by Amanda Sebestyen
One of the amazing things about nearing 80 is that suddenly younger people want to know what you did in the past. We’ve become history! Not just to be written about by other people, but to tell it how we experienced it.
Last year Tate Britain created the show Women In Revolt! Art & Activism in the UK 1970-1990, and 2025 it came to Manchester at the Whitworth Gallery: a huge show, with many pictures, videos and magazines that some of us will remember.
A series of background talks was organised in Manchester under the title Radical Acts, and I was actually invited to speak about the publications of our women’s liberation movement. This was a thrill, as I’d much earlier tried to contact the curator of the Tate show while it was taking shape, with no success. I’m deeply grateful to the scholar and Manchester organiser Alice Correia for all the support on many levels which she gave me as a 20th-century person speaking to a 21st-century audience.
Here is a new version of that speech for HOWL readers. I hope that loads of other feminists will write in to HOWL, giving their accounts of working on these different papers, journals, mags and posters, pictures and collages and more. My emphasis here was on the transformation of visual art in that upsurge of writing and reading. But of course that isn’t the only story.
Poster by Carole de Jong,. Photo by Sally Fraser. The central woman is actor Sheila Allen who later played Emmeline Pankhurst in the BBC series Stand We At Last
On the left you can see the iconic poster for the first Women’s Liberation march in London in 1971. On the right is the original photo of a demonstration against the Industrial Relations Bill a few months earlier – the first time we marched as a contingent of women. It includes myself at third from the edge; still very much wandering, seeking my voice and direction as you can see..
This was the cusp of the 70s, a time of absolute ferment of words, ideas, conversations and print. Radical bookshops like Housmans, Compendium, Grass Roots and Frontline hosted pamphlets from all over the world in their back rooms and basements. The step from reading to speaking to action often seemed short – almost instant.
Shrew was the first publication of the Women’s Liberation Movement in this country.
It was produced each month from 1969-74 by a different group, costing ‘sixpence for women, a shilling for men until we get equal pay’. It would now be called a zine, often printed by the writers themselves. Within a short time the back page of each Shrew showed an explosion of new local groups. ‘Consciousness raising’ was what we called the process by which we brought personal feelings and collective actions together. Some of us are still doing it.
It took courage to be a feminist. We were considered mad, ugly and threatening. Women I knew lost custody of their children when the family courts ‘exposed’ their membership of the women’s movement. Respectable papers like the Sunday Times and The Listener enjoyed defaming us, echoing the medical profession and functional sociologists wedded to the post-war settlement. As economist JK Galbraith put it, women had become a servant class ‘available, democratically, to almost the entire male population’.
Early efforts to write about the suffering involved in this post-war settlement had been dangerous too. Hannah Gavron’s The Captive Wife was published posthumously in 1966 after her suicide. Jane Arden (author of the shocking play Vagina Rex & the Gas Oven performed in 1969, and founder of theatre company Holocaust in 1970 leading to her experimental film The Other Side of the Underneath in 1972) again took her own life. So did the RSC’s first female theatre director Buzz Goodbody.
The New Left upheaval gave a more possible space for daring to re-open The Woman Question. Juliet Mitchell’s essay ‘Women, the longest revolution’ in 1966 was followed by Sheila Rowbotham’s pamphlet Women’s Liberation and the New Politics in 1969.
It was followed by her books Women, Resistance and Revolution in 1972 and Hidden From History in 1973. All these would now be called intersectional feminism.
1970 was a year of big books brought out by major publishing houses: Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes was followed one month later by Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.
Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex followed her painfully perceptive essays in the New York Radical Feminists pamphlets. Her writing met resistance from some UK feminist theorists at the time but is now recognised as visionary.
Then came Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, the most influential of all on women outside the movement. (Her next book, The Obstacle Race in 1979, focused on women painters.)
Separating out the threads of our grass-roots resistance movement is difficult because we would often interlace. Our posters and cartoons reached out widely: that dishcloth, for instance: ‘You start by sinking Into his arms, and end up with your arms in his sink’!
Pat Kahn did the lettering on that. Carole de Jong made our movement’s first posters, and later the Greenham broadsheets. Chandan Sally Fraser’s photos documented our first protests and conferences of 1970, Val Charlton made the placards for our first march in 1971, Cath Jackson and Jacky Fleming came through with their cartoons for Women’s Report from 1972 and Spare Rib from 1974..
But I think of the 70s as a time of words above all, books and songs, poetry and street theatre. Visual art was developing more gradually. I remember a well-respected art textbook devoting a chapter to explaining that women students chose to drop out of the art world and have children, so it was pointless to try and promote their work…
There were outposts using opposite kinds of art: the matriarchal, Mexican-inspired paintings of Monica Sjoo in early-70s Bristol and then the consciously abstract works selected by the first all-woman committee of the Hayward Annual in 1978.
First in my memory came the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union, showing their work in 1974 under the wonderful title ‘Hang Up, Put Down, Stand Up!’.
With thanks to Roberta Hunter Henderson
They included Mary Kelly, Tina Keane, Mary (now Hannah) O’Shea, and Roberta Hunter Henderson (who in the 80s hosted Brixton arts café Muse, where many Black women performed their poetry and showed their craftwork).
In the mid 70s came the Women’s Art History group: Roszika Parker, Griselda Pollock, myself, and again Tina and Mary/Hannah.
Our discussions fed into those two groundbreaking books Old Mistresses emerging in 1981 and The Subversive Stitch 1984.
As with the earlier Underground press, all the leftwing groups started women’s sections and many had their own magazines: Red Rag was partly Communist, Socialist Woman Trotskyist, Women’s Voice SWP. Socialist feminism was much broader than this and was definitely the leading strand, while we radical feminists were more anarchist-inclined, busier squatting together, starting rock bands, going in mystical directions than writing.
But we read, oh did we read!
We think that the woman in front, on the left, is Shulamith Firestone
Our first favourites were the classic Notes from the Second Year by New York Radical Feminists: ‘The Politics of Housework’, ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, and Redstockings Manifesto which read:
‘We identify with all women. We define our best interest as that of the poorest, most brutally exploited woman… We repudiate all privileges that divide us from other women.. We are committed to achieving internal democracy’…
Followed by the fiery Furies writing of Rita-Mae Brown and the poems of Adrienne Rich, Karen Lindsey and Robin Morgan.
I realise looking back that the borderlines between radical feminism, nonviolent anarchism and the Gay Liberation Front were very porous in the early 70s, and transgender people were part of our movement.
Our fledgling radical feminist group did write a ‘position paper’ for the 1972 Women’s Liberation conference in Acton. Called Thoughts on Feminism, each piece was anonymous but distinct. We wanted to avoid committee-writing and be multi-vocal, as the Italians would say.
In 1973 we produced a Radical Feminist Shrew in an unusual large broadsheet format, with a lead article about Artemisia Gentileschi and a big cover photo of her sensational painting of Judith and her companion beheading Holofernes.
That same year some of us collectively published Robin Morgan’s poem about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, after it was banned in UK.
Virago Press started in 1973 too, followed in 1974 by Feminist Books Leeds (founder Lee Sanders Comer) and Onlywomen Press (founded by Lilian Mohin). In 1976 Catcall, ‘a paper for non-sectarian feminist discussion’, was started by Judy Greenway, Margot Farnham and Deborah Hart. Trivia, with its distinctively tiny format, celebrated lesbian literature and was the first to publish Jeanette Winterson.
Then in 1978 The Women’s Press brought feminist genre fiction into the mainstream. Paperback anthologies brought writing that was once internal to our movement further out to a wider readership of women. Penguin published some of these, and Routledge’s Pandora Press joined in the 80s too.
Sheba Feminist Publishers was started in 1980 by a mixed collective (made up of white women and increasingly, women of colour), and Outwrite started in 1982 as an international feminist newspaper with Black women in the majority. It came out of a workshop run by Dena Attar and Shaila Shah in 1979 at the Women’s Publications conference in Manchester.
So the routes from pamphlet reading to conference papers to periodicals to book publishing could be indirect but were also interconnected. We would know people from different sections. It was, as Lynne Segal has remarked, ‘a shared space’, with local women’s centres and new collectives springing up all over the place: radical lawyers, doctors, social workers, therapists, self-help groups, women’s refuges as well as publishers and DIY presses.
It was lesbian squatters who started the movement’s bookshop Sisterwrite with café Sisterbite. Black feminists mixed in women’s discos and shared housing, while working on their own critical analysis of race and empire as they revealed themselves in our movement.
In the 70s women of the Race Today Collective such as Althea Jones LeCointe and Mala Sen came first in my recall, and then Women Against Imperialism started by Gail Lewis and others. By the 80s as you can see above, mixed feminist publishing was becoming internationalist and often under the leadership of Black women. OWAAD – the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent – had started in 1978, Heart of the Race by Stella Dadzie, Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe came out in 1985.
As for art, my favourite writing came from La Rivolta Femminile,
Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile
They were Italian radical feminists who emerged from the art world. The critic Carla Lonzi was their main theorist: ‘Existing as a woman does not imply participation in male power, but calls into question the very concept of power.’ Like many of our pioneers and prophetesses, she died young.
In 1974 I went to visit La Rivolta in Milan and Rome, where I made friends with Suzanne Santoro whose own book Towards a New Expression was soon to be banned in England. The ICA bookshop was forbidden to stock her pictures highlighting the erasure of female genitals in the fine art tradition. Roszika Parker wrote about this scandal in Spare Rib – the biggest publication of our movement with the widest outreach.
In 1976 La Rivolta opened their artists’ co-op studio in Rome, showing a previously undiscovered painting by Artemisia Gentileschi together with their own work. I reported to Spare Rib on this breakthrough and on other feminist factions in Italy. Rosie Parker liked what I had written and I was invited to join the Spare Rib collective — something I doubt could ever happen as easily today.
Spare Rib started in 1974 as a national magazine with mainstream distribution. Its early cover look was women’s-magazine-with-a twist: celebrity photos with subversive captions. By the time I joined the collective in 1977 a Punk aesthetic was taking over. The era of sampling and tearing was beginning, and it fitted well with our leaderless collective movement.
Spare Rib became a place where women around the country could network. Women artists were part of this interchange. There’s an example from July 1977 when Rosie Parker’s article ‘Portrait of the Artist as Housewife’ reported on the Feministo postal art exchanges where women artists made and sent works between their own homes. Those pages from the magazine, and some of the original post-able artworks, were shown again this year at Two Temple Place as part of Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen.
The Spare Rib Collective met every Thursday to decide on a theme for the next issue and analyse the last one, divvy up articles for editing, and increasingly get embroiled in passionate argument. We had a specific poetry and fiction editor, and individuals focussing on advertising and distribution. We had a designer, but other members could join in the all-night layout sessions. Each collective member had an admin day every two weeks and answered letters from readers around the country. And beyond too: Nawal el Saadawi from Egypt was one of the unexpected visitors who dropped in.
In 1981 I left Spare Rib over a very current issue of ‘no debate’. Articles I wrote had also touched on issues that remain unresolved: sex work, social purity movements, menstrual taboos. I went to New Zealand, drawn once more by a publication, or rather two which sometimes argued with each other: Broadsheet and BWD (‘Bitches Witches and Dykes’). Broadsheet seemed more like Spare Rib, and BWD more like Outwrite.
When I returned to the UK two years later many things had happened in women’s publishing. The first International Feminist Bookfair began with excitement in 1984 at Covent Garden’s Jubilee Hall. There was a range of theoretical journals now: m/f (post-structuralist) had started in 1978, Feminist Review (socialist feminist) in 1979; joined in 1983 by Trouble & Strife (radical feminist, for which I wrote a strap-line about ‘men’s power and women’s resistance’ with the late Diana Leonard), and in 1985 Women’s Review (literary).
I wrote chapters for some of these journals, and for feminist anthologies, and edited one myself. 68,78,88 invited women from around the UK to write about their lives and politics in those three epochal years.
Gail Chester, my editor, and I were proud of the range of backgrounds and ages represented. The book came out at the dawn of post-feminism! It got few and mostly dismissive reviews. I had a box of remainders in my study when accidentally in the mid-90s I heard from a young woman taking Women’s Studies at the University of Westminster. That book was on her course! Not only that, but 68,78,88 was now a Key Text and students were queueing up for it. So I mailed a copy around the UK to every Women’s Studies department… there are no such things any more.
Many of us had started to realise that our movement was being written about us without us. We had to do something!
Tentatively we’d begun a project called HOWL – History of Women’s Liberation. – back in the late 70s. It has taken more than 40 years but there is now the growing website howl-uk.org.
In the words of Sue O’Sullivan – a founder member of women’s liberation since the 60s: ‘Let the rich, united, divided, contradictory, joyful, difficult, amazing, ordinary and banal years of the WLM be recorded in our own words. This is our story’.
Through the 1980s I did more writing about art, for different magazines like City Limits, New Statesman and Society, New Socialist, Catalyst and the Women Artists Slide Library Journal (now part of the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths University).
There was that feeling in the air again, of a passionately committed radical movement, and this time visual artists were in the lead. If the 70s were about words, the 80s were about images. Diverse in ethnicity and profound in depth, this was our new school of history painting.
The room of 1980s Black women artists in Women In Revolt! was the highlight for me, though there were moving and important things to see elsewhere in the huge exhibition.
As I stood awestruck again in front of Sutapa Biswas’ fierce ‘Housewives With Steak-Knives’, I suddenly noticed a little bloodstained flag clenched in one of the woman’s fists.
Looking more closely I saw the flag was made from a cut-out clipping of Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Judith Beheading Holofernes’. And I hoped that piece of paper might have been cut from our long-ago Radical Feminist Shrew.