By Marilyn Porter
I missed all the excitement around 1968 – I was in Botswana, working, so far as I was able as a ‘wife’, at the progressive Swaneng Hill School. Alas, Swaneng was not so progressive that ‘wives’ were given full teaching positions. Instead I was allowed to ‘help out’ in the primary class. Fortunately for me the US Embassy in Botswana had decided to recruit Swaneng students to conduct Botswana’s very first census. They appointed me and a volunteer, Carl Thayer, to carry out this census. providing us with minimal training, most of it inappropriate, and then leaving us to figure it out for ourselves. The experience steered me towards sociology/anthropology when I got back to the UK. The project also gave me something to do other than being ‘a wife’.
I had caught whispers about women and a new movement of Women’s Liberation from Jill Tweedie, who wrote a women’s page in the Guardian, which we occasionally received from another staff member. Remember how long this was before internet….
1969 saw me back in Bristol with a bouncy two year old daughter and pregnant with my son and stuck at home in the classic trap. I came across a group called the National Housewives Register. Not promising, but it was a start, and at one of the meetings Jan Parham and Ellen Malos came to talk to us about the Women’s Liberation group that had just been set up in Bristol.
Salvation!
I can’t remember where the first meetings were held, but we later moved to Ellen Malos’ basement. We were a feisty lot and we had taken on a large agenda, that was growing by the day. One of our first major fights was to throw the men out. These men, even the most supportive, were into controlling us – “what you ought to do is…”. We had plenty of ideas of our own. Many of these ideas were channelled into developing the Four Demands (later six, or more) – equal pay, equal educational and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free 24 hour nurseries. Even today we are still a long way from fulfilling these first demands.
We had a lot of work to do locally. We held rallies and marches; we lobbied the various levels of government; we set up a women’s refuge in a house downtown and volunteered to have one of us present 24 hours a day – and we went to conferences. These were exciting, vibrant, and somewhat repetitive – I remember Sheila Rowbotham pacing at the back of one muttering ‘why do we have to re-invent the wheel EVERY time’. It was at these conferences that we realised the diversity of the movement, politically, socially, sexually and in every other way. Walking down a street one day at one of these conferences, I found myself with two transgender women, (one of whom, Carol Riddel, was one of the first to proclaim her sex change operation), several lesbian women dressed in extravagantly male clothes, usually of the 18th century, and two maverick Bristol feminists (Pat van Twyst and Beverly Skinner) who were dressed up as men dressed up as women ie as transvestites. Even I, a boringly woman-as-woman, was wearing the progressive uniform of male overalls.
I missed the first Women’s Liberation Conference held at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, because I was 8.5 months pregnant with my second child, but I did get to the national conferences at Skegness in 1971, Manchester in 1972 and subsequent ones, until the conferences became too unwieldy and fractious. The early conferences were packed and diverse and tended to be dominated by the better organised groups. I remember the Maoists in particular, who always wore beige clothing and talked interminably. Meanwhile I was becoming immersed in the explosion of feminist writing from Sheila Rowbotham, Juliet Mitchell, Ellen Malos and Ann Oakley in the UK and the new feminist analysis from both Europe, especially France, and the USA.
But back in the real world, the Skegness conference in 1971 was held at a vast holiday camp (empty and cold in the winter). The conference organisers had, unfortunately, failed to realise that the National Union of Miners was meeting at the same time. Class-wise we were on their side, but they decided to include striptease acts in their gala, to which we took offence. No bones were broken but it left a sour taste in the mouths of both sides.
From the very beginning the WLM was concerned with working class women’s concerns. The Dagenham sewing machinists strike for equal pay in 1968 pushed the demand for equal pay more broadly in the Labour movement. Lil Bilocca in Hull headed a successful campaign to improve safety aboard the North Sea trawlers. The Night Cleaners campaign, ably led by May Hobbs and supported by several Women’s Liberation groups, led to the unionisation of the cleaners and a number of safety protections for these isolated women workers.
In the early days of the WLM I didn’t have a well developed political analysis. There was plenty of expertise on hand. I remember being stuck in a lengthy traffic jam on the North Circular Road – the time not wasted as Ellen Malos and Betty Underwood gave me a crash course in the characteristics, origins and varieties of the leftwing groups active in the UK at the time. My knowledge, and hopefully my analysis, improved considerably when I did a post-graduate conversion course into Sociology and then a Ph.D in Sociology at Bristol university under Theo Nichols. I was interested in the development of, and barriers to, the development of working class consciousness in women, and especially the role of trade unions in fostering this. In the early 1970s the unions were entirely focused on male workers rather than the working class as a whole, reluctantly accepting the growing radicalism of women workers, but without accepting the very different position of women inside and outside their jobs, and especially women outside the paid workforce.
Some of the most profound cleavages in the early WLM arose over women’s unpaid work in the home. The massive unpaid work necessary to maintain everyone living in the most common form of the nuclear family had become visible through the work of writers such as Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley in the UK. (the French tended to take a more theoretical approach). As the scale and universality of ‘domestic labour’ became more visible so did the variety of responses to this information. Some groups were for socialising housework and childcare, and numerous collectives and communes sprang up to answer the call (some transitory, some long lasting), but some came together to demand that housework should stay privatised but be paid. It was never entirely clear who would pay for ‘domestic labour’, including childcare, but the split in the WLM was primarily between those who were quite happy to do domestic labour providing they were paid, and others (like me) who were more concerned to share or offload at least part of the domestic labour load – hence the 24 hour nursery demand and the pressure on men to take greater domestic responsibility. The Wages For Housework campaign, led by Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Sylvia Federici, was one of the splinter groups that effectively split the WLM as the 1970s went on.
One of the most vociferous campaign was around contraception and abortion. Most women were relying on the inadequate ‘Dutch cap’ (as my mother had) with a spermicide ointment. I can testify about how sex-killing the process of inserting the damn thing was. While the pill had become available to married women in 1961 and access was expanded in 1967, some doctors were resistant to prescribing it, especially Catholic doctors, who are still resistant. It did have side effects, such as nausea. There was also much counting of days and other palaver. The contraceptive coil (IUD) was still in development and banned for Catholic women because it was regarded as an abortifacient, a hard line religious view that considered ‘life’ to begin a few moments after intercourse. Fortunately both my children were ‘wanted’, though neither was fully planned.
But we were still in an age where ‘stay at home dads’ were a rarity. Men’s jobs were paid much more than women’s – hence the importance of the demand for equal pay for work of equal value. We were still a long way from the Scandinavian view of shared parenting and paying fathers to stay home. They also have, and had then, a much better (and free) system of daycare.
Children’s House in Bristol was run by two women with some assistants and took children for a good portion of the day at two years old. I also rented our attic to Kate Roberts, whose son was the same age as my Luke, and who paid her rent in child minding. She became a very good friend and we survived many of those early travails together.
Meanwhile, the WLM or, as we were increasingly calling it, simply the ‘Women’s Movement’, was flourishing and taking on more and more activities. It was also splitting into a ‘liberal’ branch, more focused on legal and economic reform and tending to disassociate themselves from the more disreputable branches of Marxist Feminists and Radical Feminists. Of course, there were a zillion other splinters and ‘tendencies’ in the WLM. Somewhere I have a chart that lays it all out – it’s about a metre long and lists little groups and splinters I was totally unaware of.
The work we did, both in our local groups and nationally, changed the discourse as well as (eventually) the legislation. More women were elected to Parliament – there are currently 264 female MPs, just over half the elected MPs. Contraception is freely available although access to abortion remains a problem, still being limited by the 1967 Abortion Act and by inadequate access to abortion clinics, especially in rural areas. Irish women won a notable battle in 2018 making abortion available at least in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Equal pay ‘for the same or similar work, or work of equivalent value’ was legislated in 1970, largely as an outcome of the Ford Seamstresses strike and Barbara Castle’s vociferous support for an Equal Pay Act. Marital rape was made illegal in 2003, though this remains one of the most common as well as most difficult crimes against women to be successfully prosecuted, and violence against women shows no sign of going away.
Some women still face clitoridectomy and other forms of mutilation. Lesbian relationships are still not recognised in many parts of the world. The variability of sexual identity is being challenged, as it was recently in a Supreme Court decision that insisted, against all the evidence, that the legal definition of a ‘woman’ should be based on their ‘biological sex at birth’, even though this is often problematic and contravenes the woman’s own sense of identity.
In a world tilting to the right and, in Eliot’s words, ‘an age which advances progressively backwards’ (TS Eliot The Rock) feminism, and all movements of the Left, have much to do.
Here’s wishing strength, wisdom and vision to the generations of feminists that follow us.