Red Rag -- Introduction

Introducing Red Rag During preparations for this digitised version of Red Rag – a marxist-feminist journal which first appeared almost half a century ago – two questions kept coming to mind: who would benefit from having such an accessible version and what resonance, if any, does the thinking and narrative it carries have with the current political and cultural crisis? This new resource should be useful to all students of the 1970s women’s liberation movement, of the diverse feminisms which emerged from and around it, of the history of the British left more generally, and of the social changes which preceded and informed the Thatcher years. It should also remind those who were involved in the movement of some of the debates, discussions and conflicts, enthusiasms and pleasures which animated friendships, groupings and conferences and changed many private lives. It was within this impassioned discourse that concepts which are now taken for granted were formed and terms like sexism and patriarchy acquired their meaning. Red Rag’s continuing relevance became clearer as a result of the 2020 lockdown, which revealed for all to see our national reliance on the least regarded, often invisible, sections of the population – the low-wage, ‘unskilled’, multicultural workforce – to provide the foundations of social cohesion and resilience in the face of a life threatening and frightening disease. In some sectors, like cleaning, caring, and nursing, the overwhelming majority of workers are women. It was to these working women that Red Rag drew attention, foregrounding the experiences of nurses, nightcleaners, assembly line workers and others in articles and interviews. The lockdown has also drawn the curtain back on the modern family to reveal a startling and relatively unchanged picture of the domestic division of labour, with mothers still taking more responsibility for childcare and domestic labour than fathers, and women, especially mothers, more likely to lose their jobs. Red Rag (and the women’s movement as a whole) laid bare the consequences of marital inequality and the grotesque injustices it allowed, including marital rape (legal until the 1990s) amongst other forms of domestic abuse. There has been an alarming growth in domestic abuse during lockdown -- home is not yet a safe space for all women – as well as a diminution in the provision of women’s refuges (pioneered by women’s 1 liberation in the 70s) due to reduced funding over the previous ten years. Given that there is no guarantee that sustainable funding will be restored to childcare or to wider social care in the succeeding months and that at the same time unemployment is rising, there is a genuine risk that women’s capacity to work outside the home is being eroded and that a rowback on women’s employment rights will ensue. To cap it all we saw in daily UK government briefings on the progress of the virus that the public faces of politics and science are once more overwhelmingly male and white, just as they were in the 1970s. My purpose in providing this introduction is to give a guided tour of some of the material that can be found in Red Rag and to indicate the context which fashioned their relevance rather than to give the pros and cons of any debate. My membership of the collective has undoubtedly affected the narrative I’ve constructed but I’ve also been able to call on other members and use both the existing archives and private papers. There are many treasures to be found here: Denise Riley writing in RR9 about single mothers, their housing needs and the women’s movement is one example, Elizabeth Wilson’s essay on Fassbinder’s Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant ( RR10) another.i To celebrate International Women’s Year in 1975 there was a stimulating cluster of reports from abroad in Red Rag9. There are also surprising absences – for example there was no extensive treatment of how the Irish ‘troubles’ were affecting women, in the UK and in Northern Ireland. Origins Red Rag was launched in 1972, just two years after the successful Ruskin Conference at Oxford announced the arrival of the British women’s liberation movement. The ground for Oxford had been prepared in the 60s by a very lively pre- movement as women in all parts of the country became aware of and increasingly angered by their unequal status and limited horizons. They talked about it, took action, and organised meetings; groups were formed in Hull, London, Manchester, Bradford and Bristol. By bringing women together at the right time Ruskin 1970 proved a turning point. A tidal swell followed as multiple new small women’s groups were formed: some were local consciousness-raising groups where women used their personal experience to pinpoint the behaviours and attitudes that bolstered women’s subordination; some were project based, aimed at creating resources for women and 2 their dependents (playgroups for example); some were study groups; many were a combination. The disruption of the broadcast of the Miss World spectacle in November 1970 and the first women’s liberation march in London on International Women’s Day in March 1971 further captured the public imagination, sparking nation-wide argument and debates in all the national media. Crucially, women’s groups were small, encouraging spontaneity, diversity and transparency. There was no leadership structure or other internal hierarchy. Members came together as part of a participatory democracy – decisions were made by those who turned up. The London Women’s Liberation Workshop, from which about half the members of the Red Rag collective were drawn, was one such loose network. Its organising principles were a variant of the self-organising and self-educating politics of 1968: week-to-week decisions were made by volunteers and policy questions were argued out in general assemblies. No political position was given formal priority – all were welcome. At the same time, women who had been politically active in the peace movement or student movement fleshed out in their women’s groups a practical criticism of the difficulties of working in groups run by men. They challenged traditional ‘male’ forms of political work, not just because they were ‘male’ but because they didn’t work for women’s groups. For example, women’s groups met in their member’s homes rather than in the pubs where male left groups met. Many pubs were hostile environments for women. Moreover to hire a room cost money and to meet in each other’s homes saved the additional cost of babysitters. Men were excluded from meetings because of their tendency to dominate discussion and to favour analysis over experience. In fact the ‘male left’ (to use a 70s phrase) tended to condemn women’s focus on experience rather than agreed theoretical positions as ‘subjective’ rather than ‘objective’ and mocked it as a search for psychological comfort rather than an way of exploring external reality. However the women who met together generally agreed that felt experience provided a pathway through which they connected with external reality. They could agree that women were economically and socially oppressed, deliberately undereducated, and objects of sexual and cultural exploitation; their aim was to understand how this happened and how a sense of inferiority was cultivated within each woman. This, they thought, would allow new insights into the sexist structures which held the process in place. 3 The realisation that the personal was political meant that the most intimate experiences could be harnessed to illuminate sexual politics. The new movement struck a chord with many women who were still active within established political groups and parties. Having fruitlessly tried for years to start discussions of women’s rights within their organisations, they could see the gap in their everyday politics, but found no agreed space for a reappraisal of women’s needs. Women’s ‘issues’ were deemed irrevocably secondary, women’s role supportive and subaltern. Florence Keyworth, a journalist with the Daily Worker since 1946, recorded her feelings in the first issue of Red Rag: ‘I have been in the movement for over 30 years and I suppose I had lost hope that sex equality would become a burning force in my lifetime. I feel a sense of gratitude to the young women who have achieved this renaissance’. Some left groups saw weakness and naivety in the women’s movement’s elementary coordinating structures and targeted it for takeover by ‘front’ organisations. At the national women’s liberation conference in Skegness in 1971 angry confrontations led to the expulsion from the auditorium of a Maoist group one of whose male leaders was attempting to control the microphone. As a result it was decided that in future men were to be excluded from all women’s liberation conferences. The experience left some with a lasting mistrust of the women who continued to belong to political groupings led and dominated by men. These various political currents and undercurrents swirled round and through Red Rag. Its collectives were shaped by them. The women involved thought of themselves as part of the Left as well as of the women’s movement but gave a different weight to each. The dynamic this created and the conflicts it charted meshed with the difficulties and the culture wars which sprang up within the wider movement. This was both a reason for Red Rag’s success and a reason for its eventual demise. The magazine was started by women members of the Communist Party (CP), in the main journalists working on party publications – Mikki Doyle, Florence Keyworth and Bea (Beatrix) Campbell from the daily Morning Star and Gladys Brooks from the fortnightly Comment.

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