Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life

By Sheila Jeffreys

I am in the very fortunate position of having been able to contribute to two waves of feminism: The Women's Liberation Movement and the new wave that is taking place now. Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life is both an engaging autobiography and a fascinating account of feminist history. From the heady days of the Women's Liberation Movement through to the backlash against radical feminism as neoliberal laissez-faire attitudes took hold. Fast forward to the current re-examination of feminism in light of the #MeToo movement and an emerging new wave of radical feminism.Sheila Jeffreys' bold account makes it clear that the feminism and lesbianism she has championed for decades is needed more than ever. With honesty and frankness, she tells of victories and setbacks in her unrelenting commitment to women's freedom from men's violence, especially the violence inherent in pornography and prostitution. We also learn what her steadfastness has cost her in terms of personal and professional rewards.Trigger Warning places radical feminism within a cultural, social and intellectual context while also taking us on a personal journey. Sheila Jeffreys has tirelessly crossed the globe to advance radical feminist theory and practice and we are invited to share in the intellectual and political crossroads she has encountered during her life.Accessible yet detailed and rigorous, this landmark volume is essential reading for everyone who has ever wondered what radical feminism really is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781925950212

Book preview

revolution.

CHAPTER 1

Origins

My career as a writer and academic has been quite unusual for a woman with my background. Indeed, colleagues at the University of Melbourne, where I was latterly a professor of politics, expressed astonishment at discovering that I was the first in my family to get a degree. My parents were white, working-class people from East London and I am the first to have had a good education which enabled me to go university. The class status of my family changed dramatically as a result of the Second World War. My father joined the army in 1928 because there were no job opportunities and was promoted as a result of the need for officers. My status was raised too, because I became an ‘officer’s daughter’ and this advantage affected the trajectory of my life.

My father, Arthur Jeffreys, was born in 1910 and my mother, Rose Jordan, in 1911. My father’s father was a ‘factory messenger’, which was a lumpen proletariat occupation involving trips between factories with messages and parcels. His family lived in Silvertown, East End Docks. My father’s mother, like other working-class women of the time, contributed to the family income by engaging in commercial activities within the home. Alongside caring for a husband and eight children, she cooked pies for dockworkers who brought pudding basins to her on their way to work and returned at lunchtime to collect the pies she had created. None of the details of my father’s life came from him. He was a traditionally patriarchal man for whom such disclosure went against the rules of masculinity. Men were strong, silent types. Everything I know about my family history came from my mother, particularly when, having become a feminist, I treated her with more respect and sought out information about her life. My father was the only one on either side of the extended family who achieved middle-class status. All the aunties and uncles worked in traditionally working-class occupations. I had aunties on my mother’s side who were hotel maids, Lyons nippies, and one made London Pride shirts as an outworkers. My uncles were factory boilermen, milkmen, worked in factories and one in what was seen as a more elevated, white collar status job in a station ticket office. The latter was married to a primary school headmistress and was thus seen to have broken the class barrier in two ways.

My mother’s family lived in Plumstead on the opposite side of the river from Silvertown. Her father was a master, i.e. trained and skilled, baker. He did not have his own shop but worked in one on the other side of the river, crossing each day on the Woolwich Ferry. My grandmother on my mother’s side was in service before she married. Afterwards, she worked commercially from her home alongside raising children. She took in laundry which she hung from rails suspended from the kitchen ceiling. The kitchen regularly flooded, apparently, with water coming up through the flagstones. Both that home and that of my father were demolished in slum clearances. I did not meet any of my grandparents. My mother’s mother died of tuberculosis when she was 52. I remember being told that a man that I saw working in the front garden of his house in the East of London was my grandfather, the only one that survived into my infancy, but I do not remember meeting him.

A fear of alcoholism influenced my early life, and I did not touch a drop until I was 21 when I embarked upon shandies, i.e. beer mixed with lemonade. I found pubs off-putting in my teens and could not stand the smell of drink. This alienation from alcohol was the result of the stories and lessons I got from my parents as a child. In common with many other working-class people in London at that time, my father’s mother was an alcoholic. My mother told me how frightening it was to be at my father’s family home when she was having the DTs (Delirium tremens). The offspring would have to lock themselves into rooms whilst she stormed around the house. Alcohol was an important influence in my mother’s family life too. Her father, reportedly, had a considerable appetite for booze. Her mother did not go out of the house to drink, but sent my mother to collect beer in a jug from the local pub. She told me how embarrassed she would be if she passed the local presbyterian minister in the street, since she was a regular Sunday School attendee and presbyterians foreswore drink.

My parents were both teetotallers when they met. Many young people ‘signed the pledge’ or went on the wagon out of a determination to avoid the fate they saw befall the older generation. Wagons, once probably horse and then motor, patrolled the streets encouraging converts to get up onto the wagon and pledge themselves to teetotalism. My father was in the boys’ brigade and my mother taught Sunday School at her local presbyterian church. Chapels and churches offered ways out for working-class young people at the time, providing potential upward mobility when many others were falling into drink and despair. My uncle, apparently, signed the pledge out of recoiling from seeing his parents brought home on stretchers after passing out from the drink. There were many spurs to give it up.

My mother maintained the prejudices of her youth towards those from different religious and cultural backgrounds. I was keenly aware of and appalled by these by the time I was in secondary school and developing a critical sensibility. Plumstead, where my mother grew up, was riven by sectarianism in the 1910s. She recounts that there was much animosity towards the Irish in the neighbourhood, so much so that the Irish and protestant boys would regularly fight on the way back from school. The Irish catholic and protestant families lived on the same streets and prejudice against the Irish residents, according to my mother, centred on the fact that they would stack fish boxes outside their front doors and create a stink. Alongside her antipathy to catholics and the Irish, she absorbed the casual antisemitism that was rife in East London when she was growing up and carried it with her through life. When, as a child, I watched television with her, she would set about identifying Jewish actors in the programmes. She would say that is a Jewish nose and then search out the names of the actors in the credits to prove that they had ‘Jewish’ names. Her antisemitism inoculated me against this form of racism. I educated myself on the holocaust, and when I started university I immediately took up with a group of Jewish friends. Her fierce prejudices extended in the 1960s to the new Black immigrants from Commonwealth countries who were arriving in London to perform the jobs that other British people did not want to do, such as working on the buses or in factories. In these ways, unfortunately, my mother carried aspects of East London culture with her throughout her life.

The protestantism she was raised in was a severe form which not only rejected drink, but also enforced a strict sexual morality. Her grandmother, she told me, wore a mobcap and wielded a stick to punish unacceptable behaviour. She turned away from the door a daughter, my mother’s aunt, who had had to leave home when she gave birth to an illegitimate baby and returned, when destitute, to seek succour. No help was forthcoming. My mother inherited this terror of what she was taught was sexual misbehaviour, but I was a child of the sexual revolution and found my mother’s point of view absurd. I remember once, when I was on holiday from university and staying at the family home, I entertained a male friend in the living-room. My mother ostensibly retreated to bed, but when I saw my friend out about 11 p.m., I was greatly embarrassed to see her sitting on the stairs with her curlers in and dressing-gown on, in tears of anxiety. I was not the only daughter to whom my mother sought to hand down her worries about sex. My older sister, Pamela, told me that on the evening when she was ironing her trousseau in the kitchen, my father paid her a visit to say that sex was not as awful as my mother made it out to be. My sisters were, most likely, both virgins when they married. But my father had anxieties too. He feared sexual predation upon his innocent daughter by men, and when I left to go up to university in Manchester at eighteen he gave me a written list of pieces of advice for avoiding trouble, one of which was that I should never be alone in a room with a bed in it with a man. He was clearly keenly aware of the way men were likely to behave. At the time I was outraged because I was so determined to be sexually liberal, but once I became a feminist and aware of men’s sexual violence, I became more sympathetic to his paternalism.

In the early 1980s I went to visit the street in Silvertown which was the site of my father’s home. Rhea Street was razed to the ground and the area was filled with high rise blocks of 60s flats which were empty and waiting for their turn to be demolished. Some elements of the culture of the neighbourhood were still intact. A man in the street from whom I sought information, tried to sell me bulk rolls of sticky-tape from the back of a van. My father was a keen entrepreneur in this way even when he was an army officer. I was told that he sought to sell on unwanted ammunition boxes that he had access to through the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC). He often used the phrase that something had fallen off a lorry, meaning that it had been half-inched (pinched). The East End stayed in my father to some extent despite his elevation in status to officer rank. My parents did not come from the area strictly understood to be cockney, i.e. within the sound of Bow Bells. Silvertown was a couple of miles to the east of its eastern boundary in Limehouse. My father did not use cockney rhyming slang and nor did my mother, but the cockney accent and vocabulary would have formed part of the soundtrack of their youth and I was very aware of it in my childhood through my London relatives.

My father was not well-educated. He attended an elementary school in Silvertown, in the East End docks area, which had a playground on the roof. Like many other children at the time, the family had no money to put shoes on his feet and he went to school barefoot. He benefitted from the 1918 Education Act which raised the age at which children could leave compulsory education, so he was able to stay at school until fourteen. He was then in various forms of temporary work which included arranging the vegetables in a greengrocer’s shop window until he joined the army at eighteen. The economic depression of the 1920s meant that there was very little work available. This advantaged my father because it forced him to join the army, where he thrived until retirement. At the time though, my mother explained, joining the army was seen as an act of last resort for working-class boys, not a good career move. In order to pass the sergeant’s exam that enabled him to be promoted in the RAOC, my mother had to help him. It involved having to read Pride and Prejudice and she had read such classic literature in her three years at a grammar school. On the outbreak of the Second World War, when there was an urgent need for officers, my father was promoted to the rank of warrant officer, the highest rank that enlisted men who did not have commissions could rise to. The war enabled some breaking down of barriers as a result of necessity and by war’s end he had been promoted to Captain, and had become a Major when he retired at 52. Men who rose through the ranks to become officers were called ‘rankers’ and were not treated with the same respect as men from higher social classes who attended military academies such as Sandhurst. I can remember feeling furious as a child at my father’s humiliation when he would arrive home to tell me that he had been required to travel in the back of the staff car while a man of inferior rank who had been to Sandhurst sat in the front.

My father, Captain Arthur John Walter Jeffreys, in Malta.

My mother received three years of a grammar school education because it was possible for elementary school children to take an exam at age thirteen which would entitle them to scholarships to continue their education. Rose was called the ‘blue stocking’ in recognition of her interest in reading and education. She won prizes at her grammar school, notably an edited collection by John Drinkwater on English poetry, which I consulted often as a child. When she was sixteen, my mother was forced to leave the grammar school before she was able to matriculate because her parents needed her to go out to work and contribute to the family income. She worked as a cashier in Foyle’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road until she married a few years later, after which she did not work outside the home again.

CHILDHOOD

I was an ‘army brat’, meaning the child of a professional soldier who was reared on army bases around the world. My oldest sister, Sylvia, was born in the UK in 1937 before my parents started to travel with the army. My middle sister, Pamela, was born in 1942 on the island of Malta during the Second World War. My mother recounted that my father was posted to Malta and she and Sylvia followed him out. They arrived a couple of days before the UK entered the war in September 1939. Had war been expected they would not have set sail. As it was, the family was subjected to the harsh and frightening conditions of the siege of Malta for several years. Malta and its people suffered greatly during the war because, lying between Italy and North Africa, it was strategically important to the German/Italian war effort. My father was involved in disposal of unexploded bombs, when Malta was, at first, defended only by three airplanes called Faith, Hope and Charity. The work of bomb disposal was immensely stressful because those detonating them never knew whether an operation would be their last. According to my mother, because my father did not vouchsafe such information, on one occasion my father’s friend was blown up in front of his eyes and he reported seeing the head, when separated from the body, still trying to speak. The stress of being under siege affected the whole family, and at one point they were bombed out while they were down in a shelter.

My mother Rose with me as a baby, Germany 1948.

Food shortages, which were particularly severe for the Maltese but affected the British army families too, caused my sister Pamela to develop rickets. In 1943, at the first point at which it was safe to do so, my mother and sisters were evacuated to South Africa by ship through the Suez Canal and under threat from torpedoes the whole way. My mother was very unhappy because she was boarded out for two years with a South African landlady. She was lonely, without her own home, family or friends. When the end of the war was in sight, she and my sisters were sent home to London, again via the Suez Canal. When my father was reunited with his family, my toddler sister, Pamela, reportedly ran away in fright as she did not recognise him.

After the war my father was posted to Germany as part of the occupation forces, BAOR, or British Army on the Rhine. My mother and two sisters accompanied him, and so it transpired that I was born in a military hospital in Munster in 1948. I have always assumed that I was conceived as part of a strategy by my mother to reengage my father’s interest. She explained to me that my father and his fellow officers spent social time with their German secretaries, going swimming in the river, for instance, which would not have been respectable for an officer’s wife. My mother stayed at home whilst my father had friendly relations with his secretary. I had a German nanny called Irmgard, who talked with me in German so that I firmly believed that any forms of endearment must be German words. I proudly told young friends when I went to infants’ school back in the UK that ‘currant bun’ was a German term. Irmgard was a strong source of love when I was a baby and toddler. I loved the family Alsatian dog, Chum, dearly too, but lost contact with him when he was supposedly sent away to live with a farmer after biting off the little finger of a neighbouring German girl.

When I was three the family returned to the UK. We went first to Streatham where my sister Pam was placed in an open-air school called Aspen House because of her rickets. She told me that the children who had to study outside even in snow, would cut their fingers deliberately so they could be sent indoors. The fresh air was supposed to be good for them. We then moved to a 1930s Tudor-fronted semi in Sidcup which my father had bought before we went overseas, and it was there that I started school at five years old.

We left for Malta, my father’s second posting there, when I was six. We lived first in Sliema where I went to an army school at which I was very unhappy. I remember the shame of not being able to read. The school in Sidcup had not been able to teach me the basics and I failed to learn to read before I left. Though these days parents might consider reading to their children to be a useful component of childrearing, this was not the case with mine. Their background and experience did not cause them to think they should engage in any way with my education. I did not learn to read until I was seven years old. A report from the Sliema school from when I was seven years and seven months old, comments on my difficulties in reading: Sheila is a very hesitant reader. The report says that my concentration was not good and concludes that I was of a rather slow, meditative nature which made it hard for me to keep up.

Me about 1952.

My late start, though, did not hold me back. As soon as I was able to do so I shot ahead, voraciously reading everything that was available including the backs of cornflakes packets and advertisements in the street, and experiencing great excitement. Also, at that school, I remember the humiliation of dance classes. The children were put in mixed sex pairs and I received a boy with filthy hands in which the dirt was ingrained. I had to hold those hands, so dancing was extremely disagreeable. Then our family was moved to Paceville, at that time a sleepy village and now a centre of the tourist industry. I was sent to a different army school and this time loved it. By the time I was eight years and nine months old, the comment on my reading was very good. I was chosen to read out a poem I had written at speech day, an occasion that was blighted by the problem of another little girl waiting beside me to read her poem. She was struck by nerves and had an accident such that I could see poo sliding out of her knickers and down her leg.

I spent my time out of school taking a neighbour’s dog, a springer spaniel called Percy, for a walk, or communing with the chickens in a large cage owned by a Maltese family down the road who would let me just sit inside and experience the birds. My mother told me she used to do the same thing in a back-garden chicken shed as a child. My school diary for September 1957, when I was nine, records my visits: I went to see some little black ducks that had got rather big since the last time I saw them. A few weeks later I recorded an extraordinary find at my father’s depot which I was taken to see. I recorded it as a cave, but in fact it was a catacomb with layers of skulls on shelves inside. This was an archaeological discovery of note. I do not write of the effect that seeing piles of skulls had on me at the time, but it is a sight I never forgot. At other times I played on the rocky beach at the bottom of the road. My father had had a wooden boat made for me at the army depot where he worked, which I called the Star of Malta and pulled around on rock pools. I spent much time examining the wildlife in the pools. My life was, apparently, full of incident. I was busy with the Brownies, where I was sixer of the pixies and my sisters were Brown Owl and Tawny Owl. I did homework most days, often too much, as I recorded, and regularly went to the lido, an area carved out of the seaside rocks, with my mother to swim. At nine years old I record searching for books to read in the bookcase, being lent exciting books and reading all day and before bed.

Me in the Brownies in Malta about 1957.

I am in front row looking the wrong way, my sister Pam who was Tawny Owl is centre back and my sister Sylv who was Brown Owl is right back.

Playing what I called ‘farm animals’ was an activity which was good for my imagination, and I undertook this with my best friend, Dierdre. I went on to collect cowboys and Indians and later, when they became available, complete flowerbeds with individual flowers, such as sunflowers, which could be stuck into holes to create displays. I did not have access to screens, smart phones or electronic games, but used my imagination copiously to construct stories with my dairymaids, stallions and plastic babies and this stood me in good stead. I enjoyed my childhood. Once I learned to swim, with a pair of water-wings at the lido on Sliema beach, I was in and out of the water like a fish. Mostly we swam at the forces’ lido on the clifftops at St. Andrews, jumping and diving straight into deep water. I had duties too. My middle sister, Pamela, who was only seven years older than me, was beginning to have boyfriends and my mother would send me to accompany her when she walked out with them, as a chaperone. I can remember sitting in a state of boredom on a chunk of rubble on a bombsite whilst she communed with a young man, probably a national serviceman.

Reviews for Trigger Warning

[A · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this is an excellent read. interesting and well written. I highly recomend

[Trish Perkins · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Editing would have made this book better. It was wandering and repetitive.