The Women’s Liberation Movement and the gendering of undercover police surveillance in 1970s Britain: the public inquiry as (un)ethical archive

Abstract

In the 1970s an undercover police officer was planted in the feminist movement in Britain. Across two years, this female officer shared activist plans, notes from large and small meetings, and feminist print material with officers in Special Branch. Nothing of interest was uncovered during this extended spell in the movement, and no plans that threatened state security were thwarted. But her time in the movement is important to historians, nonetheless; not only does it reveals the patriarchal investments of the secret state, but she inadvertently created an archive of feminist activist documents. The use of this archive, made openly available online by the Undercover Policing Inquiry (2015-ongoing), opens up knotty questions about consent and complicity for historians. This article uses evidence given to the Undercover Policing Inquiry to explore the Women’s Liberation Movement’s perceived threat to social order, arguing that the testimony shows that the movement – in significant part because of activists’ links with other movements on the Left – was taken more seriously by the British state than has previously been acknowledged. Through a focus on a female police officer, I explore women’s position as both perpetrators and victims of state surveillance in this period. The article also examines the ethics of using materials that have been made available by a public inquiry into state surveillance for historical research. It does not seek to resolve the tensions between privacy, openness, justice, and feminist research methods that this public inquiry exposes, but rather formulates some of the questions, and suggests some tentative responses to the issues it invokes. It suggests that the testimony of spied-upon activists can be seen as a reclamation of control and a retrieval of power, and that their contributions to the Inquiry are entwined with a broader tradition ‘talking back’ and reclaiming power from the state