ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Mica Nava on Feminist Consciousness Raising

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

 ACFM’s Jeremy Gilbert interviews Professor Mica Nava on her experience of women’s liberation and consciousness raising in London in the 1970s. Mica is the author books such as Changing Cultures; Feminism, Youth and Consumerism and Visceral Cosmopolitanism Here are some texts by some of the people we mention: Sheila Rowbotham Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World  Juliet Mitchell […]

Hi, this is Jeremy Gilbert from ACFM, and this is one of our new series of microdoses, extra bits to supplement the main episode. This is the full audio of the interview I did with Mika Nava, long-term feminist activist and noted scholar, for our episode on Consciousness Racing, and we hope you enjoy it. Okay, well, I'm Mika Nava, and I joined the women's movement in 1969. and I was older than quite a lot of the other people who joined the women's movement I went to my first meeting when my youngest kid was about three weeks old

and I took him along in a caracot and I was probably a week I was probably 30 or very close to 30 so I was a quite there were few women older than me but not many Most of the people involved in those early days were quite young in their early 20s. But some of the more influential ones were in their early 30s. There was really nobody over 35. And I was very pregnant when I met David Slaney, who was one of the activists at LSE in the 1960s.

And he came to dinner with somebody in the house. And he started telling me about this new group. that was starting, was composed of a lot of American women who were involved in VSC or were with the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. And where was? This was North London. This was North London in Tuffel Park actually. And although at the time I was living just off the Finchley Road. And I thought, and he said, oh, and some of them have kids, they're thinking of different ways of bringing up kids together. And it sounded really boring because it wasn't anything that I I wanted to be doing at that stage.

I thought that's the last thing I want to be doing politically. But I do want to be more engaged politically. But then I discovered that it was actually much more radical than that. And so I went along. And where was it? Where was the meeting? The meeting was in Tuffalo Park. The where in a house?

Oh, in Karen Slaney, well, Dave Slaney and Karen Slaney's flat in Dartmouth Park Hill. It was a really small room. And there were about 15 people there. in the room, or maybe fewer, and a good number of them were American. So one of the most significant women and the most influential was Rochelle Wirtis, whose article, key article, she was a psychologist and she had a PhD, and she'd written a critique of John Balby's theories of maternal separation. And for me, that was absolutely a seminal piece in my commitment to the women's movement,

my consciousness raising and other people have mentioned other key texts or other key events. But for those of us with young kids, that was it. Right, because Bulby had really, yeah, this is for the recording. The Bulby had really was one of the key figures in the post-bought period. Should I say something about that? Yeah, you did. Okay, well, actually, my mother was quite into psychoanalysis and had quite a large collection of books.

And I remember taking Bolby's book, Child Care and the Growth of Love, to me, with me, to school, to the school I was at when I was about 16. So I read it then. And it was a critique. Basically, what he exposed and what he talked about was the damage done to children who lost parents during the war and who were brought up in hospitals, often with no personal contact at all. and so from that he developed this notion of the trauma done to children who didn't have constant care from their mothers and he shifted it around but it was popularized by Dr Spock who was a very liberal child care guru in the 1960s and so it was really kind of taken for granted that if we didn't want to damage our children we, as mothers, we mothers had to be around most of the time. And he says at one point, if you go shopping from time to time, you probably, and you leave your child with a nice carer,

you probably won't be doing any damage. Something like that. So it was really quite traumatic and intense. And so, yes, it had influenced me and it did influence women of my generation, even though I'd actually have a much more progressive, and independent existence up to that point. I mean, I'd lived in Mexico, I'd lived in New York for three years, and I'd been an artist, and I'd done an awful lot of things

and been involved in revolution, left-bring politics, but I had two older children, born in 64, 66, the youngest was born in 69, and this was like a revelation. the first women's meetings were a kind of revelation. Hang on, before we get to that, I want to get into it now, because people are going to like, there's a whole audience who's going to like listening to the whole thing online. And I think the thing about Bowie is really interesting,

because I think to clarify the sort of exactly what the sort of ideology of childcare the doctor's spot promoted was, because it, because to kind of, to sort of my generation, like I'm in my late 40s and I've got children, that'll sound kind of weirdly familiar and unfamiliar because we sort of grew up when I first had kids, I was basically presented by my friend, basically by my friends who are 10 years older than me. There were two alternative theories of parenting. And one was this one based on sort of anthropology of indigenous people, which was attachment parenting, which is, again, you're never supposed to lead the child alone,

but it's in a very different social context, in a very different ideal social context. It's not in the ideal context of the nuclear family, and it's just the mum looking after it, So it's mum and dad basically both sleep with the baby all the time. We carry them everywhere. And ideally you're supposed to have a tribe of friends who also look after it. So you're basically trying to live in like some sort of indigenous communities, even some sort of paleitic community. So it's either that or it was this, you know, enforced separation, controlled crying, you know.

Funnily, both of the people who lectured me with advice about that, identified as anarchists, I remember. Identified as anarchists. One of them, they've used to. But so that's very different. Whereas the, as I understand it, I mean, you correct me if I'm wrong. The Dr. Spock theme was sort of, it wasn't exactly either of those things. It was, it was that you, indeed, you can't ever leave the baby alone,

but it's absolutely assumed that the person who will never leave the baby alone will be mum, and it'll be mum, mostly on her own, and she'll be in the house, and she won't go to work, and she won't really, and there's no emphasis, there isn't this emphasis on the importance of a kind of network of peers and children and other people. Is that all correct? Yeah, more or less. But one of the important things is to see, and is it recording still,

I mean, do you want me to go? Oh, okay, one of the important things about Dr. Spock was that he was a very progressive kind of advisor in the period after Truby King. And so particularly, he said, look, babies will learn to eat when they want to. You give them a bit of food. They won't eat too much. They'll eat what they feel like. And it's likewise with breastfeeding. You breastfeed when the baby wants something. And you don't have to wait rigidly for four hours before you, whereas some of the previous advisors were very, very, very. very strict about timing. Well, the Truby King thing, that's, you know, she's the antecedent of what in the, of the sort of, I can't remember, I think it was a he. Probably. Okay. I can't remember the, I can't remember the person now who, who was a say, who promoted it just sort of 10, 15 years ago. But it was this returned to, you know, rigid, rigid feeding times. Exactly. Bottle feeding from day one. You know, control crying. Yeah. You never go to them. Yeah, they'll get it. So these things sort of recur. But so, yeah, so that's important. So the doctor's thing, it was, you know, it was reacting against that.

And I, my doctor, my copy of Dr. Spock fell apart after a few years because I relied on it heavily. And definitely the way I brought up my kids in the 60s was according to Dr. Spock, except that he, he was not very progressive when it came to fathers. And he did shift. And actually, I was on a television program with him and some other people. I think I might have a video of it somewhere. And that was in about 1970. something. And he was really a kind of enlightened, interesting guy. And there were some other people on it about how you should bring up babies in what was natural and what wasn't and so on. Okay. So you went from that. So you went from having been, you know, very much immersed in that.

I remember this is, because my mum was in an NCT, who was in us from Dr. Charles. Yes. Me too. Exactly. You know, teacher and such, the 70s. And I still remember when my sister was, I remember I knew who Dr. Spock was because I didn't read, I wasn't enough to read the books, but I knew, I knew that was the person who told you how to look after babies. Yeah. And I couldn't tell the difference from Mr. Spock on the, on Star Trek. Oh yes, of course. I thought he was Mr. Spock. Yes. I thought he was Dr. Spock. Okay, but anyway, so you come from that and having been a mother who's been really, you know, sort of interpolated by that ideology and you, and you go into And also the National Childbirth Trust, which very much promoted sort of relatively natural childbirth.

I had my three babies at home, and I was into breastfeeding and so on. And that actually became an issue in the context of the meetings. And I was talking to Sue O'Sullivan, who was in my group at the time. She was one of the Americans in that American group, which had sprung up independently of some of the other. groups in London, but then kind of connected to them. And Sue and I were laughing about the way that she always accused me of glorifying motherhood. And I used to say, yes, I felt terrible about glorifying motherhood, but I did. And it was great for me. And she said, oh, well, it was really always a bit of a problem for her. And she felt bad because it seemed to be okay for me.

And so, you know, there was, those anxieties were expressed in that early meeting. In those early meetings, in Tufnell Park. And that was, and between 69, the autumn of 69, September 69, when I went to that first meeting. And sort of March 1970, I was in that Tufno Park group. And after March, after the conference at Oxford, we expanded exponentially. That's the Women's Liberation Conference at Rusking. Yes. And there were lots of people who wanted to join groups, so we had to split. So that quite a wrench because we left behind some people that we got very close to but we had to and we did along geographical lines and i then joined the belsize lane group which was much nearer my house and what was materially going on in the group i think that's something people are really interested

in these days and have a really vague idea about like you would turn up and well there were a number of things that we wanted to do i mean first of all people felt that they had to meet as women only and that was a very radical thing, radical demand of radical structural difference from all the other political meetings around at the time. So, and that it had to be a relatively small group, you couldn't have these massive meetings, that everybody should be involved, everybody should be given a chance, that people shouldn't monopolise meetings. There was no chair, there were no rules. That's why I still can't quite get all the rules in the Labour Party. and some people I know who've had these long histories on the left are much better at them but so we it was sort of we agreed things we would discuss

we somehow or other would have if there was anything to agree we would try and do it by consensus rather than any other way and so some of the people in the group were rather sophisticated and so but we did talk about women's issues rather than the the wider issues but some of them were there in London because of their, they had to flee from the states. They were either, you know, avoiding the draft or they were really being persecuted and had lots of left-wing connections,

often through their husbands or partners. And we talked about issues that, you know, things like childbirth, things like equal opportunities, but abortion, I mean, all of those initial issues, but we deliberately, focused away from the kind of most important issues that we thought had been addressed by the suffragettes, that is to say the vote. So we were not, we wanted it. I mean, we were into the personal as political and that meant that we had to talk about ourselves. I mean,

there are a lot of fantasies about what went on in those groups and I think a lot of groups were very different. But both the first group and my second group had quite a lot of, you know, a few people with, quite a few women with young children. So we were not typical of some of the groups with really young women. And so that was so Sullivan, Shelley, and then when we, and Karen and Angela Malamid, who lived around, still lives around the corner in Tuffield Park. And at that time, I lived in near Belsais Park. And then in that group, which sort of formed over the course of the 70s and I was in for 10 years, just about all of us had young children. The people who didn't drifted away because a lot of it was about the difficulties of the sexual division of

labour and how, and monogamy, marriage, and importantly, and this is really one of the most important things about what those groups did. They talked about political ideas, but but they were all, they were polemical, but they were also about changing the way we lived. Right. So they were prescriptive in a way. And that was sometimes very stressful. And I remember thinking, God, I can't go on any longer, because I'm going to have to change everything. And it's just too much.

I can't change everything. So it was special. You mean changing household arrangements? Household arrangements. Working up. I mean, some of the demands are in the book here, and actually in this initial article. And I did do say there, well, these were our demands, but whether or not we'll be able to achieve them is something else. So even in 1971, I was quite cynical about the possibilities of change.

So tell us some of the demand. Well, they were about living together, giving up all money and possessions. I mean, there were a few brave households that did that. Others were living together and sharing, or at least sharing a little bit more equally, childcare and child responsibility. I mean, even just helping was a kind of improvement and we went down that avenue

a bit and certainly and were there intellectual reference points in the discussion in the discussions? Yeah, we did read things we definitely read things, we read quite a lot of leaflets from America, everything was sort of what's the word for

psychos, mymograph? Mimeograph, yeah, I mean I think recycled yeah, you know those things things that, those machines that put things out in large numbers. Oh, yeah, I know that you mean. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I forgot the name. And, um, but there were all these pamphlets came from America.

So yeah, I mean, for example, Anna Koot and B. Campbell said that the most important seminal kind of influence for them was the myth of the vaginal orgasm. That was one leaflet by Anna Kurt. Other people said it was the Ford Women's Strike. And for me, it was Shelley's, critique of Balby. So yeah, and we did read stuff and we, and the Oxford Conference was a film about it and I re-saw it the other day because there was a little cluster of events,

two days, consecutive days, organised by unfinished histories where the film was screened on Monday and then there was a whole lot of feminist theatre from the 70s that was reproduced and spoken about. Do you want to just say for a moment, actually, what was her critique of Bulby?

Her critique of Bolby was that there could be multiple carers. Okay. Really, basically. I think what's interesting is anthropology became important for the early feminists because it was how people lived around the world and we shouldn't assume that there was only one way. And history, because things haven't always been the same. So, because everything was so profoundly naturalized in those early days

that we didn't think that things could be different. And then the other thing was, Sheila's got a lovely quote that I took and have used from Sheila Robottom, where she talks about how we couldn't even imagine how to get up and change the world. I mean, it's not that and it's something else, but it's along those lines. And so it was a matter of kind of opening our minds, and of course we read Juliet, Mitchell, Sheila Robottom and Juliet Mitchell were the giants of those early days in Bryn. Shulamith Firestone was so extreme and out on her limb. I mean, I make fun of her in another piece I wrote

because she said, well, 10 people should get together and take care of everybody's children. Well, I mean, it was so unlikely when it's hard for two people to make contracts, you know, and to stay together. I mean, what are you going to do? And are you going to leave babies with somebody else? Just the 10 years are up and so on and so on. I mean, they were fantasies, really.

but some very radical stuff was coming from America and it seems like so this is a kind of hobby horse of mine but I think it is really coming out in the remarks you're making that there's a certain there's a rejection of kind of liberal individualists

sort of solutions to these problems to be a really important theme and I think one of the things that we were very critical of now the National Association or National Organization of Women in America because it was reformists I remember once making a suggestion in the Tuffalo Park meeting and that was really kind of early on.

And this woman, Ellen, who was one of the American lot, said, that is so reformist. And I hardly knew really what reformist meant. I mean, it was like a very concrete strategy that we could, I can't remember what it was about, except if I do remember her response. Maybe it was around more childcare because public childcare, state childcare,

was minimal at that time. And so some of the childcare that was developed was developed actually by groups of people independently of the state. We didn't make those reformist demands of the state. And I think probably would have been a lot better off if we had, actually, with hindsight. And we were very purist. We didn't want to particularly tell our story to the press in our way. We ignored the press because it was the bourgeois press. So we were absolutely rooted in the left-wing politics.

of that moment. And some people have represented feminism in a different context. I mean, Anthony Barnett, who I was in Germany with recently, we were talking about the origins of, you know, 68 and the origins of the women's movement. He did include it as something significant, but he had a shot of a woman walking down the middle of a railway carriage with almost no clothes on and these men sitting in, you know, and it was a sort of business men sitting there, one and it was like an it was appealing to men

to take the train or something like and using a woman model and that was not our background that was not what we were reacted against because we were far away from it already I see we were absolutely rooted in the left

but it was the sexism of the left of men our men the men on the left who ridiculed women who got up and said this is a women's issue who abused and insulted and laughed at and so on and so on. I mean, it really was quite shocking

when you read some of the accounts and you see some of the comments. And even in the film that was made about the first conference at Oxford, there's this one shot taken by a male cameraman and not edited out by the male director of this woman and sort of panning up and down and focusing on the breasts and

so on in a way that really is so dated. You know, and so, I mean, it was those things that we addressed, and we learned from, and we had to challenge. And I think it's a mistake to think that it was the more, I mean, obviously, if you look at some of the films of the 60s, you think, my God. But we were partly in that community, partly in that cultural world, but, you know, already rather far out of it, because we'd been through 68.

Yeah, I understand. Yeah. So, and so what was the relationship to you make? Because, I mean, we're interested in the idea of consciousness raising, and what you're describing is basically consciousness-raising groups in a way in which women seem to have, you know, sort of raised consciousness. Is that a phrase that would have been used at the time? I think we did use consciousness raising, but it does feel a bit dated now. But we did, but we did raise, we did raise consciousness. We did transform the way people thought.

And what did that mean? Well, I mean, it meant talking about the subordination of the oppression of women and talking and focusing on the liberation of women. Liberation politics was another route. So it was left politics and liberation politics. There were absolutely the sort of ground from which we emerged. And it meant this expansion of political horizon. Yeah. Well, it was like a lot of people have talked about a light switching on a light. It's a revelation, a kind of extraordinary. I didn't think about it that everything fell into place. So it did feel like a very dramatic transformation. But from there, what followed was a bit more complicated

sometimes. But people did change the way they lived. Absolutely. And how did men relate to this thing? Because it's always, I mean, it's always been an issue, hasn't it? You have feminist consciousness raising groups, women's consciousness, but ultimately this is partly about changing a set of better. Well, I think some men were sympathetic and tried hard. Some men found it quite exciting that all the women were getting together and challenging everybody. And some men found it unacceptable and too difficult. I mean, in my Belsais Lane group, I think at the beginning, the sort of core members were all with a man.

One had already separated, but I think the rest of us were all still married because marriage was really what people did in those days. And by the end of the decade, none of them were. So, I mean, it was a kind of huge rupture. I was the last, actually, to split, I think, out of that small group. And it was incredibly challenging for everybody. I mean, that Belsize-lane group was quite unusual. There were also links not only with the left, but also with, for example, Bhagwan.

So a lot of them went to this guru in India. to explore, sort of exposing, transforming, living in different kinds of ways. So that was very attractive for a lot of people. And of course, that also broke up a lot of relationships. People can know about Baguan now because of the Netflix. Exactly. Well, the Netflix thing, I mean, there were about five women in that group

who took it very seriously, who went there. Some stayed there for many years. And some came back. Sally Belfridge wrote a very interesting book about it. But she actually, and it's definitely worth having a look at, but she took it quite seriously. So for the recording, if you don't know what we're talking about, what's wild, wild country on Netflix? Yes. The Google, Oshon, or Bangwan.

That's right. Oshow. Yeah, four, and he wasn't called Oshow in those days. And, but we called about, we talked about orange people. And I, so they were all, so, I mean, he's a, he's a sort of neo-verdantic, sort of neo-hindis. sort of teacher, sort of a teacher of yoga, you know, yoga meditation. Well, and completely sort of unrestrained sexual activity at all times of the day and night and stuff like that and exposing, self-exposing, exposing your vulnerabilities.

Right, right. And forcing people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise have done. So I remember one member of my group had the, was given the kind of, what is it called, the detail, the, you know what happens in the, when you're in the, of cleaning all the toilets. So that was her job because she looked like somebody who had not often cleaned toilets.

And so, you know, it was a funny kind of mixture of humiliation and self-exposure and liberation. Because there's all this stuff going on at that time in the 70s, isn't there? I mean, there's things like, you know, the Black Panthers had what they call

the struggle sessions where, you know, where you kind of engage in self-criticism and you kind of accuse each other of things. And the Maoist, obviously, had this practice of self-criticism and this idea that you really basically break down every trace of your bourgeois, individualist ego by, you know, having all the ways in which you're not a perfect revolutionary, kind of exposed and can't be exposed. And I think actually when we, you know, when we, you know, people sort of connected to ASFM, when we've talked about constant as raising, that when we've, the pushback we've had is that people think that's

what we mean. People think people are scared because they think, well, actually, that was the kind of dark side of the left in the 70s. And it's really interesting. I mean, in your work terms, what was it people, what was it that people were looking for in both the Women's Liberation Group and then in Baguang in these places? What was it they were looking for that pushed them in those directions?

Let me come back to that in a minute because I want to say something about black power, which I think is very important. I think the kind of politics that we were all used to before feminism, for those of us on the left, were, and it was predominantly students, middle-class women who were involved in this movement in the early days, although there were some working-class groups

like the strikers at Fords and the night workers and so on, and there were black women, but I think one of the biggest influences on us was black power because it wasn't, it was on behalf, the new movement was going to be on behalf of ourselves. It wasn't going to be like the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, on behalf of others in a remote part of the world, a kind of anti-imperialist or pro-civil rights or something like that.

We had our civil rights in the formal kind of way, but what we were doing was acting on behalf of ourselves, like black power people were. And so that was quite important. That was really a revelation. And sometimes it felt a bit uncomfortable because a lot of us felt a bit guilty about being privileged already. Right, right, right.

So we had to sort of recognize, and denaturalise our oppression. Right, right, right. And so that was one thing. And then what was the question? Oh, the 70, well, it wasn't all dark. I mean, there was. No, I'm into it.

Okay. But there was also a lot of solidarity. And it's a question of what people are looking for. Yes. You've sort of answer, but it's in really nice terms. To say it a bit and more, what are people looking for that in a constant fundraising group in Tasop Park and in Baguang, Oh, well, in Bugwan, I was not really...

Well, what's the continuity? Well, I think there was about new beginnings in a way, about stripping back. And it was all linked to a funny kind of psychoanalysis. I mean, several of the people in all of these groups then later became psychotherapists or were already very involved. And, you know, sometimes we rejected Freud, but we all read it. Juliet Mitchell started that. I mean, there was a lot of work, a lot of engagement.

about, it was about discovering and uncovering and exploring what had been kind of hidden and not exposed. In terms of view of the social construction of the self. Yes, the social construction of the self, definitely. And so, I mean, we did have joint movements. We did do things, but it was mainly about, and some of us ended up mainly writing. I mean, I was in the women's theatre group

for three years in the middle 70s, and we went around doing plays for school girls in sort of theatre and education about contraception and, you know, getting kids to be aware. So it was sort of more like sexual as pleasure, but make sure you don't have babies kind of message to 15-year-olds, which is a bit dated in today's terms, because it wasn't about sex as danger at all at that point. And so that was another thing that happened.

And then, I mean, just in personal terms and in terms of what a group provided. In 1977, I went to the Institute of Education to do a PhD, and we formed a group then of women PhD students and researchers, and that's still going. And we meet all the time. I mean, we meet every month or so, six weeks. It's shrunk over the years. Some people have returned to Chile, returned to Greece, gone to Canada. But there's still a core of about six of us. So is that, are you all the same age? Or has it renewed itself? No, no, no, no. Definitely. All the same people. We've met together for 45 years. And has that been helpful? Incredibly. So we ended up being three psychotherapists and three professors. Well, one is both. And that's

Leslie, you know. And so we are, and we've definitely supported each other. It's not been a very fraught group, unlike the Bell-Sys Lane one, which was all much more difficult. And, and we're, and And it's been incredibly, we've been incredibly supportive to each other, and now we're reaching kind of old age, and we're kind of negotiating decline. And, you know, some people are declining more than others, and it's been, and it's quite difficult. And so, yeah, and so I think these, and that had its roots in a kind of consciousness-raising group that started in order to sort of explore the, issues in academia in the mid-70s. So, yeah. So, and I interrupted you, I think you've gone there anyway a bit,

but I interrupted you when you started, we said there was solidarity, that that was one of our favorite words. Yeah, well, that is. You were talking about the fact that the, you know, the experience of the left in the 70s wasn't just one of the sort of dance, which, I mean, it's very important for us. It's very important for our whole project, actually, that we think, and it's something people have been talking about, I think, for several years now,

that this popular image was constructed for a long time of the 70s and it was all very dark compared to the shiny loveliness of the late 60s and it was punk is this kind of

but punk comes out of this dystopian moment and you're saying actually you said there was a lot of solidarity oh yeah there was a tremendous amount of solidarity but I think if you really heavily identify with something

like a women's group when things are so tense and so explosive and so difficult and like the women's theatre group and like feminist view actually very often

there are splits because people so identify with these things so there are problems and it was such a passionate engagement very intense

but it was incredibly I mean solid we also we did things together we produced plays we went we went to Wales we did LSD together

we went to yeah That's what we like to hear on the UCFN. So, you know, we did a lot of different things. And we did, and we certainly had, you know, our kids got to know each other. And we went on holidays together sometimes. And some people fought closer relationships outside the group. And some people were kind of close to people as, you know, in the group as a whole.

And some people just fell away. But there was a solid core. I mean, there are some people in the Belsize Lane group that still. meet a tiny number. I don't know very much about it. And, um, but, uh, yeah, so I became more of an academic. And so the second group from the Institute of Education was kind of more appropriate. And it wasn't as, it was like a calm second of marriage. So what, so, I mean, How did the sort of practice and constitution of these small groups? I mean, how did it sort of relate to the wider idea of a movement?

Well, we had, yeah, there was the general workshop, and there were publications, there was the Women's Liberation Workshop, and there were, you know, Shrew was one of the publications, we wrote stuff for feminists for, spare rib all the time, we, there was a sort of little sub-writing group in the Belsais Lane group that did fiction together. There were, and people had engagements outside in the workplace. I was at LSE and I got very involved in feminist stuff at LSE and in fact I didn't do terribly well in my exams because I think I turned every single exam question around to answer it in, you know, with feminist material about absence.

and about, you know, you haven't looked at this and this is what, et cetera, et cetera, and they weren't the questions that were being asked. So, I had to... And that was all very successful. I mean, ultimately, you're sort of transforming curriculum. Yes. I think that was the most successful thing, actually.

That and popularising feminism through women's magazines and so on. So that after a while, people did do that. Some people objected, but that was later in the 70s and 80s. And certainly the curriculum in universities was completely, completely transformed by feminism. And a very large number of us went into academia and did that work. And so both as, I mean, as students initially and then as lecturers. And I personally was on the editorial board of feminist review,

but that was a bit later from 1983 to 1993. And then I, you know, that sort of work takes its toll. and a lot of time, so, but was incredibly rewarding, incredibly important, and I learned such a lot. And what do you think happened? I mean, I'm interested in now in the sort of how your experience or your perceptions relate to certainly this kind of received narrative that I sort of grew up with, which is that, you know, the Women's Liberation Movement had this, you know, this period of creativity and dynamism was forward motion and was part of the broad popularisation of sort of feminist ideas of, you know, with varying degrees of radicalness across the culture and then it sort of

fragments in the 80s under the pressures like a base of certain kinds of identity politics. But is that accurate, do you think, or is it? Well, it certainly was no longer a single movement. I mean, we didn't have conferences. The big split was between radical feminists and socialist feminists. Right. And I mean, I was, I challenged the idea. of socialist feminism because I didn't think the two things went together in quite the way that

some socially feminist thought they did. So do you want to, can you elaborate that? Okay, well, first, what did the terms mean radical feminism? Okay, well, radical feminism was really a kind of separatist feminist feminism and which believed that there was such a thing as a patriarchy and they were very anti-men and anti-boys. Somebody told me the other day, where was I? that she went with a baby boy on a demonstration, was told to go away. And, I mean, it was crude, but it's less crude elements were that, well, they got quite a lot done, and they had a journal and so on, but I wasn't part of that group. I was part of the social feminist feminism also included lesbians.

It certainly wasn't about sexual orientation or sexual identity. but it was and socialist feminist feminists on the whole thought and we were all so embedded so left wing that only getting rid of capitalism

would mean that the sort of women's oppression of women would only be overthrown with the overthrow of capitalism well that seemed to me unlikely

because all the examples around showed that women were still oppressed in the Soviet Union, in, et cetera, et cetera. And some people put that a little bit more theoretically. I think it was Mark Cousins, who said capitalism is indifferent to the gender of its labor power. When did he say, though? In MF, I think. But when?

Do you know where? When? When? When. I'd say about 1980, 70, earlier, a little bit earlier, because I started going to the seminars in Birmingham in 1977. I don't know if you want all of this kind of rather more personal. I went, when I started my PhD at the Institute of Education, I went there because Diana Leonard was one of the very few women who could supervise PhDs in the country. And

that's why she had quite a few feminists, but we were also quite critical of her because she did position herself on the radical feminist side. And she was very influenced by Christine Delpherson. who was a French feminist and they said that basically the origins of women's oppression was the control in the domestic sphere by men and that you could see that and that persisted in many countries in the world and so on

and I actually took that fairly seriously and I said that you could have capitalists of oppression and that kind of domestic and I forgot the terms because I haven't read the books for so long. They could coexist. And that was my argument when I was in Birmingham at the centre. You mean the centre for contemporary cultural. The centre for contemporary cultural studies.

Everything was so flexible in those days that even if you were enrolled somewhere else, you could go to meetings there and they were open. Nobody checked you at the door. And I went to the family group that was actually coordinated at the time by Richard John And so we looked at the relationship with the family, I think it was called Family School, to capitalism and so on and so on. And so I put forward, I have something that I wrote then about that sort of theoretical relationship between patriarchy and capitalism.

And a number of us were very obsessed about that at one stage. Well, I think people are interested in it again, I think. Are they? And I think, I mean, you know, I would say the kind of, yeah, most of I've seen people my age and younger have mostly been taught that patriarchy was a sort of old-fashioned concept and it wasn't, and it was sort of wrong with various reasons. And I think, but it's never gone away from sort of activist feminism as a reference point.

And I think there's a number of us who would say, I don't think anyone's really writing about it very specifically, but partly because people, what definitely people are writing about published books about it, is the idea of social reproduction as a key kind of frame for thinking about these things. And I think a lot of people do think that patriarchy is kind of a useful, as long as you don't,

I would say, certainly amongst people I know, the idea that patriarchy is not, I don't really know anyone who's working from a kind of classically Radfem perspective. I know people who engage in a kind of radical feminism, a different kind, I'd say, which is a sort of extreme liberalism, really. But I think that the notion

that you have to understand the interaction between patriarchy and capitalism as war produces, contemporary gendered experience. I think people are coming back to that idea, right? Well, I think it was important, and I think there were links. I think what happened is that there was a moment when we kind of exhausted that debate, and we moved on to sort of post-modernism

and lack of certainty about anything and so on. So, you know, we kind of shifted with the sort of academic and intellectual fashions of the moment. But, yeah, it was important at a certain moment, and it was much debated in feminist review and I have one of my first published articles in feminist review goes through that because there were a couple or two or three

sociology of education books, women in education that came out at the same time and I did a review and I think that was in the early 80s, 1980, I think. But I wonder if one of the things is, I mean it always seems to me with sort of hindsight, that one of that, the reason I was so interested in that quote about capitalism being indifferent to the gender of the labour that it exploits is that it seems

that's one of the, that was one of the key things that shifts from the early, I mean, there's this moment in the early 70s, which you're all kind of fascinated by, but one of the things it's always, and one of the things I've always said to students is that one of the things that's now so sort of quaint about a lot of the stuff, and it comes out of gay liberation stuff as well, is this belief that, you know, by, that you can't, that you can't imagine a capitalism that, normalises and accepts, you know, queen, or all women's liberation. One of the things that's becoming clear, really, in the 80s, in the early age, with the implementation of post-Fordism and, you know,

what we now call neoliberalism, though actually you can have. You can have a capitalism, which is indifferent to those things. Exactly. And people don't really get their heads around that for quite a long time, right? No, I agree. But I was actually, I did push for it. And I think that was partly the influence of Diana Leonard and a few people, and that I had it a little bit more.

I did argue against, for instance, Katha Hall and a few other people on feminist review. So it was, but Anne Phillips wrote a very nice piece about it that kind of linked the two together that was worth returning to probably, and I could find somewhere. And so, yeah, it was a big debate, and I agree. I mean, I think it was obvious that feminism could accommodate, because we had Thatcher already, you know, that feminism and capitalism could accommodate successful women and so on and so on. And that things were shifting like that. Yeah, absolutely.

So I agree that it was problematic. And also because we could see that wherever socialism had sort of operated to some extent, it certainly wasn't particularly progressive in terms of sexual politics. Right, right. Although it was at different moments. Right, right. But of course, I mean, the other side of this is that people become aware. I mean, one reason people are interested in all this stuff again now

is that people can see the limits of that. Exactly. There's a whole set of demands that have been made in the early 70s. They still can't be realized. Well, what's so interesting is that I think all of the Me Too stuff ignores the domestic sphere, ignores what goes on at home in terms of childcare, in terms of, I mean, people are,

there's no doubt about it, that men are more conscious now about, and, you know, there's a whole article this morning and this morning's guardian about how Prince William is going to change nappies and things. So, you know, this is, it's taken for granted that men should, but it's also acknowledged that a lot of men don't, But at least it's part of the contemporary narrative about how you behave as a father and a mother. But for instance, sharing in a larger group has just disappeared.

The idea of collective sharing, of communes, of alternative ways has disappeared. And I don't know how people manage, because although there is much better child care on the state, it's still minimal and it's extraordinarily expensive. they recruit grandmothers you know it's I don't know how they manage well I think it's been made more difficult as well I mean part of I mean you know

my argument for a long time I mean it partly comes from my own experience is that it's you know I mean the I mean the commune movement was viable in the 70s partly because it was the end of the high moment of social democracy because housing was much cheaper absolutely

There was the states of infrastructure and... We could buy big houses for very little. And I, you know, and I always tell the story of, look, Joe and I, we researched, you know, what if you wanted to set up a housing gop in London, like 1999? And the answer is, well, you don't. Unless you've got, unless someone's going to, unless you've inherited a million queer, you're not going to do that. And, you know, in 1965 or whatever it was, 70, you know,

houses were available at a very low price. They did go up. in the following decade and large houses were there and people the other thing is that uh shelly chely wordis introduced us to the idea of bourgeois solutions she said we have a bourgeois solution we have an opair well a lot of uh young middle class parents could afford to have opairs because there were loads of people from abroad who wanted to come and live in london and learn english and especially with kind of uh you know trendy sort of young family and in our case we did have a whole lot of people living in the house that we lived in

because there were several flats and it belonged to it was a kind of family house and it was full of sort of the students and actors and artists and so on so you got people who were extremely nice who would come and live there and share child care and for very little money I mean compared with today so you know there were solutions that were available to people at that time that are absolutely not available now because of the situation with cost of housing really well that's so interesting because one of the things we keep coming back to in these discussions that have come out this kind of about acid

urbanism so project and discussions this is this idea of the right to the city and I've already sort of suggested that maybe this year the festival in the World Transform this year that should be our main focus and we should try and we talked about producing some sort of pamphlets about it because I think as it keeps coming back and again and again. And I think it's really interesting because I don't think we've quite thought about that gender dimension of it actually. I mean, I have said in some sort of meetings and things, well, the right to the city, it means the right to experiment with forms of household, the right to live how you want to live in the city and not be forced into a particular

way. But of course, that's absolutely crucial to thinking about these issues of social reproduction and gender. There's a limit that the neoliberalisation of the city actually puts a limit on the aspirations in terms of how you reorganise social reproducting. And when Pepe and I split in 78, towards the end of the 70s, you know, we decided that we would move, we were able to sell that house and we would move to East where houses were an awful lot cheaper and we got two quite close to each other. He lived in Kentish Town and I lived here and this house cost 28,000 pounds. Yeah, this mansion in Tasha Park, thanks. to you. I mean, and I deliberately got a big house so that other people could live in the house

and it wasn't just me and the kids. And so there were other friendly adults who, you know, my kids were bigger at that time and they could take themselves to school on their own. And, you know, but there were always somebody to cook a meal every evening somebody cooked a meal. And, you know, they would be around if somebody would be around in the house if I was out. And that was really, really important and that we did have a similar arrangement in the other house but not as developed because my then husband my father of my kids wasn't as keen on it as I was but yeah and they were quite commonplace and that had to do with the housing market really as much as anything else now that is really interesting I mean that is really interesting and it sort of relates to stuff

that Keir know we do the podcast with has been writing about as well about ideas of adult but I mean the other thing this is very much I think this is a probably something that was sort of laid on, sort of my generations were Generation X, you know, more than any others, that what the mark of adulthood was leaving the shared house to go into the private space, which, you know, which is a thing we didn't want to do. We thought we didn't want to do, Joe and I, and then we found out we had to. We had to if we didn't want to bring up kids in a situation where a landlord could throw us out. They felt like it, and that's all the product.

And that's something that's really, it's a really, it's a really, it's been a repeated thing, so many, so many of these discussions. I mean, we had one of the seminars in Hattling, we had Lynn and Keir talking about this recently, and the idea that shared housing goes, it should be something that's possible for people, should be possible long term, if they want it, it should be something

that's available, and it shouldn't be marked as infantile. It seems really important. I don't think it was marked. We actually, in the Belsight's Lane group, in the early days, saw there was a row of houses for sale in the other side of sort of towards West Hampstead, Belcise Road, I think it's called,

or one of the, sort of, you know, west of the Finchley Road. And we did think about buying them, but it would have meant giving up a lot and investing a lot and making a huge commitment and, well, it didn't happen. But we did look at it because we thought, you know, as we wanted to be able to share,

we wrote, there was an article, and I've got the, the, the, I'll show it to you in a minute, you know, what, how you, when you, share a house you don't need 10 washing machines you can make do with one or two and you don't need 10 kitchens and so on and so on so that you could really share things and that was the idea and that was the ideal but of course it didn't quite happen and I was lucky because I did have something that I'd inherited but you know some people really gave up ownership and some people hung on to it so you're never going to get a really equal share house but you do get other friendly adults who are very willing

who at that point were very willing to live in this house. And I mean, Nick Rose lived here in the early days and other people. There was a string of sort of interesting intellectuals and filmmakers and who had a big influence and drama people. I mean, they were really, my kids certainly remember some of the people who lived in the house with us with great affection. I know, yeah, I knew. Yeah.

So I wanted to ask as well, what, I mean, what, you know, you know, if somebody was establishing Constance Raising Group today, like it would, would you think, would it be any different from, do you think it would, do you think it would or should be any different? Or do you, you might feel you're the wrong person who are, because you've been, you've still got yours. But, you know, what, do you think it would be a useful thing for people to do today? Yes, I mean, I think what it does is it produces a kind of solidarity

and a kind of enduring friendship. And it's sort of a bit, I mean, it overlaps with things like group therapy, of course and maybe you know it can have some of the same crises as you have to be considerate and thoughtful and all of those things

but I think those are embedded in the you know that we in the current group we have a even now even now I mean sometimes we have a general discussion about politics of the day but we always give each other a little bit of space so we go around the room

and we say okay what's been happening with you because some people tend to talk more than others. And so we kind of structure in a little space for everybody to talk about themselves. And that just has become the habit of our particular group and maybe one of the reasons why it's endured for nearly 50 years. And do you think it has to be, I mean, because one of the things we're interested in

that we don't really know actually whether this is doable or not, whether it's a format which can only only operate in the context of women's liberation. And there has to be just gender segregated. it's a former or a type of practice. I think people do reading books, book groups, and I have a feeling that they're similar up to a point. You know, it's a sort of sense that something brings you together and something endures,

and it's a shared something that you're committed to that is sort of outside your immediate work. I mean, Richard is in a book group, and they read some very interesting stuff, and it's a funny, eccentric sort of mix of people. I mean, my women's group, we were all feminist, but we have different sort of national and class backgrounds. Right, right. And that emerges at different points.

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