It was Gay Liberation and the Women's Liberation Movement that first got me writing. At last I had something to say, and in the 1970s there was an array of alternative and 'underground' magazines in which to write and get the message across. Polemical and political writing was great, an essential part of campaigning; I loved it. My first ever published article appeared in Come Together, the mag. of the shortlived bugt explosive Gay Liberation Front. Later I was part of the editorial group of a leftwing feminist magazine, Red Rag (as in red rag to a bull). We not only wrote and designed it; we also typed up the copy on a golfball machine and pasted it up ourselves (this was just before computers cam on stream). We did everything except the final printing.

My first book, Women and the Welfare State, published in 1977, had begun as a special Red Rag pamphlet. It was a polemic that revealed the sexism of the British welfare state, and came out of my experience of being a social worker. In a way it was my revenge on social work, which I never really enjoyed! Thirty years later, my attitude towards the postwar welfare state has softened. As we've seen it dismantled and messed up by Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite governments, I've come to realise how incredibly hard it must have been to push through the NHS and the new education system in the 1940s.

Society hasn't altogether changed in the ways feminists hoped in the early seventies, but women's lives have changed enormously. It's difficult to believe now that in 1970 if a group of women unaccompanied by men entered a pub, they were likely to be ejected forthwith; and there was a big demonstration at the beginning of the movement in the Marble Arch and Park Lane area of central London where no woman was allowed in a burger bar on her own in case she was a prostitute! The prevailing idea was that a woman on her own, lingering about in public space was a 'public woman' or woman of the streets.

I've lived almost all my life in London and can't imagine living anywhere but in a big city. I wrote The Sphinx in the City (1993) as a kind of celebration of city life, arguing that in the last two hundred years or so women have had better life chances in cities than in rural life, which has always been more conservative.

Related Publications
1977 Women and the Welfare State London: Tavistock
1977 'Women in the Community', in Mayo, M ed., Women in the Community, London: Routledge.
1980 Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britian, 1945-1968, London: Tavistock (shortlisted for Fawcett Prize)
1980 'Feminism and Social Work', in Bailey, R & Brake, M, eds., Radical Social Work and Practice, London: Edward Arnold.
1980 'Beyond the Ghetto: Thoughts on Beyond the Fragments', Feminist Review, 4.
1981 'Women, the Community and the Family', in Walker, A,ed., Community Care, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
1981, 'Welfare in the Eighties' in Bridges, G & Brunt, R eds., Silver Linings: Strategies for the Eighties, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
1981 'Psychoanalysis: Psychic Law and Order', Feminist Review, 8.
1982 What is to be done about Violence Towards Women? Harmondsworth: Penguin
1983 Mirror Writing, London: Virago
1984 + Angela Weir, 'The British Women's Movement', New Left Review,149.
1987 'Women and Thatcherism: After Seven Years', in Miliband, R ed., Socialist Register London: Merlin Press.
1992 co-editor with Gillian Rogerson Pornography and Feminism: The Case Against Censorship, London: Lawrence and Wishart
1992 'The Greyhound Bus Station in the Evolution of Women's Popular Culture: Lesbian Popular Fiction in the 1950s' in Munt, S., ed., Being There: New Feminist Criticism, Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
1992 The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women, London: Virago & Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press (shortlisted for Manchester Oddfellows Non Fiction Award)
1997 'Nostalgia and the City', in Westwood, S & Williams, J, eds., Imagining Cities, London: Routledge.
1998. 'The Unbearable Lightness of Diana' in Merck, M, ed., After Diana, London Verso.

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