Race, Ethnicity and the Women's Movement in England, 1968-1993

Natalie Thomlinson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137442802
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

This book is the first archive-based account of the charged debates around race in the women's movement in England during the 'second wave' period. Examining both the white and the Black women's movement through a source base that includes original oral histories and extensive research using feminist periodicals, this book seeks to unpack the historical roots of long-running tensions between Black and white feminists. It gives a broad overview of the activism that both Black and white women were involved in, and examines the Black feminist critique of white feminists as racist, how white feminists reacted to this critique, and asks why the women's movement was so unable to engage with the concerns of Black women. Through doing so, the book speaks to many present day concerns within the women's movement about the politics of race, and indeed the place of identity politics within the left more broadly.

1

The (White) Women’s Liberation Movement, c. 1968–1975

Introduction

The introduction has outlined the problematic history of colonialism for white feminists: this chapter will explore its legacy in the early stages of the WLM. The contention of this chapter is that the WLM during these years was overwhelmingly ‘white’ not only in its personnel, but also in its praxis. This is not to suggest that there were no Black women present at in the movement; there were, and to deny this is to engage in another sort of silencing of the history of Black women.¹ Nevertheless, as is evident in Black activists’ own critique of the movement, they were few in number.² Precisely why the WLM was so white, however, is the question that this chapter seeks to answer. I argue that the reasons for this lie in the exclusivity of the activist networks that constituted the WLM (an exclusivity that functioned in terms of class and age as well as race), which in turn influenced the creation of feminist theory. As was well established in the critiques of the 1980s, white, middle-class women were implicitly the subject of much of this theory, despite its aspirations to universality. By exploring the WLM’s discourse on the family and on sexuality, I will demonstrate precisely how these theories functioned to exclude most Black women from feminism. I further examine how a focus on (white) working-class women diverted attention away from Black women within the movement. I also argue that feminism during this period developed a distinctive emotional culture that was based on providing a refuge of unconditional support and love for women in a hostile patriarchal society. Although this ideal was not always achieved, and cannot be deemed a ‘white’ emotional modality, such a culture was ill-equipped to engage in auto-critique.³ This had significant repercussions when bitter debates around identity politics occurred in the 1980s, as will be explored in later chapters. Furthermore, the ways in which immigrant and racial ‘others’ were understood by the WLM were often framed through older paradigms of liberal internationalism and Marxist imperialism that were inadequate for dealing with the contemporary reality of a society of mass immigration. Although many white feminists during this period were well aware of racism in England, they were unable to translate this awareness into practice, and generally failed to reflect on their own racially marked identities. There was also a degree of condescension towards Black women present, with white feminists often viewing women from ethnic minority backgrounds as in need of rescue from their own ‘backwards’ and patriarchal cultures. In this way, some white feminists were clearly acting within the matrix of colonialism, although they would have been horrified to have been so described. To understand what happened within the women’s movement in the late 1970s and 1980s, then, we must first understand how whiteness structured the WLM.

The road to Ruskin: the beginnings of the WLM

As has been well documented, women’s liberation in Britain originated in several places. Leftist discontent with the position of women had been growing for some time, as evidenced by the publication of Juliet Mitchell’s seminal essay, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ in 1966.⁴ More broadly, the year 1968 saw not only the fiftieth anniversary of the vote – which occasioned much newspaper comment on women’s position – but also saw industrial militancy by working-class women. Most famously, Rose Boland led a strike for equal pay for the women machinists at the Ford factory in Dagenham, a strike that spread to their sister workers in the Ford factory at Halewood in Merseyside.⁵ Less well known now, but attracting almost as much media attention at the time, were the actions of Lil Bilocca and other fishermen’s wives on behalf of the trawlermen of Hull.⁶ Out of this working-class women’s activism came the formation of the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACWER), which, according to Sheila Rowbotham, was largely formed from older trade union women and men from the Labour and Communist Party.⁷ Although it proved to be a short-lived group, it was important in helping to establish the legitimacy of left-wing women organising for women’s rights on a national scale. At the same time, the first Women’s Liberation groups were being set up in London, influenced by expat American women and their reports of the burgeoning movement back home.⁸ These groups were much more middle-class in origin and were generally frequented by women with extensive links to the left. Many of these early adherents to the WLM had backgrounds in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the significance of which will be discussed later. By 1969, five such groups existed in London, in Tufnell Park, Belsize Lane, Notting Hill, Peckham Rye and Islington.⁹ Although definitive information is hard to come by, it also seems that some groups were formed in and around universities such as Warwick and Nottingham by this point.¹⁰ The first action of women to gain significant media attention was a demonstration staged against Miss World in London in 1969. This was repeated to greater effect in 1970, when groups of feminists threw flour bombs and stormed the stage whilst the show was broadcast live.¹¹ Unfortunately, the media coverage of this event helped to cement an image of feminists as sexless harridans; it also reflected a feminist concern with the sexual objectification of women’s bodies that may not have been shared with Black/working-class women who were perhaps more preoccupied with the day to day process of survival. Significantly, it seems to have been the middle-class women who were involved in these smaller, consciousness-raising groups, rather than working-class women involved in industrial disputes, who largely attended the first Women’s Liberation conference in Britain, held at Ruskin College in Oxford in March 1970.¹² Having originated in Sheila Rowbotham’s suggestion at a History Workshop conference that the next workshop should be on women, the conference’s remit quickly became more general: it was so well attended that it had to be moved from Ruskin to the Oxford Union to allow everyone to get in.¹³

Whilst Black and working-class women were certainly present at Ruskin, the conference seems to have been overwhelmingly attended by white, middle-class (or middle-class through education), university-educated women, certainly if the accounts in Once a Feminist are anything to go by.¹⁴ According to a report in The Times, most of the delegates were ‘young women, many of them students with long flowing hair, trousers and maxi-coats’, although ‘here and there were middle-aged mothers and housewives from council estates.’¹⁵ The agenda of the conference was diverse, but largely centred around issues of the nuclear family, childcare, and equal pay, along with more niche concerns such as women prisoners.¹⁶ Race was not on the list of topics under discussion. This set a pattern that was to be repeated over the next decade, in which the dominant preoccupations of the movement reflected the white middle-class women who formed the majority of its adherents. Despite the attempts of these women to reach out to women in their local communities through initiatives such as childcare campaigns and the establishment of women’s centres, it seems they were largely unsuccessful. One journalist in a 1971 article entitled ‘Pockets of Resistance’ gave details of over forty local WLM groups (no Black women’s group was included), the vast majority of which apologetically confirmed that they were middle-class in make-up. One disgruntled woman from Doncaster was quoted briefly, claiming that a WLM group had been set up in the town two years ago but had disintegrated. She voiced the opinion that ‘I came to the decision that the W.L. movement is a middle-class one voicing middle-class ideas and with little, or no, understanding of the working-class.’¹⁷ Indeed, the article found few groups in smaller industrial towns without universities, suggesting that the WLM struggled to find a foothold there in its early years. This was an impression also confirmed by my interviewees. The emergent WLM, then, appeared to be largely unsuccessful at attracting non-middle-class women to the movement.

There were several reasons why this was, but understanding the structure of the movement through using the work of social movement theorists offers some convincing insights as to why the make-up of the WLM was as it was. Alberto Melucci has sought to explain new social movements within the context of how the ‘collective identity’ of a movement comes into being, suggesting that it is created in ‘submerged networks’ of small groups of people connected to each other in their everyday lives.¹⁸ The recognition of ‘collective injustice’ is dependent on social identification amongst those in the ‘submerged networks’, which helps explain why those involved in the early days of the WLM tended to be from fairly similar social backgrounds. Carol Mueller has applied this theory to the American women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where she convincingly demonstrates the importance of early meetings and conferences to the development of the collective identity and theoretical orientation of feminism. This was enabled by the relatively small numbers of women involved, most of whom were white and knew each other mainly through Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the civil rights movement.¹⁹ Such a framework can usefully be applied to the movement in England as well. As one interviewee, Emma Hipkin, remarked of her experience at the Ruskin Conference, ‘I already knew quite a lot of the people, the women who were involved with that, through the kind of left networks.’²⁰ And Juliet Mitchell recalled of her early feminist friendships that ‘We all went back, you see, to some sort of connection, university, or some sort of study group, or personal friendship.’²¹

This latter quote is taken from Once A Feminist, and it is striking that every single one of Wandor’s seventeen interviewees reported previous connections with the left prior to their involvement in feminism. Although I would argue this situation changed very quickly with the intense media coverage given to feminism in the early 1970s, Wandor’s book reveals an important truth. Women who were involved at the very start of this new period of feminist activity did indeed tend to be from a narrow range of political and social backgrounds, backgrounds that tended to be educated and ‘New’ rather than ‘Old’ left, and hence backgrounds that were also, by extension, largely white and middle-class, or middle-class by education.²² Furthermore, it would have been difficult initially to find out about the fledgling movement outside of these networks. Indeed, Barbara Caine has written disparagingly of ‘the charmed circle of Ruskin’, suggesting that the stories of women who came to the movement later (she explicitly names Black women, along with others) ‘wait to be told’.²³ That the Ruskin conference originated in Sheila Rowbotham’s suggestion that there should be a workshop on women’s history in itself points to the academic, rather than grassroots, genesis of the WLM. The conference was advertised in small circulation papers such as Socialist Woman: those who organised it apparently viewed their primary constituency as being located in the narrow world of the left.²⁴

Compounding this, the small group meetings that many feminists favoured were hardly conducive for reaching out to a wider social base. As many groups quickly declared themselves ‘closed’, the practicalities of finding a group were complicated and increased the need of a would be feminist to know ‘the right people’.²⁵ Inevitably some groups were cliquey and failed to include new members; and the intimate revelations involved in consciousness-raising (CR) could perhaps put off as many women as it attracted.²⁶ (These latter variables are particularly difficult to know because it is generally the testimonies of those who stayed within these small groups – rather than those who came only once – which survives). Other groups were hampered by certain women dominating conversation. Several systems were devised to combat this, from not allowing people to be interrupted, to elaborate innovations such as the disc system, which gave women twenty discs, representing twenty opportunities to speak.²⁷ However, it is not clear that these innovations were consistently implemented or truly prevented more talkative or articulate women from dominating the group, and American feminist Jo Freeman’s famous essay, ‘The tyranny of structurelessness’ – which argued that the lack of structure in such groups merely allowed an informal and unaccountable hierarchy to develop – was reprinted many times in England. Such conditions clearly favoured articulate and confident women who were likely to be from educated and middle-class backgrounds, and as such, CR groups could present an intimidating prospect.²⁸ Certainly, contemporaneous reports suggest that it was a largely white affair: Sue Bruley comments on the lack of Black women in her Clapham group, and one white woman reflected in Spare Rib that ‘I don’t know how far CR can go in bringing all women together regardless of say, age, colour or class. For instance, in my group we were roughly the same age, all white, all had higher education and similar work situations.’²⁹

The class and race exclusivity of the WLM was thus heightened by the way that many of the women first involved in the feminist movement met, although such exclusion operated as much along lines of class as race. Sarah Browne observes that the WLM group in St Andrews was largely student led and had few connections with the local townspeople.³⁰ One working-class woman from Liverpool humorously wrote in Spare Rib of her first contact with a feminist that ‘We knew she was a feminist or something because she talked posh, [and] didn’t wear any bras.’³¹ Perhaps demonstrating Melucci’s argument that ‘movements in complex societies are hidden networks of groups, meeting points and circuits of solidarity’,³² another interviewee for this project – Gail Chester, a Jewish woman from London – described her difficulties in trying to find a group in London after having left university in Cambridge, where she had first been involved in Women’s Liberation:

It was actually very, very hard actually – very hard – to find my way in, in London, because I’d essentially come from a small town, and London was huge, and I didn’t … I somehow or other did not find my way to the Women’s Liberation Workshop, which would have been the obvious place […] And I was very upset and very lost – I’d been to this national conference in Acton and you’d have thought I would have somehow managed to find my way in more, but I just … it was very hard.³³

Similarly, London- and Liverpool-bas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The (White) Women’s Liberation Movement, c. 1968–1975
• 2. Black Women’s Activism, c. 1970–1990
• 3. Jewish Feminism in England, c. 1974–1990
• 4. White Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist and Anti-Imperialist Feminism, c. 1976–1980
• 5. Critique and Coalitions: Black and White Feminists Working Together in the 1980s
• Conclusion
• Brief Biographical Notes on Interviewees
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index