Coventry.
Guerrilla Theatre for a puppet queen On June 30th the Queen visited the University of Warwick. As it was the vacation that meant the buildings, the Vice-Chancellor, the industrialists on his council and those administrative staff who were keen. The Coventry Women's Liberation Group (mostly working housewives) and a few students, decided to use the occasion to protest against the colonial situation in Ulster and urge some of the demands of Women's Liberation.
As the Queen left her limousine and entered Rootes Hall, banners were thrust at her, balloons with slogans floated everywhere, making security men jump when they popped; small children wandered through the retinue, and two toddlers somehow got in front of the procession and led it up the stairs. A mock Queen swept smoking along same route, and various guerrilla theatre scenes startled the visitors.
In the coffee bar every booth held a victim of the apitalist system each with a label ("Education" •Workers "Students") and a noose round the neck, at the end of the row a capitalist heaved at the rope which strangled them all. Elsewhere the Vice-Chancellor, on trial, was sentenced to spend a year in the University with the students.
There were various reactions from onlookers— middle-aged man. pointing to demands, whispered I quite agree with you, you know").
Our small numbers had dictated inventive means to express our militancy; these paid off in widespread and 'shocked' national publicity.
When the issue of woman in a society of men was When representatives from our group came to the Oxford Conference in February, we were 12-20 women who had been meeting regularly for a year to discuss, read about, and analyze our oppression and its political implications. Most of us were not students, were unmarried, worked "outside", and shared a political commitment to revolutionary socialism in general. Many of us were or had been active in militant leftist groups, especially during and after May, 1968. As a result of our year of serious discussion as a group, we had developed a political analysis of women's oppression and an approach to women's liberation rooted in Marxism. However, we found ourselves unable to move from theory to practice, unable to develop a program of action, to decide on ONE action even—although most of us were passionately yearning to act.
The Oxford Conference helped to unlock us, though not from anything specific that was said there. To be honest, our representatives found the formal part of the conference from a political point of view, uninspiring, often dull. Nevertheless, they came back to Paris elated, and communicated some of that elation to us. It was the presence of 600 women talking, arguing, planning as a people, sharing the concrete, living, immediate faith in their potential power as a political force which excited them. It was a challenge to us. The sense of women in motion was further communicated to us by the presence of Americans in our group who came from women's liberation groups in the U.S. We saw clearly that we must "surface" —let women in Paris know that we exist.
To create a climate in which a movement would begin, we wanted to raise the issues of women's oppression publicly and loudly. It became obvious when we discussed possible actions—whether street actions, working in factories, public housing, wide leafletting-that we were too few. We agreed that we had to increase our number, but debated for a long time the question of what kinds of women we wanted to attract. Some women in the group feel that the political direction of a W.L. movement from the very beginning. is crucially tied to the economic class of the women with whom we work. Others feel that there is always the danger that a mass movement might become reformist, but by definition a mass movement must inc lude all sections of the people; its political direction is ultimately determined by the strength of the politics of the tendencies within it in conjunction with objective conditions. This debate continues in the group. However, the group decided, not unanimously, to begin with university students-partly because they seemed the easiest to reach at that moment, but also because In France students are a highly politicized group with time and skills to devote to militant action.
In the meantime, a polemic on women's liberation signed by four members of the group appeared in the May, 1970 issue of the French L'Idiot International. This article grew out of the political discussions of the past year, but did not represent at all points the politics of the group; however, it was associated by people who read it with the group and new women began to appear at meetings. Among these women wås a group of Marxist Feminists who had been meeting together for a year. Another, group of students, came from Vincennes, the faculty of the University of Paris which was created after the events of May to collect the leftist professors and students in one place—at the edge of the city, out in the woods. Some of these Vincennes students had been in contact with the American W.L. movement through a group which exchanged literature and information about leftist activities with Liberation News Service. They were eager to work on a meeting at Vincennes, so we decided to prepare our first meeting there.
Because the students at Vincennes are regularly innundated with leaflets, posters, and urgent calls to political meetings, the women working on the details of the Vincennes meeting decided to have a provocative demonstration while handing out the leaflets for the meeting. Around 25 of us marched down the halls into the cafeteria, wearing white tee shirts imprinted with a red female power symbol (the biological symbol for female, raised fist within the circle. We carried banners and placards announcing our oppression-sexual, economic, political-with quotes from Engel, Bebel; slogans, such as "We are the people-Power to the people"; but the most striking to the spectators seemed to be those pertaining to sexual oppression. These aroused exaggerated hostility among the men in particular. "Nous sommes les mal base" (roughly translated, "we are the badly fucked") seemed to be provocative for many men, calling forth ugly reactions then and later at the meeting; in fact, it came up repeatedly in the meetings that followed as well. We made a lot of noise as we circulated, chanting examples of male chauvinism familiar to university women, punctuated by the refrain "Down with masculine terrorism. " As we walked, we handed out leaflets, particularly to women. A crowd of about a hundred followed us around; most of them were hostile. We had been prepared for significant opposition from men, even afraid of it, but even so we were not prepared for such depth and breadth of outrage. Here were "movement" men shouting insults at us—"Lesbians", "Strip," "What you need is a good fuck."
The ampitheatre where the meeting was held quickly filled up with 400-500 people, half of them men. We disorganizedly clumped ourselves together in the middle of the center aisle, having decided we were not going to speak AT people from a platform. There ensued a heated angry discussion around the question of why the men should leave. Some of the men were clearly there to put us down, disrupt our meeting, frighten us with their thuggishness. Others were genuinely hurt because we chose Vincennes, that bastion of revolutionary enlightenment, to make our point-they were with us, why should they leave. They would stay and discuss with us how we could fight for our liberation-give us the benefit of their political wisdom. Many women were also puzzled and angry at our insistence on meeting alone. But it was mostly men who did the talking—and our voluble group. There were the usual charges of bourgeois individualism amid the background of sexual insults, and the warning that we were splitting the movement. During our planning meetings we had discussed what to do if the men refused to leave, and some women despaired of ever being able to hold a women-only meeting. French students are used to working in mixed groups politically, and the charge of splitting the movement was an added threat to the already weighty influence of tradition. We had never really settled the question of tactics. After 2 hours of discussion, we felt that we had to act or risk losing touch with the women. We again demanded that the men leave, explained why we felt that women had to organize themselves to fight their oppression, then questioned their motives in remaining- -those who accepted the FACT that women are oppressed-when we knew they would never presume to refuse an all-black meeting. Most of the men got up to leave-the first among them the blacks in the audience.
We met with the 50 or so women who remained; there was a core of Vincennes students who have formed a group now meeting weekly at Vincennes. It became clear to us when we discussed the meeting later, that the initial presence of men was instructive as it pointed up for the women present (and for the more conscious men) the pervasiveness of sexist ideology even among the so-called liberated men-among their very own comrades.
Since the Vincennes action the core group has continued to expand. About 50 women attend our weekly meetings. Some come from other cities in France, having worked in isolation until they read the l'Idiot article, or heard of the Vincennes meeting. Some of the women who have come recently are interested in guerilla theatre, and there is now a committee working on that. There are also committees working on possible factory actions, organizing in working women's public housing, karate courses, and translating w.l. literature from the U.S. and England, etc.
However, we still have no program. In trying to formulate one, we realized that not only are we too diverse politically, but worse, we do not really know the extent and nature of that divergence. We have spent the last two meetings talking individually about our social backgrounds, how we became interested in w.l., why we are here and what we expect from a w.l. movement. We can then see what our political similarities and differences are, whether we can work together, and how. Whatever comes out of our meetings this summer, we are confident that a women's liberation movement has begun in France