Sex Strike

A short-lived sex boycott in Spring 1958, promoted by female undergraduates at Oxford University to protest the nuclear arms race led to a wider conversation about gender relations and revealed the deeply entrenched misogyny of their peers.

What to do with women; so began one of the last editorials of the 1958 run of the Cherwell, the Oxford University undergraduate newspaper, in a year rife with social and political debate. Some of the most controversial included the French atrocities during the Algerian independence war, the activities of the cross-university Joint Action Against Racial Intolerance (JACARI), the National Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and finally the suspended position of women in the university, many institutions of which were still closed to them.

The last two issues collided spectacularly in Hilary of 1958. What emerges from the articles of the period is the wiliness of Oxford students to discuss passionately (and dispassionately) just about everything, coupled with the general expectation that nothing of consequence would follow their debates. Janet Dawson, undergraduette (as they were called at the time) at St. Hilda’s, sought to change this with a no-sex campaign intended to nudge men towards taking active action…