Women activists in the UK discuss anarchism, feminism and the relationship between the personal and the political in extracts from interviews carried out by myself and Lynn Alderson in 1977. The whereabouts of the original tapes, or longer transcripts, is unknown, though we still have hopes of recovering them. For now, these partial transcripts are all there is. See Anarchism and Feminism: Voices from the Seventies for the other interviews and further information.
Note on Text: In line with the original intention that the interviewees would remain anonymous, I have given them pseudonyms, and made one or two minor alterations. Editorial amendments are indicated in square brackets [1977 edits] or square brackets and italics [2014 edits]. Ellipses appear in the original transcriptions, indicating cuts. In a couple of instances I have made additional small cuts, indicated with […], to remove repetition or obscurity.
I quote from this interview in my article The Gender Politics of Anarchist History.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Key Words: anarchism, anarchafeminism, feminism, politics, Women’s Liberation, 1970s
Excuse me comrades, where are all the women?
I suppose I thought of myself as being a socialist, and I began to think of myself as a pacifist because I came through a position of: ‘Well if nuclear weapons are wrong, all weapons are wrong, and war is wrong.’ Thinking through that — you can’t actually stop war as long as you have nation states — brought me to an anarchist position. The other thing was seeing that the society I grew up in was rotten and wrong, and at the same time [seeing from Communist Party reactions to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 ] any politics where you actually put your commitment to an organisation in front of your commitment to an idea and to your friends … and I thought, you can’t just have politics where you’ll hold to the line of the organisation when it goes against everything, your personal feelings, your friends and your political feelings for the kind of society you want. I suppose that was the other thing that led me to an anarchist position.
I kept thrashing it around in my head … and I didn’t know about anarchism. Nobody said the word; I didn’t know that there were anarchists. And then suddenly in 1962, when I was nearly 19, I was talking to a bloke, a Communist, about my ideas, and he looked at me in horror and said ‘You’re an anarchist!’ And I thought, ‘Oooh!’ … Then I met some other people who were, and thought I must be.
Judy: So what changes did that actually make to your activities?
Emma: Bugger all! … The only thing happening then was the anti-nuclear movement. [Involvement with the Committee of 100, [civil disobedience and direct action]] — thinking through that was the other thing that made me come to the point where I was an anarchist. …
I now feel it’s extremely important to study, particularly history, to find out why we went wrong and the Leninists went wrong and to find out what forms of organisation we need to make a revolution and to make a society that works properly… I know what the anti-intellectual thing is about, it’s about a lot of intellectuals who cut themselves off from their feelings and personal experience and that is disastrous. But I feel if you can do both things at once that makes for a much stronger movement. …
Judy: I don’t think that there is an anarchist theorist of the same kind of stature as Marx, but then I don’t know that we should be looking for one. I think looking at history isn’t the same as looking back for theory.
Emma: No. I’d rather take my theory from history. …
We don’t have any founding fathers. …
[On marriage the anarchist convention is] ‘Oh, anarchists don’t get married’ … I didn’t need a licence from the state. But I didn’t think in terms of being a woman who didn’t want to get married. …
It hadn’t actually struck me, until I left school, that I was second-class … there must have been a lot of conditioning that we weren’t aware of, But I didn’t have that awareness that we’re supposed to have of being second class. And it hit me when I left school, in terms of what jobs I could get. … Then in about ’68, ’69, another man friend came back from the States and said ‘ You know, there’s something happening — the women are really talking about things and getting things on. Why did you always do the cooking when you lived with [Chris]?’ And I sat down and thought, ‘Why did I?’ …
In the peace movement there were always strong women … but how we operated, and how I still operate politically — I’d got used to, if I want to say something, standing up and shouting, and so I could still do that … Anyone who’s been politically active before the Women’s Movement is very badly damaged in irrevocable ways… having gone through years of thinking you’re alone … you develop a lot of rigidities … I don’t see how I can get rid of them, in a way. …
Judy: What labels would you accept?
Emma: The main one is revolutionary, the second one is anarchist, the third one is … either non-violent or anarcho-communist. Sometimes both, of course, depending on the context. Feminist is a definition that I’ll put when I feel attacked — It’s not a spontaneous self-definition. Because so far as I’m concerned, when I say that I’m an anarchist you should know that means women’s liberation is going to be a primary concern. Because that’s my liberation, and as an anarchist my liberation is equally important with everyone else’s. [ …]
When people talk about women’s issues, my response is: all issues are women’s issues. If you mean making it a primary thing specifically to work with other women, without men, then I don’t — though I would also like to.
Feminism also means the first women’s bank in New York, and a lot of things within the system. I prefer to talk about women’s liberation because ‘feminism’ as a word has less political content. ‘Feminist’ is really only a label I use if I’m attacked, almost like I’ll use the label ‘Jew’ if I’m attacked by a racist. …
Judy: Do you feel that women actually ought to work with men?
Emma: Yes. Because I don’t think that things will change otherwise. It’s only by confronting male chauvinism when it arises, as it arises, and hopefully not always in the context of one’s own domestic relationships with men. I think that it’s very important for men to work more like women — and they’re not going to find out how. …
What was really shattering was being away from the organised anarchist movement for a long time and about 1973 going to a meeting and walking into the room and there were eight men there and I was the only woman. I nearly flipped! I said ‘excuse me, comrades, where are all the women? ‘ And they said ‘they’re in the Women’s Movement.’ And business then proceeded as usual … they recognised what admirable work was being got on in the women’s movement — but the actual group was proceeding as it ever had… that’s why I think that women should work in mixed groups, because the change isn’t happening.
Judy: You could say the change is happening elsewhere.
Emma: But the men aren’t changing. They’re still going on, and there are still these idiot ways of running meetings … and it’s not necessarily for lack of goodwill. A lot of younger men, having grown up in the context of the women’s movement are quite open to things, but don’t know what to do, because nobody says …
Judy: Did you find it helpful being in all-women groups, or is it something you feel you can do without?
Emma: It’s something I do do without, but not that I feel I can do without … what I’d really like is to be part of a group you go to and you create a support amongst each other for what you are doing besides that … which was the original concept of a consciousness-raising group as I understood it …
I think that total separatism is politico–crazy. As a temporary thing, fine; as an individual thing, fine; as an ideology, it’s a killer.
Judy: I’ve always thought that the reason why so many different ideas within the Women’s Liberation movement are so upsetting is because they are so threatening personally… in feminist ideas you can’t make all those neat separations between your political ideas and the rest of your life; it gets really bound up with your whole identity. …
Emma: The basis of anarchism is that the worth of every person is equal … so if that is the premise then obviously that half the human race should be treated as if they are less than the other half is untenable for an anarchist, though I know there are a lot of sexist, male chauvinist anarchists. The oppression of women, and the suppression of those things that are attributed to women traditionally. is the expression of [a] power relationship, which is obviously inimical to anarchism, as any power relationship must be. I think that anyone who is an anarchist who is not making it a prime concern, if she is a woman, to work for her own liberation and that of her sisters; or if he is a man, to eradicate an oppressive part of himself, then I don’t think they are taking their anarchism very seriously. …
Judy: Have you some sort of idea of other issues you’d like to work on, that you think are important, in the next few years?
Emma: Well, the troops are still in Ireland. That’s the main thing that is in the back of my head the whole time. …
I suppose the main thing that faces me, being 34, is that if I don’t have a child now, I can’t, biologically and yet I can’t work out a way of doing that that would be right for me, or right for the child. …
I think there are certain moral positions we share with Marxists. It is bad to exploit people, it is bad to have a class society, and so on. I am conscious that I function out of a morality … I can’t see how you can have any kind of changed society without a morality … people who say they do things not from a basis of a morality — I can’t work out how they do anything, because if I weren’t doing things from a basis of morality … I wouldn’t get up in the mornings. I think morality is a kind of prop that we will probably transcend through the creation of an anarchist society. Because I think that if the society that we make frees us from those very basic oppressions, then we will be such changed people that what we think of now as morality will be a kind of crutch which we’ll be able to let drop, because we’ll be living in such different ways.
I have continually to be thinking whether what I’m doing is giving me some satisfaction, and assessing it in two ways:
1. — Is it worthwhile in terms of what I think politically?
And 2. — Is it what I should be doing, personally? …
[Re squatting]: I do it on the basis that if there is a group of people I want to live with and we can’t get a house on any other basis, then okay. I don’t like paying rent … a political morality in housing is impossible.…
Judy: How likely do you think it is that there will be a revolution, whether it’s anarchist or not?
Emma: I don’t know, because you think about it at different levels. If I didn’t believe there was going to be an anarchist revolution, I couldn’t continue to work. I have to believe, and really physically believe it in my body, because I can’t see that the world can survive without blowing itself up or clogging itself up with plastic or nuclear waste or whatever, without a libertarian and decentralised and human society … I believe it because if I didn’t believe it I couldn’t go on; but I don’t think it. I think there may be bound to be a very repressive period which as a society we may or may not come through; as individuals a lot of us won’t come through it. But I think we have to keep believing that we will.
Judy: I find it an impossible contradiction, myself. I find it very hard to believe that there will be one, certainly in my lifetime, probably ever. The likelihood of disaster before then is very great, yes. On the other hand, what else can you do? I couldn’t do nothing, anyway. Even if the chance is minute, you may as well fight for it.
Emma: I think it’s physical. I think if I didn’t feel it really was possible — and it’s a physical feeling, it’s not an intellectual feeling, it’s not even emotional — it’s like a hunger. And when people are hungry, if they didn’t think they were going to eat some time they would kill themselves, because hunger is a very painful feeling … if I thought it was only a slight possibility, then there are an awful lot of other things I’d rather do, given the next few years. I’d rather go and earn some money and travel a lot and things like that, if I thought it wasn’t possible … intellectually, I can’t see it. …
Judy: Can you say what for you are the important differences between anarchism and Marxism or socialism?
Emma: It’s primarily a matter of organisation. The tendency with a Marxist or Leninist form of organisation is the tendency to pull in towards the centre all the time, so that increasing amounts of decisions … the authoritarian character cannot bear to have anything out of its control. Organisation is a horizontal matter between groups of autonomous people … no doubt there has to be a certain amount of delegation [but] you have continually to be watching the tendency of centralisation to happen, and you have continually to be hauling it back out again …
The thing that gives rise to anarchists being called individualists — which isn’t individualism as I understand it — is … a respect for and a validation for people, on their own merits, on their own terms, with their own skills and values and each one being as important as the other. Which doesn’t mean working individually. For me, when a collective really works is when I feel strongest as an individual, that I am not just myself, having to work it all out by myself, but that there is a group of people also doing that, and we are feeding each other and supporting each other. That’s the times when I’ve felt strongest as an individual, when I’ve been in a group which has felt strong as a group… that’s a feeling that is very difficult to convey to anyone who thinks hierarchically.