A massive 100,000 people demonstrated against the war on 27 October. I watched the south London section coming across Waterloo Bridge, the Vietnamese and red flags flickering in the wind, and felt a lump coming into my throat. All those years of campaigning and now so many people. The majority avoided confrontation by going to Hyde Park. At the point where the routes diverged, no one was directing people. It was impressive to see people thinking and deciding what they were going to do themselves.
I was to learn from a CID man who came round after I reported a robbery that November that the feeling among the rank and file of the police was that the demonstrators who went to Grosvenor Square should have been ‘mopped up’. This personal hostility among the police had been contained by orders for restraint from ‘on top’. This antagonism, as in the United States and France, was class-based: we were spoilt rich kids to many police officers. I think the police also feared the spontaneity of the 1968 left, which horrified them by its disorder. Like the Communist Party, the hierarchical police mind was distressed by the unpredictable behaviour of youthful rebellion.
Demonstrations are partly an expression of collectivity and partly a political drama acted out on the streets. Their theatrical and symbolic significance is extremely important, for they literally demonstrate opinion. The fact that they are exceptional events also means they have obvious limits. Mick Jagger wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’ and sent it to Black Dwarf after the demonstration. This street-fighting-man image had no sooner crystallized than it was being challenged from all sides from within the anti-Vietnam War movement. This big demonstration was in fact to be a watershed. Not only had the whole event been the subject of fierce arguments; it was becoming increasingly evident to many of us that simply escalating the violence and getting into fights with the police detracted from the main issue of the Vietnamese resistance to the United States. ‘Remember Whose Violence We Are Marching Against.’ The impasse was to lead many people into local community politics.
When I next arrived in the classroom at Tower Hamlets College after 27 October, I received a surprise. ‘Where were you?’ berated scornful youthful voices. Several apprentices had, unbeknown to me, decided to demonstrate. And being young East End toughies, they had gone off to Grosvenor Square., The May ‘Events’ had started them thinking, but it was the tenants’ campaign over the summer and autumn which had made them take the big step of demonstrating with the reviled ‘students’. Their mothers had been coming back from tenants’ marches angry about police violence against working-class people. They had gone to Grosvenor Square to avenge their mums.
The combined upheavals of 1968 led many of the boys I was teaching to become interested in the history of revolutions. They wanted to know how they had occurred, what had happened and why. I started by telling them about the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, in the London they knew: the apprentices petitioning the Commons and the Puritans drilling near Liverpool Street on Artillery Row. Modern sociological terms such as ‘social inequality’ made them go glazed until translated into direct expressions: ‘The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.’ So I tried an older metaphorical language which bridged direct experience and abstraction, a connection missed in contemporary left politics. I read them bits of Gerard Winstanley about the ‘inner and outer bondages’ and explained how Milton had come to write in the Areopagitica, ‘To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it … even to the reforming of reformation itself.’
Some theoretical concepts made immediate sense to them because of their work and familiarity with trade unions. In one lesson that November I described what Marx had said about alienation and asked them to write an essay about a society in which work was no longer alienated. One engineering apprentice handed in an account of a place where no one ever went into work regularly. Instead they wandered about enjoying themselves, wearing labels describing their various skills. So when the pipes leaked you would just take to the streets and hail some plumber who was mooching around, who would come and fix the pipes. I was unsure whether there would be much demand for historians.
A group of engineering apprentices decided they wanted to form their own RSSF at Tower Hamlets. This was a very big deal. Not only was the name Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation a mouthful, it required a leap into a series of alien identities – declaring themselves ‘students’ as well as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘socialists’. It also meant meeting with a long-haired hairdressing student who always looked sleepy because he took mandies (Mandrax). For skinhead engineering apprentices to go the pub with a hairdresser was a mini-revolution in itself!
The driving force behind this remarkable diplomatic initiative was a boy who had been radicalized by a Maoist shop steward who used to sell him an unreadable paper in tiny print called the Worker.A more personal experience had affected him very deeply. A child was being beaten at home in his street and he had tried to get adults to report the violence. The woman who had called the NSPCC was someone who was despised by everyone because she was a prostitute. This had made him question not simply politics but sexual attitudes and personal values.
The boundaries of assumption about where politics began and ended seemed to have been infinitely extended by the extraordinary happenings of 1968. Actions and organizational structures which would have appeared remarkable a year before had now become quite ordinary. The international student rebellions had extended to young workers and the mobilization of schoolchildren. Colleges and factories had been occupied. The Civil Rights movement had begun in Ireland. So much had been condensed into a few months, it was difficult to reflect upon the implications. It is not surprising that we believed ourselves to be creating a completely new kind of politics.
The tempo of transformation slowed down towards the end of the year, creating a space in which I realized that by being so preoccupied with the optimistic hopes of change I had evaded dwelling on anything shadowed by doubt or pessimism. Immersion in the external events of the previous year had led me simply to stack the painful, buried feelings about my parents, especially my father, on one side, as if they were lumber to be deposited from a fast-moving train. I was to learn that you cannot detach yourself so easily from your inheritance – personal and political.
It seemed evident to me that I had pushed my passivity about dealing with the outside world on to Bob. My struggle to leave him had been about my own terror of dependence and both the dependence and my terror of it went back to my childhood relationship with my father. I was exasperated with myself for jumping from one dependency to another. I continued to carry internally many of the early-sixties existential concerns about detachment. Refusing to make any allowance for my own emotions, I had assumed a very austere attitude to sexual relationships and was liable to be surprised when they affected me in ways that I could not reason away. I was constantly taking elaborate precautions not to be ‘dependent’, only to be hit unawares.
Nick, who I had lined up to be my normal and reasonable love affair, had mysteriously gone missing. Early in December Steve suddenly wrote from a ‘Station Biologique’ in France, where he was watching dolphins and birds from some tree, asking if he could come and stay because he had an interview for a job in the Virgin Islands. I wrote and said I didn’t want him to reappear. I wasn’t going to sit miserably mooning about two unrequited loves.
Black Dwarf that autumn had been shedding editorial members because of conflict about the Socialist Labour League. Bob was invited to join and he suggested that they should ask me. I was unsure whether I was up to being on the editorial board. Even though I resisted the assumption that men did the left politics, it was incredibly hard to have confidence as a woman. You were on your own. In fact I was to find an ally, the Black Dwarf secretary, Ann Scott, then aged seventeen. On 5 December Tariq, Clive, Fred Halliday and Bob decided, according to the minutes, to ‘meet regularly at 11 a.m. on Fridays at Dwarf offices. Only to be altered
under emergency conditions.’ They also agreed to ‘get Sheila to be in charge of women coverage of Dwarf. Ask her to be on the board.’
Two immediate factors were behind this decision. First, Bob had been in an argument with the New Left Review men about the Soho strip clubs, which were multiplying in the sleazy side of Swinging London. He maintained that any principled socialist man should be prepared to strip in protest outside the clubs against the insulting treatment of women. The New Left Review men had told him he was being puritanical and old-fashioned in his attitude to socialism. I had nothing personal against the occasional strip club – the one nearest to the office was perfectly friendly and gave us their tea-bags when we ran out – but they were multiplying in Soho and I sided with Bob, giggling secretly at the thought of the New Left Review men doing a strip-tease. The second factor was less utopian. The International Marxist Group, to which Tariq now belonged, supported the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights, which had been lobbying Parliament that October.
On 13 December I went to my first meeting of the editorial board, although I had already started to commission articles. It was decided that I would help Fred Halliday, who was regarded as something of an expert on sex and the family (and thus on women) because he had read Reich and knew about psychoanalysis, to do a special women’s issue. Fred wrote a long article on the ‘family’ and I zealously busied myself collecting other articles. Through Dorothy Thompson, I contacted Audrey Wise, then an official in the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers; I asked the single mother with the Valerie Solanas targets on her lavatory wall to write about having a baby; and Ann, whose mother worked for Family Planning, did an article on contraception.
I then sat on my stool in the basement by the gas fire and began writing furiously myself. Out came all the concentrated thoughts and impressions which had been unconsciously accumulating. It was the kind of article I would later recognize as one that boils up inside. In the spirit of ’68, I knew I must write not from received authorities on ‘women’ but from my own observations and feelings. In retrospect, this resolve related to a wider cultural shift towards subjectivity. I had been hearing it in the music ever since the Beatles sang ‘Help’ at the end of 1965. It joined to the outer world in the politics of Black Power. I had read other combinations of the personal and the political in Simone de Beauvoir’s writing and in Doris Lessing’s novels. Karen Horney’s ideas about masculine hegemony had also been playing around at the back of my mind over the last year. I had become a woman and I should begin with my own perceptions of what this meant. I made a list: ‘Me; Hairdressing girl; Brentford nylons; Birth control; Unmarried mothers; TUC USDAW; Ford’s women: striptease girl…’Nowsuddenly all those scattered experiences could take a new shape. As the words splattered out on to the pages, it felt as if I had reached a clearing.
CHAPTER 6
1969
When Tariq showed me the layout for the ‘1969 Year of the Militant Woman?’ issue of Black Dwarf, my heart sank. The designer, who usually worked for Oz, had heard ‘women’ and thought ‘ridicule’. On the pink cover a cartoon dolly bird looked out from a ‘V’ sign, holding a hammer and sickle. Below this image he had drawn a woman in a boiler suit in comic-book style, her pocket buttons substituting for protruding nipples. The articles I had collected were overlaid with images. It had been so hard to get those words out into the light of day, now you could barely read them. ‘Women’s liberation’ in the designer’s mind seemed to evoke everyone taking their clothes off, so he had scattered photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Yoko Ono and John Lennon with nothing on over the pages. Tariq, to his credit, took them out, costing the paper £70 – a vast sum in 1969. But I missed a nasty little personal ad the designer had inserted: ‘dwarf designer seeks girl: Head girl type to make tea, organize paper, me. Free food, smoke, space. Suit American negress.’ This was the seedy side of the underground: arrogant, ignorant and prejudiced. It explains the anger which was shortly to cohere among many women who worked on the underground papers.
Nonetheless, regardless of sabotage, there it was, the Black Dwarf women’s issue, with Audrey Wise on why more than equal pay was needed at work, information on Lil Bilocca’s campaign for safety on the trawlers in Hull, Ann Scott on birth control, ideas about community involvement in child care, and Fred Halliday on Women, Sex and the Abolition of the Family’. Across the centre spread were the words I had written in my Hackney basement. Thoughts I had mentioned only to friends, scribbled in my diary or sent in a letter had now gone off into the world. Anxiously I read what I had written about inequality at work, the struggle to combine jobs with child care, the lingering taboos on women’s sexuality, and asked,
So what are we complaining about? All this and something else besides – a much less tangible something – a smouldering, bewildered consciousness with no shape – a muttered dissatisfaction – which suddenly shoots to the surface and EXPLODES …
We want to drive buses, play football, use beer mugs not glasses. We want men to take the pill. We do not want to be brought with bottles or invited as wives. We do not want to be wrapped up in cellophane or sent off to make the tea or shuffled in to the social committee. But these are only little things. Revolutions are about little things. Little things which happen to you all the time, every day, wherever you go, all your life.
Everyday details such as these were not part of the language of politics in 1969.
I was still raw from exposure when a trade unionist from Hull whom I knew slightly stopped me at a meeting at the LSE and remarked scathingly that it must have felt good to let out all my ‘personal hang-ups’. I could feel humiliating tears starting in my eyes when Ann Scott lashed into him with icy fury: ‘It’s not just Sheila who thinks this.’ My assailant backed off in amazement. I had been rescued by another woman and one some years my junior. I snuffled my gratitude to Ann from the depths of my heart and learned in that moment how important it is not to be an individual alone. We needed one another!
Not all men were hostile by any means. Henry Wortis told me he liked the article; Edward Thompson wrote from Warwick University that January, ‘I liked your piece in BD very much: a lot in the space, a new style, not patronizing, not NLRish, sometimes poetic.’ The most remarkable tribute came from the Boston Women’s Liberation movement; the May 1969 women’s issue of the radical newspaper Old Mole reproduced my article with powerful and moving pictures. When Danny Schecter, then a radical student but later to become a well-known journalist in the United States, handed me a copy at a meeting at the LSE, I was overwhelmed that words I had written from my own experience could be relevant to women in another country. In the early years of Women’s Liberation these international practical exchanges were to be vitally important; they confirmed a feminist consciousness which often felt fragile.
Ann Scott’s passionate defence signalled a much closer connection among young radical women. I had always had strong individual friendships with women since being at school, but my intellectual and political friendships tended to be more generally with men. While these were to continue, after Black Dwarf came out that January I found myself just talking and talking with women friends with a new-found excitement. We all seemed to be going in a similar direction. Things suddenly began to connect, to make sense. It was as if we were discovering a new way of seeing which at the same time had always been somehow part of our awareness. Nor was it only women I had known for a long time who seemed to understand this mutuality of recognition. Whereas before new women might be potential sexual competition, now a glance or a smile communicated reassurance.
The small clusters of middle-class women talking to one another coincided with a new spirit among working-class women. The demand for equal pay, raised in the Ford’s dispute about grading rights, was being taken up in workplaces around the country; bus conductresses were also insisting that there should be women drivers. That January, while the Transport Workers’ Union Central London Bus Conference discussed
how to deal with proposals for ‘one-man buses’, the women occupied the building during the lunch break.
My life had turned into meetings during 1968 and the momentum of what was to be known as the ‘extra-parliamentary’ left was not abating. On 24 January the Central Hall Westminster was packed for the debate ‘Reform v. Revolution’. Michael Foot and Eric Heffer put the case for ‘reform’, Tariq and Bob argued for ‘revolution’, while I ran up and down the aisles with bundles of Black Dwarfs – this was a great selling opportunity.
By 1969, however, the millenarian hopes of 1968 had given way to a recognition that total transformation of the globe was going to take a little longer than we had figured. Yet ‘Revolution’ continued to be invoked with little definition of how and what this would entail, because it seemed self-evident to us that the Labour Party’s proposition of reforming in bits did not challenge the existing structures of class and power. We had lived through the disappointment with Labour in relation to the unions and foreign policy, and we tended to take the reforms of the 1945 government for granted. It seemed to follow that only a fundamental transformation could alter social inequality. We never imagined that this was going to come from the right and actually make Britain more unequal. It was to be Margaret Thatcher on the extreme right who would suss out how to make a leap into the unknown appear to be common sense.
The dramatic moment of the Dwarf–Tribune debate came when an impassioned Robin Blackburn (in a green army-surplus greatcoat) rushed up to the mike and announced amidst cheers that ‘the comrades’ had taken down the gates. These were of course the infamous security gates erected by the LSE authorities. They symbolized to the student movement what Barbara Castle’s attempts to curb strikes with compulsory ballots, cooling-off periods and fines represented to the unions – authoritarian control.
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