A Political Feeling, I hope so

I have made a booklet by way of introduction to a project called A political feeling, I hope so, that tries to enact some ideas of feminist politics, exploring records and reflections of it's past and traces of it's presence within a local community. Beginning from the area surrounding the Cubitt Gallery, and what we already know, or by following new information and meeting people.

There used to be a Feminist Research Centre (now the Feminist library in Elephant and Castle), above a bookshop called Sisterwrite on Upper Street. There is a Women's Therapy Centre on Holloway Road that was established by Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum in1976. Records at the local history library show proposals by an autonomous women's group, for a Women's City in1982 at Drayton Park. Plans were drawn up but never realised.

It all feels like agency rather than documentation, because the information tells us about the consciousness of women at a particular time. This is a steady gathering of a number of exchanges, references, information, conversations and feelings, made together over time, not necessarily an acurate record, but closer to the way that a community comes, with a sense of themselves or even how we understand a community, if we consider ourselves outside of it. A list of organisations, collected from databases, and some local knowledge, in the Cubitt neigbourhood.

Optimistic Feelings

We arrive at Dalston Lane together on our bikes at around 10pm, and find two completely boarded-up shop fronts. On one side is a sign that reads 'Chinaman' and on the other 'Mirror TV' A gate, then a further door leads to two rooms that are joined by comic, almost person-shaped holes. At one end of the room the walls are papered with stripes, but initially it looks like corrugated iron, and there are some canteen-style tables, which each have four chairs attached. The kitchen is full of busy women cooking delicious food and serving at the bar is a friend called Irene. It is the Women's Anarchist Nuisance Café. It used to be at the Radical Dairy in Stoke Newington, for over two years, before they were evicted in the Summer of 2003. The new squat is not women only but once a month W.A.N.C is there which is strictly women only. Run by a small collective, the food comes mostly from skips or from the Ridley Road market at the end of the day. Women are encouraged to volunteer to chop, cook and serve food, and the rest of the night is filled with music, films, performance and dancing. We sit and talk with some women who had been to Queeruption in Berlin earlier in the year.

We talk with one of the women who is part of the W.A.N.C collective, about what will happen next month, and she says there will be a motorcycle theme, and we discuss how to make a wood-burning motorcycle! In December we make it to a meeting for the W.A.N.C collective in a café in Hackney, and talk about how things are going, and what we could contribute. From the outside it seems that things are working beautifully. There is some talk of a threatened eviction of the squat. Then we discuss dividing some tasks for the next café on the 21st of January. A list is made of all the things that need to be done. We agree to help with collecting and preparing the food.

On the19th of January I met up with Rosie at the far side of Sainsbury's car park in Vauxhall. A gate leads through to the New Covent Garden Market and we cycle in. It is a huge distribution centre for Fruit and Vegtable markets, and each company has a skip. We look for the left over food to cook for the cafe on the 21st. 1. 'Queeruption is an alternative, both political and artistic/creative, to what we are supposed to see as a symbol of our 'liberation' and to go beyond the narrow and restricting idea of the 'gay' scene, world or subculture with its obsession with consumption and lack of radical politics.'

Mixed Feelings

The Crossroads Women's Centre is in Kentish town. It houses a number of women's groups, including the Global Women's Strike, English Collective of Prostitutes, Eritrean Women's Group, Wages for Housework, Black Women's Rape Action Project, Campaign Against the Child Support Act, Legal Action for Women, Single Mother's Self-Defense, Wages Due Lesbians, Wages for Housework Campaign, WinVisible, Women Against Rape (WAR), Women Count Network UK and Payday Men's Network. We heard about it through the Global Women's Strike Campaign, which takes an absolutely radical position in relation to the politics and history of the labour movement. The campaign is coordinated by the Wages for Housework Committee. In addition to co-ordinating women's strike actions on the 8th of March, which is International Women's Day, they hold a weekly community picket and open mike from 5.30pm until 7pm in Parliament Square, alongside the 24-hour peace camp. At the centre all the groups cross over, support each other's work and share knowledge and facilities. Men are working there.

There is a series of publications available from the centre including Women, the Unions and Work by Selma James, originally presented in 1972, in which she makes explicit the need for a feminist autonomy, We strive to be autonomous from capital not only because it exploits women more than men but because it exploits. We strive to be autonomous from men to the degree that capital uses men as an instrument of that exploitation.(Selma James) Nina Lopez-Jones from the Global Women's Strike told us about how, in 1982 the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied the Holy Cross Church in King's Cross for 12 days to protest against police illegality, such as unwarranted arrests, racism and failure to protect prostitutes from rape and other violence. The ECP demanded the establishment of an autonomous, broad-based collective that would monitor police behaviour towards prostitutes and prevent victimisation, rather than document the infraction after it had already happened. The women from the occupation met with Valerie Wise and Paul Boateng, Chairs of the Greater London Council Women's and Police Committees, along with Kate Allen, Chair of Camden Council Women's Unit, to make their demands. Eventually a report was drafted, but it did not mention the occupation. Now Kings Cross is being regenerated.

Günter Gaus interviews Hannah Arendt and we watch it

We are both sitting on her mattress in front of a TV watching 'Zur Person' ('To the Person') Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache (What Remains? The Language Remains), on video, where journalist and politicain, Günter Gaus interviews the Political Philosopher Hannah Arendt, broadcast on the German television station ZDF on 28 October 1964. After about five minutes I ask Susanne if it is OK to turn on my video camera and record the screen whilst recording her translating the interview. But before that, a week or so ago, I asked if she would translate it for me, she agreed.

Susanne makes music, she has a band calle No Bra. We have only met a few times before, and I have never seen her perform. We watch the whole thing through, it's over 90 minutes, occasionally stopping and asking questions, which neither of us know the answer to. Susanne speaks in a very determined way, as I imagine Arendt is doing.

Whilst it's not possible to give a completely acurate translation of the interview, it is possible to acknowledge Hannah Arendt's work, not in the solitary act of reading but in an exchange. She says that if people understand things that she understands, it makes her feel at home. Gaus asks if her intelligence made her feel excluded from normal life? She answers that she is embarrassed about it, because in her family being ambitious was considered trite. She felt alien, but never because of her intelligence.

She says if you are politically active you don't need a relation to a specific group. Love for a population is apolitical and naïve, humanity doesn't survive freedom for five minutes. It's not about opinions it's about historical truth, history departments are guarding the truth but they are not always successful. She describes the difficulty in locating public space. People form interest groups, and they break apart. You commit political actions and talking is one of them, but nobody knows what happens after those actions, and you can only take the challenge if you trust humanity.

A Talking Computer: Women's City, Founding An Economic Base Marlene Packwood writes about a new women's venture in London (1982)

During the worst economic recession since the thirties, some women are attempting to shape a dream into a reality. Women's City, conceived in controversy, is gradually finding its feet. No easy task, as it has been plagued by rumour, lack of support or cynical speculation from some elements of feminism whilst dazed at in disbelief from others. This is hardly surprising due to the struggles of feminist ventures when trying to remain solvent. However, we must take into account the fact that when it comes to money and financial concerns, women tend to think small and inconspicuously, we have been trained by men that we cannot handle money.

Breaking a mould is not without it's repercussions. Women's City intends to put 'socialist principles' of economic organisation into practice, by advocating that all women who become involved or contribute materially or politically to the formation of Women's City form a cooperative. Should women plumbers, carpenters, artists, and other workers wish to take space in the building will join together to form collectives and work cooperatively. The need for Women's City was indicated from the skills file at Labyris, the feminist car service, where many women registered. This idea took shape in the mind of one of the workers there and Women's City was born.

The proposed building is an old domed cinema off the Holloway Road in London. There it is hoped to incorporate offices and shops, but also a sauna, crèche, music, an art gallery, café, auditorium, dark-room, launderette and other ventures. Many women have written to express interest in the space available, which has meant that the Women's City collective has now become a cooperative and has an office across the road from the building. Planning permission has already been granted by Islington Council. The position is perfect for women in Central, East and North London, being near to the tubes and buses, as well as the North London Line for West London. Through a desire to open up Women's Liberation to those not already involved, Women's City will emphasise its availability to local women. The bookshop, for example, will sell current paperbacks and newspapers whilst, of course, having a feminist section so that all women will feel comfortable to come and browse. Certainly it will offer a space for communication and trade between women, the size of which has never before been available to the movement.

Women councillors at the GLC and Islington Council have been very supportive of the idea. Furthermore, finances have been carefully looked into and the idea itself seems viable. £100,000 is needed to start off with, and the women hope that this will be secured as a subsidy from the GLC. An impetus for such money being given would be that jobs for women would be created, particularly for local women and younger women leaving school. The issues of rent and rates have also been fully investigated by feminist accountants, and women who are chartered surveyors have looked over the building with a feminist architect. In the past business acumen often has not been a high growth area for feminism. This may be connected to our fears as women of handling large sums of money, or as Phyllis Chesler and Emily Goodwin put it, 'only the powerless live in a money culture and know nothing about money' (Women, Money and Power). Women's City does not aim to be in this category. They have built a consciousness of how a venture of this size should work through delving into the complexities of bureaucratic finance.

The ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) and the Manpower Services Commission have been approached to subsidise a computer bank for information on skills. Profit, however, is not seen in the 'get-rich-quick' terms of latter-day entrepreneurs but on a planned basis of women getting paid decent wages for the work they do and the money made being ploughed back into Women's City. Politically, the collective feels that women must have a strong economic base in society from which to challenge male economic strength. Women's City can help to provide and contribute towards this by its presence. Training women in different skills would be considered as important as the work done by skilled women workers, thus knowledge will grow amongst women. One of the issues I also asked the co-operative members about was the Attack Line, which they are committed to providing. The idea is that between midnight and 6am, women drivers will pick up women who have been attacked on the streets. A woman would be able to telephone a freephone number for a driver. Attack Line would not be a counselling service but would rely on and respect the woman's decision whether she wanted to go home, to friends, to the police or to hospital.

Obviously there is more work to do in planning this project since it has caused considerable controversy. Women's City feel that protecting one another is part of their solidarity and, that the Attack Line would be a sister concern to Safe Women's Transport and to other women's groups working in this area. Men will not be allowed into Women's City although women with children of either sex will be welcome, (boys up to 12 years). They are currently looking through nuances of the Sex Discrimination Act with feminist lawyers about this. When I asked them about the burden of commitment to so vast an enterprise, which many women had expressed grave doubts about, they were non-plussed. Enthusiasm and commitment, they said, were gained by working together as women who cared about and supported, one another, and by talking to the women on the various committees who had also given them support and believed in what they were doing. Women's City is not a feminist pipe dream; it is about a reality that is being created daily. To quote Chesler and Goodman again: 'Women's lives have been and are manipulated by male greed, profits, power, war and madness. Without an understanding of money and power and institutions, women can never be prepared for capitalism or its successor'. As women we need to be instrumental in creating its successor, so that our real needs in the here-and-now are addressed. Women's City believes that they are working towards this goal.

'Make sure Anna tells you about the 'Gender Conference' she organised with some of her classmates when she was at University in Sweden!' Irene Revell

I met Irene Revell during Summer 2002, she was one of the women organising Ladyfest in London. I saw Ros Murray at a Flaming Queers night at the London Action Resource Centre, in Whitechapel It was a film and video night (I met Susanne Oberbeck there also) last Summer. I didn't see either of them again until I went to the W.A.N.C café in the autumn, and then I just happened to read about their band Lesbo Pig with Anna Dahllöv who lives in Stockholm. Ros has been living in Montpellier and is involved in Irrk with Irene who is based in London, and two other friends, Boitel who lives in Germany from the band Humousexual and Kasper, who is in Stockholm. Although international and dispersed, it is an immediate project to document what is going on in their community and it acts as a catalyst, where people work together and can see and hear what is going on, and begin to feel part of a network, that they are part of. There is a publication and a 10" white record called Viva La Diva, that includes,This Beat is Lezbotronik, Valerie, Humousexual, Flamingo 50, Sewing Circle, Denial, Hello Cuca, Sara Jaffe, Lesbo Pig, San Andreas and Isso*keh. They are going to release something for an electronic band from Dijon called 'Robotnicka' with other labels making a big split release, and also a Lesbo Pig and Humousexual 7". Ros and Irene are part of the collectively run nightclub called Homocrime based in London. Anna is setting up something a little similar in Stockholm called Club Puss.

'We called the cinema Sputnik' by Madeleine Bernstorff.

In the mid-eighties we were running collectively a big old cinema from the 50's, situated in Wedding, the workers district of Berlin, which was owned before by a Turkish entrepreneur who had wanted to show Turkish films there. We called the cinema Sputnik, after our pre-Gorbachev anti-cold-war ideas. I was the only female member of this collective. A friend - Maria Schmidt - approached me with the idea to organise a film programme together for the first lesbian week in Berlin, 1985. We viewed many films and edited together a 100 minute compilation at the women's media centre Bildweschel, Hamburg called "Clichés - Lesbians in Film" - from a modified Vito-Russo-position. Over the week we screened films like Madame X, by Ulrike Ottinger, Olivia, by Jacqueline Audry (which we got from Circles), Je, Tu, Il, Elle, by Chantal Akerman, and some experimental films like the 1972 Near the Big Chakra, by Anne Severson.

We had declared the cinema a ladies-only place, and every night the cinema was packed. We had the idea of creating a separatist voyeuristic space, and trained several women as projectionists. Our vampire film night ended with the strange and special Daughters of Darkness by Belgian filmmaker Harry Kümel, starring Delphine Seyrig as the contemporary vampire seductress, speaking with her soft, warm voice, using some of the vocabulary of the women's movement. When I was projecting the film I noticed some women from the audience jumping on the stage and trying to cover the 6 metre screen with their jackets and trying to draw the big green stage curtains. Some women came up to the projection booth and asked me to stop the film. I told them that they should be patient with the development of the plot, wait until the aggressive bridegroom of the blond bride would be killed and Countess Barthory (Delphine Seyrig) would continue her elegant seduction of the bride. But the tumultuous incidents continued and I stopped the film and went down to help my colleague Maria. I was afraid they would destroy the cinema. Some women were almost physically fighting, some were saying they didn't want to see heterosexual violence during the lesbian week, and others were saying they didn't want censorship. As Maria and I were completely speechless, Ulrike Ottinger jumped onto the stage to give a speech to the audience about how they should continue to watch the film, as Delphine Seyrig had probably done more for the women's movement than many members of the audience. I told the women who wanted to get their money back 'to buy back their lesbian innocence' if they felt like it. It was a time when a lot of these incidents happened.

Issues of representation, identity and identification were questioned, even to the point that some women rejected the notion of the soft and peaceful essential character of women. The lesbian SM-movement also caused some reasons for heavy debate. In Germany, Andrea Dworkin's pornography debate was featured in the biggest mainstream feminist magazine, called Emma. When I travelled to Britain some years later in 1989, I heard that the film She must be seeing things by Sheila McLaughlin had provoked a split in the l esbian summer camp, and in Manchester there had even been a bomb threat against a cinema showing that independent and ironic film.

Menwith Hill Women's Peace Camp by Finn MacKay

I wanted to go to Greenham Common from the age of about seven. There were two Greenham women who lived in the next village and they used to bring back pieces of fence and tapes of peace songs and give them to me. When I was seventeen I finished school and rang the CND office that summer to ask if there were any permanent women's peace camps left in the country. They told me about Menwith Hill in Yorkshire and gave me a contact number. I went there on the train the next day, having never heard of it before or ever having been on a train on my own! (I come from rural Scotland; we didn't get out much.)

I arrived in time for the Women on the Road for Peace tour and we travelled to Sellafield, Aldermaston and Greenham Common. I couldn't believe I was actually going there after ten years of singing peace songs in my room and making mobiles out of fencing. At last I got to see the place for myself. It was an incredible experience and I was very inspired by the whole trip. I spent every holiday after that at Menwith Hill Women's Peace Camp and when I finished college in 1995 I moved to live at the camp and stayed there for a year. I had my own tiny caravan and collected rainwater off the roof to wash every morning. We had post delivered to the camp and we were always busy with newsletters and replying to donations. There were the practicalities of living outside, cooking on the fire and chopping wood. We had a huge trailer home which had a wood-burning stove and a gas cooker it was quite cosy really, and we lived and slept and laughed through some god forsaken weather.

I remember one Christmas waking up to find that my hot-water bottle had ice inside. I was fully involved in all aspects of the campaign, organising demonstrations, handling enquiries and taking part in non-violent direct action. I was arrested many times and defended myself in court. It was one of the most empowering times for me. I met so many wonderful people and my life was changed completely. I am still actively involved in the campaign now and we organise regular trips from London to camp for special events. We are also trying to organise regular trips to Aldermaston Women's Peace Camp, which is monthly.

Gender is all over the place

Reflections are knowledge and exchange. They are an action by the way in which they are documented, and documention can take a variety of forms whether it be photographs, kissing or making a fire. Reflections move in circular motions of actions that can feel social, sexual, psychological, fought, economic and thought again. The project A political feeling, I hope so is a number of reflections that try to keep this circular motion going. 'Possible' situations for these actions to take place have been recuperated and remembered, made or documented in the present as ideal and tangible references.

These situations use models based on knowledge, exchanged and acted upon, such as meeting a new person, film screenings or a notice board, and do not always depend on a physical location. Everything is made with the intention that these situations will allow people to feel present because it is possible and relatively easy to do so. These intentions are sometimes lived self-consciously or discussed, because that is something we can do. Sometimes they are made on a computer without even recognising anyone in particular, but with a sense of one's own capability. Other times, in a nightclub or at a meeting for a local community organisation, where particular moments can be magnified by a static public quality. That we should express all of this on one site, and take up a position, better known as 'common ground', feels unnecessary. Instead (if you are interested), we could implant something into this ground as a means to discover what is there and what just refuses to be there, and allow this non-adherence to expand.

Learning from feminist politics, which could be thought of as something like the anticipation of consciousness, we discover an urge, and the desire to break down and escape false universals, that would like to consolidate identity, and the need for identification as the key to belonging. Away from privatised experience to political moves, shifted around by an expression of curiosity and need, we find the accumulation of desire towards something close to 'our own terms', but not at the expense of someone else's. Feminist politics comes from these expressions, and is coupled with an understanding of how to make demands or refuse to answer. If our understanding of how to express terms is complicated, then we are making that expression.

I am thinking about, and working with, political females who are transforming thought and action. This does not assume that a person's identification as female is always conscious, or when consciousness exists, being a political female excludes other concerns. However, because I feel the determination to question what it means to think and act (and this is connected to self- consciousness or confidence), when contesting social relationships, gender is all over the place. Complicating the process of making a project is an attempt to move from set patterns of convergent thinking (results, fixed terms) to a spectacular declaration of intentions that is not the outburst of a fractured, closed self, but a 'coming, open, emotional community' of multiple identifications and influences.

There is already refusal, uncertainty and doubt discussed with those present and those past, with imaginary beings and with the articulation of desires (not necessarily speech) in the room, on the phone, when reading, putting pictures together, feeling and watching. This strength of doubt is needed to refuse a force of domination or simplification, where doubt can become action. A multiple, total dependency on social being; the incoherent self that pushes us together, feeling around for something familiar, that we know is there, and refuses alienation. Rethinking my commitment to representation, with the thought that commitment is representation. Making oneself visible and coherent, whether in solidarity or defiance, as a document is very dubious. Make these private doubts and fears felt, in those constructions of history and the present. Pass through representation, and begin again, with more people, with all the time, left alone to make itself. Let's make a story now as a necessity (or imposition), a performative narrative with all the social implications and misgivings, so that we have what happened and what happens now, for now.

Emma Hedditch .

Book cover of Bittersweet (1987) by Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum, who founded the Women's Therapy Centre on Holloway Road in 1976. The book is about the lives of women and their relationships with one another in the 1980s

Women's City logo

Video still of Hannah Arendt from a video copy of a TV interview with Gunter Gaus broadcast 28 October 1964 on ZDF

Friends, Emma Hedditch and Melissa Castegnetto by Jimmy Robert

Woman with banner, on Sunday 6 April, outside Holborn tube station. The banner says 'Helen Liddle = Rat Bag, Menzies Campbell, Bag of Rats, Rose-Mary Hollis, Voted for Cluster bombs'

The Greater London Council Logo