In memory of small gains… Dublin 1992. Copyright Eoin O’Broin
Author: Ann Rossiter
Once upon a time, sometime in the early 1970s, I remember that an eclectic mix of feminists including British, continental European, North American, Antipodean, and Irish, used to flock to various Women’s Liberation group meetings in a dingy, run-down house called the Kingsgate Place Women’s Centre in West Hampstead, London. Due to the efforts of Hollycroft Avenue Women’s Liberation Group in Hampstead, especially those of the dynamic New Yorker, Tamar Karet, Kingsgate Place opened in 1972 and is believed to be the first women’s centre in Britain. Chiswick Women’s Aid opened at about the same time but acted exclusively as a refuge for those fleeing from domestic violence. The Kingsgate Place Centre offered free pregnancy testing, advice on medical and social services, links with solicitors and lawyers who would answer queries by telephone, and, in an emergency, the centre could provide a bed for the night. I attended two Kingsgate Place-based groups, one being the early stages of what came to be the Women on Ireland Collective in 1973, a feminist group concerned with highlighting the effects of the war in Northern Ireland, especially on the lives of women. The other was an informal consciousness-raising (CR) group, which, if I remember rightly, met there from time to time. The latter was my first experience of CR and I found it both fascinating and intimidating. To me, the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique of CR put me in mind of how AA meetings were conducted, but worse, it harked back to the terrors of confession, a rite of the Catholic Church into which I had been initiated at the age of six or so in preparation for First Communion. At that tender age, I suffered the ordeal of having to ‘raise my consciousness’ to conjure up a list of sins (telling fibs, envy, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and the like), committed in thought as well as deed, not an easy task for one with very limited self-awareness or life experience. But there was no way out of the ordeal: rules were rules as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, and its foot soldiers – priests, nuns, and lay teachers – enforced them rigidly, insisting that nobody was ‘without sin’.
Conversely, it was fascinating to be involved in something so unceremonious and unled as a Women’s Liberation CR group with its insistence on no formal membership, and the concept of office holders, such as ‘chair’ or ‘secretary’, being beyond the Pale. The magic formula was that participants sat in a circle and every woman around the room was afforded the opportunity to say her piece, usually on a predetermined subject. There could be no greater contrast to my experience of confession, or indeed, with the political meetings I was attending elsewhere in London where invariably one or two men hogged the show!
My big CR moment came when the subject for discussion was abortion. For the first time since I had a back-street abortion while resident in London in the early 1960s I was able to talk about it to a more or less guaranteed sympathetic audience and to find that I was not alone in my ordeal. Until then, the horror of it all – so much pain, so much blood, so much shame, so near to losing my life – was suffered in silence. I was but one of the estimated 80,000-110,000 women who had illegal abortions each year in England and Wales in the 1960s. Lucky for me, I was not one of the indeterminate number of women who died each year in the same period from complications, although I came very close to it. The confidence gained from consciousness-raising bolstered my desire to become a lifelong campaigner for safe and legal abortion. Apart from being part of the campaign in Britain, I became involved in the struggle for legalisation on both sides of the Irish border and an ending to the underground trail Irish abortion seekers were forced to take. I wrote a history of that journey: Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora, the abortion trail and the making of a London-Irish underground, 1980-2000, published in 2009.
It has been said of the Women’s Liberation Movement that CR was its backbone and constituted its most successful organizing tool. I can attest to that, seeing that it steered me into becoming a fully-fledged, and very vocal, feminist pro-choice activist who has not stopped speaking out this past half century!