by Celia Burgess-Macey
We met in the basement of one woman’s house. There were about 12 of us. The first thing that struck me was how different the atmosphere was from a political meetings I’d been used to. We sat in a circle on chairs, cushions or the floor. We drank wine and ate food. Talking was shared out around the group in a democratic manner. The ground rules were that we listened to each other without interruption. No one shouted at anyone else. We aimed to reach consensus around decisions and took much more time to think about the processes of working together as women.
All this was a great relief but I continued to worry about whether this was real politics. Whether this was going to change society. I found it difficult to let go of the idea that we were being self-indulgent and only aiming for individual change rather than societal change. Was this revolution?
What in the end I ended up doing was revising my ideas about how revolutionary change came about. I hadn’t allowed myself the space to consider my own position within capitalist but also patriarchal power relationships. I had believed in women and struggling for their rights but hadn’t really identified myself as a feminist. I started to view the world in the different way and to see things that I had been blind to before. I began to be very aware, painfully aware, of many aspects of male behaviour that I found difficult. In some ways this new awareness undermined my confidence and made me feel more vulnerable. It was painful to realise that I was often bullied, shouted down, ridiculed, patronised, undermined, made to feel intellectually inferior, subjected to endless ‘mansplaining’ and that I had continued to try to please and impress my male comrades and not been able to name what was wrong.
Then there was the issue of the male gaze, my shame and embarrassment and my negative body awareness. As a girl who developed early and had large breasts I had been subjected to unwanted attention from the age of 10 when I was prevented by the teacher from taking part in school games since my breasts were totally uncontrollable and my mother, embarrassed by my developing sexuality and totally unable to discuss any bodily matters with me, had never thought to buy me a bra. I had married early to the first man who made love to me, a clever student from a working-class background who I met at the Humanist Society and who shared my political ideas. We were good friends and I learned a lot about myself and about politics while we were together (we joined the International Socialists in 1968) but I was not really ‘in love’ with him, which was just as well because he believed in open marriage and had a series of affairs until he finally left me.
So in this consciousness-raising group it was the issues around male power and sexuality that I really wanted to engage with. Our Bodies Ourselves (published 1970) was a key text and I devoured its messages. We looked at our own bodies including our vulva and discussed orgasmic sex and the clitoris (pretty taboo topics in my experience up till then). We discussed contraception, childbirth, sexually transmitted disease. But we also discussed psychology and Freud and the need for feminist therapy (Susie Orbach was founding the Women’s Therapy centre about this time). I also joined a left wing biodynamic Therapy group around the mid 1970s.
All through the 1970s there were books coming out that made me examine what it was to be a woman. Germaine Greer, Ann Oakley, Nancy Friday, Sheila Rowbotham, The Woman’s Room etc. Sisterwrite Bookshop, with its woman friendly atmosphere, reading room and vegetarian café opened in Islington in 1979 and I was a frequent visitor, devouring feminist literature avidly. I particularly leaned towards socialist feminist texts ( such as Love of Worker Bees by Alexandra Kollontai published by Virago modern classics) and was briefly in a small discussion group with Sheila Rowbotham, Juliet Ash and other Hackney socialist feminist women. Our topic was ‘Sexuality’ as we struggled to reconcile our socialist and feminist understandings.
Later I went to all the Socialist Feminist National conferences and two International ones which I’ve written about elsewhere on the HOWL website. But my Islington consciousness raising group was the beginning of belonging to the women’s liberation movement.
January 2021