Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  Christopher Wren school, on a Shepherd’s Bush housing estate, was a shock after Tower Hamlets College and my Workers’ Educational Association classes. At Christopher Wren the head and his deputy seemed to see the boys only when they were sent up to be beaten. I was appalled by the arbitrary violence of the older teachers, who hit the boys for no clear reason. The boys responded with a defiant anarchy which was then held down by harsher and harsher reprisals. When some of the fifth form broke out in the lunch hour and stole cars, the head’s reaction was not to deal with what was going wrong, but to issue orders that all of us would be locked in. Towards exam time he altered the timetable without any consultation, so we all found ourselves teaching classes with whom we had not built any relationship. Keeping order was thus far more difficult.

  The small boys in this alienated environment took their revenge on female teachers by grabbing their bums in the corridors. These crimes would be much tut-tutted about, along the lines of the original sin of boys, by the middle-aged male teachers in their blazers. There seemed no higher authority to which you could appeal, so I decided direct action was the only feasible defence. A group of tough four-year boys became my bodyguards, marching protectively behind the two miniskirted dresses I wore through that summer, one white with red spots and one a pale blue shirtwaister. When they were in lessons I adopted an ingenious sideways walk, with my bum sidling along the walls.

  Teaching was hard work in this milieu. Again I found myself arguing about Powell’s ideas. The area was more solidly white working class than east London and did not have a comparable political history. The revolts of 1968 had made no visible impact here at all. Reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies one day with a class, I asked them if they knew of any example of people living in cooperative ways. They looked at me blankly, then a voice from this bleak council estate mused reflectively, ‘The hippies.’ Play power rather than street-fighting man had penetrated the concrete.

  At the end of that June I struggled with my conscience. Methodist duty said I ought to stay on, to leave would be running away. But I couldn’t bear it and quit. When I subsequently went to teach at Starcross (formerly Risinghill) in Islington in 1971, I realized that schools didn’t have to be like Christopher Wren. Everyone smiled at you in the corridors at Starcross, and the liberal head had an open door for pupils and parents alike.

  A mix of my experience at Christopher Wren and the Black Dwarf on ‘Youth’ gave me the idea of a liberated alternative ‘Living School’. The name came from the Living Theatre, but in fact ‘living’ was a word which kept surfacing through the sixties in the visual arts as well as in drama. There were ‘living sculptures’ and ‘living cities’, for example. I collected a planning group together consisting of members of the Schools Action Union, Vinay Chand and a Young Communist League clothing worker who was a protégé of Ben Birnbaum. The aim was to bring the Schools Action Union in contact with the apprentices who had been radicalized through 1968 and 1969.On 14 June Black Dwarf announced an ‘anti-authoritarian project’ to be held at the LSE at the end of July, adding, ‘The school will be organized to allow a maximum amount of choice of activities.’ Along with discussions on education and the ‘industrial situation’, there were to be music, films, acting, poetry, songs, inflatables, ‘art and fun’. We decided there would be no oppressive timetable, just an infinity of creativity in lots of little rooms.

  A right-wing Conservative woman in the House of Lords made a fuss, asking why the LSE was to be used to propagate ‘subversion’. We were banned by Walter Adams and Living School had to be rapidly rescheduled in that old home of free thought, Conway Hall, in Holborn. The ‘anti-authoritarian’ school started amidst conflict. A big, bearded film-maker from Germany called Gustav Schlacke, showing films made by his new group, Cinema Action, was to take up most of the morning insisting that we should all storm the LSE. Fiercely protective of the Schools Action Union, who were already having a hard time at their schools, and of the radical teachers who had come to talk about education, not go into combat, I argued that this was irresponsible. Eventually a disgruntled Schlacke led a small, militant raiding party off to the LSE in Houghton Street and Michael Duane, the white-haired libertarian former headmaster of Risinghill, was at last able to speak.

  Conway Hall had fewer rooms than the LSE, but we utilized every inch. John Berger showed the Schools Action Union and Ann Scott how to make silk screen posters in the basement, Stephen Sedley (now a judge) talked on law, a left trade unionist discussed the White Paper with apprentices behind the stage. A Communist Party official tramped upstairs into the Conway Hall’s turret to lecture on Marxism. The Schools Action Union members were either anarchical or incipient Maoists, or a bit of both, and argued with him heatedly. They were stuck in that turret for several hours, blocking up a room.

  The idea of Living School was that the sessions should continue as the spirit moved them. As we had no timetable, we had no time limit and consequently it was not easy to find which space was free. This most anti-authoritarian’ of projects ended up highly centralized and, because I was the only brain keeping track of who was where, the centre became me. It was like being the face on the computer in the TV sci-fi spoof Red Dwarf. This living timetable was far more exhausting than teaching in a normal school. But at the end of the day everyone (except Schlacke, I guess) was happy.

  Vinay took a collection for Asian strikers at a factory called Punfield and Barstows, and they sent support for our challenge to an ‘unquestioning acceptance of the decisions our “betters” have decided to channel us towards’. Living School also showed a short film made by the Tufnell Park women’s group, which ended with a tribute to trade union women like Rose Boland from Ford.

  While organizing Living School, I was also writing the pamphlet for the May Day Manifesto group. There are some things you write because of an external reason, but others are obsessive, they witter inside you. These are the undeniable ones, the kind that come from within. While I was driven to write, it happened that Bob and Theresa, along with Adam Hart, his brother Charlie – a musician in Pete Brown’s band – and Phil Vaughan, a kinetic artist, who were all now living at 12 Montague Road, began a major reconstruction job in our bathroom and toilet because the floor was rotten. They applied an original combination of Phil and Theresa’s art school training and Bob’s useful O-level in carpentry and his advanced mathematical skills to replace it. Experimentation took time and for several weeks we went to the lavatory by balancing on the supporting lathes. The end result was to be a merging of the bathroom and lavatory and eventually a two-door bathroom.

  My ears were filled with the noise of honest manual labour banging away on the bathroom floor upstairs as I wrote and rewrote my pamphlet. But writing, like lust, banishes ethics and duty. So I sat on my stool (unergonomically, in retrospect, though such a concept never entered my head at the time) for three weeks, with all the ideas and reading of the previous few months welling up inside me and tumbling out on to the pages. I wrote about how women were contained in a series of acceptable ways of behaving, of the minutiae of subordination, of the difficulty subordinated groups had in finding a theoretical language to contest the power of prevailing assumptions. I considered how women accommodated, how we beat a retreat.

  I drew on my personal observation, as I had done in the Black Dwarf article, quoting Barbara Marsh saying, ‘We women are just shells for the men’, and one of the Guildford middle-class housewives in my Workers’ Educational Association class, who told me that she could be herself only in the bath. The hairdressers’ version of social stratification gleaned from one of my further education classes also found its way into ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’.

  The Queen

  pop singers (various grades)

  employers

  principal of college

  vice-principal of college

  teachers

  hairdressing students

  black people

  mother
s.

  I included a practical and somewhat dutiful section on equal pay and training, but the innovative aspect was my attempt to trace how silence is broken by a new consciousness and how women’s grievances had historically taken differing forms. I had no idea, of course, that I was to pursue these two for the rest of my life!

  From my reading of Gramsci came the word ‘hegemony’, which I adapted into ‘male hegemony’, finding parallels with the writing of Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael. Black Power provided a crucial language of cultural domination, because it gave voice to a subjectivity obliterated in Marxist versions of socialism and thus suggested a connection between individual experience and political resistance. It was very difficult at this point to validate personal experience which did not fit the existing theoretical canon, but the movements of the late sixties gave me the confidence to insist on the need to connect. I was able to pick up on a few scattered pieces of contemporary testimony from women. For instance, Ronald Fraser had edited a series of oral interviews in the New Left Review on work. These were published by Penguin in two collections and in one of these Suzanne Gail’s essay on housework appeared. The recognition that housework was both a material activity and one with effects on consciousness was of course to become an understanding of the women’s movement in the seventies. However, in 1969 it still seemed revelatory.

  I was also realizing that there had been a past. In the British Museum, I had found Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual Revolution and from his references I discovered some of the books of Alexandra Kollontai which were translated into English. Kollontai gave me a completely new insight on the Russian Revolution. It began to seem as if there had been a conspiracy to conceal daily life and women in the histories I had known before. I combed through books now, looking for references to women; Fei Ling had recommended some on China, while Christopher Hill’s work brought insights about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I began, moreover, to transpose other experiences and see new connections. For instance, de Tocqueville’s fireman, dumb on the tribune of popular power, made an appearance as the symbol of cultural silencing. I was fascinated by a printed extramural lecture called ‘Education and Experience’ which Edward Thompson sent me on the tension in English culture between class and theoretical knowledge, from the Romantics through to D. H. Lawrence. ‘Education and Experience’ was to be something which I read and re-read at many different times in my life – it is now fortunately available in the collection of Edward’s essays edited by Dorothy Thompson, The Romantics.

  The content of what I was saying really demanded a new way of writing about politics, because through a mix of subjectivity, history and theory I was trying to probe beyond what was taken for granted. Again it was the extraordinary upheavals of the late sixties which made me brave enough to risk a new form of communicating – and one vital inspiration was the manuscript of Letter to a Teacher.

  I was able to seize the chink of space which opened that June as the frenzied momentum of the last year and a half began to slow down a little. But it still felt like sending out messages into the unknown. Despite my loneliness in the writing, ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’ was to sell very well and was republished as a Spokesman pamphlet, where it had a few more years’ life.

  *

  After Living School, Juliet Mitchell, who was involved in a group in south London based on a mothers’ and toddlers’ ‘One o’clock Club’, told me about a Women’s Liberation Workshop meeting and I went along. The London groups were growing and a newsletter, which was initially called Bird, then Harpies Bizarre, had been started. This soon became Shrew and the name stuck.

  The Tufnell Park group, influenced by Dorothea, had decided to follow the example of the German student movement and set up an anti-authoritarian crèche. The Germans used to squat empty shops, creating their alternative child care in those ‘Kindershops’. The idea was that the children played freely while the adults discussed Marxist theory. Sue Cowley reported in Shrew that summer that it hadn’t worked. ‘The kids were happy,’ but the adults in Tufnell Park had sat around without much to say to one another.

  This was to be one source, however, for the idea that men should participate in child care. Shelley Wortis, who was a child psychologist, began to do research about ‘father deprivation’ to counter the literature about the crucial nature of the mother-child bond. In contrast to the traditional nursery campaigns, which had not challenged the sexual division of labour, the Women’s Liberation approach was for adults of both sexes to participate. Like the Germans, we believed in anti-authoritarian play. ‘Kindershops’ were examples of the ‘prefigurative alternatives’ which were being taken up by radical movements in many countries. In Paris they called their alternative childcare ‘crèches sauvages’.

  I began going to the meetings of the nearest local Women’s Liberation group, in Islington, that summer and we spent several weeks talking about our personal experiences in childhood and adolescence. But after my Young Socialist/International Socialist initiation into left politics, I felt uneasy about meeting just to talk. I formed an alliance with a woman in the Communist Party and a practically minded single mother from the recently formed pressure group Gingerbread, who also wanted to ‘do’ something. We started a nursery campaign – all three of us – and I was back knocking on doors, in Islington not Hackney this time. We knocked and knocked, but our public meeting for more nurseries attracted only one or two bemused local women and an articulate middle-class man who was a member of the Play School Association, an organization which helped to give mothers a few hours’ break.

  It took several years before the Women’s Liberation Workshop actually developed a nursery campaign and many disputes about whether you should set them up yourselves or lobby local authorities. After the May ‘Events’ the idea gained credence that making demands on the state would cost radical movements their autonomy; they would be assimilated and controlled through an all-pervasive ‘permissive tolerance’. I did not accept this view entirely, but like many others I was affected by the fear of ‘cooption’. It was assumed that while reforms might be granted, you would lose the power to exercise direct democratic control over daily life and thus the meaning and purpose of the gains would be lost. This argument was to meander round and round in the Women’s Liberation movement until eventually the desperate need for child care began to produce interesting hybrid forms which combined community control and state funding.

  The late-sixties emphasis on creating alternatives stimulated the formation of radical cultural groups in film, theatre, publishing and journalism which overtook the attempt through Agit Prop to provide a single umbrella; Agit Prop was to evolve into a political information service. I remained, through personal interest, politics and friendship, closely involved with this creative aspect of left politics, which was to become an important part of the non-aligned socialism of the seventies.

  Towards the end of July, Roberta brought Marc Karlin, a member of the newly formed left film group Cinema Action, to 12 Montague Road. When she went back to Oxford, Marc was to stay in the house and become one of my closest friends. He had been in Paris during May ’68, where he had been influenced by the radical film-maker Chris Marker’s interest in the work of the avant-garde in the Russian Revolution. Modelling themselves on the Russians who travelled to film the workers, Cinema Action had been filming a strike near Liverpool just before Marc arrived in my house. His first encounter with Northern working-class women in the tenants’ movement on Mersey-side had made a deep impression upon him. My first memory of Marc was that Roberta and I argued with him in the kitchen when he said working-class women were oppressed, but not middle-class women. His first memory of me was somewhat different. When Roberta opened the front door I was sitting on the lavatory, from which, to his horror, I proceeded to greet him. I think this must have been because, in the wake of all the bathroom building activity, the doors didn’t get put back on for a while.

 
My PhD thesis on University Extension was now looking like a gigantic white elephant. Eric Hobsbawm, my supervisor, proposed cuts and also the inclusion of women students who were pupil-teachers, who were often from working-class backgrounds, but by this time I could not bear to return to the sources and unstitch it. As Eric’s clear and rational voice sentenced to extermination my lovingly discovered worker-students from Hebden Bridge and Woolwich, a despairing tear started to trickle down my face which I concealed by turning my head away to the window. As we sat there in his office at Birkbeck College, a student demonstration passed noisily by outside. My thesis, I decided, was just not politically relevant.

  Writing ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’ had made me interested in elaborating my ideas historically. Roberta met Robert Hutchison, then working for Penguin, at a conference on anti-imperialism that summer and he said, ‘Tell her to write a synopsis and send it to me.’ I had no idea how to do this, so I sent him a list of chapter headings. These were to form the basis of what became Women, Resistance and Revolution and Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, except that my initial plan was even broader in scope. Because we had so little to go on, I thought I had to encompass the history of the world all in one book. There was an intimation that I might have bitten off more than I could chew. ‘I’m very interested in what I’m doing. But I’m terrified it gets to be too big a job,’ I told my diary ungrammatically. I had no way of knowing that I was sketching out in red ink a lifetime’s work. Yet I must have regarded the notes as a kind of record, for the scribbled pieces of paper were, in the strange random way of scraps of past thoughts, to survive and surprise me decades later.

  When I went to see Robert Hutchison in Penguin’s friendly, slightly scruffy offices in John Street, Islington, he looked at my list and suggested that I go away and write a sample chapter, pointing at random to the heading ‘Russia and China’ and saying, ‘What about this one?’ So I took out Reich’s The Sexual Revolution again in the British Museum Reading Room and scoured the big blue catalogues for every name mentioned in the book. Then I checked through all the headings on ‘women’ which a librarian showed me in a little back room. A bibliography by Lucinda Cisler from the United States helped me track down a few more references. I drew some blanks. ‘I want to find out about women and revolutionary movements,’ I told a bemused Fawcett Society on the telephone. The library of the Anglo-Chinese Friendship Society proved more fruitful.