This is an excerpt from my draft manuscript Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the LGBTQ+ Struggle. Comments or suggested additions would be welcome. Section 2.9 will be about the Lavender Menace bookshop on Forth St.
2.6 THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
For a time-line of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), see British Library [1]. It starts in 1961 with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill. In 1967, abortion was legalised in Britain for women who were up to 24 weeks pregnant.
More than 600 women attended the first national WLM conference at Ruskin College Oxford in February 1970. The following first four WLM demands were discussed:
1. Equal pay now
2. Equal educational and job opportunities
3. Free contraception and abortion on demand
4. Free 24-hour nurseries for children
The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in Scotland is described in close detail in a landmark book by Sarah Browne (2014).
In July 1974 the National WLM conference was held in James Gillespie’s High School in Marchmont, Edinburgh, and attended by over 900 women from around Britain. (see Sarah Browne, pp 96-97)
This was regarded as a seminal turning point in women’s liberation because of a previous decline in attendances. However, deep and increasingly bitter divisions emerged over the issue of sexuality, in particular surrounding a sixth demand that focussed on lesbianism.
Nevertheless, the fifth and sixth demands were added to the first four:
5. Legal and financial independence for all women
6. The right to a self-defined sexuality. An end to discrimination against lesbians
Esther Breitenbach, who attended the Edinburgh conference, observed that ‘the euphoria of the first wave of sisterhood was wearing off, and in its place was to come increasingly bitter division.’
A growing exasperation with the loose structure of WLM was evident in a letter published in the Edinburgh Women’s Liberation Newsletter in 1975. It bemoaned the lack of a speaker’s panel representing local groups, since invitations were getting lost or unanswered. The movement was largely unstructured.
Only sixty women attended a badly organised Scottish WLM conference held in Inch Community Centre in Edinburgh in 1978. They were drowned by the competing noise of an intrusive rock group, and the conference was abandoned,
According to British Library [1], the National WLM Conference in Birmingham in 1978 added a seventh demand:
7. Freedom from intimidation by threat or use of violence or sexual coercion, regardless of marital status and an end to all laws, assumptions and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression towards women
Anna Coote (1978) reports that this, the tenth and last National WLM conference, met at Ladywood School in Birmingham, and was attended by over 3000 women. On the Sunday of the conference, a number of specialist workshops were held on topics such as women in printing, women against fascism and racism, guilt and jealousy, the national abortion campaign, country women and Jewish women.
Margaret Jolly (2019) describes a history of the British WLM from 1968 to present and explores why and how feminism’s ‘second wave’ mobilized to demand not just equality but social and gender transformation
2.7 THE FRAGMENTATION OF WLM
Sarah Browne (2014, p182) laments the fragmentation of WLM in Britain during the late 1970s, but asserts that WLM was alive and kicking in Scotland in the 1980s. On p185 she records that WLM has inspired a new group of women, including the activist members of Slutwalks (see Vicki Allen, 2011) that challenged the sexualisation of women.
Maybe all the efforts between 1980 and 1990 of the women in Scotland discussed by Shirley Henderson and Alison Mackay, eds (1990) were influenced by WLM in some way. For example, on page 89 of this splendid collection, the establishment of incest survivors women’s self-help groups in Edinburgh and Glasgow is described.
Later women motivated by WLM should certainly include the brave members of the trans-inclusive Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre ERCC and the pro-active group Sisters Uncut (see ACE [1]).
Sisters Uncut shut up shop in Edinburgh in 2019 when the grass roots Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh (ACE) splintered and closed its doors after 22 years on West Montgomery Place.
Before 2019, the meetings in ACE of Sisters Uncut were open to all women (trans, intersex and cis) and all non-binary, agender and gender variant people. Meanwhile two local feminist charities were a bit less grass-roots pro-active. See Engender [1] and Zero Tolerance[1].
The Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre ERCC opened on 1 July 1978 with a vigil on Princes Street and to a fanfare of publicity (see ERCC[1]). ERCC was funded by private donations, and its first premises were on Forth St. in Broughton.
For a detailed timeline listing many of ERCC’s socially essential accomplishments, see ERCC[2]. In 2001, ERCC changed its name to Edinburgh Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (EWRASAC) For a very thorough oral history of rape crisis in Scotland, see Eileen Maitland, ed. (2009). Edinburgh’s very active rape crisis centre is, as of February 2023, located on Claremont Crescent in Broughton.
Adam Ramsey (2022) describes how anti-trans activists forced the rape centre into lock-down [when it was housed opposite Blenheim Place on London Road]. During 2021, the activists hounded the centre’s trans-woman director Mridul Wadhwa on social media with a torrent of venomous tweets and hundreds of threats of vigilante violence, as part of a pattern of attacks on trans-inclusive feminist groups. Then the transphobic public media joined in. During Autumn 2021 the rape centre ended its open door policy, and installed both an intercom system for access and a reinforced inner door.
BBC News (2022) reported that the arch-TERF J.K.Rowling had more recently founded a women-only rape centre Beira’s Place in Edinburgh. Given her horrific publicly-spewed opinions, Rowling doubtlessly meant cisgender-women-only.
Joanna Cherry KC, MP is well known to be a lesbian woman with policies that would be regarded by many trans people as transphobic. When such viewpoints are expressed by lesbian women or gay men, they injure the entire LGBT+ movement by involving us in a fractious struggle between each other. I find it difficult to theorise why people would want to go out of their way to be transphobic, and I regard transphobes as busy-bodying into other people’s business.
In February 2020 Cherry gave a resounding speech to the Women’s Liberation 2020 Conference at UCL, on the fiftieth anniversary of the first UK WLM conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970). See Joanna Cherry (2020). That was while eugenics was still getting hotly debated on the UCL campus, following the investigations by the Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL during 2019 (see Chapter 4).
The ever ready students protested the Women’s Liberation Conference, while describing it as a ‘TERF’ Conference and claiming that’our existence should not be a debate’. See Susanna Chen and Rhea Deshpande (2020).
Meanwhile, at the official fiftieth anniversary Women’s Liberation meeting at Ruskin College Oxford, the feminist historian Professor Selina Todd was effectively no-platformed for being allegedly trans-phobic, and a furious row ensued (see Vanessa Thorpe, 2020).
So the Women’s Liberation supporters were still split, some 40 years after WLM first splintered.
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