Week 1.
The birth of the women’s liberation movement
Questions to ponder whilst you read…
 Was the sexual revolution an important factor in the rise of the WLM? If so,
how?
 Was the Left responsible for the emergence of a ‘second wave’ of feminism in
the 1970s?
 What are the main differences you perceive between ‘first’ and ‘second’ wave
feminism? Are these useful labels for the historian?
 What obstacles did women face in forming a feminist consciousness in the
early days of the WLM?
Documents
S. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (2000)
L. Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics (2007)
J. Mitchell, Women’s Estate (1971) [part 1 traces the history of the WLM]
J. Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, New Left Review (1966) [seminal
article which played an important role in the beginning of the WLM in Britain]
Fighting for Feminism: The Woman Question in an Italian Revolutionary Group by
Big Flame Women’s Group (available at www.libcom/files/5975.pdf)
S. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1971)
G. Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970)
Histories
B. Caine, English Feminism 1780-1980 (1987) [chapter 6]
* S. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas (London: Virago, 1983), pp.5-44
* B. Campbell & A. Coutes, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation
(1987)
S. Maitland, Very Heaven, Looking Back at the 1960s (1988)
J. Glencross, How the international women's movement discovered the "troubles":
brokered and broken transnational interactions during the Northern Ireland conflict,
1968-1981(2011)
A. August, ‘Gender and 1960s Youth Culture: The Rolling Stones and the New
Woman’, Contemporary British History 23:1 (2009), 79-100
M.P. Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society, and Politics (2005) [chapter on
women]