Beyond the Boundaries: Feminist Influence in Council Housing Estates
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Beyond the Boundaries: feminist influence in council housing estates in the 1980s. A northern English case study. Jo Somerset, June 2016 Birkbeck College Graduate Certificate in History Beyond the Boundaries 2 Beyond the Boundaries Chapter 1: Introduction Page 4 Chapter 2: Feminism in the changing local authority 7 Chapter 3: Changing the practice of youth work 12 Chapter 4: Collusion and collision: class and feminism 17 Chapter 5: Connection with the women’s liberation movement 22 Chapter 6: Conclusion 28 Appendix 1 Interviews and conversations 31 Appendix 2 Wigan women youth workers 1979-94 and other relevant people 33 Appendix 3 Staffing structure 38 Bibliography 39 Figures and tables Figure 1: Estates in greatest need Figure 2: Estate-based young women’s centres in Wigan 1984-93 Figure 3: 489 jobs axed, Wigan Post and Chronicle, 14.1.93 Figure 4: Women Youth Workers’ annual reports Figure 5: Hag Fold Young Women's Centre weekly programme 1989 Figure 6: The Process of Youth Work 3 Beyond the Boundaries Chapter 1: Introduction During the 1980s, women youth workers in Wigan changed their male-orientated profession, which marginalised young women, and passed on their feminist beliefs to young women in Wigan’s council estates. This study explores how these women used public sector resources to transmit the feminist message deep into a working-class community, beyond the reach of mainstream feminism at that time. This research is rooted within social history, giving voice to ‘ordinary people’. Using micro-history techniques to zoom in on certain people in one town sheds light on the influence of a social movement on wider society, suggesting important inferences about how gender history interprets late twentieth century Britain.1 METHODOLOGY Methods Feminism underpins both theme and methodology. Feminist scholars such as Joan Sangster, Joanna Bornat, Hanna Diamond and Jeska Rees alerted me to the pitfalls of oral history: unreliable memory, unresolved conflicts and partial views of events from live subjects.2 Consulting various primary sources - youth workers’ reports, council minutes, newspaper cuttings and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate for Education (HMI) reports - at Wigan Local Studies Centre, the Feminist Webs archive (Manchester Metropolitan University) and the National Archives, I gained an overview of Wigan Council and the local economy. I created a timeline and ‘cast of characters’ in the Wigan youth work story, thus enabling cross-referencing and verification of differences of memory or perspective during 1 For a discussion of how women’s history developed into gender history, see Laura Lee Downs Writing Gender History (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 2 Joan Sangster, ‘Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History’ in The Oral History Reader. (London, Routledge, 1998) pp. 87-100; Joanna Bornat and Hanna Diamond, ‘Women’s History and Oral History’ Women’s History Review, 16, no.1 (2007) pp. 19-39; Jeska Rees, ‘”Are You a Lesbian?” Challenges in Recording and Analysing the Women’s Liberation Movement in England.’ History Workshop Journal, 69, no.1 (2010) pp. 177-187. 4 Beyond the Boundaries subsequent interviews. Preliminary conversations before formal interviews allowed me to broach areas of painful emotion, and establish which were too sensitive for audio-recording. Ensuring I adhered to Birkbeck College Ethical Guidelines on consent and confidentiality, I interviewed six women ex-youth workers (four full-time and two part-time), and held conversations with six others, including a male ex-youth worker, HMI inspector and a youth work academic.3 All twelve are named and consent was given to store the recorded interviews at the Feminist Webs archive. Inevitably, there were significant figures whom I did not interview. The interviews were analysed for conscious and unconscious feminist actions, the influence of class and region, and the impact of higher education. Utilising archive material, living subjects and the literature about feminism I established what made Wigan’s experience noteworthy. The women’s voices from interviews and contemporaneous reports provide the main evidence, supported by documents which verify or contextualise facts. As the interview sample is small, this study is presented as a case study illustrating important dynamics about the 1980s feminist movement’s limitations and how it extended beyond widely-assumed boundaries. Historiography The historiography of feminism’s ‘second wave’ falls into two categories either side of the year 2000. Authors in the 1980s-90s aimed to galvanise other feminists, while later scholars were more detached due to the distance of time. Feminism has influenced numerous disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, politics and psychology. In the 1980s, feminist historians analysed how the women’s movement had developed since 1970. Sheila Rowbotham, Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell espoused socialist feminism’s dual focus on inequality in the means of production and reproduction.4 The contrasting radical feminist viewpoint highlighted patriarchy rather than capitalism as the oppressor, 3 See Appendix 1: List of interviews. 4 Sheila Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas (London: Virago,1983) and The Past is Before Us (London: Pandora, 1989), Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom, (London: Pan, 1987). 5 Beyond the Boundaries adopting an increasingly separatist lesbian position, often theorising from personal experience.5 The psycho-sociologist Lynne Segal straddled activist and academic positions in the 1980s and 1990s.6 Magazines supporting a particular perspective stimulated debate, while academic journals fed theoretical thinking.7 Feminist analysis of youth work produced a major textbook for students, whose author was consulted for this dissertation.8 After 2000, scholars,9 including men, who were too young to have been involved in the earlier surge of activism offered a more impartial analysis but tended to overlook ‘ordinary feminists’, whom Barbara Caine categorised as women excluded from the ‘official history’.10 The impact of the women’s liberation movement on wider society has been scantily chronicled. This contribution explores how feminist principles were disseminated in a post- industrial town through the vehicle of youth work, giving a Northern English working class flavour to the women’s movement of the ‘long decade’ from 1979-94, and augmenting the few studies about use of state resources to achieve feminist ends. It spans a period during which the newly-elected Conservative government championed private enterprise over social welfare, resulting in job losses and factory closures. In response, the northern Labour municipal stronghold targeted initiatives in the neediest areas. Wigan appointed several women youth workers to work on the poorest housing estates, joining a male-dominated professional workforce.11 State power and feminism thus converged to counter negative economic effects on the borough’s population. 5 For example: Amanda Sebestyen, ed. 68, '78, '88: From Women's Liberation to Feminism. (London: Ultra Violet, 1988). 6 Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? (London: Virago, 1987) and Why Feminism? (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). 7 Spare Rib was the monthly news organ of the movement; Red Rag represented socialist feminism; Women’s Report and Trouble and Strife represented radical feminism. Feminist Review, Women’s Studies and Signs are academic journals. 8 Janet Batsleer, Youth Working with Girls and Young Women in Community Settings (2nd ed. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 9 For example, Sarah Browne The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), Estelle Freedman No Turning Back (New York: Ballantine, 2007), Finn Mackay, ‘Radical Feminism’. Theory, Culture and Society 32:no.7–8 (2015): pp.332–36. 10 Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780-1980 (Oxford: OUP 1997) p.263. 11 In 1973, 16 per cent of qualified youth workers registered with the Department for Education and Science, were female. Source: National Youth Bureau, Youth Service 14:6 (January 1975) p. 16. 6 Beyond the Boundaries Chapter 2: Feminism in the changing local authority Britain’s 1974 local government reorganisation created Wigan Metropolitan Borough (population 307,721),12 despite allegiances being to people’s home town (Wigan, Leigh, or one of the fifteen smaller townships) rather than the artificial Greater Manchester. They were Lancashire folk, not Greater Manchester people. The borough’s new council inherited a cohort of youth workers from Lancashire County Council, transforming the minimal youth provision in Wigan to the status of a council service. The Marxist youth workers advocated addressing poverty and inequality on estates, concurring with the government’s policy favouring community development rather than youth clubs.13 In July 1979, the council recruited a second ‘detached’ youth worker for the Platt Bridge estates, to break out of the ‘club-based straitjacket’.14 The subsequent appointment of Julie Hart swelled the full-time female youth worker workforce to two.15 By 1988, over half were women. Simultaneously, growing feminist awareness of how the education system short-changed girls permeated Wigan Youth Service (part of the Education Department).16 Between 1980 and 1985, a group of women youth workers, full-time and part-time, driven by a burgeoning awareness of injustice to women transformed the feminist toehold in Wigan into a stronghold. In 1986, the praise for girls’ work contained in