Nothing to protest about anymore

Sally Alexander is a grandmother and a professor of history, but to many, she will be best remembered for the night she disrupted the 1970 M...

Sally Alexander is a grandmother and a professor of history, but to many, she will be best remembered for the night she disrupted the 1970 Miss World Contest. The protest had been planned meticulously. Twenty-five women bought tickets, dressed to the nines for the occasion, then waited for a signal 8212; a football rattle 8212; before letting rip at compere Bob Hope with flour bombs, stink bombs and water pistols.

Among those who were arrested that evening and held in Holloway overnight before being bailed were Sally Alexander, Jo Robinson, then 28, pregnant and working as a set painter, and Jenny Fortune, a 19-year-old student. The three women hadn8217;t known each other before the protest 8212; the participants came from a variety of women8217;s groups 8212; but during the period before the trial, they got to know each other well. They appear together again, in a television reminiscence of Miss World 8212; a competition that, according to its supporters, was driven off our screens by 8220;harpies in their boilers and spikyhair8221;.

Alexander had neither a boiler suit nor spikes. She was an ex-actress of 26, still wrapped in the glamorous aura of the theatre, with long swinging hair and an Afghan coat. Alexander had left the theatre and her partner to attend Ruskin, the trade union college in Oxford, where she was one of the organisers of Britain8217;s first Women8217;s Liberation Conference. It was the late Sixties, student radicalism was in the air and young feminists didn8217;t wear make-up.

8220;Miss World was symbolic,8221; she explains. 8220;We wanted to get across the idea that there was more to women than their vital statistics.8221; For Jenny Fortune, the demonstration and subsequent trial was 8220;an epiphany. We had to stand up, in the face of male authority, and speak out.8221; Such was the power of the experience that Fortune dropped out of university and into full-time political activism. With Robinson, she started a successful campaign to set up the first community nurseries in north London.

For Robinson, Miss World was a continuation ofsomething that had started with the Ruskin conference. She had already been politicised 8212; she had trained to be a teacher at Hornsey Art College in 1969, the year after a big student sit-in there 8212; but involvement with feminism and the women8217;s movement came only after her participation in the conference and then the protest. 8220;For a very long time,8221; she explains, 8220;I had felt a sense of terrible injustice about the way women were treated, how few options we had. All the feelings that had kept me passive as a woman just changed overnight. It was a time to take action.8221;

The action rarely stopped. The Grosvenor Avenue commune in north London, where Robinson lived, was the hub of new Left politics. By day it was a children8217;s centre, by night a workshop. Robinson was producing posters for everything from the Ford workers8217; strikes to the LSE student sit-ins. 8220;We8217;d be up all night,8221; she recalls, 8220;but we weren8217;t going to clubs, we were going to change the world.8221;

Alexander dates the end of the streetfighting as 1976. Soon after, she joined the Labour Party, had another baby and in 1983 started teaching history at the University of East London. 8220;A movement is a very specific historical phenomenon,8221; she says. 8220;Between 1968 and 1976, the time was right for innovation, for the activism of the spectacle. By 1976, we had already established women8217;s centres, rape crisis centres, health centres. It was time to regroup; the Eighties were a time for rethinking our politics.quot;

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While Alexander established herself firmly in the world of ideas, as a feminist academic and founding editor of the History Workshop Journal, Richardson and Fortune also turned away from the spectacular towards the practical. Fortune went back to university, trained as an architect, had a baby and designs nurseries for Sheffield council.

Robinson8217;s radicalism, meanwhile, took her from the Albert Hall to a more intimate struggle. There was a profound sense that women did not own their bodies. They were there for men to look at andimpregnate 8212; and for doctors to remove babies from. Robinson retrained as a midwife and became a founder member of the Association of Radical Midwives, moving on to set up women8217;s health groups on housing estates. She is now working in a primary school.

When I tracked down Jenny Fortune, she was staying in Toulouse with a friend 8212; the woman who gave the signal for action that night in 1970. The Miss World defendants may have taken different directions, but they never lost touch with each other, nor lost their sense of pride at what they achieved. Robinson says she has only one regret about those days and that is a personal one. As an activist, she felt duty-bound to defy feminine conventions and she looks back wistfully at the dressing-up she missed. 8220;I regret those days with short hair and big shoes. I envy young women today. I love the clothes they can wear now. In a way, those little Lycra dresses show just how much women have achieved. They can flaunt their bodies and feel safe. We reclaimed ourbodies and now they can be anything. I love that.8221;