THE film Misbehaviour is currently on general release. It is about the protest at the 1970 Miss World beauty contest, compered by reactionary “comic” Bob Hope, where feminists disrupted proceedings at the Albert Hall by throwing flour bombs and rotten vegetables.

In the film Keira Knightley plays one of the protesters, Sally Alexander. The film also features a scene, manufactured for dramatic effect, with her then partner Gareth Stedman Jones.

Both are socialist historians and founding editors of the History Workshop Journal, which continues to be published to this day, styled as a journal of socialist and feminist historians.

The link is important. It is the 50th anniversary of the conference at Ruskin College Oxford that gave rise to the women’s liberation movement in Britain.

Ruskin College is a trade-union college, currently in dispute with the UCU over the redundancy of trade-union representatives, ironically. In 1970 it was a centre of socialist-historical research focused around the late Raphael Samuel, who became the founding spirit behind the History Workshop Journal.

Samuel had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s and was associated with New Left Review in the early 1960s, but he went on to become a champion of history from below — that is, ordinary working people researching and discovering their own histories.

The first workshop held at Ruskin in 1967 was titled A Day with the Chartists. Subsequent annual workshops started to have strands on women’s history. These were driven by several factors. First, the rise of the women’s-liberation movement from 1968. Second, the lack of much work on women’s history at the time and, perhaps, particularly socialist and working-class female activists.

Samuel noted in his account of the early years of the workshop that the first women’s national conference was held at Ruskin. It was first mooted by a women’s caucus which had come together at the November 1968 history workshop and was originally planned as a workshop on women’s history.

The official history of history workshop says: “By the early 1970s the women’s liberation movement had also become a key element in history workshop as, under its influence, women sought to uncover ‘hidden’ histories of women’s lives and gender inequalities.”

British feminism was unusual in the preponderance of historians among its writers and thinkers, which was probably down to the strong presence of history workshops in radical circles at the time.

Sheila Rowbotham has written in a memoir of the 1969 history workshop that there were “not very many papers” on women’s history.

At the 1970 Ruskin conference she gave a paper on women in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and the Paris commune of 1871.

Rowbotham went on to write Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) and Hidden from History (1973), which aimed to recover and tell for a new generation of activists the history of women’s struggles. 

That included the importance of Alexandra Kollontai, a member of the Bolshevik government in 1917, and the German communist Clara Zetkin, who, along with Rosa Luxemburg, was the original moving force behind International Women’s Day.

Yet when it came to the events to mark IWD in 2020 — the Marx Memorial Library meeting on Zetkin being one of the few honourable exceptions — you would have struggled to find mention of leading socialist feminists or the struggles of working women for equality, equal pay, abortion rights and much else.

The reality is that, just as Rowbotham and many others recovered a hidden history of women’s struggles a generation ago, now many of these have once again become hidden from history.