By Jenny Stroud, Brighton and Hove Women’s History Group
I think even as a young girl, and a sporty one as well, that I knew innately there was something wrong with the balance of the world. This would have been in the late 1950s/early 1960s. I wasn’t allowed to play football, rugby or cricket at school…only the boys could do that. It was completely unfair and I wasn’t sure then how to navigate all the obvious inequalities between the sexes. It wasn’t really until I met a woman in the early 1970s called Gill Flanagan, who appeared one day as a new member of my tennis club in Bracknell. She was from Leigh in Lancashire. Married with 2 daughters, she had trained later in life to be a Community Support Worker. She was clever, funny, smoked too much, loved her red wine, and cooked the best slow roasted meat and potato pie I’ve ever eaten. She was a socialist through and through. We became the closest of pals and spent hours sitting at her kitchen table planning the downfall of the Patriarchy! She gave me novels to read and feminist writers’ tomes to plough through…Margaret Atwood; Simone de Beauvoir; Kate Millett; “The Women’s Room” by Marilyn French ….and slowly “the penny started to drop”. I identified with it all and realised I had found my tribe. I was a feminist, but also, I was a lesbian feminist.
Gill founded the Bracknell Women’s Group, in a new town run by Tories. She and I discovered the most amazing women through this group and when I moved to Reading in the 1980s, I continued to centre my whole social life around “women loving women”. We supported all the feminist marches in London; all the lesbian prides we could find and as Greenham was on our doorstep, we would venture over to the camp most weekends and school holidays (I was a teacher) to support the women, taking with us food, provisions and hugs. Those were my feminist beginnings, and as the years have passed, I still see the world through the feminist lens. As Gill used to say: “Once you see how the Patriarchy works, you can never “un-see it”. Her other favourite feminist expressions were… “We’ve won a battle, but we’re in a war” (Abortion rights; Overturning Section 28; Gay marriage etc). When anyone said to her “that cigarettes killing you” she would grin and say “No, Patriarchy is killing me.” Wise words, from my best friend…who died in the summer of 2007, a few weeks before I retired. I miss her every day, and I dedicate this small piece of writing to the HOWL website from us both.
A visit to Greenham in the late 1980s… left to right; Toni Harvey, Gill Flanagan, Jenny Stroud