Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson begin their assessment of ‘The British Women’s Movement’ with an acknowledgement of the necessarily partial character of their critique and a declaration that their intention is not a destructive one. Yet despite the benefits of discussion and re-assessment that have accrued to socialist-feminists as a result of both their article and the pamphlet from which it originated,footnote1 the exercise as a whole has, I believe, been not merely partial but sectarian in its motivation, and destructive rather than positive in its effect. I do not propose here to provide a comprehensive reply to the many issues raised in their article, simply to make some general observations about their arguments and to counter some of the specific points made.

Firstly, Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson construct a version of socialist-feminist theoretical and programmatic work that is extraordinary in its generalizations from unrepresentative instances. Who are all these socialist-feminists who are arguing against regenerating the manufacturing sector or who ignore the relationship between women’s work and the organization of capitalist production? Who adopt a ‘separate spheres’ approach to tinker with family policy? There are so few of them that Weir and Wilson have to belabour one 1981 article by Anna Coote to show us that this bogey really is there. They even have to use Anne Phillips, one of the few published feminist critics of the aes, to provide the data with which they criticize her supposed position! (p. 41). The fact is that the vast majority of socialist-feminists have been, precisely, doing work that does relate women’s employment to the organization of the labour process; that does criticize the family in a radical rather than a ‘reformist’ way. These omissions in Weir and Wilson’s account of socialist-feminist work are simply gaping holes in their argument. They relegate to a footnote describing what socialist-feminists used to do in the 1970s virtually all the questions that many socialist-feminists are still working on and developing.footnote2

There is surely some onus on the authors of what is entitled a survey of a national political movement to provide some form of balance-sheet rather than a completely one-sided account. Yet the only notes that creep in to relieve the unremitting tone of criticism are a grudging respect for radical feminist activism and some carefully specified formulations about the achievements of feminists working in local government. Leaving aside the more general themes of the article, let us focus from this point of view on the extended discussion of socialist-feminism since the mid 1970s.