Women in Revolt at Tate Britain

'Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990' at Tate Britain features a huge amount of archive material from different 1970s/80s feminist currents alongside the art works which taken together give a strong sense of the visual culture and politics of the period. 

Lots of South London content included, here's a few I spotted:

'Shrew - Women's Liberation Workshop' (1970)- I noticed on the cover that this copy was at one time held in 'The Fawcett Collection, temporarily at 67 Barry Road SE22'. The Fawcett Collection later became the Women's Library. Barry Road in East Dulwich just across the road from Peckham Rye, where as discussed here previously one of the first London Women's Liberation groups was formed, a group that was involved in the production of Shrew.

'In Print' - newsletter of Peckham Black Women's Group, at one point ran Peckham Black Women's Centre, 69 Bellenden Road SE15

Leaflet for a demonstration from Brockwell Park called by the Groce Family Support and Community Defence Campaign. Cherry Groce was shot and seriously injured by police during a raid on a house in Brixton in 1985, sparking off a riot.

'Defend the black community! fascists off the streets' - a leaflet mobilising for the anti-National Front demonstration in New Cross/Lewisham in August 1977, that became known as the Battle of Lewisham. Would like to see the back of this leaflet to see who produced it.

The exhibition includes issues of Rock Against Racism zine 'Temporary Hoarding', one of which features this picture of Adam and the Ants playing a RAR gig at Elephant and Castle'. This was at South Bank Poly (now Uni) on 17 June 1978.

Chain Reaction at the Market Tavern in Vauxhall, 1980s women only SM/fetish club 

 


Quite a few visitors delighted in spotting images of themselves or friends, or things they had been involved with and by the end I was doing the same with pictures from the Clause 28 demonstrations and copies of Shocking Pink zine which my friend Katy Watson was involved with and which was based for a while at the 121 Centre in Brixton.



The exhibition closes on 7 April 2024.

Flaneuse/'London as a man's city'

I recently read Laura Elkin's 'Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London' which explores the act of women's public presence on the streets as a subversive practice:

'It would be nice, ideal even, if we didn't have to subdivide by gender - male walkers, female walkers, flâneurs and flâneuses - but these narratives of walking repeatedly leave out a woman's experience... I like the built environment, I like cities. Not their limits, not the places where they become not-cities. Cities themselves. The heart of them. Their manifold quarters, sectors, corners. And it's the centre of cities where women have been empowered, by plunging into the heart of them, and walking where they're not meant to. Walking where other people (men) walk without eliciting comment. That is the transgressive act. You don't need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you're a woman. Just walk out your front door'.

Elkin, a New Yorker who has spent much time in Paris, lived in Brockley when she was working on the book and mentions some of her London haunts: 'I have walked everywhere, and come to know Peckham High Street and Highgate, Bethnal Green and Green Park, Holland Park and Honor Oak, the Isle of Dogs and Dulwich, Clerkenwell and Camberwell, Greenwich and Gravesend'.

I was reminded of this when browsing an old guide to London,  Clarence Winchester's 'Let's look at London: A Travelogue for the Short Time Visitor' (Cassell 1935) which asserts that London is not a place for women... and that seemingly this is a good thing! (yes Clarence is a man in case you were wondering):

'If an Englishman's home is his castle, a Londoner's home is his thrice-moated strong-hold, even though the front wall stands on the pavement and there is only a yard of grass at the back. Perhaps that is why London strikes us as a man's city... 

It is true that London is by no means short of women, but they are not predominantly noticeable unless you take a stroll along Regent Street and Oxford Street about tea-time. We do not notice women in London as we do in New York or in Paris, or in Nottingham even. There are the "castles" to be looked after, and it is the women's job to see to that, which is just as well if we consider- as we should- that the domesticated man is an anachronism and an offence against nature.

In no other city in the world are men so well provided for as in London. In no other city is there a Clubland that so adequately symbolizes masculinity'

Peckham Rye Women's Liberation & the 1970 Miss World Protest

50 years ago the 1970 Miss World pageant in London was famously disrupted by feminists opposed to it objectification of women. Anti-apartheid protestors also demonstrated against the inclusion of South Africa in the contest. The anniversary has been marked by both a BBC documentary ('Miss World 1970: Beauty Queens and Bedlam') and a fictionalised movie, 'Misbehaviour', starring Keira Knightley.

Both documentary and movie frame the event in a similar way, suggesting that despite being in different camps on the night both protesters and contestants were being swept up in the social changes of the period with for instance a black woman winning Miss World for the first time. The movie incidentally features many scenes filmed in the Rivoli Ballroom in Crofton Park, where the contestants are shown rehearsing for the big night.

Rhys Ifans as Eric Morley, filmed in Rivoli Ballroon in Misbehaviour (2020)

Clara Rosager as Marjorie Johansson (Miss Sweden) stomps out of the Rivoli

Both documentary and film credit the idea of demonstrating against Miss World to the Peckham Rye Women's Liberation Group, and in a number of articles promoting the movie Jan Williams and Hazel Twort from the Peckham group are named as the inspiration (e.g. Daily Mirror, 6 March 2020).

The Peckham Rye group seemed to have been formed in 1969. In London Women's Liberation Workshop newsletter Issue 4 (August 1969) 'Janet Williams from the Peckham Rye group wrote an article about the formation of the group. Her account illustrates a growing feminist awareness many groups probably followed. The Peckham group grew out of a one o'clock club. At the first three meetings, some of their husbands attended and they largely discussed problems with childcare. At the fourth meeting Juliet Mitchell came to speak about women's oppression. After this the group decided to exclude men and change the focus of their discussions from child care to more general theorising about women's oppression' (this summary of the article comes from Kelly Coate, reference at bottom of this piece - I would be interesting in reading the whole article if anyone has it).

Several of the members decided to disrupt a public meeting at Goldsmiths College: 'It had been advertised as an open debate on revolutionary ideas, with the participation of left-wing underground personalities . . we stood up and demanded the meeting should hear us on, and then discuss, the oppression of women. We were booed loudly and asked to strip, told we needed a good fuck, etc. However, we went on to hold the 300 people in the hall to our subject for over an hour'. (Janet Williams, London Women's Liberation Workshop Newlsettter, no.4 , August 1969).  I believe this was the free festival at Goldsmiths organised by Malcolm McLaren and others in July 1969, discussed here previously, which featured R D Laing, Alexander Trocchi and other 'underground personalities;.

The Peckham Rye group were one of four London groups who rotated the editing/production of the women's liberation magazine Shrew, set up in 1969 (see Bazin, reference below).  The following year they were also involved with the first national women's liberation movement conference at Ruskin College in March 1970 where a  paper on 'Women and the Family' was written and presented by Ann Bechelli, Hazel Twort and Jan Williams from the Peckham Rye group

The first demonstration against Miss World was actually held outside the event in 1969, the following year they decided to up the ante and infiltrate the audience in order to disrupt more directly. In the aftermath Jan Williams was interviewed in The Observer (22 November 1970) and described as ‘30-year-old South London housewife Mrs Janet Williams’ who declared: ‘The protest had been planned for a number of weeks. As far as we are concerned it was a great success’.

According to Frankie Green at the interesting Women’s Liberation Music Archive 'in March 1972 women who’d met through Women’s Liberation and the Gay Liberation Front women’s group gathered at the council flat of Hazel Twort, a founder of WLM and the Peckham Rye WL group, and began the first feminist band to come out of the movement (to the best of my knowledge): the London Women’s Liberation Rock Band'. Twort played keyboards in the band. I believe she died in 1998.

Jan Williams died in 2010, her obituary in The Guardian is here.

References;

Victoria Bazin (2016) Miss-Represented? Mediating Miss World in Shrew Magazine, Women: A Cultural Review, 27:4, 412-431,

Kelly Coate, The history of women's studies as an academic subject area in higher education in the UK: 1970-1995.

SE London Women Against Rape - Lewisham demo, 1980

I found this browsing at the interesting digital archive of feminist magazine, Spare Rib. The July 1980 issues records a 300 strong march through Lewisham on May 10 1980, called by South East London Women Against Rape - a group set up 'by Lewisham women after some of them had become involved in helping a woman who had just been raped. They had been shocked not only by the rape but at the harsh and unsympathetic treatment the woman had receivd at the hands of police and doctors'. The group contacts were given as Gill Chambers and Linda Stewart at Deptford Women's Centre, 74 Deptford High Street, and feminist singer Frankie Armstrong was also mentioned as being involved. The photo shows placard reading 'Stop Crimes Against Women Now', sadly as relevant in 2017 as it was in 1980.

Festival of Choice Film Night in New Cross

The Festival of Choice is a week of events in London aiming 'to raise awareness of threats to reproductive rights and the plight of those in countries around the world who do not have access to safe and legal abortion. The Festival also wishes to celebrate solidarity and activism and to strengthen and support the pro-choice message, locally and globally'.

On Saturday 26th September, there's an evening of films and discussions at Goldsmiths in New Cross (in the Stuart Hall building from 6 pm). 'Their laws, our lives' will feature 'A quiet Inquisition', which 'follows a doctor in Nicaragua, a country where the draconian abortion does not allow abortion in any circumstance. After the screening, we will have the intervention of one of the directors of this documentary'. This will be followed by 'My Choice, the Freedom Train', a documentary that 'looks at the successful campaign by thousands of activists who stopped the reform that threatened to severely restrict the access to abortion in Spain in 2014'.