‘It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be rather personal’

This is not in any way a history of the current British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). I don’t mention most of the things women did, and I particularly don’t look at any particular campaigns or struggles. There are groups of women at present trying to put together this history.2 I am just writing one way of understanding some of the characteristics of the early WLM. One of these characteristics is the distinctively personal nature of much WLM writing and practice. I suggest here, as have many feminists, that the personal experience of the recognition of a common oppression has been a formative feature of the WLM. The implications of this view have had a rather contradictory effect on the article. I have tried to quote from other women as much as possible, but do so in the context of my own argument, which means that at times the quotations carry the weight of that argument.3