmpc_wlmms01011/ ]
Women I knew then were a mixture of lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual; these weren’t static categories. Four of us squatted one house in Mitchison Road, Amanda, Eleanor, Josée and myself, near Sarah (who was a member of the core group at the Poster Workshop http://www.posterworkshop.co.uk) Liz, Gill, Hazel, (a founder of WLM in the Peckham group) and her two daughters, Mandy and Sam. Some of us set up the London Women’s Liberation Rock Band with donations from others for musical equipment. [For more about feminist music-making from then see the WLM Music Archive: https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/l/]
In the 1980s I worked at Sisterbite cafe above Sisterwrite Bookshop, 190 Upper Street. At Islington Town hall there were huge women-only dances, with music provided by women’s bands such as the Emma Peel Fan Club. There was a disco in The Carved Red Lion on Islington Green, and Rackets at the Pied Bull at the Angel. I volunteered for London Lesbian Line, formed by women who had been in Gay Switchboard, on Pentonville Road. LL held socials at nearby pub The Bell, where DJs the Sleaze Sisters held discos. In the mid-80s I remember going to Graham Street’s Fallen Angel pub, and the GLC-funded London Lesbian and Gay Centre in Cowcross St, to organise against Thatcher’s draconian Clause 28.
A great article about women’s squatting by Christine Wall, my neighbour in a Hackney women’s community around London Fields, from the History Workshop Journal, ‘Sisterhood and Squatting in the 1970s’, is at: https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbx024
I have revisited squatting’s importance recently, seeing how political movements need physical resources and – as any struggle against occupation and colonialism demonstrates – territory as a base to organise from. No wonder our community centres, women’s centres, law centres, are starved of funds or closed, and squatting has been criminalised.
Back then the housing situation was bad enough, but few of us foresaw the enormity of the crisis now creating so much despair and oppression, laid bare in heart-rending clarity by the Grenfell fire. The obscene juxtaposition of a global super-rich using property as investment to park their wealth next to people living in deprivation, used as cash cows by profiteering landlords, without a roof over their head, or being dispersed in social ‘cleansing’ – this is a continuation of the centuries-long treatment of working class and Black people. The privatisation of public spaces, gentrification, loss of public housing, are new Enclosures, a consolidation of unjust land ownership systems and assumptions of entitlement by those who appropriate power for themselves.
The photo below, which I donated to the Islington Pride Archive, shows a reunion of women who lived in Mitchison Road. Forty-five years on I was still in touch with Amanda, who contacted Sarah, but had lost touch with the others. I was thrilled when Hazel’s daughters contacted me through the WL Music Archive. Hazel had died, and I’d last seen Mandy, visiting from Australia, now 52, when she was seven, so meeting again was emotional. We decided to go down Memory Lane, marking the occasion with a pop-up Feminist Heritage plaque:
It would be nice if similar actions were done elsewhere, to ensure our revolutionary movements aren’t erased from history, co-opted or defanged by liberalism. Histories of radical movements aren’t simply forgotten or lost naturally in the mists of time, but are suppressed and hidden to suit the vested interests of those who benefit from oppressive systems: male and white supremacist, capitalist. They no more want us to know about the past than present struggles. Why would they want us to see ourselves as links in an ongoing chain of activism, to have hope of a better world?
Archives and records are vital to keep alive our stories, ideals and work. Hence our plaque says: ‘la lucha continua!’ The struggle does continue.
© Frankie Green
*A McKenzie Friend helps an individual represent themselves in court by providing support and advice; no formal training is necessary.
This is a shortened version from Frankie’s blog written in 2017:
https://frankiegreenvariouswritings.home.blog/feminism-and-squatting/