|
The Women’s Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain
George Stevenson
London: Bloomsbury, 2019 Hardcover. xi+270 p. ISBN 978-1350066595. £85
Reviewed by Catherine Riley Birkbeck College, University of London
British feminism has recently – and effectively – mounted a challenge to ‘evolutionary’ formulations of its own history, which posit it as developing from naïve positions set out in the first and second waves into post-feminist and current feminist positions that avoid the conceptual and intellectual flaws of these earlier accounts. Writers including Clare Hemmings (2011), D. Withers (2015) and Sam McBean (2015) have challenged the trajectories of such narratives, creating new accounts of the British feminist movement that pay attention to temporality in order to understand and account for the various ‘waves’ of feminist politics and activity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There have been challenges, too, to the ‘wave’ model itself, raising valid concerns that the concept of sequential but separate periods of feminist activism and theory renders obsolete the issues, debates and ideas from earlier waves that remain relevant today. Such assumptions can all too easily play into the myth that the feminist movement, as a movement, is a thing of the past. This reassessment of feminism’s history has included a re-examination of its theories as well as its practices. As Mary Eagleton observed, ‘history has not been kind to the feminist literary criticism of the 1970s’ (quoted in Sellers and Plain, 2007: 111); neither has it always looked back fondly on the activism and lived experiences of those active in the movement during this time. Stevenson’s book fits into this contemporary investigation of the second wave. Stevenson makes as his focus the working-class women of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) from 1968 to 1979, arguing that the historicisation of the WLM as a fundamentally middle-class movement, which broke down when this intrinsic bias was challenged by left-wing / radical formulations of feminism in the later years of the second wave, is a false narrative. Instead, he sets out a new formulation of the WLM as one that was always class-conscious, and that sought to use class politics to form alliances both within its own movement, and with others outside of it. Stevenson begins by situating the emergence of the WLM in the workers’ rights struggles of the late 1960s. He cites socialist feminists including Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Anna Coote to argue that the WLM was forged in the strikes and industrial disputes of this time, for example the Dagenham machinists’ strike in 1968. He goes on in the third chapter of the book to provide an important (albeit depressing) overview of these women’s strikes of the late 1960s and 1970s, documenting this key part of women’s collective economic and employment history in the UK. Stevenson argues that the WLM was always engaged in working-class struggles and protests. The strength of the trade union movement in 1970s Britain – it was a period of industrial and economic crisis – meant that any emerging political ideology could not ignore class politics. In the previous decade, women had moved in ever-greater numbers into the workforce, but job segregation according to gender was very common across most industries: women were far more likely to be secretaries or machinists, while men did (higher-paid) manual work. Unions did not often protect women – women were much more likely than men to lose their jobs – and thus an emerging feminist politics began to take on the protection of working-class women. Stevenson also provides a timely reassessment of the Equal Pay Act of 1970, almost fifty years after its passing into law, noting the legislative flaws that allowed many employers to simply allocate higher-paid men’s work as more ‘specialised’ and therefore within the bounds of the law. Today, the pay gap in the UK remains stubbornly stuck in double digits across most industries. He then goes on to consider the relationship between public and private work: while women were moving into the paid workforce in ever-greater numbers as the fledgling WLM emerged, they continued to carry out the vast majority of unpaid domestic work at home. Stevenson looks at the arguments around the (failed) Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s to show, as Rowbotham and others argued, that this campaign helped bring together the problems of class and gender. It showed why the WLM itself was necessary, putting gender politics into class politics. This leads him to consider the crossover between Marxist theories of production and feminist theories of reproduction, and he goes on to examine the attempts made by the WLM to intersect the politics of both, focusing on the experiences of working-class women in the movement and how they engaged (or not) with their identities as both women and as working-class. Following on from this, Stevenson looks in more detail at the demographics of the women who constituted the WLM in the 1970s. He asserts that its dominance by middle-class women threw up problems for the working-class women it also contained, who had to navigate not only sexist bias from men but also class-based assumptions from other women. While he argues that these class tensions within the WLM were resolved in some specific instances – or better yet used to create positive action – this was the exception rather than the rule. As he puts it: ‘class constituted an important power relation between women’ [128]. In parts, Stevenson risks falling into the same trap he is critiquing of describing the consciousness-raising era of the late-1970s WLM as bourgeois and indulgent. He cites complaints from working-class activists about activities like yoga, music and reading, claiming these as ‘evidence’ of the movement’s inherent middle-classness. Rubbishing such activities is one thing, but claiming them to be representative of the broader movement, and its politics, is another. In spite of this, the book is nonetheless important for the space it gives to working-class activists from this period of the WLM. Hearing them, in their own words, express their experiences is fascinating, and making a record of this collective memory is part of what give Stevenson’s book its value. His overarching argument is that there must be space for nuance in our reading, and situating, of the WLM and the multiple identities contained within it. As he rightly concludes, the Women’s Liberation Movement was essentialist and it was not; it was middle-class and it was not; it was Leftist and it was not. We must move away from binaries in order to fully appreciate what it was, and what it achieved. The Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in the context of the sexist as well as capitalist paradigm of 1970s British culture. Understanding and articulating class politics, as Stevenson argues, is critical to our understanding of feminist politics, and his book is a helpful chronicle of the arguments, ideologies and activisms of this time. It takes it place within the canon of contemporary writing that usefully historicises our feminist past to reveal it to us in new, and important, ways.
Cercles © 2020 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
