Multi-Racial Feminist Collectives in 1980S Britain

“Sisterhood is plain sailing?” Multi-racial feminist collectives in 1980s Britain Book or Report Section Accepted Version Thomlinson, N. (2017) “Sisterhood is plain sailing?” Multi- racial feminist collectives in 1980s Britain. In: Schulz, K. (ed.) The Women's Liberation Movement: Impacts and Outcomes. Berghahn. ISBN 9781785335860 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/69897/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Publisher: Berghahn All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online 1 Natalie Thomlinson “Sisterhood is Plain Sailing?” Multi-racial feminist collectives in 1980s Britain Introduction Race and ethnicity were difficult issues for second-wave British feminists. A feminist movement that was almost exclusively white was increasingly difficult to justify and sustain in a post- colonial Britain where ethnic minorities formed an ever-increasing proportion of the population. As such, as this chapter will demonstrate, white feminists in Britain were often accused of racism by their Black1 counterparts; and these debates over race and ethnicity grew ever more complex through the 1980s. An increasing level of interaction between Black and white women within the women’s movement resulted in these issues assuming a much greater importance within feminist discourse of this period. The early and mid 1980s saw a blossoming of Black feminism, mixed race collectives and renewed activism on the part of anti-racist feminists. This is not to say, however, that all white feminists responded to the critiques that were mounted of them; many reacted defensively, or simply ignored them. The legacy of these debates—and of identity politics more widely—is a highly contested one. Despite the complexity of the issues at hand, the crisis of the movement that resulted has often been portrayed simplistically as either the result of the racism of white feminists, or the misplaced radicalism of Black women.2 This chapter is an attempt to reconstruct these interactions and debates, coalitions and enmities, in a more subtle and nuanced fashion, allowing us to focus on points of engagement between Black and white feminists to a greater extent than has been allowed for in previous examinations, and 2 demonstrates that, despite tensions between Black and white feminists, the British women’s movement was nevertheless able to salvage something positive from these often bitter debates. In Britain, the beginnings of the movement commonly termed “second wave” feminism are often traced back to the first conference of the women’s liberation movement held at Ruskin College, Oxford in March 1970. This and subsequent conferences gave rise to the four demands of the British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), which were equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion, and free twenty four hour childcare. Three more demands were added over the course of the 1970s: these were an end to discrimination against lesbians, legal and financial independence for women, and for the right for women to be free from male violence, and the laws that perpetuated it.3 The orientation of the WLM in Britain was predominantly socialist, although over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, radical strains of feminism became increasingly prominent. Whatever their political orientation, however, almost all of these feminists were white, a situation which was increasingly critiqued by Black feminists from the late 1970s. Indeed, given how the central the issue of race was to become to the British women’s movement during the late 1970s and into the 1980s, extraordinarily little historical attention has been paid to it. Eve Setch, Jeska Rees and Sarah Browne have all written area studies of the movement within the UK, concentrating respectively on London, Leeds, and Scotland, but their predominant focus has been either implicitly or explicitly on the debates between (white) radical and socialist feminists within the movement.4 These debates are undoubtedly important, and it would be futile to attempt to understand the British feminist milieu at this time without reference to this. However, the foregrounding of this issue has had the unfortunate effect of minimizing attention to other categories of difference in the movement, such as age, class, and most pertinently in terms of this chapter, race. Yet race is central to 3 understanding the form and trajectory of the feminist movement within Britain during these years. As this chapter will demonstrate, the challenges presented to white feminists by Black women created a more racially diverse/aware feminism. Yet differences of political orientation between Black and white feminists, and the structurally embedded nature of racial inequality in the UK, ensured that racially based divisions between feminists in Britain could not be entirely overcome. The Black feminist critique Black women’s autonomous activism in Britain dates back to the early 1970s, with prominent groups such as Brixton Black Women’s Group being formed in 1973, and the founding of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) occurring in 1978.5 However, it was the early 1980s that witnessed the most significant growth in Black women’s autonomous organising in Britain,6 a growth given impetus by the funding given to such groups by leftist local authorities (particularly the Greater London Council) in the early 1980s. This growth of the Black women’s movement led to a greater interaction between Black and white feminists, and indeed the growth of a Black feminist critique of white feminism in this period was in itself a product of this greater interaction. Despite the presence of white feminist anti-racist groups in Britain during the 1970s, such activism engendered little comment from Black women’s groups.7 The increasingly vehement criticisms of white feminists that were produced during the 1980s were, rather, the product of a greater shift towards feminism on behalf of Black activists. Such tensions were the product of Black and white feminists attempting to find a modus operandi for 4 working together: they had been less present in the 1970s precisely because there was much less contact between the two. The prime contention of the Black feminist critique in Britain—as in the US—was that white British feminists had little concept of the ways in which racism profoundly structured their lives as Black women. Furthermore, they contended, this ignorance was compounded by the white domination of most feminist groups, which created an environment in which Black women’s concerns were silenced. Indeed, these concerns around “being heard” within the women’s movement often attracted as much attention as the substance of the debates themselves. One prominent British Black feminist, Stella Dadzie, suggested during an interview that: I think there was arrogance in the sense that there was no deference to Black women’s experience or a sense that they might have something to contribute . an arrogance that was represented in a lack of a presence, you know, there was no attempt to get us involved, or to ask how we felt, or to bring our perspectives to the table.8 Essentially, Black British feminists argued that, if liberation was to be achieved for all women, then all facets of women’s oppressionincluding race and class, as well as sexhad to be taken into account. Crucially, British Black feminists argued that white feminists failed to do this, and that many of the analytic categories so long clung to by white feminists could not translate on to the realities of Black women’s lives. These criticisms were often scathing, and given space in the increasing numbers of Black women’s periodicals that were published in the 1980s. Typically, the London-based Black feminist newsletter We are Here published an article in 1985 claiming that: 5 The WLM is racist because it does not take seriously the experiences of non-white women. The WLM does not accept that third world women are subsidising WLM the world over, that third world women have made significant contributions to all progressive movements during colonial and pre-colonial times and that a huge amount of oral literature existed for centuries in non-white societies about women. White women do not need to teach us how to protest!9 Such views were reflected in the now–iconic “Many Voices, One Chant” edition of Feminist Review in October 1984. As Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar wrote in their featured article “Challenging Imperial Feminism”, “white, mainstream feminist theory, be it from the socialist feminist or radical feminist perspective, does not speak to the experiences of Black women and where it attempts to do so it is often from a racist perspective and reasoning.”10 They then went on to discuss critically issues such as the family, sexuality and the feminist peace movement, their conclusion being that: For us the way forward lies in defining a feminism which is significantly different to the dominant trends in the women’s liberation movement...True feminist theory and practice entails an understanding of imperialism and a critical engagement with challenging racismelements which the current women’s movement significantly lacks, but which are intrinsic to Black feminism.11 What for exampleas Amos and Parmar arguedwas the use of campaigning for better access to abortion when, as many Black feminists claimed, some Black women in Britain were being forcibly sterilized?12 It was for such reasons that Black feminists came to critique white feminists 6 as “racist”.

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