by Judy Greenway
In 2010, when I was in my sixties, I was interviewed for an undergraduate dissertation on the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain. As my memory was better then than it is now, here is the more autobiographical part of that interview.
I grew up in a small town in the late 1950s and early 60s, with very narrow horizons: expected to marry (as a virgin) in my early twenties, have two children and probably stay at home. The alternative was to become a ‘sexless career woman’, choosing from a narrow range of jobs. I never wanted to have children, and I didn’t fancy either of these alternatives.
I wanted sex and poetry and intellectual life, and for a while the social changes of the mid to late 1960s seemed to promise that, but the situation for women was still very exploitative and restrictive. The advent of the contraceptive pill made a big difference, though at first it was not available to unmarried women.
When I went to university, women were in a minority. I married at the end of my first year and was expected (and expected myself) to do nearly all the domestic work and put my husband’s interests first, while trying to complete my degree. Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t last long! Before becoming a feminist, I was very individualistic and didn’t at all identify with other women — I just felt I was different and didn’t want to fit in with what was expected of me.
Later on, it was sharing postgraduate accommodation and forming friendships with women who identified as feminists that led me to the women’s liberation movement. I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, which opened my eyes to female self-hatred, and various articles and pamphlets from the USA, such as Shulamith Firestone’s ‘Love’ which later became part of her book The Dialectic of Sex. Pat Mainardi’s The Politics of Housework, and Anne Koedt’s The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm all spoke directly to my own experiences. These early friendships and reading made me realise I was not the only one who felt the way I did, and gave me new ways of understanding my life and linking it to the experiences of other women.
Selling Catcall at a National Abortion Campaign demo in 1976
All this developed further once I joined the Women’s Liberation Movement, read more, and met and learned from women with a wide range of different experiences and politics.
I was involved with many different groups and activities from 1971 when I moved to London, until sometime in the mid/late 80s. For most of that time I was part of the Stratford Women’s Liberation Group. It was mainly a consciousness-raising group, but we were also involved in local campaigning, for instance for contraceptive provision. Our group was part of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop, and we produced two issues of its publication, Shrew. (Magazine editing and production rotated between the different groups which made up the Workshop.) For some time, I was also on the collective that ran the workshops’ central office. I left after it was decided to employ paid workers.
I was one of the founder members of Catcall, a non-sectarian discussion journal by and for women in the WLM, which was produced by a tiny collective doing all the typing, duplicating, etc, ourselves. I was also in an anarchist feminist reading group, and later an anarchist feminist history group which researched the history of anarchist women — work I am still actively engaged in today.
Catcall Number 12 cover by Jo Nesbit
I attended most of the national women’s liberation conferences, as well as regional ones on, for example, sexuality. (I remember one of those in London, another in Brighton, in the early 70s.) And I went on demonstrations and marches, for instance over attempts to restrict abortion.
Me (in dungarees on left) and other members of Stratford Women’s Liberation Group in front of a trade union banner before the start of a Mayday march.
One of the key ideas of the movement was that ‘the personal is political’. I understood this to mean that nothing about our lives as women was ‘natural’. We were shaped by living in a patriarchal capitalist society, and this meant that we needed to think about and analyse all aspects of our lives and try to change those aspects which were oppressive to ourselves and others. When I read about love, sex, housework I realised that these were not inevitably as I had experienced them. I realised that the power relations embedded in them could be challenged. And that such challenges needed to be part of any attempt to change society.
The impact was complex, but basically it meant raising questions about all aspects of everyday life and trying to change them. Lots of struggles over things like housework. I began to understand that even though I didn’t want children, the difficulties facing mothers were relevant to all women, and very early on I began to share childcare with a friend who was a single mother.
Meeting and working with women who were lesbians challenged my own stereotypes about lesbianism. Discussions with other women of all sexualities, and my reading and re-thinking of my own experiences helped me to realise that sexuality is not fixed and immutable. Later on, I became, and have very happily remained, a lesbian.
Note: See Judy’s remembrance of Helen Lowe in the HOWL obituary section.