This article will offer the first historical assessment of the National Women Against Pit Closures movement. It shows that it was not a spontaneous formation but the result of work by a network of committed, long-time activists with strong connections to the left, including the Communist Party and the Women's Liberation Movement. It will show how key questions caused divisions within the national organisation as it grew. In particular, activists were divided over whether the movement should aim solely to support the strike, or whether it should have broader aims relating to women's lives, gender and feminism. Related to this, the movement divided over relationships with Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers, and the question of which women should be allowed to be members. Finally, the article examines how these questions grew more pressing after the end of the strike, and how and why the national movement had largely disappeared three years after the strike.
This article argues that, by the 1970s, people in Britain were increasingly insistent about defining and claiming their individual rights, identities and perspectives. Using individual narratives and testimonies, we show that many were expressing desires for greater personal autonomy and self-determination. We suggest that this was an important trend across the post-war decades, and of particular importance to understanding the 1970s. This popular individualism was not the result of Thatcher; if anything, it was a cause of Thatcherism. But this individualism had multiple political and cultural valences; desires for greater individual self-determination, and anger with the 'establishment' for withholding it, did not lead inexorably to Thatcherism. There were, in fact, some sources for, and potential outlets for, popular individualism on the left-outlets that explicitly challenged class, gender and racial inequalities. With this, we suggest the possibility of a new meta-narrative of post-war Britain, cutting across the political narrative that organizes post-war British history into three periods: social democracy, 'crisis' and the triumph of 'neoliberalism'. The 1970s was a key moment in the spread of a popular, aspirational form of individualism in post-war Britain, and this development is critical to our understanding of the history of the post-war years.
This article offers a long overdue exploration of black feminist periodicals in the UK during the period of second wave feminism. In it, I examine four feminist periodicals-FOWAAD, Speak Out, We Are Here, and Muktiin order to trace the development of black feminism in Britain and to investigate the extent to which black feminist periodicals in the UK became key sites for the development of a black feminist political critique that was aimed at three sites: the (white) feminist movement; the racist British state; and patriarchal structures within migrant communities. Insisting upon the interconnected nature of gendered, race and class oppression in a manner that foreshadowed many contemporary theoretical developments around the politics of intersectionality, these periodicals provide vital insights into the black women's movement and its complicated relationship to larger radical black movement and the concept of 'political blackness'.
White feminists active in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s have often been accused of being blind to the needs of ethnic minority women and thus ‘racist’. While there is significant truth to these accusations, this article argues that such critiques have often been rather simplistic. In this article I explore the many ways in which white feminists of this era did engage with issues of ‘race’, however clumsily. Many white feminists in the early days of the WLM drew inspiration from the Black movement, and later on in the late 1970s and 1980s significant numbers of white feminists were involved in anti‐racist activity in groups such as Women against Racism and Fascism and Women against Imperialism, and smaller anti‐racist consciousness‐raising groups. I explore the nature of these groups, whilst nevertheless maintaining a critical stance on the ways in which these groups could often – albeit inadvertently – reinscribe white power. I argue that rather than being simply racist, one of the interesting contradictions within the WLM lay in the gap between the awareness of many white feminists of the issue surrounding race, and their inability to translate this awareness into action. I end by suggesting the larger issues that a focus on race in the WLM raises for historians of feminism, both in terms of chronology – such a focus highlights the extent of feminist activity in the 1980s – and regarding the conceptual sensitivity needed when using the term ‘racism’, given the differing ways this term was used within the WLM.
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