Abstract
‘Race’ has long been a troublesome issue for feminist politics. Despite white feminism’s historically racialised location, the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in England believed itself initially to be not just neutral to these issues, but positively anti-racist. Increasingly during the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the critiques of ethnic minority women proved these assumptions to be not just naive, but positively wrong. The debates and arguments that resulted created a crisis in the white feminist project: the universal woman who had for so long been a familiar figure of white feminist rhetoric and activism could no longer be conjured forth with any confidence. The activism of ethnic minority women was also affected, as a move away from autonomous activism towards often uncomfortable collaborations with white feminists occurred during the 1980s. Both Black1 and white women were deeply affected by the emotions generated by these debates, with some women dropping out of activism altogether. It is thus clear that these events profoundly shaped the women’s movement, and played a part in the disintegration of a coherent national movement by the end of the 1980s. Nevertheless, despite the negative light in which these events have often been viewed, it is clear that these debates also ultimately effected a far greater — if uneven — awareness of racial issues within the women’s movement, and made feminism more ethnically diverse.
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Notes
Of course, this is a hugely simplified rendition of an infinitely complicated movement. Nevertheless, the dominant narrative does more or less follow these turns. See Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1790–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981);
and Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement 1914–1999, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) for examples.
Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
Christine Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned: Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women’s Movements, c. 1880s– 1970s (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004);
Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London and New York: Verso, 1992).
See Part 4, ‘To Make the Facts Known’ in Ware, Beyond the Pale, pp. 167–224, for a discussion of Impey’s life and work; see Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 273–74 for a discussion of Marsden and empire.
Elizabeth Meehan, ‘British feminism from the 1960s to the 1980s’, in Harold L. Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990), pp. 189–204; Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, pp. 312–53. Harold Smith, ‘The Women’s Movement, Politics and Citizenship, 1960s–2000 in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (ed.), Women in Twentieth Century Britain (Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education, 2001), pp. 278–91. 0ne exception to this rule is the afterword of Barbara Caine’s English Feminism (pp. 255–71), which in addressing the movement in the 1970s, gives a complex and nuanced — if short — overview of the movement that takes into account race.
Eve Setch, ‘The London Women’s Liberation Workshop 1969–1979: Organisation, Creativity, Debate’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2000);
Jeska Rees, ‘All the Rage: Revolutionary Feminism in England, 1977–1983 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2007);
Sarah Browne, ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland, 1967–1979’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Dundee, 2009).
See also Margaretta Jolly’s discussion of this in her essay ‘Recognising Space, Place and Nation in Researching Women’s Movements: Sisterhood and After’, Women’s Studies International Forum 35 (2012), 144–46.
See Vicki Randall and Joni Lovenduski, Contemporary Feminist Politics: Women and Politics in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
David Bouchier, The Feminist Challenge: The Movement for Women’s Liberation in Britain and the USA (London: Macmillan, 1983);
Joyce Gelb, Feminism and Politics: A Comparative Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). It should be noted that Randall and Lovenduski are less guilty of ‘white washing’ the movement than Bouchier and Gelb, who barely mention the Black women’s movement.
Julia Sudbury, Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London: Routledge, 1998);
Ranu Samantrai, AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002).
See http://www.femcit.org/ (accessed 15 December 2010) for more information on this project, especially Work Package Four ‘Ethnic and Religious Citizenship’ headed by Line Nyhagen Predelli and Beatrice Halsaa. The texts that have arisen from this strand that have been particularly relevant to this book are Line Nyhagen Predelli, Kim Perren, Beatrice Halsaa, Cecilie Thun and Esmeranda Manful, Working Paper Number Two: ‘Women’s Movements: Constructions of Sisterhood, Dispute and Resonance: The case of the United Kingdom’, (2008: published online). http://www. femcit.org/files/WP4_WorkingpaperNo2.pdf (accessed 15December 2010); and Line Nyhagen Predelli, and Beatrice Halsaa, Majority-Minority Relations in Contemporary Women’s Movements (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago 1984);
Amrit Wilson, Finding a Voice: Asian Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago 1978).
Heidi Safia Mirza, ‘Introduction’, in Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–31.
Sheila Rowbotham, The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s (London: Pandora Press, 1989);
Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (Oxford, 1982);
Michele Roberts Paper Houses: A Memoir of the Seventies and Beyond (London: Virago, 2008);
Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007).
I would date this back to the publication of Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Benita Roth, Separate Roads To Feminism: Black, Chicana and White Feminist Movement in America’s Second Wave (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington D.C. (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2008);
Stephanie Gilmore (ed.), Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second Wave Feminism in the United States (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press 2008).
Winifred Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Becky Thompson, ‘Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism’, Feminist Studies 28 (Summer 2002), 336–60.
These findings are also supported by Kimberley Springer’s Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organisations 1968–1980 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005).
See Jonathan Dean, Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) pp. 10–11, for a demonstration of the many feminists who use this chronological scheme.
Karen Offen, ‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach’, Signs 14:1 (1988), 119–57.
Rachel Beth Cohen, ‘Researching Difference and Diversity Within Women’s Movements: Sisterhood and After’, Women’s Studies International Forum 35 (2012), 138–40.
The Sisterhood and After Project outlined their own similar dilemmas with this term: see Margaretta Jolly, with Polly Russell and Rachel Cohen, ‘Sisterhood and After: Ethics, Individualism and the Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement’, Social Movement Studies 11:2 (2012), 211–26.
See Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Citizens Not Feminists: The Boundary Negotiated Between Citizenship and Feminism by Mainstream Women’s Organisations in England, 1928–1939’, Women’s History Review 9:2 (2006), 411–29.
Nancy Hewitt, Introduction, in Nancy Hewitt (ed.), No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of US Feminism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 1–12(8).
Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 2.
See, for example, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, revised edn (London and New York: Verso Books, 1999); and Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 55.
A Sivanandan, ‘Black Power: the Politics of Existence’, originally printed in Politics and Society 1:2 (1971) 225–33;
reprinted in A. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1982), p. 63.
Tariq Modood, “Black’, Racial Equality and Asian Identity’, New Community 14:3 (1988), 397–404 (399).
There is little written about Jews and whiteness in an English contest, although this will be explored further in Chapter 5. However, in an American context, work on this subject is provided in Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval Davis, ‘Contextualising Feminism: Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions’, Feminist Review 15 (Winter 1983), 62–75.
Chandra Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonialism’, Feminist Review 30 (Autumn 1988), 61–88. This essay exists in several different forms and was initially published in the United States in 1984: I am using the first version published in the UK.
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth’, in D. Davies (ed.), Political Power and Social Theory (Westport, Connecticut: Jai Press, 1997), pp. 183–206,
reprinted in Philomena Essed and David Goldberg (eds.), Race Critical Theories: Text and Context (Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 369–91 (379).
See Ruth Frankenberg White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) for a thorough examination of white women who both accepted and rejected the ideas of themselves as racist. Chapters 4 and 5 of this book explore these issues further.
Quoted in Peter Fryer, Staying Power: Black People in Britain Since 1504 (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984), p. 10.
Ibid., pp. 298–316 for more information on these riots. See Colin Holmes A Tolerant Country?: Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), for — as the title suggests — an extensive discussion of Britain’s self-image/presentation as ‘a tolerant country’, despite the overwhelming evidence that suggests otherwise.
It should be noted that this was also a period which saw the struggles of Black seamen in Britain over pay and conditions. For more information on this, see Laura Tabili, ‘We Ask For British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994).
See Roderick J. MacDonald, ‘Dr Harold Arundel Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples 1931–1947: A Retrospective View’, Race 14:3 (1973), 291–310.
Rosalind Wild, ‘“Black Was The Colour of Our Fight”: Black Power in Britain, 1955–1976’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008), p. 31.
Ras Makonnen, Pan Africanism from Within (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 163–64.
For more information on the Black intellectual milieu in Britain at this time, see Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
R.E.R. Bunce and Paul Field, ‘Obi B. Egbuna, C.L.R. James, and the Birth of Black Power in Britain: Black Radicalism in Britain, 1967–1972’, Twentieth Century British History 22:3 (2011), 391–414 (92).
See Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference (Oxford: Berg, 2007) for further discussion of these issues. Wendy Webster also addressed this subject in a conference paper entitled ‘There will be mass-murder unless the Government get them out of the country before our men come back: Cross-national and cross-ethnic relationships in Second World War Britain’, given at the Women’s History Network Conference, 10 September 2011, The Women’s Library, London.
For a comprehensive overview of post-war immigration statistics, see Ceri Peach, Alisdair Rogers, Judith Chance, and Patricia Daley, ‘Immigration and Ethnicity’, in A.H. Halsey, and Josephine Webb, Twentieth Century British Social Trends, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 128–75; pp. 140–41, in particular, has an extremely useful table breaking down statistics by decade and broad ethnic group.
A note is perhaps needed here on the Racial Readjustment Society (RAAS) founded in 1965 by Michael de Freitas, who later was to egotistically style himself as Michael X. Although the group — due in most part to de Freitas’ self-aggrandising manner — courted significant media attention, and were given a lasting memorial in his autobiography, they were in reality a tiny group that deserve little more than a footnote in any serious history of Black politics in Britain. De Freitas’ own demise — executed on a murder charge in Trinidad and Tobago after a lengthy criminal career that had included working for Peter Rachman — illustrates well enough their true place on the fringe of acceptability within Black radical politics in Britain at the time. See John Williams’ recent biography Michael X: A Life in Black and White (London: Century, 2008) for more information.
See Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism and British Society, 1876–1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), for more information about anti-Semitism during this period. It should be noted that the Jewish community fought against such prejudice in numerous ways. One example is the ‘43 group’ in London, an underground group of Jewish male youths who infiltrated and physically broke up anti-fascist groups immediately after the Second World War.
See Adam Lent, British Social Movements Since 1945: Sex, Colour, Peace and Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 19. The group included amongst its number the somewhat unlikely figure of Vidal Sassoon.
Stanley Waterman and Barry Kosmin, British Jewry in the Eighties: A Statistical Geographical Study (London: Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1986), p. 21.
Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14:3 (Autumn 1988), 575–99.
See Maria Di Cenzo with Leila Ryan and Lucy Delap, Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals, and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), for a discussion on the importance of periodicals to Edwardian feminism.
These name changes were related to changes in the organisations (LWLW and its successors) that ran it. For more information, see Eve Setch, ‘The Face of Metropolitan Feminism: The London Women’s Liberation Workshop, 1969–1979’, Twentieth Century British History 13:2 (2002), 171–90.
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Thomlinson, N. (2016). Introduction. In: Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–1993. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442802_1
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