Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) very aptly describes the tensions among women seeking liberation. The quotes below presciently describe the differing approaches of Let Women Speak and WPUK.
And, of the methods and options that Greer sees as being available to women to fight for liberations, groups like Let Women Speak and Women’s Rights Network seem the closest to what Greer argues will benefit most women most immediately.
“…The New Left has been the forcing house for most movements, and for many of them liberation is dependent upon the coming of the classless society and the withering away of the state.
…The organized liberationists are a well-publicized minority; the same faces appear every time a feminist issue is discussed. Inevitably they are presented as the leaders of a movement which is essentially leaderless. They are not much nearer to providing a revolutionary strategy than they ever were; demonstrating, compiling reading lists and sitting on committees are not themselves liberated behaviour, especially when they are still embedded in a context of housework and feminine wiles. As means of educating the people who must take action to liberate themselves, their effectiveness is limited. The concept of liberty implied by such liberation is vacuous; at worst it is defined by the condition of men, themselves unfree, and at best it is left undefined in a world of very limited possibilities. On the one hand, feminists can be found who serve the notion of equality ‘social, legal, occupational, economic, political and moral’, whose enemy is discrimination, whose means are competition and demand. On the other hand there are those who cherish an ideal of a better life, which will follow when a better life is assured for all by the correct political means. To women disgusted with conventional political methods, whether constitutional or totalitarian or revolutionary, neither alternative can make much appeal. The housewife who must wait for the success of world revolution for her liberty might be excused for losing hope, while conservative political methods can invent no way in which the economically necessary unit of the one-man family could be diversified. But there is another dimension in which she can find motive and cause for action, although she might not find a blue-print for Utopia. She could begin not by changing the world, but by re-assessing herself.
…To be free to start out, and to find companions for the journey is as far as we need to see from where we stand. The first exercise of the free woman is to devise her own mode of revolt, a mode which will reflect her own independence and originality. The more clearly the forms of oppression emerge in her understanding, the more clearly she can see the shape of future action. In the search for political awareness there is no substitute for confrontation. It would be too easy to present women with yet another form of self-abnegation, more opportunities for appetence and forlorn hope, but women have had enough bullying. They have been led by the nose and every other way until they have to acknowledge that, like every one else, they are lost. A feminist elite might seek to lead uncomprehending women in another arbitrary direction, training them as a task force in a battle that might, that ought never to eventuate. If there is a pitched battle women will lose, because the best man never wins; the consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. It is not a question of telling women what to do next, or even what to want to do next. The hope in which this book was written is that women will discover that they have a will; once that happens they will be able to tell us how and what they want.
…In the computer kingdom the centres of political power have become centres of impotence, but even so, nothing in the book precludes the use of the political machine, although reliance on it may be contra-indicated. The most telling criticisms will come from my sisters of the left, the Maoists, the Trots, the I.S., the S.D.S., because of my fantasy that it might be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline.”