Islington, London – hotbed of feminist activism!

By Lynne Segal

I am part of the lucky generation entering adulthood in the golden age of capitalism in Sydney, Australia, in the subversive 60s. Then, at the start of the 70s, I got even luckier, arriving in Islington, London, as a single mother, just when community activism and welfare investment were at their height, and half the population in England lived in council housing.  Women’s activism would emerge as one of the most enduring legacies of the radical politics of the 60s.

The first public provocation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Why Miss World? was mainly organised by Islington women, and at the close of the 1960s it was Sheila Rowbotham then living in Islington who wrote one of the first pamphlets that helped launch second wave feminism in the UK – Women’s Liberation and the New Politics. Sheila was struggling to end what she saw as a ‘language of silence’ surrounding women’s lives and women’s historical resistance. Her first major book, in 1972, would be called Women, Resistance and Revolution.

Many women from Islington attended the first Women’s Liberation conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970. Two local women’s groups then formed: a Highbury Group, including my future friend Janet Ree, and the longer lasting Arsenal Women’s group, including Sheila Rowbotham, also a future friend. The Arsenal group got involved in the night cleaners’ campaign, when May Hobbs asked for help in unionising her fellow workers. Islington women were also quickly involved in the National Abortion Campaign – defending and extending women’s reproductive rights – and the National Child Care Campaign.

I arrived in Islington in 1971, buying the house I still live in. As a single mother I quickly met other young mothers looking for nursery places. Soon I was living with two other lone mothers, plus a few supportive men. Mothers on their own had often felt isolated and anxious, but on joining with other feminists we felt stronger and more politically confident in this decade of political optimism. Our hopes for a better world, especially for women, took wing. In my home we were now living collectively, with rotas for everything – cooking, cleaning, collecting the children from school and evening childcare. Everyone played their part.

Feminists were now busy uncovering all sorts of troubling things, often naming them for the first time: the prevalence of violence against women, of rape and domestic battery behind the closed doors of the home; the isolation, frustration and frequent depression of full-time mothers. We also tried to end women’s precarious place in the job market. I joined with other feminists in arranging to talk in schools and nurseries, always urging unionisation. We were raising women’s issues everywhere – the need for better housing, greater focus on women’s health, how to overcome the ingrained sexism and racism of doctors and other professionals. We shared high hopes back then. Before long, nothing seemed impossible.

Many women I knew were squatting in empty properties in Islington. This was part of a new, broader grassroots, street level, direct action politics. Just do it, many urged, and some did!* People wanted more playgroups and youth clubs, along with other resource centres.

From 1972, I worked on the Islington Gutter Press, a mixed left and feminist newspaper linked to a community-run printing press, the Islington Community Press, based in a squatted building at the corner of Balls Pond and Essex Roads. There was a squatters’ advice, and under-fives’ campaigning group upstairs, and much anti-racist work undertaken – against racism in schools (Black children were much more likely to be excluded) and against anti-SUS laws  (which gave police powers to stop and search ‘suspected persons’ – disproportionately young Black people). We linked with John Le Rose and his New Beacon Books, which was a hub for African and Caribbean literature and activism. The Community Press serviced innumerable local groups, including the ex-inmates of Friern Barnet hospital, when it was still a locked mental asylum, and they produced their own mental health magazine. In 1976, the Women’s Therapy Centre was opened in North Islington by Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum.

Meanwhile, feminists who had been meeting in small women’s groups around Islington now wanted, and needed, a base for linking up our campaigns. We briefly opened a centre for women prison visitors, across from the men’s Pentonville prison. Then in 1973, with the help of Lisa Vine, who owned the building, we started working to establish a women’s centre in Essex Road; it opened the following year. That is where I first met and formed a lifelong friendship with Sheila Rowbotham. The centre focused on four main issues: housing, work, childcare and women’s health. Women met weekly at the centre, with a daily rota system to service it.

Women I knew across London worked on a diverse range of issues, for instance organising a claimants’ union and setting up protest groups outside Holloway prison: ‘Free our Sisters; Free Ourselves’, we bellowed. Some of us, including me, became prison visitors for a while, and a few others, including Pauline Melville and Sue O’Sullivan, got teaching jobs inside Holloway prison.

A typical demo staged outside our women’s centre, had placards echoing the Why Miss World? Slogan: ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry’. However, we were all rather young, often ex-students, and though we tried to reach out to women everywhere, I’m sure our particular dress code (dungarees, loose tops or long skirts) might have made some women feel excluded.

For a few years there really did seem to be progress on many fronts – workplace resistance (unionising women workers), successful housing struggles and an expansion of community resources, more democratically controlled welfare, nurseries, play groups, law centres, battered women’s centres. We were also vigilantly combatting sexism in the media, as when we opposed pin-ups in the local paper, the Islington Gazette.

There were feminist theatre groups formed in Islington: the Women’s Theatre Group, Cunning Stunts, Beryl and the Perils. Other feminists turned to filmmaking, formed writers’ groups, often tied in with women’s magazines – the best known being Spare Rib, one of whose members still lives in Islington, the writer Alison Fell, who was one of the three single mothers living in my house.

In 1979 a women-only bookshop, Sisterwrite, was opened on Upper Street, Islington by Kay Stirling, Lynn Alderson and Mary Coghill. It remained open for 15 years, despite facing some attacks and defacements from passing angry men. It is mentioned by the now celebrated Black writer Bernadine Evaristo in her novel Girl, Woman, Other; she was a regular visitor to the bookshop.

But over this heyday of feminism there were mounting shadows. With inflation rising, recession loomed in the late 1970s, partly caused by the oil crisis, fueling the rise of the right and defensive nationalism. Full-blown class war was back with a vengeance following the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. She rolled back welfare and attacked union gains of the previous decade, determined, she said, to change hearts and minds, as well as smashing the places and spaces that kept collective struggles, resistance and fighting spirits alive. Hence the assault on trade unions (symbolised by her defeat of the miners and their communities in the early to mid 80s).

There was massive support for the miners’ strike in Islington, and we befriended the miners’ wives. At the helm of London’s GLC, 1981-86, Ken Livingstone led resistance to Thatcher in London. There was a strong women’s committee at the GLC, and we regularly headed to County Hall for music festivals and political meetings, helping to keep feminist politics afloat. Sheila, Hilary Wainwright and I wrote the pamphlet Beyond the Fragments in 1979, first printed at Islington Community Press and later expanded into a book in 1980, calling for broader alliances among trade unionists, feminists and all left political groups.

Equality, solidarity, care and commitment were the values early feminists once tried to live by, explicitly rejecting the commodified life enshrining consumption, competition and subservience to ruling corporate interests. That was the spirit of women’s liberation, the utopian yearning that I still hope to see repositioned nowadays. We have everything to fight for in sharing our visions of a more caring, greener, sustainable world.

*See Frankie Green’s HOWL story about women squatting in London

*Lynne’s story is an edited version of a talk she first gave in Islington in 2016 to a large ad hoc women’s group, some of which appears in her book Making Trouble; Life and Politics