By the time my sample chapter was ready that autumn, Robert had left Penguin and Neil Middleton was doing his job. When I arrived in trepidation to see my new editor, Neil was puzzling over whether he should publish the I Ching. ‘Why not ask the I Ching?’ I piped up, the hippie taking over. Neil looked surprised but did just that and the I Ching, of course, recommended its own publication.
When Neil sent me the contract for my first book, I could hardly believe that someone would pay me to do what I was always doing anyway. Neil told me later he had never encountered anyone able to write who was so unconfident; he was an indefatigably encouraging editor and convinced me to have the courage of my own convictions. Very few women wrote about left politics and ideas in the late sixties. Many of my women friends were educated and thoughtful but terrified of the definitive externality of print. I was just the same, but I think I had been lucky in the people – men as well as women – who showed faith in me. I had also gained just that bit of extra confidence because of Tariq’s gamble in letting me write for Black Dwarf the previous year.
The response to the Black Dwarf article and then the May Day Manifesto pamphlet helped me to believe that I had something to say. I began to express thoughts which arose through collective activity, not just out of my own head. I wrote down what I perceived, a crystallization of what I saw and heard around me. I was helped greatly by the radical assumption that an individual contributed something which would be taken and reshaped by others, rather than some timeless statement of intimidating genius. Bob remarked to me around this time that my political significance was as an example. People could look at me and feel convinced: If she can do it so can I.’ I laughed but I think there was truth in what he said. I seemed often to bumble almost unconsciously into doing a lot of things in my life which have then connected me to some broader radical mood in the culture.
The Penguin contract was to solve my failure to earn money. Early in September, still suntanned after another visit to Formentera with Roberta, I was striding through Ridley Road market in an old, short denim skirt, carrying my brightly coloured paper ‘flag bag’, when a stall-holder hailed me with an offer of work. I hesitated. A fat old baker from Kossoff’s had already proposed a job stripping for the bakers who worked through the night. But this was above board – £6 for Friday and Saturday on the biscuit stall. This was a lifesaver, £6 being just about a week’s survival. So it was the British Museum Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and the biscuit stall Fridays and Saturdays. My new employers taught me to chant, ‘Buy your biscuits – lovely broken biscuits,’ to attract the pensioners, the indigent and the thrifty. The two quick-witted stall-holders had to do my calculations as well as theirs because I remained unable to add up. They put up with this and with my peculiar politics for longer than might have been expected because the owner of the stall had his eye on me. He would take me off to the Norfolk Arms on Sandringham Road and buy me rum and Cokes.
If I don’t fancy someone to start with, drink has never inclined me to them. I was too polite to tell him this as I thought it might hurt his feelings, so instead I explained I had this book to write on women and revolution which meant I had to be in the British Museum Reading Room. It took him a while to believe me, but eventually he did and I got the sack.
The biscuit stall had tided me over until my Workers’ Educational Association classes began again that October. My Harrow class were studying Russian Revolutionary thinkers and as ever I was learning from my students. One old man, who could remember the impact of the Russian Revolution upon the east London working-class Jewish community, informed us, ‘People said that a new saviour had arisen in Russia. He was called Lenintrotsky and was taking from the rich to give to the poor.’
*
Working at the biscuit stall, however, had prevented me from going to the editorial meetings at Black Dwarf, where John Hoyland, Adrian Mitchell and Vinay Chand were becoming more and more on edge because of Tariq’s tendency to slip in International Marxist Group propaganda. The paper was beginning to turn into an organ of the Trotskyist Fourth International; only Tariq’s irrepressible delight in mischief and flair as a communicator made it readable. I knew trouble was imminent.
You could hardly move for acrimony that autumn. Black Dwarf criticized the leading figure in the International Socialist group, Chris Harman, for attacking Ho Chi Minh at the memorial meeting marking the death of the Vietnamese leader. It was true that some Trotskyists had been killed in the forties in Vietnam, though the International Socialists had not stressed the point while increasing their numbers through the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. A memorial meeting for the dead Ho Chi Minh seemed to me a divisive time to raise the issue. Whereupon Hornsey IS moved that I should be expelled. Expulsion was an extreme measure in 1969; only one other person had actually been expelled then, a Labour MP accused of racism. I knew I was being punished not only for disagreeing with Chris’s action but for my refusal to be controlled by the ethos of the group. Hornsey IS had a particular rivalry with Nick Wright and indeed one of the prime movers was the same man who had accused me of ‘fucking with a Stalinist’. The conflict was ironic, because Nick and I were drifting apart and my general perspective on domestic politics, such as the emphasis on working-class resistance, was completely in accord with IS at the time.
On 19 October shop stewards from Ford, Chrysler, Vauxhall and British Leyland held a historic conference in Coventry. They met to compare wage rates, because they had resolved to demand ‘parity’. The meeting was closed to the press, but because of my status as scribe and typist Ann Scott and I were allowed in by the Dagenham convenor, Sid Harraway, to report on the conference for Black Dwarf. There was only a tiny group of women workers present; otherwise Ann and I were surrounded by a tidal wave of trade union masculinity.
Sid Harraway, a Communist, had been active at Ford since the forties. He was generally of a rather stolid demeanour, but he had a look in his eyes as if something miraculous had happened. Despite my ignorance of the car industry, I could sense the tremendous significance of two telegrams he held out to show me. They were from workers at Alfa Romeo in Italy and Ford in Belgium. What I was seeing in Sid’s hand that day was a new kind of working-class internationalism which was to grow up alongside the official international trade union structures and was, in some instances, to challenge the bureaucratic remoteness of the unions. We were living, in fact, through the first signs of changes in the global organization of production, though we were only dimly aware of what was afoot.
After the Coventry meeting, I sat down at my kitchen table with one of the stewards who worked in the Ford paint shop at Dagenham and interviewed him about the new challenges the stewards were facing. The most politically astute stewards recognized the need for new forms of organizing. ‘Improved communications means important inter-union contact from the bottom as well as the top. The realization is growing that these links must become international. Assembly operations could be and have been transferred to Ford workers in other countries,’ I wrote, unaware how pertinent all this was to be in the future.
Tariq still groans about ‘Cars and Consequences’, which he insists was handwritten. In fact, it was typed, but on my mother’s ‘Made in India’ twenties typewriter and on especially thin paper because I took a carbon copy, giving it an archaic appearance. Sadly, by the time it appeared war had broken out at Black Dwarf.
The clash came over an article Tariq put in without the rest of us on the editorial board seeing it. Headed ‘Southern Africa Betrayed’, it accused the African National Congress of corruption and deliberately sending rebellious members to their deaths. Vinay discovered similar material was being circulated by the South African police to discredit the ANC. It was bad enough that we were publishing an unbalanced sectarian piece of hatred without any reference to the ANC’s viewpoint. Even worse, it seemed we were also unwittingly helping the South African apartheid regime.
That weekend, the consequences of our sectarian divisions
in London struck home with a devastating personal force as, troubled and miserable, I began to envisage what people imprisoned by the apartheid regime might feel on hearing that a socialist newspaper far away was attacking them. It was this that made me take an unprecedented and, for me, frightening initiative. I called an editorial meeting and tried to get the centre spread removed. We lost and a compromise was to be a critical letter signed by John Hoyland, Adrian Mitchell, Vinay Chand and myself in the Christmas issue.
This conflict was personally very painful. Tariq was an old friend and I have never had much stamina for political conflicts with people I liked. The editorial board meetings where we had laughed and joked were now grim and gloomy and I dreaded them. I was also downcast because the non-sectarian left paper I had loved had become fraught with bitterness. Left papers are real heartbreakers and money-burners and ever afterwards I would hold something back. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. One of the snags of having a love affair with a left-wing publication is the grief it brings. Just as we had been carried along by the optimism of 1968, now we were being sucked under by currents of profound distrust.
While the left was splintering in rancour, Women’s Liberation was growing. The Islington group had moved its meetings to my house that autumn. This Dalston group expanded each week. Unlike most movements and organizations, which are generally pleased about recruitment, we were thrown by our rapidly increasing numbers. We had learned from the North American model that consciousness-raising rap-style groups should be small in order to enable everyone to participate and also to connect personal experience with a broader social picture. Instead of little groups of around ten women, we would attract transitory and heaving crowds of up to fifty, all packed into my bedroom.
We were from differing backgrounds and our political views, interests and concerns varied greatly. I remember a white working-class Enoch Powell supporter and a black woman cleaner whose husband started to lock her in when he discovered where she was going. A grey-haired woman in her fifties turned up with her daughter one night: Lucy Waugh was from a Walthamstow working-class family, her mother had been active in the local Women’s Co-operative Guild, and as a young girl Lucy had done typing for Sylvia Pankhurst. Lucy, along with her daughter Liz, were both to become involved in the early-seventies campaign to organize night cleaners, in which Sally Alexander also took part. For two years Liz and I would tramp around the deserted City at night stopping women with plastic bags. ‘Excuse me, are you a night cleaner? Would you like to join the union?’ and Marc Karlin was to document the Women’s Liberation campaign in his film Night Cleaners. Among the women who came to the Dalston Women’s Liberation group was my friend from St Hilda’s, now back from South Africa, Hermione Harris, and when we divided into three smaller groups early in 1970, I joined Arsenal Women’s Liberation Workshop, which met at Hermione’s house, near the football ground.
The rapid sprouting of groups in different parts of London was making the original general meeting unwieldy. We agreed we would send representatives and that each group would produce Shrew in turn so that no centralized single perspective would dominate. These approaches to organizing were in marked contrast to both the Labour Party and the Leninist groups. At the time, it seemed to me that the North American women just created this differing vision of how to organize which somehow made complete sense. Only when I read more about the history of Civil Rights, the New Left and the US student movement was I to realize that our Women’s Liberation approach to politics was rooted in the ideas and assumptions of these movements. Over time people forgot their origins and they were called in a political shorthand simply the ‘feminist’ way of organizing.
In November 1969 women’s history appeared for the first time at the Ruskin History Workshop when one of the trade union women students gave a paper on factory women’s work in the morning session. A male trade unionist stood up in the discussion and said that a man should earn enough to enable women to stay at home and care for the children. I challenged him, stressing the importance for women of the collective experience of workplace organizing.
That lunchtime Roberta, Sally and Arielle, along with Anna Davin and myself, started talking about the need for more discussion about women. At the next plenary I announced there was to be a meeting for people interested in talking about women. I had missed the obvious double entendre and the announcement was greeted with guffaws, which made us extremely cross. A group crammed into a tiny student bedroom at Ruskin that teatime, talking excitedly. I proposed a History Workshop on women but a North American, Barbara Winslow, who was more aware of developments in the United States, pointed out that we had not had any general conference on women. And so, out of Ruskin History Workshop, was to come the first Women’s Liberation conference, held at Ruskin the following February.
For once the prognostication of a left paper had been vindicated by history; 1969 really had been the ‘Year of the Militant Woman’. While staying in Oxford, I was finishing an article for Black Dwarf summing up the year. In ‘Cinderella Organizes Buttons’, I noted the militancy of nurses, lavatory attendants, factory workers and teachers, mentioning the National Joint Action Committee for Women’s Equal Rights, the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation meeting, the appearance of the magazines Socialist Woman and Shrew. I added that discontent was coming from many sources, criticizing the tendency to try and ‘zone off’ the economic from other aspects of women’s subordination. I believed that differing aspects of experience overlapped, the stories and myths of childhood being part of our consciousness as well as the sociology of work and daily life. I ended the article with a tribute to Lil Bilocca, from the Hull trawler campaign; Rose Boland, from Ford; the bus worker Kath Fincham; the post office worker Daisy Nolan; and ‘all the women you never hear about’ – a preoccupation with silence and invisibility I was to take into my interest in the women ‘hidden from history’.
Though in retrospect the emergence of a movement appears as inevitable, at the time our organizing felt fragile. We had no idea what response we would get to the conference we had begun to plan (500 people were to come). We were thinking on our feet, developing ideas from, as it seemed, scratch, and were surprised when an older generation made contact. One former suffragette who came to our planning meeting in London that December told me, ‘Of course you’re very lucky to be allowed to use halls. They banned us.’ This generation were like political grandmothers to us, closer to our wavelength than the political mothers – the left women in the generation which preceded ours. Formed by the thirties and forties, they would often remonstrate with us for identifying as ‘women’. They had had their own struggle to be independent, political activists and saw the ‘women’ tag as restrictive; to us it was liberatory.
Women’s politics seemed full of hope and possibility, in contrast to the left, which was increasingly depressing. At Black Dwarf the conflict over the ANC article continued to be bitter and the question of my expulsion from IS rumbled on. Ann Scott had gone to Cambridge that October, so I was unable to discuss what I wrote with another woman of similar views on the editorial board. When John Hoyland was critical of my article summing up the year I felt stranded. I was beset on all sides by divisions and conflicts among people with whom I had previously been close.
The problems in participatory collectives become all too clear when these groups are riven by disagreements. Belatedly we started talking about the need for a constitution. Now it was the turn of Black Dwarf to produce discussion papers. These were written in deadly earnest, even though neither side was really listening to the other.
In opposition to the International Marxist Group, who wanted a Leninist ‘vanguard’ paper telling everyone what they should think, I produced a long eight-page statement which took its title from William Blake: ‘One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression’. I argued for diversity and debate: ‘We can’t appoint ourselves as an all-knowing élite ready to issue orders to the masses.’ We could learn not simply from the B
olsheviks but from a variety of radical traditions – Utopian Socialists, Anarchists, Anarcho-syndicalists, Guild Socialists and Third World revolutionary movements. I said that the circumstances we were facing required new approaches to organizing. We needed to consider not only external structures but the micro ones – the relations and responses among individuals. This idea had come from a spectacular confrontation early in November between Ronnie Laing and Gerry Healy from the Socialist Labour League. Laing posed the question why individual German soldiers in the First World War accepted the order to fight for their country, suggesting that the psychological approaches to child-rearing, in particular the restraints on masturbation, current in the early twentieth century encouraged absolute obedience. This psychological perspective was of course anathema to Gerry Healy, who erupted in fury. I was amused to see Laing handle his opponent with the accomplished ease of a therapist and the egocentric conviction of a charismatic leader.
Writing my ‘Lion and Ox’ discussion document was personally a monumental undertaking. I was bringing together a whole range of insights gleaned from the tumult of the last few years. Politically, however, it was a dead duck. Fred Halliday walked out as I finished the eighth page, saying, ‘I disagree with you 100 per cent.’ Fred liked vanguards at the time.
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