Chaos and hostility at the WLM Conference, 1978
1978
Betty: “[Women’s Liberation Conference]s at that point were annual conferences,
the last one, was in Birmingham in 1978, at a school in Ladywood.
Different women’s and lesbian groups took responsibility for certain
things. The Socialist feminists were terribly organised and did vast
amounts of the catering because they could be relied upon.
Anarcho-feminists would organise things in a rather vaguer manner. Two
things, however, were really awful, the plenary and the disco.
At the
end of the evening, some of the women refused to stop dancing and
refused to leave the disco and that put those of us who were organising in a very
difficult position. a) We were paying for the premises and we had an
agreement with the caretaker; the caretaker wanted to go home, we
wanted to go home having been there since some unreasonable hour that
morning and it really did feel like sisters turning on us. There were
lots of accusations about us being fascists, trying to stop people
having fun. These weren’t Birmingham women, just visitors to the
conference. It was really hard to deal with. At the plenary there were
a lot of women shouting at each other and shouting each other down. It
was chaotic and it was hostile.”
Gill: “I had come from a Labour Party
background where you had procedures for running meetings, you had a
chair, a secretary, you took it in turns to speak, and you couldn’t
speak in a debate more than once. Women were saying ‘We want to reject
this, this is patriarchal, this is constraining, this gives too much
power to the people on the committee’. I could see where this came
from, but with no structure whatsoever, you had absolute chaos. People
weren’t listening to each other. One of the things about the Quakers is that we listen a lot, and this was difficult to take.”
B: “There
was a sense from both that and the disco episode of just women
disrespecting other women. It really did virtually end Women’s
Liberation in Birmingham. I felt so bruised and I certainly knew women
who said ‘If that’s what this is about, it’s not for me’. And there
were the women who had defined themselves as lesbian returning to the
straight world.”
G: “There were women who I identified as being
‘political lesbians’, who thought that if you were going to be ‘women
identified’ you had to be lesbian, which isn’t necessarily the case.”
B:
“It was awful and it took a while for people to lick their wounds after
that. There was also the feeling that women in Birmingham had put a
vast amount of effort into the organising and who were then shat upon.
The disagreements were from women from outside of Birmingham and the
women who felt most hurt by it were the women from Birmingham who had
done all the organising. Birmingham women felt attacked. And that was
the last major conference.”
Contributed by: Gill Coffin, 63, Betty Hagglund, 50