'Second-wave' black feminist periodicals in Britain

This article offers a long overdue exploration of black feminist periodicals in the UK during the period of second-wave feminism. In it, the author examines four feminist periodicals—FOWAAD, Speak Out, We Are Here and Mukti—in order to trace the development of black feminism in Britain and to investigate the extent to which black feminist periodicals in the UK became key sites for the development of a black feminist political critique that was aimed at three targets: the (white) feminist movement, the racist British state, and patriarchal structures within migrant communities. Insisting on the interconnected nature of gendered, race and class oppression in a manner that foreshadowed many contemporary theoretical developments around the politics of intersectionality, these periodicals provide vital insights into the black women’s movement and its complicated relationship to larger radical black movements and the concept of ‘political blackness’

Response: Labour and the Varieties of Feminism

In our last issue, Charlotte Proudman offered a strongly critical account of the Labour leadership’s engagement with the feminist tradition. Here, two scholars of feminism and race offer their reflections on the arguments she raised

National Women Against Pit Closures: gender, trade unionism, and community activism

This article will offer the first historical assessment of the National Women Against Pit Closures movement. It shows that it was not a spontaneous formation but the result of work by a network of committed, long-time activists with strong connections to the left, including the Communist Party and the Women’s Liberation Movement. It will show how key questions caused divisions within the national organisation as it grew. In particular, activists were divided over whether the movement should aim solely to support the strike, or whether it should have broader aims relating to women’s lives, gender and feminism. Related to this, the movement divided over relationships with Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers, and the question of which women should be allowed to be members. Finally, the article examines how these questions grew more pressing after the end of the strike, and how and why the national movement had largely disappeared three years after the strike

Vernacular Discourses Of Gender Equality In The Post-War British Working Class

Why did women’s roles change so dramatically in the West in the period after 1945? These years saw major changes in those roles, and in dominant understandings of female selfhood, from a model based on self-abnegation to one based on self-fulfilment. The roots of this shift have often been located in the post-1968 feminist movement and in economic change. Examining this question through the lens of Great Britain, this article, however, centres working-class women as drivers of these changes, drawing on oral history interviews with over 100 women from coalfield communities. In the decades after 1950, these women constructed a new vernacular discourse of gender equality which had profound implications for the position of women in society. This vernacular discourse shared some similarities with post-1968 feminism, but rather than focusing on the division of domestic and paid labour, or sexual violence, it emphasized women’s autonomy, individuality and voice. In constructing it, working-class women drew on pervasive post-war ideas about equality and democracy, discourses of individualism and individual fulfilment, and discourses of ‘companionate’ marriage and ‘child-centred’ parenting in order to make claims for women’s rights. Through doing so, they constructed women not only as wives and mothers, but also as free and equal individuals

Telling stories about post-war Britain: popular individualism and the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s

This article argues that, by the 1970s, people in Britain were increasingly insistent about defining and claiming their individual rights, identities and perspectives. Using individual narratives and testimonies, we show that many were expressing desires for greater personal autonomy and self-determination. We suggest that this was an important trend across the post-war decades, and of particular importance to understanding the 1970s. This popular individualism was not the result of Thatcher; if anything, it was a cause of Thatcherism. But this individualism had multiple political and cultural valences; desires for greater individual self-determination, and anger with the ‘establishment’ for withholding it, did not lead inexorably to Thatcherism. There were, in fact, some sources for, and potential outlets for, popular individualism on the left—outlets that explicitly challenged class, gender and racial inequalities. With this, we suggest the possibility of a new meta-narrative of post-war Britain, cutting across the political narrative that organizes post-war British history into three periods: social democracy, ‘crisis’ and the triumph of ‘neoliberalism’. The 1970s was a key moment in the spread of a popular, aspirational form of individualism in post-war Britain, and this development is critical to our understanding of the history of the post-war years

Introduction to special issue:New Times Revisited: Britain in the 1980s

The authors in this volume are collectively engaged with a historical puzzle: What happens if we examine the decade once we step out of the shadows cast by Thatcher? That is, does the decade of the 1980s as a significant and meaningful periodisation (equivalent to that of the 1960s) still work if Thatcher becomes but one part of the story rather than the story itself? The essays in this collection suggest that the 1980s only makes sense as a political period. They situate the 1980s within various longer term trajectories that show the events of the decade to be as much the consequence as the cause of bigger, long-term historical processes. This introduction contextualises the collection within the wider literature, before explaining the collective and individual contributions made

Race and discomposure in oral histories with white feminist activists

This article arises from my research on ethnicity and race in the English women's movement post-1968. Oral history interviews with both white and ethnic minority feminists from this period revealed the complexity of these debates and the emotions they generated. I begin this article with a discussion of the dynamics that race brought to these interviews and of the concepts of composure, discomposure and politicisation. I then examine the oral tes timony of four white feminist activists. Exploring these oral histories offers, I suggest, useful insight as to how discomposure can work to effect politicisation; and conversely, how com posure can be a symptom of a lack of political engagement