The women's liberation movement in Scotland

Sarah Browne

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719087295
• eBook ISBN: 9781526112248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The first book-length account of the women's liberation movement (WLM) in Scotland

1

The women’s liberation movement in context

Historians are beginning to reassess and challenge the public portrayals of the 1970s. Recent publications by Andy Beckett, Dominic Sandbrook and Black, Pemberton and Thane indicate an increasing interest in this decade.¹ As they have concluded, the years between the governments of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher have tended to be overshadowed in historical accounts by the colourful 1960s. In comparison the 1970s loom large in public memory as a depressing age when political conflict and economic recession never seemed far away.² But this does the 1970s a disservice. As Sandbrook has correctly identified, ‘many of the things we associate with the 1960s only gathered momentum in the first half of the [1970s]’.³ However, media portrayals of the decade still persist such as the lights going out, rubbish piling up in the streets and a three-day working week. These have all led to ‘a pervasive sense of crisis and discontent’ which has continued to be associated with the decade right up to the present day.⁴ But scratch beneath these images and evidence would suggest that the decade was far more complicated than this. If the 1970s are viewed from the perspective of protestors and political activists then it was an exciting and productive period for alternative politics. Indeed Black and Pemberton in their attempt to reassess the 1970s have argued that those who were ‘seen as troublemakers of the 1970s can be read in different ways – in a wider context, and their actions as creative, democratic, demotic acts’.⁵ This was especially true for many young women. Often described like the start of a great love affair, the early 1970s were a time of discovery and intense excitement.⁶

However in reassessing the 1970s historians must be cautious about declaring that it was the most important decade in our understanding of post-1945 Britain. While many activists viewed the 1970s differently from how the decade has subsequently been described, for the vast majority of people involvement in left-wing politics and protest movements was not part of their daily routines. But it is evident that there must be more recognition that the 1970s were ‘about moments of possibility as well as periods of entropy’ and that, while many people may not have become politically active, they were still affected by the changes which political and social movements campaigned for.⁷ Indeed, these ‘moments of possibility’ were not restricted to women. Political activism flourished during this period, with many individuals active in a variety of different groups at the same time. Of central importance to these groups was the emergence of New Left thinking. With the fragmentation of the Communist Party in the late 1950s there was a proliferation of left-wing groups which sought to challenge the inflexibility of Communist thought and practice. The New Left was also characterised by its focus on the personal aspects of politicisation. Major theorists included Herbert Marcuse and Louis Althusser and these theories were promoted in Britain through the New Left Review and New Left Books (now Verso).⁸ Consequently, New Left thinking influenced many sections of society, including, for example, psychiatry, the student movement, anti-Vietnam protest groups and antiracist activism.⁹

These groups provided an important context to the emerging WLM, creating a radical political milieu in which protest methods and ideas were exchanged, and action was taken in solidarity. Central to these discussions was a focus on the personal aspects of politics, such as sexuality. For example the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) emerged in Britain in the early 1970s. It challenged existing reformist organisations by demanding that society should change its understanding and treatment of homosexuals, rather than homosexuals changing their lifestyles to fit in with society.¹⁰ In this regard it seemed to be quite successful because, as Robinson has noted, the GLF changed ‘the public face of lesbian and gay politics in Britain’.¹¹ As the 1970s progressed, women’s liberation groups often supported the protests of groups like the GLF.

Theorising liberation

An important constituent of this emerging radical political milieu was the WLM. Influenced by this turn towards personal politics it produced a number of important texts and theories and helped to transform, or at the very least influence, the agendas of other social movements and groups of the time, often forcing many male activists to acknowledge that women suffered from particular forms of oppression. A major trend in recent historical research has been to shift attention away from the published texts of the movement and towards the activities of the grass-roots.¹² While this is clearly an important development in determining the impact of the movement and in understanding its diversity, it is evident that the ideas contained within feminist publications of the late 1960s and 1970s were significant not only in stimulating the movement but in giving feminist activists a sense of identity and a set of ideas to organise campaigns around. For example, Betty Friedan’s 1963 publication The Feminine Mystique is often seen as being important in stimulating the rise of the WLM not only in the USA but elsewhere too. Indeed, McQuiston has argued this publication ‘took the lid off the isolation of those “happy housewives” and lit a spark of revolution’.¹³ Exposing the myth that American women were happy to remain in the home, Friedan urged women to campaign for equal rights. There are clear problems with asserting that paid employment would liberate women but this book is widely recognised as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century as it led many women to acknowledge for the first time that they were leading lives which made them unhappy.¹⁴ Labelled as Friedan’s European counterpart, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was also highly influential and was clearly ‘the key feminist tract’ in many countries in Western Europe.¹⁵ Its influence was such that feminism in the 1970s often became synonymous with one name: Germaine Greer.¹⁶ This is interesting given that Greer was never directly involved in the WLM. But this publication’s focus on sexuality and the body was a radical departure from most writings on gender and was, therefore, extremely novel in both its content and its approach.¹⁷

Other influential feminist writers included Juliet Mitchell, Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone. Like Greer, Firestone also focused on the body and the personal aspects of politics. She moved the parameters of the debate about the oppression of women to focus more specifically on the cultural exploitation of women. Her most notable and controversial passage was on the ability of science to free women from the role of childbearing.¹⁸ What these publications illustrate is a growing interest in ‘the body’ and women’s personal freedom. Indeed during this period we can observe a shift amongst feminist campaigners from the importance attached to the notion of equality towards favouring liberation. The concept of liberation echoed developments in New Left thinking and allowed feminist activists to widen the campaign against female oppression to include all aspects of women’s lives. Campaigns would no longer focus solely on women’s public roles as the WLM highlighted the discrimination women also faced in the home and in relationships, successfully blurring the division between the public and the private.

These texts not only inspired women to adopt a feminist identity; they also helped to form new theories about women and feminism. Indeed much more research is needed in order to understand the different ideas which emerged from the WLM and how these ideas shaped understandings of feminism during the 1970s and beyond. Until recently women’s liberation theories have tended to be described in an overly simplistic fashion, carving the movement up into two camps: radical and socialist feminists. Many accounts describe how socialist feminists believed that the purpose of their politics was to challenge capitalism and to address class divisions, at the same time as challenging the oppression of women. In contrast radical feminists believed that class was not the central division in society, instead preferring to emphasise the division between men and women. They argued that the women’s movement should not be aimed towards a class war but should be attempting to overthrow patriarchy.¹⁹ Radical feminism had emerged at the British women’s liberation conference in 1972 when a group presented a paper which took a ‘pro-woman line reminiscent of Redstockings’.²⁰ Throughout the 1970s supporters of these theories appeared to be jostling for position, each trying to make sure that one or the other would determine movement politics. This was an ongoing conversation for many women’s movements in the USA and Western Europe but it was particularly important in Britain because of the prominence of class.²¹ There were other ideologies, including, for example, revolutionary feminism, which Rees has described as the ‘younger cousin’ of radical feminism, but which is often mistakenly understood as the same ideology as radical feminism. Instead, revolutionary feminism emerged in the later 1970s after a group of Leeds-based women presented a conference paper which argued for the movement to focus on ‘men as the enemy’.²² As will be illustrated in this book, these ideological differences were never entirely clear cut in Scotland. Yet, while acknowledging the problems with simplistic labels, it is clear that these theories were very important in producing an understanding of women’s liberation. These theories may not have been adopted wholeheartedly by every woman in the movement but they formed an important focus for discussions and led to fruitful debates about what the aims of the WLM should be.

Practical examples of women’s liberation

While these ideas were important the practical example of the WLM in the USA also encouraged the growth of a movement in Britain. It was in the USA that women’s liberation first emerged. Different reasons have been offered for the rise of women’s liberation in the USA. Factors such as increasing numbers of women attending universities, rising prosperity, a backlash against a stultifying femininity which was an integral part of 1950s American society, and, arguably most importantly, the rise of social and political movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, the Students Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and groups campaigning against American participation in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War.²³

Women’s liberation also arose out of the contradiction identified by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. As more women were encouraged to go to university they found that upon graduation they were not expected to get a job or to have any career aspirations but were instead still expected to get married and to raise a family.²⁴ Many young women looked at their mothers’ lives and demanded more. Their expectations were raised at the very point when New Left thinking was arguing for a more egalitarian society and more opportunities for the younger generation. These internal and external forces led to small groups of women beginning to meet to discuss their frustrations. From these discussions political action emerged. It was these actions which catapulted women’s liberation from being a discussion topic amongst a small group of politically engaged women to capturing, for a time, the attention of the media, government and wider society. For example in 1968 a group of feminists protested against the Miss America contest. They placed high-heels, bras and women’s magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, into a ‘freedom trash can’. Whether or n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTE ON THE TEXT
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• Introduction
• 1 The women’s liberation movement in context
• 2 The women of the movement
• 3 Finding their anger in consciousness-raising
• 4 Women’s liberation in the local context
• 5 Building a network
• 6 Abortion: a woman’s right to choose
• 7 Violence against women
• Conclusion
• APPENDIX I: SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWEES
• APPENDIX II: THE SEVEN DEMANDS OF THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX