George Stevenson - The Womens Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain

George Stevenson

Figures

Tables

Charts

I would like to acknowledge the help of many people in writing this book. First, Andrzej Olechnowicz and Gidon Cohen, who have offered a great deal of encouragement and guidance throughout the project. The arguments presented below are much sharper as a result of their influence. I am also grateful for the comments from others in the Durham University History Department on various sections of this book.

I also owe particular thanks to the women I have interviewed for this project. My early contact with Penny Remfry, Anne Torode and Sally Groves facilitated a wider range of participants than would otherwise have been possible. I greatly appreciate their help, and our conversations forced me to consider both the key arguments of this book and my original approach. The direction of my future research will continue to benefit from these experiences.

I would also like to thank the archivists at the Feminist Archives in Bristol and Leeds, the Glasgow Womens Library, the Working Class Movement Library, the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, the Womens Library in London and the Bishopsgate Institute. The knowledge of the staff in these archives helped to maintain the focus of this book and make the research process more efficient and affordable, for which I am very grateful.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for being supportive throughout. Discussing class and gender on days off is not everyones idea of fun, so I would like to say both thank you and sorry to all those who have been prepared to indulge me. None of this would have been possible without the unwavering support of my parents, Barry and Kerry, and I will never forget how they have enabled my life to be different from theirs. I am also ever grateful to Gem for putting up with the stress of the research and writing process and remaining encouraging and insightful. This process would have been so much more challenging without her.

This book will focus on the feminist voices, activism and experiences of working-class women engaged with the Womens Movement and class politics and the Womens Liberation Movements (WLMs) engagement with them between 1968 and 1979. This approach will define the WLM as a part of the wider Womens Movement, of which womens industrial and community struggles were also parts. It will argue that contemporary accounts seeking to recover the significance of sisterhood or prioritize alternative identities in the movement often do so at the expense of its working-class participants and underplay the significance of class in the political identities of middle-class liberationists. It will suggest that the integration of working-class women and class politics into the story of the 1970s Womens Movement requires a reconsideration of the existing narratives of the WLM. In so doing, it will illustrate how both structural and cultural forms of class analysis can offer complementary insights into womens identity construction and political consciousness, with particular validity not only for social and political movements but also for the post-war period more widely.

It is certain that the WLM in Britain, and across Europe and the United States, was one of the most important social movements of the post-war period.

It is in the legacy

More recently, however, this narrative has been challenged by a number of historians. Pat

Catriona

The WLM did not materialize from a vacuum, and the Womens Movement should not be defined exclusively by feminism. However, it is equally vital to emphasize that the WLM did stand as a new and distinct stage of struggle for The proliferation of both the WLM groups and industrial militancy by working-class women throughout the 1970s serves to underline the significance of 1968 as a turning point in the nature of the British Womens Movement and the arrival of, if not a new wave, then a more aggressive stage of the struggle for liberation and equality.

This books choice of 1968 as the start date for the new Womens Movement is equally important as it is tied to the differing origin narratives attributed to the movement in this period. These are in turn linked to whether the birth of the WLM was the result of the coalescence of differing working- and middle-class womens experiences and struggles or whether it was born solely out of the latters. The distinction between these narratives has rarely been made, but it is significant because of its implications for the role working-class women played in the formation of the WLM. Indeed, there has often been a tendency in historiographical accounts to emphasize only the circumstances of middle-class women as the underlying causes and catalysts for the WLMs development.