‘Please Say More’: mediating conflict through letter-writing in British second wave feminist periodicals, 1970-1990

Bec Wonders, 2021, Glasgow School of Art
Supervised by Prof. Susannah Thomson, Dr. Marianne Greated, Dr. Deborah Jackson

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“One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.”

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (London: Virago, 1980.) 11.

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in women’s publishing that generated a woman-controlled communication infrastructure in the form of feminist periodicals. As a result of women actively contributing to the letter-to-the-editor pages, these periodicals offer rich source material for tracing the development of areas of feminist contention. While significant research has been done on the role of print-based feminist networks in the US by Agatha Beins and Martha Allan, its UK counterpart remains under-researched. By means of a systematic documentation and analysis of second wave feminist periodicals in the UK, this research aims to understand the primary role of these networks in facilitating the development of feminist ideas.

The research was conducted by means of a feminist archival methodology to access primary sources of correspondences found in pertinent periodicals. The selecting of material was predicated on a gradual identification of overarching disagreements in letter-to-the-editor pages, some of which transcended one particular periodical and re-emerged in other titles. As such, the periodicals in question are approached as a networked and networking infrastructure of communication and exchange. This research analyses primary sources of correspondences found in the following periodicals:

• Women’s Information Referral Enquiry Service (WIRES) (1975-1985)

• Red Rag: A Magazine of Women’s Liberation (1972-1980)

• Scarlet Women: Newsletter of the Socialist Current in the Women’s Liberation Movement (1976-1982)

• Outwrite: Women’s Newspaper (1982-1988)

• Revolutionary & Radical Feminist Newsletter (Rev/Rad) (1978–89)

• Spare Rib: A Women’s Liberation Magazine (1972-1993)

• Trouble & Strife: A Radical Feminist Magazine (1983-2002)

Tracing these debates not only resulted in highlighting the discursive and networking function, it additionally challenges popularised caricatures of the Women’s Liberation Movement by evidencing polyvocal and multi-textual negotiations.

This thesis argues that the medium of the feminist periodical was especially well suited to mediating conflict, as it produced a collective body of theoretical knowledge within the movement, while also repeatedly inviting readers to contribute with a plurality of opinion. By documenting how these debates travelled across multiple periodical titles, new light is shed on how the development of feminist theory and practice was reliant on a webbed network of debate. Rather than understanding conflict as an indication of failure, it appears that it is in fact suggestive of feminist theorising reaching critical momentum. Letter-to-the-editor pages evidence a distinct rhetoric of considered disagreement which disavowed “final word” arguments and emphasised the opening, rather than closing, of political debate. This research contributes to the fields of women’s history and feminist media studies by detailing how second wave feminist periodicals, through their correspondence pages, functioned as indispensable forums for the articulation of criticism and facilitated the advancement of feminist discourse.