Consciousness Raising Group with Essex University lake and tower blocks (Amber Djemal, Lynne Friedli and others)
Lynne Friedli
1978 – 1981 – history/literature undergraduate
1981 – 1988 – ph.d student Cross dressing, hermaphrodites and feminist debates in 18th century France and England
I was working on reception in a hotel in Dedham when I first came across Essex University. It was 1977. A few of the girls used to go to the Student Union (Ents), which was well known for brilliant gigs. A year later, I joined the many mature students who were able to access a university education through flexible, inclusive entrance requirements and the provision of a nursery (and health centre). At that time, a mature student grant was only slightly less than what I was being paid working long days and longer nights. The freedom was intoxicating.
At freshers’ week, it was the Women’s Liberation stall that stood out for me. And the confident, in your face, short haired, dungaree clad women who ran it. Someone lent me a copy of Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History. I saw two women kissing. I never looked back.
Those early years at Essex were the start of my education in feminism and socialism. I’ll never forget reading Marx’s theory of alienation and finding within it an analysis of everything I’d experienced as being wrong with work since my first Saturday job in a bakery aged 13. But it was the analyses of patriarchy that had the most profound and enduring impact on my life. In my first year at Essex, Sisterwrite bookshop opened in Islington – a kind of mecca for feminists. Mary Daly published Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room had come out the year before), and Susan Griffin wrote Women and nature: the roaring inside her – a prose poem on patriarchy, science, ecology, women’s history and feminism.
The contribution of radical feminism and the debates between radical feminism and socialist feminism were foundational for a generation of feminists – the ‘second wave’, surfing on the hard-won achievements of our 1960’s foresisters. I never stopped to think how these debates affected men and the male students around us, (both gay and straight) but I think about it now.[1] There was an active Gay Soc on campus, but I don’t recall feminists being involved. It was only years later that I ventured into Gays the Word bookshop (opened in London in 1979).
Sexual politics was woven into the very fabric of daily life at Essex, in our friendships, our love lives, in our relationship with the university and in our involvement in wider campaigns and political activism (labour movement, Anti-Nazi League, anti-apartheid, SWP, Troops Out etc). The anti Nazi League marches were my first experience of the fear of coming face to face with the far right, as my friend Kay and I took a wrong turn down a side street.
And of-course feminist reading reframed our studies. At an ‘enlightenment’ lecture towards the end of the first year, I was part of a group of women students who stood up holding a banner asking ‘Did they have women in those days?’ Armed with a copy of Cora Kaplan’s 1975 anthology of three centuries of women poets, I knew there were big gaps in the literature.[2] Radical as Essex was (in action and reputation), the curriculum didn’t always reflect that.[3] The wider student body was also in conflict with the university, notably over rents, and occupied university offices for around 10 days in February 1980.
Women students successfully fought for a room of our own. The women’s room, with its double bed, cassette player, piles of books, clothes, banners, leaflets, speculums and ashtrays was a symbol of what we could achieve together. I first heard Patti Smith’s album Horses in there. And Joan Armatrading’s Me, myself, I.
Renaming the campus tower blocks was another achievement, as a small group of us replaced signs saying William Morris, Betrand Russell, Keynes, Eddington etc with Rosa Luxemburg, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Pankhurst and Alexandra Kollontai. Maybe there was another name? I remember the red paint, the wooden boards and the leaflet we produced on the student union roneo machine. It began: good morning comrades, when you wake up today, you will no longer be oppressed by symbols of patriarchy. Your tower has a new name! Oh, to have a copy of that leaflet now.
Off campus, women students were marching to Reclaim the Night (the first march started in 1977 in Leeds), and marching with the WLM and TUC for a woman’s right to choose (in defence of abortion rights), notably to oppose the Corrie Bill in 1979 and subsequent efforts to restrict access to abortion through attacks on the 1967 Abortion Act.[4] For the first time, I heard Irish women students bearing witness to their struggles around reproductive rights in Ireland. These debates intersected with growing concerns about the price women paid for shouldering the burden of responsibility for contraception. Our bodies, ourselves! (published in 1973). Speculums, menstrual sponges, and a return to the ‘rhythm method’ of controlling fertility became very current! One of our mums, horrified by menstrual sponges, warned her daughter not to put anything in her vagina that hadn’t been boiled. “Does that apply to penises?” was the retort. We’d become those kind of daughters.
Some of us were also marching into a local beauty contest in Wivenhoe House and disrupting the proceedings, without any consultation or connection with the women taking part. I remember their puzzled, sad, angry faces with shame. I remember one of the Dads shouting ‘you lot are too ugly to win a beauty contest’. Those certainties, the conviction that we were on the right side of herstory, were both a strength and a source of division and pain. I see the same patterns in current bitter conflicts around sex, gender and transgender.
The expression of radical feminism through concepts like ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Adrienne Rich 1980 Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence) had a seismic, visceral impact. For some women, (like me), these ideas rekindled memories of long buried feelings for girls and many feminists felt inspired to explore same sex relationships. The term ‘political lesbian’ gained currency and for women in heterosexual relationships, it became possible to talk about (and demand) non penetrative sex. ‘How dare you presume I’m heterosexual’ was a popular badge. I wore it on my first Gay Pride march in 1980. Consciousness raising groups provided an intimate forum for passionate discussion of all this and more: the personal really was political.
‘Lipstick lesbians’ Lynne Friedli and Chris Baylis
Meanwhile, in Colchester, the lesbian scene outside the university looked very different. Lesbians from the town and surrounding area, (many from Greenstead, the largest council estate in Colchester), met once a month for a women-only disco at the Rec (Recreation) pub (a gay disco had started there in 1977). Rec nights were a rare opportunity for lesbians to meet and socialise. For some, the only contact with another lesbian was via the national lesbian line (which started in 1977 and was housed alongside Rights of Women, Homeless Action, National Abortion Campaign and Women’s Aid). The experiences of women I met at the Rec were a million miles from debates about political lesbians. Within the wider Women’s Liberation Movement there had been an uncomfortable history of discomfort with lesbians and gay women. I remember this finding expression in hostility to butch lesbians and perceived ‘male identified’ behaviours, practices and appearance. Although this could be applied to (glamorous) femmes too and ‘lipstick lesbian’ gained currency, perhaps a bit later and maybe with less negative associations. I also remember hearing straight feminist students describe lesbians at the Rec as ‘looking like men’. From that time, I developed a deep love of butch and butch women, one that has never left me.
In any case, as I started on my PhD, towards the end of 1981, the first news of a ‘gay disease’ was emerging and the political landscape for lesbians, gay men and those who loved them, was changing radically. 1981 was also the beginning of Greenham Common and a new era of women led political protest, with spaces for women to explore different ways of thinking, being, living that continue to resonate with current environmental and peace protests and the politics of climate change activism.
My experience of feminism at Essex has been an enduring source of strength, transforming how I view the world and the possibilities of life in every way. Some of the friendships I made in those years have endured, along with vivid memories of women I met. My degree opened up undreamt of opportunities for rewarding, well paid work. I had legal, social, cultural, political, educational, economic, reproductive and sexual freedoms my mother and her sisters couldn’t have imagined. And in the three decades following my graduation, I witnessed cultural and legislative reforms that immeasurably improved the lives of lesbian women and girls (and gay men).[5] Even so, history shows that what has been won, can also be lost. What concerns me now, in my seventh decade, is what the future holds for young women and girls today.
[1] Essex University had a strong Socialist Worker Party presence; I joined the student wing (SWSO), leaving in 1981 as moves were made to disband Women’s Voice.
[2] Cora Kaplan (1975) Salt and bitter and good: three centuries of English and American Women Poets
[3] With the notable exception of sociology. It was during this time that renowned and distinguished socialist feminist Mary McIntosh was head of Sociology at the University (who with Michèle Barrett wrote The Anti-Social Family in 1982).
[4] The Student Union regularly commissioned coaches to transport students to protests in London. Ones I remember included anti-nazi league marches, anti-apartheid demonstrations, gay pride and later in 1984, marches in support of the miners’ strike.
[5] These include the repeal of Section 28 (2003), equalising the age of consent (2000) and legalising same sex marriage (2014).
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