The Women's Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain

Abstract

George Stevenson's new book is a significant addition to the growing body of literature seeking to unravel the tangled origin stories, history, and demise of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in Britain. Since the publication in 1982 of Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell's Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women's Liberation, the intersections and tensions between class, race, and gender, alongside a focus on metropolis versus local activism, have fashioned and refashioned the telling of this important chapter in the history of female activism. These histories include Sarah Browne's The Women's Liberation Movement in Scotland (2014), Natalie Thomlinson's Race and Ethnicity in the Women's Movement in England 1968 to 1993 (2016), and Margaretta Jolly's Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women's Liberation Movement, 1968–Present (2019).Stevenson's original contribution to this rich historiography is to foreground the experiences of working-class women active in the WLM and the importance of class politics during the years 1968 to 1979. In doing so he effectively demonstrates that “an engagement with working-class women and women's class politics was a primary concern of the WLM from its origins to its diffusion” (181). Adopting this approach, Stevenson successfully disrupts and complicates long-held assumptions that the WLM in Britain was dominated by a white, middle-class sensibility. This novel interpretation is enabled by Stevenson's acknowledgment that the WLM never represented the women's movement in its entirety. Instead, it emerged in 1968 as a “new and distinct stage of struggle for women in the twentieth century” (2). This distinction is important. It embodies the revisionist interpretation of the history of female activism, including my own work, which asserts that the WLM did not emerge from a “vacuum” or as a distinct “second wave” (2). The WLM was shaped by what went before, and this included the long engagement in gender activism among working-class women in various locales, including feminist societies, trade unions, religious organizations, and housewives’ associations.Over seven chapters, Stevenson analyzes the relationship between class, identity, and politics in the narratives of women active within the WLM. This is achieved through an in-depth critique of existing literature and the judicious use of previously created oral history archives. In addition, the author includes his own oral history interviews, carried out with members of the Coast Women's Group, based in North Tyneside (in northeastern England). Their inclusion builds on the work of Browne and others in demonstrating how important it is for historians to cast their nets wider than London to capture a more complete and nuanced picture of activism among women liberationists throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s. Moreover, oral history accounts are effectively used here to further understand meanings of the past “by revealing the assumptions that framed the WLM, the society it existed in and the individual's relationship to them through the prism of class” (25). The Coast Group interviews are particularly revealing in demonstrating the extent to which the Labour Movement and the WLM were “fundamentally interlinked” (51).Having convincingly set out the close relationship between the WLM and class politics, the focus turns to the significance of women's work, both productive and reproductive, in framing the demands and concerns of the WLM from 1968 to the end of the 1970s. Particularly interesting here is the detailed discussion of WLM support for female industrial action even though women workers were far more likely to see themselves as engaged in class, as opposed to feminist, politics. Stevenson's analysis of the 1970 Equal Pay Act and its limitations, along with his reassessment of the “Wages for Housework” campaign, are additional strengths of the book. Stevenson shows here how British feminists “sought to bring struggles over community, housing, housework and personal autonomy and independence into the arena of class politics” (26). In documenting feminism and community action, Stevenson acknowledges the difficulties the WLM encountered in reaching out to working-class housewives. Some success was achieved via engagement with playgroups and nurseries. However, no mention is made here of traditional housewives’ associations. This is a pity. It would have been interesting to learn what, if any, links were made between WLM groups and preexisting women's organizations made up of middle- and working-class members.Stevenson provides an insightful and important critique of the concept of sisterhood and the use of autobiography and collective memory in telling the histories of the WLM. Stevenson successfully applies Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social and cultural capital and the concept of habitus, to explain how working-class women often felt excluded. This perception of a middle-class and white power base within the WLM was a common theme in oral history accounts of working-class activists, thereby undermining the supposed unifying ideal of sisterhood. Stevenson interrogates the apparent unwillingness of WLM members to acknowledge class and race inequalities within WLM groups, in a misguided effort to maintain sisterhood. The ability of the new and separate Black Women's Movement to overcome class difference, through a shared sense of racial identity, sets the failures of the WLM in even sharper relief. Central to these discussions was how women liberationists constructed their own class identities, and this important question is examined in the concluding chapter. Stevenson argues convincingly that the rebalancing of historical accounts of the WLM, to ensure greater diversity and inclusivity, must consider both race and class.More work is needed on the history of female activism and the women's movement in late twentieth-century Britain. The experiences of WLM activists in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland are missing in this volume. More needs to be said about the links between the WLM and the wider women's movement. Despite these omissions, this book is without doubt an important addition to the historiography of the WLM. It reveals much about the experience of working-class women liberationists and reminds historians of the importance of class as a category of analysis.