By Carol Smith
I was born in 1952, and was brought up Catholic. I went to a convent secondary school where the head nun was virtually a socialist feminist, albeit in a subtle sort of way! Perhaps she was an early liberation theologist? My mother was downtrodden and depressed and my father was a patriarchal bully of the highest order. I had two sisters. We were not allowed to have bicycles, wear trousers or anything that was not strictly ‘feminine’. Our mother was not allowed to wear trousers either.
Growing up totally controlled by a patriarchal bully teaches you how to work the system, and although my mother was not a role model of feminism by any means, she was a model of getting round the system and had all sorts of ways of establishing some form of independent life all linked to the Catholic Church and the Catholic Women’s League, so couldn’t be challenged. She was unusual for a Catholic in that era, since she approved of contraception and had a friend with five boy children who had left her violent husband. This woman was disapproved of by most of the rest of the congregation but my mother was very supportive of her, having suffered domestic violence herself.
I always believed that girls could/would/did do better and knew our mother was treated like a doormat, but I/we had no power to support her to leave and the ‘shame’ which would have been wrought by the Catholic Church was too powerful.
I went to Lancaster University from 1971–74 as a way of escaping my family, and stayed in Lancaster for a further four years being a political activist and working in Women’s Aid. I had the luck to have arrived just as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was starting and the most activist members were strong socialists, Trotskyists and feminists. Lancaster was the heyday of my life, and formative in my burgeoning understanding of what is now called the ‘inter-sectionality’ of politics. We didn’t call it that in those days — to us, it was just normal and obvious that issues such as race, gender, class, age and disability were inter-connected.
Much information from the radical health movement was produced in self-published pamphlets like these.
I had been going to GLF for several weeks which was a very steep learning curve, but the Women’s Liberation group was predominantly filled with ‘university wives’ and in those days their preoccupations were nurseries and reproductive issues which we young dykes thought were ‘het’ and nothing to do with us! We branched off from the male–dominated GLF and formed several feminist groups organised around sexuality, health, violence against women, anti-pornography, and Reclaim the Night. We went to many regional and national conferences, demos and marches. We also organised a lot of local actions: pickets, marches, demos and we had ‘Graffitti nights’, when we spray painted feminist slogans all round town and at the University. We stuck feminist stickers in all the books in the porn shop and regularly smashed its windows or spray painted it — a few years later, it closed down!. Women’s Aid was very strong in Lancaster and we went on to open a Women’s Centre in an old pub which we squatted and then converted the upper floors into a refuge.
Feminists at the time were also involved in solidarity work with the Miners’ Strikes of the 70s, and the anti-National Front demos which were held almost weekly in small towns across Lancashire and Yorkshire — we went in coaches paid for by the National Union of Students (those were the days!). We were very involved in the National Abortion Campaign (NAC), and we had small local demos as well as going to the national ones.
I remember local NAC demos and demos against porn and violence with jeering men at the roadside and local working class women clapping us! Some of us knew some of those women from solidarity work with the University Night Cleaners strike which had lasted a year in 1970. Unwanted pregnancies, anti-violence and porn were ‘levelling’ issues.
I moved to London in 1978 and to Hackney in 1985. By the early 80s, I had become a naturopath and osteopath and was predominantly involved in radical health politics (specifically in the Politics of Food) via the Politics of Health group, and in feminist health politics. We had local and national conferences, and published pamphlets which, along with the work of radical and feminist health workers, changed some of the practices and culture of the NHS.
I was in Women Against Racism and Fascism, and by the mid-80s was involved in Central American solidarity projects mainly around health, and was in the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign and the Central America Women’s Network. In the late 80s, I worked in a hospital in revolutionary Sandinista Nicaragua (another very steep learning curve). When I came back to Britain, the change with the advent of Thatcher and the demise of the Greater London Council (GLC) was palpable. There was less and less funding for local organisations, and political action became more and more fragmented.
The 1990s saw a dearth of feminist politics, so some of us who had children set up a Hackney Feminist Mothers group to explore the challenges of bringing up children in the current political scenario. Our children were what the left in the USA called ‘red diaper babies’, i.e. they went on a lot of demos!
I still participate in Feminist, Climate Change and Extinction Rebellion demos/marches. Black Lives Matter protests have a significant number of women protestors, but I am too old and a bit disabled to go to anything which might become heavy or violent, even though my heart and soul are totally there. Reclaim the Night and more recently Reclaim the Streets marches, which took place after Sarah Everard’s murder both have heartening numbers of young women participants.
Did we make a difference? Yes we did, but I have no space to tell you how!
Carol Smith biography:
I live in Hackney, in what my cousin used to call ‘ the independent socialist republic of Stoke Newington’. I love the long political history of the radical dissenters, and am proud of Mary Wollstonecraft (despite the appalling new statue on Newington Green)! Onwards and Upwards! La Lucha Continua!
Wendy Knight responds:
In 1965 I too went to a convent school – Our Lady’s in Stamford Hill. Just three of us, who had passed the 11 plus, went from my primary school. I probably got a better education than those who went to the mixed secondary modern school but I wasn’t lucky enough to have a socialist feminist as the head nun. Mine was a scary autocratic figure. As for the rest of the nuns, I remember them always telling me off for running, talking, laughing or not being able to spell!
But being a girls’ school, we could do maths, science and other traditionally male subjects without the classrooms being dominated by boys. I liked maths which I later realised is quite rare for girls.
However, we also did domestic science, which could have been named ‘how to be a good wife’, where we learned how to prepare and cook a balanced meal for a family, do the laundry and how to iron a man’s shirt. I failed that subject!
Read Wendy’s piece on this site.
Carol Smith, middle row far right of back cover of ‘Women Unite in Armed Snuggle’