Week 2.
Cultures of activism
Questions to ponder whilst you read…
 How were the activist techniques of the WLM innovative?
 What was different about the way the WLM organised from previous social
movements?
 What do you think ‘the personal is political’ means?
 How might the activist culture of the WLM make us think differently about
the kinds of sources we use to study social movements?
Documents
Spare Rib no.38 (1975) [available in MRC 711/C/1/55]
Shrew (autumn 1974) [available in MRC 758/1/8/9]
Your own documents
Histories
L. Foster, ‘Printing Liberation: The Women's Movement and Magazines in the
1970s’, in L. Forster, Laurel & S. Harper, British Culture and Society in the 1970s :
the Lost Decade (2010)
*S. Bruley, Article on Consciousness Raising Groups, in Feminist Anthology
Collective (ed.) No Turning Back: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement
1975-1980 (1981)
M. Jolly, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (2008)
D. Withers & R. Chigley, ‘A Complicated Inheritance: Sistershow and the Queering
of Feminism, 1973-4’, Women: A Cultural Review 21:3 (2010), 309-322
E. Setch, ‘The Face of Metropolitan Feminism: The London Women's Liberation
Workshop, 1969-79’, Twentieth Century British History 13:2 (2002) 171-90
M. Wandor, Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation (1990)
C. Hughes, ‘Realigning personal and political: narratives of activist women in the late
1960s and 1970s’, Women’s History Network Magazine, Spring 2012.
R. Baxandall & L. Gordon (ed.s) Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s
Liberation Movement (2000)
Kathy Battista, Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London (2013)