URSULA Hurley started work as a night waitress at a Bistro in London, but on her first night, when the owner learned. that she had children, • she was fired. dustrial tribunal backed up her employer, agreeing that, smaller business, women children were 'unreliable'.
If this was one isolated case, which could be easily reversed, it would not be too shocking. But it is not.
The Employment Bill going through Parliament at the present time, codifies the attack on every woman's right to work. with less than 20 workers will no longer be required to hold jobs women have babies. All employers will have greater freedom to refuse women the same job they had before after having a baby.
Alongside these legal attacks on a woman's right to have a job, are the effects of the provision of school meals, run- down of facilities for the (meagre as it was), the declining provision for the old and sick and the drift of women's employment towards part-time working compared to the early '70s.
Abortion The attacks on fertility con, trol also threaten freedom to do what they choose with their lives. Despite the deteat of John Corrie's restrictive abortion Bill it is likely that their will be further attempts, perhaps event a government-backed Bill, aiming to reduce the time limit on abortions to at least 24 weeks.
Back door attacks on fertility control are going on at the present timé. The DHSS Pregnancy Advisory London charity clinic, to remove all posters advertising their serVices from London The offending words were: Abortion Help? Phone PAS. Jenkin, Secretary of Social Services, (who thinks that mothers are the best people to care for children and that they should stay at home fulltime to do so), has seen fit to allow only a three month renewal for two pregnancy advisory bureaux, one of which is London's PAS! Feminism The right to work gives women financial independence The right to fertility.
sexual freedom, WUlLICI allows them to separate their sexual activity from having children. Both allow women to control their own Both these fundamental rights four 'An in- found in was born.
Firms who leave to nonthe childcare fives women's told the Service, Transport.
Patrick MP, were speaking. for These women, but they alliances SOCIOW of feminism.
serious about business, cillor, The from men. ycal . contro gives because it children properly. TEN YEARS ago this February, the first ever women's liberation conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford. women turned up to express their new confidence as women.
Women's liberation movement in Britain Ten years later women have made their mark on British politics. discrimination legislation has been passattacks on the 1967 Abortion Act have when Marie Ratterson, chairperson of the TUC, and Jo Richardson, Labour some of whom were revolutionary feminists, were a tiny minority of the demonstration, reflect a feeling that with the trade unions are wrong — a 'compromise' This Tory government is deadly economic The powerful allies the organised labour movement?
Does such a strategy challenge the autonomy women's movement, the right for women to have their own independent organisation? No, it makes it even more important that women build a strong independent movement that can fight for women's demands at home, at work, at school, in society at large. changed attitude towards women, both among men and women themselves.
But the heady days of the '60s and early '70s when more and more women gained economic independence as they filled offices, shops, canteens, and light engineering factories, are over. Women's unemployment over the last two years has been three times the rate of men's. The economic recession, coupled with the monetarist philosophy of the Tory government is hitting women hard.
Here VALERIE COULTAS takes a look at the future of feminism in the 80s.
The trade unions will not move unless they are pushed, the whole experience of the last ten years underlines this point.
The become both in unions, the more the unions will respond to demands for womens' equality, the more women can raise feminist society women's movement in Britain has ternational always been strongest and most effective when it has mobilised women on the streets, to publicly demonstrate, to women and men alike, that they have power and confidence. The InWomen's Day marches the Reclaim the Night marches, are all a vital part of winning women to a broad understanding of their oppres But while the women's movement
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ed, battered women have gained some protection in the eyes of the law, repeated
been repulsed. Above all the women's movement in this country has created a