By Miriam E. David
Miriam David 1967
I spent the year 1972-3 in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Harvard Graduate School for Education as a researcher. I had been in London for the previous six years (1966-1972), apart from three months in Israel from June to September 1967. In London, I had become very active in the women’s liberation movement (WLM).
I had joined a consciousness raising (CR) group in Belsize Park in about 1967 or 1968, with a few close friends. We wrote an issue of Shrew, the London WLM magazine and went on marches and demonstrations especially about women’s right to an abortion. Not the church and not the state, women must decide their fate!
Belsize Park CR Group Miriam-centre-back 1969,
Going to the USA was an attempt for me to find my own fate! But it was not to be. I spent ages trying to find any like-minded women in Cambridge, Mass and found it virtually impossible, until I was invited to join a Jewish Feminist group in Somerville, Mass. This was in about January 1973, where I met Nira Yuval-Davis. We have been firm friends ever since. Some in the group contributed to Our Bodies Ourselves published by the Boston Women’s Health Collective and Simon & Schuster, NY, first in 1971, then 1973. I still have my battered copy dated 1973.
Massachusetts, in any event, was an unusual liberal state and out on a limb, in the election in November 1972, when Nixon was re-elected. We all sported bumper-stickers saying Don’t blame us; we voted Democrat and Massachusetts was the only state that did!
Bristol Women’s Study Group
Returning to the UK in the late summer of 1973, I went to Bristol to work at the University, as a member of the Social Administration & Social Work department. One of my former colleagues at LSE – Hilary Land – had preceded me and she wrote me several letters over the early summer about what a good time we would have developing women’s studies and feminist work.
And indeed, we eventually did, developing an undergraduate course in family and social policy with Jackie West who was a young lecturer in the sociology department. She was probably the first real feminist in the university. Jackie and I also set up a small women’s CR group to complement the widespread work outside the university. We were also two of the eight women in the Bristol Women’s Studies Group collective that wrote and edited Half the Sky: an introduction to Women’s Studies. (Virago, 1978)
Suburban Guerillas book cover using the 1971 demonstration photo.
The Family & Social Policy course started in either 1974 or 1975 and continued for about ten years. I run ahead of my story. I arrived in Bristol in early September 1973 and stayed with Hilary Land for a couple of weeks until I moved into my house in Redland, nearer the University. The start of the university term coincided with the start of the so-called Yom Kippur war, between Israel and Palestine on 6 October 1973. It came as something of a shock, especially since a former Israeli boyfriend of mine in Cambridge had telephoned me to tell me that he had been ‘called up’ as an IDF reservist. He was on his way back to fight in Israel.
By this time, my father – a German Jewish refugee from Nazism – had given up reading The Guardian and had turned to The Times. He saw a letter there from a Professor Henri Tajfel stating that from his psychology research he had found copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in schools in Gaza. This was a deeply antisemitic publication from the turn of the twentieth century. What piqued my father’s interest was that Tajfel’s office address was in Berkeley Square, Bristol, as was mine. So, he phoned me and suggested that as Tajfel was clearly Jewish I should contact him about my arrival in Bristol. Being the dutiful daughter that I was, I followed his advice. What terrible advice it was.
An earlier photo of Miriam (centre back), with her elder sister Judy front right (1966-7)
I approached Tajfel not only for his research interests in children’s literature in Gaza but also because he was on the Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy in Bristol. He invited me to his office, and there I discovered a bed. He pursued me for a few weeks across the university environs. I felt personally responsible and so did not share this with anyone. But at one of the first women’s groups that we organised in late autumn, I tentatively raised the matter. It turned out that he was already known as the university’s and wider, serial philanderer. What a relief for me to learn this. We discussed how to deal with Tajfel and others inside and outside the university. In those days there were no legal means of redress! We decided that our only strategy was to post notices in the women’s toilets to alert staff and students to him and others.
And so, we did begin the long and arduous campaign about men’s sexual abuse of women. We grappled with trying to find concepts for this such as patriarchy or sexism. The campaigning continues as does the equally terrible war in Israel-Palestine. What a sad indictment of those times when we, as feminists, were optimistic about what changes we could bring about. My views about ‘the forever wars’ in Israel-Palestine have clearly been transformed as I have learnt about the British responsibility in Palestine (1918-1948) and Israel’s complicity in Palestine’s degradation and perhaps eventual destruction.