The ‘f’ word: from ’68 to ’08 (UK)

[struggle4progress]

Hilary Wainwright ... Paradoxically, the apparent disappearance of the women’s liberation movement, as with other movements of liberation, is in part a product of what it had to do to campaign for reforms in the direction of its vision of liberation. To make allies and gain institutional footholds, parts of the movement found themselves focusing on specific changes and becoming immersed in pursuing them. The work of nurturing the long-term vision is difficult to maintain ...

Sue O’Sullivan ... Even at the end of the 1980s, I didn’t have a clue, realist that I thought I was, how horrendously wrong things would go by 2008. Not that all is lost by any means, not that I had illusions of continual progress – only that the whole context for women’s liberation in this country has changed. Many of the ‘words’ of the movement have been tamed: gender obscures women, rights obscure liberation and freedom, advocacy obscures radical activism, and the divisions and inequalities of class, race, age, ethnicity and sexuality reverberate as they reconfigure – reconfigurations we ignore at our peril. Things change even if it’s change we neither wanted nor worked for ...

Lucy Whitman ... The sexism we objected to in adverts and popular culture back in the 1970s seems laughably tame compared to what we are subjected to now, on TV, in music videos, in both women’s and men’s magazines. Never in a million years would I have guessed, back then, that by 2008 cosmetic surgery would be a multi-billion-pound industry and that countless women would willingly go under the knife to acquire plastic breasts, or even to have their genitals ‘improved’ ...

Andrea d’Cruz ... It’s possibly fallen under your activist radar but over the past year or so, pockets of feminist resistance have begun to materialise across the UK ... The emphasis is on liberation from below, on DIY, self-organised, non-institutionalised women’s activism. The other key feature is a deliberate focus on the wider underlying and interconnecting systems and manifestations of oppression: this feminism is synonymous with anti-capitalism and anti-racism ...

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/The-f-word-from-68-to-08