Looking at the Woman Question in terms of Liberation

By Irena Fick

I first became involved in the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in 1969. I remember my first meeting, it was in Karen Slaney’s flat in Dartmouth Park Hill, North London. There were about ten women in the group then. There was a Canadian filmmaker, an Australian artist and others from different backgrounds: Sue O’Sullivan (then Cowley) was one of them. We produced postcards with slogans such as Women’s Rights Not Privileges. There was also a banner with that slogan, originally it said Women’s Rights Not Priviledges – back to the drawing board; the ‘d’ was cut out. The group organised actions and leafleting. One action took place around the Ideal Home Exhibition, questioning assumptions about women’s roles in the home. I particularly remember one slogan: A Cup, B Cup, C Cup, D  — Breasts Support Our Currency. It was a witty comment on the way capitalism relied on women’s bodies and sexuality. I think this action took place in the Selfridges department store. I had a full-time job at the time and often missed daytime activities.

We were creating something new. We attracted media attention. I remember the Oxford conference in 1970 and the International Women’s Day (IWD) march in 1971 in London. (4 photos from 1971 about here)

I remember the sticker action. Early one morning we went to several tube stations in Central London and defaced mysogynistic advertisements on the escalators. We had stickers with slogans such as This Demeans Women. I’m afraid this is the only one I remember. One of the mainstream newspapers — perhaps the Daily Mail or Daily Express — interviewed several of us. I was living in a commune in Islington at the time. There was a photograph of me with a pile of washing-up visible in the background on the front page. We were portrayed as odd rather than dangerous. What I remember clearly is that we insisted on being interviewed and photographed only by women journalists. The women who came understood immediately what we were talking about and were sympathetic.

As the movement grew, I was in consciousness-raising groups in Belsize Park, where we met in Audrey Battersby’s place, I think weekly. Later I was in groups in Islington and Haringey. One thing we tried to do in those early days was make contact with existing women’s organisations to explain what we meant by women’s liberation and consciousness raising. We saw ourselves as a fringe movement and wanted to introduce ourselves to other women’s groups to build understanding of our new and radical approach. We also wanted to understand others’ position on women’s equal rights and emancipation. We wanted to make sure that they understood that we did not set ourselves up in opposition.

I remember visiting the Six Point Group with Janet Hadley and talking to Hazel Hunkins Hallinan. We were served tea from a teapot in cups with saucers – a change from chipped mugs. Another organisation we approached was the National Assembly of Women (NAW), which was affiliated to the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), bringing together women’s organisations from both capitalist and socialist countries.

I became involved with NAW for several years and so did quite a lot of international work. The background to NAW is that on 8th March 1952 1,396 women from English regions, Scotland and Wales attended the NAW’s foundation meeting in London to advance women’s social, economic, legal, political, and cultural equality. It demanded an increase of women in Parliament, peace and disarmament, opposed the rise in the cost of living, and the Korean War which was raging at that time. NAW campaigned for equal status for women and men in all aspects of life, peace and disarmament, better education, health care, pensions, and childcare. It supported the Lamaze progressive birthing technique.

NAW is affiliated to WIDF that was founded in Paris in 1945, by women from 40 countries, many of whom had been anti-fascist partisans and/or been part of the wider anti-fascist resistance, often as couriers. Its aim was to engage women in efforts to prevent war, combat fascist ideologies, promote world peace, protect public health with a focus on child welfare, and improve the status of women. It had affiliates in five continents. Affiliated organisations included the Congress of American Women from the USA to the Soviet Women’s Committee from the USSR, and NAW from Britain.

Neither NAW nor WIDF were communist, but they were not anti-communist either, and this was a very difficult position to have during the Cold War. NAW was proscribed by the Labour Party and lost influence. A number of NAW activists joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Both NAW and WIDF have survived.

In 1972, I went to York to study and became involved in WLM that was still developing. At the same time I was also a member of the Communist Party. Looking back, I sometimes feel I was on the periphery of WLM, but I was involved in many ways.

Newsletters

With Hilary Rawlings I worked on Shrew, a newsletter which was put together by a rotating group of editors from the London Women’s Liberation Workshop (WLW).  Later I worked on Sisterhood and International Solidarity to End Racism and Sexism (SISTERS), the NAW publication. I was also involved in the early stages of Red Rag, a left socialist publication that tried to bring together socialism and women’s liberation. I remember women such as Nicky Doyle and Gladys Brooks working with younger women inside the Communist Party and challenging the attitudes of many of the men. There were debates later about whether communist women had taken over Red Rag or whether it remained a genuinely women’s liberation project, but at the time it felt like part of a wider attempt to make feminism impossible to ignore within left-wing politics. I sometimes still detect vestiges of ancient arguments, battles and mistrust. They can be quite funny and crop up in unexpected situations, a remark here, a remark there. We shed our skin when we became part of WLM. Perhaps we should shed some more, an insight of old age.

Of everything I was involved in, the WLW probably had the biggest impact on me personally. I was twenty-four years old. What was transformative was that it encouraged us to look at the woman question not simply in terms of emancipation or equality, but in terms of liberation. It made a fundamental difference to how I understood women’s lives, and my life. It was cataclysmic.

Alongside women’s liberation, international politics remained important to me. Through NAW and WIDF I attended conferences and worked with women from many different countries. In the 1980s I became involved in Women for Eastern Europe, a group of around twenty women from WLM who had expertise in different socialist countries. We met to discuss the situation of women in Eastern Europe and compare experiences.

These discussions were fascinating. In some respects women in socialist countries had achieved forms of equality that we in the West were still campaigning for. Women were encouraged into higher education and the professions. Yet there was often a gap in understanding when it came to women’s liberation. I remember discussions about domestic violence where some women understood the issue simply as violence between partners rather than male violence against women. They saw everything through the lens of formal equality. We were trying to explore deeper questions about power, gender and personal life.

At the same time, I never accepted simplistic Cold War stereotypes. Many women in socialist countries were doing important work and some of the women writers from East Germany (my expertise) were exceptional. Our discussions were valuable because they allowed us to look critically at both socialist and capitalist societies and to think about what liberation might really mean.

I have been active in trade unions (TU) throughout my life. At one point I became a TU official. By then (roughly in the 1980s) feminism had spread into workplaces and professions, and women were beginning to organise as women within unions. Yet sexism remained deeply entrenched. Too often male TU leaders were more interested in their own influence and prestige than in addressing women’s concerns.

Later I became a freelance translator and interpreter. Around 20 years ago, when I was approaching sixty, I became involved in the Older Feminist Network (OFN) and its newsletter. I am now one of the older older feminsts but remain active. With every new intake of younger older feminists, often through FiLiA, the OFN changes: from duplicating from stencils to computers, from financing ourselves through donations at meetings and subsciptions to the OFN bi-monthly newsletter to applying for funds from the Lottery Community Fund; we still have face-to-face meetings but we also meet on zoom.

Ageing is something younger people rarely think about until old age arrives. I became interested in the question of what feminism means in later life and how older women can continue to organise and support one another.

Looking back I can see changes and the impact we have had on them, both nationally and internationally. Activity is the answer, activity at all levels, from WLM to the United Nations (UN). Would Rem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, be able to argue for the abolition of prostitution to large audiences of powerful men without our input? I don’t think so.

NB: Thanks to Helena Graham for listening to me and transcribing my witterings, an Amazonian task!