Sheila Rowbotham, Daring to Hope, 2021 ✓

I particularly remember Elizabeth Wilson and Angela Weir talking calmly and firmly about their feelings, while explaining that being attracted to other women did not involve condemnation of women who desired men. Their reassurance enabled me to realize how fear can make you clam up on other people’s difference, sexual and otherwise. Over the years I was to remain grateful for their forbearance and empathy.

Otherwise Skegness did not go well. At one of the plenaries, a tall, bearded Hemel Hempstead Maoist, Harpal Brar, caused a fracas. I had already seen him in action at an early meeting on women’s liberation at Essex University in 1969, where he had provoked rage by addressing us as if we were idiots, and I groaned inwardly as he took the microphone. His manner was authoritarian, his certainty was inflexible and he spoke at length. After a while, restlessness gave way to anger. A vote was taken. The whole conference apart from a tiny group of Maoists had their hands up for him to step down. Harpal Brar ignored this trivial interference and continued his lecture. A woman sought to detach him from the microphone, but he fended her off. Only the arrival of security men finally halted his flow. That was to be the end of men coming to women’s liberation conferences and the demise of the National Coordinating Committee set up in 1970. A decentralized regional structure was to replace it. The hope was that this would prove more difficult for members of small left groups to nobble.

The term ‘radical feminism’, which in the US had initially signalled opposition to the ‘liberal feminism’ of claiming rights within the system, was beginning to mean putting women’s oppression first and foremost in an absolute sense. While I could see that many women did not desire men or simply wished to live apart from them, I did not believe that focusing on women’s relationship with men alone was sufficient to change women’s position in society. Other kinds of inequality and subordination such as race and class affected women’s circumstances. Nor did I regard women’s relations with men as exclusively antagonistic. I was convinced that demonizing one sex and idealizing the other distorted reality and led to a political dead end. So I did not accept the arguments for separatism that were being made by some women in the American movement.

The distinction between a separatist view and working in an autonomous women’s liberation movement was crucial. The latter asserted women’s oppression because this was frequently overlooked or denied and we needed space to work out our own perspectives; it did not imply abandoning other radical causes which involved men. Indeed, in the early seventies rebellion was appearing from so many sources that detaching oneself in the abstract was not even feasible. The evidence was all around us.