While Rowbotham and her fellow radicals drew encouragement from the new wave of feminists across the Atlantic, they also looked for inspiration to a group of rather less exotic women closer to home. In Hull, Lil Bilocca led a group of fishermen’s wives campaigning to improve the safety of trawlers after two were lost in bad weather in January 1968. As first they were mocked: the secretary of the Hull Trawler Officers Guild remarked that ‘the idea of forming a women’s committee to fight battles for the men is to my mind completely ludicrous’. But the scorn only spurred the women on, provoking them to set up Hull’s Equal Rights Group, one of the first such women’s groups in the country. Other women, flexing their muscles for the first time, met similar derision. Later that summer, a group of sewing machinists brought the giant Ford plant in Dagenham to a standstill when they walked out demanding equal pay and the status of skilled workers. The ‘Petticoat Strike’, as the press mockingly called it, fizzled out after three weeks, although the women did win a pay rise. In the long term, though, it was more significant than many much longer strikes, because it pushed the principle of equal pay into the headlines and became an inspiration for women workers and trade unionists across the country.8
At the TUC conference later that year, a succession of women rose to denounce the ‘industrial apartheid’ that reduced them to being ‘the slaves of slaves’. And by the late spring of 1969, when Rowbotham and other bohemian young women joined a thousand trade unionists on a pioneering Equal Pay march to Trafalgar Square, there was suddenly a sense of excitement at the possibility of change. Rain poured down on the demonstrators, but their spirits were high. Rowbotham scribbled down slogans from the forest of placards: ‘BARBARA GETS HERS WHY NOT US’, ‘WE WANT A CHANCE TO PROVE WE CAN DO THE WORK OF ANY MAN’, and from a group of Stoke pottery workers, ‘EQUAL PAY NOW. WE MAKE MUGS, BUT WE ARE NOT MUGS’. It was their first demonstration, the Stoke women told her, and they were a ‘bit nervous’: ‘You hear such funny things about what goes on at them.’ But despite the nerves and the weather, Rowbotham sensed a mood of tremendous excitement and adventure. ‘Everyone I talked to felt this was only the beginning,’ she wrote in Black Dwarf. ‘The movement for EQUAL PAY NOW is going to get bigger, noisier and more determined. And it’s not just about equal pay. You can’t challenge the economic subordination of women without immediately highlighting the total secondary social position. Something is stirring. Something which has been silent for a long time.’9
Although equal pay had never been one of Labour’s priorities, pressure from the trade unions – which were increasingly conscious of their growing female membership – almost immediately paid off. With so many women flooding into the workplace, only diehard reactionaries rejected the principles of equal pay and equal opportunities. In an influential leader in May 1968, The Times called employers’ failure to make allowances for mothers and married women ‘gross discrimination’ and ‘a great waste of potentially useful skills’. What was worse, only one in ten women earned more than £16 a week, with half earning less than 5s. an hour, a pittance by male standards. Change must come ‘with all deliberate speed’, the paper said, and so it did. In January 1970, Barbara Castle introduced an Equal Pay Bill to compel employers to pay men and women equally within five years. Revealingly, she presented it as ‘a measure for efficiency as well as equality’: like most women of her generation, she was uncomfortable with the moralistic politics of militant feminism. Some employers objected that it would put them out of business, while Enoch Powell characteristically condemned it as reckless meddling with the free market. But with polls showing that both men and women overwhelmingly supported the principle of equal pay, most senior Conservatives were keener to proclaim their pro-women credentials than to stand in the bill’s way. Addressing the National Council of Women in May 1970, Edward Heath promised that his government would help working women to advance ‘with perfect freedom and every chance of promotion’. Equal pay legislation, ‘while vital, is only the beginning’, he said, for ‘a revolution in the hearts and minds of men will be needed if equal job evaluation is to be translated into real equality’.10
As a man notorious for his brusque and dismissive attitude to women, Heath made a very implausible feminist revolutionary. It is certainly hard to imagine him as one of the protesters at the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall in November 1970, when concealed agitators hurled smoke bombs, flour and general abuse at the bewildered presenter, Bob Hope. Perhaps more than any other event, it was this moment that catapulted radical feminism into the public consciousness, although Miss World herself was less than impressed. ‘I do not think that women should ever achieve equal rights,’ she said, ‘I do not want to. I still like a gentleman to hold back a chair for me.’ As the academic Laura Mulvey, one of the protest’s organizers, later mused, it was not an event that ‘attracted people to the movement’, but it did get it ‘much more widely known’. Even the heir to the throne felt compelled to offer an explanation for the protesters’ shocking behaviour, revealing his own deeply considered thoughts on the vexed question of modern gender relations. ‘Basically,’ said Prince Charles, ‘I think it is because they want to be men.’11
For many feminists, though, a more significant event was the first National Women’s Conference, held at Ruskin College, Oxford in February 1970. The organizers, who included Sheila Rowbotham and other socialist activists, expected 100 people to turn up; in fact, they got 500, so many that they had to move their sessions to the Oxford Union building nearby. They discussed papers on the family, work, crime and women’s history; they called for equal pay, free abortion and contraception, and all-day childcare to allow mothers to work. Most of the delegates, according to reports, were ‘young women, many of them students with long flowing hair, trousers and maxi-coats’, although ‘here and there were middle-aged mothers and housewives from council estates’. In between sessions on woman’s resistance in history and the inspirational example of the French Revolution, ‘clusters of young women in the ragged fur coats and with the long, straight hair of the 1960s generation could be seen talking intensely about everything under the sun’. Rowbotham had ‘never seen women in that mood before, hearing people speak who’d never spoken before, seeing people inspired to do things they wouldn’t have done in the past’. To take part in seminars and workshops with so many women was ‘terrifically exciting’, agreed another delegate, Michelene Wandor. ‘You thought, “This is the first time anybody’s noticed this and, by God … it’s going to be different tomorrow.” ’12
Although there had been women’s groups before the Ruskin conference, it marked a genuine turning point, inspiring hundreds of women to set up their own organizations. According to one estimate, scores had been established across the country within months of the conference. In London, with its population of affluent, articulate, politically motivated young women, there were four feminist groups in the autumn of 1969 (in Tufnell Park, Belsize Lane, Ladbroke Road and Peckham Rye), seven groups by the turn of 1969 (including Sheila Rowbotham’s group in Hackney), fourteen by the middle of 1970, and no fewer than fifty-six by the end of 1971, from local organizations to specialist subject and study groups. In the beginning, Rowbotham recorded, the Hackney group had met in one another’s front rooms; by 1971, however, there were so many members that ‘we no longer even knew one another’s names’, so they had to split into two ‘consciousness-raising’ groups. Most belonged to the umbrella London Women’s Liberation Workshop, which had premises in Covent Garden and combined the functions of a bookshop, a social centre and a clearing house for information, and published a newsletter and the radical paper Shrew, which the different local groups took it in turns to produce. When the Hackney group had a go in October 1970, they focused on the issues of playgroups and nurseries, as well as running stories about the plight of housebound mothers and an interview with a local West Indian woman about ‘nurseries, abortions, racism and relationships with men’. Two years later, when they had a second go, t
he subjects included ‘black women’s position in the labour market … teachers, secretaries, trade unions, equal pay, housework, motherhood, relationships with children’. It was not exactly a hilarious read; on the other hand, it was often a lot better written and more pragmatic than the underground papers of the late 1960s.13
Although feminists were later stereotyped as dungaree-clad harridans with their heads in the clouds, their demands in the early 1970s were extremely practical. At the first International Women’s Day rally in March 1971, more than 1,000 women marched from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square in a blizzard (they had an unenviable knack for picking days of appallingly bad weather) in support of the four goals agreed at Ruskin: equal pay, equal education and career opportunities, twenty-four-hour nurseries, and free contraception and abortion on demand. Even this, however, was a bit much for the newspapers. The Evening Standard’s man on the spot reported that the crowd had mostly been ‘girls from colleges, sad bed-sitters in North London or the smarter, liberated areas like Hampstead’, many of whom had left their bras behind and therefore boasted ‘defiantly if awesomely pendulous’ breasts. In the Telegraph, meanwhile, one female columnist wrote that although some of her sisters’ ‘nags’ had a point, the problem was their ‘tone of voice’. The ‘overriding impression that Women’s Lib with all its Socialist-orientated frenzy suggests’, she wrote, ‘is of a deep sexual unhappiness among its members’. (‘Don’t bother to write an article,’ a friend had advised her; ‘just print their photographs.’) In any case, the ‘battle of the sexes’ had gone on too long already: ‘Can’t we drop it? Morbidly interesting though it may be I shall not attend the flop of the year. I shall stay at home and with my children watch “Dr Who”. It’s far more exciting – to this thrill-seeking female anyway.’14
Yet despite the carping, there was a genuine sense of utopian excitement about the early years of what the press called the ‘women’s lib’ movement. ‘Demonstrations became fun,’ the writer Zelda Curtis later recalled. ‘Women musicians sent us dancing along the route; women choirs sang songs by women for women; women’s theatre groups dressed up as brides and house drudges to confront the onlookers; new, bright and cheerful banners flew, green and purple everywhere; and “choice” became the core word of our campaigns.’ And as was often the case with campaigns rooted in the counterculture, there were some splendidly pretentious and laughable moments. In 1971, for example, the Women’s Street Theatre Group put on their Flashing Nipple Street Theatre Show, consisting of women with flashing lights attached to their clothing at the groin and breast areas. Later, they mounted an agitprop piece in the women’s toilets at Miss Selfridge on Oxford Street, while Sugar and Spice, which they put on in Trafalgar Square on International Women’s Day, 1971, included a display of ‘a huge deodorant, a large sanitary towel, and gigantic red, white and blue penis’.15
Of course it was easy to laugh at the real-life Sarah Janes in their flared jeans and dungarees, with their earnest lectures on patriarchal oppression and the need to rename history ‘herstory’, or their peculiar mania for taking intimate photographs of their genitals and blowing them up as wall posters. Yet not all feminist efforts were so extravagant or so easily derided. They set up playgroups, nurseries and playgrounds, they fought for equal pay on the shop floor, and they built a coalition of tiny local groups and major national organizations such as the National Council for Civil Liberties, the National Joint Council of Working Women’s Organizations and Women in Media. It is true that their members were overwhelmingly young, well educated and middle-class, and much of their rhetoric reads now as turgid, self-indulgent, pseudo-Marxist waffle. But their efforts undoubtedly had a wide impact on the lives of many thousands of others, from the children in the playgrounds they set up to the nervous women who visited their centres for advice on escaping their abusive husbands. Above all, no social movement of the 1970s posed a bigger challenge to the complacent assumptions of British society, from the bedroom to the workplace, from laws and customs to pay and politics – a testament to the underappreciated vigour of national life during a supposedly dreary period.16
It was female activists, for example, who capitalized on the growing unease about domestic violence, which until the late 1960s had rarely even been discussed. One criminological survey suggested that almost two-thirds of the women murdered between 1967 and 1971 were killed by their husband or lover; another, analysing more than 3,000 cases of violence in Scotland in 1974, found that one in four involved husbands hitting wives. ‘An astonishing number of wives’, said the Sun, ‘accept violence as part of the normal relationship between a man and a woman.’ From 1971, however, there was somewhere for victims to go, thanks to the activist Erin Pizzey, who set up the Chiswick Women’s Aid refuge in Goldhawk Road, the first such centre in the country. Even she was taken aback by its success: by May 1973, the centre was receiving 100 telephone calls a day, and by the end of the decade there were 99 women’s aid groups and 200 refuges across the country, many funded by charities or the government. It was thanks in part to Pizzey’s tireless activism, especially her groundbreaking book Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear (1974), that the Labour MP Jo Richardson introduced what became the Domestic Violence Act of 1976, which allowed women to get court injunctions to restrain their violent husbands. And yet, revealingly, Pizzey did not consider herself a typical feminist: indeed, she had opened the Chiswick centre only after walking out on a local women’s group where, she later recalled, she ‘heard shrill women preaching hatred of the family’. During the 1980s, she became a hate figure for radical feminists after accusing them of hijacking her crusade against domestic violence and using it as a front for their campaign against men and the family. But her legacy is incontestable. As the Labour MP Jack Ashley told the Commons in 1975, ‘it was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical by establishing the Chiswick aid centre. As a result of that magnificent pioneering work, the whole nation has now come to appreciate the significance of the problem.’17
But domestic violence was not the only dirty little secret exposed during the early 1970s. There were ‘thousands of households across the country where rape will be committed tonight, carefully camouflaged by the sacraments of marriage’, Jill Tweedie told Guardian readers in January 1972. Indeed, rape was much in the news during the 1970s, partly because feminists insisted that it was far more common than hitherto believed, but also because of shocking high-profile cases like that of Peter Cook, the ‘Cambridge Rapist’, who conducted a campaign of terror against local women for nine months before he was given a life sentence in 1975. Not all rapists, however, received similar treatment. In June of the same year, a judge allowed one rapist to appeal because ‘the girl was not without sexual experience and the intimidation had been mild’, while a week earlier another man escaped with only a suspended sentence after raping a woman at knifepoint.
And in a third horrifying case in June 1977, the Court of Appeal handed a suspended sentence to a Guardsman, Tom Holdsworth, who had attacked a teenage barmaid after she refused him sex, ripping out her earrings, fracturing her ribs and causing injuries to her genitals that a doctor likened to those suffered in extremely complicated childbirth. ‘It does not seem to me that the appellant is a criminal in the sense in which that word is used frequently in these courts,’ said Mr Justice Wien. ‘Clearly he is a man who, on the night in question, allowed his enthusiasm for sex to overcome his normal behaviour.’ Almost unbelievably, the three justices decided to set Holdsworth free on the grounds that the sentence would ruin his promising army career; as for the victim, meanwhile, they noted that she would have suffered less if only she had agreed to have sex with the man. By any standards, this was an astonishingly callous verdict, and in a long editorial, The Times argued that it proved the point of those who argued that rape victims were consistently mistreated by the justice system. Such was the furore, in fact, that the next day th
e paper broke with its usual practice and published the entire text of the judgement. ‘We apologize for printing passages of such a sickening nature,’ a disclaimer read, ‘but feel that this transcript is necessary to enable readers to form their judgement.’ Indeed it was: few people reading the full account of what the poor girl had suffered could have had anything but contempt for the judges, as well as for the criminal himself.18
While it would be many years before the police and the courts treated rape victims with the sensitivity they deserved, the subject had at least ceased to be taboo by the late 1970s. London’s first Rape Crisis Centre was opened in 1976, a year later women in Edinburgh held the first Take Back the Night march, and by the end of the decade Britain had sixteen rape crisis centres, paid for by charitable trusts. But it was television’s oldest soap opera that arguably did most to publicize the shock and suffering visited every year upon countless women. On 19 October 1977, almost 13 million people watched open-mouthed as Coronation Street’s Deirdre Langton (Anne Kirkbride), was attacked and sexually assaulted underneath a viaduct. In the following episode, she was shown breaking down in tears and confessing to a friend, but refusing to go to the police out of shame, and later episodes traced the aftermath of the assault, with a traumatized Deirdre refusing to go out or to sleep with her husband.
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