ABSTRACT
In chapter one we reviewed a range of examples of organising activity in the women’s movement in Britain and elsewhere and, in organisational terms, showed how the stance of the movement is simultaneously oppositional-to conventional modes of organisingand avocational-of something else. This ‘something else’ is characterised as non-hierarchical organisation-the structuring of relationships towards some end in a way which creates and maintains equality between participants-and it is the clear and emphatic expression of the centrality of the value of this form of organising which makes women’s movement organisations an appropriate locus for exploring how non-hierarchy ‘works’. Such a specification is paralleled in anarchist approaches to social order, but comparison with accounts written from a feminist perspective illustrates how anarchists have glossed over two important features of non-hierarchical organisation: first, the need to identify an ideology or rationality which motivates such attempts by imbuing them with a value dimension; and second, the need to go beyond assertions of ‘spontaneous cooperation’ by inquiring into the precise nature of the strategies and tactics which may be employed in the implementation of non-hierarchical organisation. Drawing on a wide range of anecdotal and reflexive accounts from the women’s movement the search was for communalities of experience and intention and for the identification of problem areas and proposed solutions.
