Negotiations of feminist identity and social relations at a London Women's Centre by Hermione Gray Fleming A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London 1 ProQuest Number: 10610982 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10610982 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 ABSTRACT This thesis provides an ethnographic account of a Women's Centre in North London and focuses upon the negotiation of a distinctive feminist community of identity at the Centre, in the context of the women's movement. This account takes issue with the usual classification of Women's Centres as one instance of a range of local manifestations of the women's movement and its implication that their organisation and structure can be inferred from an analysis of the movement. The thesis is organised in two parts. In the first part, the first chapter addresses methodological issues and argues that the thesis presents material which is not available from the sociology or history of the movement. The following three chapters consist of an analysis of feminism and the women's movement as the context of the Women's Centre- They examine its discursive, social and political dimensions, the different relations of its participants with the political cultures and social groups from which the movement emerged, and the forms and means of communication which structure its different dimensions. Contrary to the commonly held view that the small group is the basic unit of the movement, it is argued that the movement is organized on the basis of social networks. The second part of the thesis examines the feminist positions and social relations at the Women's Centre in terms of hierarchies of identity and difference. These hierarchies are demonstrated by the analysis of the spatial organization of the Centre and the social positions and life-stories of women using the Centre. The negotiation of identity is pursued in the final chapter in an examination of instrumental negotiations between the Centre and the local government. It is argued that the mobilisation of a distinctive community of identity at the Centre is achieved through the activation of cross-boundary social networks which extend across the social field of the women's movement and beyond it. The relatively permeable nature of the symbolic boundary of the Women's Centre permits both cross-boundary networks and strategic exclusions which function to accommodate different feminist positions. This accommodation of difference is contrasted with the fragmentation of the movement at a national level. 2 Contents Page ABSTRACT 2 INTRODUCTION 6 1. Methodological Issues and Theoretical Frameworks 28 1.1 Questions of ethnography; methods of enquiry and writing practices 31 1. 2 Anthropology at home 38 1.3 The status of texts 40 1.4 Gender, structure and agency 44 1.5 Research issues: the (re-)formulation of the research project, research methods and 'points of view' 47 2. The Woman's Centre, the Women's Movement and the Feminist Formation 59 2.1 Introduction to the Centre. An overview of its location, history and organization 60 2.2 Feminism and the women's movement; questions of identity and difference 78 2.2.1 Feminism as a discursive formation 83 2.2.2 The women's movement 101 2.2.3 'The Women's Movement with capitals' 118 2.3 The Women's Centre as a distinctive feminist community of identification within the women's movement 123 3. The Women's Movement as the Context of the Woman's Centre: A Historical Perspective 136 3.1 The emergence of the contemporary feminist formation and the women's movement as a gender-specific generational entelechy 139 3.2 Social locations and the formation of feminist consciousness 144 3 Page 3.3 Divisions within the women's movement, the tensions between the movement and its field of emergence, and the topography of feminism 157 3.4 The accommodation of difference at the Women's Centre 173 4. Women's Routes to the Centre and the Meanings of the Centre 179 4.1 Groups and individuals at the Centre, their routes to the Centre and the relations between them 182 4.1.1 The socialist feminist group 183 4.1.2 The Women's Therapy group 191 4.1.3 Occasional Centre users 199 4.2 Marriage, motherhood and the negotiation of feminist identities 201 5. Communication Networks, the Women's Movement and the Women's Centre 216 5.1 Communication networks and models of communication 218 5.2 Print language, speech communities and markers of feminism at the Women's Centre 235 6. Spatial Organization and Social Organization at the Women's Centre 249 6.1 The analysis of gender and space and the gender organization of the public and the private 252 6.2 Locality and identity 266 6.3 The Women's Centre and the local community 280 6.4 The organization of space at the Women's Centre 286 4 Page 7. The Women/s Centre and the Local Authority: Negotiations and Identity 322 7.1 Definitions of the new social movements and their expressive and instrumental dimensions 323 7.2 Negotiations for resources and the re-negotiation of identity at the Women's Centre 330 7.3 The re-negotiation of feminist identity and difference in terms of oral style 338 7.4 Relations of exchange and power in negotiations with local government 349 8. Conclusion 364 Bibliography 369 5 INTRODUCTION The thesis is based on fieldwork carried out during 1977 and 1978 at a Women's Centre at Riley House in the London Borough of Camden. The Women's Centre was used by a variety of groups and the thesis aims to analyse the different relations and practices which characterised the social world of the Women's Centre and constituted a specific community of identification. The Women's Centre is generally referred to throughout the thesis as the Centre. Analysis focuses upon the processes of inclusion and exclusion through which the Centre identity was constructed from the diverse practices, projects and social relations of women participating in the different groups which comprised the Centre. These groups were constantly in process with changing social composition, varying objectives and focuses of interest. The framing of the Women's Centre as an object of study involves situating it in relation to both feminism and the women's movement and to the local community, which is defined in terms of local government and the organization of social reproduction. The Centre was established by women whose association with each other derived from, or was marked by, their involvement with the women's liberation movement, the specific form in which 'second wave feminism' emerged in Britain in the late nineteen sixties and which was formally established in 1970 (Wandor, 1972? Sebasteyn, 1979; Coote and Campbell, 1982; 6 Rowland, 1983; Wilson, 1984; Delmar, 1986). Making sense of the Centre in terms of the meanings assigned to it and derived from it by the women using the Centre therefore involves an analysis of the women's liberation movement and the more diffuse women's movement which succeeded and subsumed it. Women's Centres have been classified and discussed as 'manifestations of the women's movement' in an unproblematic way (Dalerup, 1986, p. 29). In fact there is very little literature on their internal organization and social composition, particularly before the advent of 'municipal socialism' and the introduction of women's committees into local government in the nineteen eighties (Perrigo, 1986; Tobin, 1990). References to participation in Women's Centres and indeed to 'organising a Women's Centre' (Fell, 1984) abound in feminist literature but there is a notable lack of description and analysis. In the first person testimonies of women's participation in the women's movement which constitute a significant proportion of feminist literature, Women's Centres feature only as a context of particular group meetings or events. The internal organisation of Women's Centres is not addressed as an object of study in histories of contemporary feminism or the women's movement, either: rather these focus upon the structure and processes of the small group (Coote and Campbell, 1982; Bassnett 1986; Dalerup, 1986; Delmar, 1986; Rowbotham, 1989). The relations between Women's Centres 7 and the women's movement are, therefore, not documented or analysed. The thesis investigates the relations obscured by the interpretation of Women's Centres as unproblematic 'manifestations' of the movement. While the Centre cannot be regarded as manifestation of a unitary women's movement and still less as an exemplar or microcosm of it, the social relations, cultural practices and informal power structure at the Centre were derived from the organisational forms, social networks and discourses of feminism and the women's movement which were selectively appropriated and continually re-worked at the Centre. These appropriations and transformations underpin the construction of a distinctive feminist community. For this reason, the Centre has to be analysed in the context of feminism and the women's movement, and the discussion of feminist discourses and practices moves from the general to the particular.