The Women's Liberation Movement at Forty (review)

To walk into Ruskin College on the fortieth anniversary of the first women's liberation conference was for me, as for many of the women there, to summon up the remembrance of conferences past; and not only the first Women's Liberation conference which this conference was remembering and celebrating. For anyone involved in the women's movement, the History Workshop movement or left politics in the 1970s and '80s, the seminar-rooms and lecture hall of Ruskin were very familiar and full of memories. Several generations of women were represented at this conference, as a display of hands at the opening address demonstrated. There were some who had been instrumental in the organization of the very first feminist conference in Britain, some who had grown up into the Women's Movement with those women as their foremothers, and some with a relatively recent involvement in feminist activism.

I was far too young to have been present at the first conference, but like many there I have been shaped by the manifesto, the books, the expectations and demands that emerged out of that first meeting in 1970. The 2010 conference was full of familiar faces – from every period and from a wide range of feminist politics over the last three decades. I would regularly catch myself thinking that I knew someone – only to realize that of course the woman I thought I remembered would by now be considerably older. Where once feminist activists regularly met in meetings and conferences, and were so known to each other that contact details seemed unnecessary, now we are much more fragmented into separate campaigns and academic institutions, into specialisms and political organizations. That is a testimony both to the pervasive impact of the women's movement, and also to the loss of a unifying momentum, themes that kept recurring over the course of the weekend.

Generational tensions did emerge in the early sessions; in one, women familiar with the experience of consciousness-raising moved the chairs away from a conventional seminar line-up into a more sisterly circle. Some older women who had been at the first conference expressed their considerable resentment at being talked at rather than with, while younger women who had been schooled in the institutionalization of women's studies were more equable about the academic conventions of the formal paper. Over the course of the weekend, with a variety of workshops, plenary addresses and discussions, most people had a chance to speak and to share the richness and variety of the experience that was there.

Sheila Rowbotham was an appropriate person to kick off proceedings and to remember, as one of its instigators, 'The 1970 Women's Liberation Conference', as a woman who has charted a century of women's activism and who has spent her life digging up the women's experiences that have been hidden from history. Her paper carefully assessed the hopes of 1970 from the perspective of 2010, and argued for a feminism that is constantly reinvigorated by new contexts, while also remembering its past. Rowbotham along with Anna Davin and Sally Alexander were all cited as influences by the speakers in the first session I went to, on 'Collecting Liberation Histories'. All the presenters were involved in archiving and collecting feminist artefacts and testimonies, and all explained how their work had been shaped by the approach to history forged by the New Left, History Workshop and feminist historians. Rachel Cohen is working on an oral history project based at the University of Sussex collecting feminist histories from across the country. Gail Cameron, from the Women's Library, discussed their recent exhibition on the Women's Movement and described the permanent collection held in London, its archives dating from the Suffragette movement now augmented with documents from the second wave of feminism. There was a degree of alarm among some of the older women there (including me) that the photocopies and roneoed newsletters (often in purple ink), once such a vital means of communication for feminist activists, and...