Feminism Regendering the Left

Feminism

Regendering the Left

in early 1969, women organized a session on womens liberation during a revolution- ary festival at Essex University. The occasion was tense. Men, as well as women, were pres- ent and responded by dismissing the issues.

At various times it seemed as if the meeting would go over the edge and end in acrimony and ridicule:

For a moment the womens resentment focused on a man whod made a speech about political priorities. He said very self-importantly that in a revolutionary movement you couldnt waste time on trivia, and the fact was that women sim- ply werent capable of writing leaflets. In the smaller meeting we held later a girl

[sic] hissed venomously through her teeth, I always change his fucking leaf- lets when I type them anyway.¹

Such stories fill womens accounts of 1968. If young women were clearly present in dem- onstrations and sit-ins, marching in CND and opposing the Algerian War, they were decid- edly not on the podium. In 1968, girlfriends and wives were present with their men. They made the coffee and prepared the food, wrote the minutes and kept the books. They handled the practical tasks, while decision-making, strategizing and taking the limelight stayed with the men. Flagrantly contradicting the antihierarchical and participatory ideals of the

1968 movements, this taken-for-granted status soon led to anger: We really have to battle to have a turn to speak, one French woman militant complained, but when

weve finished, we might as well not have bothered, they havent even been listening.²

Sometimes there were public clashes, most notoriously at the Frankfurt

Congress of the West German student movement SDS on 13 September

1968. Fed up with the male-sidedness of the West German movements taboo-busting sex radicalism, a West Berlin Womens Liberation Action Council began advocating radical childcare arrangements (Kinderladen, or storefront daycare centers) to begin democratizing relations between women and men. At the SDS Congress, Helke Sander now demanded at- tention to the specific problems women face, so that problems previ- ously hidden in the private sphere could become the focus for womens political solidarity and struggle. She then challenged SDS leaders to ac- knowledge their own alienation. The links between the strain of continuous public militancy and private unhappiness had to be addressed: Why do you talk about the class struggle here and about the problem of having orgasms at home? Isnt the latter worthy of discussion by SDS?³

The all-male podium responded with ribald belittlement, whereupon Sigrid Ro ger, the leaderships token woman, pelted one of them with to- matoes. By November, when the SDS Congress reconvened in Hanover, eight autonomous womens groups had formed. They turned the move- ments antiauthoritarian axioms against the sexism of its own political cul- ture. Liberate the socialist stars from their bourgeois pricks, urged the Frankfurt Broads Committee (Weiberrat) in its so-called lop-them-off leaflet. The accompanying cartoon showed a woman proudly reclining with an axe. Mounted as hunting trophies on the wall were two rows of idio- syncratic penises, each bearing an SDS leaders name.⁴

CREATING MOVEMENTS: FEMINISM OF THE SECOND WAVE

These stories say two things. First, Womens Liberation Movements, some- times called the Second Wave after earlier movements petering out in the

1920s, were dramatically linked to 1968. The West German movement crystallized inside SDS. Various small Parisian groups converged in the French Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes during 196770, including Feminism-Marxisme-Action; Nous sommes en marche; Antoinette Fouques and Monique Wittigs group, which became Politique et Psychanalyse, or Psych et Po; Les oreilles vertes; and the Thursday Group.⁵ In Italy, the Movimento de Liberazione della Donna launched in Rome in June 1970 was linked to the Radical Party and open to men, while other groups Collettivo della Compagne in Turin; Il Cerchio Spezzato in Trento; Rivolta Femminile in Milan; Lotta Femministaformed directly in the crucible of

196869.⁶ Second, the moment of feminist truth was an infuriating expe- rience with Left misogyny, the shock of the sexist encounter.⁷

This brought a dialectic of inspiration and anger. The British revolu- tionary newspaper Black Dwarf, launched by socialist academics, poets, and activists amid the volatile intermixing of counterculture and New Left in June 1968, exemplified the tensions. Sheila Rowbotham ran a theme issue on womens oppression in January 1969 containing articles on single motherhood, contraception, women in unions, Marxism and psychology, and sexual humiliation, with a centerfold manifesto called Women: The Struggle for Freedom. Yet the newspapers designer (a young hippy, radicalized via the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) initially overprinted [the manifesto] on a naked woman with the most enormous pair of breasts imaginable. The general response of the editorial collective to the theme was patronizing. One left man said he supposed it had helped me ex- press my personal problems. But it had nothing to do with socialism.⁸

Nevertheless, change was afoot. Rosalind Delmar went to her first womens meeting at the London School of Economics in summer 1968: A male trade unionist came in and started telling us what to do. We told him to go away, no one was going to listen to him. There had always been a tendency on the student left to defer to industrial workers because they were felt to be more strategically important than anyone elsecertainly more than women. I was very impressed with what we had done.⁹ Like Delmar, many came to Womens Liberation through the student movement and its internationalist campaigns, further pushed by the seeming irrele- vance to women of many established labor movement concerns. In the setting of embittered divisiveness produced by the student movements dis- tinctive politics, as Old Left politicians arrogantly disparaged direct action, participatory democracy, and the ethics of commitment, younger women who were tired of being disregarded easily looked elsewhere.

Thus 18-year-old Aileen Christianson entered politics in 1962 by march- ing with CND to Glasgow. After five years of university education in Ab- erdeen, she moved to a research position at Edinburgh University and dur- ing 196970 became radicalized through the Defence of Literature and the Arts Society, antiapartheid direct action, and the campaign against secret files. She was inspired by reading Germaine Greers Female Eunuch in De- cember 1970. She helped run a local election campaign on a platform of grass roots democracy and laid the foundations for a Residents Associ- ation. Then in 1974, she briefly attended the Edinburgh Womens Libera- tion Conference.¹⁰

Born in 1937 from a working-class background, with a grammar school and university education, Audrey Battersby was a social worker living on her own in Islington with three children. She went with a friend to Juliet Mitchells course at the Anti-University and helped form the Tufnell Park womens group.¹¹ My socialism . . . was totally male-dominated. I always took a back seat, I rarely said anything. I went, and did, and demonstrated and whatever, but I was still the little woman. Her older loyalties were now remade: Id always been a socialist, anti-nuclear marcher, anti-

apartheid, that sort of thing, but this was different because it was our own struggle.¹²

The first National Womens Liberation Conference met in Ruskin Col- lege, Oxford, on 27 February 1970, drawing five hundred women (plus 60 children, 40 men) from around the country. They came from the handful of London groups, Coventry, Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol, and elsewhere; from International Socialism and Trotskyist and Maoist sects; and from the National Joint Action Committee for Womens Equal Rights. It was a convergence of many individuals, mainly in their twenties, primed by immediate political experiences, personal biographies, and countercultural incitements for breaking away. Accounts agree on the newness, the empowering sense of an unexpected and clarifying collectivity. Some participants brought a wealth of cosmopolitan backgrounds in Europe and North America, while others felt a bit like young girls from the provinces. Another strikingly different feature was the presence of children: there were all these children, and there was going to be a creche, run by men. For Sally Alexander, one of the organizers, the event was a

mind blowing experience, which brought dispersed bits of myself . . . more together. There was a general feeling of breaking through: And I never went back toor was ever remotely interested inthose sorts of bits and pieces of male left politics that I had picked up on and had seen a bit of.¹³

The practical outcomes were a National Womens Coordinating Com- mittee and the Womens Liberation Movements Four Demands: equal pay; equal education and opportunity; 24-hour nurseries; and free contraception and abortion on demand. The first national womens march was planned for International Womens Day next year, and the Conferences now met annually until 1978, when factionalism supervened.¹⁴ But the movements real presence lay in the local groups and campaigns. The London Womens Liberation Workshop was a loose federation of small groups in the 1970s, for example, with 80 affiliates at its peak. It was antihierarchical and de- centralized, deliberately contrasting with the traditional Left from which many of us had come. It registered the passionate desire to rethink what politics involved: We wanted to redefine the meaning of politics to include an analysis of our daily lives.¹⁵

The founders came through the student movement and similar experi- ences but were alienated by the gendered culture of militancy. They were often isolated by motherhood, highly educated but undervalued. They had professions in education, health, media, and the arts. They were mainly born in the 1940s. Of 10 founders of the Belsize Lane group still active in

1979, seven were aged 2633 in 1969; seven were already mothers or preg- nant; eight were in the arts (theater, film, photography, writing, pottery); all had a profession (two social workers, two health workers, two writers, an acupuncturist-photographer, a potter, a film editor, an academic).¹⁶

There were no links to earlier twentieth-century feminism. There was a

sense of all these people who were really new to politics [being] suddenly released to express themselves.¹⁷

The Ruskin Conference came in a wider cluster of events.¹⁸ The earliest had the strongest old Left linksthe equal pay strike at Ford Dagenham on 728 June 1968, where women sewing machinists demanded wage par- ity with welders, metal finishers, and body repair workers.¹⁹ This strike provided the impetus for the National Joint Action Committee for Womens Equal Rights, whose campaign culminated in the Trafalgar Square Equal Pay rally of May 1969. Second, Anne Koedts mass-circulated pamphlet, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1969), brought womens sexuality into politics, distinguishing it from reproduction, separating pleasure from the penis, and converting individual problems into political ones. Thirdly, the Tufnell Park group leafleted the Ideal Home Exhibition in the spring of 1969 to reach women in their roles as housewives, consumers, and mothers. The action raised issues of housework, childcare, family, and the sexual division of labor via critiques of consumerism and advertising. It questioned the Lefts assumed real prioritiesthe frozen notions of the proletariat and/or point-of-production politics.²⁰

Especially notable was the disruption of the televised Miss World pag- eant in November 1970. Women demonstrated outside the Albert Hall and infiltrated the audience, storming the stage at a prearranged signal, throw- ing smoke bombs and bags of flour. Four women stood trial for the action, using the dock as a platform. In 1969, protestors had worn sashes saying

Mis-Fit Refuses to Conform, Mis-Conception Demands Free Abortion for All Women, Mis-Fortune Demands Equal Pay, Mis-Treated De- mands Shared Housework, Mis-Nomer Demands a Name of Her Own, and seven similar slogans. This 1970 action mixed creativity, anger, direct action, and mass media in turning the spectacle of women to spectacular use. It expressed 1968s typical hostility against consumer capitalism

Graded, degraded, humiliated. . . . Legs selling stockings, corsets selling waists, cunts selling deodorants, Mary Quant selling sex. . . . Our sexuality has been taken away from us, turned into money for someone else. Ab- solving the contestants, they attacked our conditioning as women, and our acceptance of bourgeois norms of correct behavior.²¹

The national demonstration of March 1971 brought all this together: the Four Demands; links to working-class women and the labor movement via the campaign for equal pay; critiques of womens confinement in the family; public voicing of sexuality and politicizing of the body; attacks on consumerism, commercial exploitation, and public representations; an in- ventive political style. Childcare campaigners parodied the nursery rhyme with a 12-foot-high Old Womans Shoe; another float showed childbirth

bedecked with strings of cardboard cut-out babies and sanitary towels; banners displayed cosmetics, bras, and corsetry, appropriating the ad- mans appropriation of the movement; women danced to Eddie Cantors

Keep Young and Beautiful on a wind-up gramophone on wheels.²²

WOMENS LIBERATION AND THE NEW POLITICS

For British feminism, defense of the 1967 Abortion Act was the most salient national campaign. Womens slow, uneven progress in unions was another. After the Ford equal pay strike came the protracted night cleaners cam- paign from the autumn of 1970. A womens rights conference of the Na- tional Council for Civil Liberties at the TUC in February 1974, with 550 union and Womens Liberation delegates, was the first explicit coalition. The campaign for the 10-point Working Womens Charter grew from grass- roots alliances of feminists and local union branches, often coordinated via trades councils. In 1975, the TUC incorporated these demands into its own Charter for equal pay and opportunities, maternity leave, nondiscrimina- tory tax laws, and social security, later adding a proabortion statement and universal childcare in 1978. The TUCs official march for abortion rights in October 1979 mobilized one hundred thousand people.

But the Womens Liberation Movements real center of gravity was the small consciousness raising (CR) group (with 3050 varying participants in its weekly meetings), often attached to a womens center, around which circulated many other actionscommunity childcare initiatives and drop- in centers, claimants unions, squatting and housing campaigns, family al- lowance campaigns, womens health groups, wages for housework, Work- ing Womens Charter groups, links to individual unions, National Abortion Campaign groups, womens therapy centers, groups on nonsexist educa- tion, womens literacy classes, newsletters and local newspapers, and of course study groups, all of them with leafleting, public meetings, research, and direct actions. Feminists agitated other contexts, from local meetings of national campaigns (including the Labour Party) and Women and So- cialism events to new initiatives like Womens Aid for battered women, Gingerbread for single parents, Under Fives community nursery groups, and so on. There was a big multiplier effect: Every action taken leads outwards, has wider repercussions. For instance, those members of consciousness-raising groups live in families, belong to unions or political parties, talk to the neighbors, take children to school, post letters, ring up friends. Ideas get around.²³

What was distinctive about this new feminism? The small Consciousness Raising group was the quintessential Womens Liberation form: an ideal of unstructured, decentralized, nonbureaucratic association. For the British pi- oneers, who were often young mothers isolated from the public worlds they desired, this reflected everyday needs; neither workplace and profession nor parties and public institutions gave usable supports. The CR group made the personal political, building collective identity around matters that pol- itics conventionally ignoredchildren, daycare, schooling, careers, health, housing, loneliness, and of course husbands, boyfriends, and partners. It

encouraged expression of feelings and thought, the finding of voice. It was where the most difficult issues were aired. It was the ur-democratic form, where every member could speak and be heard.

This small-scale, participatory basis of Womens Liberation expressed a vital 1968 legacythe revival of direct democracy and direct action, the critique of alienation, the interest in self-actualization. This was a new vol- untarism, a politics of subjectivity, making personal change the key to emancipation. It also meant extraparliamentary politics, beyond the frame- works of electoral and party action, usually on a local footing. The per- sonal meant less an individualistic private domain than the contexts of everydaynessthe quotidian and the local. This politics was profoundly contrary to old Left thinking about the party. Plurality and flexibility were the rule: movement implied dynamism, adaptation, lack of rigidity, while organization implied hierarchy, immobility, fixed structures.²⁴

Womens Liberation also practised a subversive and exuberant political style. It meant taking the cultures trappings and symbols, its most cher- ished beliefs, and disordering them, playing with them, turning their mean- ings around, in acts of public transgression. It was a calculated acting-out, a purposeful disobedience, a misbehaving in public. It was a questioning of national institutions, designed to startle the complacencies of the largest publiclike the laying of a wreath to the unknown wife of the unknown soldier at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris in August 1970.²⁵

Street theater and agitprop were essential, from the Electronic-Nipple Show at the 1970 Miss World protest and the general parodying of conventions to the flourishing of feminist theater, as troupes like Monstrous Regiment and Gay Sweatshop brought new themes to the stage.²⁶ In the Italian unions, feminists stepped outside the time-honored ritual culture: They carried multicoloured banners (instead of the obligatory red), shouted fem- inist slogans, and publicly celebrated sisterhood where the traditional terms were fraternity.²⁷

Womens Liberation was separatist. In Britain, the Skegness Conference of September 1971 showed that mens participation wouldnt work, a les- son repeated in small groups (We met with the husbands at first, but they took over, so we had to stop).²⁸ Broader coalition building often mattered less than giving women a separate political space. In France, abortion re- form was carried by Choisir, formed in April 1971, the French branch of International Planned Parenthood, and the Mouvement pour la liberation de lavortement et contraception, an umbrella federation formed in April

1973, while Womens Liberation itself preferred women-only small groups, producing parallel campaigns also found in Britain and elsewhere. This principle of autonomy brought a stronger separatist logic toward radical or revolutionary feminism and thence often to political lesbianism. Radical feminism became a generalized stance against male power, not capitalism or bourgeois society. By the mid-1970s, this had a new edge. Radical fem-

inists attacked heterosexuality as such, dismissing straight women for sleep- ing with the enemy.

In excluding men from its new center in Covent Garden in November

1973, the London Womens Liberation Workshop forced socialist feminists onto the defensive.²⁹ Its newsletter serialized The Clit Statement, an ex- treme polemic against heterosexual women by New York radical lesbians in summer 1974. Sheila Jeffreyss pamphlet The Need for a Revolutionary Feminism in 1977 advocated overthrowing the ruling power of men. Leeds Revolutionary Feminists made political lesbianism the rule in 1979: men should be avoided not because of sexual preference but as a political duty

. . . all men were regarded as potential rapists and heterosexual women were branded as collaborators.³⁰ Separatists rising intolerance conflated feminist authenticity with sexual orientation. It narrowed Womens Liber- ations organized framework just as it was taking off, sending socialist fem- inists and nonaffiliated women to other settings.

Still, expanding the Four Demands to include financial and legal inde- pendence and calling for [a]n end to all discrimination against lesbians and a womans right to define her own sexuality was a vital change. Sex- ual liberation was big in the counterculture, which wanted sex out in the open, an all-pervasive element of daily life: No boundaries, no taboos, no deviants, no hostages to guilt and repression; more sex, better sex, dif- ferent sex was on the agenda. But Womens Liberation made this an egal- itarian ideal, committed to extending knowledge about the body and be- ing frank about female physiology, while bringing womens sexuality and erotic desires into public voice.³¹ It claimed the private sphere for change, seeing family and sexuality as key sites of power. Orgasm, contraception, abortion, body knowledge, control of sexuality, all joined the agenda. This body politics differed from that of the 1920s and 1930s: rather than ra- tionalizing sexuality, it stressed experimenting with female agency in an ethic of choice and personal change, while questioning accepted definitions. In the early 1970s, these ideals converged with gay liberation. Despite much embitterment, the gain was huge: not only was lesbianism affirmed but the complicated factors shaping masculinity and femininity were brought into the political arena, as was the question of pleasure.³²

With the radicalizing of separatism into political lesbianism came a stress on violence against women. The first British battered womens refuge was created in Chiswick in 1972: when the National Womens Aid Feder- ation was launched in 1975, there were 111 similar groups, and by 1986 there were 179. Women Against Rape was formed, with Britains first rape crisis center in North London in 1976; by 1985, there were 45 centers nationwide. Both areas displayed the feminist dualism of public lobbying and grassroots elanbringing guilty secrets into the open, agitating opin- ion, pressing government for support; yet organizing women for self-help in locally grounded collective action.

Take Back the Night actions pushed this further, attacking the climate of fear restricting women in publicred-light districts, porn shops, X-rated cinemas, men-only bars, violent and demeaning imagery in advertisements. Women marched rowdily through the streets of London and other cities on

12 November 1977, demanding freedom to walk down any street, night or day, without fear. This progression, from exposing physical violence to attacking violent representations in culture, was spurred in Britain by public sensationalism and police sexism surrounding the serial rape- murders of the Yorkshire Ripper in 197780. On 27 November 1980,

10 days after the thirteenth killing, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) was founded in Leeds: women demonstrated outside cinemas, glued up the locks of sex shop doors, smashed windows of strip clubs, daubed angry messages on walls (MEN off the streets), and marched to Reclaim the Night.³³

For WAVAW, male violence was a single system of control: Sexual ha- rassment at work . . . rape and sexual assault . . . sexual abuse in the family

. . . obscene phone calls, pornography, rape in marriage (unrecognized in law), gynecological practice which violates womens bodies . . . we dis- cussed them all.³⁴ This campaigning captured big public space for feminist ideas and by 1980 also linked to the new peace movement. Take Back the Night grew from the International Tribunal of Crimes against Women in Brussels in 1976, which made sexual violence a call to action: one hun- dred thousand women joined the Italian marches in fall 1976, and the first West German marches occurred shortly thereafter.³⁵ The first German

Womens House for battered women opened in West Berlin in November

1976; by 1979, 14 cities had shelters; by 1982, there were 99. These and other initiatives had the British mixture of local militancy, public agitation, and city funds. But in West Germany, foregrounding violence also made it easier to form coalitions. The Declaration on Violence Against Women issued by the Democratic Womens Initiative in Du sseldorf in October 1979 explicitly linked this to structural violence elsewhere, in work, the arms race, and the environment. The Womens Congress against Nukes and Mil- itarism in September 1979 made the same connections.³⁶

Womens Liberation also changed perceptions of work. Not only by campaigning on low and unequal pay but also by demanding that home- work, casual service work, and housework be valued, feminists redefined the very category. Wages for housework drew the most publicity. Lotta Femministas Manifesto of Housewives in the Neighborhood (1971) in Italy demanded state payments to men and women, linked to neighborhood serv- ices, housing reform, and reorganizing the working day.³⁷ While unrealistic when the welfare state was under attack and as likely to entrench as subvert existing sexual divisions of labor, this manifesto proposed expanding con- trol over daily life in precisely those community matters that the Lefts traditional focus on the factory neglected, like housing, transport, town planning, childcare, worktime and leisure time, and public services. This

new approach connected with contemporary transformations of class. Not only womens growing presence in the workforce but also a new awareness of the sexual division of labor and a changing grasp of what counted as work upset traditional left-wing assumptions about what working-class politics should contain.

Womens Liberation created a new feminist public sphere. First came newsletters linking local groups, like Shrew for London Womens Libera- tion Workshop (originally Bird, then Harpies Bizarre, from the spring of

1969), followed by national magazinesSpare Rib in Britain (launched

July 1972 by Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe); Le Torchon brule (1970

73) and its successors in France; Effe (1973) and Quotidiano Donna (1978) in Italy; Courage (1976) and Emma (1977) in West Germany. Womens centers followed. In London, these ranged from the main gathering point at Covent Garden from 1973 to more improvised local centers. In Islington, the York Way Womens Center (197273) was followed by Essex Road

(197476) and a third in 1978; each time a womens health center, child- care arrangements, local campaigns, legal advice, research and writing pro- jects, and a simple meeting place were the main goals. Activity in the Netherlands crystallized around cafes and bookshops, Consciousness Rais- ing groups, and womens education classes: in 1977, 37 Dutch towns had centers; by 1982, there were 160.³⁸

British Womens Liberation created the National Information Service in Leeds for the huge volume of queries and contacts outside London, with a bimonthly newsletter from 1975, which developed into WIRES (Womens Information, Referral, and Enquiry Service). GLIFE was the equivalent in France from 1975, plus a 24-hour emergency hotline, SOS Femmes Alter- natives. Feminist publishers began with Virago, Womens Press, Only- women Press, and Sheba in Britain; Edizione della Donna, I libretti verdi, and La Tartaruga in Italy; the Munich Frauenoffensive in West Germany; and De Bonte Was and Sara in the Netherlands. Feminist networks, like the British Womens Film, Television and Video Network, formed in the media. By 1980, womens studies had gained a foothold in universities. Early grassroots activity became an elaborate feminist scene of alternative bookshops, publishers, magazines, Womens Summer Universities, womens studies research centers, ongoing campaigns, and safe houses, plus broader subcultures of self-help, medical self-care, and womens heath networks. This activity recalled the social democratic subcultures after the 1880s, though without the centralized resources of national parties and unions.

FROM WOMENS LIBERATION TO FEMINISM

Womens Liberation movements coalesced nationally via abortion cam- paigns.³⁹ In France, this was dramatized in April 1971 by the Whores

Manifesto signed by 343 women in Le Nouvel Observateur declaring their experience of illegal abortions, a tactic repeated in West Germany in July, with 374 names and photographs appearing in Stern (plus another 2,345 women over the next six weeks, with 86,100 declarations of support). The French action achieved the freeing of four working-class women in Bobigny accused of procuring an abortion for a teenage daughter.⁴⁰ In West Ger- many, the campaign built from the first National Womens Conference in Frankfurt in March 1972; 1971 surveys showed 71 percent of women sup- porting legalization, rising to 83 percent in 1973. In Italy, the Collective of 6 December emerged from a 1975 rally to coordinate the campaign, and eight hundred thousand signatures were collected for a national referen- dum.⁴¹ When laws were passed (France 1975, West Germany 1977, Italy

1978), they did not provide for free abortion on demand and usually reg- ulated access with time limits, counseling requirements, and sociomedical conditions. But the campaigns had decisively shifted public climates. In both Britain and Netherlands, abortion had been legalized in 1967. The National Abortion Campaign (NAC) and the broader Coordinating Com- mittee in Defense of the 1967 Abortion Act then worked to neutralize the backlash in Britain, as did We Women Demand and its successors in the Netherlands.

Abortion campaigning displayed the full repertoire of Womens Liber- ation politics: big splash events like demonstrations; subverting the law by self-help and lay provision; and lobbying inside the system. Womens reproductive rights meant control of sexuality and languages of auton- omyOur Bodies, Ourselves, in the title of the universally translated hand- book, or My Belly Belongs to Me, in the West German slogan.⁴² Abor- tion rallied a gender-based collectivity of women from all backgrounds, ages, and classes. Campaigns consistently linked abortion to economics, social rights, equality in households, sexuality, and family, all in critiques of male domination. Thereby, feminists escaped the abstract sloganeering against capitalism, bourgeois society, and womens oppression to more concrete ground, where links to other issues were preserved. Feminists

transformed abortions from being a civil rights issue into a struggle over how power was being exercised in society, involving not just the state or the Church as institutions, but the micro relations of power in everyday life.⁴³ Demands for controlling ones body grounded more general claims to political identity. Abortion redefined the boundaries of politics per se rather than remaining an issue by itself. Reproductive freedom issued a challenge to societys dominant values by questioning existing religious, medical, and political authority. It brought the body politic itself into question.⁴⁴

Internationalism was essential, in a shared mobilization across not only Western Europe but also the Atlantic. United States Second Wave feminism predated European events. From the early books like Betty Friedans Fem- inine Mystique in 1963 and the creation of a national womens lobby in

NOW (National Organization of Women) from 1966 to the radicalizing collisions with the sexism of Student for a Democratic Society, Womens Liberation happened first in the United States.⁴⁵ But transnational circuits remained active. Young American women were in the earliest Womens Liberation groups in London. West German SDSers were also in London in 196870. Helke Sanders speech of September 1968 circulated widely, while translations, like Shulamith Firestones Dialectic of Sex, Kate Milletts Sexual Politics, and Germaine Greers Female Eunuch, as well as Anne Koedts pamphlet, were common. British Reclaim the Night marches were directly inspired by West German predecessors. After the transition to de- mocracy in 197577, Spanish Womens Liberation deployed precedents from Britain, West Germany, and France. The publication of New Portu- guese Letters by the so-called three Marias in 1973, and the authors sub- sequent trial, became an international cause cele`bre.⁴⁶

There were important crossnational differences, however. The strongest Womens Liberation movements were in Britain, France, Italy, the Neth- erlands, and West Germany.⁴⁷ Each grew from 1968, while angrily re- jecting its sexist and gendered limits. They had a common patternsmall localized groups, with a participatory ethos of direct action, evolving to- ward separatism, with sexual politics ever more primary, and achieving through national abortion campaigns wider mobilization among women and broader alliances in the Left. As national movements, Womens Lib- eration crested with these 1970s campaigns. But as conflicts opened along the fundamental divide between radical or revolutionary versus socialist feminisms, the momentum was dissipated.

Interestingly, Scandinavia lacked distinct Womens Liberation move- ments in the 1970s. In April 1970, 12 Danish women (so-called Redstock- ings) organized a public protest against fashion and makeup called Keep Denmark Clean, which was followed by other small groups. In Norway, the first battered womens helpline appeared in Oslo in 1977, producing the first refuge in 1978, with 53 shelters and three thousand activists by

1991.⁴⁸ But the broader framework of separately organized feminism didnt coalesce for various reasons: legal equality within marriage had already been achieved in Scandinavia by 1929; civil equality was matched by un- usually high female employment; relatively depatriarchalized welfare states offered positive citizenship for women; and the right to an abortion was already won.⁴⁹

In Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland, conservative gender regimes in- hibited strong womens movements. Smaller-scale feminisms focused either on winning the vote, as in the Zurich Manifesto of the Swiss Womens Liberation Movement in June 1968, or achieving civic equality, as in the Austrian family law reforms of 197578 or the later Swiss counterparts of

1988. Womens movements emerged via the democratic transitions in Por- tugal, Spain, and Greece in 197475 but were more attuned to parliamen- tary politics than Womens Liberation per se. In Eastern Europe, there were

no comparable feminist movements, whether in the Prague Spring or the