women's movement conference took place in 1970. But it was 1968 which saw the birth of the modern women's liberation movement. The upheavals of that year provided a catalyst for a movement which, for all its weaknesses, survives today and is testimony to the thoroughgoing changes which were set in motion at that time, writes JUDITH ARKWRIGHT. THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT emerged in '68 took a number of diffe- rent forms. The popular image of the bra burners and the miss world protesters was only a part of a number of develop- ments that came together all at once. The decade preceding 1968 had seen many changes in women's employment patterns and, between 1959 and 1964, a massive increase in the unionisation of women — twice as fast, in fact, as the increase in women employed. In 1954 the very active campaign for equal pay for teachers and civil servants had come to a climax and the Tory government was forced to concede in principle, though it was not imple- mented until 1961. This concession was also partly a result of the rising birthrate and the fact that, consequently, more women teachers were needed. Nevertheless interest in equal pay was now aroused and the issue never really went away from that time.' In fact the expansion of the welfare state in general led to a growth of female employment in which in turn increased pressure for concessions on equal pay. Around this time the ideas of the US women's movement were beginning to percolate through to this country. Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, had been published in 1963. Friedan represented mainly middle class profes- sional women (the book is partly based on a survey of her classmates). The National Organisation of Women which she helped set up partly reflected that. Other works by radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics were not published in this country until 1970 and 1971. To a certain extent they represented a reaction to the left's res- ponse to women's liberation. Sheila Rowbotham remembers that 'in the autumn of 1968 vague rumours of the women's movement in America and Germany reached Britain...All we knew 30 was that women had met together and
which encountered opposition within the left'.?
Women on the left involved in the events of 1968 were beginning to question the role ascribed to them by men.
I ART 1) LESBIAN I AM BEAUTIF that time came from elsewhere. It was working class women who took up the struggle around various issues including the unfinished struggle for equal pay.
In the spring of 1968 a women's rights group was formed in Hull around a campaign led by Lil Bolocca and the fishermen's wives to improve the safety of trawlers after two ships had been lost in January of that year.
In the same year 300 sewing machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant went on strike, demanding that their job should be regraded. The strike lasted three
weeks and the women extended their demands to the general principle of equal pay. They were only partially successful - winning their demand in full only after a further strike and appeal to an industrial tribunal in April 1985!
This example alone points up the inadequacies of the legislation on equal pay that was passed in the intervening 17 years! During 1969 there were further strikes for equal pay in Skelmersdale, Manchester, Coventry and Dundee.3
In October 1970 the two developing strands of the broader women's movement were to come together around the campaign by night cleaners for the right to join the Transport and General Workers Union. In this campaign they were supported by the Dalston women's liberation workshop and firm links were now being made with the emerging women's liberation movement.
Although the Ford women had not won everything they wanted they had succeeded in putting the issue on the agenda once more and the Labour government was forced to put the promises of its 1964 election manifesto into
the establishment of the national joint action committee for women's equal rights. This committee, made up of sections of the trade union
Tand women's organisations, called a demonstration in May 1969 and, in the autumn of that year, Barbara Castle introduced her equal pay bill. The bill finally became law in 1970 and, for all its loopholes, it was an important milestone — the first major piece of legislation on women's rights since the 1920s.
In a separate but parallel development at the end of 1968 and beginning of But Sheila Rowbotham points out that 1969, women's liberation groups were the actual initiative for organisation at taking the first faltering steps to establish themselves. There were two groups in London and one in Essex. The Tufnell Park group in particular was very influential and produced the first newsletter, called Harpies Bazaar later to become Shrew. For the most part such groups were made up of the far left, including women involved in Vietnam solidarity and American women students. These groups also included young mothers unhappy with the role ascribed to them within the wider struggle.
Sheila Rowbotham recalls the res-
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no7 Mayitune 1988
ponse to an article she wrote for Black Dwarf in January 1969 on marxism and the sexual humiliation of women: 'I remember one left man coming up to me and with a pitying air saying he supposed it had helped me to express my personal problems but it was nothing to do with socialism'!4
What the history of the women's movement shows us time and again is the continual reluctance of the labour movement in general, and the left within it, to take the issues seriously.
At that time one important way to take on the male left was the establishment of socialst women's groups, based
the International Marxist Group, but attracting wider forces. The February 1969 issue of Socialist Woman stressed rather anxiously that 'We are not anti-male, a charge often thrown at those concerned with the women ques-
We are opposed to private property, the alienation of labour under capitalism...to men who do the gaffer's job and assist him to do the dirty on women
whether in the home or in
Most accounts seem to agree that, compared to its role in the US women's movement, consciousness raising as such was not so important in the early period of the movement in Britain. All the groups mentioned above were mainly involved in campaigning activities.
One campaign which reached the headlines in 1969 and again in 1970 was the miss world protest.
The miss world competitions were an appropriate target for the beginnings of the women's movement at this time since they epitomised everything that the new generation of women rejected about the fifties. The contest was established in 1951 by Mecca managing director Eric Morley. He explained that married women were banned from the contest because it might make woman dissatisfied with her life as housewife and mother...
Of course it was this protest and a similar one in the US at the 1968 miss demands of the movement for equal pay, America contest — when bras, girdles, false eyelashes and cosmetics were thrown into the dustbin - that helped give the women's movement its image. However, the women involved in the protest saw it in a correct context ignored by the hostile media.
One of them wrote at the time that I see the miss world contest was but a drop in the ocean of capitalism's mess.. Exposing it because we related to it was the beginning of a rejection of our culturally privileged positions...But freaking out at the phoney glamour of began to develop in the seventies. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/june 1988
this sort of spectacle is only a start, because it's still a limited and middle class response'?
Ta way typical of the moment of the need to broaden out and link up with other women. Nevertheless, propaganda actions like this are an important part of our heritage and can perform an important role at times.
The begininngs of a centralised women's movement can be dated from the February 1970 conference. been called as a result of women getting together at a meeting on working class history held at Ruskin college. When the time came for the conference, be moved to the Oxford Union building because so many more than expected turned up — about 500 women.
FREE ALERTIN HEMA MI
This conference established the four equal educational opportunities, twenty-four hour nurseries and free abortion on demand. The four demands later became seven when they were added to at subsequent conferences. Groups then started to get more active and the real growth began to occur after the demonstration of 8 March 1971.8
For the women involved there was a sense of historic achievement which was not always appreciated by the left and others, though a greater understanding of the significance of this
The women's liberation movement was very much born in the late 1960s and in a way provided one of the more lasting gains of that period, though we cannot underestimate the extent to which the gains that women made are being challenged today, despite superficial adaptations to feminism.
The long lasting effect of the movement points up some of the differences between it and previous struggles of women.
The women's movement of the sixties and seventies was all-embracing in its vision of women's position in society and, although women were active on specific campaigns, there existed a collective consciousness which challenged women's role in the family and as sex objects in a way which had not really been done before.
It is because of this vision and because of the way it grew up that this movement was a much more natural ally of the left and of the labour movement than its US counterpart proved to be. It is to be regretted that this was not always recognised by the left.
Lee Comer, who was involved in the socialist feminist current that was to develop later, best summed up this aspect of the movement in a passage from her book Wedlocked Women:
"The women's liberation moment is not and never has been about the amelioration of the position of women vis-a-vis men in capitalist society...Because the women's movement analyses and questions the very fundamentals of human experience - the division of labour between the sexes, the tenets of masculinity and femininity, the sexual oppressive nature of a society divided by class, sex and race — the movement, unlike any before it, confronts both the minutiae and the totality of human experience...women bring the acutality of their experience, pinioned at the base of the family unit and in the lowest sector of the workforce, into a political awareness of the totality of oppression'' • Footnotes 1. Cited in E. Wilson, Only half way to paradise, Tavistock. 2. Sheila Rowbotham, "The beginnings of women's liberation' in The body politic, Stage 1. 3. April Carter, The politics of women's rights, Longman. 4. Sheila Rowbotham, op. cit. 5. Socialist Woman, February 1969. 6. Cited in 'Miss World' in The bady politic, Stage 1. 7. ihid. 8. April Carter, op. cit. 9. Lee Comer, Wedlocked women, Feminist Books. 31
Women protest in the occupied territories