Women’s Liberation Conferences were held to allow local grass roots groups, campaigns and services to meet as equals to promote discussion and exchange of information.
There wasn’t a rule book but followed the politics of equal and shared working ie no one group or person, and particularly not the organising group, had any control of the agenda.
Some months in advance of the conference dates groups and individual women were asked to submit ideas for workshops which could be discussion or practical. The role of the organising group was to collate these suggestions and where appropriate find out of two or three suggestions that seemed similar would combine. This of course would work for say a workshop for feminists in teaching. But not say for WPUK and We Need to Talk wanting workshops on the GRA / self identity.
The collated list of workshops would then be circulated and those interested in attending would indicate workshops they would be interested in participating in.
Based on the level of interest a final list of workshops would be drawn up.
If the woman or group whose workshop suggestion was part of this final list wanted to present a paper, then it was accepted practice that this would be made available in advance to those wishing to attend, so that no time at the workshop would be spent on the paper being read out while the majority sit around trying to pay attention. The meant that workshop could be committed to shared discussion.
There would often as not be no plenary as they served no function. On some occasions they did happen and likely as not became divisive because of the concept of how was it who thought they were entitle to be on the stage. And did on occasions lead to the stage being if not occupied heckled. Eg it wouldn’t be possible for women academics to give a speech from the platform about best practice or ways forward when women in universities have failed to come together to work to end the discriminatory practices and silencing of gender critical feminism. Ie women’s liberation feminist was about what was practiced. (So hopefully women in universities would have held a workshop where they worked out a strategy to challenge the dominance of queer politics in education, rather than having lone individuals having to fight a rear guard action against being non platformed or whatever.
Of course I recognise that this would not happen today for a number of reasons.
First of all there are hardly any active women’s groups, so the notion of workshops where activists could meet up to exchange info and ideas isn’t something that works with keyboard feminism.
Secondly, too women have a vested interest in being the “owner” of ideas, so for instance would never share a paper. And equally would not share a workshop for someone or some group organising on the same issue as their own.
What is sad is that what was an enormous amount of work at a time no one had access to a computer, let alone the internet but still managed to organise and share information so that women came to conferences fully informed and ready to engage, would today be so incredibly easy to do.
So for the organising group it was irrelevant whether you were a socialist or a lesbian separatist. The function of the organising group was to facilitate the wider network of women’s groups to meet up and have the opportunity to make connections and progress the work they were part of.
Because part of the power of women’s liberation was knowing that even if you were only involved in a local group, there were other similar and different Women’s Liberation groups functioning all over the country.
I very much doubt that any women would do that today.
And I am afraid I don’t think many women would be that interested in attending what was effectively a working conference. Most women attend conferences and even marches as a feminist event to passively consume.
(I’ve cut this down from something I wrote that was much longer. So I hope it makes sense. I am all for WPUK having a conference to further their aims and campaign. But it isn’t women’s liberation. It is just one strand.)