News of the Essex women’s meeting had spread by the time a small group of us gathered again in London on 3 March. Jane Arden, the author of an avant-garde feminist play, Vagina Rex, made a dramatic entrance in a big, broad-brimmed hat, fashionable on the King’s Road. ‘Stupid hat,’ I thought to myself cattily. She addressed us with majesty, telling us we had to head a movement. Hackles went up all over the room; we were intensely suspicious of leadership and, as fugitives from being bossed by the men, did not take kindly to it from women. We were determined to create a democratic collectivity which gave all women the space to develop – an unforeseen outcome was that we implicitly tried to subdue extreme figures. The early Women’s Liberation groups were to establish a consensus of tentativeness as an alternative to strident militancy.
In the free-for-all combat of the student movement, men who could assert charisma or just sometimes aggression would tend to hold the floor. While the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation had a rhetoric of participation, its anarchic style of meetings effectively excluded most women. Whereas women might have had a secondary role in the more hierarchical Young Socialists, at least there we had been allowed a nominal position.
Now we were desperate for autonomy. One man came to the meeting and refused to leave unless we gave him a ‘political’ reason for his exclusion. ‘We need to be able to talk to one another before we can work out any political reasons,’ I replied. I did not equate this all-women discussion with a total separation from left politics. Autonomy meant space, not a severing from the left. Implicitly we saw this as indicating another approach to politics in general. The thoughtful Dorothea observed how the women’s revolt in the German student movement had also spoken for the ‘little men’ who were similarly crushed by the ‘theorists’.
Roberta was there, frowning in concentration as the two North American women from the Tufnell Park group, Sue Cowley (later O’Sullivan), blonde and petite with her pixie face, and Shelley Wortis, a serenely imposing figure with jet-black hair, spoke about child care. Unlike the approach usually taken on the left then, in which new relations in the family were to follow a ‘revolution’, they were intent on making changes in the here and now. Along with their anti-authoritarianism and belief in participatory democracy, the North American women brought into the British Women’s Liberation movement a belief in prefiguring a desired future in the way you organized. They also possessed an openness to new realities and perceptions and a respect for knowledge rooted in experience. The influential New Left thinker C. Wright Mills had argued the need to translate personal problems into social issues and this concept was to have a particular relevance to women.
The combination of radical influences at that first meeting made it one of the most exciting events I have ever experienced; we stayed on for hours, discussing and discovering, and when I came away I was still thinking about it. In the left sects, all necessary ‘correct’ knowledge was already parcelled up; after this women’s meeting, it seemed that nothing was already known. I began to recast my memories, wondering how I had been affected intellectually by studying at an all-girls’ school and deciding that I deferred to men intellectually.
The fierce mood of democracy in the early days of Women’s Liberation was to be empowering. Just as the avant-garde in art was to reject any hierarchy of subject matter, we were blotting out all distinctions between differing kinds of knowing. On reflection, I believe a more equal balance between theorizing and tacit understanding is preferable. Like many anti-authoritarian movements, we were to discover that an extreme rejection of hierarchy could result in a denial that anyone did have differing degrees of understanding and thus something to pass on.
The conviction that ‘liberation’ meant changing the world and yourselves was prevalent in the student left. But what about the impact of self-expression on others? The LSE had erupted again after summonses were issued against some students and lecturers, and I spent the evening of 10 March with Vinay and the International Socialist students, wiping the slogans off the wall. ‘It’s not fair on the cleaners,’ we told the ‘libertarians’ who accused us of acting as ‘guards’. Introducing subjectivity into politics had its downside.
On the back of an International Socialist leaflet ‘Support LSE’, which must have been produced around this time as it was protesting against Walter Adams’s lock-out of the students, I scribbled ideas about women’s position in red ink. Women, I noted, defined men only in oblique ways, through irony, through intonation. The ‘differences’ between women were frequently more ‘apparent than the universalizing features’. I considered there to be different levels of consciousness and ‘very limited traditions of struggle’ (I was to learn how mistaken this latter view was through studying women’s history!). Having read my Mao and Trotsky, I considered that the resolution of the ‘theoretical contradictions’ in women’s position would be through practice: ‘a real task of life’ rather than exclusively a process of intellectual understanding. Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels had suggested to me that this new consciousness might not develop through formal political structures. Christopher Hill’s essay on Clarissa indicated that a moral protest against women’s predicament had appeared in the novel long before it attained any political expression.
I wondered how the ‘confusion’ and ‘conflict’ affecting women like me had arisen. A key factor seemed to be the split in how we were regarded sexually and in the ‘persona’ (Bergman had given me a new word) permitted in the public spheres of politics, intellectual culture and academic life. While women were accepted in an abstract way in an intellectual or academic milieu, men appeared to find it ‘difficult’ – I wrote ‘impossible’ at first, but crossed this out as too pessimistic – to permit women also to be sexual. You were expected to be one thing or the other: ‘Bed/intell’ I called this split in my own shorthand. The notes ended grumpily with an obvious borrowing from Black Power: ‘Men’s job not to tell us what we’re like, which they do all the time. Start to explore what they are like in relation to us.’
By March 1969 the euphoria of May ’68 had metamorphosed into the ‘past’. On 3 March I wondered in my diary about ‘this strange optimism that flashes through the world, that last year was smattering, shimmering … Where does it come from?’ During the late sixties so many ideas flew around, springing from differing sources at the same time and going through several permutations, that we could not track their course or their implications. For instance, occupying spaces was a preoccupation of the situationists, but it was also what the US Civil Rights movement had done when they sat-in on buses or at restaurants. It was of symbolic significance again in the North of Ireland marches through Protestant’ territory and reappeared as metaphorical space in the idea of ‘prefigurative’ alternatives in both the US New Left and the German SDS.
Because so many new radical streams continued to emerge, it still seemed possible to graft the transformatory consciousness of 1968 on to everyday resistance. A former student from Tower Hamlets College turned up and took me off to interview a young working-class couple squatting in north-east London. The squatters had been inspired by one of their relatives, a defiant man in his fifties who could remember the spontaneous squatting after the war. ‘Squatting,’ he told me, was ‘like unions, people sticking together’ – a local memory of direct action and collectivity had persisted. The squatters were to be brutally evicted by builders, even though the young woman was pregnant.
Housing was a material need which also raised wider questions about how to live and how space was owned and controlled. Before Christmas Agit Prop had considered occupying Centrepoint, the giant skyscraper near Tottenham Court Road tube, kept empty so the rents would increase. But the plan had leaked and the housing activist Ron Bailey had urged us not to do it. He feared violence and the accompanying bad publicity would rebound on his homeless families. Our modified scheme that March was to stage a demonstration.
Eight of us duly turned up outside the tall building at t
he crossroads of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. The police, who must have thought Agit Prop was some kind of nerve centre of revolution, had blocked all the traffic off around Centrepoint. We had decided to try and look respectable and so I wore my short red Chelsea Girl military-style coat, a slightly out-of-date evocation of the Sergeant Pepper cover, which was my idea of ‘respectable’. Ken Loach’s film Cathy Come Home had become a symbol of the plight of the homeless and we had a long banner, ‘Cathy Come to Centrepoint’. It was sunny but very windy that day and we had not remembered that the tall Centrepoint building acted as a wind trap. We could hardly hold the banner straight. However, our leaflets, with the picture of ‘Cathy’ with her baby and the heading ‘Cathy Come to Centrepoint: It’s Empty’, vindicated the attempt to communicate more graphically. Cabbies put their hands through the windows to take them; even the police read them sympathetically.
Our action at Centrepoint proved you could get the optimum coverage from a minimal deployment of demonstrators! Not only were the TV cameras whirring but the Guardian solemnly reported:
A rather disorganized march was led by Mr John Hoyland, an artist [I think they got the wrong John Hoyland], who wore a giant black and red mask and carried a placard bearing a slogan in the shape of a speaker’s bubble in a cartoon…
Mr Bob Rowthorne [sic], a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, said the group did not want to see homeless people accommodated in Centrepoint but wanted to protest against the money wasted on the skyscraper.
I was wilting under the ceaseless round of activity and complaining hopelessly in my diary about my inability to get any work done: ‘Every time I get a few days something new happens.’ Though my thesis was slipping into the void of abandoned PhDs, I retained an interest in the long conflict over knowledge which has been part of the history of working-class education in Britain, writing about this in the 14 March issue of Black Dwarf: ‘To know that we want something is not in itself sufficient. We must know what we want and, what is more important still, how we are to get it, in other words we must first understand before we can transform.’
Agit Prop had become involved in planning meetings to hold a unifying conference of the left, an initiative backed by Raymond Williams from the May Day Manifesto group, the Communist Party and the Young Liberals. The idea was to develop alternative socialist policies and to set up local left forums. I added the Left Convention to my weekly round of meetings and joined the group on education. Bob was coordinating the economics ‘commission’ with help from a young Cambridge graduate, Hugo Radice.
Our attempt to forestall the sectarianism of the left groups was to prove futile. The International Socialists denounced the Left Convention and as a result Bob was to leave IS and join the Communist Party. The economics commission, however, did survive, turning into the Conference of Socialist Economists and eventually producing the journal Capital and Class. Every ten years or so there seems to be a similar venture to the Left Convention. This was to be my first time around.
A peculiar thing about left politics is that you set out to do one thing – in this case, to create a structure for left debate and unified campaigns – and instead quite different consequences ensue. The positive outcome of the planning meetings was that I made several new friends. Among them was Ben Birnbaum, a trade unionist from the east London clothing industry. Ben was full of perceptive observations about politics, based on his experience of activism in the unions, the Communist Party and the East End community, explaining, for example, how a sense of Jewish identity against fascism had stimulated commitment to trade unionism. He pointed out that important interactions between culture and the workplace were missed by the syndicalist-influenced left. He also approached leadership very differently from the anti-authoritarian student left. ‘A cadre,’ Ben insisted, was someone who you could ‘always rely upon to organize in a shop when the need arose’. Related to his view of responsibility was his respect for craft skill, which went against the distrust of the skilled worker on the libertarian left. Ben’s observation of the clothing trade had convinced him that to possess a skill developed a strategic frame of mind which could be the basis for a consciousness of the need to organize. I was learning again how words could assume differing meanings and Ben made me qualify my absolute certainties about how to organize.
The Left Convention had revealed the political differences I had buried when I joined the International Socialist group. Members of IS considered that my involvement with the planning meetings was due to Nick’s influence. It was assumed that women were semi-permeable membranes who absorbed men’s ideas through the semen. ‘You’ve been fucking with a Stalinist,’ hissed a man in Hornsey International Socialists, pinning me against the wall at a party. This attitude was a mix of male sexual control and a religious feeling that the group should be your whole life, with sex only permissible within the boundaries. It was, of course, anathema to me. No one was going to tell me what I should or should not do.
The reality was that Nick, the organization man, took a cynical view of the Left Convention himself. Moreover, we had not seen much of each other during those months. My emotional energy continued to be largely consumed by the endless round of political meetings and demonstrations. Nick said to me in March that he found me ‘unreal’, I think because I was ceasing to exist as a private person.
One profound misunderstanding between us was that I retained my existential refusal to make demands. Nick expected demands, saying if I nagged him he’d be around more. I couldn’t imagine anything more demeaning. Though Nick and Steve were completely dissimilar, I had managed to reproduce similar patterns in the two relationships. On one occasion Steve had grumbled about me getting off with other men and this had made me angry enough to respond with the observation that if the spaces between his visits were smaller perhaps I wouldn’t. I was surprised when he said sorry. I was so bothered about dependence and independence, the most obvious complaints stuck in my throat. This convoluted pride might have been ostensibly self-defeating, but it was part of how my sense of myself as an autonomous person had developed. It was to be modified over the years, by having a child and by growing older, but it has never completely gone. I can recognize the same responses among several friends – not only in Britain. Some future psychoanalyst might identify the Greco–Piaf syndrome in women of a certain age.
On 21 March I received an ominous phone call from the Daily Mail, which was waging a campaign against leftists in higher education. They wanted to know what I taught in liberal studies. Around this time Tower Hamlets College told me they did not have any part-time hours for me next term. It felt like a kick in the stomach. I had been there longer than many full-time staff. But Bill Fishman had gone to Balliol and the union wasn’t interested in part-timers. It was Ben Birnbaum and another older Communist trade unionist I had met in the Left Convention meetings who really understood the hurt of losing a job, and they made attempts to get me work. I was eventually to find some teaching in a boys’ school in Shepherd’s Bush called Christopher Wren.
Several people from the planning meetings, including Ben, were going to the Institute of Workers’ Control conference at the end of March, which that year was up in Sheffield, where Jean McCrindle was now living. The IWC conference had grown to 1,000 people and assumed a greater significance through the participation of trade union leaders such as Lawrence Daly from the miners and Huw Scanlon from the engineers. By 1969, the IWC not only had an influence on the left trade union leadership but, less visibly, was creating a space for the early networks of shop stewards to develop – these were to become extremely important in the seventies labour movement. It was effective because it was independent of parties and groups. Amidst the working-class men there was a knot of middle-class socialists, among them Bob, Gus Macdonald from the film-workers’ union, who spoke at the plenary, and Clive Goodwin, with the tall blonde woman who worked as his assistant, elegant and efficient as ever, but balking slightly at the overwhelming proletarian
masculinity of the gathering.
Audrey Wise spoke on ‘Women and Workers’ Control’ and, on the suggestion of one of the organizers of the IWC conference, Tony Topham, we held a women’s meeting there. Along with Jean McCrindle, I contested the view taken by some Trotskyist women there that you had to concentrate on getting rid of capitalism first and then women would be all right. By this reasoning Women’s Liberation as an autonomous movement was ‘diversionary’. The argument was to recur many times in the early days of Women’s Liberation.
In one of the breaks, Ben Birnbaum introduced me to a small bird-like woman in her fifties called Gertie Roche, a left-wing trade unionist in the Leeds clothing industry, who had left the Yorkshire Communist Party along with the Thompsons in the exodus of 1956. Gertie was to be swept into the leadership of the 1970 clothing strike. In a sudden rebellion, the workforce, who were predominantly women, surged through the streets of Leeds, from factory to factory, pioneering the mass picket before Arthur Scargill and Saltley Gates. Gertie, who was also to help the new Women’s Liberation group in Leeds when it began to meet, asked me shrewdly when I visited her, ‘And you, are you emancipated in your own life?’ It was reassuring to hear the flat Leeds tones, so familiar from my childhood, expressing radical opinions.
Gertie, like Audrey Wise, acted as a link between Women’s Liberation groups and an older working-class left influenced by a non-Stalinist Marxism, and both of them enabled me personally to understand more about the relationship of working-class women to trade unions. My neighbour Barbara Marsh was to act as another ‘bridge person’ for me. Her accounts of the everyday prejudice she encountered in terms of race, class and gender helped me see how these were intertwined and led me to admire how Barbara never let herself be consumed by bitterness. While sympathetic to some of my ‘Women’s Liberation’ propaganda, Barbara took other bits with a pinch of salt. A staunch Catholic, she was opposed to abortion. But we became and stayed friends despite our differences.
Promise of a Dream Page 29