Interviews with the New Left ‘A Very Special Time’: The Personal and the Political and the Genesis of the Women’s Liberation Movement Catherine Hall interviewed by Andrew Whitehead
This is the text of an article published in History Workshop Journal and posted online in November 2023. The text as published is available on open access here: https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbad019/7343242 The article should be cited as: Andrew Whitehead, Interviews with the New Left: ‘A Very Special Time’: The Personal and the Political and the Genesis of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Catherine Hall interviewed by Andrew Whitehead History Workshop Journal, 2023, dbad019, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbad019
Catherine Hall with Becky (left) and Jess, 1971. Photo courtesy Catherine Hall.
In the course of a long academic career, Catherine Hall has been a pioneer of three new areas of historical enquiry, all of them intensely political: women’s and gender history; the history of Empire and the impact of the profoundly unequal relationship between Britain and its imperial possessions; and the legacies of British slavery. In this interview transcript, she looks back on her initial political engagement and the manner in which this was shaped by family and friendships, and the sense of excitement which came with the advent of the Women’s Liberation Movement at the end of the 1960s. ‘We were doing it all’, she says of the energy and scope of the women’s movement in Birmingham in the early ‘70s. ‘It was a very special time.’ Catherine Hall was born in Kettering in the English East Midlands in 1946. The family moved to Leeds when she was three. Her father was a Baptist minister. Although she came to reject her father’s religious faith, she was shaped by the household’s radical, egalitarian and internationalist outlook. While still at school, she went on her first Aldermaston peace march. And there – through another member of her family, her older sister – she first met Stuart Hall, who had come from Jamaica to Britain as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951. They married in 1964, in part to avoid distressing Catherine’s parents by living together as an unmarried couple. Stuart Hall went on to become the most influential figure in British cultural studies and a theorist and commentator of huge renown. Amid the excitement of radical politics in the 1960s, Catherine Hall also reflects on some of its less palatable aspects: the intense and sterile sectarianism that was sometimes evident; and the marginalising of women’s experiences and perspectives and the silencing of women’s voices. At the close of the 1960s, her life was transformed by twinned developments, one a personal whirlwind and the other political: the shock of all that it meant to become a mother; and the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement which gave voice, succour and confidence to women activists and the issues they embraced. ‘I had to reconstruct my world’, she says, ‘and the women's movement was how that happened.’ The edited transcript published here is of a conversation conducted on Zoom on 7 December 2020 as part of an oral history of the British New Left. Catherine Hall has very kindly given permission for the transcript to be published and has revised and in a few places slightly expanded the text. The full transcript will be deposited in due course at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and the Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She was for many years an editor of History Workshop Journal and remains an associate editor. Andrew Whitehead
Andrew Whitehead: As I read your introduction to Civilising Subjects[1], YCND [the youth wing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] was your introduction to politics. Is that right?
Catherine Hall: Well, I suppose my introduction to politics was through my family. Because my father [John Barrett] was a progressive, at the radical end of the Baptists, and my mother [Gladys Barrett] was very active in the United Nations Association and all those kinds of activities. The New Statesman was always in the house. They were absolutely solid Labour voters. So politics was present always, I think. But formally getting involved - I can't remember whether Young Socialists came before YCND. I suppose I was in the sixth form at that point.
AW: And what did YCND involve?
CH: Well, something that all these organisations involved. If you went to Leeds Girls' High School, you never met any boys. So being involved in mixed social activities, social/political activities, was always - to be honest, that was a pleasant part of it. We went to Aldermaston. It's hard to remember actually - I'm sure we did local activities. handing out leaflets. We talked about what it was all about. The fear of the bomb was very present in the culture. And I can remember a very dramatic moment in relation to that - the real terror around the time of the Bay of Pigs.[2] I remember being in the classroom at school and we were really frightened as to what was going to happen. And the talk of how people were building their shelters, worrying about how to survive - there was a lot of public, governmental materials (this was long before the internet) about what to do in the face of a nuclear attack. Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't that long ago. And those were very vivid. So it was very present in the culture.
CH: I think the year I met Stuart [Hall], which was '62. Basically, my sister is four years older than me. And she was in Oxford. And she got involved with a group in Oxford, New University. They were the next generation after Stuart and co. So Margaret was at Somerville doing Classics. She got involved with Michael Rustin very, very early on in being in Oxford, so became part of that group. And Stuart was their mentor, really. And so when I went to Aldermaston in '62, I must have gone with Leeds people, but my sister was on the march too. And they were all going on holiday to Wales, to a house that our next-door neighbour in Leeds owned at that time in Dolgellau. Anyway, somebody couldn't go at the last minute, so little sister was allowed to come. So, I had the Easter holidays immediately after the Aldermaston march there. But I didn't get involved with Stuart then. I didn't get involved with him until a year later, when I moved to London after finishing my A-levels. But I was on the march that year and then of course the following year.
AW: With your parents' blessing?
CH: Yes. I'm sure they were a bit nervous. But, you know, that was very close to their world. And they were very encouraging of their daughters' activities. And, of course, because my sister was older and she was going, it made it supposedly safer.
AW: What do you remember of the mood of that march?
CH: Well, I suppose I remember quite a lot of trudging along (laughs) and sleeping in exceedingly uncomfortable places. Things like that. I think there was quite a lot of excitement. All of this was in the shadow, was absolutely in the shadow of the terrible stroke that my father had had. So our family was riven apart. I was very young and as a young radical, this was what you did and this was where you went. I found the Young Socialist meetings ghastly. Even then the Trots were - it was so sectarian. It was: you have to follow the line. Part of the appeal of YCND was it was much more open to different ways of thinking. But I wasn't exactly very confident - I was a girl, I was really a girl.
AW: When you got to London in 1963, how did you find that?
CH: Well, it was incredibly difficult personally because - I told you my father had had this dreadful stroke and he had to retire. And he was a very powerful preacher, a very significant man in the Baptist Union which at that time had a strong radical wing. The Baptists have always been split between the progressives and the extremely conservatives with a small ‘c’. And my father was one of the leading figures in the progressive bit. He was the superintendent of the North-Eastern area of the Baptist Union. Anyway, his illness was just totally shattering. There was no warning. He was then an invalid for the next seventeen years until he died and my mother looked after him. So my mother was shattered. Life just fell apart. So they moved to London. It's necessary to tell you this stuff, it's highly relevant to everything that happened but personal rather than political in any obvious way. My father had been adopted and he was an illegitimate child, though we didn't know that until many years later. He had in effect been adopted by a very charismatic Baptist minister who was a lot older than him. And they went to live in the house of this couple. It had been the plan that the house would be divided and my parents would have the upstairs flat and Sidney and Winifred would be downstairs. But Sidney died just before they were to move to London. And so instead of moving to this wonderfully welcoming set-up, they moved to a completely devastated widow. And my mother was a devastated widow of a different kind - my father was still alive, but he could never be the man that he was before he was ill. So it was a very, very depressed scene. And I'd been living with friends in Leeds to do my A-levels and that wasn't very easy either. So I went to London. My sister wasn't living at home anymore, so there was just me in this new flat with my debilitated father and depressed mother. So it was very tough. And that summer, Margaret was spending an enormous amount of time with Michael. I think they got married that summer, actually. And Stuart was very much part of the social and political world in which they were all living. Stuart was very involved at that time with George Clark - there's a whole history of Notting Hill activism, community activism, and the Campaign Caravan Workshop. One of the sponsors of all the Notting Hill work, the community work and so on, was this farmer. We all went for a week's political discussions wherever this farm was, somewhere outside London. And we all stayed in the barns in sleeping bags and so on. So that's when I got really involved with Stuart. And then I went to Sussex, because I was going direct from school to university. So I went to Sussex in the end of September or October. But by that time there was a pretty substantial love affair between us, even though I was so young and he was much older than me. I stayed at Sussex for a year and a term. I didn't like it at all. Then we got married and I moved to Birmingham. We wanted to live together and I just didn't want to distress my father too much. I don't know whether we would have got married otherwise. Anyway, we did.
AW: And you were a student again at Birmingham?
CH: So then I transferred to Birmingham. My political experience at Sussex was absolutely horrible. The Socialist Society there was completely dominated by Militant. And they were awful. They were really an absolutely ghastly group. There was no way we would have called it women's liberation at that time, but the three women friends who tried to be in the Socialist Society at that time, we knew there was a problem about masculinity and about male dominance in the left. That was definitely a relevant, a very relevant, experience. So then I went to Birmingham at the end of 1964. We got married in December '64. And my experience there in the history department, it was terrific because I was taught by Rodney Hilton who I became deeply attached to and decided I wanted to be a medievalist because of him.[4] I knew Edward and Dorothy Thompson. We went to stay with them in their house in Wales, Votti. The Making of the English Working Class came out in '63. They were part of my life from the minute I started being with Stuart, which wasn't easy at all because I was very, very young. And of course, by '63, '64, a hell of a lot of water had passed under the bridge, a lot of it pretty choppy, to put it mildly, with the ending of the first phase of the New Left. Stuart had left New Left Review and it was a very hard time for him. The new group led by Perry Anderson soon took over and the character of the journal changed. So all this stuff I picked up, both personally and then going to meetings in London and meeting lots of people, all in the wake of the New Left.[5] But then to be taught by Rodney and just the excitement of encountering a completely different society which was what medieval history felt like, well, it was great. So I made the great mistake of thinking I could be a medievalist. I had a huge debate internally when I'd finished my degree as to whether I should go and work with Edward in Warwick or whether I should stay with Rodney. But anyway, I decided to stay with Rodney. But these major Marxist historians were very, very significant people for me. And then I attempted to do a PhD in medieval history which was a serious mistake as my Latin was hopeless. And in '68 I had Becky and got involved in the women's movement in the pretty immediate aftermath of that and gave up on the medieval aristocracy and its complex and dominating relationship with the gentry that I had hoped to explore. I was already interested in Gramsci. I turned to women's history instead.
AW: When you were an undergraduate or a recent graduate, you went to ‘A Day with the Chartists’. How did you end up at that first History Workshop?[6]
CH: Well, we knew Raphael [Samuel] very well. He came and stayed with us at Birmingham and so on. I knew him from - from the beginning, again, with Stuart. We would go to Elder Street – so we were part of that world. And well I'm sure Raphael - well of course he wasn't called that then[7] - I'm sure he talked to Stuart about History Workshop. And then, well I'd met Sally [Alexander] - I can remember when actually because I know that Becky was a baby, I would say it was the summer after she was born so I think it was probably the summer of '69. And we went to the Thompsons, to Wick Episcopi, and Sally and Gareth [Stedman Jones] were there. And of course, Stuart knew Luke [Hodgkin] and Anna [Davin] in Oxford and, used to go to their house a lot. It's just a network - it's a network. We were all interested in the history of radicalism – so Chartism was part of that and Dorothy [Thompson] worked on them – the main thing I can remember about it is being in the place that was at the centre of the Chartist Land plan, I think on a pretty chilly day.
AW: 1968 was the year of Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Do you remember hearing about it?
CH: Yes. It was very, very shocking. So we were living in Birmingham then. We'd had the experience of being a mixed couple, which was extremely unusual at that time, and obviously met hostility. The first time we tried to find a flat to live, it was just frightening - what kind of reception you were going to get and so on. And having a mixed-race baby – lots of comments… Stuart was already involved with race politics in different ways. And the main black communities were not in the area where we were in in Birmingham. We lived first of all in Selly Oak, very close to the university, and then in '68 we bought a house in Moseley. It was an area very dominated by the university and became absolutely central to all my women's liberation activities. It was close to Balsall Heath, which was of course a totally different population, particularly of South Asian migration. Powell made the speech right in the centre of Birmingham, in a hotel.[8] Now what I can't remember is whether there was a demonstration then, whether either of us were on it. I don't know. I was very involved in university politics at that time because that was before Becky was born - and the build-up to the occupation which happened in Birmingham in December '68. I was very pregnant when the Great Hall was occupied.
AW: What was the occupation over?
CH: Well, in the wake of Paris. And making demands about changes. We were a very active group in the history department demanding changes in the syllabus. Not about decolonising at that time but - for example, there was no teaching on historiography in the history department at Birmingham. So the idea that there were different approaches to history that you might want to think about was very radical. They were demanding democratisation of the governance of the university. It was very dramatic and a very absorbing experience politically to be so in the maelstrom. But it was also complicated because Stuart was on the staff and of course I was a student. And Richard Hoggart, who was the director of the Centre [for Contemporary Cultural Studies] at that time, was heavily involved in trying to mediate with the vice-chancellor and was - certainly not 100% behind the students whereas Stuart was much closer to the critical student position. So there was some discomfort around the complexities of all of that.
AW: Did Powell change your political activity?
CH: Having a baby totally changed my life. Totally and utterly. I had no idea. Absolutely no idea. None of my friends had children. By then, Stuart had a whole group around him at the Centre. Very very lively graduate students, many of whom stayed for absolutely years. It was just a very different time from now. So I had to reconstruct my world and the women's movement was how that happened. I think of the New Left as Stuart's New Left, which I was never part of because I was too young. Of course, '68 and the women's movement and so on - there are lots of connections between that and the New Left. But the politics of the New Left as my understanding of it from him, and from everything I know about that, that was a very particular moment which ended with the takeover of New Left Review. It was the ending of the hope of a popular movement rather than an intellectual current.
AW: You see that as an end rather than the end of a chapter?
Well, it was the end of a very important chapter - I mean, when since then has there been a politics which has been able to speak across culture, internationalism, party politics, with a vision of a socialist future? So I suppose in all my political experience since then, the difficulty has always been: how do you bridge those gaps? How do you move from being involved in a women's group or whatever it is to being a political movement, which is not essentially about us, a particular issue - women and gender - but is about social transformation, social and political transformation?
AW: The women's movement you got involved with in 1969, that was locally in Birmingham?
CH: It was centrally in Birmingham and it was hugely active - for the next ten years virtually. And that broke up in the wake of the last women's liberation national conference in Birmingham in '78 which split over lesbianism and revolutionary feminism. And there was never another national conference. Up to then, there was the attempt to hold all the different elements together. But it didn't survive. And I was very involved in a particular grouping - we all called ourselves socialist feminists, with Sheila Rowbotham, Sally Alexander and others.
AW: And did you feel this was something very new?
CH: Well, we were arrogant just as today's young feminists are arrogant and think nobody has thought these things before when actually an awful lot of them have been thought before. One of the things I remember so clearly is how pissed off Dorothy Thompson was at the next generation's – our - sense of how we were doing something so different and new. (laughs) But now I understand that generation. You could say I've spent many years discovering. We had no idea of the numbers of women historians there were in the eighteenth century or the nineteenth century. Not a clue! Or even in the twentieth century. And of course I think there were new things about women's liberation which were particular to that time just as there are new things now to the particular politics of feminism in the twenty-first century. But there were many continuities.
AW: The women’s liberation conference at Ruskin in 1970 is often seen as the landmark. Rightly?
CH: Yes, it felt terribly important. Because it was the first time there was a series of national demands which were agreed at the conference and which we all voted on.[9] And so there was a platform which we were at that moment agreed on - which of course we then went on to argue about and disagree about. Symbolically it was a very important moment. But politics, (like history), is always about conversation, disagreement and conflict – the hope has to be that there is enough shared to be able to build a movement together.
AW: As a venue, Ruskin College is often seen as old left, very male dominated. It's not the obvious place to have a women's liberation conference.
CH: No, well it was entirely because of the connections with Raphael and history. Sally [Alexander] was at Ruskin at that time. And Sheila Rowbotham was another of the key people. I'm sure we had the space for free. And we cleared up and what have you.
AW: What do you remember of that?
CH: I remember - it was really exciting. And the place was packed. I can remember where I was sitting - I was sitting up in the gallery, with my friend from Birmingham, Val Hart. She and I started the first women's group in Birmingham. And we both had babies - we both had our lives transformed.
AW: Were your babies with you? Was Becky with you?
CH: Yes. There's a lovely picture of Stuart in the creche. But not with Becky - with somebody else. (laughs) Because of course we all believed in the importance of looking after everybody else's children, sharing childcare. Yes, Becky was there.
AW: And you say it was empowering - ?
CH: Oh, the sense of: all of us together. And also, things like the men doing the creche. I mean, what a change. That was so new.
AW: Do you think that you and those present at Ruskin realised at the time just how much of a change that event represented?
CH: Yes I think so because all of us, all of us who were socialist feminists, were also involved in left politics. So we were completely used to being in totally male dominated political meetings. I think this was partly why the women's movement felt so full of life, you know. (laughs) All these people who hadn't thought they had a voice finding a voice and finding a collective voice - it was really transformative.
AW: Do you have any memories of demonstrations and protests at that time? CH: We had little demonstrations. Not so long ago, I counted up the number of groups there were in Birmingham by the middle of the Seventies. It was astonishing how many women's groups there were. Absolutely astonishing. And we had newsletters and we had demonstrations, we had lots of shared childcare, we had endless different activities. And I started teaching women's history before we left Birmingham. We left Birmingham in '81. So the range of activities, from Reclaim the Night, to children's play groups, to consciousness raising groups, to educational groups, to reading Marxism groups, you know, we were doing it all. It was a very special time.
[1] Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002
[2] In April 1961, Cuban exiles acting under the direction of the American government laned at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba as part of an unsuccessful invasion attempt. This was a prelude to the Cubam Missile Crisis of October-November 1962.
[3] Aldermaston in Berkshire was the site of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. From 1958 to 1963, anti-nuclear weapons campaigners staged an Easter protest march between Aldermaston and Central London.
[4] Rodney Hilton had been a prominent member of the Communist Party Historians Group. In 1963 he was appointed Professor of Medieval and Social History at the University of Birmingham.
[5] Stuart Hall was the founding editor of New Left Review, which launched in January 1960. He stood down two years later.
[7] Raphael Samuel, who taught at Ruskin College and was the founder of the History Workshop movement, styled himself at the time Ralph Samuel.
[8] Enoch Powell, at the time the Shadow Defence Secretary, made his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech about what he saw as the consequences of large-scale Commonwealth immigration at a Conservative Party meeting in Birmingham on 20 April 1968.
[9] The ‘Women’s Weekend’ convened at Ruskin College, Oxford, on 27 February – 1 March 1970 was the first national Women’s Liberation Conference. It formulated four demands: equal pay; equal educational and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and free 24-hour nurseries.