Lynne Segal: founder of the Islington Gutter Press

Gender off the agenda

A lack of appetite for politics among the daughters of the feminist movement gives Lynne Segal cause for concern. Peter Gruner reports

Making Trouble: Life and Politics. By Lynne Segal. Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books, £10.99. order this book

LYNNE Segal is a feminist writer and scholar, whose gentle looks belie a growing concern that many of the gains of women’s liberation are being eroded.
Her latest book, Making Trouble, is full of personal stories and a chronicle of the radical politics she has been engaged in.
She regrets that despite the successes of feminism, women in general are still doing more of the household chores.
She also sees the daughters of the women’s revolution, whose mothers fought against the beauty business personified by the Miss Great Britain pageant, in a world where they are exhorted to remain forever young, perhaps considering cosmetic surgery out of fear of those tell-tale stigmas of ageing.
Lynne, who has lived in Highbury for more than 30 years, is a professor of psychology and gender studies at London University’s Birkbeck College.
Her book chronicles her involvement in the feminist movement almost from the day she and her infant son arrived here from Australia in 1970. It is also a fascinating social history of that period.
Her home is close to the former squat where she, Ralph Edney and others produced the Islington Gutter Press, a monthly newspaper that was required reading for every north London radical. It campaigned on a myriad of issues, from lack of nurseries, poor housing and factory closures to supporting those tackling racism, sexism and homophobia in the borough and well beyond.
“It’s hard to explain to people today how we found the time, energy and inspiration in those days for such full-time street politics,” Lynne says. “I was lecturing at what was then Enfield College of Technology, but many of my friends and political allies were on the dole. There were meetings, demonstrations, leafleting, lobbying, community liaising and poster making to be done. That’s before we even thought about writing articles for the Gutter Press.”
Political pundits denounced the 1970s feminists as “anti men” and “ugly harridans” but there was the beginning of an enormous sea change in attitudes and laws that has undeniably improved life for today’s young women.
“It is thanks to women’s liberation that it is easier for women today to leave a loveless or violent marriage,” Lynne notes. “Other victories gave women more employment and reproductive rights. Many men are, or at least know they should be, a lot more caring and sharing around the home.”
The 1970s was the decade in which women’s liberationists set up refuges for battered women, most of them mothers; won legislation to enable women to obtain a court order against a violent husband or father; and campaigned successfully for child benefits to be paid to the person caring for the child, not just the husband in the family.
But despite the improvements, Lynne is disappointed that instead of the hoped for egalitarian and confident society under New Labour, there is now a “crazy world” of ubiquitously imposed market forces, with everyone competing with each other.
“There is a kind of free market Stalinism now regulating the public sector,” she says. “Even primary school teachers must spend as much time filling in forms about what they will be teaching as they spend in the classroom.”
Elsewhere, every institution is forced into a situation where they are competing against each other, whether in schools, universities, hospitals, offices or factories. “It is driving people out of the public sector, because the most worthwhile and socially useful jobs will be the worst paid.”
Now in her early 60s, Lynne is taking up the banner on behalf of the ageing baby boomer population, particularly where women face discrimination. She has taken an interest in the recent row over the sacking of television presenter Moira Stewart for apparently being too old.
She is an active supporter of Independent Jewish Voices and Jews for Justice for Palestinians, both organisations involved in attempts to support those working for peace and justice in the Middle East.
Despite all her concerns about the present, Lynne remains an optimist, at least of the spirit. “Being drawn to feminism brought politics back into my personal life in the 1970s.
“But then, being drawn to politics has kept me attached to the wider loyalties and commitments, allowing at least some escape from the self- doubts and disappointments that shadow individual lives.”