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Censored/Uncensored:
Lovers in Dialogue
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab011oa
MargarettaJolly
University of Exeter, UK, mjolly@exeter.ac.uk
Address
for correspondence: Margaretta Jolly, School of English, University of Exeter,
Queen's Building, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK; Email: mjolly@exeter.ac.uk
This paper considers the
practice — and art — of personal letter writing in the context
of `second wave' feminist politicization of personal relationships. It focuses
on excerpts and analysis of a brief correspondence between Carole Harwood
and her husband Kevin Littlewood when Harwood was imprisoned for dancing
on the nuclear missile silos at Greenham Common Airforce Base in 1983. Reversing
the traditions of domestic letter writing as the extension of a waiting wife's
role as well as the gender paradigms of men leaving home for war, these letters
reflect a transformation of gender relations that can also be seen in published
epistolary literature of the time. At the same time, the letters' playfully
elliptical allusion to Harwood's burgeoning lesbian feminism suggest that
letter writing reflected the fears and fantasies that feminist relationships
could involve, even as it helped to carry women and men into new and challenging
relations in the context of 1980s activism.1
`Love
is more complex than theory ... the letters are ultimately about love.' This
was Robin Morgan's assessment of the eight unsent letters she wrote to her
husband Kenneth Pitchford between 1962 and 1969, and published in her collected
writings Going too far: the personal chronicle of a feminist, in 1977 (Morgan,
1977: 22). As Morgan equally argued, however, the transformation of `love',
especially in sex, has been a central aim in feminism, and this article deals
with personal letters that reflect this front line of relationship politics
in the heyday of the `second wave'. It is unsurprising that few were as bold
as Morgan in publishing their personal correspon- dence with lovers, but even
the everyday private letters of those who did not consider themselves writers
can be a revealing source of ideas about both masculinity and femininity,
and the transforming impact of feminism on relationships. As ideas of sexuality
as a key to
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patriarchy
became popularized alongside economic and political theories, such discussions
could become wishful, painful or simply evasive: Morgan did not send her letters
to her husband for seven years. More commonly, correspondences, with relationships,
broke off. However, there are arts to censorship, just as there are arts to
confession. If we take censorship to be the blunt end of a wide spectrum of
construction in everyday communications, we can see such letters are creative
texts: writing practices whose truth is relative precisely to the degree that
it is relational. I focus my discussion on a brief correspondence between
British peace activists Carole Harwood and Kevin Littlewood to demon- strate
their reversal of the canonical scene of heterosexual letter writ- ing, a
waiting woman writing to keep up a military or travelling man's morale. Littlewood
wrote to his wife while she was imprisoned for dancing on the nuclear missile
silos at Greenham Common Airforce Base in 1983 in awe of her evolving feminist
ideals and with wry humour about his role as `house husband on the home front'.
Harwood's replies are brief, partly because she was writing on rationed prison
stationery, partly because she was also writing to Bridget Evans (this is
a pseudonym), a woman she had met and who was to become her lover during the
campaign. I situate this cor- respondence in a broader consideration of feminist
letters as auto- /biographical and political forms that transformed a legacy
of familiar letter writing as women's duty and a feminine art. However, I
will also suggest that letter-writing was complicit in avoiding the confrontations
that feminism could provoke in personal relation- ships, even as it registered,
and sometimes facilitated, new and chal- lenging relations in the context
of 1970s and 1980s activism. Harwood and Littlewood's letters tiptoe at points
over their emerging differences as Harwood discovered lesbian feminism even
as such new silences were a necessary effect of new dialogues between women,
elo- quently expressed in Harwood's romantic correspondence with her lover.
That I do not discuss this correspondence is due to the latter's requests
for privacy. The saving, archiving and publishing of old let- ters raises
its own questions of constructive censorship, dialogue and necessary silences.
This, however, is the subject of another paper: suf- fice here to say that
it is further evidence of the way that letters even in their after-life continue
to participate in the relationship politics of the women's movement. Harwood
and Littlewood's correspondence, as well as the permu- tations of their relationship,
symbolizes the relative and historically specific nature of gender separatism
for many. Yet I make no claim to be representative here. If such letters show
the sophistications of
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love
(and the contracts of love are sophisticated in this story), like all life
writing, they remind us that this is because love is so particular. For this
reason, I begin with a biographical narrative that incorpo- rates sections
of the correspondence, before providing an analysis. Such a narrative is intended
to honour the idiosyncrasies of the rela- tionships involved, while also suggesting
what the letters do not say as well as what they do. * * * In 1982, the year
Carole Harwood first went to a women's peace camp at Greenham Common Royal
Airforce Base, to protest about the siting of American cruise missiles in
Britain, she and Kevin Littlewood had been together for six years. They had
met as mature students doing a history degree at the University of Cardiff.
Carole had left her first marriage because of going to university and had
begun concurrent relationships with Kevin and their history pro- fessor, G.A.W.
Neither was Welsh — Carole Scottish-English, Kevin English — but
they had each lived in Cardiff for years, Carole looking after her three children,
Albert, Rupert and Emma, who were then 12, 17 and 19, and Kevin working in
the sphere of history, museums and heritage. Carole had been a peace activist
far longer than she had been a feminist, imprisoned at the age of 16 for peace
protests with the early CND in 1961. When she got involved with Greenham,
aged 36, she was embarking on a teacher training course, but soon felt that
life at the peace camp was far more important, not to mention excit- ing,
promising a women's scene and outdoor living she had long fan- tasized about.
Kevin was happy to support her, as he was used to participating in protests
such as the Miners' Strike and the Anti- Apartheid movement. G.A.W., her other
lover and 20 years older, was more uncertain about Carole's plans to commute
to a peace camp known for its feminist and lesbian activities (Harwood, 2003a; Littlewood, 2003). The correspondence excerpted below was written during 14
days in February 1983 when Carole was in Holloway Prison, London, for dancing
on high security missile silos at Greenham Common with 43 other women on New
Year's Day.2 It expresses all the ideal- ism of the peace camp in its heydey
and is ironically reminiscent of the morale-boosting letters sent during war
campaigns. Reversing this canonical form of marriage by post, however, it
shows Kevin's amused promise to `keep the home fires burning' in Carole's
absence. His descriptions of the everyday doings of their house in Radyr,
punctuated by visits to sardonic G.A.W. with whom he was great friends, and
their favourite coffee shop Astleys, show a
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quiet
shift in views on who does the housework as well as who can be a public martyr — and indeed, who does the letter writing. Carole's letters, meanwhile, are
addressed to Kevin and the children together — with requests that Kevin
keep G.A.W. up-to-date — crammed in tiny writing on rationed prison
paper. According to the accounts she gave at the time to journalists and later
to Sasha Roseneil, who has written the most thorough academic treatment of
Greenham to date, Harwood had felt moved to protest because of her fears for
her children's future in the nuclear cold war and her letters home con- tinue
this maternal vein (Roseneil, 2000: 255-56). Significantly less personal,
they express the difficulty of writing in prison but equally the difficulty
of writing about her discovery of radical feminism. Ironically, therefore,
it is Littlewood's letters that register the changes that were imminent for
both of them, and where we glimpse how sexual politics met peace politics
in the Greenham protest. Characteristically joky, this is nevertheless the
drive of the letters' ongoing story of `Ant' and `Bee', cartoon characters
taken from Angela Banner's children's book primers, who play out Carole and
Kevin's relationship in fictional form (Banner, 1969; 1970). * * * Kevin to
Carole: 14 (?) February 198333 Dearest love: No big speeches (as such!) I
think the less I say, the better, since both of us suspect the grand gestures!
I'll be thinking of you and all your brave sisters. At New Year I thought
of you, and once again I watch you going off to fight, confront, upturn the
state. Do what you can, my love, and you know I am with you — when it
all seems too much & too far & too high, just think of all the people
behind you. I know it seems as if they are complacent — but you are
in the vanguard and must jolt all our consciousness. One day soon, it will
be comprehended.44 The following day, Carole, together with 43 other women,
was tried for `breaching the peace' and on the 16th she was found guilty and
bound over `to keep the peace' (Hopkins and Harford, 1984: 104). With 37 others,
Harwood refused this sentence and went to prison for 14 days in lieu, believing
that `you've got to force the state to fol- low... through to the conclusion'
(Roseneil, 2000: 264). Kevin heard the news on the radio, just after he had
written the following: Kevin to Carole: 16 February 1983
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Everyone's
well here. I'm just sitting in Astley's after doing some shop- ping, and I'm
on my way to G.A.W.'s to do the newscaster job & tell all. Must mute the
women angle — perhaps I'll tell him you were all men in disguise, that'll
cheer him up. A quiet week so far — I bought Al an inner tube ... and
Ru is in & out as usual. I saw Una L-M and she was her usual Hobbes-ian
self (nasty, brutish & short!) she tried a parting shot. `It's ok going
on these demos, but you need men to look after your kids'. `Well' said I `you
can always ask women to do it'. Exit Ant, right, polishing his mandibles.
Exit U.L-M eating pas- sers by. Littlewood informed a telephone tree of supporters
of the arrest and promised to get G.A.W. to write to Carole. Four days later:
Kevin to Carole: 21 February 1983 Reading between the lines, Newbury D[istrict]
Council is applying the pressure, although I don't understand their ultimate
aim — soon no one will be able to walk on that `common' so they'll have
to call it `Green- ham Private' or `Greenham Rare' or `Uncommon'. So then
you'll be `Uncommon Women' which is a very apt description of you all. Well,
today, Monday I packed off the Joeys to school with packed lunch etc, And
then I went round to G.A.W.'s for he was typing out some stuff for me. Then
I went on to college, where many asked after you. Then at 4 p.m. G.A.W. picked
me up & I did Quicksave shopping and he drove me home & I cooked dinner.
So a very fruitful day, and I think I'm clear now. ... I enjoyed meeting your
friends and I think they're super women. Speaking of `soup' -er I had a call
from Bridget, who is burning herself up flitting backwards & forwards
to London, Yorkshire & All points South/N/E.West. I hope she takes a rest
soon. Anyway she'll be seeing you on Wednesday, and sends her love. Oh Bee,
won't we have a time when you're here again, won't we snuggle and hug and
huggle so snug. Do I like hugs? Pie face—now you know I love you! P.
Chops — oh wot love, wot love! By the bye, forgot to tell you but the
Virago piece was a really excel- lent article, very mature & also very
gripping. You write with your heart Bee, and it comes through in so many ways.
... [G.A.W.] misses you a lot, and I tell him stories from the `Re- constructed
Ant's Joke Book' & he snaps out of it quite quickly. Do I miss you? Ant
keeps a stiff upper mandible and gazes at the rainbow in the West, and plays
his 2d-concertina to those who will listen, singing songs of Bee and her sisters
and of all the peace in the world & how we will keep it safe.
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Carole
had received concussion in the police van and was in the prison's hospital
wing (Hopkins and Harford, 1984: 106-11). After two days she was passed fit
to return to ordinary cells but she refused until Bridget Evans, with Kevin's
help, got the story covered in the Guardian newspaper. Carole to Kevin and
children: 20 February 1983 Darlings, How are you all. I Imagine you tonight,
Sunday, getting ready for school, having baths, watching `Heart to Heart'!!
Dear souls I miss you all but it won't be long now.... Dear Albert [sic] to
give the karate instructor my apologies on Tuesday (will Kevin or Ru take
you & pick you up? Is Jeremy going?) Well chaps here we are — my
5th day! It's all very curious & I'm learning an awful lot. What a delight
to see you Ant, though gloomy facing you across a table. I was most impressed
by the picture of you writing 4 letters at once. I keep it by me. It's so
jolly to have a letter, even a few lines, it breaks up the day. We are not
being allowed to work ... so getting up at 7.15 makes for plenty of reading....
[my] apologies for the smudgy pen — they took mine, pens all my paper
etc, off me when I arrived. Presumably they are terrified you might make some
intelligent use of your time, the regime seems dedicated to producing inanimate,
insensi- ent vegetables! Still that's by the way. Albert when you are a self
made millionaire you shall buy me a new biro! Did you stay at Emma's on Friday
night (was Ru O.K?) & did you go out with G.A.W. on Satur- day? Drop me
a note telling me, briefly — no hassle, what you've been doing. In the
same letter Carole asks if Kevin is coping, `especially with money', suggesting
that her mother and G.A.W. would lend some if necessary, and that people can
bring `gifts like homemade pies'. She also asks Kevin to let the Employment
Exchange know that she cannot sign on for a couple of weeks. On the 21st February,
her sixth day inside, she writes: The post has just arrived — I seem
to have an awful lot of contacts in Formby!! Tell Heather I'm really grateful
& give her my love, she is a good sister to us. Lots of messages of encouragement
& thanks from all over Britain, it's very moving. The best tribute anyone
can pay, though, is to take responsibility themselves & act. It's very
important & urgent. That's why I so appreciate what you're all doing at
home — without your support, encouragement & courage I wouldn't
be able to take the stand I feel so committed to. Thank you, I know it's not
easy. How about the shopping etc. Can G.A.W. give you a lift etc. How is he?
... wow, another letter from Liverpool C.N.D! I've applied for
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more
letters but that, I now realize, means very little so don't expect another
for a week. I don't know if we are going to court in the [crowd?] tomorrow
or not — seemingly the simple eviction (which seems 59 of us) can be
heard in our absence, I hope not, I fancy a day out. In the same letter Carole
asks Kevin to tell Bridget that she will write if she can. Carole was already
falling in love with Bridget, to whom she had sent a rose in the witness box
during the trial. Kevin to Carole: 22 February 1983 I send my love to you
for all the days we are apart and trust that we will enjoy our days together
despite the uncertainty of life. I know that your path is marking itself out,
and whatever you do I will be with you in spirit if not always in body! I
am ordering a rainbow for your return, and the riverbank will be at peace
once more when you are home. If you're only here for a short time, if you
have to go on your journeys soon, we will make the time that [much] more precious.
The coffee in David Morgan's is piping hot — I had one this morning
& drank to you & your sisters — and we'll be sharing one soon.
Kevin accompanies this with a drawing of Ant thinking smilingly of Bee who
is flying back from a peace/women's sign. Around that day Carole wrote to
him and the children: Darlings — I laughed & laughed at your letters
& drawings—Ru what a poet, Al what an artist; who could ask for
more?! I can't begin to tell you what a difference it makes, you are the very
best of chaps. I look forward to seeing you tremendously. I hear [the School
of Oriental and Asian Studies] is asking if Ru will accept a `B' or a `C'
off them! Consider it carefully Ru, I think you should ask them to put a bit
more effort into it, say you may accept them with 3 `A's — don't go
throwing yourself away. Well done — seriously, they must have been very
impressed. What a surprise to see such a young & bouncing striped toad
in the prison today (did he get in/out in a laundry basket dressed as a washerwoman's
daughter?) How jolly of you to hop along. I expect by the time this reaches
you, Ru, your interview will be over but good luck anyhow.... Losing your
freedom, even for a short time makes sounds & smells & the countryside
& friends (especially you two) so precious, & after all that's why
we're here. Keep the world safe for me! We have to make it good for everybody....
Sorry I couldn't write to you both individually but getting a letter & envelope is like purchas- ing New Mexico! But I do think of you all the time
& your exquisitely
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silly
letters make me warm all over (or is it the central heating?). Keep an eye
on each other, keep a special eye on little Al' at school our Ru, at the moment.
I love you both lots & lots & will soon be home — what a mindless,
semi literate letter this is — ah well. In the early hours of 25 February,
six women from the campaign climbed into Holloway and onto its roof to protest
the conditions of women prisoners (Roseneil, 2000: 223). Harwood heard them
inside and wrote the following: Carole, prison diary: 25 February 1983 (?)
The world is turned upside down! Here we are begging for bread & water
instead of tea & cakes while our brave sisters break into the prison!
I can hear the women outside — wow what a noise. The authorities are
very grumpy — Police, in groups of 4! Patrolling the grounds & Nell
chewing on her raw carrot. God I'm starving. Tomorrow's Saturday — I
can't believe its so short a time to go now. Finished `Wives & Daughters',
an endearing book, you live in it in a curious way but curiously unexcit-
ing. Kevin, Al & Nan came to see me today — what fun. Albert looked
very Dennis the Menace, he & Kevin have gone off to sub aqua & Mum
is coming back in the morning with G.A.W. & Ru; I feel much visited — its extremely pleasant. This prison is going to be a quieter place after next
Tuesday. Skeeter & I have been swapping fantasies about natural yoghurt
& nuts — its getting really out of perspective!! A letter from [her
first husband] Mark. I felt very curious. At the same time I had a letter
from the camp saying Patriarchy was dying — it dies hard all the same.
I've come a long way since Mark & there's no going back. I hope I, it,
us is what Kevin wants — I must be a very different woman from the one
he met in 1976. So many complexities. Nell's singing `Take the Toys from the
Boys' out the window — the whole of Islington seems to be alive with
music — massed choirs outside the gates. Now all the prisoners, not
just the Greenham women, are singing. We are on our way, hand in hand women
everywhere. This unsent `diary', which seems to end with an address neither
to her family nor to herself but to a posterity that will recognize `Greenham
women' as the important subject, suggests what could not go into the cheery
letters: it seems symbolic that she wrote it on the back of a letter from
Kevin. The final exchange of letters is equally ambiguous about what will
happen when Carole returns home, even as it reminds us how vital organized
letter writing is to political campaigns for keeping up morale: Kevin to Carole:
26 (?) February 1983
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It
will be so good to be together once more, and breathe the air of freedom.
And won't we have a jolly time then, and you can do whatever you want with
no restrictions.... some quiet times together and some gentleness & softness
for my darling Bee, my only love. We've come so far together my sweetheart
and we've a long, long way to go yet, together. I guess the days pass slowly
for you; I wish I could speed them for you, but letters don't last long do
they? Still, we can share something, although it's only small. A phone would
be a handy thing, would they put one in for you? I've been a reconstructed
Ant & paid all the bills & written all the letters & tidied up.
It keeps me occupied, I do miss you my little Scottish cauliflower. I think
of you hard at 7 p.m. each night and hope a little of it gets through to you.
We really must perfect this thought transference lark, it'd be so useful!
... Emma rang, I dissuaded her from spending all her cash on the train, I
hope that's the right thing? She has kept in touch and I think the day in
court had quite an effect upon her. She seems strong in her resolve. We haven't
actually seen her, they are still decorating! ... I've been writing the diary
which may fill in some blurred outlines for you, tho' I think you know most
of what's gone on. I hope your spirit is still strong, and you're winning
through. Carole to children: 27/28 February 1983 I was desperately sorry not
to have seen Ru on Saturday. I had a mess- age in from the peace camp that
a young man called Ru was without; as opposed to within, or rather without
his mum. Dear soul, how dreadful, G.A.W. should have waited but I don't think
he knew the form — not being a regular visitor at H.M.P. I imagine we
will all feel very disorientated when we get out — in order to survive
you adapt & having adapted the old norm has to be re-found. I'm not explaining
it very well. In many ways it's been unbe- lievably emotionally harrowing
but so informative, so instructive — we are all feeling very strong
& determined, there is so much injustice. I had an outraged letter from
David Fernbach saying he's writing to the Guardian & is going to quote
something I'd said about `the state apparatus is even now aimed at our foreheads'.
I don't, offhand, remember saying it, it's not something that trips off one's
tongue but I daresay they talk of nought else at Heretic Books! But it was
a lovely letter & I was most touched. By the way do thank Gill Boden for
the enormous bouquet of flowers — how good people are. Lots more letters
including one from Charlie Swain & Cardiff Trades Council which is
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absolutely
hilarious — how we (the women of Greenham) show that Britain is still
great! We'll lead mankind; are fighters for peace etc. Also a very curious
letter from Sue Maudlin — Polly sends her love to Albert. How are you
Joeys — I can't draw pictures etc as I've already had one of my letters
last week returned for re-writing so I send you lots of sun- shine, rainbows,
flowers, moons & stars & everything jolly. Dear things I miss & miss you but it really isn't long to go now.... Having been reprimanded for
what I wrote in a letter a few days ago I feel more than usually inhibited
& will save all the really significant things I have to tell you till
when I get out. Until then my Five Darlings (you are feeding the canary aren't
you?!) plus other resident creatures take care of each other.... My love to
you all — Al, Ru, Em, Kevin, Bridget, G.A.W., Nan, Gill & Co, everyone
... Chin up Chaps.... All my love Mum, Carole55 * * * In Angela Banner's children's
books, Ant and Bee are two gentle- manly insects who live in a teacup together,
but venture out to have educational adventures that enable learning the names
of countries, colours and how to spell. Ant carries a cane and wears a bowlerhat.
He has a playful nature, occasionally getting into trouble. The prac- tical-minded
Bee, with moustache, umbrella and floppy hat, keeps Ant from getting too carried
away. In the letters, these innocent crea- tures appear a light-hearted way
to avoid overt gender roles in a het- erosexual context, as well as to explore
changes at a distance: it is notable that they are described in the third
person. As Ant, Little- wood casts himself as soft and excitable to Harwood's
principled strength. His potentially phallic mandible here becomes a comically
diminished weapon, ironically polished after his successful defence of his
`new masculinity' in the face of the sexist Una-L.M. In one let- ter, praising
Carole's `magnificent' contribution to a book on peace, he teases `I had to
stiffen my mandibles in order not to cry & put the Rayburn out'.6 In another
letter, `Ant' is accompanied by a smaller ant representing 12-year-old Albert,
scurrying to catch a train to Lon- don to visit Bee. The childlike world of
`Ant' and `Bee' present him as loving, emotional and earthbound in relation
to his magisterial, yet smiling and round airborne partner. But as Ant, Littlewood
signals that Carole/Bee is on a journey away from him. Having just heard her
sentencing on the news, he does not assume that his partner will come straight
home from prison, writing, `In your own time, Bee, all in your own time'.
Another letter includes a drawing of Bee that he explains is `on a silo
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on
the far horizon', alluding to the trespassing dance on the silos for which
Harwood was arrested, and adds: `I send my love to you for all the days we
are apart and trust that we will enjoy our days together despite the uncertainty
of life. I know that your path is marking itself out, and whatever you do
I will be with you in spirit if not always in body!'7 This is illustrated
by Ant thinking smilingly of Bee flying back from a peace/women's sign. He
continues: `I am ordering a rainbow for your return, and the riverbank will
be at peace once more when you are home. If you're only here for a short time,
if you have to go on your journeys soon, we will make the time that more pre-
cious [sic]'. What the letters do not say overtly but hint at is that Carole
was beginning a new relationship with Bridget Evans, who was getting deeply
involved with Greenham against her employers' wishes and who also had an ongoing
relationship with another woman. Both Carole and Kevin mention Bridget frequently
in their letters, Kevin even visiting Bridget's parents' home with her after
a mutual visit to Carole in prison, and at one point Carole asks Kevin if
Bridget has `unwittingly babysat an Ant'? To respect requests for privacy,
Bridget's version of events and her correspondence with Carole are not part
of this paper. But it can be acknowledged that Bridget and Carole's passion
was clearly beginning to press at Carole's relationship with Kevin in a way
that Carole's open relationship with G.A.W. had not, despite the fact that
Bridget often visited the family home. Eventually Carole and Bridget broke
up, though for more than a year Carole maintained Bridget and Kevin in an
open relationship alongside the bemused G.A.W., and Carole was never to return
to an exclusively heterosexual lifestyle. Letters have always been unsteadily
poised between censorship and confession — classically rhetorical in
their ability to persuade or even deceive, yet also celebrated for their spontaneity
and innocence of aesthetic intention. Partly this is because they make plain
the particu- larities of the writer—reader relationship that at some
level underlies all writing and indeed, speech genres too; the fact that all
meaning fluctuates according to who interprets it, and when, and where. But
though letters are flamboyantly explicit about the relationships that sustain
them, they are more than simply substitutes for speech. Part of what defines
their ambiguous authority is precisely that they dra- matize feelings towards
writing itself — its abstraction, its tones, even simply, many people's
sense that they cannot be articulate on paper. For that reason, the most typical
epistolary themes are mediation, confidence and reading (Altman, 1982; Gilroy
and Verhoeven, 2000: 8), that is, writing about writing and interpretation
itself. The
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consequence
is that `the reader is always obliged to seek to measure the sincerity of
the letter' (Porter, 1986: 4): truth in letters involves an even more slippery
and particular pact than in diaries or autobio- graphies. In the context of
the second-wave women's movement, the issue of sincerity in personal letters
was especially marked as a genre histori- cally associated with both feminine
art (though this has often been expressed as women's `natural' spontaneity)
and women's labour (Jolly, 2002). In novels, poems and essays, the epistle
was adapted to foreground the politics of communication between women and
men. The `Three Marias' New Portuguese letters, censored on publi- cation
by the Portuguese government ostensibly for its sexually explicit accounts
of women's (heterosexual) relationships, was a high profile example of an
epistolary manifesto that refused old patterns of waiting woman and travelling
man and the breakdown in com- munication that ensued (Barreno et al., 1975).
Others, such as Kathy Acker's Great expectations (Acker, 1983), Marge Piercy's
Braided lives (Piercy, 1983: 149, 260—261) and Ann Oakley's Taking it
like a woman (Oakley, 1984), were more ambivalent in their addresses to men.
Oakley's address to a lover, published under the tongue- in-cheek title `A
French letter', for instance, painfully admits her desire and fear of his
rejection alongside awareness of men's sexual power and abuse. Juxtaposing
frank descriptions of their love- making with details of her everyday domestic
mess, she seems to break down false oppositions of mothers and lovers. But
the title's punning reference to a condom suggests that there is still the
need for `protection', whether of the woman who may be hurt by a man for whom
she cares too much, or of the man who does not really want to hear about either
her everyday life or her desire. Although the letter-condom makes their sex
`safe', it also signifies what still sepa- rates them even in their intimacy.
It is unsurprising therefore, that the hope for new honesty in rela- tionships
between women and men was more usually displaced by the discovery and celebration
of women's relationships with each other, emblematic in the rise of an epistolary
motif of women as each other's confidantes. Three published at the same time
as the Harwood-Littlewood correspondence demonstrate this theme: Alice Walker's
The color purple (Walker, 1982), Gillian Hanscombe's Between friends (Hanscombe,
1982) and even the deliberately main- stream Jill Tweedie's Letters from a
fainthearted feminist (Tweedie, 1982; 1983), in which the fainthearted feminist
writes to her radical separatist friend rather than sorting out a better relationship
with her sexist husband. (Interestingly, the protest at Greenham is the
159
one
political protest that both the faint-hearted and the radical feminist can
agree upon.) The traditional division of labour and cultures of sentimental
friendship that produced correspondence between women is reworked as a romantic
identification between political allies. Perhaps most pertinent to the question
of sincerity in feminist let- ters is the one novel that came out of Greenham,
Mud, by Nicky Edwards who lived there through 1983. This is a novel with a
fasci- nation for the problem of what letters do not say. The plot concerns
a somewhat jaded former peace camper who is writing a play about First World
War soldiers in order to understand `men's motives' for going to war. Befriending
a First World War widow, Ada, she gets to read Ada's letters from her husband
John from the front in 1916: I saw what Ada meant about him not telling her
anything. The longer he was out, the less informative his letters were. After
a year, they were almost straight formula notes, with very little of himself
coming through, as if he was in another world from which he could not make
the mental effort to drag himself back and would not drag her into. He thought
he was trying to protect her from distress, but it seemed all of a piece with
him not being able to bear hearing a bird singing in the one blasted tree
left standing in their hundred square yards of nothingness. No part of him
could be spared for another life. So he talked about the weather and grumbled
about the food and kept the woman he used to talk to `not like most blokes
would' at arms' length, for fear that she would make him realise that not
all the world was a muddy ditch in the middle of a war.... I felt angry for
her sake, as I put the last of the say-nothing, don't-risk-a-feeling letters
down. What a real man. How bloody British. `There, there, dear, don't you
worry about me. I'm fine.' Of course he wasn't. Making endurance possible,
by putting whatever unmanly feelings made him able to talk to her aside for
the duration. Making killing possible. And Ada reading these letters all down
the years, trying to wring out some scraps of meaning or caring that he hadn't
been able to put in, for fear that he'd see the emperor's new uniform for
what it was. (Edwards, 1986: 54—55) Here military censorship is overdetermined
by the everyday self-cen- sorship of British masculinity in the misguided
name of `protecting' women. In contrast, Carole and Kevin's correspondence
cheeringly protests against both the appalling scene of war and its investment
in an ideology of gender that represses both men and women, further demonstrated
by Carole's commitment to talking to the soldiers at the camp (Roseneil, 2000:
242). But Edwards' novel is equally
160
symptomatic
of the new kind of communicative difficulties that arose from feminist anti-militarist
protest. For while Mud protests the sep- aration of men from women in war,
there is an ironic parallel between life at the peace camp and in the trenches,
where the intense, danger- ous and primitive conditions as well as the women-only
community counter the desire to communicate to those `outside'. Although Edwards'
protagonist criticizes the First World War soldier John's in- ane letters
home to his wife, she too finds that she is unable to write a word about her
experiences when she is at Greenham — even to her woman lover, with
whom she eventually breaks up. Life at the all- women camp is so dramatic,
immediate, all-encompassing, there is an almost traumatic adjustment period
on return to what feels like a `civilian' life of heteronormativity. Indeed,
Edwards conveys no confidence in the immediate future for communication between
men and women. While she champions the need for men to stop cen- soring their
feelings and for heterosexual couples to break down their barriers, the narrator
herself prefers to be separatist. Separatism of course was a very real element
of Greenham's appeal. In the novel, the narrator tries to explain to herself
as much as to the baffled and critical outsiders why she went as precisely
the urgent need to fo- cus on women not men: And there I fit, like so many
other women. Turned up and clicked into place as though held by strong magnets.
Finding a real women's space for the first time, after years of polite feminism,
always prey to co-op- tion in the let's-not-be-too-threatening-here world
of giving them credit, they are trying, the poor lambs, mixed politics. Not
having to compromise. Being able to make a virtue of rejecting men, instead
of hiding or disguising it.... I should be writing about [Ada], rid myself
of this tiresome interest in why men do the stupid things they do. Who cares?
Let them go off and slaughter each other. We can look after ourselves. Women
treat each other as important. No time to lose. (Edwards, 1986: 112-13) Sasha
Roseneil's sociological study of Greenham shows that the decision for the
camp to be women-only and the ensuing flowering of lesbian relationships there
were crucial to its magic for the protes- tors and arguably for the camp's
political efficacy too, at least in terms of its feminist aims. As she put
it: Greenham was an arena in which [the hegemonic construction of] `woman'
was deconstructed and rejected, and alternative notions of `woman' were formed.
The woman of Greenham was different in many respects from the woman of patriarchal
creation. She was a woman
161
who
transgressed boundaries between the private and public spheres, she made her
home in public, in the full glare of the world's media, under the surveillance
of the state. She put herself and other women first, acting according to her
conscience, taking responsibility for her own actions. She dressed according
to a different aesthetic, in warm, comfortable clothing, removing many of
the markers of femininity, but often adorning her body in ways which celebrated
her independence of fashion. She was confident and assertive in the face of
authority, rejecting its power to control her behaviour, testing it and taunting
it. She developed close friendships and often sexual relationships with other
women. This woman was stepping outside many of the restric- tions of patriarchy.
(Roseneil, 1995: 156) The gauge for such a transformation was precisely that
it was women like Carole, who came as mothers protesting on behalf of children
rather than explicitly feminist reasons, who underwent the greatest politicization
towards feminism and personal change (Roseneil, 1995: 157). In her interviews
with 35 protestors Roseneil showed that more than half who had identified
as heterosexual when they first went to Greenham became sexually involved
with women (Roseneil, 1995: 158). In interview with Roseneil, Carole herself
emphasized this as an impact even greater than the anti-militarist message:
One of the things that I feel personally is that it brought the possibility
of a lesbian lifestyle to the surface for women ... from all backgrounds.
It's put `lesbian' back into the vocabulary. They might have been burly, and
they might have been muddy, and they might have been grubby, but ... people
didn't say they're a gang of well-meaning housewives. They said that they're
a gang of dykes, and on balance they were right. I think that's been very
important. And the idea that women can take control of their own lives, and
take control of other people's lives, and can say to politicians, we're not
going to have this sort of shit. (Roseneil, 2000: 316-17) In this context,
Carole's relationship with Bridget seems less a symptom or a cause than a
necessary passion, in some ways parallel to Bridget's decision to join the
campaign despite the warnings of her employers. For many women at Greenham
such changes were threat- ening to male husbands and partners (Roseneil, 1995:
150-51). Carole's decision to incorporate a lesbian relationship into an already
non-monogamous household and to balance mothering with the needs of two lovers
was perhaps unusual, but presented its own
162
dilemmas.
The fact that Carole's letters to Kevin tell us nothing of this, and that
Kevin's to Carole tell us only of his hopes and jokes as a reconstructed househusband
is significant. When Carole again leaves the family in November 1983 for as
one of five British women who took the United States government to court as
a last ditch strat- egy to prevent the deployment of cruise missiles, her
journal is filled with passionate identification with Greenham's politics
and her worry about leaving her children, leaving little clue as to the ever
more complex sexual relationships that sustained her.8 And while Kevin continued
to write morale-boosting letters from Ant to a now `superwoman' Bee, they
said nothing of his own much more ser- ious difficulties and infidelities
burgeoning at home. * * * In these circumstances, the letters of peace campaigners
here are ironically like those of military couples, conditioned by their need
to preserve relationships and for that same reason, both reassuring and deceptive.
It seemed and, to an extent, was genuinely physically dangerous to protest
at Greenham: as Kevin remembers, `it sounds melodramatic but you didn't know
if people were going to come back' (Littlewood, 2001b). But at stake, too,
was a permanent change in women and men's personal relationships. At one end
of the spec- trum, women confessed to continuing needs and desires for men,
finding it difficult to reconcile this with their politics. But at the other
end of the spectrum, as for Harwood, the discovery of feminist com- munity
and lesbian relationships meant that changes were happening that could not
be expressed in writing at all, indeed that perhaps obviated the need to communicate
with men. While letter writing between lesbian lovers during this period was
exceptionally rich and confident, even as it often thrashed out puzzles of
difference or infidelity (Turner and Tornatore, 1996), correspondence between
feminist heterosexual lovers or partners was faced with the potential asymmetry
of men and women's needs, as women needed to explore their identities as women
without men, while men needed to come to terms with new and more equal relationships
with women. Although some men tried to find a parallel interest in gender,
prompting some infamous men's groups, the tactful `editing' I have outlined
in my reading of Littlewood and Harwood's correspondence is probably more
representative of communication at the time. David Morgan's Discovering men,
an early academic summary of what men's groups had been tentatively exploring
through the 1980s, suggests the prob- lem that this poses for the need to
analyse, and ultimately to change
163
gender
`interactionally'. Thinking about `the importance of the audi- ence for studies
of men and masculinity and the conditions of their productions', he suggests
that: While there may be times which are appropriate for all-men groups to
discuss and share such issues, more and more of the discussions must take
place in mixed audiences. And this also means that men, as well as exploring
their own practices, should also continue to work for change in the institutions
in which they work so that their contexts of discovery may also be truly mixed.
(Morgan, 1992: 199) Letters, however, sometimes written precisely because
of the emotional distance opening up in a relationship, underline Morgan's
point that if men cannot be separatist, women may often have to be. This invites
the usual conundrum of how to find women who are going to be willing to maintain
political as well as sexual conversation with men, for the more politicized — and perhaps, ironically — the more lesbian that women become, the less
interested they may be in doing this. This is a conundrum much less talked
about these days. Times have changed dramatically since the early 1980s and
even since 1990 when David Morgan's book came out. The evolution of queer
politics, in which strategic alliances between women, men or transgendered
people who identify as sexual/gender dissidents, is perhaps a logical response
to the separatism of lesbian feminism, just as lesbian feminism was a necessary
response to the male-centred terms of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.
The shape of a correspon- dence like Harwood and Littlewood's testifies to
the fact that separ- atism, like censorship, was ultimately a fictional affair
in both senses. On one hand, Littlewood's phallic-less Ant and Bee and joky
cheers for a women-led peace protest and on the other hand, Harwood's motherliness
and light allusions to her other lovers, are certainly creative responses
to the very complex way that lesbian feminism entered a heterosexual marriage
as well as to the immediate exigencies of political imprisonment. But as love
letters and family letters they tell of the queer sensibility that was already
there in 1970s non- monogamy and even Greenham's lesbian feminism, as much
as a story of a woman with an irrepressible taste for adventure and a man
of libertarian ideals. Carole's future was not with Bridget any more than
with Kevin. Carole and Bridget separated after a year of combining an open
relationship with Kevin, at which point Carole and Kevin became
164
involved
in a three-way relationship with another woman. These days Carole writes poetry
and has `ten horses, one pig, eight piglets, geese' and `two lovers': a woman
with whom she has been involved for nine years and a horseman from a gypsy
background (Harwood, 2003a; 2003b). Kevin, still a historian and political
singer-songwriter, is about to move North with his partner (Littlewood, 2003).
Feminism and anti-militarism are still important for Carole: she was involved
in a woman's direct action against the US invasion of Iraq this year. Kevin,
meanwhile, looks back to the early 1980s with fondness as an `incredibly creative
time of action', though muses that `twenty years seems a long time in politics,
let alone love' (Littlewood, 2003): We had the ideals — and I still
believe in what I wrote/thought/did, and still think of myself as a socialist,
communist, whatever — liber- tarian? But it all seemed to break up on
`the personal' — love, jealousy, possession, obsession — all those
damned bourgeois notions, don't y'know! But we still think it might just work,
one more time. (Littlewood, 2001a) Letters between lovers, even and perhaps
especially when they idea- lize or omit, inevitably confirm the subsequent
evolution within fem- inist thinking of a sense that desire was a hole in
the political programme. Must we conclude then, with Robin Morgan, that `love'
must always outstrip theory in its personal joys and madnesses? This would
be unjust to all the relationships in this story that expressed so eloquently
the experimental ideals of their time. As perhaps precisely `theoretical'
as well as literal dialogues, letters confirm that new rela- tionships were
an essential source as well as effect of the women's movement and that writing
had a distinctive role in their mediation. Acknowledgements I would like to
thank Carole Harwood and Kevin Littlewood for their very generous support
for the writing of this paper as well as permission to cite their letters:
their amusement is still going strong. I would also like to thank Jane Hargreaves
for her wonderful wel- come to the Bristol Feminist Archive.
NOTES
1 Carole Harwood has requested
that her real name be used and I have respected her wishes. Kevin Littlewood
has also given permission for his real name to be used. However, as I have
not been able to speak to the lovers or their descendents personally, I have
disguised their identities. Carole's lover from 165
Cardiff is referred
to as G.A.W. Her lover from Greenham is referred to as Bridget Evans, the
name used by many Greenham women to protect their identity. Her first husband
is referred to as Mark. Clearly, the identities of all persons discussed
here are ultimately traceable since the letters are in a public archive,
but I have felt this to be the most ethical policy. I would be pleased to
hear from any persons who have further questions or interests regarding this
matter.
2 Harwood's memory of the
action is given in Roseneil, S. (2000: 208—10).
3 I have indicated where
the dating of letters is uncertain.
4 All the letters cited or
discussed are held in the Feminist Archive (South), in Bristol. I have reproduced
them in the form they were written, excluding ellipses and a provisional
attempt to date them where they are undated.
5 Harwood gives a public
account of her stay in Holloway in Hopkins, S. and Harford, B. (1984: 106—11).
6 This was probably written
on Tuesday, 22 February.
7 Letter dated as received
24 February 1983.
8 The diary is held in the
Feminist Archive (South), in Bristol.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR MARGARETTA JOLLY is a lecturer in twentieth century literature
and culture in the School of English, University of Exeter. She is the edi-
tor of The Encyclopedia of Life Writing (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001) and Dear
Laughing Motorbyke: Letters from Women Welders of the Second World War (Scarlet,
1997). She is currently researching on letter-writing in the contemporary
women's movement.