Brief Biographical Notes on Interviewees Adithi C.* was born into a middle-class family in Mangalore in 1953, before coming to take a degree in English at Newnham College, Cambridge, in her early twenties. She became politicised whilst a student and became involved in femi- nist campaigns, including Wages for Housework. She worked for a while in the Women’s Resource Centre in Cambridge in the 1980s. She has since moved onto working for a regional organisation that aims to provide help and support to ethnic minority populations. Bola C.* was born in the early 1950s into a middle-class Black family in Jamaica. She moved first to Canada and then to Cambridge in her twenties, in the 1970s. She became involved in both the Cambridge Black Women’s Group and in Labour Party politics in the 1980s, and worked for the council. She is an evangelical Christian, which informs her belief in social justice. Julie Callaghan was born into a white working-class family in Seaforth, just north of Liverpool, in 1959. She left school at sixteen and went to secretarial college before becoming involved in bookshop work. She joined a consciousness raising group in the late 1980s and thus became involved in feminism somewhat later than most of the other interviewees. She works at News From Nowhere,a radical bookshop in Liverpool. Gail Chester was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Bournemouth in 1951. She moved to London aged seven, and took a degree in Geography at Girton College, Cambridge, where she first became involved in the women’s movement. She moved back to London after graduating and worked initially in local govern- ment before making a career for herself in the radical book trade. She remains an active and committed feminist. Adele Cohen* was born in a Jewish family in Denmark in 1940. She escaped the holocaust as a baby before coming to England to study in the early 1960s. She eventually settled in Liverpool, trained as a psychotherapist, and was active in many left wing groups and the co-counselling movement. She moved to Israel for a few years in the late 1980s before returning to Merseyside. Bridget Cullen* was born into a lower middle-class white family in rural Ireland in 1943. She travelled around Europe in the 1960s before eventually settling in London with her Indian husband. She became involved in radical politics around both feminism and Ireland in the 1970s, and is a key member of the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. 202 Brief Biographical Notes on Interviewees 203 Stella Dadzie was born in London in 1952 to a white mother and a Ghanaian father. She grew up with her white mother in London, but visited her diplomat father in Ghana regularly. She took a degree in German at King’s College London in the early 1970s and became involved in radical Black politics at the same time. She was a founding member of OWAAD and co-authored The Heart of the Race. Yvonne Field was born in a Black family in Deptford, London in 1960. Her par- ents were recent migrants from Jamaica. She worked in youth and community work for many years, and was a colleague of Miriam Levy. She was involved in Black women’s groups in the 1980s, particularly in relation to her professional life, where she was a member of Aurat Obaa, a group of Black feminist youth workers based in London. She spent some time in Guyana in the late 1980s before returning to London and setting up her own diversity consultancy. Valerie Hall* was born into a white working-class family London in 1939. Despite attending a prestigious grammar school, she left school with no qualifications. She moved to the Wirral in the 1960s became involved in radical politics in the 1970s, joining the Communist Party and becoming involved in Women’s Libera- tion. She took a degree as a mature student in the 1970s and held various public sector jobs afterwards, and was also involved in the Black women’s health council in the city. She is now retired, but continues to enjoy success as a poet. Emma Hipkin* was born into a white non-conformist family in 1946 and grew up in Yorkshire, where her father was a minister. She attended university in the mid-1960s and became deeply involved in women’s liberation in the midlands in the 1970s. She has since become a prominent feminist academic, working on intersections of race and gender. Cathy Jones* was born into a Black family in Liverpool in the late 1950s. Upon facing systematic discrimination in the job market after leaving school, she helped to set up an employment agency for the Black population of the city. She then moved to London and became involved in Black feminist groups there, before moving to Houston in the late 1970s to study for a degree. She returned to Liverpool in 1981 and became involved once more in Black and feminist politics, eventually becoming chief executive of Blackburne House, a social enter- prise aimed at low paid or unemployed women to equip them with the skills to progress into employment in technical professions. Miriam Levy* was born into a Jewish family in London in 1949. She took a psychology degree and, after graduating, made a career for herself in youth work. During this period, she became a feminist, and subsequently became involved in feminist youth work for girls. She moved back to London in the mid-1980s where she became involved in Jewish feminism. In 1989 she gave up youth work to work full-time as a poet and writing workshop facilitator. Joy Njnje was born into a Black family in Jamaica in 1959 and moved to Peterborough in 1966. She left school at sixteen and has done a variety of public sector clerical jobs. She became involved in the Cambridge Black Women’s Group in the 1980s and was, for a while, the paid administrator for the group. Unlike 204 Brief Biographical Notes on Interviewees the rest of my sample, Joy was hesitant about labelling herself as feminist; but, like Bola, her Christian beliefs profoundly informed her sense of social justice. Shelley Spivak* was born into a working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1936. She won a scholarship to attend a prestigious college at 16, and eventually ended up teaching at a well-known women’s college in the late 1960s. She came to the UK in the early 1970s and became highly involved in radical separatist femi- nism. Her life took another turn in the mid-1980s when she became increasingly interested in religious Judaism, eventually becoming an ordained rabbi. Mandy Vere was born into a white middle-class Quaker family in Stockport in 1955. She came to Liverpool to study at the university in the early 1970s, but never finished her degree. She became involved in a number of radical causes in the city, and lived in a woman-only communal household for a number of years. She has worked in the city’s well-known radical bookshop, News From Nowhere (run by a feminist collective), since 1976. Notes Introduction ∗ Pseudonyms. 1. Throughout this book, I capitalise ‘Black’ in line with contemporaneous usage, with the capitalisation intending to highlight the political nature of ‘Blackness’ as an identity. Though there are certainly legitimate arguments to be made for capitalising ‘white’ to highlight how it is, too, a political con- struct, I have decided not to for this book as this was not common usage during the period this book is concerned with. 2. Sally Alexander, Interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 2012, C1420/45, Sisterhood and After, British Library, London, transcript p. 46. 3. Of course, this is a hugely simplified rendition of an infinitely complicated movement. Nevertheless, the dominant narrative does more or less follow these turns. See Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1790–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Femi- nism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981); and Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement 1914–1999, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) for examples. 4. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Christine Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned: Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women’s Movements, c. 1880s– 1970s (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London and New York: Verso, 1992). 5. See Part 4, ‘To Make the Facts Known’ in Ware, Beyond the Pale, pp. 167–224, for a discussion of Impey’s life and work; see Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant- Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 273–74 for a discussion of Marsden and empire. 6. Burton, Burdens of History,p.1. 7. Elizabeth Meehan, ‘British feminism from the 1960s to the 1980s’, in Harold L. Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990), pp. 189–204; Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, pp. 312–53. Harold Smith, ‘The Women’s Movement, Politics and Citizen- ship, 1960s–2000 in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (ed.), Women in Twentieth Century Britain (Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education, 2001), pp. 278–91. 0ne exception to this rule is the afterword of Barbara Caine’s English Fem- inism (pp. 255–71), which in addressing the movement in the 1970s, gives a complex and nuanced – if short – overview of the movement that takes into account race.