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Memories by Trisha McCabe

A political lesbian with missionary zeal, 1979

"Everyone I knew thought it was highly dodgy, they were concerned that I’d got some sort of missionary zeal about being a political lesbian, but I never changed my mind and 25 years later, I’m still here, a lesbian”....

Tensions with bisexual friends

“But a couple of things happened that really disturbed me. I shared a house with a bisexual friend and was very friendly with and babysat endlessly for her small daughters. She was appalled at where I’d ended up politically and was quite hostile and ...

Getting involved with the women’s movement

Trisha came to Birmingham in 1974 aged 18 to go to University. She was engaged – it hadn’t occurred to her that she was gay. She stayed on after graduating to do some research in 1977 and tried to get involved with the Women's Movement, going to the ...

Pressure to adopt lesbian feminist dress code

“I used to go to women's discos, and remember taking my frock off and putting on trousers and then thinking ‘What am I doing, I’m censoring myself’ and putting the frock back on.”...

Organising the 1978 Women's Lib Conference

Trisha got involved in organising the April 1978 national Women's Liberation Conference, held in Birmingham. This was a significant point in her feminist development. At the time, she was living in a house with five men, one of whom she was having ...

Birmingham Women's Liberation Conference 1978

Trisha’s main roles were with the practicalities of organising the conference rather than the content. “I was looking after lost children at that point having spent all my time Gestetnering endless reams of paper, the only one I wouldn’t print was on...

Birmingham Women's Liberation Conference 1978

32 “During the plenary there I was with a microphone, it made you a target because the plenary was thousands of people in a room and women just getting hysterical, it was impossible to manage. The Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, like Sandra McNeill an...

Birmingham Women's Liberation Conference 1978

“It was the end really, because it had become too big to manage. The splits were obviously already there in a big sense because it was clear that there were real tensions between different groups of women, but in Birmingham (Conference), on the one h...

Squatting the Refuge 1979

See Women’s paper article PDF)Trisha went to a meeting about setting up a women’s refuge, and “Literally at 6.00 a.m. the next morning, I was breaking into a beautiful, Chamberlain designed house on Priory Road (now the Priory Hospital) which we squa...

Toe in the water of lesbian sex

“Soon afterwards I had my first relationship with a woman, I’d been quite keen to find out what lesbianism was like, and had started sleeping with someone but it was more out of curiosity, I figured if you sat up and talked with someone all night you...

Eureka moment at the Rev Rad conference – Septembe

Shortly afterwards, Trisha went to the Revolutionary Feminist Conference in Leeds in September 1979. “Ideas have always been more attractive, will grab and pull me in a particular direction. It crystallised it for me, it was like a kind of ‘eureka’ m...

Coming out through the women’s movement

“There was a group of us who came out through the women's movement, and that was a different experience from that of a lot of other lesbians, who struggled to come out in other environments, it was relatively easy. I was lucky in that respect”....

Being a political lesbian

“As a label it was simply saying that sleeping with men was sleeping with the enemy and the phrase didn’t necessarily mean you had relationships with women or you were massively attracted to women. It could but didn’t necessarily, but it did mean tha...

Setting up the Birmingham Revolutionary Radical

After the Revolutionary Feminist Conference in Leeds, Trisha and Stacey and a couple of others set up a revolutionary feminist group which lasted around five years. “Almost everyone in it was a lesbian, there was one woman I remember who wasn’t and o...

Combating pornography and violence

“We (the revolutionary feminist group) were involved with WAVAW (Women Against Violence Against Women) and the anti-pornography stuff. We were always very active in the marches against violence against women; we marched to and invaded a couple of por...

Under attack as a revolutionary feminist

“At times we felt quite attacked; for example one time I was flogging tickets for a lesbian disco and went up to a mixed group of women and said, ‘I’ve got tickets for a lesbian disco, it’s for lesbians only but does anyone want to buy a ticket?’ I w...

Women against Violence

“We didn’t understand why other women were so uptight, when you’re in the eye of the storm you can’t tell how big it is. We were involved in Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) but could take the moral high ground, because we weren’t involve...

Patriarchy Study Group

A Patriarchy Study Group was set up, which met for the weekend in Leeds, London or Birmingham. “They were always vegetarian except in Birmingham when Stacey would cook and we’d have chops or a chicken. I remember her sticking her hand up a chicken an...

Fissures at the Birmingham WLM Day Conferences

Birmingham Women's Liberation Day Conferences were held regularly at Tindal Street School, Balsall Heath. “There was a lot of paranoia at the time, but it was interesting. I remember the one conference where we were saying that the local Women's Libe...

Jewish women

Trisha recalled “There were some difficult issues between Jewish and Arab women in the women's liberation movement, and in Birmingham, the Jewish women's group and Palestinian women's groups had dialogue, which just wasn’t happening elsewhere”....

Other Women’s groups

Trisha recalls “I was involved with the Women's Self Defence group, through Women's Aid, and we used to go round and teach self-defence to women, it was good fun. Outwrite, Insist, and Women and Words, were all writing groups. There was the Socialist...

Mixing at the Old Mo

“We (the feminists) had a lot of social contact with other lesbians, mainly around the Old Moseley Arms pool room. The ‘straight dykes’ (meaning non-feminists who’d come through the gay scene rather than the women's liberation movement), thought we w...

Hierarchy of ‘right-on-ness’

“The main place we all came together and had our big rows, where things went a bit hairy, were at the Women's Liberation Day Conferences. The heterosexual women in particular felt criticised for being with men and they thought that we thought that we...

Socialist feminists v revolutionary feminists

“We were fairly dismissive of socialist feminism but only politically, not personally, we all knew socialist feminists and I thought got on reasonably well with them, so it was a strange dichotomy. Jackie Atkins was a communist, socialist femi...

Star Club Socials

“Jackie was involved in organising the women’s socials at the Star Club (Communist Party Club – there were always incidents like, someone thinking they’d spotted a transsexual in the toilets”....

Boy children

“There were some mad things about boy children, and I’m sure that mothers of boy children would say that there was a lot of hostility in Birmingham as well. It was bloody irritating to have older boys who would just dominate at things like the confer...

Uptight about the past

“I can see it was difficult for others, leaving aside the fact that Stacey on her own managed to attract very strong emotions; about ten years ago, a long time since we’d been involved in all that, we had a party at our house, and Stacey and some oth...

Thatcherism negated need for extremism in feminism

“Since the 1980s the whole political landscape has shifted so massively, it’s broadened out a lot, the changes are quite positive, it’s a kind of post-modernism thing. We (revolutionary feminists) were on the extremes, and I thought the extreme plays...

Impact of HIV / AIDS on lesbians

“In terms of the analysis of gay men as the ultimate power, men not needing women, the HIV / AIDS crisis completely exposed the fact that gay men were not in a powerful position at all. The thing that always struck me was that if HIV had been transmi...

Post-modern Queer Politics

“What I see now is much more of a continuum, for younger gay people, and some who aren’t, the whole thing of ‘Queer Politics’, saying ‘As long as you’re not normal you’re all right’ – I quite like that, so the basis on which you find something in com...

Current personal politics

“I’m not really involved in any politics now, I support Stonewall and Oxfam but I’m not involved in campaigning. I’ve always been issues based never party politics. A friend is working round people trafficking especially women for the sex industry, c...

Lesbian Mothers

260 Lesbian MothersTrisha got together with Jackie (Atkins) around 1988/9; they bought their first house together in 1990. “The first thing she said to me was ‘You’re not going to have kids are you, or I’m off!?’ Jackie had kids who had by then grown...

Changing status of lesbian mothers

“Now it’s more of a choice, about having kids or not having kids. It’s turned around a lot, at one time, being a lesbian mother meant you were in the minority in the movement and now it seems quite normal for lesbians to have kids. It’s almost that n...

Lesbians choosing to have children

 “There were very few lesbians who became pregnant through donor insemination) in the 70s and 80s but later on it became quite a feature, I know quite a few that’s had kids. A friend has a story of cycling around with a test tube in her armpit. ...

Withdrawing from the lesbian social scene

Trisha described how her involvement in a disastrous relationship with a woman who turned out to have extremely serious mental health problems, had impacted badly on her social networks. Although she eventually split up with her and got involved with...

Lack of support for same-sex relationship violence

“I tend to try to hang out with people who aren’t mentally ill, these days! Me and my friend, the first thing we say if anyone gets involved with anyone else is, ‘Are they sane?’ I wonder what it is about the lesbian community, I think there are a lo...

The National Lesbian Conference London 1981

The first national lesbian conference was in London, in 1981 and I don’t recall there being a second one. The women I went with were a real cross over between the revolutionary feminist group and the Women and Manual Trades group, some weren’t part o...

Working with girls

“When I was doing my research at University, I was interested in young women and the transition of school to work. The professor at the Centre for Contemporary Studies was famous for this, but his work was all about lads, so I did this research on gi...

Keeping the lads out of girls only space

“Women only space was absolutely unheard of, the lads would do everything to get in to the Girls' night at the youth club, they set fire to the doors, they used to break in, my self defence came in very handy, I was very good at kicking behind me and...

National Association of Youth Clubs

“There was a National Association of Youth Clubs Girls’ Work Officer called Val, based in Leicester and there was this whole network of Girls’ Workers, a huge proportion of which were lesbians. I got to know Val through this, then got involved with h...

Getting into training around single sex work

Pratiba Palmer (now a film-maker) was then a youth worker, and I remember being denounced by her in a lesbian youth workers' forum, for some transgression I’d committed in terms of race, I’d doubtless stumbled over a word or something. It was when I ...

The problem of lesbian youth workers…

“The Chair of the London Union of Youth Clubs who later became Vice Chair of the National Association of Youth Clubs was a really nice woman and had a very healthy attitude - she was straight but her mother had been a lesbian and had gone out with Vi...

Lesbian Film Show banned

While I was working for the National Association of Youth Clubs editing ‘Working with Girls’, Val had agreed I could have some time to set up and support a Young Lesbians Group in Birmingham, as there was a gay youth group but no girls went to it. Fo...