In 1984, Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar wrote, ‘white, mainstream feminist theory, be it from the socialist feminist or radical feminist perspective, does not speak to the experiences of Black women and where it attempts to do so it is often from a racist perspective and reasoning.’ This has become the general consensus within the Anglo-American feminist academy, which charges white feminists active during the 1970s and 1980s with racism. In the case of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in Britain, these white, middle-class feminists, incapable of looking beyond their own concerns, are accused of being ignorant and indifferent towards the needs of Black and ethnic minority women as well as completely failing to acknowledge the racism of the state in which they lived and were a part. To a significant extent such criticism is warranted. However, these charges of racism fail to do justice to the complexity of the ways in which white feminists did engage with race, Black women and post-colonial liberation movements in the 1970s and 1980s, albeit in a discursively and materially restricted way. The contention of this essay is that rather than continuing to reduce the entire WLM down to ‘racists’, it is more constructive to try and understand why white feminists acted the way they did, a question that has been seldom asked by the British feminist academy.
Writing the history of women’s liberation can be made more difficult due to the lack of traditional archive sources. This is primarily due to the fact that the WLM was against formal organisation and hierarchies, which has meant that those involved in the white WLM have generally not left behind the archival sources that are associated with most political movements, such as constitutions and minutes. Furthermore, accessing the personal papers of different feminists has also proved to be problematic due to the short time frame of the movement, which means that very few of these collections are accessible to historians. Due to the specific nature of this research- white feminists and race- this dissertation will be using a primary source base of contemporaneous periodicals, newsletters and personal papers as they were undoubtedly the most important printed archival materials on the WLM, providing feminists with a space to discuss and debate different topics, including race. For the first two chapters which focus on the backgrounds of white feminists and formation of ‘sisterhood’ in the white WLM, the sources used are primarily memoirs, autobiographies and interviews with prominent feminists and members of the Women’s Liberation Movement, particularly those in Michelene Wandor’s Once a Feminist and Liz Heron’s Truth, Dare or Promise. These sources have proved to be the best way to understand the relationships that these women had to race, particularly at this moment in history, when there was not much discourse around domestic race issues in the feminist movement and in the wider left. For the chapter on anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist feminism, the research focuses on informational pamphlets and the documents from anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist groups Women Against Racism and Fascism (WARF) and Women Against Imperialism (WAI), which have proven to be crucial for the analysis of how white feminists discussed issues of race, particularly due to the fact that these organisations have been largely ignored by both feminist scholars and scholars of anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns. For the final chapter, periodicals have proved to be particularly useful when examining the relationships between Black and white feminists, as they were the most important space for internal debate the during the late 1970s through to the mid-1980s, when the number of small, self-published feminist journals were most prominent. Whilst periodicals pose the difficulty of having a multiplicity of viewpoints and styles, as opposed to a single clear ideological position for the WLM, this is undoubtedly what drove the movement forward and encouraged debate, particularly in terms of the discussion of race from the late 1970s onwards. Furthermore, periodicals and newsletters also enable feminist historians to see the responses of the readership and thus the wider feminist community. It is important to acknowledge that a study of this kind is unable to fully represent the views and experiences of the entire nation, particularly given the different racial demographics of each city at the time and this dissertation has attempted to give regionally diverse examples despite the limited source base available. Nonetheless, it is still an important task to attempt to paint a picture of the discussions of race that were occurring at the time.
The historiography of the feminist movement within Britain during the second half of the twentieth century is incredibly limited. Whilst there exists a plethora of memoirs and autobiographies, there has been very little historical scholarship addressed to the Women’s Liberation Movement. Most of the writing on the women’s movement of this period can be found in the field of sociology/cultural studies, such as the work of sociologists and political scientists, where one is ironically most likely to find a narrative history of the movement from the late 1960s onwards. These significant problems associated with the recording and documenting of the history of contemporary feminism are particularly ironic given the emphasis that the WLM gave to consciously recording its own history. The fact that the movement gave such importance to the recovery of past feminisms and the history of women in general gave many of those involved in the WLM a strong sense of the need to protect and preserve their own contemporary developments. However, this conscious recording of the WLM’s history by the women involved has resulted in the privileging of certain groups and events over others. As a result, the history of contemporary feminism is one that excludes the women on the periphery in order to preserve the narrative of what Barbara Caine critically describes as ‘the charmed circle of Ruskin.’ Until the recent work of the historian Nathalie Thomlinson, a book-length academic historical study of race in the Women’s Liberation Movement was non-existent. This is primarily due to the established chronology of the WLM, which places the movement in between the rise and demise of the National Women’s Liberation Conferences between 1970 and 1978. This chronological scheme, that implicitly equates a lack of national conferences with the end of feminist activism is rather simplistic and ethnocentric. As a matter of fact, the women’s movement did not simply continue into the early 1980s, and by using race politics as the axis for analysis, we can see that the 1980s was, in fact, as equally a dynamic period of feminism as the 1970s. By extending the chronology of the Women’s Liberation Movement to include the 1980s, this dissertation hopes to follow Thomlinson’s trajectory, one that was inspired by the American historiography on the subject, to challenge the traditional idea of what the women’s movement was and who was active in it. More specifically, this dissertation will be answering the following question: to what extent was the WLM a racially-exclusive movement which failed to engage with issues of race? This question is particularly poignant when considering the fact that, despite these accusations of racism, many white feminists in the WLM were ironically, highly aware of Black liberation movements and would have even considered themselves to be committed anti-racists. It is these paradoxes that make an in-depth analysis of the politics of race in the WLM valuable. This dissertation will argue that rather than being simply racist, the white feminists in the WLM did engage with race, albeit through a myopic and limited lens, which ironically reinscribed the whiteness of the women’s movement. This dissertation aims to extend the argument made by Nathalie Thomlinson in her article The Colour of Feminism: White Feminists and Race in the Women’s Liberation Movement, by arguing that this re-inscription of white power was due to the fact most white feminists were unable to bridge the gap between their awareness of racial difference and racism and action, embodied by the enduring vision for ‘universal sisterhood.’ In order to argue the latter, this dissertation will begin by examining the the early stages of the WLM and the paradoxical engagement of white feminists with Black and postcolonial liberation movements which served to reinforce the gap between the white movement and Black women. The third chapter will explore white feminist participation in anti-racist and anti-fascist activism and how this activity complicates the notion that white feminists were racist but ironically reveals the whiteness of the movement. The final chapter will explore the shift in the 1980s towards important collaborative work between Black and white feminists, revealing how the movement still struggled to escape the overwhelming whiteness of its organisational and theoretical mores.
I- Politics, Race and the Early WLM: An Education
Despite white feminism’s historically racialized position, the WLM in England believed itself initially to be not just neutral to these issues but positively antiracist. This is partially due to the fact that it came into existence during a very unique historical moment of the 1960s and in order to understand the position that the politics of race occupied within the Women’s Liberation Movement, it is necessary to contextualise it within this utopian post-war moment. It is within this framework that the inherent paradox within the movement is revealed: a movement which borrowed the rhetoric of liberation struggles such as Black nationalism and Anti-Imperialism, but one which still existed and acted within the matrix of colonialism, embodied in the emergence of the white feminist vision of ‘universal womanhood’ or ‘sisterhood’. The influence of global, international movements can be traced from the beginning of the movement. The 1950s and 1960s, a period of significant influx of migrants from the Commonwealth, saw the emergence of a distinctive Black British politics through which many of the early participants of the WLM were introduced to radical political activism. It was through movements such as as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the Black Liberation movement that many white feminists found analogies between the oppression of women and ‘others.’ Sheila Rowbotham, one of the organisers of the inaugural Women’s Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, claims that the idea that one should organise on the basis of one’s own oppression came from the Black movement. Similarly, Juliet Mitchell accredits the Black Movement as ‘the single greatest inspiration to the growth of Women’s Liberation.’ It is within this Marxist, anti-imperialist framework that the understanding of the organising around oppression occurred for early WLM feminists. However, it was in this very space, one that was heavily male-dominated, that women began to realise the need to organise separately, and where the vision of ‘universal womanhood’ began to emerge. This can be seen when Mitchell herself discusses her decision to study women’s oppression in Michelene Wandor’s Once a Feminist where she recalls:
‘“I was in this very male-dominated new left group that was dividing up the Third World into areas of specialism, saying, ‘I’ll do Algeria, I’ll do Tanzania, I’ll do Persia’… I said, ‘Well, there’s women who also don’t fit into class analysis. I’ll do women.”’
Ironically, it is in this conceptualisation of the category of ‘women’ that the vision for the WLM grew, one the saw the oppression of women as ‘universal’ but was in fact, implicitly white. It is also ironic that many Black women decided to organise autonomously after experiencing a similar marginality within the both the Black Liberation movement, and within the WLM resulting in the establishment of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in 1978. However, this exclusion of Black women from both Black Nationalism and WLM was not something that white feminists came to be aware of until the late 1970s and early 1980s.
This is largely due to the fact that this political activism, a largely male-dominated space, was one of the only ways in which the white, middle-class women of the Women’s Liberation Movement encountered people from migrant communities and ethnic minorities. It was in this same context that some white feminists developed personal and activist relationships with Black politics. Janet Hadley, Selma James and Catherine Hall, all interviewed by Michelene Wandor in Once a Feminist, spoke about their own experiences with Black politics and relationships with Black men. Janet Hadley talks about her experience of having a Caribbean boyfriend, attempting to start up the Black Panthers in the UK and hearing the Black Marxist historian and activist C.L.R James talk. Similarly, Hall and James also talk about their relationships with Black men and how their socialism and involvement in Black political activism often pre-dated their feminism. However, in these interviews conducted in 1990, these women draw analogies between Black oppression and women’s oppression that could be viewed as myopic, patronising and even untrue. In her interview, Janet Hadley recalls ‘when I first came across the notion of women’s oppression, I felt I already had a whole box of concepts that I could relate it to. I could say, “oh yes, it’s just like with Black people, women feel inferior, they’re taught to feel inferior by society.”’ Whilst this analogy is rhetorically successful, and it is unsurprising that many white feminists found inspiration from the Black movement, there is still a failure to identify the racial privilege of the speaker as a white woman. Furthermore, within this statement, there are various problematic assumptions that are at the very root of the Women’s Liberation Movement race problem. In drawing a comparison between racist and sexist oppression, what these white feminists are suggesting is that the experiences of white women and the Black community are essentially the same, implying that this absolved white women from charges of racism. This is particularly important in the context of this essay as it demonstrates the complex relationship white feminists had with race, and how, in drawing this analogy between sexist and racist oppression, many white women failed to conceive women fa faced both. n arguably addedssion of its own racialised ics of race in the subsequent years of the WLM, ation arguably addedto towho faced both.
This inability to perceive the unique oppression that faced Black women can be explained by the fact that, where white feminists did have encounters with Black and ethnic minorities in the early years, it was almost exclusively with migrant men. This was due to the fact that where white feminists encountered the migrant community, it was primarily through male-dominated organisations such as Black Power, as evidenced in Wandor’s Once a Feminist, where Janet Hadley recalls her experience as a woman in the Black power movement stating: ‘I didn’t really have any close relationships with Black women at the time.’ This can be seen in the 2007 text Visceral Cosmopolitanism by Mica Nava, one of the first women involved in the movement, also married to a Black Mexican, who argues that women were the drivers of cosmopolitanism and racial integration in the capital, because of their relationships with migrant men. Nathalie Thomlinson makes a sound criticism of the essentialism of Nava’s argument, but she also notes that Nava’s argument is useful for the understanding of the relationships and complexities between white women and racial ‘others.’ She notes that, because of the heterosexuality of the majority of women, those white women sympathetic to the problems of migrants were far less likely to have intimate relationships with migrant women, and thus less likely to have an awareness of their concerns, or even to see them as a visible group. Nava’s study sheds light on why white feminists still thought of Black and migrant women through an orientalist lens, as objects of study rather than comrades-in-arms, which Chandra Mohanty theorises this in her article Under Western Eyes as the ‘Third World Woman.’ This criticism rings true when you look at the use of the term ‘Third World Woman’ evidenced by some of the articles produced at Spare Rib, where white feminists writing on ethnic minority women reproduced this tendency. For example, when Germaine Greer wrote ‘We are the ‘third world’ at home’, in an article in 1975 against enforced population control, she seems to draw a genuine equivalence between the experiences of women in the ‘Third World’ and women in the West, echoing the rhetoric used by white feminists in the early WLM, who analogized the experiences of the Black community and their own experiences of oppression as white women. Ironically, this attempt to unify white women and ‘Third World’ women in struggle only serves to demonstrate the continued impact of the matrix of colonialism. It demonstrates how white women often, even inadvertedly, used colonialist discourses that reproduced of the narrative of the ‘passive’, ‘helpless’ and ‘primitive’ Black and ‘third world’ woman that needs to be rescued that was prevalent at the height of Imperialism. This argument is built upon by Nathalie Thomlinson, who considers how this stereotype of the ‘International Woman’ or ‘Third World Woman’ was in fact a reflection of the discursive restraints of feminist theory to deal with issues of ‘race’, making the point that whilst Red Rag, a socialist-feminist periodical, did not publish a single piece on ethnic minority women in Britain, it did sometimes do pieces on ‘International Women.’ This rhetoric will come to fuel Black feminist criticism of white feminists in the 1980s, claiming that it was a way to lump all non-whites into a single category and thereby managed to avoid dealing either with the racial issues that occurred at home or their own racism. However, it would be myopic to consider this solely in terms of racism, as the phenomenon of mass-migration from the Commonwealth was post-war and with most white feminists having grown up in the 1940s and 1950s, they would not have had Black immigrant peers. This is expressed by Liz Heron in the introduction of her book Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties:
We were also the first post-imperial generation, and if the references to an awareness of this are only incidental- with the definite exception of Gail Lewis’s account of a childhood in Kilburn’s West Indian community- they are still there, as casual testimony to a colonial era that was ending.
However, whilst it is true that the colonial era came to an end in the formative years of the white feminists interviewed, its legacy continued to mark both the discourse around race and the daily experiences of women in WLM and race. Furthermore, as early immigrants were more ghettoised in earlier phases of migration, and such a physical separation arguably added to the material constraint that restricted white feminists’ ability to engage with deal with race. This chapter has sought to demonstrate the paradox of ethnocentrism of white feminists who had nevertheless been involved in mixed race relationships and/or race-based politics. It is crucial to remember this context when examining the politics of race in the subsequent years of the WLM, a movement that clung on to its vision of universal sisterhood and struggled perceive its own racial exclusivity.
II- Formation of a ‘sisterhood’ in the (White) Women’s Liberation Movement
The notion of ‘sisterhood’ was one that held prime importance in the Women’s Liberation movement, one that aimed to unify women against a common struggle. Yet why was this sisterhood so white? By exploring the backgrounds of the white women in the WLM, the distinctive emotional culture of the WLM and the central demands and preoccupations of the movement, this chapter will argue that by the organisational and theoretical mores of the WLM functioned to exclude Black women to create a sisterhood that was almost exclusively white. To understand the formation of this sisterhood, it is useful to start by looking at the backgrounds of the women who attended the Ruskin Conference in 1970. Described by The Times as mostly ‘young women, many of them students with long flowing hair, trousers and maxi-coats’ the conference predominantly attracted white, middle-class women. Whilst there were definitely Black and working class women present at the conference, such as Black activist Gerlin Bean who talked of her presence in an interview with Shrew magazine, these women were not written into the narrative of the Ruskin conference. This is reflected in the backgrounds of the interviewees in Wandor’s Once a Feminist, which claims to be the ‘stories of a generation’ but focuses on the stories of those present at the conference. Furthermore, race was not one of the topics of discussion at the conference, a pattern which continues throughout the 1970s, reflecting the restraints of this sisterhood which prioritized the concerns and demands of white feminists. The movement was undoubtedly far more than just the National Women’s Liberation Conferences, but it is important to note the crucial role they played in the organization of the white women’s liberation movement, and the difficulty this poses for historians attempting to study the genesis of the WLM from the perspectives of those who came to exist on the periphery of the movement. In order to understand the formation of a ‘white’ sisterhood in the WLM, it is necessary to examine the collective identity of the movement. Alberto Melucci, social movements theorist, explains the importance of this ‘collective identity’, suggesting that it is created through ‘submerged networks’ of small groups of people connected to each other in their everyday lives. This collective identity, or ‘sisterhood’, was based on the identification of a collective oppression, which initially surfaced in the form of the Four Demands at Ruskin. Melucci’s theory helps us understand why the women in the early stages of the WLM were from similar backgrounds, and how this subsequently shaped the whiteness of the movement’s organizational and theoretical mores. For example, Juliet Mitchell recalls in her interview for Once a Feminist: ‘We all went back you see, to some sort of connection, university, or some sort of study group, or personal friendship.’ This reflection is repeated with most of Wandor’s interviewees, all of which came to be involved in feminism through the narrow world of the New Left. In her article The Colour of Feminism, Nathalie Thomlinson argues that, although this changed with the intense media coverage given to feminism in early 1970s, Wandor’s book is fairly representative of the backgrounds of the women who dominated the movement. It is also worth noting the fact that the inaugural conference at Ruskin originated from historian Sheila Rowbotham’s suggestion for a women’s history workshop, which indicates that news of the conference would have been primarily restricted to these circles, highlighting the academic, rather than grassroots provenance of the movement. It was also at these conferences that the emotional culture of the WLM grew. In the introduction to her book Once a Feminist, Michelene Wandor describes her experience of coming to consciousness, with the Ruskin Conference ‘as both the focus and the symbol of this process.’ This experience of ‘coming to consciousness’ is one that came to occupy a crucial position in the emotional culture of the WLM that ensued in the following years, one that perpetuated the class and race exclusivity of the early stages of the movement.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the Women’s Liberation Movement existed as national movement through a network of small groups across the country. Ironically, this small group structure, which intended to provide a refuge of unconditional support and love for women in a patriarchal society, ended up perpetuating the exclusivity that dominated the Ruskin conference. Janet Ree recalls in Once a Feminist that ‘[…] the quality of relationships that those meetings produced is indescribably powerful, and far more important than my relationship with a man at the time, without question.’ Similarly, Catherine Hall, who was very active in the WLM in Birmingham, including helping to organise the (last and very acrimonious) 1978 national conference reflects back in Sue Bruley’s article on the Clapham group ‘we felt that p.71iousness-Raising in ClaphamTo a signficant ea Parmar, writ singe Black woman in her omen ist feminism. ists and in a way twas as important as those sorts of political activities’, referring to the conferences. Looking at consciousness-raising groups is particularly useful when analysing the lived experience of the WLM. Bruley, who had been part of a CR group herself, described approaching the newfound sisterhood with ‘evangelising zeal.’ Whilst these groups were a very important part of what Nathalie Thomlinson calls the ‘emotional culture’ of the WLM, which fostered the necessary trust and support for the intimacy required for consciousness-raising, it was a culture which was exclusive along class and race lines. For example, in the Clapham group, the women were almost exclusively white, with the exception of one Black woman who joined towards the end of the period and even then, the group did not take on board the crucial importance of diversity and difference in the women’s movement. One member felt that ‘black women needed to form their own groups . . . just as we had to find a voice away from left-wing men they had to find their own agenda.’ What is more, there was an increased need to for groups to be ‘closed’ to protect the existing bond between its members, making it largely inaccessible for women on the periphery of the movement. However it is worth noting that consciousness-raising came to be used by many white feminists as a way of dealing with their own anti-racism and anti-Semitism in the 1980s. Although it is important to acknowledge Bruley’s article only recounts the experiences of the Clapham group, and the fact not all feminists wanted to join a CR group, it is a useful example of how the women’s liberation movement was structurally exclusive despite its rhetoric of universal sisterhood.
As Lovenduski and Randall have argued, the movement which claimed to speak for all women made virtually no real attempt to reflect their demands and concerns. It is through exploring the central demands and preoccupations of the WLM during the 1970s, that the gap between its vision of ‘universal sisterhood’ and its reality as a white, middle-class movement becomes evident. Issues such as reproductive rights, sexuality, body politics, and the family were all framed in such a way that marginalized and alienated Black women, whether they were already involved in movement or not. It is useful to focus on white feminist discourse on the family and sexuality, as these are issues which are particularly revelatory of the ethnocentrism of the WLM. The family, and related issues such as childcare and housewifery, were one of the central preoccupations from the beginning of the WLM. The May 1971 issue of the Shrew, edited by the Belsize Lane Women’s Liberation Group, is a prime example. In the editorial, they explained their decision to focus on the family for this issue, claiming ‘the institution of family is responsible for many (all?) of our hang ups.’ Whilst this was certainly rang true for some women across Britain, it was not the case for all women. As Hazel Carby argues in her 1982 seminal article White Woman Listen! the institution of the family held a very different meaning for Black women. It was a site of cultural and political resistance to oppression. Furthermore, Black and Asian families were less likely to conform to the classic nuclear family, with Black families more likely to be headed by a single mother, and Asian women were likely to be part of an extended family structure than white families. This discursive focus on the nuclear family is one of the central ways in which white feminists unconsciously defined feminism and its preoccupations as white. Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh’s text The Anti-Social Family, is a prime example of the sociological analysis of the family that dominated white academia- the western model. What is particularly interesting about Barrett and McIntosh’s book is the controversy that ensued. Whilst they partially took on Black feminist criticism in their article Ethnocentrism and Feminist Theory, they still claimed that their text was not necessarily racist or inadequate as an analysis of the position of women from different ethnic groups. In claiming to only be guilty of ethnocentrism, ironically Barrett and McIntosh were accused once again of racism by some such as Heidi Safia Mirza and Caroline Ramazonoglu. The controversy that this discourse on the nuclear family caused is incredibly revealing of the differing understandings of what ‘racism’ means and the emotional responses that such accusations evoked. This type of response is not exceptional; from sociologists to ‘ordinary’ women in CR groups, the accusation of racism hit a nerve for women in the WLM, a culture that was ill-equipped to engage in autocritique.
Similarly, in the personal-is-political culture of the WLM, the issue of sex and sexuality occupied an important position for white feminists. However, it was also a topic that split the movement and functioned to exclude Black and working class women. In an interview for the Sisterhood and After project, white feminist Beatrix Campbell reflects on the consequences of sexual pleasure and how some women would go to one meeting and never return. This emphasises the fact that, whilst the discussion of sex and sexuality attracted many women, it also had the potential to deter and alienate women. This was particularly the case for working-class women, Black and white, many of whom were more concerned with survival as opposed to sexual politics, who often considered the discussion of sex to be a ‘luxury.’ Therefore, it is useful to examine the ways in which the focus of sex and the body and how it maintained the WLM as a white, middle-class affair. The discourse around sex and sexuality in the periodicals of the WLM was explicit, even shocking, compared to other women’s magazine’s at the time. For example, in its early years, Spare Rib published various articles on sex and the body, such as an article entitled ‘The Liberated Orgasm’, ‘The moon within’ and ‘Unlearning not to have orgasms’ all of which feature various suggestive black and white photographs of women and/or explicit drawings of female genitalia. Whilst these articles would have undoubtedly had an empowering impact on many women, the recommendation that such activities should be pursued on a ‘spare’ evening with no-one around, would have been unrealistic for working-class women- both Black and white- with busy lives and overcrowded housing situations. Furthermore, the images in the articles were almost exclusively of white, able-bodied women, alienating Black women further from the WLM discourse on sex and sexuality. This discussion was not limited to Spare Rib and such periodicals, with this sense of openness and sexual exploration having unfolded further in local WLM groups and consciousness-raising groups, whose exclusivity would have expounded the exclusion of Black women. This is not to say that sex was not a problematic issue in Black communities, with the issues of sexuality and lesbianism coming to the fore in the 1980s. However, sexual and body politics were never, then, given the same privileged position in the Black women’s movement as in the white WLM. Whether or not the marginalisation of Black women, by the overwhelming whiteness of its organisational mores and theoretical biases can be counted as racism, is a difficult question. However, what is clear is that a focus on these matters, however inadverted, helped to maintain the whiteness of the WLM, a whiteness which inescapable, even in the anti-racist and multi-racial feminist activism of the 1970s and 1980s.
III- White Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist and Anti-Imperialist Feminism
Despite the gap between the rhetoric of universal sisterhood and the overwhelming whiteness of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s organisational mores and theoretical biases, over the course of the 1970s, an increasing number of white feminists became involved in anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns. This chapter will focus on the two main groups or networks that organised against racism, fascism and imperialism in the latter half of the 1970s: Women Against Racism and Fascism (WARF) and Women Against Imperialism (WAI). As Nathalie Thomlinson has argued, these groups have been largely ignored by both chroniclers of feminist and anti-fascist campaigns and for this reason, it is important to consider these groups as a part of the WLM, the wider Anti-Racism and Anti-Fascism movements, and the extent to which they influenced the politics of race in the WLM. By exploring the context of how these groups emerged, the organisational and theoretical concerns of these groups, and their understanding of what ‘racism’ means, this section will argue that whilst the existence of these groups undoubtedly complicate the notion that white feminists were completely insensitive to issues of race, this engagement with the politics of antiracism and anti-imperialism ironically revealed the whiteness of WLM.
The 1970s was a period of heightened racial tensions, with the rising popularity of the National Front provoking widespread interest across the left in anti-racism and antifascism towards the end of the decade. This was particularly motivated by the fact that the NF were appealing to the white working-class voters considered traditionally to be the core supporters of socialism. In Vron Ware’s in introduction to Beyond the Pale, she argues that white feminists did not just react to Black feminist critique, but were often engaged in a complex range of anti-racist action. This meant that was almost an assumption among white feminists that as feminism was a progressive, even revolutionary force, it contained within it an ‘automatic anti-racist position’- often expressed through solidarity with liberation struggles even in its early days. This is demonstrated by an article from the Socialist Woman, quoted by Thomlinson, which claims that WARF was ‘founded in response to our experience as women on the 23 April Anti National Front demonstration [in Lewisham].’ Furthermore, in a letter written by Janet Hadley, a former member of WARF, accompanying a collection of WARF documents in the Feminist Archive South, she recalls the creation of WARF being in response to the activity of the Anti-Nazi League, which she calls ‘crude in the extreme in their approach to racism, and in particular to Black and Asian women.’ However, while Thomlinson argues that rather than arising directly as a response to racism within the WLM itself, WARF was established by feminist women on the left in response to the sexism found there, Hadley’s letter claims that ‘WARF found itself facing in two directions- first in a critical stance towards the ANL, but also feeling its task was to struggle against racism within the women’s movement.’ Women Against Imperialism was similar to WARF, a group of white feminists who organised around issues of imperialism and racism since the late 1970s, evolving out of a series of day-long ‘educationals’ on racism and imperialism run in London in autumn 1978. Both were as much product of the wide left as of feminism. In a document entitled ‘Elections and Women Against Racism and Fascism, WARF describes itself as ‘propaganis[ing] in the WLM on the subject of racism and fascism’ as well as being active in in the broad anti-racist and anti-fascist movement taking up the question of Women’s Liberation and oppression within that movement. These groups emerged out of the new visibility, and new language, of antiracist discourse on the left, that unlike the campaigns at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, focused on domestic rather than imperial concerns. It is doubtful whether the race debate would have happened in feminism at this moment or brought into the mainstream of the women’s movement if it was not for those feminists who had maintained relations with the wider left. However these groups and their anti-racist attempts were not able to completely break away from the overwhelming whiteness of the WLM structures. A criticism from Black feminists was that these groups failed to recognise how they were racialized as white, and how this whiteness shapes white women’s lives. By the late 1970s, white feminists did begin to have an awareness of ‘white privilege’, however abstract, and how this benefitted them. However, as American Sociologist Anna Zajicek has argued, involvement in antiracism groups ‘enables white women to acknowledge the existence of white privilege without implicating themselves in its operation.’
What is of particularly revealing is how these groups focused on sexual rather than racial politics, a replication of the focus of the whole movement itself. In 1978, Big Flame, a socialist-feminist newspaper, published a pamphlet entitled ‘Sexuality and Fascism’, which was made up of write-ups of speeches given at the Big Flame Day School on Sexuality and Fascism in December 1978. While it does explicitly mention the ‘important development over the last year or so has been the growth of black women’s organisations fighting against such things as the use of ‘virginity tests’ and Depo Provera and other threats to black women’ arguing that ‘these organisations which can challenge the state’s racism and cut the ground from under the feet of the fascists, need to be offered whatever support they ask for.’ However, the focus of the pamphlet is primarily fascism, with multiple pages dedicated to ‘Women in Nazi Germany’ and ‘Men and Fascism.’ Furthermore, the section on ‘Women and the NF’ contains a list of the different ways in which the NF affects women. However, the ‘women’ that this section prioritises is white women and how fascism affects these women, with points such as ‘The NF would limit the use and availability of contraceptives for white women’, ‘The NF are totally opposed to the women’s movement’ with only one section at the added on at the end on ‘The NF’s attitude to non-white women.’ This also suggests that they unconsciously viewed all women as ‘white women.’ This can be seen further in the issue of Red Rag entitled ‘Women and the National Front.’ This begins to explain why WARF and WAI were more comfortable discussing fascism rather than racism. For example, the North London Women Against Racism and Fascism group’s notes for the Socialist Feminist Conference in 1978, expressed this, stating:
‘At first many of us were concerned with fascism- we could see, hear and smell that more easily. We even discussed whether in the group’s name Racism shouldn’t go in front of Fascism and decided that it should be Racism; at the time it was probably for many of us a fairly unprincipled decision based on how the initials W.A.F.R. and W.A.R.F. looked.’