In Conversation with the Women’s Liberation Movement: Intergenerational Histories of Second Wave Feminism, British Library, 12 Oct. 2013

On Saturday 12 October 2013, 250 people, mostly women, gathered in the British Library’s Conference Centre for the History of Feminism Network’s autumn event. It was the culmination of months of planning by Sarah Crook and Signy Gutnick Allen, the coconveners of the Network; Professor Barbara Taylor, from Queen Mary, University of London and the Raphael Samuel History Centre; and Polly Russell, from the British Library. What had started with a brainstorm in March between Barbara, Signy, Sarah and Laura Schwartz from Warwick University eventually brought together twenty-one speakers, all women once active in or now studying the Women’s Liberation Movement, and a passionately engaged audience who came to listen to them. Audience members were invited to use the event to reflect upon their own experiences of the Women’s Liberation Movement and of current feminist activism, an invitation that was wholeheartedly taken up throughout the day.

As organizers we had hoped that the event would be both a celebration and a critical evaluation of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Any such appraisal, we thought, must go back to the ‘source’: the women who were integral to the movement. At a time when feminist activism is experiencing a renewed sense of urgency, we felt – as historians, and as women acutely aware of the continued inequalities in our society – that it is timely to reflect on the legacies of our feminist foremothers. The British Library had already paved the way with the launch of its oral history project, ‘Sisterhood and After: an Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement’. Under the stewardship of Polly Russell, we took inspiration from this new archive, which is certain to be an outstanding resource for academics and interested parties alike, and held the event at the British Library.

The format was unusual: five themed sessions of forty-five minutes each commenced with a twenty-five minute ‘discussion’ between two historians of the Women’s Liberation Movement and two WLM veterans, and were subsequently opened up to the floor. This allowed for questions and comments from the audience. Our aim in designing the sessions this way was to encourage genuine conversations to take place on stage, without the mediating, and potentially controlling, presence of a chair. In this, we were inspired by oral history practice, and aspired to promote dialogue between different generations of feminists. So as to allow room for interpretation, we chose to make the themes of the sessions (women’s history, reproductive choices, sexualities, race, and work and class) as broad as possible. Nonetheless, we regretted that time restrictions meant we could not include dedicated sessions on a number of significant subjects (for example, disability, internationalism, and gender identity); we hope to host a similarly intergenerational event to explore these.

The interplay between academic analysis and activism was a topic raised by our panellists at a preliminary briefing meeting, and we decided to raise it in our opening remarks. A significant number of our Women’s Liberation Movement panellists were feminist academics or authors of important feminist texts, and we had selected PhD candidates and professional historians as interviewers. However, many of them also work in the present-day feminist movement in non-academic settings, and consider academia to be a site ripe for feminist interventions. We see the boundary between academia and activism as porous. From the planning stages on, however, the status of feminist work and workers within academic institutions was problematized, and this strengthened our desire to listen to a wide range of voices on the day. The audience was generous in intervening in these debates and offered a more diverse understanding of the issues.

In keeping with the historical focus of the day, the theme of the first session was Women’s History. The session featured Sally Alexander and Catherine Hall, both of whom have done much to assert the continued importance of women’s history in all its richness and complexity. They were ‘interviewed’ by Lucy Delap and Rachel Cohen, both of whom research women...