Joy, laughter and 'radical happiness' in the British Women's Liberation Movement

The Women's Liberation Movement was an explosion of emotional political activism. The feminist print media and personal testimonies from activists articulate a depth of feeling and "swirl of emotion" (Waters 2016:451) that was central to the movement. They burned with a righteous anger but were also joyous, full of love and laughter. In Radical Happiness (2017), feminist activist and academic Lynne Segal calls for a return to the mobilising of joyous emotions in collective protest. She terms this "the miraculous revolutionary power of joy" (2017:xiv). But how much did joy and happiness form a part of the WLM? How powerful was it, what were its limitations and what did it mean for the cultural and political protest?

This project will explore these questions through a source-based analysis in British archives, including the Women's Library, the Black Cultural Archives, Glasgow Women's Library and the Feminist Archives North and South. The main questions this research will ask are:
1) To what extent and in what ways did a sense of happiness, joy and laughter form the British WLM?
2) To what extent did joy and humour challenge societal norms and become a powerful political "tool"?
3) Was happiness as relevant and significant to the movement as anger in the creation of a powerful sense of sisterhood, the sustaining of political activism and the diffusing of political challenges to the movement?
I will also explore questions of diversity by examining the reaction to such outpourings of joy from those inside and outside the movement as well as how feelings of happiness and the significance it held in the WLM changed over time. I will consider how different groups of women in the WLM, including from different racial, cultural and class backgrounds and sexual orientations, experienced the collective feelings of joy.

Previous work has considered the importance of emotions in the WLM (Waters 2016, Rees 2010) with a focus on the significance and strength of anger in the WLM; but what of Bruley's (2013: 726) description of the "tremendous outburst of emotion" that was experienced as joyous and also characterised involvement in the WLM? These emotions complicate the simplistic narrative of the British WLM as dominated by anger, alongside the misogynist portrayal of feminists as always irrational and man-hating. This research on the importance of joy and happiness in the movement will challenge this narrative and bring a radically new perspective to the analytical history of the period. The WLM is also often considered too white and too middle class and not relevant to protest today. However this is to obscure the complexity and diversity of people in the movement (Thomlinson 2012). In accessing affective and emotional experiences, this analysis can reveal the affinities and contradictions that shaped the WLM and continue to form protest movements today.


I will draw on the work and approach of sociologist Deborah Gould (2010) in her study on AIDS activism during the 1980s. Her analysis views emotional and affective sensations as central to providing a multi-faceted understanding of "human beingness" that may be obscured or misunderstood in an analysis of what is considered to be more rational and cognitive (2010:17). Further to this, I will draw on the work of feminist theorists, including Sara Ahmed (2004) and Clare Hemmings (2011). They are concerned with how power circulates through feeling and affect and with the potential of affect to allow access to a visceral, emotional and embodied dimension. Their approaches give value to emotions as a form of knowledge that "cannot be separated from the bodily world of feelings and sensations" (Ahmed 2004:171). As with Gould's (2010) analysis of ACT UP, these approaches can reveal much about the connections, motivations and experiences of women within the WLM.