The women's liberation movement in Scotland by Sarah Browne

Author:Sarah Browne [Browne, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory
ISBN: 9781526112248
Google: fXC5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-05-16T03:06:12+00:00

Source: Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal, no. 4, 1978, p. 16.

Ma Broon featured in discussions about the women’s movement in Scotland once more during the 1970s. In The Scotsman journalist Julie Davidson’s article ‘Time of Political Reckoning for the Modern Ma Broon’ she wondered why women, especially those associated with the WLM, had remained silent over the question of devolution.116 Introducing her article Davidson argued that the character Ma Broon and what she represented continued to haunt

the sculleries and parlours of Scotland’s social history like an irreversible curse. She patrols our psyche like a bossy traffic warden, comic incarnation of the authoritarian drudge … Despite her apparent power, despite her control of the domestic fiefdom, Ma Broon probably asks Pa Broon how she should vote; if she votes at all. Her power is private, internal, compressed and dictated by pragmatism. The dutiful daughters of Scotland hold the head of the country’s impoverished manhood at the cost of holding their own outside the home.117

Using Ma Broon as her example, Davidson questioned the prevailing myths about Scotland. She also questioned why feminists had failed to engage with the debates about devolved power in Scotland in the late 1970s and argued that women’s voices ‘could have been powerful’ in these discussions. She challenged the belief of many women’s liberation activists north of the border that more political power for Scotland would have

been a triumph for the McNasties; for the kind of meanness and mediocrity which has characterised some areas of Scottish public life; for the flexing of machismo muscles in an amphitheatre of reaction and repression. With no nice times for women.118

A vote was held in 1979 to determine whether the people of Scotland wanted to see more power devolved away from the Westminster parliament to a Scottish Assembly based in Edinburgh, conducted against a political backdrop which had witnessed a resurgent Scottish National Party (SNP). The 1970s was a decade in which people north of the border were assessing the implications of more political power and considering what it was to be Scottish.119 Yet, Breitenbach has stressed that ‘there is little evidence of active engagement of feminists in the debate on devolution in 1979’.120 The silence about devolution in the WLM is not surprising considering that many active feminists were not party political and had more in common with those groups which operated in a political culture where politics was conducted on the streets rather than in parliaments. The parliamentary nature of the devolution campaign, therefore, would not have interested many active feminists, although smaller women’s liberation groups, like the Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence, did discuss it.

However, the two issues should not be confused. Women’s liberation activists in Scotland could feel that the British movement was dominated by those in the South of England and that they had different issues to face and campaign on, while still displaying ambivalence about the devolution issue. Most activists viewed the WLM as an international movement but one which should be more representative and should

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