The Women's Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain by George Stevenson;

Author:George Stevenson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

That this had equal significance to the British movement was illustrated by the fact that this article had been reprinted by British feminists and donated to a British archive.19 Moreover, there were a number of direct parallels with British feminists’ experiences. Evelyn Farrer, for example, wrote a similar piece, entitled, ‘You Don’t Need a Degree to Read the Writing on the Wall’, in which she emphasized importance of class to her identity: ‘My class is basic to who I am, how I think, talk, respond, behave, my aims (or lack of them!), standards, what I expect, what I see, what I eat, what I drink, what I do.’20 There was also a parallel to one of the key issues highlighted by Brown, ‘the idea that a working-class woman with a college education escapes their class background’, which she described as ‘sheer arrogant blindness’ on the part of middle-class feminists.21 Farrer agreed, citing her frustration at this notion because it disregarded experiences prior to university, ‘Too bad about the twenty years that went before’.22 This common irritation was illustrated again in Val Turner’s account in the Working-Class Women’s Liberation Newsletter, where she recalled being told by middle-class women she couldn’t set up a working-class liberation group because she had been to university, thereby implying in Turner’s eyes that education equalled losing ‘all your WC [working-class] values and attitudes gained during the years before’.23

There was a more general problem that underpinned the issue of education, which was a sense from those who identified as working class that it was extremely difficult to prove their authenticity to self-defining middle-class women due to the latter’s preconceived classist notions. Gail Chester, for example, recalled how once she accepted the importance of her working-class background and position, despite her university education, she found that she had to ‘defend’ it within the WLM.24 In a note published in the Women’s Information Referral and Enquiries Service (WIRES) in 1976, for example, a working-class woman angrily challenged middle-class feminists’ assumptions that the WLM was entirely middle class and detailed the impossibility of convincing them otherwise because they would always provide a reason why a working-class woman was actually middle-class: ‘They’ll smile at you with glazed eyes and pat you on the head . . . or they’ll just pretend they heard what they wanted to hear and leave you believing you actually got through.’25 This chimed with Farrer’s opening sentence, where she wrote, ‘We all know the women’s liberation movement is middle class because middle class women are always telling us it is.’26 She explained that some in the movement ‘call themselves classless, they say we are too . . . assuming that their values, standards, their ways of behaving and talking and even their experience are the norm we should all measure up to’.27 Comments like these reveal that the perceived centrality of middle-class women’s experiences within the WLM, among women of both classes, could serve as a similar exclusionary force as the centrality of maleness to definitions of ‘worker’, albeit with the sex and class intersection inverted.

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