Was this was the first National Womens Liberation Conference in 1970, which Sheila organised?
Sheila: Yes, we’d organised it, but we didn’t know how many people would come and suddenly all these people flooded in. I remember one young girl, she was about 17, still at school, and she was speaking into the microphone, so excited. Everybody felt we had this new connectiveness. Of course we then got into arguments, but it was amazing – joyous actually – at that conference. Susie: There was a really strong feeling of a different sort of society. You didn’t know there were people out there. I mean, just talking to somebody in the ladies’ and discovering they felt the same was amazing. You did literally feel as though you were a bit mad. People used to say: ‘Why are you grumbling? You’re privileged, you’ve been educated. Some people have got real problems.’ Lynne: By the end of the Sixties, I had read de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing but there were no role models apart from them, and it was hard to know quite what to be. So that’s what brought me to women’s liberation: I was a single mot
