ABSTRACT
The British women’s liberation movement (WLM), alongside similar movements of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, put all systems of thought and forms of social relations up for contestation. Although the movement is remembered as providing a challenge to sex and gender norms, its association with peaceful activism and a reformist set of “official” demands suggest that it was undoubtedly radical but potentially not “extremist”. However, in this chapter, I argue that the WLM met many contemporary definitions of political extremism, as well as having a more complex relationship to political violence than is often discussed. By focusing on the movement’s campaigns for forms of universal basic income (UBI), such as “wages for housework” and the activism of Claimants’ Unions, I assert that feminist contributions to these campaigns, and the extremism of their intended impact on capitalist political economy, have been obscured. The movement’s politics around social reproduction sought to completely reconstruct economic and social relations and in so doing came into unapologetic and deliberate conflict with the capitalist social order, British social institutions, and the British state. Thus, this chapter concludes by arguing that it was the movement’s analysis of the intersection of patriarchy and capital, and consequent struggles over social reproduction, that are its enduring extremist legacies
