Women’s Liberation Now and Then

By Sheila Jeffreys, author of Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life (Spinifex: 2020). This article is adapted from Sheila’s talk at the Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation session at #FiLiA2021.

A new wave of feminism is taking place and I never thought I would see one. I was involved in the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in London in the 1970s and 1980s before moving to Australia. Like all my sisters who continued to care about the WLM I experienced serious grief for a lost movement in the 1990s and particularly in the 2000s. It did seem that feminism would not rise again as all our women’s facilities disappeared, our discos, bookstores, publishers, women’s centres, bands. But then I was invited to speak at a radical feminist conference in London in 2012 and realised that a new wave of radical feminism was beginning to rise there. I moved back to the UK in search of it in 2015. It is wonderful to be involved in a burgeoning movement once more but this wave is very different in many ways from what we had before. As a woman whose youth was formed by the glories of the WLM a new movement had a lot to live up to. As I work in this new movement, I realise it has some glories of its own, it is intergenerational and international. I am finding community and friendship through my work with the campaign against the destruction of women’s rights by the transgender activist movement, particularly with the Women’s Human Rights Campaign. I meet up online with feminists and lesbian feminists from Spain and Germany, from South and North America. I am able to make a contribution once more and that delights me. I shall compare some of the elements of the WLM with the new movement that is growing.

One big difference is that the new wave is intergenerational. Back in the 1970s we thought we were inventing the wheel. We were not of course, but we did not have contact with the feminists who had been active in the period up to the second world war, or even those still active after it. It is really different now because many women from the WLM are involved in the new wave and able to speak about what went before.

Another difference is that the women who are coming to the new movement have an array of skills and talents that are greatly advanced compared with the 1970s. Back then women lawyers and doctors were rare. When we left university, it was to careers in teaching (mostly), the civil service and librarianship. The new generation of feminist activists have advanced skills and access to malestream culture and politics that we did not.

The men’s rights movement

Men ignored us back then. They had little interest in what we feminists were doing even though our movement was prominent and well covered in the media. Men did not try to get into our meetings or try to stop our marches. They really seemed completely uninterested, except for some who actively supported us by forming their own men against sexism meetings in which they talked about how to be less macho and aid women’s liberation. It could not be more different now. Men who claim to be women as well as a host of other manosphere groups which hate women stalk, police and abuse women online, try to destroy their jobs and businesses, report them to the police for hate speech or kill them e.g. the murder of the UK MP Jo Cox. Feminists now have to operate under the radar and in a cesspit of womanhatred in popular culture that requires very considerable courage and resolve. Women becoming feminists now are immediately confronted by the cruel weight of a male resistance movement in the form of transgender activism. It is radicalising, though, and has played a crucial part in creating this new wave.

Social media

It is social media that has enabled men to organise and develop their strategy and tactics to defeat women’s rights and opportunities. The social media platforms, of course, are owned and run by unredeemed patriarchs who flex their muscles by tossing off their platforms women who are insubordinate. Our communications, with little exception, are subject to men’s control. Back in the 1970s, our communications were entirely independent. Women’s groups created newsletters and magazines and ran them off on gestetner machines and sold them through subscriptions and in the women’s bookstores and women’s centres that no longer exist.

The development of social media has been seen by many commentators as really useful for feminism because it allows women to meet online and discuss. But our hand published newsletters in the old days created a movement on a scale which it is very hard to imagine now when all the opportunities of social media are supposedly open to us.

Building our new movement

The glowing possibilities of women’s friendship, community and culture that are dangled before our eyes on social media need to be transformed into face to face meetings, cultural events and celebrations, so that we can bask in the love and excitement of being with our sisters. We need, once again, to be able to luxuriate in the company of women and have women in all aspects of our lives.