The women's liberation movement in the UK has consisted of a diverse, and often interconnected, group of individuals, collectives, publishing houses, and protests through the 20th century and after. The movement emerged from earlier developments in women's and workers' liberation and civil rights in the UK, including equal suffrage ideologies, and proto-feminist writing, and generated new movements in feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism in the UK into the late 20th and 21st centuries. The UK women's liberation movement is characterised by organising on the grounds of intersections between women's rights and other issues, for instance workers' rights, racism and ethnic discrimination, religion, and social justice.
Key issues The Women's liberation movement in the UK was spurred on by events within the nation and globally which forced women to think in different ways about their political lives. Informal or grassroots groups emerged to tackle a range of issues, with new members to formal WLM groups recruited through consciousness-raising sessions. US-based writing was key to some developments in the movement, with Redstocking activist, Kathie Sarachild's articles used by women to analyze issues impacting their own lives and question whether those challenges were broadly effecting other women, giving each woman a personal stake in the outcome of the movement. Women who joined leftist movements felt that feminist issues were relegated to the sidelines, leading to specific campaigns led by women, with queer women and women of colour creating further spaces to address intersectional oppression.
Worker and domestic carer rights Two important events, the Dagenham Ford Plant strike by women machinists in 1968 over pay inequality, and a campaign launched the same year by women in Hull over local fishermen's safety, led to a desire for women throughout the nation to organise on workers' rights. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972) by Selma James and Mariosa Dalla Costa examined the place of women in terms of paid and unpaid labor. The book led to several chapters of the Wages for housework (WFH) campaign in Britain and other countries.
Reproductive rights Abortion was a unifying issue for liberationists throughout the nation. The British Abortion Act of 1967 was passed to eliminate unsupervised primitive and unhygienic procedures and had little to do with women's rights to govern their own bodies. From the emergence of the WLM in Britain activists felt the importance of shifting the debate to self-determination. In 1971 the British edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, originally written by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, was edited and published by Angela Phillips and Jill Rakusen in England, becoming an important text, urging women to become familiar with their own bodies.
In 1975, the National Abortion Campaign (NAC) formed to defend abortion rights, advocate for further improvements and extensions of reproductive rights, and promote awareness of family planning services and contraceptives. Distrust between NAC, unions and WLM activists led to several fissures, but despite the uneasy alliance the groups worked together and there was some fluidity with activists participating in multiple factions for the cause.
A series of proposals were introduced in the 1970s, starting with James White’s 1975 bill to restrict abortion on the basis of gestation. In June 1975, NAC staged a demonstration that attracted between 15,000 and 20,000 people. NAC fought against various House Of Commons' Bills that were intended to restrict abortion rights, creating alliances with organisations that worked with "other oppressed and exploited groups".
Bill Benyon’s 1977 bill to not only limit abortion based upon gestation time but to give medical professionals an opt-out to refuse; and then in 1979, a bill introduced by John Corrie to restrict not only gestation but the grounds on which abortion could be attained. Further complicating the debate was the paucity of National Health Service facilities throughout the UK, giving women in southern England readily available abortion centers, which were lacking in other areas of the nation. Though there were a wide variety of views among individual liberationists on the topic, the movement was in favor of women's autonomy over their own bodies.
There were conflicts within the WLM in how they approached the subject of abortion on England. Women in the WLM criticised labor unions for not going far enough in political support for free abortions on demand. Nevertheless, the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the NAC along with the Committee in Defence of the 1967 Act (CoOrd) planned an October 1979 march in support of abortion rights. The march was the largest pro-abortion march in the country and was part of the Campaign Against the Corrie Bill (CACB). The differences between the organisers of the pro-abortion march led to an "angry clash" with radical feminists from the London Women's Liberation and Women's Aid holding up the parade because they felt they, not the other organisations should lead it. NAC was criticized by some feminists for working with male bureaucracies, but maintained a policy that all allies, regardless of their roots, who were working against the Corrie Bill to restrict abortion rights were critical to defeat the bill.
Violence against women Another critical area of work during the period focused on violence against women. Out of consciousness raising sessions, women wanted to find means to combat violence and bring the problem into the public sphere.
In 1972, one of the first shelters for victims of domestic violence was set up in England. It was called Chiswick Women's Aid and was largely steered by Erin Pizzey. The first rape crisis centre in England and Wales was opened in 1973. The Bristol Women's Centre opened that same year and one of the services they offered was pregnancy testing, vital when no self-testing existed in the period. They also had a space to offer emergency shelter to "battered women", as victims of violence were called at the time. In other areas, women's centres became hubs for activists in the movement, for example, the centre in Norwich had meeting space for consciousness-raising groups and training, provided advice services on a variety of issues like health, housing, and marriage, as well as offering pregnancy tests. In Brighton, the women's centre, opened in 1974, was next door to the women's shelter, allowing women the pretext of going to the centre, when they were actually fleeing violence. By 1979, more than forty women's centres offered a variety of services throughout the country.
The Women's Aid Federation of England was founded by liberationists in 1974 to specifically work on the issues of domestic violence, with branches established in each of the four countries of the UK. The central body was critical for networking, as well as attaining government funds to assist with the work. In 1977, the British edition of Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will was published and became an influential text, showing how rape had been weaponized throughout history. In response liberationists throughout the UK worked to shift the focus away from women's behaviour toward the perpetrator. Through establishment of rape crisis centres, they led the effort to provide support to victims and campaigned for change, publishing articles to increase awareness among the public.
After a serial rapist attacked and killed five women in West Yorkshire with little response from the police, liberationists in Leeds organized the Leeds Rape Crisis Centre and planned a conference to discuss violence against women. They organized the first Reclaim the Night march in 1977 to challenge the idea that women should stay inside after dark in order to avoid rape and assault. Reclaim the Night protests spread to Bolton and Brighton and a national march was held in London on 20 January 1979. The Guardian reported in 1979 that the marches had had "little attention except for a few sneers and weak jokes". However, the marches took place in 12 locations in England and involved hundreds of women. Reclaim the Night inspired the Take Back the Night movement in the United States.
In 1979, the Southall Black Sisters formed to address violence against women and address issues within the black and Asian communities. Based on a liberationist model, they offered consciousness-raising discussions, counseling services and information in a multi-lingual format.
Race, ethnicity, and sexuality The women's liberation movement in the UK was concurrent with, and intersected with, wider movements for political rights for marginalised people. Important figures in the women's right's movement were active in lobbying for rights for lesbian, gay, trans, and queer people in the United Kingdom, and dedicated groups and protests were organised against discrimination faced by women of African and Asian descent, Irish women, and women who organised under politically black identies. That is not to say that all UK women's liberation groups were intersectional: in 1985 the London-based 'Black Feminist Newsletter' criticised the general WLM movement for being "racist because it does not take seriously the experiences of non-white women".
Peace and anti-war activism Student activists in France and the UK were involved in protests over Apartheid and the Vietnam War, radicalizing them on other issues. The Greenham Common Peace Camp was established in 1981, beginning with women from Wales and growing to include hundreds of women across 19 years.
Mental health The Women's Therapy Centre, founded to provide counseling and help with mental health issues, was established in London in 1976 by Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum.
Conferences and collectives
National Women's Liberation Movement The first National Women's Liberation Movement Conference, attended by around 600 women took place in Britain, for three days, from 27 February 1970, at Ruskin College. At the conference the liberationists laid out their focus areas, which included child care, equal education and opportunity, pay equity, and reproductive rights.
NWLM Conferences throughout Britain occurred at varied locations, including Sheffield (June 1970), Skegness (1971), Manchester (March 1972), London (November 1972), Bristol (1973), Edinburgh (1974), Manchester (1975), Newcastle (1976), London (1977) and Birmingham (1978). Though changing the location was meant to unify the women, it led to feelings in some quarters that the long journeys to nationwide conferences were marginalizing women from other parts of the country. At the 1974 conference of the WLM in Edinburgh two additional goals—economic and legal independence for women and the right to autonomy over their sexuality, free from discrimination—were adopted. At the eighth and final conference, held in 1978 in Birmingham, liberationists added a demand for freedom from violence.
By the end of the 1970s the movement had grown so large that it was difficult to sustain the personal and individual aspects which characterized the early movement. Conferences in Britain numbering near 3,000 participants made it difficult for individual activists to have a say in shaping policy or in discussions. Fragmentation on issues which were important to their personal political perspectives, was common for activists in the later part of the movement. In the drive to move from theory to action, liberationists began working on single-issue campaigns to ensure that gains which had been made were not rolled back. In addition, as the state had reformed many policies toward women and political and economic situation had shifted dramatically, activists felt a need to shift the way that they engaged with the state and public.
Black British and British-Asian collectives