The feminist spectrum: from self help to women's liberation in 1960s and 1970s Britain
In 1982,in an article celebrating twenty years of the National Housewives Register, Mary Stott, former editor of the Guardian Women’s page, urged social historians to take serious note of this organisation and its sister self-help groups which that newspaper had done so much to nurture. Their existence, she argued, was evidence of an ‘assertion of women’s purposeful independence’ and demonstrated that the climate was ripe for the consciousness-raising of the seventies.’ These women’s groups were ‘a bridge between two phases of a lively-minded woman’s career’ and a model of women’s networking which, she suggested women’s liberation might do well to emulate. This paper argues that women’s groups across the ‘feminist spectrum’ were part of an upsurge in grass-roots or community or voluntary activism, implementing change in a range of domains from health to childcare. These women had discovered an autonomy that was dependent upon mutually constitutive social connections, especially with other women, in self-help groups relating to children and the family or in the workplace. They created nourishing empathetic communities that allowed them to express their feelings in a safe space. This, according to one spokesperson was the ‘real women’s lib’.
Professor Lynn Abrams is Chair in Modern History at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on gender history, Scottish history and oral history. Her latest book is ‘Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings and the Self in Post-War Britain’ (OUP, 2023).
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This page was last updated on 30 June 2024
