by Andy Beckett
Other legacies of the movement were more enduring. As well as its stunts and lifestyle experiments, the GLF had done less dramatic work: putting on dances for gay men and lesbians that were high-profile and no longer furtive events; publicizing these and other gay and lesbian happenings in Come Together; prompting the formation of GLF groups outside London, in Leeds, Manchester, Brighton and Birmingham. In July 1972, the feuding London GLF briefly put aside its differences to organize the first Gay Pride march, from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park. In early 1974, an office the group had rented in the basement of Housmans, a well-known left-wing bookshop near King’s Cross, was converted by former GLF activists into the London Gay Switchboard, a free information and legal advice service. By 1975, it had a staff of sixty volunteers and was receiving a thousand calls a week.
Other ex-GLF members stayed in politics. Peter Tatchell had joined within a week of arriving in London from Australia in 1971, after seeing a GLF sticker on a lamp post. During the eighties and nineties, he made himself into Britain’s best-known gay activist, in part as a prominent member of OutRage!, which described itself as a ‘queer rights direct action group’ and retained the old GLF flair for confrontation and theatrical gestures. Angie Weir, an important GLF member later known as Angela Mason, became director of the lesbian and gay lobby group Stonewall and then, in 2002, director of the Labour government’s Women and Equality Unit.
The GLF helped establish in modern Britain for the first time a visible, unapologetic and rapidly expanding gay culture. This had its commercial as well as its idealistic side. As even the Colvillia drag queens had discovered with their Portobello market stall, homosexuality could be a commodity as well as a crusade. In the seventies, the most obvious manifestation of this was the success of Gay News. It had been conceived as a ‘national homosexual newspaper’ in late 1971, at the height of the GLF’s ideological civil war. Some of its staff were GLF members, and at first it operated as a collective, as Come Together always did. But Gay News soon signalled its distinctiveness. ‘News is not only the bad things that can happen to us,’ suggested the first issue’s editorial, ‘but knowing what others are doing, sharing and achieving. Information …’ The second issue demonstrated this more upbeat, less politically radical sensibility by giving over its front cover to contact ads. By Issue 40, Gay News was calling itself ‘Europe’s Largest Circulation Fortnightly Newspaper for Homosexuals’, and carrying listings for gay pubs from Aberdeen to York. By Issue 85, in 1975, the paper was featuring ads for gay shops, gay pin-up calendars, mainstream Hollywood films with gay characters and the 1976 Gay Spring Weekender in Torquay.
‘I was against Gay News, the whole idea of it,’ said Feather with quiet force. He looked around his austere living room. ‘We knew in the GLF that capitalism had the ability to absorb dissidents.’ In Britain in the mid-seventies, true equality for gays – indeed, the satisfaction of even the more modest demands bellowed out by the GLF in Highbury Fields – was decades off. But homosexuals, in part thanks to the GLF, were now a recognized market – and a market could be served. It was a sign of the Britain to come.
The other great seventies revolt over gender roles and sexuality proved harder to commodify. Women’s Liberation emerged as a movement in Britain less suddenly than Gay Liberation. ‘At regular intervals throughout history, women rediscover themselves – their strengths, their capabilities, their political will,’ wrote Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell in their 1982 book Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation. They prefaced their assertion with quotations from Mary Astell in 1700 – ‘If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?’ – Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 – ‘Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?’ – and Christabel Pankhurst in 1902 – ‘The great social injustices are the subjection of labour and the subjection of women.’
The next wave of British feminism began to form during the sixties. By then, the fundamental grievances articulated by Astell, Wollstonecraft and Pankhurst had been further sharpened by the contradictions of life for women in post-war Britain. Families were getting smaller. Domestic chores, thanks to new home technologies, were becoming less all-consuming. More women were going to university. More women were working: in 1951, 36 per cent of those between twenty and sixty-four; in 1961, 42 per cent; in 1971, 52 per cent. More women were acquiring the sort of life expectations traditionally held by men. In many ways, these were not being met. Women’s pay compared to men’s fell between the early fifties and mid-sixties. The welfare state continued to assume that women were primarily carers rather than earners. Employers and trade unions did the same. The laws governing divorce and abortion were liberalized, cheap contraception became available and sexual freedom acceptable, but the greatest beneficiaries of this new permissiveness were men. About other, even more sensitive areas of gender relations, such as domestic violence against women, the reforming politicians of the sixties and counter-culture revolutionaries had little or nothing to say.
The injustice and frustration of the position of women in Britain and comparable countries was expressed, periodically, in brilliant books by foreigners. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) was a monumental work of scholarship and polemic, written in an intoxicating grand style, about the domination of women through ‘patriarchy’, the fear and hatred of women that underlay it, and how only the ‘liberation’ of women could end it. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) was more journalistic but equally potent. It was a vivid report, sometimes melancholy, sometimes furious, from ‘the comfortable concentration camp’ of female domesticity to which even the highly educated middle-class American women that Friedan interviewed had been confined soon after university, and where they acquired dishwashing sores and public personas that seemed ‘listless and bored, or frantically “busy”’.
Then, in 1970, two more seminal feminist volumes appeared. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics took on Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and other revered male counter-culture figures and, with slashing literary criticism and bitter humour, showed their supposedly iconoclastic writing to be full of neuroses and bullies’ assumptions about sex and women. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was even more revelatory. ‘Women’, she wrote, ‘have very little idea of how much men hate them.’ Greer’s prose was as quick and concentrated as that of a good tabloid reporter, and effortlessly mixed the raw and demotic – ‘tits’ – with the analytical and academic. Her book, inspired in part by the rebellions of 1968, called for nothing less than a revolution in female consciousness. Woman must ‘recapture her own will’. But Greer had no illusions that it would be easy: ‘Take … joy in the struggle … For a long time there may be no perceptible reward … other than new purpose.’
The first British women’s groups, in which women shared personal experiences and ‘raised’ each other’s consciousnesses, were established in 1968. As Gay Liberation would, the new political movement initially took its language, ideas and tactics from a precursor in America. And it quickly attained a momentum. The following January, the underground newspaper Black Dwarf declared 1969 the ‘Year of the Militant Woman’.
A few weeks later, Marsha Rowe arrived in London from Australia. She was a young magazine journalist from Sydney with high hopes of the British counter-culture. She had grown up in a pretty harbourside suburb, ‘not reading books’ and with few intellectual or career expectations. ‘I was brought up with the idea that it wasn’t up to me to go to university.’ But then one day, she told me, ‘My life changed. I bought Oz magazine on a newsstand.’ Oz was a kind of Australian Private Eye which had moved from straightforward serrated satire into the more freeform cultural and political iconoclasm practised by the underground press. Rowe paid for herself to go to university, did some work for Oz and more conventional magazines like Vogue, and joined Sydney’s new sixties bohemia. It did not satisfy her for long. By 1969, ‘I had explored every bit. I was bored.’ Other ambitious and rebellious Australians s
he knew had moved to London, so she followed them.
‘I felt that I was arriving in a city … that was on the cusp of imminent changes, but I didn’t know what. Everything did seem to be breaking up … The excitement and general hope of earlier in the sixties had obviously gone … and it was like, “Where’s it all going?”’ At first she hated the place: ‘People were snooty about Australians.’ After a brief stay, she fled to Greece for six months. There the military dictatorship – the reign of the ‘Greek colonels’ – and the brave opposition it provoked politicized her for the first time. ‘When I came back to London, I thought, “OK, I’ve got to be engaged in some way.”’
She began working for Oz, which had also moved to London. But it was not the radical experience she had hoped for. ‘I did boring secretarial work. It was just assumed that women would. I typed bits of research, but I didn’t think I could write at all.’ A gust of remembered frustration lifted her soft voice. ‘I hated having to be a secretary. But I really did have a sort of idea that maybe women were there to support men. In the counter-culture we still did all that stuff the men didn’t. I ended up having all these crazy boyfriends, and I would be doing the boring job to pay for their creativity. You lived your creativity through the man.’ And yet that inequality also felt increasingly intolerable. Rowe paused. ‘I had very conflicted feelings that I couldn’t articulate.’
She left Oz for another London-based radical newspaper, Ink, which had a slightly more considered and earthbound political agenda. Yet the gender imbalance seemed just the same. Despite her experience, she worked in production, not editorial; and when the paper acquired some new office technology, three women she had hired as typists were casually fired by the male editors. ‘I could not believe it. I knew what some of these young women had given up. I didn’t have any trade union background. So I resigned in protest.’
She had no idea what she would do next. For a few months she worked for a literary agent. Then, in December 1971, she and two other women who had had unhappy periods in the underground press, Louise Ferrier and Michelene Wandor, decided to call a meeting for women who had had similar experiences. It was held in Rowe and Ferrier’s basement flat in Notting Hill and fifty people came.
‘It was like the lid had been taken off,’ Rowe remembered. ‘We didn’t really stay on the topic of work very long. Almost immediately, it was all about how you did all the shit stuff at home … about how we supported men … There were women who’d had to have children adopted, who’d had to have abortions … It was all about the sexual repression in the so-called liberated sixties. But none of us had ever said any of these things to each other … We didn’t have any language to talk about what we wanted to talk about. The concepts weren’t there. Sexism wasn’t a concept. We just had to find a way by … mentioning experience. This was what consciousness-raising meant. You’d start describing your experience to each other. And then you’d come to an analysis.’
After the meeting, Rowe and Ferrier ‘stayed up all night, thinking, “No one will ever speak to us again.” That we’d crossed some terrible boundary. We were absolutely terrified, and ecstatic at the same time. It was very strange. And, of course, everybody did speak to us again, and there was another meeting, and another …’ At the third gathering, Rowe recalled, ‘I said, “I think we should start our own magazine.”’
Spare Rib, the debut issue of which was published in July 1972, was not the first British feminist magazine of the era. A loose but rapidly expanding federation of women’s groups called the London Women’s Liberation Workshop had been producing Shrew, basic-looking and fierce in tone, and originally called Bird and then Harpie’s Bizarre, since 1969. Nor was Rowe and Ferrier’s meeting in Notting Hill the first significant gathering of the new British women’s movement. In February 1970, the inaugural National Women’s Liberation Conference had been held at Ruskin College, Oxford, with 400 women hungrily debating, discovering kindred spirits and daubing slogans – ‘Sisterhood is powerful!’ – across the university and the city beyond. The following November, a hundred feminists disrupted the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall by throwing flour bombs at the stage. The following March, the first demonstrations for women’s rights took place in London and Liverpool, with men and children among the marchers and snow swirling around the banners calling for equal pay and free twenty-four-hour nurseries.
The early movement had elements in common with the Gay Liberation Front, with whom the feminists sometimes closely collaborated: it was theatrical, ambitious and sometimes utopian in its demands, effective in its guerrilla tactics, relatively small in scale. But even more than the GLF, the new British feminism was a profound challenge to the way that the British Left thought and behaved.
Some of this challenge lay in how the women’s groups worked. ‘We were very conscious of the fact that the [London Women’s Liberation] Workshop’s structure was completely different from the traditional Left from which many of us had come,’ wrote the Belsize Lane women’s group, looking back at their late sixties beginnings for Spare Rib in 1978. ‘Our women’s groups were deliberately small and federated to avoid the pitfalls of centralization and hierarchy.’ Within the groups themselves, the emphasis on individual experience as the basis for forming political ideas was the exact reverse, in many ways, of how trade unions and other orthodox left-wing bodies functioned.
This was not the only point of difference with the unions. In October 1971, the second National Women’s Liberation Conference took place in the less romantic surroundings of an out-of-season Skegness. By coincidence, the National Union of Mineworkers, which was gearing up for its strike that winter, was holding its annual conference next door. ‘They had a striptease as part of their socializing,’ Angie Weir, who was at the women’s conference as part of a GLF delegation, recalled later. ‘We zapped [disrupted] that and had discussions with the miners … I don’t think they were very happy about it. I just remember getting onto the stage when they [the strippers] were on and then being hustled off.’
It was into this world of seemingly limitless political possibilities and difficulties for women that Spare Rib was born. Rowe was twenty-six. Her co-editor Rosie Boycott, another bruised veteran of the underground press, was twenty. ‘Their temperaments, for the time being, meshed well,’ wrote Boycott in her autobiography, characteristically writing about herself in the cool third person. While Rowe was self-deprecating but steely and principled, Boycott was pragmatic and mercurial, a rebel from an army family and Cheltenham Ladies’ College who had already networked her way around the British counter-culture. When they were seeking funds and attention for the first issue of Spare Rib, wrote Boycott, ‘Marsha … joined a consciousness-raising group, attended the political meetings and versed herself in the law affecting the rights of women. Rosie went to a few meetings and a large number of parties and talked the whole idea up to anyone who would listen in the hope that they’d forget her age and inexperience and come over with the cash.’
Rowe got hold of desks and filing cabinets by visiting the offices of Ink, which had recently gone bankrupt, before the liquidators moved in. Partly by candlelight – the miners were now on strike – the two women drew up and distributed a questionnaire to find out what other women wanted from a feminist monthly, and from the responses and their own notions they distilled the magazine. ‘We wanted to be accessible,’ Rowe told me. ‘We wanted to do a magazine that was largely professional, we wanted to be in WHSmith. We didn’t want to bring it out … the way the underground press did, when they felt like it and when they’d got enough material together. We were going to produce it to a regular schedule, have things in it that were readable.’ In her quiet, insistent voice, she went on: ‘The whole idea was to do this bridging, this dialogue between what most women would accept in a magazine and what we were trying to explore.’
The first issue was dense and wordy, but unlike most underground publications it was clearly laid out on glossy paper. It had a cover photograph o
f two smiling, natural-looking women, and non-confrontational cover headlines – ‘Growing up in the Bosom Boom’, ‘Georgie Best on Sex’ – that could almost have come from a conventional women’s magazine. Inside, the tone was sterner but eclectic. There was a feminist critique of romantic novels, a scattering of rude but pointed cartoons, a rather old-fashioned paean to Barbara Castle (‘as slim as a girl … had a hair do before each battle with the toughies from the unions’), a lengthy article on the suffragettes, a recipe page (‘banana and raw cabbage salad’) and a supportive piece about a group of women in London ‘fighting for a fair deal for women night cleaners’.
The first edition of 20,000 copies sold out. Two issues later, on the magazine’s first full letters page, a reader wrote:
Dear Spare Rib,
After unsuccessful attempts to obtain your magazine in the early morning, I nipped out in my so-called ‘lunch hour’ (36 minutes!) and managed to buy a copy. Holding it proudly aloft I marched back into the office feeling liberated already, but, my boss was paying us a visit and had heard of you also, and the remainder of my lunchhour (his is later!) was lost while he was absorbed in our magazine. Very flattering … but not exactly ‘Women’s Lib!’ … Carry on the good work and perhaps one day everyone will know we are equal, including ourselves!
Yours truly,
Elaine Rowland,
70a The Avenue,
Willesden, N.W.6
Not everyone was so positive. Other letter writers, and some prominent older feminists, found Spare Rib insufficiently bold. The magazine’s launch party was disrupted by members of one of the GLF’s more dogmatic factions, ‘dressed’, Boycott wrote, ‘in clown outfits and smudgy make-up … “You’re selling out,” they said … “Your magazine is straight and bourgeois.”’
