A Look Back at Anger: the Women's Liberation Movement in 1978

The British Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) has received scarce attention from historians, though many women have published first-hand accounts. These accounts are usually from a socialist feminist perspective, which tends to silence or disparage revolutionary feminist actions and ideas. Archival and oral history research on the WLM's last National Conference in Birmingham in 1978 illuminates how such a perspective is partial and in need of revision. The conference witnessed bitter disagreements, with the final plenary session degenerating into chaos as women debated the merits of resolutions relating to sexuality and violence against women. This article reconstructs the events leading up to the plenary, and interrogates the often implicit but rarely explicit notion that a particular group of revolutionary feminists was responsible for the breakdown of the Conference, and with it, the WLM as a political force.