Women's Activism in the Modern British City

This chapter reflects on how the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM)’s fourth, third and seventh demands (for childcare, for improved access to reproductive health, and for freedom from male violence) played out in modern British cities. Examining how each sparked specific campaigns (for playspaces and nursery education, improved health access and outcomes and street safety) we see how much of the British WLM’s activism was shaped by and reflected in the surrounding urban environments of inner cities and newer peripheral estates. The chapter references activism from the 1950s onwards, but its main focus is on the 1970s and early 1980s. This period, seen as the highpoint of British feminism, coincided with the rise of a movement termed by John Gyford as the ‘New Urban Left’ in local government. This movement came to dominate around thirty local authorities in the 1980s including over a dozen London boroughs and larger Metropolitan authorities such as the Greater London Council (GLC) and Merseyside County Council.6 While the New Urban Left was never a group with just one agenda, its broader concerns when in power exceeded the accepted remit of local government. The councils it controlled directed municipal support to nuclear free zones and community activism and radical arts programmes, matching the WLM’s efforts to extend the boundaries of what was deemed political. The New Urban Left meshed with feminist activism in other ways as many local authorities looked to decentralise power and build alliances with various groups beyond the town hall. Matrix had criticised the stereotypes of urban design which assumed that women would mainly be in their homes rather than in public space. Community activists, by contrast, realised that these stereotypes unintentionally put women ‘in the front line of interaction with the local state’ as the ‘primary consumers of a large range of council services’ such as schools, housing and the general urban environment. Women’s Liberation and community activism were both predominantly city-based phenomena that emerged from a background of urban crises in the 1970s. Both were also supportive of and supported by the New Urban Left whose ascent across various local authorities gave feminist activists access to government funding even as national state spending slowed.