HOWLING WITH PRIDE AND SHAME: Recollections of the Women’s Liberation Movement

By Diane Langford

Whenever I can’t sleep, I listen to the BBC World Service. Early one morning in February, 2010, wearing headphones so as not to disturb my slumbering partner, I was startled awake by my own voice shouting in my ear, speaking at the first National Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, February, 1970. [World Service: Witness: The Women’s Liberation Movement]. That’s how I started writing an account of my experience of the WLM. Motivated by my defiant younger voice.

Growing up in racist, colonised Aotearoa (aka New Zealand), I saw women’s powerlessness, lives of domestic drudgery, lack of education, low self-esteem, anger and boredom.*  When I arrived in 1960s London, liberation movements were rocking the world. When my friend Ricki died after a back street termination two years before the 1967 Abortion Act, in my grief I raged against ‘the system’ but had no name for it. Now, the WLM shone a spotlight on patriarchy. The unrelenting mockery by mass media made everyone aware of ‘women’s lib,’ as they sneeringly called our liberation movement.

My introduction to the WLM came from reading American journals. I learned about Claudia Jones who was deported from the USA, who coined the concept of ‘super exploitation’ in relation to Black women’s labour. An article published on International Women’s Day, 1951, had triggered Claudia’s arrest by the FBI. Her writings on race and gender pre-dated the ‘second wave’ of the WLM by 20 years.  https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/life-and-times-of-claudia-jones-in-her-own-words/

Before coming out as a lesbian, I learnt a great deal about global politics during my marriage to Claudia’s former partner, Abimanyu Manchanda, an Indian freedom-fighter. https://abhimanyumanchandaremembered.weebly.com/the-manchanda-connection.html   I was pregnant with our daughter on 1970’s first national WLM London march; we named her after Claudia Jones.

Everywhere, women were powerless, trapped. I was attracted to the notion of liberation in relation to women, which expressed solidarity with national liberation movements. In Britian I was a member of the Women’s Liberation Front (WLF), which was set up by the Maoist group I joined in the sixties and was named in solidarity with national liberation movements. I attended preparatory meetings for the first national conference, with the late Arielle Aberson, and Sally Alexander from History Workshop. Trade union women and WLF set up the Women’s Equal Rights Committee, a ‘broad front’ – leftist terminology for an organisation the masses can join but is usually controlled by a (self-appointed) vanguardist cognoscenti.

The WLF proposed women’s right to equal education as a founding principle of the WLM. Having been encouraged to leave school at 15 to take up factory and typing work, I was passionate about this.  During the early 1970s a WLF meeting was held at Regent Street Poly, with speakers from Vietnam (Lin Qui), Palestine (Leila Mantoura) and Azania (Elizabeth Sibeko). I have a leaflet advertising another WLF meeting, titled ‘Women with Guns’, from around the same time. Peggy Seeger, Buff Orpington and other women musicians performed at gatherings we organised at the Camden Studios. Turkish women comrades made a massive banner depicting a woman raising her fist with broken shackles. This image, doctored, somehow appeared subsequently on the cover of Juliet Mitchell’s Women’s Estate.

A Zimbabwe comrade, Eileen Razemba, accompanied WLF to Ruskin in 1970. In the bathroom, a woman grabbed a handful of her hair. ‘Ooh, it’s just like pubic hair’, she exclaimed. Eileen calmly carried on washing her hands, running the water between her fingers and splashing her face.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about me’, she said, ‘I’ve had worse.’
‘But I shouldn’t have put you in this position.’
‘On the contrary, I’m glad I came. It’s been interesting.’
I’d persuaded her to come, imagining that if she addressed the conference, women would embrace the idea of international solidarity. She wasn’t even called to speak, one of the few Black women there, a highly experienced organiser of the women’s movement in Zimbabwe.

Other WLFers and I volunteered to transcribe the speeches at Ruskin, working hard from tapes and notes, producing reams of verbatim testimonies intended for publication as a book. Nothing ever seemed to come of the project; I wondered what happened to the transcript, until in 2014 I read about the Women’s Library’s move to the London School of Economics which referred to items in the collection.

Flimsy-typed pages are the only original surviving records of the first UK Women’s Liberation Conference, held at Ruskin College in 1970, which voted for equal pay and education, free contraception and abortion on demand, and 24-hour state nurseries so that any woman could return to work. [Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, 10 March 2014.]

Before 1971’s WLM Conference in Skegness, Chris MacKinnon and I met with Juliet Mitchell, Lois Graessle, Janet Hadley * from the newly formed Women’s Liberation Workshop, and others to put forward an idea to solve the problem of larger groups (code-name for Trotskyites) dominating the movement. Our solution was to rotate the venue and chairing of each national conference. Every group would have equal access by a system of pooling resources. The host group would edit an issue of the magazine Women’s Struggle. This gave a tremendous boost to smaller groups. Imagine hundreds of women turning up in a small town for such a conference!

In June 1968 women machinists at the Ford Motor company in Dagenham went on strike and in February 1969, ten thousand garment workers in Leeds struck against harsh conditions and low pay. In mid-May 1969 over a thousand women workers from all parts of Britain demonstrated and held a meeting in London. Striking Fakenham women leather workers came to an early WLM conference. Arguments about the ‘male wage’ surfaced in the unions; gender discrimination at work could no longer be ignored.

‘Nurses’ Exploitation must end! Health on the cheap won’t work.’  I wrote that headline for a leaflet publicising a meeting held on 12 September 1969 at the Conway Hall under the auspices of the Women’s Equal Rights Campaign (WERC) months before Ruskin happened.  According to the leaflet, that date had been designated Equal Pay Day, by whom I cannot remember. Speakers included Sister Patricia Veal of the United Nurses Association, Leonora Lloyd of the National Joint Action Committee for Women’s Equal Rights and Daisy Nolan of the Post Office Engineering Union. Daisy and her colleagues, branded ‘Hello Girls’ in the tabloids, were striking against their humiliating sexist work conditions and had succeeded in bringing the telephone exchanges to a standstill during a postal strike. Women working for the GPO could not achieve full pay grades until aged 28 and had to put their names on a list for permission to go to the toilet.

I spoke at local branches of the Labour Party Young Socialists, Norwood Technical College Socialist Society, Mary Dachelor’s School for Girls and Forest Hill School for Boys. At the latter I was greeted with hoots of ‘go burn your bra’, a slogan they’d gleefully picked up from media misinformation. They argued furiously amongst themselves over questions such as whether women can think as well as men, or drive lorries, and whether a man should have to help with housework after a day’s work. There was uproar when one said the teacher would leap onto a desk if a mouse came into the room. They were surprised to hear that the Deputy Commander of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was a woman.

The elegance of the girls’ school was a world apart and most of them accepted that they were privileged. None of them thought that women were ‘naturally inferior’: ‘different but equal’ was the dominant viewpoint. They were reluctant to believe that equality was impossible because women were penalised for being ‘different.’ I implored them to do their own research into documents such as the Newsome Report on education, various Acts of Parliament on marriage, divorce, inheritance of property, abortion, ‘illegitimacy’ and the legal position regarding mortgages, insurance, council tenancy, passports, adoption etc. The women teachers agreed this would be a good idea.

In the mid-1970s I became a Shop Steward, the ‘Mother of the Chapel’, at the Press Association in Fleet Street. I wrote for the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT)  journal, reporting, for instance, on the TUC Women’s Conference. In the 1980s, with a posse of radical women I campaigned against Clause 28 and the stigma of HIV, bringing women’s and LGBT+ issues into trade unionism, fought against Murdoch’s empire during the Wapping dispute, helped facilitate Women in Print to set up the Fleet Street crèche, and lobbied for Palestinians after the 1982 Sabra/Shatila massacres. I then helped revive the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and have since made several visits to Palestine, following an awakening at the 1969 PLO conference in Algiers.

My involvement in the national WLM petered out after Skegness. Most women there saw things differently. For many, it was the beginning of the movement, not the disillusioned ending that it was for me. By then, I’d fallen out with former comrades in the WLF, an initially exciting grouping including women from national liberation movements and places such as Turkey and Iran where regimes had forced them into exile.

Throughout this time, WLM groups were under police surveillance. We knew this of course, but the extent of the infiltration still shocked with later revelations of betrayal and deceit. I participated in the recent Undercover Policing Inquiry, in solidarity with women tricked into relationships. https://frankiegreenvariouswritings.home.blog/state-surveillance-of-the-womens-liberation-movement-and-other-campaigning-organisations/

I remain a Women’s Liberationist (a term I prefer to feminist, as anyone liberal or right wing, can now identify thus) and continue to campaign, still committed to the liberation of women from all oppression and exploitation. I feel that current women’s organisations must take pains not to reproduce the shortcomings of the 70s/80s movement, with regard to racialisation, class, disability and colonialism and their intersections.

The shame I feel as a ‘white western feminist’ has been magnified a hundred-fold by the appalling, calculated lack of solidarity of some women with Palestinian women. Diverse and opposed groupings of the WLM left legacies that still cause disagreements, so I’ll end by saying I believe it important to acknowledge that those acting in good faith, however we were seen at the time, had in common the desire and motivation to devote their lives to making a better, more just world. Something to be proud of.

*Dr Pala Molisa in Breaking the silence on prostitution and rape culture, E-Tangata, December 2015. https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/breaking-the-silence-on-prostitution-and-rape-culture/

*Lois Graessle and Janet Hadley each have an obituary in HOWL

*Diane Langford’s Blog:  https://dianelangford.com/2022/02/