On women’s liberation

Press, 14 August 1982, Page 16

On women’s liberation

Sweet Freedom — The Struggle for Women’s Liberation. By Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell. Picador, 1982. 248 pp. $6.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Heather McPherson) This is a timely book. With unemployment increasing, the American Equal Rights Amendment dead, and Gordon Campbell’s article (“Listener,” May 22) confirming New Zealand women’s suspicions that "sexual segregation at work has actually increased, with ‘women’s work’ offering in general lower rewards, career prospects and job security," many women may be. feeling that the first 10 or so years of women’s liberation have produced little concrete change. “Sweet Freedom” is an over-all view of women's liberation in England. It is a wide-ranging account, well written, well researched, and in spite of apparent feminist losses in the lean 1980 s, encouragingly positive. It could be a useful introductory text on the aims of women’s liberation, where they conflict with the Establishment, and sometimes, with each other. As a potted herstory it should - please most feminists, given the odd niggle over definitions or the glossing over of the short-term necessity for and

benefits of separatism, as one small example. But it also points out that more dialogue, more analysis, more questioning is needed.

The book is organiseed simply into nine chapters including Work, Family, Sex.those areas .where the movement’s consciousness-raising slogan, "the personal is political,” most applies. Subsections within the chapters are occasionally titled lightheartedly enough: “Did we fall or were we pushed?”, “Lie back and think of England”; others, though illustrated with English law and precedents, are as cogent here- “Equal pay - some more equal than others," “Education cuts,” “The problem of powerlessness,” and “The male perspective on news values.”

An obvious illustration of the latter, the authors note in their introduction, was the initial distortion of the so-called braburning episode. Women’s Liberation has been, and continues to be a grass roots movement as well as a series of specifically oriented organisations struggling to change the system. The authors approve and argue for this "broad approach to feminist politics which will help to keep up the momentum of struggle in the 1980 s.” I look forward to a local account of the issues. ■