Fissures at the Birmingham WLM Day Conferences
1978
Birmingham
Women's Liberation Day Conferences were held regularly at Tindal Street
School, Balsall Heath. “There was a lot of paranoia at the time, but it
was interesting. I remember the one conference where we were saying
that the local Women's Liberation Movement, is anti-lesbian. It wasn’t
just the revolutionary feminists who were saying this conference is
anti-lesbian and we’re not going to do it again; the differences
outweigh the commonalities, especially around race and sexuality. It
fissured around that one issue. It’s difficult to distinguish between
Revolutionary Feminism stuff and the sexuality stuff, because they got
very mixed up together. But I thought that maybe it didn’t matter if it
fell apart around race and sexuality, because just being a woman wasn’t
enough of a common bond to hold us all together. I wasn’t over anxious
about it but it was an upsetting time. It was naïve to think it could
stretch to accommodate the degree of difference. There were a lot of
women, lesbian and heterosexual, who found the politics and tensions
too much. It did get quite tense and split, but we always prided
ourselves at being able to get on regardless. From our point of view as
revolutionary feminists we thought we were much nicer and more open and
less uptight than the Leeds and London lot. In Birmingham we just tried
to get on with it. For other women, it often felt very extreme. It was
a strange place to be. There are a lot of people around who still have
very strong feelings about what happened, and very different memories.
It amazes me how strongly women still feel about it.”
Contributed by: Trisha McCabe, 51