A different kind of feminist

Submitted by AWL on 24 June, 2014 - 5:23

The Christmas of 1969 was a turning point for me.

I was a month off my ninth birthday when my sister gathered up all the selection boxes and various other sweets and treats and parcelled them up for the pot-bellied, fly-covered starving black kids who appeared in our living room every teatime all the way from Biafra. I didn’t declare then that I was a socialist. But I did carry what felt like huge burden of concern that I had some responsibility to sort things out. Immediately, that meant giving all our chocolate away. In the long term, it meant finding out about how the world works and why some kids starve to death on a huge scale while others have loads of chocolate.

I was a feminist before I was a socialist. I was fifteen in 1976 and the influence of the women’s movement was filtering through to popular culture. Candy Stanton’s ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ was in the charts warning young women of the crushing pain of being trapped by marriage and kids. Erica Jong’s the ‘Fear of Flying’ gave a ‘grown up’ and modern, liberated expression to the history I was being taught at school about the Suffragettes. I was angry, but inspired.

The Friday before I left school in June 1977 I was sent for an interview by my office skills teacher and I got the job. I felt I’d gained a further addition to my liberation: music, novels, history and now my own job and some cash. How wrong could I have been? Having a wage did buy me a few choices. But I became brutally aware that typing wills and conveyances for 7.5 hours a day, five and half days a week was nothing short of (wage) slavery.

There were times when the relentless routine felt like crushing torture. I had just left school, where I’d had a great time, and now this! Fortunately, I worked with several other young women who found that laughing their way through the day helped. Kicking the boss’s afternoon cake down the dusty corridor, putting back on the plate, then knocking on his door and presenting it to him with an insincere smile, broke the monotony. Nailing a kipper under his desk and then insisting his room didn’t smell felt like payback for him robbing our time.

My parents were pleased I hadn’t had to go into the ‘pots’ (working in a pottery production factory). Instead, I had a nice, clean job in an old ,established solicitor’s. Working in a small office for some silly old fuckwit was seen as progress. The thing that irked me more than anything was that I had no free time, no say in how my waking hours were being spent. I really felt like any freedom I’d had at school had been taken away from me.

After three years of working in a variety of mind numbing jobs I left work to go to college. By now, we had a woman prime minister, riots on the streets, a war in the Falklands, growing unemployment, the selling off of public services and a celebration of the greedy “Yuppy”. I knew, without any doubt, I had no solidarity with Thatcher and she had none with me or my class. Bitterly disappointed with Labour after the ‘Winter of Discontent’, it all seemed a bloody mess. I found a leaflet for a women’s consciousness raising group and joined. This brief encounter was no love story. I was looking for solidarity and some answers, I didn’t find it here. These educated, clever, articulate, middle class women didn’t like my accent, my energy or my politics. For some strange reason I’ve yet to understand they were obsessed with talking to each other about their genitalia. I was obsessed with talking about changing the world. I was a feminist- but a different kind of feminist from them.

The next stop was the local women’s peace group: this involved eating a lot of gluten free cake and talking a lot about non-violent direct action. From here I went to Greenham: this involved eating a lot of dhal and engaging in a lot of non-violent direct action. My new cause was better, more worthy than the introspection of the consciousness raising group, but didn’t go far enough. It would be great to put a stop to Cruise Missiles but the system that makes them and ‘needs’ them would still exist.

Then I found a leaflet for a meeting of local socialists called the Militant. This seemed more akin to what I was looking for. I told a bloke I ‘d recently met about the meeting because I thought he might be interested. He was quietly alarmed that I might join them and asked me to start some discussions with him about the politics of the Militant. These discussions were more about his politics than the Miliant’s but he convinced me of the need to consciously fight for socialist revolution. I was persuaded of the need to be an organised revolutionary and to get involved in the Labour party – despite the ‘Winter of Discontent’.

In November 1983, National Graphical Association members in Warrington were in a bloody battle with their boss, Eddie Shah, and we joined the picket lines. This was a raw physical fight: defending the right to picket against the police. At the time, I could not believe what I was seeing. The police were militaristic and scary- but the experience was galvanising. The bloke I was with was arrested and I went home without him. The next day, I went up to Warrington with a couple of friends and got arrested for contempt of court, after loudly chanting ‘the workers united will never be defeated’ when my friend’s charges for affray were read out. I was put in a cell with Minnie, a woman who had, in self-defence, escaped her violent boyfriend by hitting him with a bottle. She was arrested and he was free — despite his record of domestic violence.

I was a socialist feminist. And nothing has changed since then to make me question my commitment to the cause of smashing capitalism into the ground and in its place creating a new socialist society.

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