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 (revolutionary feminists) 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 race,
equality politics, women's politics, and being revolutionary feminist
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