Women's Lib

Something reminded me the other day about the Women's Liberation Movement (I think it was a newspaper article about how today's young women are indifferent to feminism, finding it irrelevant). Looking back I see it as something that was a fashion, something you did, because everyone else did. I know that I was very enthusiastic , buying The Female Eunuch and marvelling at it. I also read Kate Millett and some others whose names I can't quite remember at the moment, though I'm sure I'd recognise them if someone reminded me. Oh, I know - Jill Tweedie in the Guardian and of course pioneers like Mary Stott.

Anyway, I started to trawl my memory - I went along to weekly meetings of the local Women's Lib group with a couple of friends, one of which was a New Zealander, Heather, who arrived on our doorstep at the squat in Oxford that myself and my boyfriend had just moved into. She'd been looking for somewhere to live and someone had told her. She was, at the time, a radical feminist, dressed glamorously in an ankle-length ex-Nazi leather coat she'd picked up in an Amsterdam flea-market. She was as thin as a rake and stood on our doorstep, smoking a roll-up. 'Hi - I'm Heather', were her first words, in the broadest Kiwi accent. I'd never met anyone like her before. and her direct, down-to-earth Antipodean good sense soon sorted our flaccid hippy haven.
She introduced me to the burgeoning feminist movement and, along with a few others, went along with Heather to the early meeitings of the local Women's Liberation group. It was in a small church hall type of place and we all sat round in a circle and talked, and sometimes shouted. Our boyfriends would come along with us and sit in the garden of a nearby pub waiting for us, with an air of amused tolerance. Anyway, I don't remember much of what we discussed, except one occasion when someone brought along a film of miners' wives, and the support systems they'd created to help their husbands and their communities during the recent miners' strike (this was around 1973-4, so we were right in the middle of the ill-fated Heath government). This film caused a right storm - I think the woman who'd brought it along had intended to show us that working-class women were as capable of organisation as us middle-class types, but someone got up and angrily asked the group why we sitting watching stuff about a load of housewives, who, of course, were slaves to servility. There was a huge row about the direction feminism should go in - anywa, it was all pretty unedifying, and as someone, probably the only person in the room apart from Heather, also from a humble background, who had some personal experience of working-class life. I don't remember any other meetings, and we soon lost interest in going, though not before we'd participated in an event that still brings me out in a cold sweat every time I think about it.
The group had heard that the students at St Catherine's College, Oxford had hired a stripper to 'perform' in their Junior Common Room (JCR), so it was decided that we'd infiltrate the event and disrupt it. Although the college was all-male in those days, the students had been allowed to bring women to this event so it was pretty easy to get in and sit there unnoticed. What transpired was truly scary - the stripper got going and this was the cue for us to stand up and start shouting things like 'this degrades women' and chanting. There were quite a few of us, but the room was crowded and there were a hell of a lot of students. They went ballistic and chased us out - I don't know what happened because I fled into the nearest ladies' loo and cowered until the mayhem died down and I could slink out unnoticed. The noise was terrific and what was most scary was the bile and viciousness that emanated from the thwarted crowd. I suppose they'd worked themselves up into a state of high sexual anticipation and excitement, and we'd thwarted them. Anyway, I was terrified, not only of the students, but of being found out by my braver colleagues and labelled a coward, which of course I was. The whole episode told me that political activism was not for me and I went on to have babies and acquire the status of the dreaded housewife.
I wonder what happened to everyone there? I know that one of the group went on to marry a vicar and become a well-known writer, and Heather went on to forge a great career at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after many ups and downs, becoming an Australian in the process. She's stayed a good friend and we've kept in close touch, but I sometimes think about all those other young feminists and wonder where they are....