I was radicalised on a hot day in Leicester in 1989. A handful of men were drinking outside a pub. Something about their liveliness set me on edge: I was walking alone and knew they would not let me pass without incident.
A slug-like man — weak eyelids, swollen mouth — grabbed me from behind and anchored my waist with his forearm. He smeared his fingers across my breasts, thrust his groin against my backside and blew salty lager breath in my ear. When I recoiled, he lifted me in the air. I kicked out like a dying fly. Then he released me, adding a shove as I hit the pavement. I ran. I could hear him laughing streets away.
I was 21. Such entitled, casual attacks happened all the time. Later, still reeling, I told my housemate about Slug-Man. She said my real struggle was not with him. It was with those who had encouraged him through a culture of sexual aggression or indifference: police, pornographers, lawmakers.
Women, she said, would never be free from physical violence until this was confronted. My housemate had joined a local anarchist group, and some of the female members were breaking away into a feminist faction. They wanted to force a women’s revolution. Would I like to join?
I spent six months as a radical feminist. That period has been on my mind ever since Susan Fowler, a former engineer with the tech company Uber, published her now famous blog post in February last year: a disarmingly factual account of the same sort of persistent harassment my friends and I faced nearly 30 years ago, combined with undisguised discrimination. It included her “high performer” boss propositioning her for sex on her first day at work.
Fowler’s account led to the downfall of some prominent men, and more women in tech came forward. Then we learnt about the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Revelations and resignations swept through media, politics, banking, public and corporate life.
Before February 2017, I had lost patience with feminism. I may not have kept up, but in recent years the movement felt moribund: well-behaved marches; a few conflicted US writers; a small, persistent sense of unfairness. When I read Fowler’s blog post, I understood in a flash the failures, successes and limitations of my radical feminism of 30 years ago. I also saw that today, unlike then, there is every reason to be optimistic.
I turned up to my first meeting of the Leicester Women’s Anarchist Group in January 1990. Civil disobedience was in the air: demonstrations against the Thatcher government’s poll tax were about to erupt; whispers of illegal mass parties in the countryside turned into thrilling late-night adventures.
The women at the meeting were mostly in their twenties, organised, highly articulate and furious — a potent combination. Most had been attacked and harassed by men. My encounter with Slug-Man was far from the worst of it.
They quoted US radicals: Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller. A well-thumbed copy of Alice Echols’ Daring to be Bad — a history of women’s civil disobedience in the US in the 1960s and 1970s — was passed around.
We were brought together by an overwhelming sense of physical danger. We had good reason to feel unsafe: rape within marriage, for example, was still legal (it would be criminalised in England and Wales a year later). Even now, two women are killed each week in England and Wales by a partner or ex-partner, according to official statistics.
We chose our weapons: surrealism, humour, illegality, direct action. Civil debate and peaceful demonstration had let us down. Full of crazy hope, we wrote a manifesto. I still have a copy.
“Shows of defiance against those who hold power reminds the oppressors that their power can only be temporary. This hierarchy exists only to those men and women who have been numbed into passive acceptance.”
Just as my group got started, a 20-year-old woman, Michelle Raynor, was murdered in Leicester. Her body was left in a cinema car park. The killing was a sex crime, and it gave us focus. We organised a “Reclaim the Night” march — a women-only protest begun in the US about a decade earlier — promoting it with home-made leaflets. Fifty people turned up, according to a report in the local newspaper.
In the same edition, a story appeared with the headline: “Woman in canal”, about an inquest into the death of a woman whose body had been found with multiple injuries. Her boyfriend had given evidence and the coroner recorded an open verdict. “Their relationship . . . became stormy with frequent arguments, sometimes resulting in her being physically assaulted,” the coroner said. “The evidence before me is insufficient to show how she came to be in the water.”
We chose our weapons: surrealism, illegality, direct action. Civil debate and peaceful demonstration had let us down
It was time to step up the pressure. As well as feminist literature, we passed around Society of the Spectacle, a 1967 work by French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord. We were struck by his call for “radical action in the form of the construction of situations . . . that bring a revolutionary re-ordering of life, politics and art”.
Our group was not the first to bring such tactics to women’s rights. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the suffragettes had mastered the Situationist stunt before the term had been invented. They stamped circulating coins with the slogan “Votes for Women”, placing their message at the centre of everything. We found the idea thrilling and wanted to find a way to do the same.
In 1986, Clare Short, a Labour MP, had tried and failed to introduce a parliamentary bill to ban pornographic pictures in newspapers. The Sun — by the end of the 1980s, the UK’s most popular newspaper, with four million copies sold daily — featured a topless woman, the “Page 3 girl”, every day. The youngest model was 16. Other tabloids carried similar images.
Short said she objected to “the constant proliferation of women in poses with captions that say, ‘Take me, use me, dispose of me.’” She tried to introduce another bill in 1988, and failed. But by 1990 her supporters had launched a direct-action campaign, Off the Shelf, encouraging women to confront high-street newsagents.
Today, Page 3 seems mild — something akin to a seaside postcard. But to our group, those images were a banal entry point to the rot that had killed Raynor, led to the coroner’s conclusion in the case of the woman in the canal and encouraged aggressors like Slug-Man.
How was Susan Fowler able to advance feminism with a few thousand words, when we failed to make a dent after months of effort?
One Saturday, a dozen of us stormed the Leicester city centre branch of WH Smith. We wore face scarves, brandished bin bags and shouted: “Fight the oppression!” and “Women are angry now!” We scooped up copies of The Sun and stuffed them in the bin bags. We hurled copies of Playboy and Penthouse all over the floor, then trampled on the bin bags and the magazines and dumped the lot on the counter, where a young female shop assistant looked like she might cry. Then we marched out, shouting “Take control!” at bystanders.
I still think of the frightened shop worker. In 1990, we were full of righteous indignation. If we upset people, that was the point. Now I can see how our fury might have made her feel unsafe in the place she worked.
Recently, I called Clare Short. I wanted to ask why she had persisted with her campaigns in the face of defeat and ridicule. In 1986, The Sun called her “Crazy Clare”. Commentators in the national media accused her of being against sexual pleasure and screwed up about her own sexuality. One Conservative MP, Robert Adley, ignored instruction from the Speaker of the House of Commons to treat the bill seriously. He said: “There are few pleasures left to us today. One that I enjoy is sitting on the Underground, watching the faces of the people who are pretending not to be looking at Page 3. If the Hon Lady has her way, we will be deprived of that pleasure.”
Short is now 72. When she answers the phone, her gruff determination is immediately familiar. Of course she could not give up, she says. Thousands of women wrote letters of support, which she later published in a book. They were “eloquent, moving and powerful — a wave of women telling me they felt the same way”.
Was she hurt by the criticism? “No. Those images demeaned everyone. They took away the tenderness of sex.”
The Sun’s Page 3 brazened it out in print for another quarter of a century, finally disappearing in 2015, three years after the cause was resurrected by a new generation of campaigners.
One morning in April 1990, Leicester woke to find its Victorian public monuments wrapped in enormous reams of paper bearing the slogan: “Rape=Porn Porn=Rape”. Emboldened by the poll tax riots in London, we had gone on a graffiti and fly-posting run across the city. The evidence for our assertion was thin — even today, researchers disagree about the real-world impact of pornography. We had also printed 500 “Leicestershire Police” notices announcing a curfew on men after 7pm, looping them around lamp posts. Many people assumed they were real. The local paper ran another story: who were the city’s band of radical feminists?
Sometimes more destructive acts of vandalism were mooted. But I wanted to take up a place on a postgraduate course in another city, and knew that a criminal record would damage my prospects. Radicalism turned out to have limits, and self-interest was one of them. By July, I had moved, and I eventually lost touch with most of the other women.
In the end, our group disbanded, defeated and burnt out with fury. Page 3 girls continued their daily parade; Off the Shelf faded away too; the local paper reported more grim stories of violence against women. Perhaps the end was inevitable. We had few resources: graffiti, home-made leaflets, posters and scrappy, photocopied zines. We had caught the attention of a few hundred women who turned up to our events after reading about our antics in the local newspaper.
How was Susan Fowler able to advance feminism with a few thousand words, when we failed to make a dent after months of effort? One answer lies in technology — a resonant message today can reach millions in hours rather than hundreds in months. #Metoo and #timesup allow women to find one another easily and instantly.
Fowler’s version of direct action was also more intelligent and level-headed than our grandiose protests in a provincial city. But there are similarities: she confronted authority with a fearless, factual account, in her own name and using that of the organisation that treated her so badly. She was disobedient in that she ignored rules about how women are supposed to behave.
Analogue feminist protest is still alive and still noisy. Last month, women stormed a board meeting of Save the Children to demand the charity’s leaders take responsibility for failing to protect staff from sexual harassment. In February, Sisters Uncut, another protest group, invaded the Baftas to protest against a UK domestic violence bill.
Failure often leads to retreat, but history has shown that it is usually shortlived. In the past, it was hard to mobilise numbers, but that has changed. Today’s young women have the means — and the reach — to succeed.
Helen Barrett is the FT’s work and careers editor
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