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Emma Wallhead, A Political Sexual Revolution: Sexual Autonomy in the British Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 1980s, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 34, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 354–376, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad026
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Abstract
In the 1970s and 1980s, women across Britain—particularly those in the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM)—took part in a distinct sexual revolution fuelled by a very specific question—who gets to determine the ways in which I am sexual? The active engagement by women with this question of sexual selfhood belies a historiography of sexual revolution—real or imagined—in which women were the passive beneficiaries (or victims) of technological, cultural, religious, social and/or, economic shifts. Drawing on the writing of women in the feminist press, mainstream media, books, and pamphlets, this article describes the specific contribution of the WLM to shaping new possibilities for a sexuality defined, and controlled, by women. I argue that the WLM combined a powerful political framework with an influential social network to significantly contribute to a far-reaching process of deconstructing and recasting female sexuality and sexual relations.
‘Not long ago I made the intellectual decision to become bisexual’, 25-year-old London resident Linda told Guardian reporter Lindsay Mackie in 1973.1 Separated from her husband and in love with a man at the time of her interview, Linda continued: ‘I am in a bit of a state of flux with this new-found independence but I feel amazingly self-contained.’ For Linda, this independence was as much physical as anything else. ‘I come back home and I feel the outlines of myself’, she explained. I‘m not living through anyone else and almost every day I say to myself “I’m me and I’ll never be anything else and I’m satisfied with it.”’ Linda’s description of her choice as an ‘intellectual decision’ is telling. From the late 1960s, British women started a conversation about their bodies and sex as part of a broader, self-conscious exploration of autonomy.2
Linda had attended her first women’s group meeting in 1972. It was the start of an involvement with the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) that would alter her perspective and ultimately her life. ‘I see everything now in a political way’, she explained. More than a call for collective action, however, Linda’s political perspective was a call to reconsider the way in which she conceived of and lived her life as an individual, including how she lived her life as a sexual being. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson point to a distinction between the ‘typical concerns of post-1968 feminism’ and the vernacular understandings of British working-class women in ‘individuality, autonomy and voice for women’.3 However, it was not so much that women in the WLM were not interested in ‘individuality, autonomy and voice’. Rather, the context for that interest was different. The assertion of sexual autonomy by women of the WLM was underpinned by a political critique rejecting sexual norms that defined female sexuality in terms of men’s interests. This article considers women like Linda who, as part of their engagement with the WLM, began to think, and talk, in terms of ‘a sexuality that is autonomous from men’s interest’, not just as an intellectual exercise but as a way of living.4 While the political framework on which this work was built led women in the WLM down some different pathways to those of other women, the research for this article has also demonstrated that there were many areas where the expression of autonomy ultimately looked the same. The WLM both reflected and contributed to broader changes in which women, more generally, considered and expressed their sexual selves.
On one level, there is nothing new about associating the terms ‘sexual revolution’ and ‘sexual freedoms’ with British women of the late twentieth century. Women are at the heart of many accounts of sexual revolution. Callum Brown links increasing pre-marital sexual activity by women with religious decline from the 1950s.5 Alana Harris, writing about contraception, and David Geiringer, writing about sexual freedoms, both illuminate how women were simultaneously the topic of, and absent from, religious discourse about sex.6 Sexual images of women evidence a ‘sexualisation’ of culture for Marcus Collins and Ben Mechen.7 Of course, the most popular way in which women are brought into a landscape of sexual revolution is by reference to the unlocking of women’s sexual freedoms with the increasing availability of the contraceptive pill. Hera Cook observes that the increasing availability of reliable contraception enabled women to ‘[move] towards autonomous sexual activity’ as it was possible for those women who could access the pill ‘to have sexual relations without becoming pregnant and/or marrying’.8 But the extent of these freedoms has been contested with some significantly discounting their consequence. These commentators have asserted that, rather than freedom, women ultimately became victims of greater pressure to have sex. For Sheila Jeffreys, as women were co-opted into male notions of sexuality, the ‘sexual revolution completed the sexualisation of women’.9 Dominic Sandbrook suggests that the sexual revolution, together with access to the pill, might have enabled women to have more sex but, rather than marking greater autonomy, women merely felt more pressure to have sex with men.10
What all of these accounts have in common is a focus on the impact on women of various changes to the political, religious, cultural, and economic environment that, in the words of Callum Brown, tends ‘to downplay the significance of the popular sexual revolution’.11 Such accounts obscure the nature and extent of a far-reaching and influential intellectual engagement with sexual self-determination by women such as Linda from the early 1970s. While it is true that many people were concerned about the impact on women of an increasingly sexualized environment, this says little about the way in which women, themselves, thought about living a sexual life. While the freedom to have sex with men without fear of pregnancy certainly contributed to an environment in which women could live an autonomous sexual life, the freedom to have sex with men was not, in itself, the achievement of an autonomous sexual life.
This article provides a new account of sexual revolution as a series of changes driven by women brought about by an all-encompassing claim to sexual autonomy and sexual self-determination. It was a revolution facilitated by a convergence of moments and shifts such as increased labour market participation by women, growing numbers of women enrolling in higher education, abortion law reform, religious decline, increasing cultural permissiveness and, of course, advances in contraceptive technology. However, the WLM claim for sexual autonomy was not simply an inevitable outcome of these various trajectories and to position it in that way misrepresents this historical moment, detracting from its contribution in shaping social and intellectual history. This was not a case where women were swept along on an inexorable wave. They consciously and actively engaged in a very specific and new exploration of the meaning and expression of bodily autonomy, including the right to determine and own their own sexual lives. Rather than passively accepting dominant narratives of women’s sexuality, women of the WLM intellectually tackled a fundamental question—who determines the ways in which I am sexual?—and they posed this question publicly and in large numbers.
None of this is to suggest that the WLM was monolithic. While it is difficult to quantify its extent,12 the WLM was a national movement with which thousands of women variously engaged, whether as full-time activists, as ad hoc participants or as women engaging only through access to feminist publications such as Spare Rib or even via exposure through mainstream publications.13 However, the WLM was also diverse in its composition.14 Not all women in the WLM agreed on all matters—with some significant and serious disagreements being a notable element of the movement. Nevertheless, the movement was grounded on a fundamental interest in the position of women, specifically the oppression of women, across all areas of life.15 This was the political framework that defined the WLM and it was this interest that led, for many feminists, to an active engagement with understanding, and challenging, that oppression as it applied to their sexual lives. It was an interest that commonly centred on a ‘critique of patriarchal heterosexuality’.16
For Hannah Charnock, the sexual behaviour of teenage girls of the late twentieth century was significantly shaped by peer networks. Charnock argues ‘that sexuality needs to be understood as a social phenomenon that was shaped by and performed through individuals’ relationships with their local communities and immediate social networks’.17 Similarly, beyond providing a political framework that demanded the examination of sexual autonomy, the WLM was also a significant social network that both challenged, and supported, women to undertake the often confronting work of conscious self-examination necessary to an autonomous sexual life. A movement of thousands of women, the WLM provided both opportunity and support for a wide-ranging discourse on sexual autonomy. Women’s sexuality had previously been primarily discussed by men albeit interrupted by singular women who championed sexual autonomy such as the women associated with The Freewoman journal,18 but now large numbers of women were participating in a new conversation about women’s sexual autonomy. Not unlike Charnock’s teenagers, privacy still mattered to the women of the WLM but it was not the overriding concern it had been and, contrary to the suggestion by Hera Cook that women were reluctant to speak openly about sex in the 1970s, large numbers of women—both in the WLM and more broadly—were, in fact, talking explicitly and openly about sex across the decade.19 This article draws heavily on the archive of that discourse—through pamphlets and documents of the WLM, through publications such as Spare Rib and Shrew, and through feminist contributions in the mainstream press. In doing so, it is necessary to acknowledge the contribution of transnational movements, particularly the WLM in the USA, that had significant influence on the women in the British WLM.20 Women in the British WLM voraciously read and circulated material on sexual autonomy written by women from the WLM in the USA who were asking similar questions.21
This article starts by examining prevalent representations of the WLM’s engagement with sexuality, including the well-trodden narrative of the futility of the WLM’s efforts to revolutionize sex. It is proposed that, despite bitter debate, the WLM provided impetus—both as a political framework and as a social network—for women from all factions to examine the place, and expression, of sex in their lives in a way that was distinguished from the ways in which women had previously related to sex and the expression of their sexual lives. This work included an appropriation of the discourses of sexologists and others to conceptualize a sexuality in which women had control of their bodies and responsibility for their sexual experiences. These tentative steps into autonomous sexual expression represented a significant challenge to sexual norms within heterosexual relationships. Part two of this article examines the issues that arose for women when considering incorporating new ways of thinking about sex into their own intimate relationships with men. While some successfully made changes, others saw it as an impossible task and some women felt that the only way that they could take control of their sexual lives would be to live those lives without men. Part three of this article looks at the rise of political lesbianism as a response to the challenges of sexual liberation within a heterosexual paradigm. However, there were also many women—such as Linda—who felt able to explore new ways of being intimate with a wider range of people. In the final part, the article examines celibacy in the context of sexual autonomy and its importance to many in strengthening their relationships with others.
A Self-defined Sexuality
In July 1974, more than 900 women gathered in Edinburgh for the sixth National WLM Conference.22 At this conference, the following was added to the list of demands of the WLM: ‘We demand an end to discrimination against lesbians; and the right to a self-defined sexuality for all women’. At a subsequent 1978 Conference, at the recommendation of the Brighton Women’s Liberation Group, the demand was split into two parts with the latter part—the right to a self-defined sexuality for all women—repositioned as a preface to all demands.23 In their proposal to split the demand, the Brighton Women’s Liberation Group argued not only that the demand for an end to discrimination against lesbians was distinct and should stand alone but that ‘a women-defined sexuality is not a demand but rather a basic principle/premise/assumption underlying the ideology of the WLM’.24 The statement has, however, had a fraught history. It was not well understood at the time and its significance has, subsequently, been obscured in the historiography. In their 1982 reflection on the WLM, Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell wrote that, despite the demand being subsequently split into two, it continued to be seen primarily as a demand about lesbians and that women—lesbian and otherwise—struggled to identify with the demand beyond its more evident call for ‘a commitment to lesbians’ civil rights’.25 In a more recent account of the 1978 Conference, Jeska Rees similarly highlights a sense of confusion surrounding the sixth demand. ‘The status of the new, slimmed down sixth Demand was uncertain in the months following the conference … And the status of the new non-Demand—the right to a self-defined sexuality—was even less clear.’26 For Coote and Campbell, in the confusion and controversy that surrounded the sixth demand, an opportunity had been lost for the movement to clearly engage with ‘a positive commitment to female eroticism, as something powerful and autonomous, which was shared by heterosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals …. It would be what women wanted it to be, not what men decreed’.27 Yet it should not be interpreted that because this particular opportunity had been lost, that women across the WLM did not meaningfully engage with sexual self-determination.
In an oral history recorded as part of the Sisterhood and After Research Team, Jo Robinson recalls: ‘There wasn’t any defined sexual politics’.28 It is clear, however, that there was a common theme that women were equally grappling with. This theme was self-determination. Across the board, women were examining their bodies and sexuality as sites of politics and patriarchy. If the personal was political, a woman’s body and sexuality were going to be primary sites to examine this relationship.29 This examination came on the heels of a critique of a cultural sexual revolution that was seen as having favoured the interests of men. The critique was most famously articulated in Kate Millett’s literary study of female sexuality, Sexual Politics, which was published in the USA in 1970 and in the UK in 1971.30 In Sexual Politics, described by one reviewer as ‘a book that [analysed] revolution in order to serve revolution’, Millett made it clear that, rather than liberating women, sexual revolution had firmly maintained the subordination of women.31 Focusing on writers who, for many, represented sexual liberation—Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer—Millett drew attention to a sexual revolution that maintained or even strengthened men’s power over women, including the definition of female sexuality by men in male interests. Noting that a woman’s ‘sexuality is very subject to social forces’, Millett contended ‘that the conditions of patriarchal society have had such profound effects upon female sexuality that its function has been drastically affected, its true character long distorted and long unknown’.32
In the same year that Millett first published Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch which, despite major differences in style and substance, also drew on literary texts to illustrate that ‘the female is considered as a sexual object for the use and appreciation of other sexual beings, men’.33 Greer likened the effect of this as a form of castration that erodes a woman’s energy which she defined as ‘the power that drives every human being’.34 In this, like Millett, the significance of sexual subordination for all areas of a woman’s life was drawn out by Greer. Similarly, feminist Eva Figes held up sex as a symbolic site for ubiquitous patriarchy: ‘The sex act is an effective symbol because it is so basic and animal, and can be considered “natural” – so if it is “natural” for a man to lie on top of a woman it would therefore follow that male domination is also part of the natural order.’35 In this natural order, women were innately passive while men were aggressive. In her first book, Sex, Gender and Society published in 1972, sociologist Ann Oakley observed: ‘The female’s sexuality is supposed to lie in her receptiveness and this is not just a matter of her open vagina: it extends to the whole structure of feminine personality as dependent, passive, unaggressive and submissive.’36 If, as argued by Beatrix Campbell, a woman ‘only experiences sexuality as defined by men in a male-dominated culture’, what could be done to place a woman’s sexuality back into the hands of the woman?37 One of the forms which this work took was to appropriate and recast key discourses about women’s sexuality, including appropriation and recasting of psychoanalytic and other ‘expert’ discourses about female sexual pleasure.
Putting Autonomy into Practice
Female sexual pleasure was not a new concept. It was of particular interest to sexologists, psychoanalysts and others from the early part of the twentieth century.38 Marie Stopes, one of the most frequently cited proponents of female sexual pleasure, identified a ‘physical yearning’ or ‘creative impulse’ in women that was ‘a physical, a physiological state of stimulation which arises spontaneously and quite apart from any particular man’.39 Some scholars, such as Hera Cook, position Stopes as an early proponent of female sexual autonomy.40 However, Stopes made it clear that what ‘stimulated’ and gave force to a woman’s sexual desire was her relationship with ‘some particular man’.41 This reliance on male partners in heterosexual sexual relations and, more specifically, married heterosexual relations is seen by many as undermining Stopes’ legacy. Margaret Jackson, for instance, has written: ‘Female sexuality cannot be simultaneously autonomous and dependent on men for its expression and fulfilment.’42
Beyond reliance on the stimulation of a male sexual partner to stir a woman’s ‘creative force’, Stopes and her contemporaries also located control of, and responsibility for, women’s sexual experiences with men. ‘I feel sure’, Stopes asserted, ‘that the prevalent failure on the part of many men to effect orgasms for their wives at each congress, must be a very common source of the sleeplessness and nervous diseases of so many married women’.43 Women were not expected to take an active role in the sexual relationship and, indeed, were reluctant to do so.44 Reflecting on the oral testimonies of close to 200 individuals who grew up in the first half of the twentieth century, Kate Fisher observes: ‘It was important for wives to maintain a passive sexual identity in which they received the attentions of husbands but did not themselves play any active role in initiating sexual activity.’45 It was largely accepted by women that the male would initiate intimacy and educate and guide them in sexual practices.46
While the advice in books and magazines placed female experience in the foreground, the sexual satisfaction of a woman was generally framed as both subordinate to and consequent to that of her male partner. ‘[A]ct lovingly’, advised columnist Evelyn Home in 1967, ‘even if desire is lacking: to want to give pleasure will restore your own desire all the more quickly’.47 This framing was not just a matter of discourse. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher found that women connected sexual pleasure with the ‘the giving of love’ in their private lives.48 Their female interviewees ‘presented [sexual pleasure] as a happy by-product of a loving and caring act’ rather than as an end in itself.49
The WLM started from the premise that women are oppressed by men and called on women to think critically about their position and make their own decisions, independently of men.50 This manifesto extended to female sexuality. The WLM also called on women to understand how their sexuality had been defined by, and subordinated to, men and challenged women to take charge of their sexuality. In a pamphlet reproduced in Shrew in 1972, Angela Hamblin declared: ‘The distortion and mutilation of female sexuality is achieved through defining it exclusively in terms of its complementarity to men’s, and never in its own right. Male sexuality is defined as the “given” and female sexuality is then defined in relation to it.’51 The first step was to recognise that nexus. Pat Whiting called on women to discard what she saw as a ‘cultural myth that women but not men need “romantic love” before they can respond sexually’.52 ‘Historically’, she said, ‘women have suffered from too much romance and not enough realism’. For Whiting, the work of Masters and Johnson provided an effective dose of realism.53 Based on observations of approximately 10,000 sex acts, Williams Masters and Virginia Johnson provided, what many people—including Pat Whiting—viewed as ‘hard scientific fact’ about female sexuality.54 According to Whiting, this evidence ‘exploded … the myth that women have to be “in love” to enjoy sex’. For the WLM, however, it was the findings of Masters and Johnson that the female orgasm was a product of clitoral stimulation that was of greatest interest. These findings debunked Freud’s proposition that, for a woman to have successfully matured, her ‘erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation has been successfully transferred … from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice’ during puberty. If this process failed to take place, said Freud, a woman would remain prone ‘to neurosis and especially to hysteria’.55 The research of Masters and Johnson, which was seen to be the first scientific account of clitoral orgasm and undermined Freud’s theory, was quickly co-opted by feminists, most notably by Anne Koedt.
In 1968, Koedt, a member of the New York Radical Women, presented a paper at the women’s liberation conference in Chicago titled ‘The myth of the vaginal orgasm’.56 Koedt recapitulated the physiology of the orgasm: ‘There is only one area for sexual climax, although there are many areas for sexual arousal—the clitoris. All orgasms are extensions of sensations from this area.’ Koedt maintained that this meant that women’s sexual pleasure was not reliant on penetration. It also meant that, in focusing only on penetration, women’s sexual pleasure would necessarily be overlooked. Koedt made a call to action for women to ‘demand’ a new approach: ‘What we must do is redefine our sexuality.’ While Koedt had repackaged existing information, for many women it was their first exposure to the physiology of female sexual pleasure and the pamphlet was a revelation.57 Her paper, reproduced in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists in 1970, soon spread to women’s liberation groups across the western world, including Britain.58 British feminist Beatrix Campbell found the paper ‘absolutely life-changing’: ‘The story was telling me about my sexual life, it detonated it, it was a detonator.’59 For Campbell, who had believed that her inability to enjoy heterosexual sex was her own fault, the insight about the source of female orgasm posed an ‘enormous challenge’ to everything she had understood and believed.
Koedt was, however, just one voice in an emerging conversation in which women talked to other women about their lives in a way that sought to give new perspective to those lives. Conciousness-raising groups formed an important part of this conversation. These were small groups of women who gathered regularly, often in the homes of members, to share and discuss their personal experiences. In this way, the political aspects of those experiences could be understood and foregrounded.60 Taking back control of their bodies and sexuality formed an important part of these sessions for many women including an examination of the most intimate of details about relationships, bodies, and sex. Looking back at her experiences in the WLM, Sue Bruley describes how, in her group, ‘[w]e got down to the mechanics of sex and related our earliest sexual encounters and how men behaved in sex’.61 The feminist press was another form of conversation between women and provided women with new perspectives on their sexuality. A primary text for many women was Our Bodies, Ourselves, by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1971.62 A British version was published by Penguin in 1978.63 The book encouraged women to learn about their bodies and to explore their own sexuality. Women were guided in self-examination techniques to explore and understand their sexual organs. While providing instruction on a process that women could carry out at home, the British edition encouraged women to carry out the self-examination ‘in a group where you can discuss and compare what you see with other women, and break down taboos about touching yourself and looking at each other into the bargain’.64
Newly established feminist publishers such as Virago, Onlywomen Press and Sheba also contributed to the books on female sexual autonomy. One of these was The Body Electric, written by British sex therapist and journalist Anne Hooper and published by Virago in 1980.65 Hooper had been inspired by workshops run by Betty Dodson in the USA and established the ‘London Pre-Orgasmic Workshop’ in partnership with Eleanor Stephens.66The Body Electric, based on that workshop, called on women to learn about their sexuality, be comfortable with their sexuality, and to be able to be responsible for their sexual lives. According to Hooper it was ‘vital to forget about your partner’s needs … and concentrate wholeheartedly on your own’ when someone was ‘trying to bring you to orgasm’. Acknowledging that it might feel selfish, she reassured women ‘that [this] ultimately is what sex is all about, where you disappear into an inner world of pure sensual adventure’.67 Yet for most women there was a need at some point to consider and communicate with partners, often men.
Autonomy in Relationships
Women were not looking for an autonomy that ‘promotes the sort of independence that involves disconnection from closer interpersonal involvement with others’.68 Rather, they sought to exercise autonomy within the context of their social relationships with others, including men. Open communication in marriage had been increasingly valued from the 1960s and, throughout the 1970s, many women sought to express their sexual needs more openly with their partners.69 There were, however, many women who still felt reluctant to raise issues. Beatrix Campbell was frank about the apprehension she felt when thinking about raising Koedt’s paper with her partner, Bobby. Reluctant to acknowledge her sexual dissatisfaction with Bobby, Campbell admitted that she never had the conversation with Bobby—‘I didn’t dare’.70
For many women, however, the WLM provided both the political framework and social support to tackle the issue in their relationships. Interviewed in 1971 by the Notting Hill Women’s Liberation Workshop group for the September issue of Shrew, a 25-year-old sales representative—Ros—said that she had previously been reluctant to discuss sex with a man.71 ‘I was brought up to think that the worst thing you could do to a man was to criticize his sexual technique.’ Prompted by her involvement with the WLM, Ros had decided ‘to be far more honest about sex and not be afraid to talk about it’. For some, the price of preserving the feelings of their partners at the expense of their own was too great. Responding angrily to the suggestion by Jacqueline Brandwynne in Cosmopolitan that women should not be honest about their experience of sex, Jill Marshall of Sussex asked: ‘How are women ever to discover and enjoy their own sexuality and achieve sexual equality when we are told to preserve the male ego whatever the cost to the relationship?’72 For those who were discussing sex with their partners, there was an increasing sense of male sexual insecurity and the ‘coaching’ by women was not always well received. In a 1981 issue of Spare Rib, Angela Hamblin quoted a woman for whom the discussion had been drawn out: ‘I know at first I said the same thing over and over again to B and he just didn’t hear me and then eventually he did … he started to hear … but even now there are things he doesn’t hear but I know in time he will … .’73 Two years later, another woman independently told Hamblin: ‘At first, he reacted by not understanding what I was saying; by becoming celibate for months on end; by becoming self-punitive and self-destructive; by being constantly perplexed and “trying-to-do-it-better”.’74 One of the common themes that emerged from Hamblin’s survey was the degree of effort and persistence that was needed, often running to many years, to make change in intimate relations. For many women, however, there was a prior question of what autonomy in sexual relations looked like. To communicate effectively in the first place, you needed to know what you wanted.
Redefining Sexual Pleasure
‘Orgasms were never going to be enough’, said Lynne Segal, ‘however autonomously we might control them’.75 Koedt’s pamphlet left many women with an ‘unease about such a mechanical approach to sex’ or troubled by the focus on orgasm.76 Very early on, Germaine Greer had expressed concern about ‘the substitution of the clitoral spasm for genuine gratification’ and a focus on the genitals—to be stimulated mechanically—rather than a focus on sexuality and the person as a whole.77 Similarly many were keen to emphasize a broader picture of sexuality that was not only less focused on penetration but also less focussed on orgasm.78 Reflecting on a conversation with friends in 1981, Angela Hamblin recalled:
We wanted to free ourselves from the limitations which patriarchal definitions had placed upon our sexuality. We wanted to discover more about our own bodies, responses and needs and to explore more open, less goal-oriented, forms of sexual pleasure.79
Reporting on the results of a survey of Spare Rib readers in 1983, Hamblin reported that, ‘in total contrast to the dull repetitiveness of the heterosexual ritual’, respondents focussed on ‘sensuous contact’ and ‘exploration’, as well as emphasizing a slowing down of sex.80 One respondent favoured ‘[s]pending a long time making love—slowly and sensuously without a mad dash for orgasm’. Others were more specific about the emotional content. One respondent mused: ‘What do I want? Affection, generosity, respect, excitement, exploration (of bodies, of emotions), the chance to develop, the chance to direct and control what’s happening.’ Lynne Segal wanted to explore the eroticism of power suggesting that ‘it is not necessarily orgasms that we are deprived of, but more likely any possible sexual scenarios for exploring and enjoying the contradictory tensions of erotic desire—dependence and strength, control and passivity, love and hate—in any playful, yet intense and pleasurable way’.81 For many women, however, power dynamics proved problematic rather than playful as they butted up against political theory. Some women felt uncomfortable if they responded—even in fantasies—to subordination. In her recent autobiography, Sheila Rowbotham shared her experience of this struggle: ‘David and I tried changing stereotypical male and female roles. I kept tabs on the pleasure I could feel in passivity and abandonment, wondering whether these indicated a furtive desire for coital subordination. But marking erotic responses did not eradicate them. They just sat tight in some remote corner of my being.’82 Rowbotham wasn’t alone. In an article written for The Observer in 1984, Minette Marrin reported that large numbers of women were similarly grappling with this difficulty of reconciling arousal through submissiveness with feminist emancipation.83 For Lynne Segal, this contradiction was a reflection of seeing sex as necessarily binary with an active, dominant participant and a passive, subordinate participant.84 She suggested that women should acknowledge and embrace the fact that sex involves vulnerability on the part of all participants, including men. While acknowledging that ‘no feminist can ignore the symbolism of “the sex act”, nor many men’s psychic compulsion, combined with their physical and/or social power, to coerce women into it’, Segal exhorted women to look beyond ‘conventional narratives of sexuality and gender difference’.85 For Segal, autonomy was the right to choose: ‘Every time women enjoy sex with men, confident in the knowledge that this, just this, is what we want, and how we want it, I would suggest, we are already confounding the cultural and political meanings given to heterosexuality in dominant sexual discourses. There “sex” is something “done” by active men to passive women, not something women do.’86 But to some women, there was only one possible power dynamic in a heterosexual relationship—the subordination of woman to a male oppressor. For that reason, they suggested, the only option for autonomy was for women to eschew relationships with men.
At the WLM Conference in London in 1977, Sheila Jeffreys held a workshop that established the Revolutionary Feminism network.87 Revolutionary Feminism posited that ‘men are the enemy’ who ‘colonise’ women through penetration.88 They charged that ‘every woman who engages in penetration bolsters the oppressor and reinforces the class power of men’.89 But avoiding penetration did not absolve a woman engaging in sex with a man from her culpability. According to the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists (LRF), all sex with a male was a form of acquiescing to, sanctioning, male power. ‘There is no such thing as “pure” sexual pleasure’, stated the LRF’.90 This was a stance that, in the words of Beatrix Campbell, ‘equated autonomy with separatism’.91 If sex with men was inherently problematic, then perhaps men should be taken out of the equation altogether.
The Coming out of the Political Lesbian
Political lesbianism, to use the American term, was the logical evolution of Revolutionary Feminism.92 It was a conscious rejection of oppression through the sexual act. Being lesbian was simply ‘better’ and was something that could be, and should be, chosen. The LRF elaborated: ‘The advantages include the pleasure of knowing that you are not directly servicing men, living without the strain of glaring contradiction in your personal life, uniting the personal and the political, loving and putting your energies into those you are fighting alongside rather than those you are fighting against and the possibility of greater trust, honesty and directness in your communication with women.’93 But what of desire? Elizabeth Wilson located political lesbianism in behaviourism that posited that ‘not only could you learn to have orgasms, you could also learn to respond sexually to women’.94 This, argued feminist Frankie Rickford, undermined the work that had been undertaken to revolutionize the sexuality and sexual lives of women. In a letter to WIRES, Rickford wrote: ‘The tragedy is that women’s tentative attempts to explore and reveal and challenge standard sexual practice have been killed stone dead by the two commandments that if you do it with women you’re OK and if you do it with men, you’re out.’95 For the LRF, however, the level of sexual desire for other women was less important than the rejection of sex with men. ‘Our definition of a political lesbian’, they claimed, ‘is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men’.96 In other words, you could be a political lesbian and not have sex with another woman.
Many feminists were to identify as ‘political lesbians’ but the degree to which their sexual lives involved an authentic desire for women and the extent to which they engaged in sexual practices with other women is opaque. However, it is clear that, political or otherwise, increasing numbers of women were choosing to identify as lesbian and share their lives with other women. Indeed, from the late 1960s, there was an increasing visibility of lesbians both in the WLM and across the general population. In 1978, the British edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves attributed a ‘freer expression of lesbianism’ to the WLM.97 For others, the WLM had a more direct impact in the transformation of their emotional and sexual lives.98 In an article by Sue Cartledge and Susan Hemmings in Spare Rib examining the reason why women became lesbian, one woman recalled that she noticed an attraction to women when attending the women’s liberation conferences. One woman they had spoken to about becoming lesbian explained: ‘I suppose my life had become more and more involved with women, and they seemed far more interesting than my husband, or any men, more exciting, more glamorous.’99 Cartledge and Hemmings added that, glamour aside, many women had developed strong friendships with other women in the WLM through spending a lot of time with them and that sexual relationships with other women represented ‘an extension of the closeness that grows up between women working together politically, and depending on each other, as well as enjoying more relaxed times’.100
Some women found themselves exploring sex with men and with women. Deborah Gregory, who had researched women’s bisexuality at the Third London Regional Women’s Liberation Conference in 1980, concluded that there were a significant number of feminists who identified, at least privately, as bisexual. ‘Many feminists’, she reported, ‘view their bisexuality not as a transition period to either lesbianism or heterosexuality, but see themselves as having made the transition to a positive acceptance of their bisexuality’.101 Speaking of her own sexuality, Gregory said that she ‘would only feel close to a man who could accept that sex was about me expressing my sexuality as much as about him expressing his, and that my sexuality did not consist in my responsiveness to him. Had I not found any man equal to that challenge’, she continued, ‘I would today identify as a lesbian’.102 Despite this commitment to ensuring the maintenance of self in her sexual relationships, Gregory acknowledged that ‘issues of personal autonomy and freedom within sexual relationships … are difficult and delicate balancing acts for all women’ and for some women, including Gregory, celibacy could provide a respite to this challenge.103
The Right to be Celibate
For members of US radical feminist collective Cell 16, celibacy was one of three essential practices in which women could liberate themselves, along with separatism and karate. Writing in 1968, Cell 16 member Dana Densmore argued that women invariably compromised themselves in sex noting, ‘[o]ne hangup to liberation is a supposed “need” for sex’.104 However, the position of Cell 16 was not commonly shared across feminist groups in the 1970s.105 In 1978, women were cautioned, in Our Bodies, Ourselves, that there were ‘some very real drawbacks to long periods of celibacy’ which included a lack of physical affection which is analogous to ‘a kind of starvation’.106 This attitude mirrored broader social attitudes to celibacy in which ‘celibacy was inextricably associated with repressed spinsters, and had been relegated to a shadowy past of outmoded morality’.107 However, by the late 1970s and into the 1980s, interest in celibacy as a choice was growing.
While references to celibacy in Spare Rib were sparse throughout the 1970s, notices of meetings, workshops, and even conferences started to appear from late 1979. Some explained the growing interest of women in celibacy as a ‘backlash against permissive culture’.108 Indeed, many women explained a desire to resist pressures around sex as the main reason for choosing to be celibate. In The New Celibacy: Why More Men and Women are Abstaining from Sex—and Enjoying It, the American psychologist Gabrielle Brown described the ‘new celibacy’ as a reaction to a social and cultural overemphasis on sex.109 Encouraging Spare Rib readers to read The New Celibacy, Elisabeth Hill from Ilford mirrored the sentiment emphasizing that women should have the ‘right to choose’ not to have sex without feeling inadequate or guilty.110 In her recent history of singleness, Emily Priscott suggests that ‘[i]n the new social climate, celibacy seemed like a backwards step, a renouncement of the bodily autonomy that Greer had fought for’, but for many women celibacy represented an option that was just part of their self-determined sexual lives.111 Sally Cline concluded from the interviews she conducted with women in Britain and North America: ‘All the reasons women give for celibacy are in some way related to a central notion of autonomy.’112 Furthermore, rather than celibacy being an act outside of sexuality, Cline argued that ‘the decision not to engage in sexual acts is undeniably a sexual statement’.113 Making this point, in 1980, the Celibacy Group renamed itself the Autonomy Group.114 For some, celibacy was not necessarily sexless. This was the distinction between celibacy—a choice—and asexuality—considered to be a more natural state of being without sexual urges. Celibacy, as discussed throughout the era, predominantly referred to an absence of sex with other people. It did not preclude masturbation. Even Cell 16 reluctantly suggested that women could relieve themselves through masturbation if necessary.
Many women saw celibacy as a legitimate part of, and consistent with, attachment. Sally Cline argued that ‘[t]he nature of the autonomy that celibate women are grasping for is significantly different from the traditional male view. It is a need for intimacy and independence which I have termed connected autonomy’.115 Many found value in celibacy as a means to deepen emotional connection with others and practiced an intentional celibacy, distinct from abstinence practiced for birth control, within their relationships.116 For others, celibacy was a way of recalibrating their sex lives. Some women found it difficult to understand their sexual needs and/or assert new patterns of sexual behaviour while sexually active. ‘Periods of celibacy’ were seen as a way for women to reset their relationship with sex. Writing for Spare Rib in 1981, Angela Hamblin reflected that it could be difficult for women to challenge the long-standing association of sex with penetration or to challenge the belief that all intimacy had to result in orgasm while in a sexually active relationship. Hamblin noted: ‘These periods of celibacy not only provided us with a breathing space within which we could begin to dismantle some of the long-established destructive patterns, but also gave us the opportunity to discover more about ourselves and our own needs’.117 For self-identified bisexual Deborah Gregory, celibacy provided an important respite to ‘get back to the core of who “we” are’, a process necessary to feeling connected to others without losing herself.118
Conclusion
The WLM disrupted a discourse about female sexuality that had persistently reflected that sexuality as both dependent on, and in binary opposition to, male sexuality. In this, it was unique. Writing in 1983, Lucy Bland situated the WLM in relation to the interests and concerns of feminists earlier in the twentieth century concluding that, while the WLM mirrored the concerns of the social purity feminists in demanding the right to say ‘no’ to sex, it also radically extended the reach of feminist concerns.119 It made a ‘claim [to] the right to be sexual’ in a way that was, amongst other things, ‘for the first time decentring heterosexuality from the dominant definition of sex, arguing for lesbianism as a political and not simply a personal choice, and for celibacy as an option that doesn’t necessarily spell no-sex, but sexual self-pleasure’.120 This was not just discussed in theoretical terms. Women thought about how the theory could, or should, apply to their personal lives. ‘The Women’s Movement changed me sexually’, declared 26-year-old Diane. ‘It’s made me aware of lesbian relationships, I know now I can enjoy women just as much as men. I know too if I want to have casual sex that I can do just that, you know bring a guy back to my place, I’m calling the shots too. When you become very aware of yourself you become confident, you realize you can have a relationship with somebody on your terms and that’s very important for women.’121
The significance of the WLM lay in both establishing a political framework that drew attention to women as an oppressed group (across all areas of their lives) and creating a social network to facilitate and support the work of women to challenge oppression. The WLM was fuelled by the local, regional, national and, even, transnational connections forged by women with each other. Through this network, thousands of women entered a shared discourse and formed relationships that would permanently alter their social landscape. Sarah Stoller draws attention to the ‘deep and enduring friendships forged through the WLM’ that were as new as they were comparatively intense.122 Like the adolescent girls described by Hannah Charnock, who looked to each other to test their understanding of sex and sexual currency, women in the WLM looked to each other to re-examine their sexuality, including the cultural construction of female sexuality.123 The network also provided women with considerable support and encouragement for experimentation with new ways of being sexual. At the same time, however, it was an environment in which women were vulnerable to scrutiny and assessment against feminist theories. While this encouraged women to re-evaluate the way they lived their lives, it also led to fissures across the movement as some women started to feel that other women were attempting to dictate the terms of their sexuality which, they argued, obviated the project of a self-determined sexuality.124 However, such differences and disputes should not be interpreted as diminishing the work undertaken by women to analyse the issue of autonomy in their sexual lives. Reflecting on similar work undertaken by the American WLM, Jane Gerhard explains that feminists ‘generated new accounts of American sexual thought … not through an orchestrated and coherent critique but through a range of writings from different and, at times, antithetical points of view’.125 In the same way, while much of the work undertaken by British feminists to disrupt British sexual norms appeared disjointed and, at times, antithetical, that work was also strongly connected by a concern with sexual autonomy. Involving thousands of women, each with different ideas about a fulfilled sexual life, there were bound to be differences of opinion but the conversation did not end with the fallout from the 1978 WLM Conference. Many of the references in this article source from the late 1970s and 1980s, some even from the 1990s. Importantly, the conversation extended not only through time (to inform future campaigns such as pornography and #metoo) but also in reach to women who did not necessarily identify with the WLM. This was not a niche movement. Thousands of women in the WLM were not only talking to each other but were taking the conversation into the mainstream. Adelaide Bry wrote in Cosmopolitan in 1975 of a ‘sexually aggressive woman’ who ‘is much less a type than she is a healthy strong personality who has taken it upon herself to define her own sexuality rather than allowing some man, or men, or the society at large to define it for her’.126 Almost ten years later, in 1984, feminist Eileen Fairweather discussed the merits of celibacy with Cosmopolitan readers while, in the same year, British psychologist Dr Anne Dickson—author of A Woman in Your Own Right (1982)—wrote about assertiveness in sexual relationships and facilitated ‘Cosmo’s Sexuality Seminar’.127 Even the readers of the more conservative Woman magazine were not immune with Virginia Ironside advising a reader to read The Female Eunuch.128
The sources analysed in this article do not permit an empirical assessment of the ways in which the WLM changed the sexual behaviours of women. They do make it clear, however, that the WLM at the very least changed the way in which large numbers of women thought and talked about their sexuality. A woman might still rely on her partner to take responsibility for her sexual pleasure. A woman might still be concerned to prioritize the desires and preferences of her partner. For many, however, these were now more self-conscious choices and perhaps the decades-long conversation and cumulative small actions ultimately created a little more space for women more generally—and not just feminists—to exercise a greater degree of sexual agency in their own interest.
Footnotes
In an account by Lindsay Mackie, ‘Guardian miscellany’, The Guardian (29 November 1973), 11.
For writing on women’s engagement with autonomy in the post-war period see, for instance, Lynn Abrams, ‘The self and self-help: Women pursuing autonomy in post-war Britain’, Transactions of the RHS, 29 (2019), 201–21; Emily Robinson et al., ‘Telling stories about post-war Britain: Popular individualism and the “crisis” of the 1970s’, Twentieth Century British History, 28 (2017), 268–304, Jon Lawrence, Me Me Me? The Search for Community in Post-War England (Oxford, 2019), and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, ‘Vernacular discourses of gender equality in the post-war British working class’, Past and Present, 254 (2022), 277–313.
Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson, ‘Vernacular Discourses of Gender Equality in the Post-war British Working Class’, at 286.
Betsy Ettorre, ‘The “perks” of Male Power’, in Scarlet Friedman and Elizabeth Sarah, eds, On the Problem of Men: Two Feminist Conferences (London, 1982), 214–26, at 225.
Callum Brown, ‘Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman c. 1950-75: The Importance of a “short” Sexual Revolution to the English Religious Crisis of the Sixties’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 189–215.
Alana Harris, ‘A Magna Carta for Marriage: Love, Catholic Masculinities and the Humanae Vitae Contraception Crisis in 1968 Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 17 (2020), 407–29; David Geiringer, ‘Catholic Understandings of Female Sexuality in 1960s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 28 (2017), 209–38.
Marcus Collins, Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2003); Ben Mechen, ‘“Instamatic living rooms of sin”: Pornography, Participation and the Erotics of Ordinariness in the 1970s’, Contemporary British History, 36 (2022), 174–206.
Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975 (Oxford, 2004), 331.
Sheila Jeffreys, Anti-Climax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (2nd edn, Victoria, 2012), 109.
Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970 – 1974 (London, 2011), 432. See also Collins, Modern Love, 176.
Brown, ‘Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman’, 194.
Journalist, David Bouchier who provided estimates of participation in 1983, is most commonly cited. At that time, while suggesting that there were, at most, 20,000 participants in the movement, Bouchier acknowledged that far more than this number had been seen at certain events, such as 60,000 women participating in demonstrations on abortion. Given that official circulation of just one of the feminist publications—Spare Rib—has generally been reported to be 25,000—with copies often shared beyond this number—Bouchier’s estimate for women engaged in feminist thought throughout the 1970s and 1980s seems very low. David Bouchier, The Feminist Challenge: the Movement for Women’s Liberation in Britain and the USA (London, 1983), 178. For a discussion of the circulation of Spare Rib, see Lucy Delap and Zoe Strimpel, ‘Spare Rib and the Print Culture of Women’s Liberation’, in Laurel Forster and Joanne Hollows, eds, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s : The Postwar and Contemporary Period (Edinburgh, 2020), 46–66.
Despite a noted lack of engagement by the WLM with the press (see Kaitlynn Mendes, ‘Reporting the Women’s Movement: News Coverage of Second-wave Feminism in UK and US Newspapers, 1968-1982, Feminist Media Studies, 11 (2011), 283–498, at 488), many feminists were writing for mainstream publications including Cosmopolitan, Nova and The Guardian throughout the period.
For an account of the diversity of the movement, see Sue Bruley, ‘“It didn’t just come out of nowhere did it?”: The Origins of the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1960s Britain’, Oral History, 45 (2017), 67–78.
The Tufnell Park group described a shared interest in an ‘analysis of the causes of women’s oppression and of the means to change it’ Shrew, 6 (October 1969), at 1.
Beatrix Campbell, ‘A Feminist Sexual Politics: Now you See it, now you don’t’, Feminist Review, 5 (1980), 1–18, at 1.
Hannah Charnock, ‘Teenage Girls, Female Friendship and the Making of the Sexual Revolution in England 1950-1980’, The Historical Journal, 63 (2020), 1032–53, at 1036.
Such as Stella Browne and Dora Marsden. See Lucy Bland, ‘Heterosexuality, Feminism and The Freewoman Journal in early Twentieth-century England’, Women’s History Review, 4 (1995), 5–23.
‘It is easy to forget how rare and genuinely shocking it was for British women to write/talk explicitly about sexuality in the 1970s.’ Hera Cook, ‘Angela Carter’s “The Sadeian Woman” and Female Desire in England 1960-1975’, Women’s History Review, 23 (2014), 938–956, at 939.
Lucy Delap, ‘Feminist Bookshops, Reading Cultures and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Great Britain, c.1974-2000’, History Workshop Journal, 81 (2016), 171–96, at 191. See also Sue Bruley and Laurel Foster, ‘Historicising the Women’s Liberation Movement’, Women’s History Review, 25 (2016), 697–700, at 699.
Jane Gerhard, ‘Revisiting “the myth of the vaginal orgasm”: The Female Orgasm in American Sexual thought and Second Wave Feminism’, Feminist Studies, 26 (Summer 2000), 449–76.
‘Liberation’, Women’s Report, 2 (July–August 1974), 19.
Spare Rib, 70 (May 1978). See also, Jeska Rees, ‘A Look Back at Anger: The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1978’, Women’s History Review, 19 (2010), 337–56.
‘Forum’, Spare Rib, 71 (June 1978), 34–35, at 34.
Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The struggle for Women’s Liberation (2nd edn, Oxford, 1987), 248.
Rees, ‘A Look Back at Anger’, at 349. See also Anna Gurun, Second-Wave Feminist Approaches to Sexuality in Britain and France, c. 1970 – 1983, PhD thesis, University of Dundee, (2015).
Coote and Campbell, Sweet Freedom, 249.
Jo Robinson, ‘Jo Robinson Discusses Sexual Pleasure’, interviewed between 11 November 2011–4 December 2012 for Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project, published 8 March 2013—https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/jo-robinson-sexual-pleasure accessed 26 March 2023.
The term ‘the personal is political’—which was adopted by feminists internationally—was the title of an essay by Carol Hanisch in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists (1970), at 76.
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Great Britain, 1971).
Barbara Hardy, ‘Consciousness Raising’, New York Times Book Review (6 September 1970, reprinted 6 October 1996), 96.
Millett, Sexual Politics, 118.
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London, 2012, first published London 1970), 17.
Greer, The Female Eunuch, 73.
Eva Figes, The Case for Women in Revolt: Patriarchal Attitudes (Greenwich, 1970), 48.
Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society (Victoria, 1972), 100.
Beatrix Campbell, ‘Sexuality and Submission’, Red Rag, 5 (1973), 91–94, at 91.
See, e.g. Marie Stopes, Married Love, ed. Ross McKibbin (Oxford, 2004); Theodoor. H. Van de Velde, M.D., Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (London, 1926); and Helena Wright, The Sex Factor in Marriage: A Book for Those Who Are or Are About to be Married (London, 1930).
Stopes, Married Love, 37 (emphasis in original).
‘[Stopes’] main contribution was the construction of an autonomous female sexuality, which existed independently of male sexuality, and provided a realistic basis for a more equal interaction with men in the context of her own time.’ Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution, at 192.
Stopes, Married Love, 63.
Margaret Jackson, The Real Facts of Life: Feminism and the Politics of Sexuality c1850-1940 (London, 1994), 141. (emphasis in original)
Stopes, Married Love, 62. Compare Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, 166.
Ellen Holtzman, ‘The Pursuit of Married Love: Women’s Attitudes Toward Sexuality and Marriage in Great Britain, 1918-1939’, Journal of Social History, 16 (Winter 1982), 39–51, at 45.
Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 (Oxford, 2006), 215.
Kate Fisher, ‘Lay Back, Enjoy it and Shout Happy England: Sexual Pleasure and Marital Duty in Britain, 1918-60’, in Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan, eds, Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (Basingstoke, 2011), 181–200.
Evelyn Home, ‘Evelyn Home – After a baby’, Woman (11 March 1967), 76.
Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge, 2010), 320.
Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, 323. See also, Fisher, ‘Lay Back, Enjoy it and Shout Happy England’.
See e.g. Women’s Liberation Workshop Fourth Weekly Newsheet [Sic], (8 October 1970), 3. See also Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (London, 2015, first published 1973).
Angela Hamblin, ‘The Suppressed Power of Female Sexuality’, Shrew, 4 (December 1972), 1-2, at 1.
Pat Whiting, ‘Female Sexuality: Its Political Implications’, in Michelene Wandor, ed., The Body Politic: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain 1969-1972 (London, 1972), 189–213, at 204.
Whiting, ‘Female Sexuality’, 201.
Kevan Wylie, ‘Masters and Johnson – their Unique Contribution to Sexology’, BJPsych Advances, 28 (2022), 163–65.
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans and revised by James Strachey (New York, 1975), 87.
Anne Koedt, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, Paper presented for the Women’s Liberation Conference in Chicago during Thanksgiving, 1968.
Kate Fisher has observed that many women ‘denied knowledge of the marriage advice literature, revealed only partial awareness of its existence, or even demonstrated hostility to its message’. Fisher, ‘Lay Back, Enjoy it and Shout Happy England’, 184.
Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists (New York, 1970), 37–47. In Britain, one of the distribution points was the London Women’s Liberation Workshop (See, e.g. Shrew (February/March 1970), at 2.
Extract from an interview for Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project by the British Library and the University of Sussex, recorded 6–7 September 2010, extract accessed from https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/beatrix-campbell-consequences-of-sexual-pleasure accessed 26 March 2023.
Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (Harmondsworth, 1971), 61–63.
Sue Bruley, ‘Consciousness-raising in Clapham: Women’s Liberation as “lived experience” in South London in the 1970s’, Women’s History Review, 22 (2013), 717–38, at 729.
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women (New York, 1971).
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Health Book By and For Women, eds, Angela Phillips and Jill Rakusen (1971, British edition London, 1978).
Phillips and Rakusen, Our Bodies, Ourselves, at 136.
Anne Hooper, The Body Electric (London, 1980).
Eleanor Stephens had been a member of the Boston Women’s Health Collective before moving to London and joining the Spare Rib collective. She was a regular contributor to Spare Rib with a particular focus on sex and sexual politics.
Hooper, The Body Electric, 3.
Marilyn Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships: Rethinking the Feminist Critique’, in Diana Tietjens Meyers, ed., Feminists Rethink the Self (New York, 1997), 40–61, at 40.
Lesley Hall locates ‘greater sexual openness between the sexes’ from the 1950s. Lesley Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950 (Cambridge, 1991), 82. See also Martin Richards and B. Jane Elliott, ‘Sex and marriage in the 1960s and 1970s’, in David Clark, ed., Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change: Writings for Jacqueline Burgoyne, 1944-88 (London, 1991), 28–46.
Extract from an interview for Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project by the British Library and the University of Sussex, recorded 6–7 September 2010, extract accessed from http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/beatrix-campbell-consequences-of-sexual-pleasure accessed 26 March 2023.
Notting Hill Women’s Liberation Workshop, Shrew, 3 (September 1971), 6.
Letter to ‘Dear Cosmopolitan’, Cosmopolitan (November 1975), 232.
Angela Hamblin, ‘Taking Control of our Sex Lives’, Spare Rib, 104 (March 1981), from 6, at 7.
Hamblin surveyed 200 women (readers of Spare Rib) receiving 84 responses. Angela Hamblin, ‘Is a feminist heterosexuality possible?’, in Sue Cartledge and Joanna Ryan, eds, Sex & Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions (London, 1983), 105–23, at 122.
Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure (London, 1991), 44.
Sheila Rowbotham, Review of The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975 by Hera Cook, The English Historical Review, 121 (June 2006), 896–8, at 897.
Greer, The Female Eunuch.
See, e.g. Hamblin, ‘Taking Control of Our Sex Lives’.
Hamblin, ‘Taking Control of Our Sex Lives’, at 6.
Hamblin, ‘Is a Feminist Heterosexuality Possible?’, at 118.
Lynne Segal, ‘Sensual Uncertainty, or Why the Clitoris is not Enough’, in Cartledge and Ryan, Sex & Love, 30–47 at 46.
Sheila Rowbotham, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s (London, 2021), 36.
Minette Marrin, ‘A Bandwagon Named Desire’, The Observer (19 February 1984), 45.
Segal, Straight Sex.
Segal, Straight Sex, 240 and 245.
Segal, Straight Sex, 266. More recently, Lucy Delap has explored the responses of anti-sexist men to feminist perspectives of sex including the connections drawn by women between sex and violence in the late 1970s and 1980s in particular, with responses ranging from inventive forms of experimentation in an effort to move away from penetration to degrees of sexual paralysis experienced by some men. For other men, it led to exploring sex with other men. Lucy Delap, ‘Rethinking Rapes: Men’s Sex Lives and Feminist Critiques’, Contemporary British History, 36 (2022), 253–76.
‘Women’s Liberation 1977’, Spare Rib, 58 (May 1977), from 6, at 12.
Sandra McNeill et al., ‘Revolutionary Feminism: Statement from the 1st year’, Women’s Liberation Movement Conferences 1970-1978, Sally Alexander Papers, The Women’s Library, LSE 7SAA/1 Folder 8; and Love your Enemy? The Debate between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism (London, 1981), 5.
Love your Enemy?, 6.
Love your Enemy?, 7.
Beatrix Campbell, ‘A Feminist Sexual Politics’, at 3.
The LRF discussed the provenance of the expression in Love your Enemy?, 67.
Love your Enemy?, 9.
Elizabeth Wilson, ‘I’ll Climb the Stairway to Heaven: Lesbianism in the Seventies’, in Cartledge and Ryan, Sex & Love, 180–95, at 186.
Love your Enemy?, 11.
Love your Enemy?, 5.
Phillips and Rakusen, Our Bodies, Ourselves, 87.
Historian Margaretta Jolly suggests that ‘a minimum of 250,000 queer women over seventy today owe their sense of sexuality in part to the WLM’, See Margaretta Jolly, ‘After the Protest’, in Kristina Schulz, ed., The Women’s Liberation Movement: Impacts and Outcomes (New York and Oxford, 2017), 298–319, at 311. See also Sue Bruley, ‘Women’s Liberation at the Grass Roots: A View from some English Towns, c.1968–1990’, Women’s History Review, 25 (2016), 723–40.
Cartledge and Hemmings, ‘How Did we Get this Way?’, Spare Rib, 86 (September 1979), from 43, at 46.
Cartledge and Hemmings, ‘How Did we Get this Way?’.
Deborah Gregory, ‘From Where I Stand: A Case for Political Bisexuality’ (dated May 1981), Papers of Amanda Sebestyen. The Women’s Library, LSE Folder 7SEB/A/16 (Unpublished Papers, articles, discussions on sexuality), 4. An abridged version of this paper—titled ‘From where I stand: A case for feminist bisexuality’—was later published in Cartledge and Ryan, Sex & Love, 141–56.
Gregory, ‘From Where I Stand’, 12.
Gregory, ‘From Where I Stand’, 15.
Dana Densmore, ‘On Celibacy’, No more Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation, 1 (1968), no page numbers.
Echols, Daring to be Bad, 158.
Phillips and Rakusen, Our Bodies, Ourselves, 85.
Emily Priscott, Singleness in Britain, 1960-1990: Identity, Gender and Social Change (Delaware, 2020), 23.
Priscott, Singleness in Britain, 1960-1990, xv.
Gabrielle Brown, The New Celibacy: Why More Men and Women are Abstaining from Sex – and Enjoying It (New York, 1980).
‘A good sex book …’ in ‘Letters: A good sex book …’, Spare Rib, 102 (January 1981), 4.
Priscott, Singleness in Britain, 1960-1990, 26. Compare Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London, 1985), 18–19.
Sally Cline, Women, Passion and Celibacy (New York, 1993), 111.
Cline, Women, Passion and Celibacy, 3.
Spare Rib, 96 (July 1980), 29.
Cline, Women, Passion and Celibacy, 115.
Brown, The New Celibacy, 110. See also Liz Hodgkinson who claimed that celibacy had improved both her own and her husband’s wellbeing, in Lorna Hogg, ‘Today Lifestyles: “Sex is not compulsory …”’, Evening Herald (Dublin) (Monday 18 May 1987), 11.
Hamblin, ‘Taking Control of Our Sex Lives’, at 7.
Gregory, ‘From Where I Stand’, 21.
Lucy Bland, ‘Purity, Motherhood, Pleasure or Threat? Definitions of Female Sexuality 1900-1970s’, in Cartledge and Ryan, Sex and Love, 8-29, at 28–29.
Bland, ‘Purity, Motherhood, Pleasure or Threat?’, 29 (emphasis in original).
Diane, age 26, quoted in Rosita Sweetman, On Our Backs: Sexual Attitudes in a Changing Ireland (London, 1979), 201.
Sarah Stoller, ‘Forging a Politics of Care: Theorizing Household Work in the British Women’s Liberation Movement’, History Workshop Journal, 85 (2018), 95–119, 111.
Charnock, ‘Teenage Girls, Female Friendship and the Making of the Sexual Revolution in England 1950-1980’.
‘Anger and resentment against the new radical feminist denunciation of heterosexuality was expressed by many straight feminists, particularly by socialist feminists. We began to avoid each other, and open feminist gatherings became increasingly stormy and unpleasant places to be.’ Lynne Segal, Straight Sex, 58. Angela Hamblin pointed out that, for many women, ‘transforming the basis upon which we are prepared to share our sexuality with men’ represented a largely ‘private struggle which, despite the support which many individual women have given each other, has not been validated by the women’s liberation movement as a whole’, in ‘Is a feminist heterosexuality possible?’, at 105. See also Athina Tsoulis, ‘Heterosexuality – A feminist option?’, Spare Rib, 179 (1987), from 22 and Beatrix Campbell, ‘A Feminist Sexual Politics’.
Gerhard, ‘Revisiting “the myth of the vaginal orgasm”’, at 450.
Adelaide Bry, ‘The Sexually Aggressive Woman’, Cosmopolitan (July 1975), from 98, at 98. Other regular contributors to Cosmopolitan who tackled issues of sexuality included Catherine Storr, Anne Hooper, Carol Dix, Eva Figes, Sheila Kitzinger, and Anna Raeburn.
Eileen Fairweather, ‘No Sex Please, I’m having a Break!’, Cosmopolitan (October 1984), from 158; Anne Dickson, ‘Breaking the Sexual Silence’, Cosmopolitan (May 1985), from 156.
Virginia Ironside, ‘The Little Woman’, Woman (28 June 1980), 68.
