Women’s Liberation – my early years as a cultist

Author: Zoe Fairbairns  Date: May 1970

I got involved with feminism the way some people get involved with religious cults. People join cults because their heads are full of unanswered questions – and one day they meet a person or a group that seems to have the answers. That was how it was for me in 1969 when I first encountered the words ‘women’s’, ‘liberation’, and ‘movement’, side-by-side in the same phrase. Why was it OK – mandatory, even – for girls at school to strive and compete and achieve, while those same activities would mark an adult woman as unfeminine? Why did boys urge girls to have sex with them, but despise them if they gave in? Why did brides promise to obey? Why did women get less money than men for doing the same job? Why were some jobs closed to women? Why did my mother, who claimed to have ‘everything I ever wanted’ (i.e. husband, home and children) spend so much of her time in states of exhaustion, depression and rage?

The answer was contained in one word: patriarchy. The work of overthrowing patriarchy began to fill my life. I joined consciousness-raising groups at St Andrews University where I was a student. We campaigned successfully against sex discrimination at the university’s Appointments Board. After graduation, I got a part-time job at the Women’s Research and Resources Centre (later renamed the Feminist Library), and another at the Pregnancy Advisory Service. I joined the advisory group of the feminist publishers Virago. I wrote feminist fiction and non-fiction, and published some of it. Like many cults, Women’s Liberation was also about lifestyle. I spurned fancy clothes and makeup, since these would send out the wrong signals to men looking for women who send out the wrong signals. I adopted the title ‘Ms’, and got into public arguments with officials who tried to stop me using it. I stopped going to weddings. Cults often have charismatic leaders – dodgy individuals who seek to brainwash their devotees, exploit them sexually and take their money. If anyone had tried that with me, I would surely have succumbed, so besotted was I with all things feminist. But I was quite safe: 1970s feminism wasn’t that well-organised, and we didn’t do ‘leaders’. Everything was decided by consensus, which meant that meetings went on for hours until one side remembered it had a home to go to and shuffled out, exhausted. The fittest prevailed – until next time. For this reason I probably spent much of the 1970s with that wide-eyed, sleep-deprived look so characteristic of cultists who throw themselves into their beliefs 24/7.

1970s feminism wasn’t really a cult – it was a much-needed political movement that filled a cult-shaped space in my life. For me it arrived at just the right moment, and whatever may still be wrong in sexual politics, things are far better now than they were under the dead hand of pre-70s patriarchy. I’m no longer a cultist, but I am still happy to call myself a feminist – and to look like one.