A Movement Moves . . . Is There a Women's Movement in England

06 knash (jk/d) 11/7/02 1:45 pm Page 311 A Movement Moves . Is There a Women’s Movement in England Today? Kate Nash GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ABSTRACT There is a diversity of views among feminists who have been debating whether or not a women’s movement exists in Britain today. In part this is due to the lack of a clear working definition of social movement. This article uses social movement theory to discuss the ambiguous signs that are taken to indicate either the movement’s continuing existence or its disappearance: the growth of mainstream political organizations; a focus on ‘women’ in cultural production; the ‘micro-politics’ of everyday life (often enacted in the terms of ‘I’m not a feminist but . .’). The article looks at the history of second-wave feminism in England using the two main schools of social movement theory: the ‘contentious politics’ model focusing on organizations and formal political structures; and the ‘submerged networks’ theory that takes solidarity, conflict and challenging dominant cultural codes to be central to social movements. KEY WORDS challenging codes N feminism N identity N micro-politics N political opportunities N social movement theory N solidarity N submerged networks N women’s movement The women’s movement is invariably listed among the new social movements that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. However, in Britain, in contrast to the US, it has rarely been studied as such using social movement theory. The women’s movement has mainly been written about by feminists as ‘movement intellectuals’, who, assuming a broadly feminist audience, put forward a view of the movement that is intended to shape it in some way, to make it more effective (Eyerman and Jamieson, 1991). In recent times debate over the movement has taken a somewhat different turn. Feminists have been debating whether or not a women’s movement still exists, whether it should be revived or not and what form it should take. However, without clear working definitions of what the women’s movement might be, there is immense scope for confusion and misunderstanding. To what The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 9(3): 311–328 [1350-5068(200208)9:3;311–328;026377] 06 knash (jk/d) 11/7/02 1:45 pm Page 312 312 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 9(3) extent are feminist conclusions concerning the continuing existence of the women’s movement shaped by implicit definitions of ‘social movement’? This article sets out to elucidate possible models of the feminist movement, using social movement theory, in order to contribute to this debate.1 SIGNS OF A MOVEMENT? A recent comprehensive statement of the view that the women’s movement no longer exists in Britain, written for both an academic and a popular audience, is that of Lynne Segal in Why Feminism? Though she does not define ‘social movement’, she confidently states that the women’s movement ‘grew rapidly as a mass movement [from the late 1960s], peaking in the mid-1970s before dissolving as a coherent organiz- ation by the end of that decade’ (Segal, 1999: 9). A directly contrary view is that of Rosalind Coward in Sacred Cows. Like Segal, Coward is also a veteran of the 1970s women’s movement and writes for an audience beyond the academy. She takes the view that feminism is extremely powerful in political and social institutions but that there is no longer a women’s movement as such (Coward, 1999). However, she goes further in arguing that there is no need for a women’s movement today. As Coward sees it, feminism is a movement against the power of men over women and in today’s much more ‘uneven and heterogeneous’ society, where it is not clear that women share a position of disadvantage as such, the premise on which it achieved so much is no longer valid. Yet another position is argued by Natasha Walter, a journalist and broadcaster of a younger generation, who agrees with Coward that feminism has grown more powerful and that much has changed but who argues that nevertheless ‘something that looks very like a women’s movement does still exist in Britain [and rightly so]. It is not a mass movement . but a large collection of single-issue organizations that press for feminist aims in many different accents’ (Walter, 1998: 44). How is such a divergence of views possible? Clearly there are ideo- logical differences here, even though all these writers would position themselves on the Left. The disagreements are also facilitated by the fact that there are signs of activity that lend themselves to such very different interpretations. These activities have enough in common with the aims and strategies of early second-wave feminism to suggest a possible continuation of the movement in a modified but more mainstream form; they might be taken as indications of its success; or they might be seen as evidence of its cooption and dissolution into mainstream politics and social life (Epstein and Steinberg, 2000). It is even possible to interpret such activities as indicating the mutation of the women’s movement into something hostile to the aims of feminism. This is the argument that 06 knash (jk/d) 11/7/02 1:45 pm Page 313 Nash: A Movement Moves . Is There a Women’s Movement? 313 Coward makes in Sacred Cows, putting forward the case that the movement has resulted in the demonization of working-class men and that the celebration of the feminine today has more in common with notions of the ‘eternal’ battle of the sexes than with justice for women (Coward, 1999). This article explores the question of whether these activities add up to a social movement or not, using social movement theory to clarify the terms of the debate. One of the most important signs of a women’s movement in England today is the growth of feminist involvement in mainstream political organizations. This growth is well documented (Lovenduski and Randall, 1993: Ch. 5; see also Gelb and Hart, 1999; Lovenduski, 1996). The most obvious is the Labour Party, which introduced women-only short-lists for ‘winnable’ seats in 1990 (though these were later found illegal under sex discrimination law) and set up the Women’s Unit, a special committee to influence policy, when it came to power in 1997. There are also a number of women’s organizations and feminists in voluntary sector organizations that lobby at the national and European level, while women’s groups at the local level have generally gained in strength. Although women are still marginal to the political process, many of the issues that second-wave feminists put on the political agenda are now mainstream. There are, for example, publicly funded campaigns against domestic violence, the difficulties of reconciling childcare and paid work are at least recognized by the major political parties and ‘masculine’ work cultures are under attack in legal cases against sexual harassment. This is not to say that there is always the political will to carry out reform, especially where proposals come into conflict with business interests. Nevertheless, many issues that were practically unheard of in the 1960s and were controversial in the 1970s are now the common currency of political life. The difficulty in interpreting these activities as signs of the continuing existence and relevance of the women’s movement is that they might equally be taken as an indication of cooption into mainstream politics and a neutralization of the radical demands of the women’s movement. From this point of view it is not coincidental that the difficulties of reforming the public/private distinction, the theme that runs through all the activities of second-wave feminism, are proving intractable; what is needed is revol- ution that can only come from outside the existing political system. In the realm of cultural production, there are also activities that might or might not be taken as indicative of the continuing existence and relevance of the women’s movement. Ideas have always been very important to feminism, and there has undoubtedly been a growth in the production and distribution of feminist ideas in education, not just in women’s studies but also across arts and humanities degrees that now often include units on gender where feminist theory is the dominant paradigm. Again, however, this is ambiguous as an indicator of the 06 knash (jk/d) 11/7/02 1:45 pm Page 314 314 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 9(3) continued existence of the women’s movement. On the one hand, it means that a large proportion of students are exposed to questions about issues that have direct relevance to their own lives; in this respect, academic feminism contributes to something like consciousness-raising. On the other hand, this is taking place in the hierarchical and assessment- oriented context of education rather than in informal groups. Further- more, it is a commonly heard argument that feminist theory is now so difficult and obscure that it contributes more to the elitism of university education than it does to political education. Outside the academy, it would seem that popular feminist publishing has declined: Spare Rib – a journal explicitly set up to unite the movement nationally – no longer exists and explicitly feminist titles are less popular than in the 1970s (Segal, 1999: 3). While there are probably more popular works by and about women in the 1990s than ever before, it would be stretching a point to see these as feminist given the ambiguous status of feminist ideas and values in popular culture.

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