Coming of Age in the UK Women’s Liberation Movement
The decade of the 1970’s saw remarkable expansion of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK. Ideological shifts on the role of women gave way to new demands by the movement, and provided an opportunity to combine self-realization with protest. This excerpt from Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968-present explores why and how feminism’s ‘second wave’ mobilized to demand not just equality but social and gender transformation.
A quick reminder of what women were up against even in the 1970s: they still required a man’s permission to borrow money from the bank; jobs were advertised by gender; only 26 of the 650 members of Parliament (MPs) were women in 1970, and fewer still (only 19) in 1979, the year Thatcher was elected as prime minster; domestic violence and marital rape were not considered crimes; doctors (most of whom were men) were often ignorant of women’s health; husbands often got child custody; and marriage — allowed only to heterosexuals — was still idealized as the high point of a woman’s life. It was not until 1975 that the Sex Discrimination Act was passed and, as with equal pay, its changes were phased in over subsequent years.
This scene underlay the WLM’s seven demands. The first four, set out at the Ruskin conference and passed at the national conference in Skegness in 1971, were equal pay; equal educational and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and free twenty-four-hour nurseries for children. Demands five and six, passed at the 1974 conference in Edinburgh, called for legal and financial independence for all women and the right to a self-defined sexuality, including an end to discrimination against lesbians. The seventh was added in 1978 at the last national conference in Birmingham: freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of violence or sexual coercion regardless of marital status; and an end to the laws, assumptions, and institutions that perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression to women.1
Asking for the moon — as the night cleaners’ action group playfully did — did not seem pointless.
From today’s perspective, these demands are relatively uncontroversial, if unachieved, particularly equal pay, equal opportunities, legal independence, freedom from violence, and an end to discrimination against lesbians. Others — free twenty-four-hour nurseries, abortion on demand, and the right to a self-defined sexuality — seem overly simplistic. Yet they provide a measure of the movement’s imagination at the time. Asking for the moon — as the night cleaners’ action group playfully did — did not seem pointless.2 Discussions about pay were part of transforming what counted as work, what class meant, what “success” itself was. Yet it was difficult to translate such ambition into the limited political framework of the time.
The night cleaners’ campaign of 1970–73 to improve pay and conditions for women bearing the double burden of low pay and the responsibilities of unpaid work at home demonstrates these difficulties.3 The campaign was initiated by May Hobbs, a cleaning supervisor who was, unusually for someone in the cleaning trade, a union member. The WLM got involved when she approached the Dalston Women’s Liberation Workshop (of which Sheila Rowbotham was a member) and the International Marxist Group for help. Sally Alexander and others spent two years picketing, leafleting, publicizing, and socializing with Hobbs and her husband, with shop steward Jean Mormont, and with the thirty-five or so other cleaners.4 The campaign was initially successful — the women received a substantial pay raise and gained the support of MPs such as Lena Jager and Joe Ashton.5 However, these gains were lost when the cleaning contract changed hands and the new contractor was not bound to the terms of the previous agreement. The Transport and General Workers’ Union, to Hobbs’s and others’ fury, was largely unsupportive of workers they considered unskilled and unorganized.6 Hobbs barely mentioned the WLM in her witty autobiography of 1973, and the Berwick film collective’s avant-garde version of events failed to impress the cleaners as any kind of campaigning tool.7
But if we think about the 1970s as a time when concepts were developed that reevaluated the centrality of childbirth, caregiving, and maintaining the home — central to economies and nations as well as to personal psychologies and relationships — then the picture looks much more compelling. Campaigns around women’s domestic labour were at the heart of the movement. This drove the thinking behind the demand for unlimited childcare (women work flexible shifts at all hours because of their responsibilities to care for children) and a reformed benefit and legal system in which women would not be dependent on a male breadwinner and lack reproductive rights.8 The links between class and gender struggles fed the fifth demand, the campaign for financial and legal independence, popularly known as YBA (Why Be A) Wife. Mary McIntosh, a key formulator, explained that this campaign grew from a married friend’s objections to paying tax as part of a couple in light of the long assumption that women would be kept by men.9 But this grew into a larger analysis of the marriage contract — playfully proclaimed on the badge “Don’t do it, Di!” as Diana Spencer prepared for her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981. McIntosh, who had shifted from the Gay Liberation Front to the WLM, enjoyed this moment of lesbian solidarity with a very heterosexual problem. What united so many was that women took care of the house and family, always and for free.10
(1.) Zoë Fairbairns, Helen Graham, Ali Neilson, Emma Robertson, and Ann Kaloski, The Feminist Seventies (York: Raw Nerve Books, 2002), 93–104.
(2.) Lynne Segal, Why Feminism?: Gender, Psychology, Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 17; Nightcleaners, Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975.
(3.) George Stevenson, “The Women’s Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: Gender, Class Formation and Political Identity in Women’s Strikes, 1968–78,” Women’s History Review 25, no. 5 (2016): 741–55, 746.
(4.) Sheila Rowbotham, “The Nightcleaners’ Campaign,” in Conditions of Illusion: Papers from the Women’s Movement, ed. Sandra Allen, Lee Sanders, and Jan Wallis (Leeds: Feminist Books, 1974); “Jolting Memory: Nightcleaners Recalled,” in Plan Rosebud: On Images, Sites and Politics of Memory, ed. Maria Ruido (Santiago de Compostela, Spain: CGAC, 2009); Sally Alexander, S&A, C1420/45, transcript pp. 74–77, track 2. See also “The Night Cleaners: Transcripts,” The Women’s Library @ LSE 7SHR/D/02; and Dutiful Daughters: Women Talk About Their Lives, ed. Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham (London: Allen Lane, 1977), section on Jean Mormont, 139–56. Thomlinson discusses the racial politics of this campaign — more than half the cleaners were black — in Natalie Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–1993 (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2016), 50–51
(5.) May Hobbs, Born to Struggle (London: Quartet Books, 1973), 85.
(6.) Stevenson, “The Women’s Movement,” 747.
(7.) Hobbs, Born to Struggle, 82–84; Nightcleaners, Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975. The collective was founded by Marc Karlin, Humphry Treveleyan, Richard Modraunt, and James Scott, joined during filming by WLM artist Mary Kelly.
(8.) This demand was typically misunderstood as endorsing heartless collectivization. See Barbara Holland, “Inside a Soviet Nursery,” Spare Rib 116 (1982): 18–20, and Sheila Rowbotham, The Past Is before Us: Feminism in Action since the 1960s (London: Pandora, 1989).
(9.) Mary McIntosh, S&A, C1420/11, transcript p. 82, track 3.
(10.) Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, 3rd ed. (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975); Ellen Malos, The Politics of Housework(Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 1995).
Margaretta Jolly is based at the University of Sussex in England, where she is Professor of Cultural Studies and director of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research. Margaretta’s work has focused on auto/biography, letter writing and oral history, particularly in relation to women’s movements. She is the editor of The Encyclopedia of Life Writing (2001) and author of In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (2008), for which she won the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK Book Prize. Working with the British Library in London, Margaretta directed Sisterhood and After: The Womens Liberation Oral History Project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She currently leads The Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing, funded by the Leverhulme and partnered with the British Library.
