Heterosexual Love in the British Women's Liberation Movement: reflections from the Sisterhood and After archive

The question of how to be a heterosexual feminist has long vexed women's liberationists. This article is interested in how a set of British activist women in the 1970s dealt with the challenges of heterosexual love. The article's source for this is the Sisterhood and After archive, the relatively untouched tranche of interviews with leading activists in the women's liberation movement (WLM), compiled between 2010 and 2013 and held at the British Library. Through these intimate and often enigmatic sources, the author sets out to explore the space between the theory of loving men and its practice among a handful of women liberationists. In doing so the author emphasises the importance of a supra-political space, the private, in the composition of these narratives. In addition, the socialist complexion to the British women’s movement is considered in the context of the wider political moment of the 1970s.