Zoe Fairbairns
The year was 1969, the country was the USA. I was an exchange student at a college in Virginia, taking a year out from my degree course at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Glancing one day through the Washington Post, I came upon a report of an incident concerning a committee that was meeting at the House of Representatives in Washington to discuss the contraceptive pill.
The Pill (we always gave it a capital letter in those days) was still a relatively new development on both sides of the Atlantic, and the sorts of questions the committee was considering were – was the Pill safe? Did it work? Would it lead to sexual promiscuity and moral collapse? These and other matters were being discussed by a gathering of congressmen, doctors, clergymen, senators, social workers, lawyers, politicians – every one of whom was male.
Suddenly, the Post report told us, a door swung open and a group of women burst in, waving banners and shouting their demand to know what was being said about such an important female matter, in secret, by a men-only committee. Would women be allowed to give evidence to the committee? Would women have access to its findings?
I can’t remember how the immediate matter was resolved. But I know that, for me, Women’s Liberation had arrived.
From then on, I read everything I could lay my hands on about this exciting new movement. Women’s Liberation was concerned not only with birth control, but with education, with equality at work and at home, with fairness, with respect, with religion, with civil rights, with marriage and singleness, with clothes and underwear and makeup and language and childcare and safety on the streets.
It was all very exciting – and very American. There was nothing like this, I thought, on my side of the Atlantic.
But I was wrong. By the time I got home to the UK, in the summer of 1970, Women’s Liberation groups were forming throughout the country. A conference had been held at Ruskin College Oxford, and a programme of demands had been formulated: (1) equal pay, (2) equal opportunity, (3) free contraception and abortion on demand, and (4) free 24-hour nurseries.
We set up a group in St Andrews to pursue these demands and discuss other issues. We noted that as women students we were not allowed in the beer bar of our own students’ union. We also noted that the University Appointments Board – which supposedly existed to help all final-year students to move into good careers – had separate shelves and separate application forms for men’s jobs and women’s jobs.
Over a year or two, we made some progress. The Appointments Board adopted equal opportunity policies. The beer bar opened its doors. We even managed to get rid of a ‘slave market’ – a disgusting laddish stunt in which women students were auctioned off by the boys to the highest bidder for a date. All for charity, of course. When the Women’s Liberation group protested, we were told we were being uncharitable. But the ‘market’ was abandoned.
On one matter, we were sadly unsuccessful. The Students’ Union had for a long time employed a married couple to manage the building and do general admin. We discovered that the wife was being paid less than the husband for their shared endeavours. We organised a delegation to go and see her to discuss what we could do to put right this injustice.
She told us to mind our own business and get back to our studies.
But there you go. You can’t win ‘em all.
See Zoe’s website for more info and stories – www.zoefairbairns.co.uk