I first got involved in the Women's Liberation Movement in 1970 at the
age
of 19, and have been politically active as a feminist ever since. For
most
of this time I have worked in feminist and radical publishing, while for
the last 2 1/2 years I have been part of Women Speak Out, a network of
mainly younger women who define themselves as anti-capitalist, radical
feminists. My other main political activity is campaigning as a
community
activist in Hackney, the working-class, ethnically diverse area of
London
where I live. My main focus has been on the issue of maintaining the
relatively high local level of full-time, affordable nursery provision
in
the borough. Almost all the people I work with on the issue of nurseries
are women, and though few of them would define themselves as feminists,
it
is clear that women feel passionate about nurseries in terms of their
personal autonomy. Nursery provision is just one area of public services
that is being annihilated by the Blairite/Thatcherite agenda of
privatisation of public services and the concomitant destruction of
local
government. Because women still do the vast majority of caring, and
tend,
at least in working-class areas, to identify primarily with their local
community, fighting these policies must be regarded as a feminist issue.
I have recently encountered an attitude being put forward by some media
pundits and academic feminists a) that the Women's Liberation Movement
as
an activist political movement is dead and b) that no woman under thirty
is
interested in identifying with an activist women's movement. However, my
personal experience of long-term radical feminist activism seems to
suggest
otherwise. I plan to address some of the possible reasons for this
apparent
discrepancy, the most obvious being the role of feminists in the
academy,
the interlocking role of the metropolitan-dominated media, and a limited
understanding by many prominent feminist commentators of the influence
of
race and class on people's political activity.
I shall conclude by examining some of the similarities and differences
between feminist activism in the 1970s and now. This will hopefully
enable
us to consider how best to re-invigorate an activist Women's Liberation
Movement, which, I contend, has never really gone away.
return to
conference