Images of Liberation

Sally Fraser’s photographs capture the look and atmosphere of the women’s liberation movement at its moment of emergence in the early 1970s. Six hundred people, mostly women with children, arrived on the Friday evening of the first national conference of women’s liberation— the ‘women’s weekend’—held at Ruskin, a trade union college of adult education in Oxford, in March 1970. We had only anticipated perhaps one hundred so the overflow filled the Oxford Union where the statues of distinguished men were swiftly covered with scarves and veils. Ruskin students—engineers, lorry drivers, post office workers, miners—emptied their rooms and communal spaces (library, billiard and tv room, the bar and canteen) for the guests. Sally Fraser’s camera scans rooms crowded with women of all ages, some with children, a scattering of men whose visible presence at meetings was a source of contention. A woman in the Union Hall clasps a child in one hand, a cigarette in the other (everyone smokes), another child lies on the chair beside her; a solitary woman with neat hair crosses her stockinged legs; a young woman reads a pamphlet at the back of the hall. Close-ups pick up historian Sheila Rowbotham’s incandescent smile, then literature lecturer Juliet Mitchell’s joyful clasp of the outheld fingers of filmmaker Sue Crockford’s small son, a table crowded by women, covered in empty plates and coffee cups. A group of children in the crèche listen to a story read by Chris Williams, husband of Jan whose coruscating critique of family, motherhood and housework made a plea for the independence of mothers, wives, daughters and communal living (see ‘Women and the Family’ by Jan Williams, Hazel Twort and Ann Bachelli in Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation, edited Michelle Wandor, Virago, 1990). Ruskin students and fathers organized the creche. Arielle Aberson, a Ruskin student from Geneva and one of the conference organizers is caught in concentrated profile; she sits next to her aunt, Raya Levin, a social worker attached to Holloway Prison, who ‘ran a small workshop on delinquency’ on the Saturday (Wandor 1990: 48). Dressed in Afghan coats, thick sweaters, with hair piled up or Sally Fraser’s photographs, Images of Liberation were exhibited at Exeter College, Oxford, as part of the Photo Oxford 2021 Festival, and were curated by Four Corners. An expanded exhibition, Photographing Protest, will take place at Four Corners’ gallery in East London from March 2022. Visit fourcornersfilm.co.uk for more details.