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Gender, Feminism, and the British Left, 1944–1991

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The Motherland Calls, the compositional centre of the monument-ensemble "Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad" on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, Russia.

Records of the Communist Party of Great Britain's Women's Department

This archive shows how certain segments of the CPGB came to embrace some of the concerns of the women's liberation movement, highlighting communist involvement in campaigns related to abortion law, employment rights, and the whole gamut of feminist politics.
Professor Kevin Morgan,  University of Manchester

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Study the uneasy but often animating interplay between orthodox leftist movements and gender politics

An orange stamp of Rosa Luxemburg.

This collection contains records compiled by the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) Women's Department during the period 1944–1991. These records include minutes, agendas, and promotional materials from various women's campaigns, events, and conferences. They also include copies of Link, the party's women's magazine, and Red Rag, a controversial journal published by the party's more militant feminist members. 

Together, these items provide a unique insight into the relationship between Western communism and the women's liberation movement during the post-war era.

The collection is accompanied by three contextual essays written by Professor Kevin Morgan, a senior academic at the University of Manchester.

Contents

Gender, Feminism, and the British Left, 1944–1991...

Records of the Communist Party of Great Britain's Women's Department

Discover 
Women working in textile manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution.

Highlights

Black and white illustration of a woman holding a globe contained in the female symbol, with the text women in the world curling around the symbol.

Licensed to access Women in Action bulletins, 1964–1969

A series of bulletins issued by the CPGB's Women's Department encouraging female members to join campaigns on a wide range of issues. Protests against the Vietnam War feature heavily.
Black and white photograph of women marching, featuring a prominent banner with the text Women's Liberation and a drawing of a closed fist.

Licensed to access Papers from Maggie Bowden relating to abortion, 1970–1979

Maggie Bowden was a high-ranking official of the National Assembly of Women, one of the CPGB's key women's institutions. This document highlights their struggle for liberal abortion rights in the UK and abroad.
Cover of an edition of Red Rag, featuring illustrations of women doing manual labour.

Licensed to access Red Rag: official volumes, 1971–1977

Red Rag was a revolutionary women's magazine published by a small group of militant CPGB members. Their politics were heavily influenced by the the women's liberation movement.

Black and white photograph of women marching, featuring two prominent banners with peace signs on them. One says Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Torbay, the other says Weston-super-Mare.

Licensed to access The Women for World Disarmament campaign, 1983–1984

This paraphernalia sheds light on the Women for World Disarmament campaign, which took place between 1983 and 1984, at the height of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp.

Insights

  • Karl Marx’s analysis of the gendered division of labour under capitalism suggested that women faced a unique oppression — a specific economic exploitation linked to unpaid labour in the domestic sphere.

  • In spite of this, as well as the involvement of prominent suffragettes such as Sylvia Pankhurst in the formation of the CPGB, "[early] communists were usually hostile to anything smacking of 'bourgeois feminism' or a separate women's agenda.”
  • That said, the CPGB of the inter-war years was arguably more enlightened on women's issues than wider British society, arguing for equal pay, better education, and an end to workplace discrimination in all its forms.
  • It was not until 1944, however, that the party established its National Women’s Advisory Committee. The committee's purpose was to coordinate women’s activities and attract more female members.

  • Although seemingly natural allies, the women’s liberation movement did not always sit comfortably with the men who dominated the CPGB bureaucracy. Many took their cue from Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin who once observed that "free love" was a sign of "bourgeois decay". In the 1970s, this attitude was challenged by a group of young, radical feminists inspired by the counter-culture of the previous decade — a development which caused a great deal of tension and division within the party.

  • The CPGB’s last General Secretary, Nina Temple, was the only woman to ever lead the party, pledging to make it "feminist and green, as well as democratically socialist." She eventually oversaw its dissolution in 1991.
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Related Media

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The Departments of the Communist Party of Great Britain: A Detailed Guide Contextual Essays

The singular nature of the CPGB's relationship with the Communist International means that the organisational holdings of the archives in Britain are of a highly asymmetrical character. Discrete groups of documents from the inter-war years, some of considerable historical significance, appear to have been retained by individuals and deposited in... Read more →
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Individual deposits within the CPGB archives are significant both for the biographies of the individuals concerned and as a record of the wider activities of the party and its ancillaries. The dividing line between these materials and the party's institutional records is indeed extremely blurred. Even in the post-war decades,... Read more →
Professor Kevin Morgan
Published 20th January, 2020

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