Women’s Liberation Now and Then by Sheila Jeffreys

A new wave of feminism is taking place and I never thought I would see one. I was involved in the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in London in the 1970s and 1980s before moving to Australia. Like all my sisters who continued to care about the WLM I experienced serious grief for a lost movement in the 1990s and particularly in the 2000s. It did seem that feminism would not rise again as all our women’s facilities disappeared, our discos, bookstores, publishers, women’s centres, bands. But then I was invited to speak at a radical feminist conference in London in 2012 and realised that a new wave of radical feminism was beginning to rise there. I moved back to the UK in search of it in 2015. It is wonderful to be involved in a burgeoning movement once more but this wave is very different in many ways from what we had before. As a woman whose youth was formed by the glories of the WLM a new movement had a lot to live up to. As I work in this new movement, I realise it has some glories of its own, it is intergenerational and international. I am finding community and friendship through my work with the campaign against the destruction of women’s rights by the transgender activist movement, particularly with the Women’s Human Rights Campaign. I meet up online with feminists and lesbian feminists from Spain and Germany, from South and North America. I am able to make a contribution once more and that delights me. I shall compare some of the elements of the WLM with the new movement that is growing.

One big difference is that the new wave is intergenerational. Back in the 1970s we thought we were inventing the wheel. We were not of course, but we did not have contact with the feminists who had been active in the period up to the second world war, or even those still active after it. This was different in Australia. In the UK, we were mostly very young, in our twenties, though some women were a bit older and some had young children. Women over 40, let alone over fifty, were largely absent. It is really different now because many women from the WLM are involved in the new wave and able to speak about what went before. The books that came out of the WLM and so inspired us then are reaching a new audience. The ideas do not all have to be invented from scratch. There is some continuity even though many younger feminists today are having to find feminist ideas for the first time because our movement, our books, our practices were excluded from gender studies (once women’s studies) courses in universities and from recognition generally, and there was a hiatus of a couple of decades between the death throes of the WLM in the 1990s and the beginning of a new wave in the 2010s.

Another difference is that the women who are coming to the new movement have an array of skills and talents that are greatly advanced compared with the 1970s. Back then women lawyers and doctors were rare. When we left university, it was to careers in teaching (mostly), the civil service and librarianship. We did not become scientists and filmmakers, engineers and architects. Decades of increasing opportunities for women have gone by, and the women I meet in the new movement are confident in their rights as well as their abilities. The new generation of feminist activists have advanced skills and access to malestream culture and politics that we did not. Women have taken it for granted now that they are equal citizens, in a way which we could not back then, when we had to protest the fact that many pubs would not serve women. So, it is a greater shock to them than it is to us veterans to discover that there is a massive campaign against women’s rights by transgender activists and their allies, which includes the erasure of women as a category of persons based on sex.  

But getting this new wave going is a sluggish business and faces a huge and furious male backlash. Feminists now are reprimanded, bullied, doxed or reported to the police and taken to court by transgender activists if they assert that women exist as a rights-bearing category which needs separate services. It is inspiring to see the rage of women who had expectations that women’s rights were established, only to find that they were ephemeral. Something they had taken for granted had been snatched away and the new feminism is engaged in a life or death struggle to prevent the political erasure of women.

Separatism and women’s community

Back in the 1970s we had a women’s community and culture as well as politics. The basis of our movement was separatism. Our very frequent meetings and conferences, our poetry readings and discos, all were women only. We made our friends there and met our lovers there and no men tried to stop us from meeting up or to control what we could discuss. We would not have dreamed of including men in our groups or activities because the women only principle was worked out very early on. Some feminists went no further in their separatism than women only meetings and events. Many lesbian feminists like myself engaged in separatism in our lives, choosing to confine our friendships to women, to live in women only households, to read only books by women, and so on. I still do not read novels by men or engage socially with them. Today the new feminists are becoming more and more radical though separatism as a philosophy and politics is not yet well known or acknowledged.

Men ignored us back then. They had little interest in what we feminists were doing even though our movement was prominent and well covered in the media. Men did not try to get into our meetings or try to stop our marches. They really seemed completely uninterested, except for some who actively supported us by forming their own men against sexism meetings in which they talked about how to be less macho and aid women’s liberation. It could not be more different now. Men who claim to be women as well as a host of other manosphere groups which hate women stalk, police and abuse women online, try to destroy their jobs and businesses, report them to the police for hate speech or kill them e.g. the murder of the UK MP Jo Cox. Feminists now have to operate under the radar and in a cesspit of womanhatred in popular culture that requires very considerable courage and resolve.

Transgenderism

At the time of the WLM the phenomenon of men pretending to be women, saying they were transsexual or even just cross-dressing in public was rare. There were only a couple of occasions in the late 1970s when transvestites tried to get into women’s discos and there was general rage at their temerity. The transgendering of women and lesbians in particular, was pretty much unknown. We did not come across it. This landscape has changed dramatically. As an offshoot of the rise of kink and the development of the pornography industry, transvestites, men who seek to imitate women for sexual excitement, have achieved extraordinary political and social power and effected political capture of our institutions and legal systems, and dominance in culture. Women becoming feminists now are immediately confronted by the cruel weight of a male resistance movement in the form of transgender activism. It is radicalising, though, and has played a crucial part in creating this new wave.  

Social media

It is social media that has enabled men to organise and develop their strategy and tactics to defeat women’s rights and opportunities. The social media platforms, of course, are owned and run by unredeemed patriarchs who flex their muscles by tossing off their platforms women who are insubordinate. Our communications, with little exception, are subject to men’s control. Back in the 1970s our communications were entirely independent. Women’s groups created newsletters and magazines and ran them off on gestetner machines and sold them through subscriptions and in the women’s bookstores and women’s centres that no longer exist. We had rules so that no personal attacks were to be published whereas on social media now, women engage in vitriolic pile-ons against each other. Otherwise, there was freedom for women to express their opinions in letters and articles.

The development of social media has been seen by many commentators as really useful for feminism because it allows women to meet online and discuss. Certainly, it can be a good tool to allow women to find each other and develop activism but it may not provide a more useful tool than our independent media did before. Feminism is a weak plant today because there are very few women’s groups or meetings offline and those that do exist are likely to meet resistance from men and the women who support them. The revival of feminism since the early 2010s has been extremely slow compared with the brushfire that took off in the early seventies in the UK. In other countries it is just getting going. Our hand published newsletters in the old days created a movement on a scale which it is very hard to imagine now when all the opportunities of social media are supposedly open to us.

Personal is political

The campaign against men’s violence against women was fundamental to the WLM and this campaigning has in some respects never stopped and is at the heart of the new wave. But some aspects of feminism that we saw as vital to the WLM have not, so far, been reenergised. In the old days a basic mantra of radical feminism, and that which distinguished it from other varieties of feminism, was the understanding that the personal is political. The personal is political means that what goes on inside our own heads and how we behave as women, much that we think is natural and just how things are, is constructed by the forces of male domination. This applies particularly to harmful beauty practices which are in many respects more severe in their effects upon women’s health and dignity today. In the 1970s feminists were involved in a massive change in the culture away from the Marilyn Monroe look of women twisted into pouter pigeon shapes and knocked off their feet by high heels, and sexualised through uplift bras and heavy makeup, towards what was called at the time a unisex look. Men had quite long hair and a less macho look and women, particularly feminists, were likely to adopt short hair and flat shoes and eschew makeup. Political critiques of makeup and beauty practices in general were widely published and discussed. On this we have regressed a long way. The shoes on women in prominent positions, politicians and TV presenters for instance, are designed to hobble women and undermine our dignity and status to service the male sex right.

Another aspect of personal life that we recognised as politically constructed was compulsory heterosexuality and a sexuality organised around the eroticising of women’s subordination and male domination. Sex was understood by feminists to be fundamental to our oppression and twisted to fit the shape and demands of male domination and women’s subordination. We understood too, at that time, that mental health diagnoses were sexist and the whole field of psychology was deeply misogynist. Now most aspects of our understanding of how the personal is political are unknown and raising these issues again can cause deep resentment. Even many feminists today believe that lesbianism and heterosexuality are innate, which casts into outer darkness the many thousands of women like me who were heterosexual when they discovered feminism and quite quickly chose to become lesbians. It disappears our experience and renders our memoirs subject to accusations of falsification. How could we have experienced what was not possible?

Building our new movement

The glowing possibilities of women’s friendship, community and culture that are dangled before our eyes on social media need to be transformed into face to face meetings, cultural events and celebrations, so that we can bask in the love and excitement of being with our sisters. This was starting to happen before Covid19 and will happen again, with FILIA conferences, for instance. The WLM of the 1970s was fuelled by women meeting up with each other. It started with consciousness-raising groups and swiftly morphed into a movement of hundreds of different groups on a wide range of issues. Social media, on the other hand, enables not just men’s aggression towards us but also seems to cause some alienation between women that is much less likely if we have more real-world connection. For the sake of the women who are now discovering their love for other women, we need to move from the alienation of online lesbian dating apps back to the passionate possibilities of moving in a world of women. We need, once again, to be able to luxuriate in the company of women and have women in all aspects of our lives.