Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

Researching difference and diversity within women's movements: Sisterhood and after

This paper illustrates how Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project has approached difference and diversity within the history of women's movements. I argue that the terms ‘difference and diversity’ cannot do justice to histories of black women unless they are used to highlight the impact of race on black women's experiences in women's movements. Furthermore given the widespread acknowledgment that there was tension in the British women's liberation movement over the marginalization, exclusion and racism faced by black and Asian women, the project sought to ensure that black and Asian women's varied experiences as campaigners were explored and we also asked our white interviewees about race. I show how the in-depth nature of the life history interview method holds the possibility for greater reflection on these vital and often unsettling issues in feminism's history.     

Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: origins and evolution, 1970–2000

The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside accounts and debates which appeared in printed sources, such as books and newsletters from the British Women's liberation movement from 1970 onwards. The article also reflects on the process in which past events and personal memoirs move from stories to histories, enter the archive, and begin to acquire the status of history.     

Consciousness-Raising in Clapham; Women's Liberation as ‘Lived Experience’ in South London in the 1970s

This article demonstrates the centrality of the small group process, known as consciousness-raising, to the women's liberation movement in 1970s Britain. It argues that by focusing on women's liberation campaigns, demands and conferences too much emphasis has been placed on the ‘public’ face of the movement and insufficient emphasis has been given to the process by which women sought to understand their oppression, redefine themselves and create new feminist identities. By examining the impact of women's liberation on personal life we see how women sought to live out the implications of the slogan ‘the personal is political’. This article examines the process of consciousness-raising in one south London group from 1972 to 1979.     

Bridging cross-cultural feminisms: annie besant and women's rights in England and India, 1874-1933

Abstract

Annie Besant was a Victorian radical whose outspoken views included advocacy of women's rights and opposition to British imperial policies. In her mid-forties she went to live in India. Contesting British attempts to Westernize Indian society, Besant found herself in the seemingly anomalous position of defending traditional Indian patriarchy and resisting efforts to reform the status of Indian women. Such conservatism brought on Besant criticism not only from Western liberals and Christian missionaries, but also from many Indian social reformers. When she gradually shifted her views and voiced her support for Indian women's rights, Indian nationalists condemned her as a British imperialist. The conflict between loyalty to national heritage and opposition to traditional patriarchy is one that colonized women have commonly experienced. By examining how an anti-imperialist British feminist responded to the question of women's reform in India, this paper offers another perspective on the complexities of this dilemma.     

Defining Female Subjectivities in Italy: motherhood and abortion in the individual and collective memories of the 1970s women's movement in Bologna

In Italy, women have long been stereotypically marked as either objects of sexual desire or as producers of new life. This changed radically in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism redefined gender relations and experimented with new paths of life not determined by matrimony and maternity. The legalisation of abortion, during the second half of the decade, is now hailed as one of the primary achievements of the women's movement. A theme closely connected to abortion such as motherhood, on the other hand, seems to have been excluded from the public memory of 1970s feminism. Drawing on the outcomes of an oral history project, this article unearths the dominant discourses and individual and collective silences within the public memory of the 1970s women's movement in the Italian city of Bologna, and explores the processes of creating ‘composure’ among women as they remember their experiences of motherhood and abortion.     

‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral histories of female members of the MIR in Chile through the work of Luisa Passerini

This article engages the work of Luisa Passerini in order to analyze the oral histories of women who belonged to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a theoretical framework that considers the interplay between memory, testimony, and gender as well as a transnational historical perspective can help explain how feminism and ‘new left’ groups emerged from the revolutionary 1968 context. Of primary concern is the manner in which certain gendered aspects of the MIR women's experiences—particularly the brutal sexualized political violence they endured at the hands of the state—have been historically silenced and also how, more recently, women's testimonials have helped to break that silence. Finally, the article proposes that feminism, both as a mode of critical thinking and as a social movement, will allow us to more fully ‘hear’ the testimonies of these women and to understand how their memories are ‘speaking from today.’     

Informing Red Power and Transforming the Second Wave: Native American women and the struggle against coerced sterilization in the 1970s

It is argued that despite formidable foes—including powerful feminist organizations and Native American rights groups—Indigenous women's activism had an important influence on the larger movement for the termination of sterilization abuse in 1970s USA. Their work highlighted coerced sterilization as a most agonizing example of compromised tribal sovereignty—and demanded that political leaders address it. The article describes the tangible achievements of these women in effecting federal regulations as well as their influence on mainstream American feminist ideology and Indian Country's interpretation of women's rights as sovereign ones.     

The Women's Movement and Government

Some scholars have suggested that institutionalisation and professionalisation of women's movement organisations leads to ‘feminist fading’. This article examines whether such propositions hold true for the Australian women's movement. It maps changes in the women's movement that had emerged by the 1990s, including increased diversity and increased national and international networking as well as increased institutionalisation. It finds that loss of political influence has less to do with institutionalisation than with a changed discursive environment that constructed the welfare state and women's reliance on it as a problem. Nonetheless, women's movement institutions have continued to sustain feminist values and engage in differently organised but effective campaigns. A case study of the women's health movement in Victoria shows how it succeeded in having abortion removed from the criminal code in 2008. Repertoire had changed since the 1970s but the goal remained the same.     

‘Fanm Se Poto Mitan’: Haitian Woman,the Pillar of Society

In this paper Marie-Jose N'zengou-Tayo draws on a variety of sources, both historical and contemporary, to describe the journey of Haitian women from nineteenth-century post-War of Independence, to present-day Haitian society.The paper is divided in two sections. In the first, the author traces a brief social history of women, quoting anthropological and sociological studies from the 1930s to the 1970s. She begins with rural peasant women noting their significant involvement in farming, marketing and in the internal food trade sector. The development of polygamy and common law unions as the most common form of conjugal union is seen as a practical response to survival in rural Haiti. The author notes the major impact on women's lives of continued political upheavals, violent repression, rural degradation and migration to the cities. Opportunities for employment in a deprived urban setting, and women's initiatives in income generating are also described under the Duvalier regimes. A brief overview of the lives of the middle class is included, although there is a paucity of research in this area available to the author. Violence against women is a regular threat facing domestic workers, and a means of repression used by the state against women across classes.In the second section N'Zengou-Tayo addresses the literary representation of Haitian women by both female and male Haitian writers. The paper examines how female writers have developed subversive narrative strategies to shape a female identity in order to break away from the stereotypes portrayed in men's writing.N'Zengou-Tayo concludes that the tremendous contribution of Haitian women to their society has neither been recognized nor documented. Despite this, the resilience of Haitian women, whether in their daily lives or in their writing, has enabled them to make strides towards improving their lives.     

Women's Voices in Swedish Towns and Cities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: municipal franchise,polling, eligibility and strategies for universal suffrage

This article examines women's polling and eligibility in the municipal elections in Swedish cities and towns in the decades round the 1900 turn of the century. The aim is to present the patterns of suffrage, voting behaviours and representation that emerge from statistics produced by the women's movement and to discuss how these relate to the women's movement's strategies for women's political citizenship and national suffrage. The results are furthermore analysed in comparison with eighteenth-century conditions, when legally competent women who paid taxes could vote in some elections.     

Gaining a Public Voice: Ottoman women's struggle to survive in the print life of early twentieth-century Ottoman society,and the example of Halide Edib (1884–1964)

After delving into the emergence of women in Ottoman print culture and the challenges associated with this process, this paper focuses on women's periodicals which provided a platform for women writers, education for a female audience and a means of communication between both parties. Analysing the social and technical challenges of establishing independently run and long-lived women's journals under the restrictive circumstances of the early twentieth century's gender-segregated Ottoman society, this article not only documents women's struggle for survival in the publishing world but also explains why women's periodicals and their female authors had an ephemeral print life. After acknowledging the role of print culture in the women's emancipation movement, the focus is on Halide Edib as an exceptional example in terms of her survival and transformation from unknown to world-renowned author. Her struggle to enter and become established in the print life of the late Ottoman society illustrates the potential and available positions for women in the publishing sphere and explains the failure of her female contemporaries to achieve success in this area.     

‘Hand in hand with the women,forward we will go’: welsh nationalism and feminism in the 1890s

This article explores the history of women's liberalism in Wales in the 1880s and 1890s, during the period of the Liberal nationalist movement known as Cymru Fydd or Young Wales. The Welsh Union of Women's Liberal Associations (WUWLA) was founded in 1892 to provide an important bloc of votes for the Progressive (Suffragist) faction in the Women's Liberal Federation, but its aims combined Liberal, Nationalist and feminist objectives. This article argues that briefly, and uniquely, in the 1890s, the WUWLA was able to bring together feminism and nationalism in British party politics, despite some opposition from its own nationalist members. The active intervention of women ensured that the masculinist language of nationalism shifted to an emphasis on equality of the sexes. In 1895, Cymru Fydd, embodied in the Welsh National Federation, espoused women's suffrage among its objects, and gave women's organisations special representation in its structures. This change is explored both through the writings and the events – a series of meetings and conferences – which led to the formation of both the WUWLA and the Welsh National Federation. But the weakness of liberalism at the end of the 1890s, together with divisions within Wales, meant that the new politics was short lived. The decline of women's national organisation after this period, though not fully explored here, can be linked to those problems, but also to the rifts created between Liberals, women and men, over the issue of women's suffrage in the Edwardian period.     

Constructing women's citizenship in the interwar period: the Edinburgh women citizens’ association

As a new stage in women's political participation, enfranchisement brought new efforts to advance gender equality and women's social position and new organisations were formed of women voters, including the women citizens' associations. Concerns with women's and children's welfare and social reform that had been important to sections of the pre-war women's movement were repositioned alongside the pursuit of an equal franchise, equal pay and opportunities and women's representation, in relation to women's new political status. Study of the women citizens' associations in Scotland supports an account of the period 1918-30 as one of considerable political activity, particularly in developing women's role and influence in relation to established political institutions and civil society. It suggests that the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ feminisms after 1918, mapped onto the binary of equality and difference, was not necessarily a tension for women's organisations. It gives insight into the meaning of ‘citizenship’ for women activists and how the status, rights and responsibilities of citizenship articulated and shaped a distinctive women's politics, bridging political, civil and social rights.     

Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’ and Female Desire in England 1960–1975

In The Sadeian Woman (1979) Angela Carter suggested that the visions of free female sexuality created by the Marquis de Sade in his violent pornographic novels provided insight into existing female sexualities in her own—British—society. In this article the representation of female sexuality in novels set in contemporary British society, written by women, and published between 1960 and 1975, is examined in relation to Carter's exegesis of the good, virtuous Justine and the meretricious, sexually desirous Juliette, two contrasting characters from Sade's work. The limitations of the three other alternatives present in the novels are described; containment within long-term marriage, good-hearted promiscuity; and the rejection of emotional repression. Then Carter's own solution to women's sexual inequality is placed in the context of feminism in the late 1970s, and the role of the novels in contributing to change is acknowledged.     

‘The Message Is in the Book’: What Virago's Sale in 1995 Means for Feminist Publishing

This article examines the UK publisher Virago, the world's largest women's imprint and the best known of the second-wave feminist publishing houses that sprang up during the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist publishing remains a peculiarly unacknowledged and underexamined aspect of feminist history, but one that had real influence and effect. This article gives a historical account of Virago, noting its intention to enact feminist politicking through the act of publishing books. The author looks at the effect Virago had on the industry more widely, on literary culture and on attitudes to women. The author also examines changing formulations of feminism and how these were reflected—or not—through Virago's published output. The author then moves on to her central proposition: that Virago's sale in 1995, rather than marking the death of feminist publishing (as was stated in media comment at the time), was in fact the point at which it was saved. Virago's move into Little, Brown, coinciding with the rise of an increasingly commodified consumer culture, the conglomeration of the book industry and more pluralized expressions of feminism, allowed it to continue to work as a publisher of women's writing while none of its contemporaries survived. The author looks in detail at the changes post-1995 within the book industry, within feminism and in wider culture, as well as at Virago. The author asks whether Virago still has value as a ‘feminist’ imprint and how it has sought to remain vital and relevant.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

Historicising the Women's Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

The Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s emerged out of a set of economic and social circumstances where women collected together in disparate groups and contexts to express their dissatisfaction with their role and position in society. Through consciousness-raising and activism women raised their voices, profiles and visibility. This important moment of women's history is revisited in this collection of essays, which look afresh at the diversity of the movement and ways in which we might historicise the feminism of the time.     

Matilda sturge: ‘renaissance woman’ 1

Abstract

This article notes the virtual exclusion of women from accounts of the ‘Renaissance’ within late nineteenth-century British Quakerism. A focus upon a hitherto neglected figure, Matilda Sturge (1829-1903), author and Quaker minister, reveals her long-standing involvement in the aspects of Quakerism crucial to the Quaker Renaissance and as an active participant in the debates which preceded it. But Matilda Sturge also was active in the Home Mission movement, a project of Evangelical Friends, which has generally been represented as antithetical to the liberals of the Quaker Renaissance. Foregrounding women's experience introduces new perspectives on late nineteenth-century British Quakerism.     

Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women's movement, 1928–1945

In 1928 the YWCA welcomed the introduction of the universal suffrage by declaring that women in Britain were now entitled to the full political privileges of citizenship. This article will explore the way in which the YWCA, previously omitted from histories of the British women's movement, sought to educate and inform its members about the rights and duties of democratic citizenship. The involvement of the YWCA in citizenship education and its role in campaigning for the citizenship rights of women will be assessed, with a particular focus on workers’ rights and the appointment of women police. Despite its reluctance to be identified as overtly feminist, the YWCA was determined to ensure that women had access to social and economic rights within a democratic society. The article therefore argues that a new definition of the women's movement is required in order to uncover the full extent of female engagement in politics and public debate in the aftermath of the suffrage.