Laboratories of gender: Women's liberation and the transfeminist present

In 2018, the Feminist Archive South received funding from the UK Government Equalities Office to run events in community locations across the South West. This programme enabled cross-generational engagements with inspiring histories of the recent feminist past. 1 Activities were open to self-identified women and non-binary people – a point that enraged so-called ‘gender-critical feminists’ […]

Name of the Father, ‘One’ of the Mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan: With introduction by Penelope Deutscher

An introduction to Françoise Collin’s ‘Name of the father’ Penelope deutscher In 1973 the philosopher Françoise Collin (1928–2012) founded, with Jacqueline Aubenas, the first Frenchlanguage feminist journal, Les Cahiers du Grif. Collin was also a writer of fiction and récits (Rose qui peut, Le jour fabuleux, 331 W 20, Le Rendez-vous), a poet (Le jardin […]

Sexism, Capitalism and the Family

Sexism, Gapitalism ” the ramil, I~_ __ Bosalind Delmar (This paper was written for the Womens Liberation Conference, London, November 1972) The relation between sexism and capitalism is often expressed as an opposition: is it a sexist society or a capitalist society? Are we interested in feminism-or socialism? We see socialist women denouncing feminism as […]

‘Liberate socialist eminences from their bourgeois cocks!’: Women ’68ers, marching on alone

It is hardly news that history has its blind spots, hidden even from those attentive to its most neglected byways. These are often within emancipatory struggles that are swiftly disregarded once their fervour fades. When disputed legacies originate in confrontational, often anarchic challenges to the prevailing order of just about everything, systematic accounting tends to […]

Feminism did not fail

‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen had organized […]