Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  My first contact with an actual Women’s Liberation consciousness-raising group was to be a visit to the Tufnell Park group early that April. Shelley Wortis invited me to talk about women in the French Commune and I gave them an excited summary of Edith Thomas’s The Women Incendiaries. Thomas’s account of women’s action in the streets complemented the ‘history from below’ I had learned from Richard Cobb. The contemporary inspiration of the women active in Palestine and Vietnam encouraged an interest in the history of women’s role in revolutionary movements in the early days of Women’s Liberation not only in Britain but also in the United States.

  The Tufnell Park group was not at all like my experience of meetings in the Labour Party rooms on Graham Road or the pub room in the Britannia. There the chairs had been in rows. In the house on Dartmouth Park Hill everyone sat around on chairs or on the floor. Shelley acted as a linchpin for the group, but the atmosphere was quietly cooperative. You could hear yourself think and half-formed ideas could be developed collectively. The consciousness-raising approach of the early Women’s Liberation groups could go badly wrong, when a consensus coalesced into a perspective which could be hard to contest. But when the anti-authoritarian insistence on everyone participating worked, it could be magic.

  Early that April I read Juliet Mitchell’s essay ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ once again. But my own interests were in the processes of consciousness rather than in the structures of subordination. I wanted to understand how new perceptions of oneself appeared both through public action, such as strikes, and through personal sexual experiences.

  Pondering on my own desire to be overwhelmed sexually, which I thought conflicted with my equally strong wish to be independent, I ruminated in my diary during April that men and women carried both potentials: to overwhelm and be overwhelmed. I concluded that the differences in how these were generally expressed arose because we had been ‘socialized into the “male” and “female” roles’. By the time you slept with your first man, I decided, you had already been educated into a submission so pervasive that ‘even the non-submissive girl … will doubt herself’.

  From my own observation of the two areas of the public sphere familiar to me, politics and academia, I had deduced that women related differently to politics and to ideas. I believed we took intellectual criticism more personally, were less inclined to lose ourselves in abstractions and less likely to become sectarian. Unable to conceive at this point that women might become sectarian in different ways, I optimistically imagined that women would play an important ‘de-alienating role’ in radical politics. I was convinced that women could make a unique contribution to radical thinking about behaviour, responses, everyday existence and consciousness.

  I had stumbled into a dilemma which did not go away. The stress of an oppression which spanned the public and private spheres could reduce women to being simply victims. The idea of women as carrying an utopian alternative was attractive because it presented a way of escaping from a politics of victimhood. More generally, it was part of the search for the means of moving from life as it was lived to life as it might be, which was so important in the radicalism of the late sixties.

  Our utopianism, however, raised some complicated issues. As a potential, the recognition of opposing values presents a way of imagining an alternative way of being. The problem comes when these congeal into a fixed ideal of ‘women’ as all good and ‘men’ as all bad. In the light of what has happened since, I would be more wary about women necessarily behaving differently from men in politics. More generally, while the utopian impulse is a vital part of any movement for change from below, it requires a fluidity between reality and desire to be maintained. And this is of course easier said than done.

  In April 1969 I reflected in my diary that a distinguishing feature of the revolutionary left was that unlike academia, where women could put the personal aside, you had to live out a split between public and personal. You were expected to act in a removed manner as a thinker one moment and as a sexual woman the next. And when it came to sex, you would be ‘treated persistently as an object’. I thought that having to live this split explained our ‘terror at assuming a total responsibility’ and our tendency to ‘look for a man to hide behind’ when it was necessary ‘to confront people’.

  Looking back, I don’t think it was the case that all my sexual experiences could be summed up as ‘objectified’. The early-sixties belief that action was morally justified by a subjective ‘authenticity’ assumed a new permutation in the early Women’s Liberation discussions of ‘OK’ sex as opposed to ‘objectified’ sex. What started in the late sixties as an impulse to consciously democratize sexual relations ended by imposing prescriptive restriction in the early-eighties feminist movement. Sex in theory was to move away from sex in practice.

  In the late sixties my actual sexual feelings and behaviour were infinitely varied. I was as capable of wanting momentary sensual pleasure as a man, but this was a barely permissible female thought then and so when it was ‘lust’ it still just ‘happened’, while ‘love’ continued to justify everything. Most sexual encounters fitted neither of these extreme polarities. I would ‘fancy’ men, for instance, a lighter feeling than either love or lust. Or I would just be curious about a man I hardly knew: ‘I wonder what he’d be like?’ Sometimes sex would come up as an expression of closeness with political friends whom I was fond of but did not particularly desire. In other cases, it remained muted, below the surface of friendship.

  I was puzzled. Even the friendliest of men seemed to find talking about sex difficult. Things that were perfectly obvious to women appeared to be alarming to them. ‘They are afraid,’ I noted in my diary on 13 April. ‘They wince.’ I was puzzling over the contrary expressions of sexual desire and consciousness: ‘The man who makes strong statements about male dominance can desire himself to be dominated in bed.’ The assumption that everything might not be as it seemed was something I took for granted, but many intellectual Marxist men appeared to find this very peculiar.

  Though exasperated frequently by men’s behaviour and attitudes, I certainly did not see them as universally predatory, which is the retrospective caricature of the sixties. I was hurt by some men, but I know I hurt people too. I was, moreover, aware that there were pressures on men to compete and succeed which I was glad as a woman to escape. It seemed evident to me that these expectations of masculinity affected how men behaved. Instead of simply blaming individuals, which I regarded as a dead end in the same way as what I called ‘the achievement principle’ of women getting into top jobs, I wanted to make differing kinds of relationships and ways of being women and men possible.

  I was already troubled by two questions which were to cause many an anxious debate in the seventies, asking my diary, first, whether the prevailing culture of masculinity was only a consequence of capitalism or was there some underlying structure which we were to call ‘patriarchy’? Second, I wanted to know whether we should concentrate on changing the attitudes and behaviour of the revolutionary left or try ‘to reach women in general’.

  My involvement in the Left Convention education commission and my persistent chat about Women’s Liberation led George Gross, the Hegelian Scotsman who was editing a series of May Day Manifesto pamphlets, to suggest I should write one on women, enabling me to develop the original Black Dwarf article. I originally wanted to call this pamphlet ‘Women’s Liberation and the Whole People Question’. I thought ‘wholeness’, a theme in the late-sixties counter-culture, could overcome the personal sense of division. It also intimated that the specific experiences and interests of women were of general relevance and could contribute to a search for a different kind of socialism from the Trotskyism of the sects. But George Gross argued it would be better to use the term ‘new politics’, which he said was being used in the US New Left. ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’ was to be the result.

  While I was writing away, the International Socialist group was turning
more ‘Leninist’, which meant in practice that the centre could strengthen its control over the new membership. By April discussion papers were sprouting all over the place and I produced my own, the ‘Magic Marxist faction’ – part spoof, part plea for a left politics which could appeal through the imagination. I knew I was powerless and thus resorted to fantasy. But the joke contained a kernel of serious conviction. The document was about a magician who was otherwise known as Comrade ‘Y’. His magical endeavours were of an alchemical sort, for he lived in a baked bean tin which he was trying to turn into magic Marxism. As all the other discussion documents were prefaced by quotes, so was mine: ‘“Socialism is an integral vision of life; it has a philosophy, a mysticism, a morality”, Gramsci. “Magic has the power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason”, Paracelsus. “All theory must be able to enter its own belly button and be born again”, Comrade “Y”.’

  Early that May I was trying to think about the symbols of power embedded in the culture of daily life. Re-reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on the French Revolution of 1848, I was struck by his story of a fireman who participated in the workers’ assault on the National Assembly. The man mounted the rostrum and then stood there utterly unable to speak. Silenced by the trappings of customary power, he was humiliated and paralysed. As I read de Tocqueville’s sardonic account, it was as if I could feel the words choking deep down in the nameless fireman’s throat.

  I had taken out my childhood glove puppets that April and, inspired by the friend of John Hoyland’s who had moved from masks to making puppets, began painting their faces and making them some new clothes. One was Barbara Castle in a fur hat and boa and one was a cheeky-looking red-haired youth madeformeasa child by two 1956 Hungarian exiles – they had gone on to create the TV marionettes Pinky and Perky. In my version of Punch and Judy, he put Barbara Castle’s White Paper into a sausage machine in defiance, not only of her but of the policeman and a skeleton ghost of capitalism. My puppet box was the adapted TV from the 1968 Agit Prop Revolutionary Festival.

  The May Day demonstration against the White Paper that year was a massive 200,000 strong. I did the puppet show in Victoria Park on a sunny spring day, still wearing my bright-red military coat. In a break between performances one of the dockers who had supported Powell in 1968 came up to me with a baffled expression: ‘You lot were on the other side to us last year.’ It was indicative of the swirling momentum of those two years. We were all turning somersaults in great waves which kept on pounding against every customary assumption of politics.

  I lost my beloved Paris nosebag that day. Its strap had broken many times and I had repeatedly sewn it together. I always carried it with me, despite the inelegant, bunched-up stitching. It was stolen out of the puppet box, leaving me without any money. I was stranded in Victoria Park and began seriously thinking I would have to sleep the night in the box – I never considered just leaving the thing and walking home. Finally, about 8 p.m. someone managed to get a message to a friend in the Young Liberals who arrived and rescued me in a car with a roof rack.

  Amidst the mass movement of predominantly male trade unionists, a smaller mobilization among trade union women was occurring with the aim of extending Barbara Castle’s commitment to equal pay to a wider definition of equal rights. When the National Joint Action Committee on Women’s Equal Rights held a demonstration that May, even though it rained about 1,000 trade union women, their perms carefully covered by umbrellas, tripped smartly dressed to Trafalgar Square in high heels.

  I ambled happily around, snatching interviews as the rain dripped from the rims of their umbrellas, jotting down their improvised banners. ‘Barbara gets hers so why not us?’ I knew that this demonstration expressed the pent-up frustration of women who had been campaigning, in some cases since the forties. Only many years later was I to learn that a similar agitation for ‘rights’ among trade union women also ran parallel with the emergence of Women’s Liberation in the United States. In both cases the mobilization of working-class women has been neglected in the histories of the sixties and of the women’s movement.

  ‘Something is stirring,’ I wrote in Black Dwarf, ‘something which has been silent for a long time.’

  Not only the International Socialists but also the International Marxist Group were closing up in this period. When Tariq returned from Pakistan towards the end of March, I commented in my diary, ‘Behaving strangely. IMG have cavils and mysterious power scenes about him.’ One result of the editorial board’s complaints about the long Trotskyist treatises which now kept appearing in the paper was that John Hoyland and I were to do a ‘youth’ issue. This comprised such honorary youth as David Widgery, who had been developing his own kind of political writing in Oz; his ‘Cabbage Water Cock Up’ sputtered in staccato style over the page. We also included part of a speech by a German SDS member, Helke Sander, asking the student men at a conference in 1968 why they talked only ‘at home about the difficulties of orgasm’. In Germany as well, women were contesting the scope of politics and the boundary between public and private experience.

  The most remarkable piece was part of a manuscript Charlie Posner had given me, compiled by a radical Italian priest from the words of his peasant pupils. It described, in language of great clarity and beauty, the cultural silencing which was preoccupying my thoughts, demonstrating how political ideas can be expressed from personal experience. It was later to be published by Penguin as Letter to a Teacher.

  Towards the middle of May, Fei Ling Blackburn and I went to a Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation meeting, which I hated, writing to Roberta, in another letter I never posted, ‘They move and talk like men.’ Those of us who saw ourselves as ‘Women’s Liberation’ regarded women in left groups as interlopers. We suspected them of seeking to impose alien male Leninist concepts; a veritable fifth column. I could conveniently forget that I was in a left group because the International Socialist group was so completely dismissive of Women’s Liberation that it did not have a line’ on us. Paradoxically, while the leadership simply felt we should not exist, individual women IS members or the girlfriends and wives of IS members were the ones who actually played a key role in starting the early Women’s Liberation groups in many cities.

  Another political paradox was that while assuming our little groups were discussing entirely new questions about women’s position and being fiercely resistant to the imposition of an already established line, the feeling persisted that ‘answers’ were hidden in some body of thought. I urged Roberta, who was having a difficult time studying anthropology with Evans Pritchard in Oxford, to make contact with Fei Ling. ‘She knows about French stuff, theory things,’ I declared. Again it was Paris, the mecca, which must have the answer to all theoretical quests. The emphasis on direct experience and collective democratic learning, associated with the North American idea of consciousness-raising, was distrustful of received theories and focused on immediacy. On the other hand, the rush of ideas and upsurge in awareness encouraged us to read and stimulated intellectual inquiry in all directions.

  In my case, wondering what had happened before to women led me to rethink the history I had learned. An important early influence was to be a Swiss student at Ruskin College called Arielle Aberson, who was writing a thesis on the consciousness of the French student movement of the 1860s which preceded the Commune. She and I met through Roberta for the first time towards the middle of May and excitedly discussed Edith Thomas’s writing and the work of the French historical sociologist Evelyne Sullerot, who wrote Histoire et Sociologie du Travail Féminin. Arielle encouraged me to write first the pamphlet ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’ and then the books which grew out of it, Women, Resistance and Revolution and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. Tragically Arielle was to be killed in a car crash in the early seventies; I dedicated Women, Resistance and Revolution to her memory.

  By the time I wrote to Roberta, around 18 May, that swell of extern
al political activity in which I had been immersed since the spring of 1968 was finally beginning to slacken. At last I had time to catch breath and begin to consider my personal predicament. My friendship with Bob was still very important, but the old tensions between us were niggling away more overtly now. We were, I think, finally separating, long after we no longer had a physical relationship. Bob was deeply committed to his relationship with Theresa, who was soon to move away to live with him in Cambridge. And I was feeling isolated. ‘I suddenly had a wave of great loneliness – coming as these things always do with me after a time when I’ve felt integral and free-wheeling,’ I told Roberta, adding, ‘Oh dear, I don’t want a husband, what is wrong with me, but often I am lonely.’

  By May I knew my relationship with Nick had become stuck. I couldn’t talk to him about my personal feelings and the connection between us had begun to drift. In retrospect I think that part of our initial attraction had been based on political disagreement. We had come up with a late-sixties left version of being attracted to what was forbidden. However, by May I could hardly be bothered to argue in defence of IS because increasingly I was coming to identify with Women’s Liberation. Nick didn’t go away entirely but continued to wander in and out of my life throughout the rest of that year.

  Material reality was finally getting through to me. My part-time teaching money from Christopher Wren school was late in arriving and I was utterly broke by the middle of May, surviving only on a £5 loan from Clive Goodwin – £5 was still a considerable sum. I once took a man who claimed to be a US draft dodger all the way from Hackney to Cromwell Road to get £5 from Clive for him to ‘escape’ to Holland (he was back within a few days and we eventually realized he was an agent). However, £5, even in 1969, would not last long.