‘Yours in Struggle’: Bad Feelings and Revolutionary Politics in Spare Rib

Abstract

When Spare Rib first launched in July 1972, its glossy pages promised to explore the ‘new’ politics of women's liberation through the familiar form of the magazine. From editorials exploring how it feels to work collectively to letters from readers expressing the emotional toll of discrimination, Spare Rib makes a consistent effort to provide spaces in which the feelings associated with women’s liberation can be articulated and explored. This article examines the extent to which affect theory might help to illuminate the virulent discourse of feeling in Spare Rib. Foregrounding the high premium placed on personal testimony, both within the women’s liberation movement and in Spare Rib specifically, it explores a mixed selection of published correspondence and reflective editorials in order to assess how ‘bad’ feelings, in particular, might serve as a magnet’ around which the politics of feminism can be negotiated and critiqued.

Keywords:

• feminist periodicals
• women’s liberation movement
• Spare Rib
• affect theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Fairweather’s article prompted an impassioned public meeting in 1979, organized by Spare Rib and the National Abortion Campaign, which is evoked to powerful effect by Margaretta Jolly in ‘“The Feelings behind the Slogans”: Abortion Campaigning and Feminist Mood-Work circa 1979’. Referring to the remembrances of Jan McKenley, who was present at the meeting, Jolly describes women ‘“testifying” to sadness, guilt and loss as well as relief’, sharing ‘abortion experiences in a way that campaigns to date had not allowed’ and which point ‘to complexities not captured by straplines such as “Abortion on Demand—A Woman’s Right to Choose”; “Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Right to Decide”’ (Jolly 2014: 105).

2 For Spare Rib’s coverage of changes to abortion legislation, see Nicholls (1975), Spare Rib Collective (1975b, 1979a, 1979b, 1979c) and Warren (1975a, 1975b, 1975c, 1975d, 1975e).

3 These appeared under the heading ‘In Our Own Write’, a title that Spare Rib would retain for its regular letters page before rebranding it as ‘Letters’ from March 1974 (with the exception of the November 1972 issue, when it was ‘P.S.’).

4 Amongst the most controversial articles published in Spare Rib are Morrell (1974), Greer (1972, 1975), and Kelly and O’Hara (1990).

5 Beginning in February 1990, the fierce dialogue about the future direction of Spare Rib rages on within the magazine’s correspondence pages until May 1991.