Chapter 1
The beginning
In the midst of the Cold War, in a divided country, feminists were about to start a global movement that for decades to come would unite women in symbolic protest against male violence against women. Shortly before midnight on 30 April 1977, small groups of women began gathering in the centre of towns and cities across West Germany: Bochum, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hanau. They were dressed as witches, carried flaming torches and had painted women’s symbols on their faces. The date of their synchronised protest was no accident. They were assembling on that night to mark what is still known across Germany as Walpurgis Night, a superstitious tradition to mark the coming of May; a time when witches and tricksters are believed to roam.
But that year, it was women who took back their streets on that dark night; on the stroke of the witching hour, women roamed freely in riotous processions down avenues and through parks where, on their own, they would have felt unsafe. They danced and laughed in city squares, and they pelted men who got in their way with flour bombs and with water pistols loaded with dye. They sang songs and chanted: we are not pieces of meat; we are not here to be leered at, grabbed at and abused; we are not cattle to be looked over by male eyes. They were protesting against sexual harassment, loudly voicing their anger against rape and all forms of sexual violence against women; they reclaimed the night to highlight how rarely they could. Men beware, they chorused, now the night belongs to women.
Those women started a movement that night; with the light of their flaming torches they passed on a tradition that has marched all over the world and which is still inspiring and empowering women everywhere to this day. The protest they popularised is called Reclaim the Night (RTN) across Europe and Asia and Take Back the Night in Canada and America. This is a book about the path that protest has taken, about how it has changed from that day to this and what that process means for the contemporary Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). It is a book about feminist activism, specifically feminist activism against male violence against women. It will speak to activists who are involved in the Women’s Movement today; indeed, it will speak to anyone who believes in the urgency of change for women and who wants to think about how we might make that happen.
What is feminism?
This book is in part about history; but it is also a book about our future. Not just a future for women, but also a future for all of us; a future that is more just and equitable, a future full of hope. It is my contention that feminist theory and politics contain answers that can help us get to that destination; I will try to prove this in the chapters to come. In particular, I will be exploring the politics and theory from the time known as the Second Wave of feminism and particularly from influential American and British theorists. This is the period, from the late 1960s through to the 1980s, when feminism is last considered to have been at its height in the West. It was named the Second Wave because it was seen to follow on from a First Wave of feminism, the previous recognised upsurge of feminist activity during the 1800s and 1900s, most renowned for the activism of the Suffragettes.
It is impossible to begin a book about feminism and feminist activism though without first outlining what feminism even is, what it means and what it means to me. Feminism as a social movement can be defined in a very broad sense as a global, political movement for the liberation of women and society based on equality for all people. However, as any activist reading this will know, perhaps too well, there are probably as many unique definitions of feminism as there are people who identify as feminists. The term means different things to different people, it also freights meaning and it is charged with symbolism, not all of it positive. There is no one, agreed, unifying definition of feminism that I can outline neatly and clearly once and for all. To complicate matters further still, there are several different recognised types, tendencies or schools of feminism within this broad movement itself; each of them are overarching types which themselves contain additional diversification and disagreement. To name just a few of the recognised schools of feminism, there is liberal feminism, socialist feminism, anarcho-feminism, black feminism, womanism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, lesbian feminism, separatist feminism, pro-feminism and revolutionary feminism. I will attempt further explanation later, but throughout this book, I will be focussing mainly on just one of these schools: radical feminism. This is the school of feminism to which I subscribe. It is also the school of feminism that has arguably contributed most feminist theory on male violence against women, its causes, consequences and what we can do about it. The Reclaim the Night or RTN protest was just one of the ways that feminists did something about it, and, as I will show, it was radical feminists who played an influential role in making this happen and in bringing this protest to the UK.
The above typology of different schools and labels of feminism might not mean much to contemporary feminists or to women’s rights activists who are reading this book today. It might seem like so much divisive division of what should be an all too simple matter; the matter of pursuing equality for women in all spheres, from the workplace, to the streets, to the home. Such a goal should surely be one that nobody could disagree with, much less fight over or create conflicts around. I understand the frustrations with such divisions, and throughout this book, I will explore some of them and uncover what theory and ideas lie behind them. Firstly, on a more positive note and in the spirit of charting our proud history, I will be spending the next chapter taking a look back at where the current UK WLM heralds from and in whose footsteps we are marching today. This history can inform and enrich our present work today and enable us to learn from mistakes and successes. Looking back like this helps us to see how far we have come, but for many in this movement, although much has changed for the better in terms of women’s rights, the struggle will not be finished until patriarchy is overthrown.
What is patriarchy?
So what is patriarchy? In its form as a social movement, which we can call the WLM, the purpose of feminism is to, as the feminist scholar bell hooks summarised so succinctly in 2004: ‘challenge, change and ultimately end patriarchy’ (2004:108). The term ‘patriarchy’ itself is one you will probably read and hear often in feminist circles, on and offline, in academia, in journalism and in blogs. I will use it frequently throughout this book. The term originally comes from the Greek language, and strictly speaking, it means the rule of the father. It is used mainly to describe a male head of household or a father or grandfather who headed up a family. But the term is now more widely and generally used to mean male rule or male dominance; for example, male dominance or male superiority in a whole community, a whole society or a whole world. Feminists use The P Word to refer to male supremacy, to societies where men as a group dominate mainstream positions of power in culture, politics, business, law, military and policing, for example – societies like ours.
Historians, such as Gerda Lerner in her 1986 book on the history of patriarchy, argue persuasively that male supremacy has marked social governance across the globe for a long, long time – for thousands and thousands of years. Lerner mainly argues this on the grounds that no evidence can be found for anything contrary. She contends that no evidence exists of any society or nation characterised by female supremacy; where women as a group have had power and control over men in every sphere of life, including their personal affairs such as reproduction and sexuality. Such a society, marked by female supremacy and male inferiority, would be termed a matriarchy; it would be a mirror image of patriarchy, just as unequal, but with women in charge instead of men. It is unlikely such a situation has ever existed and hopefully it never will. It is important to understand that this is not the destination that feminism is aiming for, contrary to many of the popular myths about feminism. Feminism is a movement for change, not a changing of the guard. By this, I mean that we are not working for a world unchanged apart from the leadership. Ours is a revolutionary movement, thus it is about a different type of world altogether, one not marked by extremes of poverty and wealth, or by war and exploitation. Neither has our movement been struggling for centuries simply for equality with unequal men. In this book, I will address such myths and misunderstandings that surround feminism and its aims. This is an important task, because setting the record straight will give contemporary activists the opportunity to make up their own mind about one of the oldest and most powerful social justice movements the world has ever known – their own.
Too often, the lies that are told about feminism alienate people from this movement, particularly younger women. Some contemporary forms of activism also seek to define themselves against an imagined feminist past and in doing so they sometimes write off Second Wave politics as outdated, redundant, tired and second-hand. This perspective continues to flourish and thrive, even in the face of much evidence to the contrary. But when most of this evidence is offline, in archives and collections which are hardly easy access, it is not surprising that misconceptions about feminism are allowed to gather pace, growing stronger whenever the movement peaks again. If we are to avoid recycling lies, circulating incorrect received wisdom, reinventing wheels and spiralling down familiar debates then we have to escape a tradition of historical amnesia and reclaim what our retro feminist theory and activism has to offer us.
This feminism of the Second Wave is often called history, yet it is as relevant today as it ever was. It contains much of value to current feminist activists and to all people concerned with social justice. Many progressive women and men today are hungry for their history, or herstory, are curious to know where the contemporary manifestation of feminism began, what shaped its journey and how it differs from forms of activism today. This interest is partly because feminism is enjoying another peak today. Here in the UK a resurgence of feminism has been sweeping our shores since the early 2000s, and despite much efforts, it seems unstoppable. Whether we term this a new wave of feminism or not, whether we give it a number or whatever we call this new observable upsurge of feminist voices and feminist activism, it has the potential to leave a changed world in its wake; indeed, it is already doing so.
This new generation of feminist activists are stirring up a new women’s movement; they are also active in struggles for social justice more generally. They can be found organising, supporting and leading in movements against cuts to welfare rights and in organisations against war and imperialism for example. This is admirable and urgent because it is not an easy time to be pursuing social justice, not for feminists or any other activists; we are facing a seemingly relentless rising tide of neo-liberalism. By this, I mean the not-so-new approach to the world that applies market rule to every area of life, not just in finance and business, but also in healthcare, education and welfare for example. These are all essential services, yet increasingly around the world, including in the UK, they are being privatised and treated as profit-making opportunities rather than as human rights. With this move comes decreasing access to such essentials, especially for poor and marginalised people. As competition generally increases, wealthy countries step up their military and economic might and wrestle for control over natural resources they can exploit for profit. The scholar Lisa Duggan has written about this process in her excellent book The Twilight of Equality (2004), which also provides a good history and background to just what this concept, neo-liberalism, actually means and where it comes from.
Alongside this shift, and not unrelated to it, individualism has increased and collective social movements have taken a battering. The new generation of activists, the likes of whom I have met and introduce in this book, is also a generation that has grown up being taught that they can be whoever and whatever they wish to be and that the only thing standing in their way is themselves and their own will and ambition. This myth of meritocracy and equal opportunities encourages individualism over collective action, because when people believe this myth, they obviously see no need for protest movements around particular classes or identities, such as the Women’s Movement or the Civil Rights Movement. If things do not go well for people in the workplace, education or in their personal lives, they are more likely to blame themselves, rather than sexism, racism, class oppression or homophobia; concepts which in current society are often seen as out of date. This type of blame even applies to experiences of actual violence or harassment, with too many people believing that it is their fault if they are sexually harassed in the workplace or at school, abused by a partner or are a victim to sexual violence. Our society encourages this view, and in turn that keeps people isolated and alone, rather than providing them the opportunity to get involved in collective struggles against such common experiences. These are common experiences which are symptoms of an unequal, sexist world; they are not symptoms of what clothes someone chose to wear, who they dated, where they worked, what time of night they were walking home or what alcohol they had been drinking; nor are they caused by a lack of independence or willpower. This symptomatic violence is just one issue that feminism has long been tackling, and is one area where today’s feminism is making a difference: on the life and death issue of male violence against women.
What is male violence against women?
The current resurgence of feminism is taking on in new ways some of the oldest and most pressing injustices against women, and male violence is a unifying concern. This is also of course the key focus of global RTN marches. But what exactly do feminists mean when they refer to ‘male violence against women’, and how can this term make sense when violence is sometimes committed by women, including against other women, and when men are victims of violence too? The term applies to rape, domestic abuse, forced marriage, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, stalking, sexual exploitation in prostitution and trafficking for prostitution, female genital mutilation and so-called ‘honour crimes’. It is estimated that up to three million women every year in the UK are affected by these crimes and male violence against women remains one of the biggest human rights challenges across the globe. The crimes listed above constitute, though by no means exhaustively, what I mean by the term ‘male violence against women’. More formal, official definitions can be found in policy documents such as those from the United Nations, where it is often referred to, just to confuse my efforts at clarity, as ‘gender-based violence’. For example, in the snappily titled 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and in the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), violence against women is defined as physical, sexual or psychological violence against women because of their sex alone or where such violence affects women disproportionately.
The precursor term ‘male’, which I am using here and throughout this book, is often missing from these policy and legal documents on violence against women. They often refer euphemistically to just ‘violence against women’ or to the supposedly neutral ‘gender-based violence’. Such phrasing is significant – I suggest that it is not accidental either; and it is profoundly political. Language matters, and this type of language suggests parity, it suggests gender neutrality; because the terminology is not sexed, it is therefore both and neither male nor female. By referring to gender-based violence, the sexed facts and reality of sexual violence and intimate partner and family violence for example, are hidden and obscured in plain sight. The focus is stealthily shifted away from the brutal fact that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of such crimes and that women are overwhelmingly the victims.
But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women. To this end, it is important to acknowledge that this type of violence is not a natural phenomenon, like bad weather. It does not just happen, it is not a fact of life; it is a fact of inequality. It has a perpetrator and a victim, it has a cause and likewise, it has a cure. The most important and relevant lesson feminism has taught us is that male violence against women is not biological, it is political. And if it is made, then it can be un-made; if it is learnt, it can be un-learnt. This is just one of the positive and inspiring messages from feminism that I will be covering in this book.
Feminism is not afraid to name the perpetrators of violence against women or gender-based violence by referring to these crimes specifically as male violence against women. This terminology is emphasised in many explicitly feminist approaches, but is particularly present in the theory found in radical feminism. This school of feminism defines male violence against women as both a cause and a consequence of male supremacy and female inferiority; and as a symptom of patriarchy. What this definition means is that while male violence is indeed a blunt and bloody symptom of patriarchy, it is also, at the same time, a foundation which props up patriarchy. If this definition is accepted, then it is vital to address and challenge patriarchy as part of the struggle to end all forms of male violence against women. Contrary to anti-feminist myths, feminism has promised that this is possible; feminism promotes the belief that all of us can change, that men are not naturally violent or abusive. This is an important facet of feminist theory to grasp, because it goes against that most well-known lie about feminism, the lie that our movement hates men and defines and reduces all men to rapists and abusers. Feminism actually does not let men off the hook in this way.
The theory and politics from feminism is far removed from what is called biological determinism or essentialism. This means that feminism does not believe that there is anything in men’s biology that makes them violent, nor does feminism believe that there is some essential truth or essence to men that makes them inherently violent. It is in nobody’s interests to write our futures in stone like this, or rather, to write off our futures. We understand that most men do not rape or abuse the women and children they know and love; we posit that this means there is no excuse for the men who choose to do so. Radical feminist theory in particular, identifies male violence against women as a form of social control. This perspective highlights that when they do happen, these widespread and targeted acts of violence affect all women, whether we personally are lucky enough to have avoided them or not. They affect all women by restricting women’s freedom, liberty and personhood. All women, in all our diversity, know what it is to live with the fear or reality of male violence. I will be discussing this perspective in much more detail later in this book, and exploring further the reasons behind such epidemic levels of male violence against women and what we might do to end it.
Feminist activism against male violence against women
Although I am focussing on quite recent feminist activism and theory against male violence against women, this activism is by no means new. There has likely been resistance to such violence for as long as it has existed, and there has been organised feminist resistance across the world for centuries. RTN is just one such way that people have organised this resistance. The march is still a common and powerful response today. It was how communities responded to the tragic rape and murder of Jill Meagher, walking home one night in Melbourne, Australia, in September 2012. It was also how people protested in towns and cities across India, reacting to the news of the horrific gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi, attacked by a group of men while she was travelling home by bus.
The thousands of people who take part in these protests all over the world are marching in the footsteps of the brave and pioneering women who founded such methods of activism decades before. Those women set in place these tactics of direct action, and they also established support services and provisions for women affected by male violence. In the UK, these activists built women’s refuges, they founded the Women’s Aid Federation in 1974, they set up Rape Crisis Centres in 1976; they brought the crimes of male violence into the public domain, into the light of day. In so doing, they changed laws, policies, hearts and minds, and they saved lives. The legacy of the services they created is still benefitting women, children and, indeed, men to this day, albeit under almost continual funding threats which endanger decades of specialist work. This is especially the case now, as ideological welfare cutbacks are attempting to push women back into the home where they are expected to do caring work for no pay, caring work they may have previously done outside the home for low pay. Facts of unequal life, facts such as domestic abuse and sexual violence, are seen in this neo-liberal climate as private, individual matters. Those affected are expected to fund their own support or to find it themselves within the nuclear family. Despite all the work feminists have done, such services are still considered far from essential, and in times of recession, they are often the first to be dropped.
Much has been written on the legal and policy work to reduce male violence against women, so it is the specific activist response that I focus on here in this book. While researching such activism in the form of RTN, it has become clear that not much history of this protest has been written down. There is a great deal of theorising, reflection and analysis of other street protests, for example the anti-capitalist Reclaim the Streets Movement across the UK and Europe in the 1990s, or the environmentalist anti-roads protests in Britain in the same period. While many arty coffee table books of photojournalism document the colourful, creative and angry methods of such protests, nothing similar exists on RTN. This is despite this movement being a global protest and being just as colourful, creative and angry. Perhaps because it has traditionally, and often still is currently, women-only, this method of protest has been considered too controversial or niche for scholars who often too readily settle on examples of male, perhaps macho, political heroes. Whatever the reasons may be, RTN is often absent from histories of social movements, from academic studies of street marching and protest and from herstories of the WLM. Given its global reach, and continuing relevance and resonance with a new generation of feminists, I hope to demonstrate in this book that this is a serious omission.
To remedy this omission, I will provide a background to the emergence of RTN in Europe and to how it was born in the UK in 1977. For the first time I will put on record the herstory of this important protest. I will also go back further still, to explain some of the background to the WLM of the Second Wave, looking at how the term ‘women’s liberation’ came into being and how the Second Wave began in the US and the UK in the late 1960s. While marching through the chapters of this book, as well as learning about the history and present of feminist activism, you will also travel through some of the most controversial issues affecting feminism today. Just as in the past, there are still many different definitions and understandings about what feminism is and what it means; there are still also feminists aligned to certain schools or types of feminism rather than others. There are also still several areas on which feminists disagree, and some arguments which have been going on for decades; our movement is by no means one unified family. These disagreements are being discussed both within and outside the movement, on and offline.
These disagreements concern issues such as the role of men in feminism; the inclusion of transgender, transexual or self-identified gender-queer people in feminism; and also the long-running divisions between feminists positive about the so-called sex industry – namely, prostitution and pornography – and those feminists who include these institutions in their definitions of male violence against women. Adopting a phrase from the well-known feminist activist and policy theorist, Professor Liz Kelly, I refer to these divisions as ‘feminist fault lines’. This is not to suggest however that these are the only controversial areas of feminist debate; our movement has more than its fair share of disagreement. However, these are the main disagreements which impact on the organisation of RTN marches and which affect the activist organisers who are trying to make those marches successful. I will therefore explore these particular disagreements in this book. I will try to show that it is only from carefully considering such conflicts that theory and practice can move forward. Although it can seem off-putting to new feminists or those interested in women’s rights, discussion, debate, conflict and difference is an essential part of feminism, as it is of any social movement that continues to live, grow and learn.
Difference and intersectionality
Many of these disagreements between feminists obviously come down to personal political standpoints, but many of them also emerge from power relationships between women. It should go without saying that not all women are the same; there are differences between women, powerful differences of power. These have always been, and remain, potential areas of division and exclusion in the WLM. For example, along the social fractures of ethnicity, social class, sexuality, age, caring responsibilities, immigration status, economic position, health and language to name but a few. All of us, women and men, inhabit all of these identities, by which I mean that all of us have an ethnic background, a first language, an age, a sexuality, a social class background, a sexed identity, a gender identity, a body with differing degrees of health and an economic position which may or may not be strong.
These identities also change for all of us; they are not fixed, they do not stay the same. For example, we may become parents or we may become carers of elderly or sick relatives, we may become disabled ourselves or get ill, we may change our religion or our sexual identity or we may change our sex or gender identity. Our concerns and priorities will react as these identities flux and alter. The changes and intersection of these identities affect how we experience our world, and the barriers we may face, based on the differing levels of power and privilege that society attaches to certain identities rather than others. Ours is unfortunately a racist, sexist, homophobic and prejudiced society; these structural inequalities affect all of us and they have not gone away, despite the claims of neo-liberal narratives and despite the assertions of some queer politics or third wave feminism. These inequalities affect feminists too and they also play out within the WLM. Women are not immune to such prejudices of course, but neither are they immune to enacting prejudice against others.
There is a special term used in feminism to describe the fact of multiple and intersecting identities and the structural power relationships between them; that term is ‘intersectionality’. The term was first coined by feminist legal scholar Professor Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. She used the term in an article about how Black women are failed in employment discrimination cases, by a legal system that can only respond to them as either Black, or as women, but not as both. Crenshaw pointed out that Black women often faced discrimination precisely because they were Black and women. In the legal cases she documented, women testified that they saw White female employees being treated differently to them and Black male employees being treated differently to them too. So it was not as simple as identifying the prejudice they experienced against them as just racism or just sexism, it was both of those mixed together.
Crenshaw used a metaphor to explain this position; she said it was like someone standing at a crossroads or intersection, with traffic rushing towards them from all different directions. They were going to be knocked over and hurt by that speeding traffic, and it would not be an easy job to say precisely which lane of traffic or which car had hurt them the most, it was a combination of forces that hit them and harmed them. The same is true with the intersection of personal identities; these cross over, they run into one another and form a unique blend, so identities such as race and sex cannot be separated, they in fact intersect. The term ‘intersectionality’ has become widely used, especially in feminist activist circles, to refer to how power relationships intersect within certain groups, as well as between groups. It draws our attention to fractures of race, social class and sexuality between women themselves; for example, it usefully highlights the point I emphasised above, that women are not a homogenous group.
We can use the idea of intersectionality to consider our own identity. Being aware of our own identities, and acknowledging and understanding how these bring us varying levels of privilege compared to others is an important political reflection. It helps us to understand our personal biographies, our life history and how the society around us has shaped those and continues to shape our futures. When we consider ways that certain elements of our identity have brought us access, or resulted in us being excluded, we can extend this awareness to analyse whether and in what ways we may be part of excluding others. We can aspire in our language and in our actions to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, to remember that we cannot speak for everybody; not even everybody who belongs to the same group that we do, for example, all women, all lesbian, bisexual or gay people or all Black people. This awareness is called having an intersectional approach and it has become central to contemporary feminist activism, sometimes perhaps in ways that were never intended when the term was first coined, and perhaps in some ways that ironically hold the movement back rather than helping it to grow. Later in this book, I shall delve further into these often-fraught debates, presenting the views of contemporary feminist activists on just what this terminology means to them and their activism.
Positionality: Where does the writer speak from?
For now, because it is important to be transparent about our identities and understand how they act upon our lives and the lives of others, I shall outline my own identity and the position from which I speak. This is what is called ‘positionality’, and all writers, commentators, academics, journalists and bloggers speak from a certain position or standpoint. No researcher or writer lives in a vacuum, nobody is neutral. Our opinions on social issues are shaped and informed by our own life experiences and in turn, those life experiences are shaped by the very social issues that we comment upon; I am no exception.
Different elements of my identity have shaped my own biography and trajectory in life, contrastingly benefitting or hindering my journey. I am White, Scottish and I come from a very rural, working-class area of Scotland, largely dominated by farming and forestry. I identify as a radical feminist. I am also an out lesbian. I am lucky enough to have no serious disabilities and I have benefited from a university education. Although my family were far from rich, I was enriched by many books in the house and by the left-wing political opinions of my parents and my parents’ friends, which instilled in me a passion for politics and particularly for protest politics about matters that affected daily life. I was never interested in how a bill becomes law or in the difference between a white or a green paper. I was interested in how ordinary people could get issues onto the public agenda and make things happen. From a very early age, I wanted to be one of those people.
In 2004, I founded the London Feminist Network, a network aimed at bringing together feminist groups and individuals in action. As part of this group, I also revived the London RTN in the same year. I had been somewhat disappointed by the lack of feminist activity in the capital at that time, having moved there in 2002 to work in a small charity offering advice and guidance to Scots in London. My own political background is rooted in the Women’s Peace Movement, where I cut my political teeth in my late teens. I was looking for similar, lively, angry and practical feminist activism when I moved to London; instead, I found little activism around and most of it online only.
My interest in the Women’s Peace Movement goes back a long way. As a child, I was obsessed with the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in Newbury, Berkshire in the South of England, which was active during the 1980s. Lasting approximately 12 years, this protest remains one of the largest women’s peace camps the world has ever known, sometimes attracting 50,000 women to particular demonstrations, including what were called Embrace the Base actions. This was where rings of women held hands and encircled the nine and half mile perimeter fence of the US military base blockading entry to military and civilian personnel. The women were protesting against nuclear cruise missiles being stationed at Greenham, and they established many creative and humorous methods of campaigning, which we now call non-violent direct action or NVDA. They blockaded the gates to the military base to stop convoys of trucks carrying missiles from leaving on manoeuvres for example, they organised mass trespasses into the base, often in fancy dress, they utilised criminal damage to sabotage military machinery and they also made their oppositional presence felt by camping directly outside the gates of the base, living outdoors in all weathers. They bore witness to the military machinations of those protecting weapons of mass destruction, and, in their novel approach, they drew the eyes of the world onto what was supposed to be a top-secret military establishment.
Growing up in isolated rural Scotland, I was many miles and far removed from this type of revolutionary women-only protest. Fortunately, I saw coverage on the news and my parents were also friends with two women who spent their holidays camping at Greenham; from the age of seven, I was hooked. I listened to vinyl records of Greenham women’s peace songs, I designed my own Greenham supporter tee shirts and waited for the day I could be part of it myself. Alas, I was born too late, and by the time I was a teenager, the Greenham protestors had been in place long enough to watch the last American soldier leave by the gates they had built and the base was being cleaned up and used by NATO for exercises. It was eventually given back to the local council in Newbury though, and much of it turned back into common land for local people and businesses. This did not spell the general demise of the patriarchal, military industrial complex in the UK, however; that was unfortunately far from dormant.
I was thus able to become part of another, more recent women’s peace camp instead, protesting outside the largest US listening base in the world, a place called Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, run by the National Security Agency or NSA of America. Following the Snowden revelations of 2013 and allegations of economic, political and military spying by the US, which have emerged from Wikileaks, for example, the NSA is an organisation now far more well known than it was when local CND, Greenham and peace activists in Yorkshire began to organise resistance outside Menwith Hill in the 1980s. Many Greenham women were part of this protest, including a woman called Helen John, who was one of the original founders of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in 1981 and who then became involved in building a permanent women’s peace camp outside the base at Menwith.
I was 17 when I first got involved in the protest at Menwith Hill, or Wo-Menwith Hill as we called it. I then moved to live at the peace camp when I was 18, and lived there permanently for about a year. I took part in all elements of the campaign. I wrote newsletters, conducted media interviews, organised protests, took part in NVDA, defended myself in court and fundraised for the peace camp. Our camp ran as a collective as much as possible, we had circle meetings to discuss most things, from the serious to the mundane. We shared tasks and somehow, without rotas or too much arguing, everything that needed doing seemed to get done, whether it be chopping firewood or washing muddy plates. It was this sense of collective, real-time rather than online, women-only, dynamic and direct protest that I was looking for in the WLM of the early 2000s. When I couldn’t find it, I decided to try to build it myself.
Reviving Reclaim the Night
In the summer of 2004, I floated the idea of an activist network for London on the few feminist online lists and egroups that I knew of. I sent out an email asking any interested women to meet in the café space of the Royal Festival Hall in central London on the South Bank of the River Thames. Around six women turned up to that first meeting; they were all energised and enthusiastic about a face-face, activist network in London to co-ordinate activities and plan possible events. We arranged another meeting and similarly advertised it around the few online groups that we knew of; at that time, the online presence of feminism was nothing like it is now. It was really only in its early stages. The advert obviously travelled around though, virtually and by word of mouth, because at the next meeting around a dozen women participated. Women wanted to plan campaigns we could run, events we could set up and actual, physical, real things that we could do, rather than just talking about things online. So the meetings continued to grow and word continued to spread, so much so that in that November of 2004, the London Feminist Network, as I named it, held the first revived London RTN march, following a break of that type of protest in the capital for several years.
I had long wondered why RTN had appeared to decline across the UK, seemingly since the 1990s, albeit still being kept alive by some women’s sector organisations and by creative university women’s officers in the National Union of Students. I had learnt about the history of this protest from women I had met through the Women’s Peace Movement; in particular, from a feminist activist named Al Garthwaite from Leeds in Yorkshire, who founded the first RTN marches in the UK in 1977. I had listened intently to stories of women marching through city streets with flaming torches. I knew all the words of the folk singer Peggy Seeger’s ‘Reclaim the Night’ song and I wondered why, with a rape conviction rate estimated at only around 6 per cent, this urgent protest had so declined.
When Sylvia Walby and Jonathan Allen’s report on the British Crime Survey in 2004 suggested that one in four women were living with domestic violence and that around 60,000 women every year were affected by rape, I remember discussing with other feminists why we were not taking to the streets any more. It seemed to me that demonstrations like RTN were needed more, not less, than they had been in the 1970s. It transpired that a few others thought the same and that some of them were even willing to help make it happen. So, with the help of women at the Lilith Project, part of Eaves Housing for Women, who offered assistance with photocopying fliers and setting up a website, the London Feminist Network organised a small RTN march in November of 2004. We had no idea how many women would attend, but a small group of 50 assembled at Euston station to march through parts of Camden and into Cambridge Circus near an area called Soho in central London. At that point, the local police had no idea who we were or what our protest would look like. We did not get roads closed down for us and we had to march down the pavements all the way, with some women carrying candles in jars and veterans teaching us old chants and songs from the original marches. We could not afford to hire a venue to hold a rally at the end of our march, as we do now, so we just gathered in Cambridge Circus, outside a theatre there, and sang our songs and waved our banners, before retiring to one of the many nearby pubs.
From those small beginnings, the revived London RTN grew and grew. It expanded into a central event on the feminist and women’s sector calendar. It now has the support of most major Trade Unions, of women’s sector organisations and of many organisations working for peace, human rights and justice. It regularly attracts over 2000 women from all over the UK and beyond, and for one night it closes down the streets of central London so women can march for the right to live free from the fear of male violence. The idea has caught on, and many other towns and cities have been inspired to revive their own tradition of RTN, with several places holding their first ever marches.
RTN is not the only organised protest against male violence against women to have emerged in recent years though, indeed, this issue has become a key feature of the growing feminist resurgence. Million Women Rise (MWR), founded in 2008, for example, is an annual march through London against all forms of male violence against women; it is held to mark International Women’s Day, which is held annually on 8 March. Attracting attention more recently, the so-called SlutWalks against violence against women, emerged firstly in Canada and then in the UK in 2011. These usually mixed marches were a response to what is known as victim-blaming; this is the term used to describe the phenomenon whereby society appears to blame the victims of male sexual violence for crimes against them, rather than the perpetrators themselves. You can see this phenomenon sometimes in media reports of rape, where great attention is paid to whether a female victim was walking alone, or to what she was wearing, whether she had been drinking alcohol and whether the attack took place late at night for example. The SlutWalk grew out of such victim-blaming, the march being provoked by advice to women from a male police officer in Toronto, Canada, who warned women not to dress like ‘sluts’ if they wanted to avoid rape and sexual assault. These marches drew a lot of attention globally. This attention was arguably partly due to their title and the fact that some participants attempted to protest victim-blaming by marching in clothes they believed society would view as ‘slutty’, meaning sexually ‘provocative’ or overtly sexual. RTN is not the same as SlutWalk. It covers similar issues, but it does it with clothes on. Unlike SlutWalk, RTN also has a long history going back to the 1970s and it is truly global. My own interest in the history of RTN and my own involvement in its resurgence are what motivated me to research this area.
Background to the book
The activist voices that you will hear in this book come from individuals involved in RTN and in many other social justice protests and movements. The research I carried out, however, was specifically on views and experiences of RTN, the UK WLM and feminism more broadly. I conducted 25 face-to-face interviews with feminist activists and surveyed 108 using an online survey. All participants had either marched or organised on RTN, they came from all over the UK, from a variety of backgrounds and they had been active feminists for between one to over 40 years. I carried out the research in early 2012 and it was part of my PhD fieldwork for my thesis on changes in the British WLM, which I completed at the University of Bristol in 2013.
Much of the data I gathered on my field trips around the UK is presented in this book, in the form of activist accounts and direct quotes from activists themselves in their own voice. To research the beginnings of RTN and of the Second Wave in the UK, I also turned to feminist archives such as those in Bristol and Leeds run by the charity the Feminist Archive, where many original fliers, posters, badges and photographs of the early RTN marches can be found. I used collections of feminist magazines from the Second Wave, such as Spare Rib, probably one of the most well known of the British feminist magazines in the 1970s and 1980s, which was published until 1993. I also used periodicals that will be less well known, such as the Rev/Rad Newsletter, the Revolutionary and Radical Feminist Newsletter, which looks a bit like what we now call zines. It was printed on old print presses, stapled by hand and mailed out to activists around the country. Similar amounts of hard work, late nights and repetitive strain injury went into the higher circulation WIRES, the Women’s Information Referral and Enquiry Service, which was the official newsletter of the British WLM from 1975 until 1985. These periodicals trace the history of RTN in the UK, through letters, adverts and articles, right from when it first started.
Searching through these archive materials and interrogating the memories of those who marched on the original UK RTN, I hope to show you how the protest has changed over the last 40 years. I will consider whether these changes are positive or negative and what we can learn from them. Rather than dismissing the Second Wave period of feminism out of hand or simply describing only the current feminist resurgence, I hope to analyse both together, and consider what original feminist theory can offer to the struggles we are facing today; some of which are remarkably similar to those addressed by the feminists before us. To do this I will translate, or perhaps re-translate, classic radical feminist texts, in particular the 1969 publication from Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, which still stands as one of the most enlightening and surgical analyses of patriarchy ever written. Forget the myths you have heard about radical feminism, for only some of them are true. Instead, prepare to think about why so many lies are told about this particular brand of feminism, how it acts as a scapegoat for all that is most threatening about our social movement and how any revolutionary movement for change could really ever be anything but threatening. These are the women you were warned about; you can be too.
The route
The next chapter will provide a brief introduction to the emergence of Second Wave feminism in the UK and the influences from America and from the many social movements active at the time. The New Left, civil rights, Black Power, gay liberation and anti-war organising all influenced this recent upsurge of feminism. In the UK, things really got started in 1970 with the famous women’s rights conference at Ruskin College in Oxford. Following that, National Women’s Liberation Conferences began to be held regularly and many magazines and journals were produced. Throughout it all, male violence against women was a key concern, becoming addressed in one of the Seven Demands of the UK WLM.
In Chapter 3, I will look at some of the differences I mentioned between feminists and between different types or schools of feminism. I will introduce some basic defining features of these different schools and note some of the main sites of divergence. One of the big disagreements which complicated and enriched much of the activism and theory on male violence against women was that between socialist feminists and radical feminists. These two schools of feminism disagreed over the causes of male violence against women and consequently, over what should be done about it and what methods of protest should be used. These conflicts played out in RTN, not least in some of the criticisms of the original marches which still influence perceptions today.
The herstory of RTN will be put on record in Chapter 4, from its European roots to its fiery progress across the globe. In this chapter, I will also shed light on the beginnings of RTN in the UK in the city of Leeds in the North of England. I will present some of the possible influences behind the protest march emerging when and where it did, because the location of Leeds was far from random. High-profile crimes against women during the mid-1970s and the slow, sexist and disorganised police response were all motivators for the march, as was the sophisticated sharing of international news throughout the Women’s Movement and the UK coverage of the German RTN. This period was a time when new feminist theory on male violence against women was in development and in contestation; issues such as rape were just being taken up in the new Rape Crisis Movement and in local action groups. Socialist and radical feminists clashed, as did the autonomous anti-rape groups with the organised actions of a group called Wages for Housework. As well as delving into these theoretical disagreements, this chapter will also consider some of the early but long-lasting controversy around RTN; namely, the charges of racism made against the UK marches.
Continuing the theme of disagreement and conflict, Chapter 5 will look at how the modern RTN has fared in a climate influenced by queer theory and by new liberation movements. Queer theory is not just a strand of scholarship, investigation and academia; it also refers to a politics and to methods of activism. The term ‘queer’ is also a label that many of the new generation of feminist activists use to describe themselves. It has become a label particularly for those who do not wish to be boxed in by the conventional, narrow categories for sex, gender and sexual orientation. For those who feel their sexuality is more fluid than the standard tick boxes of LGB – lesbian, gay or bisexual – and for those who feel their gender identity is not typically masculine or feminine, for example, ‘queer’ can be a useful and inclusive descriptor. In this climate, challenges to feminism have questioned to what extent a movement can really speak or act for such a diverse group as women. Here I will state some of the main differences between radical feminist theory and queer theory on such questions – questions of sex, gender and structural inequality for example. However, in this chapter, I will also consider some of the similarities and the debt that much queer theory owes to feminism, particularly early radical feminist thought.
In Chapter 6, the voices of contemporary feminist activists can be found, with the ideas and motivations of marchers today being compared with the views of original marchers from the past. This chapter looks at how the practicalities of the march have evolved, in policing and in direct action for example. Activists provide different reasons for observed changes in RTN, including the influence of neo-liberal narratives and also the influence of third wave feminism. I explore their views of this particular brand of feminism, many of which were negative. This chapter also introduces one of the biggest and most controversial changes in RTN – the shift to including men on marches.
Chapter 7 focusses in more depth on the shift from women-only to mixed marches, which has happened over the course of RTN from the 1970s to the present day. This chapter outlines and explores the main key arguments made in favour of male inclusion and the counter arguments against. The activists I met were mainly pragmatic about expanding the borders of the march and building a successful and well-attended event. Alongside that however, there was often a tension between unease about excluding anyone and an emotional connection to women’s leadership.
Chapter 8 continues to look at the shifting borders around the march and explores wider issues of exclusion and inclusion on RTN. Not just in terms of men’s presence on the marches, but considering the role of self-defined transgender or queer activists and also the competing arguments over the approaches marches take towards the sex industry. In this book, I use the term ‘transgender’ to refer to those people who identify as non-gender normative or as non-binary; that means anyone who does not consider their presentation or their identity to be feminine or masculine in a mainstream way – they cross the lines of gender. I use the term ‘transexual’ to refer to those people who have chosen to legally, socially and perhaps medically cross the lines of sex – that is, they define as the opposite sex to that which they were labelled at birth. As a shorthand, I will sometimes use the term ‘trans’ rather than the two terms ‘transexual’ and ‘transgender’; though there are in fact important differences between these two identity categories, as I cover in more detail in Chapter 5. When I refer to trans women, I mean transexual women, and when I refer to trans men, I mean transexual men. Issues around the inclusion and exclusion of groups such as trans women and also men and queer activists shape the form that RTN marches take; they also affect those organisers who are trying to build large and successful marches. This chapter explores some of the common critiques and arguments that these activist organisers face, critiques which are based on quite abstract gender and queer theory but which have very real and practical ramifications.
Feminism is not all about controversy and disagreement though, and in Chapter 9, I will look at the many aims and motivations which feminists of all different tendencies shared. I asked all the activists I met about what sort of feminist world they were working towards and what short-term goals or indicators of feminist success we might be able to focus on now. This chapter then compares those aspirations to the previous goals of the Second Wave in the Seven Demands and invites contemporary activists to update and add more to this wo-manifesto.
The last chapter, Chapter 10, forms a brief conclusion and summarises the history, theory and activism which I have explored in this book. I have only touched on many issues here and there is much more to find out, not least from returning to the feminist classics from the Second Wave. While it is not the case that all the answers we are looking for will be found there in the archives and in old journals, it is certainly the case that such material contains useful information. Amongst all the mistakes of the past, there were many, many successes. It is important that we learn from both the rights and the wrongs of our movement, as well as from what lies in between, in those unsure areas from which grand theory springs. We have no shortage of such uncertainty today, as a new generation of activists try to navigate a changed terrain, where stubborn inequalities nevertheless remain the same. What we do not have so much of today is safe spaces where that journey can take place.
During the Second Wave, these places were created; their importance was understood and recognised as they gave birth to classic feminist theory, and to exciting and original methods of direct action and protest. Our WLM came from the ground up, it started with women’s everyday experiences and it sought to change those for the better, for all women. In the next chapter then, I will look back at some of this herstory, at the beginnings of the Second Wave in the UK.