Looking back on birth of feminism
2020 will see the 50th anniversary of the first national conference on women’s liberation. In the latest in a series on milestones in the coming year, produced with Huddersfield University, recalls the agenda.
POLITICS: 2020 will see the 50th anniversary of the first national conference on Women’s Liberation. We look back on the historic milestone with Huddersfield University academics to when the first stirrings of feminism began, paving the way for today’s #MeToo movement and a battle that is far from over.
IT WAS in the rarified yet politically charged atmosphere of Ruskin College, Oxford, that Britain’s first “me too” moment occurred.
Some 300 people had been expected for the first national conference on women’s liberation. In the event, nearly twice as many turned up.
It was so far from the political mainstream that few knew it had even happened. It registered barely a ripple in the Westminster bubble. Not even The Guardian covered it.
“I understand why they didn’t want the Press there,” said one delegate. “It was obviously going to be reported as a jokey thing and that’s part of what they’re fighting.”
When it ended, a four-point manifesto had been agreed. The delegates demanded equal pay, equal job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free 24-hour nurseries.
But as the 50th anniversary of what is now seen as a milestone event is celebrated in a few weeks’ time, most commentators agree that its agenda has been far from fulfilled.
“Feminism wasn’t a word that most people understood in 1970,” said Wendy Webster, a professor of modern history at Huddersfield University. “If they had heard the word at all they would have associated it with
the suffrage era – not the age of the mini skirt, Twiggy and Mary Quant. To them, feminism ended with women getting the vote.”
The first stirrings of unrest were detected publicly a few months after the conference, when infiltrators at the annual Miss World contest in London disrupted the proceedings by blowing whistles and shaking football rattles.
“It was part of a wider
movement,” Prof Webster said. “Miss World was all about judging women on what they looked like. It became part of the agenda around sexual harassment, which was a term that had been coined by the Women’s Liberation movement in America. No-one had heard of it before 1970.”
It was part of a tide of what became known as second-wave feminism – the first wave having
ended with enfranchisement – which engulfed much of the western world during the 1970s.
But it was not universally accepted. “A lot of women would identify with certain aspects of it, but not necessarily consider themselves as feminist,” Prof Webster said. “Black women were not represented at all. They didn’t see themselves as being part of it.”
The buzzphrase that most
captured the public imagination – and not in a good way – was not feminism but Women’s Lib, which became the butt of a hundred jokes by comics in working men’s clubs.
“There was a lot of hostility and mockery,” Prof Webster said.
Progress came in fits and starts. The Equal Pay Act, promoted by Barbara Castle, was passed a few months after the conference at Ruskin College,
but did not come into force until 1975, at which point the Sex Discrimination Act also outlawed unfair work practices.
The Women’s Liberation Movement held another seven national conferences during the Seventies, the second in Skegness, a world away from the dreaming spires of Oxford.
As the decade went on, the agenda widened to include legal and financial independence
for women, the right to a selfdefined sexuality, and freedom from violence or sexual coercion.
But the cause of liberation was not advanced by the election of the country’s first female Prime Minister at the end of the 1970s.
Prof Webster said: “Margaret Thatcher did attend celebrations of the Suffragettes, but she wasn’t a force for the advancement of women. She called them strident feminists.”