This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 35, Summer 1997.
The late 1980s were a period of intense debate, conflict, challenge and change within feminism and for feminists. Here Sarah Green reflects on the differences between then and now, and tries to do justice to the complex lived history of lesbian separatists in London.
I glanced across the House of Lords gallery at a small group of women gathered in one of the visitors’ boxes on the other side. I recognised them from Lesbians Against the Clause meetings, and I was enjoying the contrast between this wood-panelled bastion of the Establishment and those women. But I also suspected they were up to something, as they looked more nervous than the rest of us when they had passed the security people earlier on, and although it was warm in the gallery, they had all failed to remove their heavy coats.
It was February 2, 1988, and the Lords had just finished debating Clause 28 of the Local Government Bill, which prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’. They were now voting on the Clause. My attention was drawn away from the women opposite and back to the floor tens of feet below, as the vote was being called. In their wisdom, the Lords decided that the Clause should remain in the Bill as it was.
Seconds later, a commotion broke out, and what has now become a famous event was unfolding before me. The group of women opposite had tied ropes to the rail and were abseiling down them into the floor of the House. The ropes were a bit too short, but they managed to get on to the floor anyway, and one of them even managed to get half way to the Queen’s throne (she later explained she wanted to denounce the Clause from there) before being grabbed by one of the liveried security guards and, securely held around the waist, dragged kicking and yelling out of the chamber.
The good Lords were stunned; some of the gay men in the Visitors’ Gallery were appalled, and one of them rushed into my visitors’ box to complain that this kind of behaviour would ruin the reputation of the campaign against Clause 28. The Stop the Clause campaign and the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Activists (OLGA) had made similar complaints against a Lesbians Against the Clause demonstration at Piccadilly Circus, and had told their own members to boycott it. These organisations knew that Lesbians Against the Clause had a considerable number of lesbian feminist separatists amongst its members. Such women argued against the Clause on the grounds that lesbianism should be promoted, and for the same reason as those in favour of the Clause sought to pass the law: promotion of lesbianism might help to undermine the ‘fabric of British society’, which, as far as many separatists were concerned, was oppressively patriarchal and needed to be undermined. Stop the Clause and OLGA were arguing instead that Clause 28 was against the spirit of civil rights, and anyway, the idea that you could ‘promote’ homosexuality was ridiculous. The lesbian feminist separatists were once again getting in the way. On May 28 1988, they would also get in the way of Sue Lawley as she tried to read out the BBC’s Six O’clock News and four women chained themselves to her desk and shouted anti-Clause 28 slogans from around her feet. The Sun later faithfully reported two of the women’s names as Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, not having read up on their lesbian history.
Researching lesbian separatism
That’s how my eighteen months with lesbian feminist separatists in London started. The idea of doing the research began in 1985, while I was living in Islington for a short while. I met separatists for the first time then, and while I was intrigued by what they had to say, I didn’t understand, and I wanted to. Not that I understood anything much about London or Britain either at the time, as I’d grown up on a small island in Greece, and since leaving it, I’d first lived in small parochial towns and then regularly shunted between Britain, the USA and Italy. As a result, I was confused about most things that people did and said. Oh, I’d read about various feminisms, and labelled myself a feminist if anyone asked, but I was an intellectual feminist. I never stayed anywhere long enough to get involved in any organisations or movements. I was always on the outside looking in.
The combination of coming across separatists and realising I knew little about either them or London more generally, and the fact that I’d recently finished an anthropology degree, led me to decide to do the research. Books weren’t enough; I’d read so many books about feminist theory and sexuality that they were coming out of my ears, and they didn’t make me understand what was going on in London, which was clearly about much more than just feminist theory. I wanted to know about living it, about the experience of it in daily life. My own experience was too all over the place to make any sense.
I was constantly plagued by the ethics of what I was doing, despite my being as open as possible with women about the research. Simply advertising yourself doesn’t change the fact that you’re poking around in other people’s lives. I was so troubled by this problem that I delayed publishing anything on it for several years after I finished the research. Three things eventually made me break my silence. First, I’d promised a lot of women that they weren’t wasting their time sharing their thoughts and lives with me, because I would, as faithfully as possible, write them down and publish them. Second, I’d read so much that I felt misrepresented separatists, except from separatists themselves, that I wanted to try and even the balance a little. And third, I had learned such a lot from these women, not only about separatism, feminism and lesbianism, but also about London, about being a person in the late modern age, about what is going on around us all, that I thought it was worth sharing, even though I could never replace the things they themselves have said and written. The following is my small contribution.
Awkward cusses
The years I was doing the research, 1988 and 1989, was a strange time for London in general, borne of a backlash against everything the Greater London Council (GLC) under Ken Livingstone had done until it was abolished by Thatcher’s government in 1986. This included a GLC-led ‘positive images’ campaign on behalf of lesbians and gay men, and Clause 28 was a backlash against it. The events surrounding Clause 28 showed me two things I would carry with me over the next months: that separatists were as much a part of London as anyone else; but also that a lot of people, even those with whom separatists shared some public spaces in London (the wider lesbian and gay community, other feminist groups) found separatists to be awkward cusses and wished they would just be quiet. Separatists were many things during my time in London, but quiet was never one of them. Such women had a reputation, especially among people who’d never met any, of being the ‘shock troops’ of feminism, of being man-hating, bad-tempered, loud-mouthed, ‘urban amazons’ with no sense of humour and who had a tendency to rip your head off if you said the wrong thing. To me, that meant separatists were strongly committed to what they believed in and were therefore liable to express their opinions loudly and often. Frankly, I admired that; women haven’t made many gains over the years by being polite and popular. Anyway, the abseiling incident proved well enough that they had a fairly good sense of humour given the right circumstances, but I’m talking about reputations here.
It was also a strange kind of time for separatists. Repeatedly, women I spoke to said they felt something was changing, but they weren’t quite sure in what direction, except that it felt like a fragmentation of something, that things were cracking at the seams somehow. Some spoke of a ‘siege mentality’, referring to the ongoing battles around identity politics, particularly concerning race, but also about lesbian sexuality and sexual desire, prompted by an increasing number of women whom many separatists labelled ‘libertarians’. The name was intended to indicate that such women were profoundly anti-feminist and were promoting forms of sexual expression amongst lesbians which were pornographic and ‘pro-S/M’; that is, ‘libertarians’ were promoting precisely the kinds of sexual relations which separatism, based either on radical or revolutionary feminist ideas or a combination of both, argued were the foundations of heteropatriarchy.
And while separatists were battling against a ‘libertarian’ invasion of their space in London, others were challenging separatists’ approach towards differences between women, particularly in terms of race. One of my life-history interviewees, whom I call Nicola, a separatist at the time, put it this way:
there was a strong tendency that if you put one foot wrong, you were damned for the rest of your life. And of course that’s very frightening. It always was like that, there always was an element of that. But when we’re talking about ‘hey, you white fucking racist’, that’s an awful lot heavier, being called that, than another white feminist saying, ‘gee, I think you’re anti-feminist.’ There’s a huge difference.2
I myself experienced a great deal of this ‘siege mentality’, most especially through a collective dispute at the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (hereafter called the Archive). That dispute, which centred on issues of race on one side and sexual desire on the other, became so bitter that eventually one half of the collective sued the other half in the High Court of Justice. And that lawsuit was only possible because the Archive was officially registered as a limited company, a condition of receiving grant aid from ex-GLC inspired policies to help disadvantaged and minority groups in London. As a result, the Archive was subject to company law, which the two sides of the collective — a lesbian feminist and largely separatist collective — used against one another once the dispute got out of hand. All of this taught me a lot about how a particular place, London, came together with a particular historical moment, both in feminist debate and in the city, and led a group of politically committed women to painfully fight out a transition towards a different kind of perspective, one that reflected today’s time and place.
Exploding myths
That’s what Urban Amazons, the book I wrote on all this, is really about: the way in which ‘the personal is political’ changes through being lived in practice, day to day. I wanted to understand how all aspects of women’s lives affected their politics, and not only the moments when they were wearing their political identities on their sleeves. I also wanted to explode the myth that separatists lived in some dark, mysterious sect-like commune in London, a place that no one else knew and which had no contact with the rest of the world. It was so far from the truth that I decided the reason people believed in it was because they wanted to think that separatists were something totally ‘other’, totally alien to the women they knew, so they mentally placed separatists somewhere enclosed and inaccessible, in a timeless zone unaffected by what happens in the wider world. This is plain wrong.
The time I spent with separatists was a period when the radical and revolutionary feminisms on which separatists based their beliefs were being seriously challenged in a way that affected separatists themselves. Those strands of feminism, which took shape during the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement, developed into many different perspectives, even though, just to confuse matters, most still carried the labels ‘radical’ or ‘revolutionary’ feminism.[1] The variety was partly due to the fact that these approaches are based on personal experience as being at the root of feminist understanding of oppression, and most especially experience of gendered and sexual relations: so one woman’s understanding of radical feminism, for example, will never be quite the same as another’s.
Amongst the many perspectives which developed was lesbian feminism, and there are many strands of that as well. However, the main distinguishing character of lesbian feminism (as opposed to lesbians who are also feminists of some sort) during the 1980s in London anyway, was a political definition of lesbianism: lesbianism was equated, amongst other things, with being ‘woman-identified’ rather than ‘male-identified’. In theory, any woman who had managed to expunge male-identification from her head was a lesbian and, in effect, a feminist. One of the things that led to controversy was that some lesbian feminists suggested women could not be feminists without being lesbians (though the reverse is not necessarily the case, as it is possible to have ‘male-identified’ lesbians), but that’s by the by.
And finally, one of the strands which developed from lesbian feminism was separatism, a position which argued that withdrawal from any involvement with men was an essential part of the battle against (hetero-)patriarchy. Again, there are a variety of perspectives within separatism, but one of the main features is the argument that having personal relations with men both helps to maintain patriarchy and prevents women from having the ‘space’, symbolic as well as physical, to become woman-identified. Therefore withdrawal from relations with men is essential to the feminist project.
This position led some women to attempt to carve out a separatist-informed women-only space out of a corner of ‘alternative London’ during the late 1970s to mid-1980s. However, when I was there, everything they had built for themselves seemed more than usually under threat. The challenge was both from the ‘inside’, from internal and interminable battles between women, and from the ‘outside’, from the swing to the right in Britain, from the loss of so much funding from the abolition of the GLC and the impoverishment of the inner city London Boroughs known as the ‘Loony Left’ boroughs by the Tory press. Or rather, it was all part of the same time and place, it was all happening simultaneously.
Doubts of one’s own
More than that, most of the women involved in these battles could no longer be neatly divided into different political camps. Many previously committed separatists were beginning to have doubts of their own. Many had accepted the idea that differences between women sometimes mattered more than their commonalities in the way people experienced oppression. A good number had even begun to explore tricky issues surrounding lesbian sexuality which had previously been little discussed: having given lesbianism a political definition, the relationship between that and lesbian sexual practice became somewhat problematic. Was it a complete answer to say that any objectionable, oppressive, domineering and even violent behaviour in lesbian relationships had resulted from a failure to remove ‘internalised heteropatriarchy’? And while separatist approaches had much to say about what was wrong with heteropatriarchal sexual practices, there was not a great deal of concrete practical advice about how to do it differently, except to say that it should not be oppressive. Nor was there much comfort in the thought that if your own personal lesbian relationship seemed to express some of the same problems identified as heteropatriarchal in separatist debate, then you were guilty of internalised heteropatriarchy and were therefore not a good feminist. In practical terms, it didn’t help too much.
During my eighteen months in London, these kinds of issues swirled around the debates and disputes women were experiencing, and they started to shift the goal posts. The focus on differences between women, rather than the differences between men and women, was making the unity of ‘woman’ look particularly shaky – an important practical matter in the spaces built to be part of a unified ‘woman-only community’. As one woman, Alice, put it:
I guess the otherness, the difference, always seems to be a problem, because it’s almost like… because we’re a community under siege, to admit difference sometimes makes it feel insecure, and seems to weaken our resistance.
This was especially so when it was suggested that the notional ‘woman’ upon which that unity was built was in fact modelled on a white, middle-class, north American or northern European, young, able-bodied woman, and did not fit anyone else particularly well. Alice was commenting on her experiences of being a black woman in the lesbian feminist community.
Not the summer of love
Apart from the Archive dispute ending up in the High Court of Justice, these debates led to some extraordinary events during those eighteen months. T&S readers may recall the Lesbian Summer School held in July 1988, which brought together more than 250 lesbians and lesbian feminists of various hues for four intensive days of workshops, lectures, discussion groups and shows. In one course of workshops, entitled ‘Lesbian Sexuality’, so much upset was caused that women left the room weeping and the presenter of the series was so distraught by reactions to her presentation that she refused to give the fourth and final workshop, being replaced by an extremely brave stand-in at the last minute.
The main cause of the trouble was that many of the audience, particularly younger women, had been expecting a ‘safe space’ in which to openly discuss aspects of their own lesbian sexual experience. In contrast, the course presenter, a committed revolutionary feminist, wanted to give a talk about the nature of ‘male supremacy’ and show how the emergence of ‘libertarianism’ was bringing heteropatriarchy into the lesbian community in London. That misunderstanding made both sides feel thoroughly intimidated by the other.
A snippet from a member of the audience during the third session, to give a feel for the atmosphere at the time:
I’m really tired of being marginalised in this meeting. A woman here has just walked out because she’s intimidated. She’s too frightened – don’t ‘tut’ at me – she is too frightened to stand up and say why she is feeling marginalised and I think a lot of women are feeling like that here. [. . .] I don’t want to be told that what we are doing is projecting our pornography. [. . .] We should be able to come here and talk about ourselves, and not be told that we’re not proper feminists [. . . .] Why are we continually being put down and silenced?
Another incident involved a controversy over showing a newly-released film, She Must Be Seeing Things, which is about the troubled relationship between two women, one black, one white, in which the black woman suspects her partner of really wanting a man. Some of the women at the conference felt the showing of the film was an example of ‘creeping libertarianism’, mainly because of a scene involving a sex shop, and tried every way they could, including almost toppling the projector, to stop it being shown. Others, including the tutors who wanted to present the film, felt it was a chance to discuss the power dynamics of mixed-race relationships between women, and they were completely dumbfounded by the reaction they received at the conference.
Those four days were probably a nightmare for almost everyone concerned. Although looking back on it, those events were extreme, what lay behind them were emerging changes in the lives of much of the audience: the women who were not presenting courses or films, who did not generally stand on podiums to say their piece, but who were committed to their politics in one way or another and were being troubled by the way things were going. Younger women had not experienced those earlier years and were coming at the issue from a completely different perspective, borne of a different era. Many of the older women were no longer satisfied with the feminism of the 1970s and early 1980s, mostly due to the unresolved issue of differences between women. But with these raging battles going on, they were not sure how to revise their position either. Many I spoke to complained that the debate had become too polarised between extreme viewpoints and did not address their own experiences, problems or daily life at all. A few quotes from life-history interviewees to give a taste of the confusion this had all caused:
I used to call myself a radical feminist, but I think these terms are outmoded now, because there’s been too much fighting over the demarcation lines… Now I’m so often told that I’m a libertarian that I get too personally distraught. . . . I don’t really know how I would define myself. I’m not sure that I want to. (Ruth, 47)
For me, being a separatist has got to be being a lesbian. . . . But of course, different women have different reasons for being separate – for example, black women – and I do involve myself in mixed anti-apartheid campaigns. But I only compromise my politics so far, otherwise I’d lose my integrity, you know. (Clara, 33)
You see, I went through a big crisis . . . because revolutionary feminism doesn’t take into account things like racism and classism and anti-Semitism and that sort of thing . . . I mean, there was a time when I was a strict, strict feminist separatist . . . . Now I think, where was my head? (Nicola, 30)
With the emerging feminist theory of the time seeming increasingly obscure and wandering off into the realms of postmodernist and psychoanalytic abstraction, these women weren’t getting much help in practical terms from that quarter either.
As the year drew on, all of this started to filter through into groups, meetings, new workshops held by both sides, and people just having conversations with each other over a cup of coffee. Some of the women who had been labelled ‘libertarians’ at the Summer School organised a series of meetings to explore ‘lesbian taboo’ topics, including butch-femme, fantasies, mixed race relationships and so on. One of the organisers, who had in the past been a revolutionary feminist separatist, explained to me that as she had been labelled as ‘one of those women’ at the Summer School, she had nothing to lose and these issues needed discussing. On the other side, separatists organised a Lesbian Sexuality Day in order to explore and promote their very different perspectives on sexuality, something which many felt was no longer being heard as a result of the accusation by ‘libertarians’ that separatists were ‘anti-sex’.
Minorities of one
By 1989, however, although the debates rumbled on in meetings and groups, there had been some important shifts. For one, the separatist approach was no longer dominant in public women-only spaces, and there were fewer and fewer of those. But something else more important had happened in my view. While the ‘identity politics’ period fiercely debated differences between women, in which groups identified by some difference (e.g. race, class, ethnicity, disability) sensed a common oppression which they felt was not recognised by others, as the 1990s drew on, the debate increasingly became an issue of diversity. Diversity doesn’t identify groups based on a common difference; diversity emphasises the individual as unique, and argues that the individual is composed of a mosaic of influences from all kinds of sources, a mosaic which can and does change over time. Everyone becomes a fluid and continually changing minority of one.
Looking around the lesbian scene today in 1997, it seems a completely different world. When I was spending time with separatists in London, the rainbow flag was hardly known; only the trendiest had ever heard of queer theory; Diva didn’t exist; the words ‘transgendered’ and ‘spansexual’ didn’t pass anyone’s lips; email was used mostly by computer scientists and the Internet had hardly emerged from its original use as an aid for the US military in controlling its global operations. It would have to wait for the next decade before the dykes of cyberia started to install modems and digitally surf round the net.
Times do change. Propping myself up at the bar of a trendy new queer joint in Manchester’s Gay Village and flicking through the Pink Paper, I decided that Urban Amazons has truly become history. I wondered how many of the young women in this bar knew anything about those days, about the radical and revolutionary feminism which had dominated so much of the lesbian scene during the early to mid-1980s; about the battles that were fought in collectives, groups, conferences, meetings and women’s own homes. But most of all, I wondered how many knew anything about what those women had been fighting for, what they believed, hoped and feared about the world in which they lived.
I immediately admonished myself for being a patronising git, told myself that I was feeling old because I’d found my first grey hair recently, then promptly finished my beer and rejoined the conversation of the friends I was with, reminding myself that I was no longer writing a book about lesbian feminist separatism.
But those thoughts returned when I received the proofs of the book. As I’ve described, Urban Amazons spoke of a time when the changes clearly visible today were just beginning; of a time when lesbian feminist separatists in London were struggling with those changes and trying to make sense of them, at the same time as living with the lesbian feminism they’d inherited from the 1970s and early 1980s. Nowadays, we all know what happened: queer happened; all the national TV soaps decided lesbianism was trendy, for a time; drag kings emerged; Della Grace is no longer a shocking photographer, or at least no more shocking than others who have begun to emerge; politics, in its old guise of fighting for a cause as opposed to some issue that personally concerns you, has become boring and old hat; even postmodernism has become old hat; and somehow, lesbianism has been reduced, in the public scene at least, to being one lifestyle amongst many. In the old days (and I am talking about the 1980s here, not last century), lesbianism was all kinds of things, but it was not just a lifestyle: for some, it was a fundamental part of their feminist practice; for others, it was a central part of their personal identity; for many, it represented a continual struggle with a world which discriminated against them in all kinds of ways, especially at work. For most of the women I met in London in the late 1980s, it was all of those things, and more. For all I know, it may still be all those things for many women, but that’s not reflected in public spaces much anymore.
I’m not saying that we should go back to the 1980s, that today’s lesbians have lost their political drive. Frankly, Goddess forbid a return to the days when it was possible to destroy a woman’s reputation in separatist circles by simply implying that she was pro-S/M or, just as damning in many ways, that she was a ‘liberal’ feminist. I’m not one of those feminists who moans on about the loss of a true feminist politics in amongst all the objects of consumer desire which are sent to tempt poor unsuspecting lesbians and feminists. Many of today’s younger lesbians, in their own way, are as politically minded as older lesbian feminists ever were, even if the politics have shifted somewhat. In fact, both the abseiling incident and the invasion of the Six O’clock News studios were carried out by young women, the age group that was being accused by some separatists, particularly revolutionary feminist ones, of losing their political vigour in the late 1980s through being tempted by ‘libertarianism’.
What I am suggesting is that the public spaces through which we move today have changed; the spaces which used to be available and visibly represented a lesbian feminist political stance have virtually gone, leaving us with a much-expanded lesbian, gay and queer scene, which always reflected lifestyle more than politics anyway. The anger, and the understanding of the how oppression works still exists, even if it’s a bit more complicated than it once was; it’s just that there aren’t many spaces where these things can be publicly expressed anymore. The book I wrote about how some separatists in London in the late 1980s struggled with the transition is an attempt to make sense of how we got to this state of affairs.
My conclusion was that although separatists did have their particular perspectives, they did not belong to some enclosed communal subculture or counter-culture. They were and are as much a part of London and their own cultures as anyone else. During the late 1980s, they were particularly struggling with the legacy that the abolished Greater London Council (GLC) had left behind in the city, ongoing battles about race and racism, the influence of postmodernist thought which suggested that ‘women’, let alone ‘lesbians’ don’t exist as such, and a generation gap which meant that younger women arriving in London had virtually no personal knowledge of radical or revolutionary feminist, let alone separatist, campaigns or politics. They were also dealing with boring things like the right-wing backlash, being generally poor and having to deal with the difficulties in finding decent accommodation at a price they could afford in London. The real difference between these women and others in London is that they had strong feminist separatist beliefs which they not only used to try and change the world, they also used them as a guide to their personal practices, the way they lived their everyday lives, in the same way that most other kinds of radical feminists did and do.
If I learned anything from that period I spent in London, apart from a deep respect for the strength of character of many of the women I met, even those whose politics I personally did not share, it was to read feminist theory which speaks of the personal being political in a new light. There was a continual interaction between those women, the city in which they lived, the groups with which they mixed, and changing trends in their feminist beliefs. What worries me about the way things are today is not so much the apparent lack of political verve, but the tendency for a belief in ‘diversity’ to lead to naivety. If people concentrate on what makes them individually different from everyone else, and turn themselves into a construction project, releasing themselves from being chained to any particular pre-packaged identity, it’s easy to forget that the world is, after all, constrained by some fairly hefty power structures, ones which still affect us all daily. If we are going to make of ourselves anything we like, from where do we get the ideas about what we like? Divine inspiration? I think not.
Note
All the quotes in this article are from taped extracts which appear in Sarah Green Urban Amazons: Lesbian Feminism and Beyond in the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Battles of London (Macmillan, 1997)
Footnote
[1] Revolutionary feminism, a term coined in 1978, developed from certain strands of radical feminist-based lesbian feminism, but that’s a longer story than I have room for here. One main distinction between them which women mentioned while I was in London was that revolutionary feminism focuses much more strongly on male sexual violence against women as the underlying characteristic of heteropatriarchy than does radical feminism.?