THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT AT FORTY, Ruskin College, Oxford, 12-13 March 2010.

Abstract

To walk into Ruskin College on the fortieth anniversary of the first women’s liberation conference was for me, as for many of the women there, to summon up the remembrance of conferences past; and not only the first Women’s Liberation conference which this conference was remembering and celebrating. For anyone involved in the women’s movement, the History Workshop movement or left politics in the 1970s and ’80s, the seminar-rooms and lecture hall of Ruskin were very familiar and full of memories. Several generations of women were represented at this conference, as a display of hands at the opening address demonstrated. There were some who had been instrumental in the organization of the very first feminist conference in Britain, some who had grown up into the Women’s Movement with those women as their foremothers, and some with a relatively recent involvement in feminist activism. I was far too young to have...