You are not logged in. Signup to contribute or login! Not recieved your activation email? Click here to send it again.

Thatcherism negated need for extremism in feminism

1988


“Since the 1980s the whole political landscape has shifted so massively, it’s broadened out a lot, the changes are quite positive, it’s a kind of post-modernism thing. We () were on the extremes, and I thought the extreme plays quite a role in being innovative and stimulating different ways of thinking, it’s where you get new and different ideas, a lot of them are crap but one or two filter through into the mainstream. Thatcherism changed everything, you could see the left fall apart, you could see the impact of it on , equality politics, , and being became irrelevant when everything else was so far right. When you shift politics to the right that far, the extreme becomes much less relevant and it became clearer that building alliances was more important, and the personal damage we did to each other, the slit your throat as soon as look at you kind of stuff, was just incredible”. I found it astonishing to find myself saying ‘We’re defending liberal values’, when liberal was a dirty word to me, and now here I am saying, ‘We’ve got to stop liberal being a dirty word from the right, when it used to be a dirty word from the left’.”

Contributed by: Trisha McCabe, 51

Click here to read the full interview with this contributor