Consciousness Raising Group with Essex University lake and tower blocks (Amber Djemal, Lynne Friedli and others)
Chris Baylis (Lavercombe)
Having left school during my first year of A-levels, and following an unsuitable marriage aged 18-yrs with motherhood following a year later, I studied A-level English Literature and Sociology at night school when my son was a baby. Following a very suitable divorce, I arrived at Essex University with my four-year-old son in 1980. I was 24-years-old and in receipt of my freedom and a grant from Wirral Borough Council that included a Dependants Allowance.
For the first two university terms, my son attended the nursery on campus, the fees being hugely subsidised because of my single-parent status. When he started school in Spring 1981, my female, feminist tutors finished their afternoon sessions in time for child carers to make the school pick-up times. Without such financial and considered, practical support, and the ability to rent a small house in Colchester for £11 per week, I would not have been a student at Essex University.
My night school studies had introduced me to Marx and class politics. In 1979, when visiting a friend who was studying at Essex University, I was handed my first copy of Spare Rib magazine. Within the time it took to journey back to the Wirral, I began to understand that many of the life choices that I had considered personal to me, born of my own volition, were, in fact, largely shaped by the politics of gender. I immediately placed an order for Spare Rib with my local newsagent and looked forward to picking it up every month, rolled in a wrapping of plain brown paper. I began to read: Annie Oakley, Sheila Rowbottom, Germain Greer – but it was the discovery of Shulamith Firestone’s, The Dialectic of Sex, in the local library, that really turned my head. These texts, read in the context of my ‘old’ life paved the way for discovering such writers as Elaine Showalter, Phyllis Chesler, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and engaging in the radical/socialist feminist debates. The practice of consciousness raising became hugely important for many of the university women that I began to know and the understanding that the personal is political became embedded within us. I forged a couple of female friendships during my time there that have endured for forty-five years.
I very quickly located the Women’s Room. It was amazing to find such a space on campus, and I remember being part of a sit-in to persuade the powers that were to have the room made available for women to access overnight, thus facilitating the safety of those staying late on campus. We were successful. Later, the university branch of Lesbian Line was run from this vital space and some of us made the first, face-to-face, one-to-one contacts with women over a coffee in town. For some of these women it was their first opportunity to talk about their feelings and to question and explore their sexuality. For myself, Essex university provided the conditions that enabled me to admit to myself that I had been falling in love with women all my life. Colchester town provided the monthly lesbian disco at the Recreation pub – a heady mix of wonderful women, wonderful disco dancing and alcohol. The highlight of the evening would be a sole, irrepressible, bare-breasted, t-shirt swinging woman dancing on a tabletop to Sister Sledge’s, ‘We are family’. The joy in the room at such times was palpable.
Lynne Friedli, Chris Baylis and others trip to Brittany
Not long after I arrived in Colchester, I travelled down to Brighton from the university in a student filled coach to picket the 1980 Tory conference – ‘the lady’s not for turning’ event. Within the conference hall, a Socialist Workers Party member was beaten unconscious for heckling the prime minister. However, despite the large police presence, the perpetrators of this violence were not identified or called to account. It was the first and last time my young son accompanied me on a political demonstration.
I remember the Reclaim the Night marches in Colchester, protests initially organised by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists (LRF) in the context of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders. Male violence against women, and the threat of it, was identified by the Leeds women as the main instrument in the oppression of women. I remember the verbal hostility and abuse sometimes directed towards the marching women. On one of these occasions a friend was arrested, and I was later enlisted to dress in the smartest, straightest outfit I could muster, to bear witness to her good character in a Colchester courtroom.
Divisions within the Women’s Movement were painful but inevitable. Many feminists with their own understanding and conviction of the ‘truth’ of their political analysis failed to fully explore and embrace the multifaceted nature of so many women’s lives and struggles in relation to social class, race, sexuality, disability, motherhood, ageing. In 1979, the LRF had published their pamphlet, Political Lesbianism: The case against Heterosexuality, denouncing women who engaged in heterosexual activity as collaborating with the enemy. For many of the feminists on campus, it felt that Big Sister was seeking to supplant Big Brother.
On campus there was some wariness of lesbians amongst straight, feminist women and there was disapproval by lesbians of bisexual feminists. Then there was the condemnation of so called ‘political’ lesbians by ‘real’ lesbians and the disapproval of butch and lipstick lesbians who were criticised for aping heterosexual norms. However, I don’t remember lesbians of any hue fighting for the right to get married. Gay Pride in London was initially comprised of mostly men, so the lesbian women began to walk together within the larger march. Condemnation of the S&M dyke contingent led these lesbians to march under their own colours, separate to what were deemed by many of them to be the ‘Vanilla’ lesbians. How judgemental we often were.
Other feminist protests included those against pornography and attempts to restrict the time limits on abortion. In January 1982, a group of us marched as part of the feminist campaign, Women Against Violence Against Women, lobbying MPs at the House of Commons. Our young selves with our banners of protest were captured on the front page of the Morning Star newspaper.
In 1981, six of us, including two women who were not Essex students, travelled to Brittany by car for two weeks of summer camping. I remember it as a wonderful, magical time of much talking, sun, swimming, eating moules mariniere for the first time and drinking farm made, cloudy cider. One of our party was a printer and she produced white t-shirts for the six of us emblazoned with ‘L’ETE DES FEMME 81’ in suffragette colours. I still have mine – a little ragged but treasured and occasionally worn.
L’Ete des femmes T shirt from Essex women’s trip to Brittany
I did not complete my undergraduate degree course at the university but went on to finish it elsewhere and later to undertake post-graduate study. I no longer recognise the world that I live in but my studies at Essex enriched all aspects of my life, crossing the boundaries of literature and literary theory, social and political theory, philosophy and history and providing me with an enduring diversity of frameworks and lenses that within and through I continue to try and make sense of what goes on around me. I was granted an opportunity that would not be available to a young woman in 2025 who found herself in the same circumstances as myself in 1980.
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