Scarlet Women was produced by a collective of women, most of whom were based in North Shields, North Tyneside. Penny Remfry was one of those and still lives locally. This is her recollection of how Scarlet Women began and developed.
I came up to Tyneside in January 1973 to work in the Tynemouth, later North Tyneside, Community Development Project. I had been living in Montreal before that and involved in various political activities including early feminist ideas. One of the first things I did when I arrived here was to look for some feminist activity. I found my way to the only women’s group around at the time, the Socialist Women’s Action Group which met at the Bridge Hotel in Newcastle on a Monday night. I persuaded the wives of the two men I was working with to come with me, and there we met 2 other women who had recently come to Tyneside.
Most of the women in the group were the wives or girlfriends of men who were in International Socialists who met downstairs in the bar. The women’s politics reflected that of their menfolk and were concerned with economic issues such as the impact of rising prices on housewives.
The 5 of us quickly recognised that we had a different perspective on women’s issues which was much more women focussed. It was the time of constant attacks on the 1967 Abortion Act and we wanted to organise a campaign to support a Woman’s Right To Choose.
We left SWAG and started the Coast Women’s Group and other women joined us.. We were a consciousness raising group as well as being involved in issues and campaigns and we talked about our experience as women, in particular in relation to men. We talked about women’s oppression as wives, mothers, girlfriends and the discrimination we faced in education, the workplace and even as what we would now call ‘consumers’. Women still had to get their husband’s signature to enter into a hire purchase agreement back then.
Many of the members were or had been members of left groups but were frustrated that their issues concerning the many ways in which women were discriminated against were ignored by their male colleagues. Wait til after the revolution, we were told, then we’ll sort out the Woman Question, as it was called.
In 1976 there was a Women’s Liberation Movement Conference in Newcastle and we decided to raise this issue of what we called ‘wearing 2 hats’ there by organising a workshop on the issue. We also ran the crèche at the conference, and while we looked after the babies and toddlers we got our male supporters to look after the older children. The workshop was more than full. Loads of women it turned out were grappling with the same issue: how to get the left to take us and our concerns seriously.
The workshop agreed to set up a newsletter as a way of sharing our thoughts and experiences and developing our understanding of women’s oppression under capitalism. The Coast Group offered to co-ordinate the newsletter and we set up regional contacts who would send us information and through whom we could circulate the newsletter. Over time we also set up an editorial group which included women from the north west, London and elsewhere.
Our aim in the newsletter was not to tell women what to think but to share thoughts on what the important issues were and what we were doing about them in terms of campaigns and activities. We wanted to explore the relationship between our feminism and the socialism of the left groups (including Labour Party).
Meanwhile there were other feminists asking similar questions, but coming to different conclusions – the radical and revolutionary feminists who saw men as the enemy, separate from capitalism, and who argued that women were primarily oppressed by patriarchy – male power.
In 1977 there were 2 feminist conferences in Europe, one in Paris and one in Amsterdam. The Paris one was organised by socialist feminists, the Amsterdam one by radical/revolutionary feminists. We sent members of the group to both and subsequently printed papers from both sides of the argument.
After much discussion Scarlet Women came to the view that capitalism and patriarchy were not 2 different systems of oppression but one and the same, capitalism being the system of economic production producing goods and profit for the capitalists and patriarchy the system of re-production, producing the labour force which made possible the production of goods and profit.
After the early newsletters Scarlet Women started to focus on issues: women’s reproductive power, financial independence, fascism and racism, Northern Ireland, sexuality, imperialism, new technology – and the final issue, which never got printed, on anti-nuclear weapons and power. This issue, SW15, was produced in 1983 but never got printed for reasons I can’t remember. It was put together mainly by Ann Torode who interviewed women from Greenham and the anti-nuclear campaigns of the time. It has now been brought to life courtesy of the Star and Shadow, available to view here.
[Posters are from Penny’s vast personal collection]
Charlotte Swindell and Bethan Sproat discuss the project:
We came to embark upon this project through our involvement with North Tyneside Women’s Voices, meeting Penny and learning of her experiences. Penny told us she had all 14 issues at home, including issue 15 which was never sent to press, and we decided we had to do something to ensure that Scarlet Women wasn’t lost to history. And more than that, bring it back for a new generation, open up the discussion of socialist-feminism once again. There is a physical set of copies in the Feminist Archive North, donated by Anne Torode, but we need them online too, so they’re fully accessible. Archives are power; to let something of this importance disappear would be typical of female oriented materials though history, it would be irresponsible.
Our process initially involved transcribing the issues by hand, and uploading them one by one onto this blog. Though not aesthetically ideal, this ensured that the text was accessible to the visually impaired. We have now had several of the later issues scanned at Northumberland Archives which gives the viewer the full experience and, where possible, features OCR (optical character recognition), enabling the text to still be accessible. We have been able to fund this so far with the pot of money left over from when Scarlet Women was in publication.
The process of typing, though very time consuming, was beneficial to us as we became fully immersed, taking in the text as we transcribed it, getting to know the issues inside out. After finishing an issue, we’d get together with Penny and talk about what we’ve been working on and get caught up on the topics that each issue discussed. We have found that Scarlet Women is a fantastic way to inform our own lives – it’s been a real education for us, getting to know the history behind ways of thinking that we have always felt connected to. It’s like putting language and theory to thoughts we’ve always had and opening the dialogue, giving us confidence to speak our mind and take Scarlet Women forward.
It is interesting to see social developments in the last 40+ years and the conclusion can be drawn that we are still fighting the same fights. It’s an important reminder to not give up, despite society currently feeling like things are going backwards, because things do change. Scarlet Women has shown us that women’s liberation comes in a many forms and that it is hard to untangle these and figure out what comes first, if anything. Scarlet Women has a lot of nuanced arguments about different issues that affected women around the UK at a time when communication looked very different. We are finding that there is more scope for broader and increasing conversations now, and lots more access to information which has perhaps altered who is able to have these conversations. This is so important because voices are being heard that were possibly lost before!
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