The ‘silver thread’: Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan (1890–1982), the Six Point Group, and new understandings of intergenerational female activism in England, 1960s to 1980

ABSTRACT

Focussing on the life-long activism of former suffragette and feminist Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan this article presents an innovative re-appraisal of histories of the women’s movement in England during the 1960s and 1970s. Adopting a micro-history approach the article uses Hunkins-Hallinan’s experience of feminist activism to make two connected arguments. The first is to challenge the suggestion that post-suffrage feminist societies such as the Six Point Group lost their ability to participate in and influence campaigns for gender equality into the second half of the twentieth century. The second is to ensure that the contributions made by older women to the women’s movement during the 1960s and 1970s are no longer obscured by the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Drawing on both arguments the article reveals the previously hidden co-operation and intersection between older and younger generations of women campaigning for women’s rights during these two pivotal decades.

KEYWORDS:

• Life-long activism
• feminism
• women’s liberation movement
• intergenerational activism
• Six Point Group

Introduction

In December 1969, reflecting on the end of another busy year of activism, Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan updated relatives via her annual ‘Family Newsletter’. Here she wrote that the work of the Six Point Group (SPG), the feminist society she joined aged 32 in 1922, following her re-location to England from the United States, ‘has run like a silver thread through all of my life in London and it still does’. She went on to write that ‘my London certainly has the most stimulating, constructive and intellectually honest women’s movement … it is interesting and satisfying to work in and I am totally involved’.¹ Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan’s life-long commitment to campaigning for gender equality is an ideal case study to question several long-standing assumptions around the nature and trajectory of the women’s movement and female activism in Britain post-1945. By tracing Hazel’s involvement in the SPG, a post-suffrage feminist society set up in 1921 by Lady Rhondda,² and with a particular focus on the group’s activities during the 1960s and 1970s, this article has two central aims.

The first is to challenge the suggestion that feminist societies such as the SPG lost the capability to influence public debate on gender equality. The idea that during the 1960s and 1970s, these groups were overshadowed, even stifled, by the emergence of the more radical Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) is contested. Moreover, the article challenges the view that long-established feminist groups, for example the SPG, failed to engage with or work alongside the younger women who instigated and joined the WLM. There is no doubt, as Pat Thane has argued, about the lack of recognition among WLM activists of earlier campaigns undertaken by feminist, political and voluntary women’s organisations.³ Such perceived gaps are compounded by the dominance of the wave metaphor. Since the late 1960s historians, political theorists and social scientists have often adopted this model to map the trajectory of female activism across the twentieth century.⁴ The result is that peak moments of activism, the most visible outbursts of protest, have dominated the historical narrative of female activism in industrialised western nations. Between these ‘peaks’ a chasm appeared to separate ‘first wave’ feminism (the women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) and ‘second wave’ feminism (the WLM). Consequently, it was often assumed that the WLM was a brand-new social movement that sprang up out of nowhere.⁵ This view is now changing. There is much greater recognition that the activism around women’s rights and gender equality continued unabated between these ‘waves’ in different ways and in many locales, including in Britain.⁶

Nevertheless, this division between ‘first’ and ‘second wave’ feminism has contributed to the enduring idea that activism undertaken by established women’s societies and that of newly emergent WLM groups in the late 1960s and 1970s occurred in discrete spaces. Histories of the WLM have often overlooked the on-going activism of post-suffrage feminist societies and fail to acknowledge the continuities and connections between the many diverse groups making up the twentieth-century women’s movement. Adopting a microhistory approach, by taking a close look at the activist career of one woman, Hazel Hunkins-Hallinin, and her work for the SPG, allows a different argument to be made. In this re-telling of feminist activism during the 1960s and 1970s, through the lens of one activist’s story, and that of the SPG, the complex interconnections and shared experiences between different generations of feminists and feminist societies are revealed. This new knowledge calls for a shifting of consensus within the historiography, both in England and beyond, about the dominance of the WLM in these two formative decades.

The second aim of the article draws on this re-positioning of the SPG as an effective activist group during the 1960s and 1970s, and on the life-long activism of Hazel Hunkins-Hallinin. Both are utilised to re-evaluate contributions made by older women to the women’s movement during these years. As Pat Thane observes ‘there seems to have been little contact between the older and newer women’s organisations’ with the WLM ‘overwhelmingly a movement of younger women’ who ‘tended to be hostile or indifferent to constitutional action through parliament’.⁷ The ascendency of younger women within the WLM and the dominance of the WLM in histories of female activism has meant that the experiences and expertise of older women have often been overlooked. And yet middle-aged and older women continued to fight for gender equality throughout the 1960s and 1970s and continue to do so today.

Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, the former suffragette who went on to serve as Honorary Secretary, Chairman, Vice-President, and President of the SPG during the years 1950–1980 (when she was aged 89),⁸ is an exemplar of the many women who devoted their adult life to the fight for gender equality. Hazel’s motivations and life-long commitment to the women’s movement are documented across the twentieth century. The article then brings to light the on-going campaigning of the SPG, with Hazel at its helm, during the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of fading into the background the SPG played a central role in bringing together the older and newer elements of the women’s movement. As a result pressure for reform around issues including equal pay, worker’s rights, access to abortion and birth control remained a key feature of public life. This process of re-assessing the relationships between different generations of female activists allows for an important re-appraisal of the interconnections between older and newer women’s groups during the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, this more considered assessment of the relationship between the SPG and the WLM highlights how foregrounding intergenerational conflict in the sociology of generations⁹ risks discounting the commonalities that different generations of women shared when it came to activism around gender equality.

Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan: life-long activist for women’s rights

In her Chairman’s Report, delivered to the 46th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the SPG on 20 April 1967, Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan concluded with the words:

Inevitably, there is little to show for a great deal of hard and persistent work. For instance, the records show I have written nearly 500 letters, none of them duplicated, all of them just trying to keep the wheels oiled and turning. Although the work is arduous and time-consuming, it is the life blood of progress. I hope you will bear with us when projects do not come out as handsomely as expected and celebrate with us when they do. But always, always, give us your support. It is a cause which concerns every woman.¹⁰

Hazel devoted her adult life to ‘the cause’, the fight for women’s equality. Born in Aspen, Colorado, U.S.A. in 1890 Hazel studied chemistry at Vassar College, graduating in 1913. She went on to teach and study at the University of Missouri where in 1916 she completed a master’s degree in chemistry. However she soon experienced gender discrimination first hand when she failed to secure employment as a chemist. She recalled this rejection in an article published in The Washington Post in August 1977:

I had decided I wanted to be a chemist, not a teacher again. I applied from New York to California, answering every ad relating to chemists. I got stacks of letters back. A big stack. Every single one read, ‘You are qualified, but we do not employ women.’ I was indignant!¹¹

This injustice propelled Hazel in 1916 to join the new National Women’s Party (NWP), set up by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, to demand the equal franchise for women in all U.S. states via an amendment to the American Constitution.¹²

Hazel was soon working for Alice Paul, leader of the NWP, at the party’s headquarters in Washington DC. Here she engaged in militant activism and along with Paul was arrested and jailed in 1917 for chaining herself to the railings of the White House. She was sentenced to 30 days in Occoquan jail and went on hunger strike. Within a week President Wilson had pardoned the women.¹³ Reflecting on her experiences as a suffragette Hazel commented that the NWP never sanctioned violence:

Ours was peaceful picketing, although violence was put upon us. We were clubbed by police, had our clothing torn and our banners ripped from the poles. I remember when I was speaking in Lafayette Square being pelted with eggs. My coat was dripping when I finished.¹⁴

In 1920, the year the 19th Amendment was ratified by the Senate, thereby extending the right to vote to women on equal terms with men, Hazel left the U.S. and moved to London. During the 1920s and 1930s, she worked as a freelance journalist, including for The Chicago Tribune, and started a family with her partner, later husband, fellow journalist Charles Hallinan.¹⁵

Hazel joined the SPG in 1922 marking the beginning of her long involvement with this post-suffrage feminist society. In her interview with historian Brian Harrison, Hazel acknowledged how she benefitted from the guidance and support of Teresa Billington-Greig during her early days as a member of the SPG.¹⁶ Billington-Greig passed onto her the skills of running a meeting and effective organisation, and so shared her vast experience of activism with Hazel who then applied this knowledge to her various roles within the SPG. As a ‘non-party political organisation working to establish equality for women’ the SPG had started out with six aims to secure legislation with regards to child assault, the unmarried mother and her child, the widowed mother, the guardianship of infants, equality in the civil service and equality of teachers pay.¹⁷

By the mid-1920s the six points which framed the work of the group had been condensed into the following: ‘political equality; occupational equality; moral equality; social equality; economic equality and legal equality’.¹⁸ Throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s the SPG, led by its founder Lady Rhonda, prioritised equal rights legislation, with a particular focus on the economic and working rights of women, especially those of married women. The organisation worked closely with the Open Door Council (1926) to achieve these goals and in 1938 a new organisation, the Married Women’s Association emerged out of a SPG committee to campaign specifically for the rights of married women with regards to financial arrangements in marriage, property rights, guardianship of children and access to social welfare benefits.¹⁹ Hazel was a member of both these groups but it was with the SPG that she made her mark, beginning, in her own words as a ‘tea girl’ and then from the 1950s onwards taking up key leadership positions.²⁰

In 1968 In Her Own Right was published by the SPG. The book was a collection of essays penned by ten leading women activists including Nancy Seear (President of the Liberal Party in the 1960s and later Baroness Seear) and Lena Jeger (Labour MP and later Baroness Jeger). The publication emerged out of a conference ‘Women and the Changing World’ organised to investigate ‘the success of the movement towards emancipation and to discuss the problems remaining fifty years after the enfranchisement of women’.²¹ In her essay entitled ‘A Revolution Unfinished’ Hazel highlighted the lack of change with regards to gender equality and the generation ‘after generation of little girls’ who become adults ‘completely conditioned to an overwhelmingly masculine society, restricting the development of women until they have no vision of anything different before them’.²² She hoped that the book would ‘open the eyes of teenage girls starting out in life’ so that they demand a ‘better chance’. For newlywed young women, Hazel wished to encourage them ‘not to abdicate their rights as people to an unequal partnership in marriage’. She also wished to engage with older women who had ‘shied away from “women’s movements” and who learn late in life what odds are stacked against them’. For all these girls and women the aim was to make them realise their ‘actual status’ for only then ‘we can hope that the emancipation of women, as a movement, will come alive’.²³

From her words, it is evident that Hazel had a keen awareness of the different generational challenges 50 years following the limited extension of the parliamentary franchise to women. It is also notable that her concerns, and that of the collection, were to overcome the restrictions on the aspirations and life chances of girls and women, especially with regards to women’s domestic roles. She ends her chapter with a quote from fellow contributor Pat Hornsby-Smith who writes that ‘the home may be the centre of women’s life, but it should not be the boundary’.²⁴ These concerns, and particularly those around the experiences of girls and younger women, are prescient of the issues that would become central to the activism of the WLM. Although she didn’t go as far as directly challenging traditional gender roles, as the WLM did, Hazel was cognisant of the social, cultural, and economic restrictions that result in lowered expectations and limited aspirations for the next generation of women.

Hazel hoped to transform the lives of women by showing them they had far more to offer than ‘being merely a mother and household drudge’ and could become a woman who is a person ‘in her own right’.²⁵ One initiative she led on was to develop a Schools Talks Programme. The SPG recruited young women speakers throughout the 1970s to go into girls’ secondary schools and talk to sixth-form pupils about feminism and the variety of options they had on leaving school. Although initially London based, two SPG speakers visited Maidstone School for Girls in February 1973. One speaker, Anna Coote, aged 26, was a journalist, writer and broadcaster and a member of the Fawcett Society.²⁶ She was known for speaking to the girls about equal pay and equal opportunity and encouraging them to consider less conventional careers. However it was also acknowledged that ‘upper most in the minds of this age group is how to reconcile the career with a family’.²⁷

The hope here was that by directly speaking to girls through these school visits the next generation of women would understand feminism and their right to gender equality. Hazel wrote that ‘it is with the younger set that we most actively should work because they suffer from the customs and mores handed down by their mothers and grandmothers and even further back, one would judge, from medieval times’.²⁸ The need to engage directly with girls and younger women so that they would grasp all the opportunities (albeit still limited) now open to them was clearly a priority for Hazel in her later years. As a former suffragette, who risked arrest and incarceration, Hazel appeared frustrated with women who continued to opt for marriage and motherhood over a career.²⁹ This may be one of the reasons why Hazel was so interested in the WLM and the new generation of activists seeking to secure the rights of women as equal citizens.

In September 1969 Hazel featured in a two-page spread by Irma Kurtz in The Sunday Times magazine, with the headline ‘Boadicea Rides Again’.³⁰ The article drew comparisons between the British and American women’s movements and on the need for more radical action to be taken to push for greater equality for women in general, and in the workplace in particular. The emergence of the Women’s Liberation Workshop (WLW)³¹ in London is documented, and their tactics (for example guerrilla theatre) are referred to as ‘endearing, very bold, and unique among international feminist groups’. The article then turns to Hazel and the SPG which is described as ‘one of the most successful women’s rights organisations in existence, for, although it stays within established channels, it works with speed and directness’. Hazel is interviewed in the ‘serenity’ of her club which is viewed as ‘a perfect contrast to the WLW headquarters in Islington’. Asked about her impressions of the women active within the WLM Hazel replies that ‘they are young and utterly unsophisticated politically, but they’re full of beans. The membership of our group has been far too old for my liking’.³²

Recognition of the generational gap between the WLM and the SPG is revealing. As this newspaper article illustrates, the SPG did seek to engage with these younger women activists while also being very aware of its own ageing membership. For Hazel herself growing older did not seem to limit her activities or her irrepressible energy for campaigning for gender equality. As well as her role as a very active SPG Chairman throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Hazel stayed in touch with the women’s movement in the U.S. In 1977, aged 87 and now Vice-President of the SPG, she returned to the U.S. to join the March for Equal Rights parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, which ended at the White House to mark the anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920. As reported in the Washington Post Hazel marched alongside women dressed in white and carrying banners lettered in gold and purple. Explaining her desire to be on the march Hazel observed that, ‘equal rights is so clear-cut; it's fundamental—a basic change’.³³ It was this goal, yet to be achieved, that sent Hazel back to London to ensure enforcement of the 1970 Equal Pay Act and 1975 Sex Discrimination Act.

Hazel was appointed President of the SPG in 1978 and continued to be active in the group until it went into abeyance in 1980 (finally closing in 1983). It is perhaps no coincidence that in the same year Hazel experienced significant health issues which must have slowed her down. On 27 April 1980, she wrote in a letter that she had been unwell since 25 January with ‘a degenerative disease of the spine’ and that the ‘future looks a bit bleak’. However she had her telephone and directories on a table beside her, alongside her typewriter and wireless and so could keep on working, ‘what more could one want?’³⁴ Two months later, on 2 June she celebrated her 90th birthday with a party at the University Women’s Club in London. This enabled her to celebrate ‘60 years of happiness living in London and 57 years working with the SPG and other feminist movements which have achieved this century’s advance towards the goals we seek’.³⁵ In 1982, aged 91 and in poor health Hazel met with the historian Dale Spender who was working on her ground-breaking study There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century (1983).³⁶ Spender described Hazel as ‘sparkling, irreverent and immensely generous with her time’ and whose life-time of activism was ‘proof of women’s resistance, the evidence of women’s capacity to act, to contribute, to promote change, to shape our society’.³⁷ The ‘silver thread’ of activism had continued to run through Hazel’s life, up to her death at home in London aged 91, on 17 May 1982. Her husband predeceased her in 1971 and she was survived by her four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Six Point Group, 1960s–1980

The SPG remained at the centre of campaigns for gender equality throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1960 the group’s long-serving Chairman Monica Whately resigned due to ill health and Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, then Honorary Secretary, was confirmed as the new Chairman. In this role, and later as Vice-President and President, she was able to guide the work of SPG over the following two decades. The 1960 AGM Report provides useful insights into the workings of the group. The Executive Committee had met 12 times in 1959–1960 with an average of eight in attendance. Individual member subscriptions (which in 1959 totalled £38 and 10 shillings)³⁸ were raised to 10s with the expectation that most members would donate more than this annual fee to ensure that the work of SPG could continue. In addition to its lobbying and campaigning work the SPG organised regular meetings for members in private houses on specific themes as well as larger public facing conferences, often held at the Palace of Westminster thanks to the support of female Members of Parliament (MPs) keen to promote the group’s work.³⁹

The AGM Reports for the 1960s reveal the myriad issues that occupied the SPG’s time, and which were prioritised for action. Representation of women on juries and the number of women admitted to medical schools were just two of the many topics that the group investigated during these years. In 1964 it was agreed the group would focus its efforts on several projects. These included lobbying to support the bill on Equal Guardianship of Children that Conservative MP Joan Vickers had introduced into Parliament. The group was also to ‘agitate for the establishment of sufficient day nurseries and crèches’ so that mothers could take up employment opportunities. The final objective for 1964 was to campaign for equal pay in public sector industrial grades as well as the ‘application of equal pay for equal work in industry’.⁴⁰

Hazel as SPG Chairman reported that the group had been successful, along other women’s organisations and MPs Joan Vickers and Judith Hart (Labour), in opposing proposals by Lord Balniel during the April 1963 Employment of Women Bill debate.⁴¹ This bill if passed would have allowed the Minister for Health to regulate the employment of women returning to work after child-bearing. Opposing the bill the SPG along with the Status of Women Committee (SWC)⁴² lobbied the Ministry of Health and other MPs arguing that greater economic support for women after childbirth was needed rather than a restriction on their right to work. On 5 April 1963, Judith Hart succeeded in ‘talking out’ the bill ensuring in Hazel’s words that ‘“our side” had won a major battle’.⁴³

This instance of successful lobbying demonstrates not only that the SPG remained active in preventing legislation deemed detrimental to women’s rights but was also effective in bringing together a network of women’s groups, and MPs to orchestrate their campaigns. Hazel herself reflected on this when she told members that ‘the battle against the Balniel Bill also brought about a splendid co-operation with various women’s organisations which we hope may be maintained’.⁴⁴ Throughout the 1960s the SPG worked closely with a variety of women’s groups. For example, it teamed up with the British Federation of University Women (BFUW) to lobby for a change in the law with regards to married women’s income tax. The aim here was to change to ruling whereby a married woman was taxed through her husband as opposed to being regarded as an independent ‘tax entity’. The BFUW was particularly concerned that professional women were being penalised and so had ‘no incentive to work full-time or indeed work at all’.⁴⁵ In 1961 the SPG President, Mary Stott, along with representatives of the BFUW met with the Chancellor and were pleased that his subsequent Budget ensured that the ‘floor of the surtax was raised so that professional women can now earn more before they get into the surtax group’ but expressed on-going frustration that ‘the principle of taxing a woman through her husband still remains’.⁴⁶

In a pamphlet published in 1965 the SPG identified specific concerns requiring action. These were the underrepresentation of women in public life, equal pay across public and private sectors, equitable tax rules for married women, equal partnership in marriage, equality of opportunity, particularly around career choices for girls and equal guardianship of children. At its 1965 Spring Conference a number of these on-going concerns were discussed alongside sessions on ‘Abortion Law Reform’, ‘Prostitution’ and the ‘Come Back of the Mature Woman’ (based on research into the employment opportunities for older women carried out by the BFUW)’.⁴⁷ Throughout the 1960s the SPG continued with its lobbing and investigative work with the aim in influencing legislative changes that would enhance the lives of women and remove some of the gender discrimination experienced by women in their everyday lives. Having played a key role in the campaign for equal pay for equal work in the public sector (achieved in 1955) pressure was maintained on the private sector to follow suit. Working with the SWC it was agreed to target the nationalised Bank of England and banking sector to highlight the pay discrimination experienced by women.⁴⁸

Hazel used the SPG’s 48th AGM in April 1970 to reflect on achievements over the previous 10 years. She celebrated the fact that among the group’s Vice-Presidents were leading figures from all professions together with eight MPs and five members of the House of Lords. It is worth noting here that the SPG did focus more on equalities that were of benefit to white middle-class professional women, a fact replicated in its membership and indeed in the experience of Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan herself. Moreover she reported that In Her Own Right had received positive reviews from a wide range of women’s organisations led predominantly by white middle-class women including the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (WI), the Townswomen’s Guilds (TG), the Soroptimists International of Great Britain and Ireland (SIGBI) and the National Council of Women (NCW). Membership of the SPG remained small and rather exclusive, despite the recruitment of 50 new members in 1968 (adding to c. 126) with membership subscriptions increasing over the previous 10 years with a total for 1969 of £125 and 10s (the subscription had risen to £1).⁴⁹

The early 1970s marked a period of reflection and transition for all women’s organisations continuing to campaign for women’s rights and gender equality. On 3 March 1973, the BFUW organised a conference on ‘The Role of Women’s Organisations Today’. The aim of the conference, which included delegates from over 30 women’s groups including the SPG and organisations representing working-class women, for example the Co-operative Women’s Guild, was to consider the role of women’s groups ‘in a period of rapid and perhaps unprecedented social change’ and ‘how far our objectives are still valid and our methods still effective’.⁵⁰ Acknowledging the impact of the post-war welfare state, the increasing numbers of married women going out to work, the improved educational opportunities available to women and better health care, the organiser Rosalind Chambers argued it was time for group reflection.⁵¹ In bringing old and new (including the WLW) organisations together at the conference it was hoped that some clarity could be gained on their future role. This was done in the knowledge that state expansion into the voluntary sector and the professionalisation of some services previously provided by women’s organisations may fundamentally challenge the nature of their work.⁵² Chambers concluded her brief by suggesting if some of the groups were to decide their ‘day is over’ then ‘let us go out with a bang rather than a whimper’.⁵³

Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan had no intention of winding down the work of the SPG. On the contrary, she was convinced more than ever of the important contribution the SPG could make towards achieving greater gender equality. In the summer of 1970, it was reported that the SPG had approximately 300 members with Hazel, still Chairman, explaining ‘we are not concerned about numbers, but our membership is, you might say, hand-picked’. ⁵⁴ About half of the membership were London based with a second stronghold in its North West Branch (overseeing membership in the Manchester and Cheshire areas) and despite not meeting regularly the group was able to ‘move quickly when the occasion arises’.⁵⁵

This point was evidenced by a conference organised by the SPG at 8pm on 3 March 1970 at the Palace of Westminster. The theme was equal pay, and the aim was to discuss the implications of the Equal Pay Bill (later passed into law in May 1970) with Barbara Castle MP Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, who was leading efforts to have this crucial legislation passed in the House of Commons. Attendees included representatives from women’s organisations such as the WI, the TG, the Co-operative Women’s Guild, the Women’s Group on Public Welfare, the Married Women’s Association, the Fawcett Society and SIGBI, as well as delegates from newer more radical groups, for example the WLW and the working-class women’s group Mothers in Action.⁵⁶ The fact that the event was advertised in the WLW magazine Shrew may account for the attendance of these groups at this meeting.⁵⁷ The ability of the SPG in bringing these groups together for a unique opportunity to meet with Barbara Castle is testament to the reach and continued influence of the group within the women’s movement at this time.

After this meeting, the SPG was invited by Edward Bishop MP to advise the Parliamentary All-Party Equal Rights Group on action regarding the Anti-Discrimination Bill (which later became the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act) and to prevent evasions to the 1970 Equal Pay Act.⁵⁸ Throughout the decade the SPG remained on its guard and took every opportunity to ensure that having helped secure the enactment of these two fundamental legislative acts that the law was used effectively to safeguard the rights of women workers. In a leaflet published by the group at the end of the 1970s it was clear that its work was not yet complete. Here on-going concerns included ensuring that the 1970 Equal Pay Act was fully and consistently implemented across all occupations. It also highlighted the fact that the 1975 Anti-Discrimination Act ‘does not operate to give women the freedom by right to enter any activity they so choose on the same conditions as men. Customs, traditions, social mores, and male sabotage work against them’. Change was also required to safeguard the rights of women in marriage so that wives become equal partners with rights of co-ownership of the matrimonial home and use of household goods.⁵⁹

A second issue of concern for the SPG throughout the 1970s was ensuring choice with regards to women’s reproductive rights. In 1970 Caroline Woodroffe of the Birth Control Manifesto (under the auspices of the Family Planning Association) invited the SPG to support their work as ‘just the people we need to ensure the impact of the Manifesto on parliamentary candidates’. Woodroffe explained this action was needed as in 1969 only 45 out of the 130 local authorities in England and Wales were providing ‘anything like a full birth control service. And to date 30–40 per cent of women having abortions still have to go outside the Health Service’.⁶⁰ On 11 October 1976, the SPG came together with seven other women’s organisations to demonstrate opposition to any attempt to restrict the right of women to safe, legal abortion under the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act. At this public meeting, held in the Grand Committee room of the House of Commons, it was made clear the aim was ‘to demonstrate middle of the road, middle aged, middle-class defence of the common-sense character’ of current legislation against ‘tendentious attacks’ as represented by Conservative MP William Benyon’s Abortion Amendment Bill.⁶¹

This bill proposed to reduce the time limits for women to procure an abortion to 20 weeks and to require doctors who performed the abortion to inform the woman’s general practitioner (GP).⁶² As a member of the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) Co-ordinating Committee in Defence of the 1967 Abortion Act (Co-ord), made up of 37 women’s groups, the SPG was outspoken against any changes to the Act that would compromise the right of women to access safe and legal abortion.⁶³ Hazel, as the SPG representative on Co-ord, attended its meetings and encouraged members to write to their MP to vote against the bill. The SPG also supported the efforts of the National Abortion Campaign to quash the Benyon Bill and it was defeated after two readings in the House of Commons.⁶⁴ It is interesting that the Chairman of the North West branch of the SPG, Olwen Haig, noted that some members had expressed reservations about the Co-ord campaign but after discussion had voted to adhere to its manifesto on abortion rights.⁶⁵ This raising of ‘respectable’ middle-class women’s voices against Conservative attacks on the 1967 Abortion Act (the TG also regularly opposed any attempt to limit the right to legal abortion) is noteworthy and too often overlooked in histories of the WLM.

The evidence presented here of on-going activism by the SPG during the 1960s and 1970s, and its ability to influence legislators on questions regarding women’s rights is significant. This significance is set in sharp relief because of the frequent elision of the SPG in historical accounts of female activism post 1945. For example, Martin Pugh (2015) and Paula Bartley (2022) make little or no reference to the SPG beyond the 1950s in their major surveys of the twentieth-century British women’s movement.⁶⁶ This omission perpetuates the belief that activism for women’s equality in the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by newly emerging groups, including those associated with the WLM. This was not the case, as has been shown here. Doubtless the SPG remained a small pressure group made up of predominantly middle-class white women and like other long-established women’s groups found it difficult to recruit new and younger members. Indeed for the SPG this challenge proved unsurmountable and led to its suspension in 1980 with Hazel lamenting the fact that the network ‘just seemed to die out’.⁶⁷ Nevertheless the SPG’s activism throughout the 1960s and 1970s proved essential in sustaining established networks and forging new ones across generations.

Intergenerational female activism

Sometime in 1969 or 1970 Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan wrote a fascinating account of her first encounter with a WLM meeting. She recalled coming out of her local London underground station, Belsize Park and seeing a sign advertising a meeting of ‘Women’s Lib’ for that evening in the Old Hampstead Town Hall. She decided to go along as she had thought up to that point that the WLM was a ‘flash in the pan’. She wrote ‘I had nothing against them but considered that the older organisations were doing a good job without the bizarre doings of this group’. When she arrived at the meeting she had a shock as there some 250 women in attendance, more women than she had ever seen in one place. She recalled being exhilarated by the number but also the seeming confidence and independence of the women who were aged in their twenties to their forties. At the same time she felt some resentment that these women had not gone to prison or on hunger strike for the cause and for a moment she felt ‘old, passé’.⁶⁸

This feeling, she wrote, was quickly ‘swept aside’ as ‘here was change and growth and vigour and purpose toward an end I had had in sight a long time ago’. She described how the meeting ‘broke into small groups of 10 women, they were all white, mostly middle-class women … as many housewives as there were office workers … and a sprinkling of working-class women’. A consciousness-raising session then began with each woman sharing her personal experiences of being enslaved to men.⁶⁹ When the meeting ended the women dispersed. Hazel concluded her story by noting the meeting marked the birth of ‘a new ephemeral sisterhood, across the classes and in my case across the generations’. ⁷⁰ These notes on SPG headed notepaper are undated and it is unclear if Hazel drafted these recollections for a newspaper article or a speech. Regardless her words provide us with a wonderful insight into her direct encounter with a WLM group in London. They also may help explain why in her interview in 1977 with the Washington Post Hazel declared herself an admirer of consciousness-raising because ‘it makes everything bearable when one gets rid of anti-women feelings’.⁷¹

Hazel as Chairman of the SPG during the 1960s and early 1970s went out of her way to engage with younger women active in the WLM. The SPG archive indicates that these efforts paid off. Not only did the WLW send representatives from its Peckham workshop to the equal pay meeting organised by the SPG on 3 March 1970, but it appears that a good relationship then developed between Hazel and the WLW. Contrary to suggestions that there was little contact between the SPG and the WLM, members of the WLW invited Hazel and the SPG to join them in their picket and leafletting of the Miss World Contest, at the Royal Albert Hall on Thursday 27 November 1970.⁷² It is not clear if Hazel or other members went along but relations between the two groups remained good. A letter from WLW to Hazel in 1970 thanked her for her ‘kind comments about SHREW’ and confirmed the Workshop would like to exchange newsletters in the future’ and had put Hazel on its mailing list.⁷³

Hazel’s desire to nurture relations with the WLM may have been motivated by an awareness that she was getting older. But she was also very aware that many women were not taking advantage of the freedoms won for them by previous generations of activists. In a letter dated 16 September 1970 Hazel opined that many women aged 30–50 appeared content to settle for less than equality and opt for traditional domestic roles as wives and mothers.⁷⁴ These women could be critical of younger women trying to break free of gender roles through their involvement with the WLM. Instead Hazel wanted all women to embrace the opportunities now won for women. In a letter to the National Organisation of Women (NOW) on 24 January 1973 she wrote that ‘after a lifetime of work in the women’s movement, I have watched with interest and approval the modern movement in the U.S.A. and give it my whole-hearted approval’.⁷⁵

Conclusion

Noticeably absent from Hazel’s accounts and her reflections is any sense of generational conflict. The sociology of generations and its focus on how conflict results in social change, with younger generations seeking to right the wrongs experienced by their parents and grandparents, is useful in explaining change over time.⁷⁶ For histories of the women’s movement, and particularly that of so-called second wave feminism, generational conflict between mothers and daughters and younger and older women has often been identified as the context out of which the WLM emerged. Of course, there is much truth in this. As Margaretta Jolly so well expressed in her oral history of the WLM in Britain, ‘the intake of breath almost all took when the interviewer asked them about their mother’.⁷⁷ Lynn Abrams has also highlighted the tensions between daughters and mothers around themes of self-sacrifice and self-realisation.⁷⁸

Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan’s experience of activism within the SPG complicates this narrative. Her story presents a messier interpretation of relations between different generations of activists during the 1960s and 1970s. Having first doubted the ‘sticking power’ of the WLM she became intrigued by their new radical forms of activism and their willingness to reject traditional gender roles. Her hope was that these younger women would finish the job she herself set out to do in 1917, to dismantle the inequalities women endured and to persuade girls and women to grasp the new opportunities presented to them. In common with the younger generation she was frustrated that more women didn’t come together to put an end to gender inequality. In her interview with Dale Spender she exclaimed that ‘Women can change society and I simply don’t understand why we aren’t raising hell. We should be out there and causing a nuisance’.⁷⁹

Similarly the relationship between the WLM and established women’s groups such as the SPG was more complicated than current histories of the women’s movement allow for. WLM groups such as the WLW were willing to engage with more established women’s societies and older women activists as evidenced here. It came as a surprise to Dale Spender to learn that Hazel featured in the Spare Rib Reader (1982) in an article entitled ‘Decades: Talking Across the Century’. Here Hazel noted that ‘Germaine Greer’s book [The Female Eunuch] does me proud on the first and second pages, thanking me for backing the movement when it was so unpopular’.⁸⁰ Expanding histories of the WLM and of the women’s movement more widely, to include the experiences and reflections of older women, not just in Britain but in all locales where women campaigned for gender equality is important. Doing so not only makes visible the life-long activism of these women but demands a more nuanced approach to understandings of intergenerational conflict whereby social change can occur across generational divides, and not just through intergenerational strife.

This article has illuminated how the SPG continued to be an effective pressure group campaigning for women’s rights throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As a result it can no longer be dismissed as marginal, ineffective or ‘past its sell by date’ during these two decades. The SPG, under the leadership of Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, remained relevant by nurturing relationships with established women’s organisations, pressure groups and MPs as well as building new connections with the WLM. This ability to sustain and expand these networks, thereby enabling the sharing and passing on of experiences, expertise, and knowledge on how to campaign effectively, was crucial to the success of activism around gender equality at this time. Foregrounding these intergenerational connections has the potential to transform understandings of the women’s movement and initiate new debates about the agency and impact of female activists in the second half of the twentieth century.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caitríona Beaumont

Caitríona Beaumont is a Professor of Social History at London South Bank University, U.K. Her research focuses on the history of female activism, women’s social movements and protest in nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland and Britain. She has published numerous articles and chapters and her book Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928–1964 was published in 2013 by Manchester University Press. She is currently leading two projects: Agency and Advocacy: Locating Women's Grassroots Activism in England and Ireland, 1918 to the present (AHRC funded) and Afterlives: uncovering life stories and contributions of activist women in the wake of revolution and war: Ireland, Finland, Germany, Austria and Hungary, 1918–1980s. She is co-editor of Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: Experiences, Expertise and Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, in press, 2024).

Notes

1 Family Newsletter. December 1969. SPG/M23. Six Point Group Archive (hereafter SPG Archive). Women’s Library. London School of Economics (LSE).

2 Lady Rhondda (1883–1958) was a leading British suffragette (a supporter of militant action to win the parliamentary vote for women) and feminist. In 1920 she set up the feminist weekly journal Time and Tide and in 1921 she launched the Six Point Group, which campaigned on six key issues for women (including equal pay and equal opportunities). In 1926, with others, she set up the Open Door Council to campaign against 'protective' legislation for women. UK Parliament Website https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/parliament-and-the-first-world-war/parliamentarians-and-staff-in-the-war/written-portraits-of-parliamentarians-during-the-first-world-war/margaret-haig-thomas-2nd-viscountess-rhondda/ (accessed January 1, 2024).

3 Pat Thane, ‘Women and Political Participation in England 1918–1970’, in Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? ed. E. Breitenback and P. Thane (London: Continuum, 2010), 24.

4 Dawn Llewellyn, Reading, Feminism, and Spirituality. Troubling the Waves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 31.

5 See Karen Offen, ‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach’, Signs 14 (1988–89). For histories of the WLM see for example David Bouchier, The Feminist Challenge: The Movement for Women’s Liberation in Britain and the USA (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983). More recent work has expanded understandings of the movement. See for example, Laurel Forster and Sue Bruley, eds., Historicising the Women’s Liberation Movement in the Western World 1960–1999 (London: Routledge, 2021). Sue Bruley, ‘Women’s Liberation at the Grass Roots: A View from Some English Towns, c.1968–1990’, Women’s History Review 25, no. 5 (2016): 723–40, Sarah Crook, ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement, Activism and Therapy at the Grassroots, 1968–1985’, Women’s History Review 27, no. 7 (2018): 1152–68 and Natalie Thomlinson, Race and Ethnicity in the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

6 See for example Sarah Browne, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), Sharon Thompson, Quiet Revolutionaries: The Married Women’s Association and Family Law (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) and Lynn Abrams, Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings, & The Self in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

7 Thane, ‘Women and Political Participation’, 24.

8 From the early 1950s Hazel served as Honorary Secretary and then was appointed Chairman in 1961, a position she retained into the early 1970s. In 1977 she served as Vice-President and became President in 1978 serving in that role to 1980. These key leadership roles were interrupted by bouts of ill-health due to a serious lung condition acquired following a bombing incident when she was an air-raid warden in the Second World War, for example in the mid-1950s and again in the mid-1970s.

9 See for example John Connolly, ‘Generational Conflict and the Sociology of Generations: Mannheim and Elias Reconsidered’, Theory, Culture and Society 36, no. 7–8 (2019): 153–72.

10 Six Point Group Newsletter, April 1967. SPG Archive. Box FL526. SPG/B46-51 Annual Reports 1965–1969, Women’s Library, LSE.

11 Katherine Conger Kane, Interview with Hazel Hunkins Hallinan, The Washington Post, Sunday 21 August 1977. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/08/21/hazel-hunkins-hallinan/003d6b6a-0ea5-4c6e-8858-0615c0ce5a7a/ (accessed January 21, 2024).

12 Caitríona Beaumont, The Transnational Women’s Suffrage Movement: how the vote was won in the USA, 1848–1920 (Gender, Identity and Social Change, Adam Matthew Digital 2018).

13 Kane, Interview with Hazel Hunkins Hallinan.

14 Ibid.

15 Hazel shared more of her early experiences as a suffragette and moving to London in her 1982 interview with the historian Dale Spender. Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century (London: Pandora Press, 1983), 11–43. Hazel and Charles had four children Nancy, Joyce, Timothy, and Mark and subsequently married in the late 1920s. During the 1920s she moved in the radical circles of the Fabian Socials where she met Beatrice Webb and became friends with the American lawyer and feminist Crystal Eastman. Ibid., 26.

16 Oral evidence of the Suffragette and Suffragist Movements: the Brian Harrison Interviews. Interview 32. 8 February 1975. 8SUF/B/032. Women’s Library, LSE. https://www.lse.ac.uk/library/collection-highlights/the-suffrage-interviews (accessed January 21, 2024). Teresa Billington-Grieg was a suffragette and member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, a founding member of the Women’s Freedom League and a member of the SPG.

17 Six Point Group Leaflet, n.d. MC532. Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan Papers 1864-1984. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Adam Matthews Digital Collections: Gender Identity and Social Change). Accessed April 8, 2021.

18 Peter Gordon and David Doughan, Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations 1825–1960 (London: Woburn Press, 2001), 128.

19 The Open Door Council was founded in 1926 to secure equal employment rights for women. Ibid., 116. For the Married Women’s Association see Thompson, Quiet Revolutionaries. For more on the women’s movement in Britain 1920s to 1950s, see Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain since 1914 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women’s Movement 1918–1928 (London: IB Tauris, 1997) and Caitríona Beaumont, ‘The Women’s Movement, Politics and Citizenship, 1918–1950s’, in Women in Twentieth Century Britain, ed. I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2001), 262–77.

20 Oral evidence, Brian Harrison interview. Hazel was proud of the fact that she was the only ‘American woman who had achieved chairmanship of a national organisation (British) without having climbed to that office through marriage to an English title’. Letter dated 24 January 1973. SPG/M19. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

21 Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, ed., In Her Own Right (London: George G. Harrap & Co. LTD, 1968), 7.

22 Ibid., 9.

23 Ibid., 10.

24 Ibid., 17.

25 Ibid. Back of book cover summary.

26 Anna Coote went on to write the first full length history of the UK WLM, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (London: Picador, 1982), with Beatrix Campbell.

27 Schools’ Program Report, SPG/M19, SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

28 Letter dated 3 December 1970. SPG/M19. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

29 Between 1928 and 1964 the majority of women did marry and have children. Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Post-War British Culture’, in Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s, ed. R. Bessel and D. Schumann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 198.

30 Boadicea was a queen of the ancient British Iceni tribe. Irma Kurtz, The Sunday Times 21 September 1969. International Alliance of Women Archive (hereafter IAW Archive), 2/IAW/2/B/49. Women’s Library, LSE.

31 The London Women’s Liberation Workshop, set up in 1969, was an umbrella organisation co-ordinating women’s groups across London. The Workshop published the influential feminist magazine Shrew. See Eve Setch, ‘The Face of Metropolitan Feminism: The London Women’s Liberation Workshop, 1969–79’, Twentieth Century British History 13, no. 2 (2002): 171–90.

32 Irma Kurtz, The Sunday Times 21 September 1969. 2/IAW/2/B/49. IAW Archive. Women’s Library, LSE. This quote also appears in Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) which includes a tribute to Hazel and acknowledges her contribution to the women’s movement.

33 Kane, Interview with Hazel Hunkins Hallinan.

34 Letter dated 27 April 1980. SPG/N8-12. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

35 Letter dated 8 May 1980. 2/IAW/2/B/49. IAW Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

36 Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement. Spender interviewed Hazel as well as Dora Russell, Mary Stott, Constance Rover, and Rebecca West about their life-long activism for gender equality. See also Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, ‘Radical Books: Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century (1983)’, History Workshop, February 8, 2024, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/feminism/radical-books-dale-spender-theres-always-been-a-womens-movement-this-century-1983/ (accessed May 14, 2024).

37 Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement, 13–14.

38 Six Point Group Minutes AGM. 8 April 1970. SPG/B46-61. AGMs/Annual Reports 1965–79. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

39 Six Point Group, Report of Annual General Meeting May 1960. SPG/B34-35 AGMs/Annual Reports 1954–64. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

40 Equal pay in the non-industrial civil service was introduced on an incremental basis from 1955. Women teachers were given equal pay in 1961. SPG Newsletter (typed document), April 1964. SPG/B34-35 AGMs/Annual Reports 1954-64. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

41 See https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1963/apr/05/clause-1-regulation-of-employ-ment-of (accessed May 14, 2024).

42 The Status of Women Committee was established in Britain in 1935 by the National Council of Women following a directive from the League of Nations. By the 1960s it worked as a national body to co-ordinate the work of women’s organisations campaigning for women’s rights. Affiliated members included the SPG, the Open Door Council and the Married Women’s Association. The Committee also lobbied political parties and MPs on all matters relating to women’s equality particularly around equal pay, employment rights, married women’s rights, and social welfare benefits. It ceased activity in 1980. Gordon and Doughan, Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations, 138–9.

43 SPG Newsletter (typed document), April 1964. SPG/B34-35 AGMs/Annual Reports 1954–64. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE. Hart defended her position in a television debate with Lord Balniel on 5 April 1963. https://www.gettyimages.se/detail/video/married-womens-bill-alterations-england-london-itn-nyhetsvideor/1253224162 (accessed February 4, 2024).

44 SPG Newsletter (typed document), April 1964. SPG/B34-35 AGMs/Annual Reports 1954–64. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

45 Typed AGM Report. 24 April 1961. SPG/B34-35. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

46 Ibid. It was not until 1990 that the law changed to allow all individuals to be taxed as separate persons.

47 SPG, What We Think on Questions of Interest to Women, Report of the Spring Conference 1965. IAW Archive, 2/IAW/2/B/49. Women’s Library, LSE.

48 Notes on Women in Banking. n.d. SPG/M23. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

49 Six Point Group Minutes AGM. 8 April 1970. SPG/B46-61. AGMs/Annual Reports 1965–79. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

50 Typed Programme. 8 February 1973. SPG/M19. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE. Included among the groups attending were representatives from the Co-Operative Women’s Guild, the Fawcett Society, National Council of Women, National Union of Townswomen’s Guilds, National Federation of Women’s Institutes and Status of Women Committee, Soroptimists International Great Britain and Ireland, Women’s Group on Public Welfare, and the Women’s Liberation Workshop.

51 See Eve Worth, The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

52 For a discussion on concerns regarding professionalisation see Caitríona Beaumont, ‘The “Housewife as Expert”: Re-Thinking the Experiential Expertise and Welfare Activism of Housewives’ Associations in England, 1960–1980, in Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: Experiences, Expertise and Activism, ed. C. Beaumont, E. Colpus and R. Davidson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press 2024).

53 Ibid.

54 Anonymous, ‘Working for Women’, Summer 1970. Newspaper Cutting. SPG/N8-12. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

55 Ibid.

56 Letters accepting SPG invitation to 3 March Conference, February 1970. MC532. Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan Papers 1864-1984. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Adam Matthews Digital Collections: Gender Identity and Social Change). Accessed April 8, 2021.

57 Shrew January 1970, 15. https://archive.org/details/ucl_uwtd158_004/mode/2up (accessed May 14, 2024).

58 Letter dated 12 November 1971. SPG/M20. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

59 Six Point Group Leaflet, n.d. MC532. Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan Papers 1864–1984. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Adam Matthews Digital Collections: Gender Identity and Social Change). Accessed April 8, 2021.

60 Letter dated 25 May 1970. SPG/M19. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

61 Six Point Group AGM/Annual Report 11 May 1977. SPG/B57-61. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

62 The Benyon Bill, Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/naq7em6f (accessed February 4, 2024).

63 Co-ord Minutes meeting held on 21 April 1977. MC532. Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan Papers 1864–1984. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Adam Matthews Digital Collections: Gender Identity and Social Change). Accessed November 11, 2021.

64 The Benyon Bill, Wellcome Collection.

65 Six Point Group Executive Committee Minutes July 1978. SPG/A295-310. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

66 Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain since 1914. 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Paula Bartley, Women’s Activism in Twentieth Century Britain: Making a Difference Across the Political Spectrum (Baskingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

67 Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement, 34.

68 Typed notes. n.d. SPG/M23. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

69 On consciousness-raising see Sue Bruley, ‘Consciousness-Raising in Clapham; Women’s Liberation as “Lived Experience” in South London in the 1970s’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 5 (2013): 717–38.

70 Typed notes. n.d. SPG/M23. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

71 Kane, Interview with Hazel Hunkins Hallinan.

72 Letter n.d. MC532. Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan Papers 1864–1984. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Adam Matthews Digital Collections: Gender Identity and Social Change). Accessed November 11, 2021.

73 Letter on Women’s Liberation Workshop headed notepaper n.d. Ibid.

74 Letter dated 16 September 1970. SPG/N8-12. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

75 The National Organisation for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 and was a key in supporting the emergence of the WLM in the US. Letter dated 24 January 1973. SPG/M19. SPG Archive. Women’s Library, LSE.

76 Connolly, ‘Generational Conflict and the Sociology of Generations’.

77 Margaretta Jolly, Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968–Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5.

78 Abrams, Feminist Lives, 34–63.

79 Spender, There Has Always Been a Women’s Movement, 41.

80 Ibid., 11. Spare Rib Reader (1982) was edited by Marsha Rowe. The article captured a conversation between Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan and Gail Lewis with Carole Spedding and Amanda Sebastyen.