Jill Nicholls
Jill Nicholls by the river
I arrived at the University of Cambridge age 19, having had a gap year, which was unusual in those days – it was because I’d been to a state school, so, unlike public school kids, I had to do my Oxbridge entrance exams in a ‘third year 6th’. Once I’d taken the exams and done the interviews, I was left with virtually a whole year off. I went on the hippy trail to India and worked in Paris for a while, and was very taken by the residue of the évenéments of 1968. And when I got to Cambridge, there they were (if a bit late). A hand-painted banner across the front of the university’s ancient admin building, the Senate House, declaimed: ‘The revolution is here, we have transcended individual consciousness’! A boy perched on a pillar with a huge yellow plastic hammer, blowing bubbles. Play power. Instead of imposing sanctions against participating, as some staff did, my director of studies encouraged me to go down and see what was happening – “I would if I were your age’, she said.
Mine was an all-women’s college – 1971 was the last year when girls at Cambridge HAD to go to all female colleges. (From the following year, some men’s colleges began to admit women.)
So I had two big influences towards getting involved with Women’s Liberation – 1/ ‘counter culture’/left/revolutionary politics (with their usual marginalisation of women), and 2/ the tradition of fighting for female education within a male institution.
Newnham College embodied that proud history but was also a bit stuffy, a bit ‘girls’ boarding school’, which was new to me, having been to a mixed school. It was a welcome base for meeting and talking at all hours with other women, but it was also exciting to get out of the college and mix with the mixed-sex ‘revolutionaries’.
Cambridge WLG – Jill Nicholls’ face is covered with her hair
I remember women’s liberation as emanating entirely from Newnham, but that cannot have been so (there were four women’s colleges and there was also the town, of which more in a minute). I also remember Women’s Liberation politics being new to Cambridge; perhaps they were, but it may just have been that they were new to me.
One action I remember us taking was invading an all-male college while its members were sitting in its great medieval hall eating dinner, all wearing academic gowns – this ritual was known as ‘formal hall’. We pranced in with placards and musical instruments, circling the tables, demanding that it go co-ed. We were thrown out but no arrests were made. It was kind of thrilling and frightening – it felt very daring, breaking a big taboo.
Cambridge WLG street theatre
We also did street theatre in the market square – I think about housework and violence against women, though I can’t remember for sure. That event was mixed, with ‘men against sexism’ supporting us – I have photos of it still.
We women published a magazine called Redstocking (as opposed to Bluestocking) from a building in the centre of town where the students’ union was based (left wing students, not the right-wingers at the Union Society, which was a very traditional, snobby debating society. I remember that a rich student called Arianna Stassinopoulos drove into town from Girton College in her red sports car and spoke against feminism at the Union Society, but I can’t remember who put the case for it. Not one of our group anyway.)
Our feminism was very influenced by socialism, though I remember being relieved that I didn’t have to attend meetings of ‘SocSoc’ (the Socialist Society) because my main allegiance was to Women’s Liberation – so I was saved that tedium. Some of the feminists were in the Communist Party, some saw themselves as way to its left, and some got interested in Maoism, even those who had been to China, so for whom it was a reality not just a fairyland. I was taken by the fairyland utopia of it, somehow failing to register the millions of dead, and took to wearing a Mao jacket and little velvet slippers from Red China instead of the long skirt I used to wear, that caught in my bicycle spokes, and old floppy silk blouses from charity shops, with my hair all over my face. I remember one of the Communist Party feminists telling me once that I shouldn’t dress like that because it would ‘alienate the working classes’. I imagine the Mao jacket would have appealed even less.
There was always a divide in Cambridge between Town and Gown – with the Gowns dominating the economy. We students sometimes joined up with the Town Women’s Group, though there were always differences – many of them had children! and jobs!
I remember going leafletting early one morning at a factory on the ‘town side’ which I find a bit embarrassing now – what did we think we had to teach factory workers?
I also recall the day that I first saw Spare Rib magazine (where I subsequently worked for six years). It seemed very glossy and jolly and off-puttingly like an ordinary women’s magazine – which was of course its point. By then I was living not in college any more but in what we called ‘the women’s house’ – five of us, all active feminists, sharing a terraced house for our final year. There was also a ‘men’s house’ – Men Against Sexism that is – in a nearby street.
We had very little contact with the movement outside Cambridge. I didn’t go to any conferences while I was a student and I think only went to London once, in 1972, to go on a march to support the miners; on the same day I visited the Women’s Liberation Workshop in Earlham Street. The women there were older than us and seemed much more radical. The rabbit warren of a building smelled of the purple ink that the newsletter was produced in, on their hand-turned Roneo machine.
A friend in the Cambridge group, in the year above me, went to the USA one summer and came back more open and defiant in her lesbianism and more radical in her feminism. We held a meeting at which she told us of her adventures in the States and showed us the pamphlets she had brought back, with much more about lesbianism and by black women than in material we had read before. We were impressed. I remember her climbing with another friend from the group over a wall into a men’s college to play some trick – she tugged at her friend’s long hair and said ‘Better get rid of this, girl, they can grab you by it to catch you’. And she did.