Our model is the amazing Jill Tweedie, a former columnist on the Guardian. Her close friend Polly Toynbee told me that after a diagnosis of motor neu… - Jill Tweedie

She [Tweedie] opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ...
I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another.
She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ...

It would be a tragedy if the still embryonic Women's Liberation Movement in this country sank without trace into the amniotic fluid of niceness, but already I detect some signs. The women directly concerned with organising the March 6 demo, though they point with pride to the massive WL movement in the US seem not to have learned very much from the performance of their American sisters. They bend over backwards to be fair. ('We must be very careful not to assume that if a woman is refused a job it is sexual discrimination' — why? It's not our job to worry about fairness.) They talk too much about wanting to be taken seriously; they say too often how much they deprecate extremes and shudder with refined horror at bra-burnings, and at SCUM and WITCH. Not at at the image we want, they say, metaphorically crooking their little fingers and adjusting their petal hats. We don't want to go to jail, or worse, be laughed at.
The tendency among these ladies is to sneer at the Germaine Greers of the movement and, indeed, it is easy enough to carp at sweeping genralisations and lack of careful factual research. But anger, neurosis, insights , obsession and extremism is where it is at and women will have lost the battle before it has begun if they reject all this and concentrate their energies only on concrete injustice. Reforms like equal pay, equal job opportunities, free contraception, better nursery schools, have needed implementation as long as I can remember, and armies of hard-working, dedicated women have been pushing them forward as long as I can remember, too, and a great deal longer. The only new ingredient Women's Lib had to offer was the intellectual recognition of an imprisoned psyche, and the realisation that when that inner battle is fought and won, concrete injustices crumble at the roots.
And that is not done by being nice. American liberationists did not surge into life thinking of the other chap's point of view or making constant efforts to be fair, moderate, cool and ladylike. They succeeded by being prejudiced, unfair, immoderate, uncool and devastatingly unladylike and they came up with the only symbolic image of the movement so far (em) bra-burning. A small and risible thing, perhaps, but their own.

In my early teens, skinny ribs daily rent asunder by the explosive emotions within - oh golly gosh how I hate that spotty, mingy Mildred and will Rock Hudson ever ever clasp me in his steely arms - I burst upon a diary with a great gold lock.
But the Moroccan leather binding, the milky expanse within, instantly transformed me into Baroness Munchausen. My very handwriting spiked into the serious trembly copperplate I deemed more suitable for the consumptive heroine I wished to be than the thick round letters of the large schoolgirl I was (if experts today are right and handwriting shapes the fortunes of the writer, I should have died elegantly at the end of the diary). Even the contents were bastard - I found it beneath my dignity to write of anything but the most searing Brontë-esque passions and now, far from being a record of day-to-day events, each entry requires a simultaneous translation: "Today I think I shall go mad, I shiver, I groan, I sob" (Myron Fickelburger didn’t sit next to me in Chemistry); "Wild gales sweep across the moors, I run and howl, my eyes stream tears" (it’s windy in the playground and I’ve got this bit of asphalt in my eye). Discovered long hence, that diary would provide historians with a vivid and haunting picture of youthful stress in the fifties - vivid and haunting and deeply untrue.