1 The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement

It started with tomatoes. On 13 September 1968, at the 23rd National Assembly of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (German Socialist Student Association or SDS), the new West German women’s movement was born after activist Helke Sander gave a lecture on women in the SDS and the New Left. A founding member of the Berlin Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for the Liberation of Women), Sander took the SDS to task for failing to engage with women’s issues. ‘We will no longer be satisfied that women are occasionally permitted to say a few words, that you, because you are good anti-authoritarians, listen to, only to then return to the agenda’, Sander began. In particular, she criticised the SDS for maintaining the long-standing distinction between the public sphere of politics and the supposedly ‘apolitical’ private sphere in their work. In doing so, she argued that ‘the specific relationship of exploitation, under which women live, is suppressed, ensuring that men need not give up their old identity granted through patriarchy.’ Although the SDS, as one of the major organisations of the West German student movement, saw itself as a radical alternative to the traditional vestiges of political power, Sander stated forthrightly that by upholding such patriarchal norms and failing to see the private sphere as a site of politics, the SDS was both a ‘mirror for broader social relations’ and ‘no different from the unions and political parties’.¹ Moreover, she concluded by saying that if the SDS failed to address her claims, they would reveal themselves to be ‘nothing more than a puffed-up, counter-revolutionary ball of dough’.²

When Sander’s speech ended, the meeting moved on to other matters–just as she had predicted. The SDS’ blatant failure to examine their own politics and take women’s inequality seriously angered fellow Berlin activist Sigrid Rüger. Taking to her feet, she began throwing tomatoes at the stage, yelling ‘Comrade Krahl [Hans-Jürgen Krahl, an SDS leader], you are objectively a counter-revolutionary and an agent of the class-enemy to boot!’³ Sitting at the intersection of socialist, 1968 activism and the formation of a feminist consciousness, the significance of the Tomatenwurf (literally ‘tomato throw’) within the history of West German feminism is contested.⁴ Although some scholars see it as the inaugural act of the New Women’s Movement in West Germany, others have questioned this teleological interpretation, arguing instead that class oppression was the dominant paradigm at this time.⁵ However defined, as SDS member and feminist activist Frigga Haug reflected in 1986, ‘by accusing male comrades, friends, brothers, fathers, in short the entire sex, and exposing them as the practical beneficiaries and agents of day-to-day oppression, women gave a new shape and direction to political struggle.’⁶ Indeed, by criticising the demarcation of the public from the private, Sander underscored the very message that would dominate the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s: that the personal is political.

However, these actions and critiques also provoked widespread angst. By revealing fundamental inequalities and power structures, by accusing both men and the state of being complicit in these structures, and by challenging longstanding gender roles, feminism (and feminists) proved to be a destabilising force in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These issues struck at the very heart of the post-war West German state, built as it was on the reinscription of patriarchal gender norms and the idealisation of the male breadwinner/female homemaker family. But they also went much deeper. Since the 19th century, patriarchy had been woven into the very foundation of the German state, as a sexual-moral order tied German liberalism to patriarchal gender roles.⁷ In this way, by contesting patriarchy, feminists also challenged much else, sparking myriad popular anxieties and fears: over the status of the family, the role of women and men and even over the role of the state in the private lives of West Germans.

These anxieties surrounding feminism in the late 1960s indelibly shaped domestic violence activism in Berlin from the mid-1970s onwards. The years following the SDS conference in September 1968 to the start of the women’s shelter movement in late 1974 were formative for domestic violence work. This period not only moulded feminist approaches to domestic and gender-based violence, but it solidified an awareness among activists that in order to legitimise the Berlin shelter project, they had to navigate these popular fears of feminism. As such, this chapter examines the formation and politics of the New Women’s Movement in West Germany, from its emergence out of 1968 and the student movement, to the rise of feminist domestic violence activism in the mid-1970s. It focuses particularly on the formative example of reproductive rights activism and explores both how feminists sought to provoke and challenge the status quo and how the public, especially the media, responded to their critiques.⁸ While there are already several studies examining media responses to women activists that show how they ridiculed, demonised and even pathologised feminism and women’s emancipation, this chapter asks what this meant for later feminist projects like the women’s shelter campaign. It argues that these anxieties, especially those surrounding the perceived gender transgressions of women activists and the connection between feminism and terrorism, set the stage for the institutionalisation of domestic violence activism.

The New Women’s Movement in West Germany emerged both out of and in response to the student movement of the late 1960s. Like many other countries at this time, demographic, political and socio-economic changes throughout the post-war era in West Germany ignited generational rebellion.⁹ Against the backdrop of the unprecedented growth of the Wirtschaftswunder, the baby boom and a corresponding increase in the number of students in higher education, not to mention successive conservative, Christian Democratic (CDU) governments since 1949, the ground was ripe for change in the 1960s. At this time, a broad coalition of students, activists, trade unionists, liberals and socialists came together to protest against university over-crowding, the failures of de-Nazification and democratisation and the lingering presence of authoritarianism, fascism and imperialism in West Germany as well as globally.¹⁰ They took part in radical protests and demonstrations and generally attempted to enact their anti-authoritarian, collectivist politics in their everyday lives, forming communes and spaces where they could discuss and live out their political ideals.¹¹

The SDS was a particularly important organisation within the broader student movement.¹² Formed in 1946, the SDS was originally closely tied to the West German SPD.¹³ However, at a time of strong anti-communism, the SDS’ increasingly socialist, New Left orientation concerned the Social Democrats. Not only had the Communist Party been banned in West Germany in 1956, but the 1959 Godesberg Program eliminated the SPD’s lingering Marxist policies in favour of refashioning itself as a general party for the political left. Wanting to distance itself from the strongly ideological student organisation and with growing tensions between the two groups over West German rearmament, the SPD separated from the SDS in November 1961.

Although popular concerns over the state of West German democracy had been mounting throughout the Adenauer era, it was the formation of the grand coalition between the CDU and SPD in 1966 that brought the SDS to prominence.¹⁴ The CDU had held the Chancellorship since its inception in 1949, mostly in coalition with the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP). But when the FDP withdrew their support in 1966, CDU-leader Kurt-Georg Kiesinger turned to Willy Brandt of the SPD to form a government. As the two largest political parties in the Federal Republic, this grand coalition held 90 per cent of the seats in the Bundestag. This not only rendered the official opposition powerless, but laid the path for the seamless introduction of the Notstandsgesetze or Emergency Acts, a controversial piece of legislation that would give the state the ability to act extra-constitutionally and suspend civil liberties in the event of a crisis. Fearing what this meant for democracy, particularly in light of the abuses of emergency powers during the late Weimar and early Nazi eras, various left-wing political groups, including the SDS, formed an Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition or APO), offering a voice to students and the New Left in West Germany. The SDS quickly became a leading organisation within the APO. Drawing heavily on critical theorists and psychoanalysts such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, the SDS shaped the theoretical foundations of the student movement and coordinated collective action and protest across the country.¹⁵

From the very beginning, women were actively involved in both the SDS and the student movement more generally. They took part in political debates, protests and militant actions.¹⁶ Women also made up approximately 30 per cent of SDS members, a figure even more significant given that in 1965 only 28 per cent of all students entering higher education in the Federal Republic were women.¹⁷ Despite women’s engagement in radical politics and although the student movement espoused equality, liberation and the end of oppression and exploitation, the topographies of the West German student movement were distinctly gendered. This is clearly portrayed in the accounts of women student activists, who frequently highlight their misogynistic treatment within the ostensibly progressive Left.¹⁸ Certainly, whereas men’s activism was hailed by the movement as revolutionary and transformative, women were marginalised into supportive roles. As Silvia Bovenschen, a leading activist in Frankfurt, reveals, it was unquestionable that the ‘men held the big lectures and the women gave out the flyers.’¹⁹ Even when women attempted to make their voices and opinions heard in discussions and meetings, their male comrades patronised them and treated them with condescension. Activist and writer Inga Buhmann’s ‘main criticism’ of the men associated with the Frankfurt School and the SDS was that they ‘used their knowledge as an arrogant instrument of power, above all against women. It was often the case that if I asked a question, I received a sermon in response consisting of a continuous series of quotes from the five books that everyone had to read in order to be “in”.’²⁰

These attitudes also translated into a broad-ranging objectification of women in the student movement. Annemarie Tröger, an SDS member, remembers that women’s identity in the SDS was defined by the ‘status of their current comrade … their husband or boyfriend’, with women typically dismissed as merely ‘her comrade’s appendage’.²¹ Student activist and wife of famed student leader Rudi Dutschke, Gretchen Dutschke similarly describes men treating women in the movement like ‘accessories that could be put away at will’.²² Summing this up succinctly, Buhmann describes the roles available to women in the student movement:

Every new woman in the group either had to quickly catch herself an alpha male as a boyfriend or, presenting herself as emancipated, sleep her way through the various beds to find a bit of affection and recognition, or she had to play the strong woman, who could do without such things, that is, adjust as best she could to the men and surpass them in “male virtues of power”.²³

This objectification of women was further amplified by the sexual revolution, where access to women’s bodies was politicised as a form of socialist liberation from the bourgeois norms of heterosexual monogamy.²⁴ A popular anti-authoritarian saying at the time even maintained that ‘whoever sleeps with the same woman twice already belongs to the establishment.’²⁵ Unsurprisingly, as one woman reflected in 1975, ‘women were so clearly oppressed in the SDS that the idea [of separating] had been in the air a long time.’²⁶

These dismissive attitudes towards women activists also echoed in the mass media at the time.²⁷ Christina von Hodenberg has argued that in the 1960s women were typically represented as either ‘sex objects’ or ‘asexual mothers and housewives’ in the West German media and this was reflected in the depictions of women student activists.²⁸ On the one hand, the media objectified them as ‘beautiful embellishments’, ‘ladies in panther-fur’, or in the case of communard and model Uschi Obermaier, as the ‘“pin-up” of the revolution’.²⁹ On the other, they were mocked for any transgression of typical feminine norms. As Der Spiegel floridly described, women activists were ‘dangerous eyeshadow-accretions in combat boots and slovenly jeans, upper-class girls with floppy hats and pony-tails, nappy-tired young mothers’.³⁰ Much like their male comrades, the media were more concerned with women activists’ looks, bodies and sex lives, than with their ideas or political work.³¹

It was in this context that Sander came to speak at the SDS conference in September 1968. Despite her legendary role in that day’s events, her political engagement in women’s issues predated the Tomatenwurf. Trained as a filmmaker and actor, Sander returned to Berlin from Helsinki in 1965 after separating from her husband. Living as a single mother and studying at the Berlin Film and Television Academy, Sander became involved in the SDS and Leftist political causes.³² However, Sander–like many other women at this time–faced the problem of combining her political interests with her studies and full-time childcare responsibilities. This led her, along with other SDS women, to form the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen in late 1967, a group which aimed to address women’s isolation and representation within the Left. Much like Sander’s speech at the 1968 SDS conference, the Aktionsrat highlighted the discrepancy between socialist politics of equality and women’s lived experiences. As the group’s first flyer proclaimed ‘We were jealous, because equality was always harder for us than for our fellow male students, because for us the longing for inspired flights of fancy never quite fits and we were sad because in our individual attempts to combine study, love and children, we got bogged down or simply encrusted.’³³

Motherhood was a particular concern for the Aktionsrat. Women with children were especially vulnerable to the exigencies of the prevailing gender norms in West Germany. The Adenauer government had strongly promoted patriarchal family structures as a path to reasserting social stability in the wake of Nazi defeat and male breadwinner/female housewife families were still the norm in the late 1960s. This resulted in limited–and typically authoritarian–public childcare options, which meant that having a child signalled the end of many women’s careers.³⁴ For women involved in socialist politics at this time, this was a hard pill to swallow. Their participation in a movement aimed at questioning oppression only made them more aware of their own inequality. At the same time, having children also limited women’s ability to engage in revolutionary politics: with their male comrades unwilling to take on care responsibilities and children not allowed at demonstrations, mothers were forced out of the student movement. As the Aktionsrat argued, ‘Those women who have children realise quicker that the existing working conditions must simply be killed off–whether through the authoritarian state kindergartens, the musty atmosphere of the family, or the nervous haste of single women. We don’t need a scientific analysis to see clearly that this society must fundamentally change’.³⁵

A single mother herself, Sander understood this frustration first hand. Her handwritten leaflet first attempt. to find the right question articulated the experiences of many women in West Germany when it first circulated in February 1968.³⁶ ‘i got married, because i was pregnant and for economic reasons could not afford to remain unmarried’, explained Sander, continuing,

of course, it was natural that i would interrupt my studies, so that my husband could complete his. it was obvious, that the man must study, just as it is natural that the man must support his family, that the man must have an education and that the woman must take care of the children. this is simply how it is.³⁷

But this had left Sander feeling resentful, even ‘aggressive’. With echoes of Betty Friedan’s ‘the problem that has no name’, Sander believed she was not alone: ‘every thinking woman is emotionally fed up with this system, even if she can’t articulate it. she’s fed up because she senses that this system will never be ready to even slightly fulfil her desires.’³⁸

Sander was, in fact, not alone. From its beginnings around a kitchen table in December 1967, the Aktionsrat grew in numbers throughout 1968, eventually peaking at 500.³⁹ Hosting weekly meetings at the West Berlin SDS ‘Republican Club’, the Aktionsrat formed working groups on sexual health, women’s financial independence and children’s education. What they are most famous for, however, is their work to establish Kinderläden (childcare centres opened in empty West Berlin storefronts), which found strong support from women and the student movement. Offering an anti-authoritarian and collective alternative to state-run childcare, the Kinderläden not only gave mothers an opportunity to participate in politics and activist work, but also reflected the student movement’s broader critiques of the fascist tendencies present within capitalist West German society. As Sander argued, ‘the main goal’ of the Kinderläden was ‘to give children the strength to resist by supporting their emancipatory energies, so that they can address their own conflicts with the system by changing the world’.⁴⁰ By the time of Sander’s speech to the SDS, there were already five such childcare centres in Berlin with others opening up throughout West Germany in the wake of the Tomatenwurf.⁴¹

It was out of her work with the Aktionsrat that Sander came to speak at the SDS conference in September 1968. She was there to present the Council’s strategies and work in an attempt to build an alliance with the SDS. But more than this, Sander’s presentation was about engaging with the SDS and showing them what women could bring to the table. In her own words, Sander wanted to speak at the conference because ‘the most intelligently-informed public and arguments that we encountered at the big events on the Vietnam War, on the manipulation of the press, on the Greek Junta, on the Emergency Acts and on many other topics, would never be experienced anywhere else.’ At the same time, she also wanted to make it clear to her ‘esteemed comrades … that we [women] had the potential to raise new questions of shared interest and as a result also offered new capabilities’.⁴²

However, the response of the SDS–to simply move on with the agenda–sent a clear message to women. Reporting on the significance of the Tomatenwurf for the radical newspaper Konkret, then-journalist Ulrike Meinhof argued that unlike other student protest actions, the Tomatenwurf was not symbolic, but rather the final straw. ‘These Berlin women in Frankfurt no longer want to play along’, argued Meinhof. Moreover, ‘the consequence of Frankfurt can only be that more women examine their problems, organise themselves, work through their issues and learn to express themselves. And demand nothing more from their men, other than to be left alone in these matters and to wash their own tomato-stained shirts.’⁴³

In the aftermath of Sander’s speech and Rüger’s subsequent protest, women across the West German student movement began to organise. Alongside the Aktionsrat in Berlin, women organised Weiberräte. Often translated as witches’ or hags’ council, the name Weiberrat plays on an antiquated and pejorative term for woman or wife (Weib), combined with Rat (council), a word evoking the revolutionary councils formed in the aftermath of the First World War.⁴⁴ According to Silvia Bovenschen, much like the Aktionsrat, the first Weiberrat came together because women ‘had had enough of being treated like children by their fellow male students’.⁴⁵ By the time of the next SDS meeting in November 1968, there were already eight Weiberräte in the Federal Republic. It was at this SDS conference that the Frankfurt Weiberrat gained notoriety with their leaflet Statement of Accounts. In a short paragraph, the Weiberrat criticised the SDS for their treatment of women activists. ‘We’re not opening our mouths’, began the leaflet, ‘If we left them open, they’d be crammed with: petit-bourgeois dicks, the socialist pressure to fuck, socialist children, love … platitudes, potent socialist lechery … revolutionary groping … superficial socialist emancipation.’⁴⁶ After listing even more examples of misogyny within the socialist left, the leaflet proclaimed: ‘Liberate the socialist elites from their bourgeois dicks.’ Alongside this statement, the leaflet featured an illustration of a naked witch, reclining on a chaise-longue and holding a battle-axe in her right hand. Above her head, six penis trophies are mounted on the wall, each with a number corresponding to the name of a male SDS leader (see Figure 1.1). This image clearly played upon the concept of the group as a council of witches or crones, as well as evoking the collective power of women and the threat that they posed to men. Indeed, the figure of the witch would become a prominent symbol of women’s strength as the women’s movement developed in West Germany.

Although the activism of both the Frankfurt Weiberrat and the Berlin Aktionsrat have clear links to feminism, for most of the late 1960s, women’s activism in West Germany was firmly embedded within socialist politics. In a flyer from October 1968, the Berlin Aktionsrat specifically defined itself as a ‘political group, belonging to the anti-authoritarian camp and working together with the APO’. Moreover, they were definitively not a ‘bourgeois emancipation movement … We do not strive for the “emancipation” of women that will give us the same opportunities to compete with men socially and economically’. Instead, they wanted to ‘overthrow the system of competition between people’, something they believed was only possible through the ‘transformation of the means of production and the system of power in a socialist society’.⁴⁷ Even the texts the Aktionsrat and the Frankfurt Weiberrat read were a blend of foundational socialist works, including August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism and Clara Zetkin’s On the History of the Proletarian Women’s Movement in Germany, alongside contemporary feminist writing.⁴⁸

By the 1970s, however, the status quo was starting to change. The Grand Coalition came to an end with the 1969 elections, which brought a Social Democratic government to power for the first time since the creation of the Federal Republic 20 years earlier. The new chancellor Willy Brandt, working in coalition with the FDP, ushered in a new era of politics for West Germany with an expansion of the welfare system, the creation of more universities and the start of rapprochement with the communist East through Ostpolitik. At the same time, the student movement, which had been splintering since the Emergency Acts were passed in 1968, was coming to an end. Facing internal divisions and competing ideological approaches, the SDS disbanded in 1970.⁴⁹ Similar tensions were also evident in women’s organising. The first Frankfurt Weiberrat disbanded in 1969, after its numbers grew too large to effectively enable the kind of egalitarian and anti-authoritarian organisation desired by the group.⁵⁰ Likewise, the Berlin Aktionsrat was split between activists focused on discussing socialist theory and those interested in the Kinderläden and project work. It, too, dissolved in 1970.

Yet amid these transformations, a self-consciously feminist movement started to emerge in West Germany. The New Women’s Movement, as it was known, owed much to this earlier activism. Despite defining themselves as socialist, groups like the Aktionsrat and the Weiberräte were formative for the creation of a women’s movement and many activists moved seamlessly from the student movement into the New Women’s Movement. Indeed, historians have variously labelled this early women’s organising as the ‘roots’ of the later feminist movement and as the ‘most important outcome’ of 1968, enabling both a change in women’s roles and ‘society as a whole’.⁵¹ As Katharina Karcher has aptly described, 1960s student activism formed an ‘explorative phase in which women on the Left began to organize, think and mobilize independently from their male comrades to work towards new forms of political subjectivity’.⁵²

The late 1960s were also pivotal to shaping public responses to feminism, as the media’s derision of women activists and women’s emancipation continued into the 1970s. Feminists used this attention to their advantage, deliberately provoking the media by staging confrontational and even militant protest actions, which were designed to challenge preconceptions of women’s roles. While this activism and the media have been vitally important for ushering in the liberalisation of gender norms in the Federal Republic, they also created a new set of challenges.

Although Germany had been a locus for women’s activism since the 19th century (what has been called the ‘First Wave’), the upheavals of the world wars and Nazism meant that by the 1970s there was little awareness of this earlier women’s activism.⁵³ From Olympe de Gouges to the women’s suffrage movement, as Bovenschen declared, ‘we didn’t know anything about all that when we started at uni in 1968. … Suffragette was a bad word when I was young. If a man said that to a woman, it meant she was sexually unappetising.’⁵⁴

But more than just lacking an historical role model, women activists were also missing a language to describe the shared experiences that brought them together as women. Compared to women’s movements in the United States and Western Europe in the 19th century, the earlier women’s movement in Germany was starkly divided along political lines between liberal-bourgeois feminists and socialist feminists. As Myra Marx Ferree has argued, this historical legacy hindered the emergence of gender as a politically unifying category for women in Germany, as political organisation had traditionally been firmly tied to class.⁵⁵ This meant that when women began organising in the 1970s, they needed to determine what brought them, and would hold them, together as a movement.⁵⁶

To this end, in the early 1970s, women in the Federal Republic formed physical and discursive spaces where they could discuss their shared experiences of womanhood. In Berlin, building on the work of the Aktionsrat, Helke Sander formed a new women’s group, Brot und Rosen (Bread and Roses) in 1971. At the same time, six women from the gay rights group Homosexual Action West Berlin formed their own autonomous women’s group.⁵⁷ Together, these two groups opened Germany’s first Women’s Centre in West Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbour-hood in March 1973.⁵⁸ This centre would be a major meeting point for feminist activism in the city.⁵⁹ A Federal Women’s Congress also convened for the first time in Frankfurt in 1972, bringing together 400 women from across the country to discuss women’s issues and enable feminist networking at a federal level. Later in the 1970s, the development of feminist media also enabled conversations between women, with the first feminist publishing house, Frauenoffensive, starting in 1975 followed by the release of the major feminist magazines Courage and EMMA in 1976 and 1977, respectively. Aside from these developments, women also met around kitchen tables and in church halls; they raised women’s issues at their unions and took part in protests and demonstrations.⁶⁰ This early activism touched on many key issues of women’s inequality: pay discrimination, women’s education, gender in the workplace and the international position of women.⁶¹

But by far the largest, and most unifying, campaign focused on abortion. Starting in the early 1970s, women in West Germany converged around the issue of reproductive rights and the decriminalisation of abortion. This was the first major campaign of the New Women’s Movement and was a formative example for domestic violence activism. West German feminists were not alone in their fight either: the 1970s were a hugely active time for reproductive rights activism globally. Although many European states–the United Kingdom and most of Scandinavia and Eastern Europe–had decriminalised abortion by this time, across Western Europe, the United States and parts of Australia, obtaining an abortion remained a criminal act.⁶² The issues of birth control, reproductive rights and women’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies thus became central campaigns for the emerging transnational women’s movement.⁶³

For much of the 20th century, access to and control of reproductive choice has been one of the most crucial flashpoints for women activists globally.⁶⁴ As historians have highlighted, the regulation of family planning and contraception and the concomitant debates about who should bear children and how many they should ideally have, have long been tied to state-and nation-building projects. Indeed, birth control has facilitated the realisation of racial or eugenic ideals and has been used to limit the reproductive decision-making power of women, especially women from racialised or colonised groups and working-class women.⁶⁵ Margaret Sanger, a pioneer of birth control, even toyed with calling her movement ‘race control’ and ‘population control’.⁶⁶

This was certainly the case in Germany, where Paragraph 218, the law criminalising abortion, was first introduced in the Imperial Criminal Code of 1871.⁶⁷ From this time–and for much of the 20th century–debate and reform of Paragraph 218 centred on issues of religion, motherhood, declining birth rates, the defence of the German nation, self-determination and the rights of women as citizens, as well as eugenic and racial concerns.⁶⁸ This final element found its most radical expression during the Third Reich, as the Nazis bound the politics of reproduction to their racist and ultimately genocidal aims.⁶⁹ Under Hitler, punishments for encouraging, performing or receiving an abortion were increased, especially in cases involving women deemed racially fit by the regime. A 1943 Executive Order on the Protection of Marriage, Family and Motherhood even authorised the death penalty for cases where the abortion endangered the ‘life blood of the German people’.⁷⁰ However, in cases where a foetus was believed to be disabled, or where the parents were Jewish or carriers of a genetic disorder, abortion was permitted. Parallel to this, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases introduced in 1933 enabled the forced sterilisation of individuals determined to have certain mental or physical disabilities and conditions. Abortion was briefly permitted in the aftermath of the Second World War in response to the widespread rape of German women by occupying soldiers. However, following division in 1949, West Germany reverted to the pre-1933 formulation of Paragraph 218. In comparison, after 1950, East Germany permitted abortion on medical grounds, or if one of the parents carried a genetic illness and from 1972 women were able to obtain an abortion for any reason in the first trimester.⁷¹ Despite these reforms, the historical links between abortion, racial and eugenic thinking did not disappear in the two Germanies with Nazi defeat.⁷²

At the same time, however, Germany also has a strong history of advocacy for reproductive rights. The German Bund für Mutterschutz was one of the first women’s organisations in the world to directly address abortion and birth control. As early as 1908, the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (an umbrella organisation for the growing feminist and women’s rights movement in Wilhelmine Germany) debated the removal of Paragraph 218 at their annual conference in Breslau.⁷³ Although this discussion touched on women’s right to sexual and reproductive self-determination, it was enveloped in a broader gendered framework of women’s ‘natural’ maternal instincts and responsibilities.⁷⁴ In this way, decriminalising abortion was less about recognising women’s autonomy and more about creating better mothers: by enabling women to give birth on their own terms, abortion would improve women’s ability to care for their children. Abortion was also a central concern in the Weimar era, as a coalition of feminists, socialists, sex reformers and doctors called for the removal of Paragraph 218. Much like pre-First World War activism, however, abortion in the Weimar Republic was not understood in terms that would be classed as feminist today. At a time when the women’s movement was starkly divided along class lines, abortion was primarily framed as an issue of class and economics.⁷⁵

Against this backdrop, the abortion rights activism developing in the early 1970s was markedly different. From the late 1960s, Paragraph 218 came under increasing public and political scrutiny as part of a broad-scale reform of the Criminal Code. Although the criminalisation of abortion was upheld in the amended Code of 1969, with an estimated 300,000 to 1 million illegal abortions yearly in the Federal Republic in the 1960s, it was clear that reform was needed.⁷⁶ But this is also what brought women to feminism and bound them together as a political movement: at a time when access to the contraceptive pill was tightly restricted and sexual education primarily focused on abstinence, unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion was a widely shared experience for women in West Germany.⁷⁷ The call to decriminalise abortion resonated strongly with women and throughout the early 1970s, feminist organising against Paragraph 218 grew rapidly. In Frankfurt, there was the Weiberrat and Frauenaktion 70 (Women’s Action 70); in Munich, there was the Rote Frauen (Red Women) and Berlin had Brot und Rosen, not to mention the many other smaller groups and everyday discussions that women engaged in about their reproductive rights. At the federal level, Aktion-218 (Action-218) acted as an umbrella organisation, bringing together women’s groups from across West Germany and coordinating national protest against the continued criminalisation of abortion.⁷⁸ While women from only seven cities took part in the first national meeting of Aktion-218, at the second meeting, only one month later in July 1971, women from 16 women’s groups and 20 different cities took part. The movement only grew from there.

But it was not only the experience of unwanted pregnancy that brought women to abortion rights activism. It was also the broader issues of self-determination and autonomy, which had slipped off the feminist agenda in the 1920s, that so echoed with women. Much like the Aktionsrat’s work on motherhood and Kinderläden, Paragraph 218 was a tangible example of the systemic ways in which society not only limited women’s choices, but also placed them outside of their control.⁷⁹ With clear echoes to Sander’s earlier writings, the 1972 Women’s Handbook published by Brot und Rosen declared ‘We [women] must, through an illegal abortion, become criminals, just so that we can do normal things that are essential for our self-worth, such as finishing our studies, keeping our jobs and avoiding the physical and material damage of having children.’⁸⁰

As Ilse Lenz highlights, in the 1960s and 1970s, although women were typically the ones who maintained a lifelong responsibility for a child, the decision of whether to have a baby in the first place was largely in men’s hands. At that time, not only did men have a legal right to have sex with their wife, but the majority of doctors were men, as were the criminal court judges who presided over cases of illegal abortion.⁸¹ In this way, contesting Paragraph 218 was about putting control of women’s bodies back into the hands of women.⁸² As a 1975 flyer from the Frankfurt Women’s Centre argued, ‘Paragraph 218 is more than just a paragraph that bans or permits abortion. It reveals all the contempt for women and misogyny that rules in this society.’⁸³

Unlike previous women’s activism, the campaign to decriminalise abortion was heavily mediatised. Women’s groups and feminist activists purposefully engaged in provocative protests that were designed to capture media attention. Moreover, progressive male and feminist journalists used their editorial positions to publicly advocate for women’s rights.⁸⁴ One of the most prominent figures in the Paragraph 218 campaign in West Germany was feminist activist and journalist Alice Schwarzer. Originally from Wuppertal, Schwarzer spent the 1960s living between Paris and West Germany, and worked as a freelance political journalist between 1970 and 1974.⁸⁵ It was in Paris that Schwarzer started her engagement in feminism and women’s politics, befriending Simone de Beauvoir and joining the Parisian feminist organisation, Le Mouvement pour la libération des femmes (Movement for the Liberation of Women). As a member of this group, Schwarzer was involved in the campaign to decriminalise abortion in France and assisted with the Manifestes des 343 (Manifesto of the 343).⁸⁶ In this manifesto, published in the magazine Nouvel Observateur on 5 April 1971, 343 French women admitted to having had an illegal abortion. Although this self-incrimination exposed the signatories to criminal prosecution, it also tangibly demonstrated the failure of the law to prevent abortion.⁸⁷

Not long after its publication, magazines began contacting the two journalists responsible for organising the Manifesto. Wary of what this would mean for the campaign, one of the original journalists, Jean Moreau, asked Schwarzer to run a similar action in West Germany. Wanting to ensure that it was taken seriously as a form of ‘collective, political action’ and not simply sensational gossip, she approached the editor of the illustrated weekly newsmagazine Stern and promised to find 300 to 400 women, including celebrities, who would publicly admit to having obtained an abortion.⁸⁸ This resulted in one of the most infamous pieces of feminist publishing in the Federal Republic: the ‘We Had Abortions!’ exposé. Published almost a month after the French Manifestes, on 6 June 1971, 374 West German women claimed: ‘I’ve had an abortion. I am against Paragraph 218 and for children who are wanted.’⁸⁹

Such provocative protest methods only escalated as debate over abortion reform continued at a federal level. Between 1972 and 1974, the Bundestag deliberated between two alternative solutions to Paragraph 218. On the one hand was the Indikationsmodell, or the indication model, which was initially proposed by the federal government in 1972 and was in part supported by the Christian Democrats. Under this reform, women would be able to receive an abortion on the basis of certain ‘indicators’, which included socio-economic considerations, the health of the mother, whether the pregnancy had been conceived through rape or incest and eugenic concerns. On the other hand, was the Fristenmodell or time-limited model. This reform, favoured by feminists and some SPD and FDP members, would allow a woman to obtain an abortion at any point in the first trimester, regardless of the circumstances. While the Bundestag debated these different legal alternatives to Paragraph 218, women from across the Federal Republic took part in mass protests, demonstrations, teach-ins and even started a letter-writing campaign to the Justice Minister Gerhard Jahn.⁹⁰

The third reading of the proposed amendment to Paragraph 218 was set for April 1974. In the lead-up to this vote, feminists throughout West Germany organised confrontational and provocative campaigns in order to persuade sitting members of the SPD and FDP to support the Fristenmodell. On 6 February 1974, nearly 2,000 women attended a meeting organised by Brot und Rosen at the Technical University in Berlin to coordinate protest efforts.⁹¹ One month later, a group of Berlin-based feminists, including Alice Schwarzer, organised a statewide demonstration called Letzter Versuch or ‘Last Try’.⁹² As a part of this action, Schwarzer, along with other feminist activists, gathered the support of the medical community.⁹³ On 9 March, 14 doctors performed a public abortion in a Berlin apartment, using the vacuum aspiration method, that was not yet in use in the Federal Republic.⁹⁴ Schwarzer even arranged for the procedure to be filmed as part of a special report on abortion for the public news programme, Panorama. At the press conference ahead of the procedure, the doctors declared that ‘Every day in the Federal Republic, 2,000 to 3,000 illegal abortions are performed. Our action shall end this hypocrisy. We demand equal rights for all, the development of safe contraception and child-friendly living conditions.’⁹⁵ Two days later, in an extension of the previous ‘We Had Abortions!’ campaign, in the 11 March 1974 issue of Der Spiegel, 329 doctors not only admitted to having ‘without financial advantage, performed abortions or helped women obtain an abortion’, but also that they would do so again, despite its illegality.⁹⁶

In many respects, these campaigns were successful. It was estimated that between 70 to 80 per cent of women backed the decriminalisation of abortion.⁹⁷ The popular liberal press–Stern and Der Spiegel–were also largely supportive of decriminalising abortion, even if their attitudes towards women remained problematic in other ways.⁹⁸ Despite such widespread support, this activism also provoked consternation, fear and backlash. Soon after the release of the initial ‘We Had Abortions!’ issue of Stern, police in various cities in West Germany led raids and crackdowns on women’s groups, using the article as a ‘hit-list’ to target women who had had illegal abortions and the groups that supported them.⁹⁹ Most shockingly, Schwarzer’s report on abortion was pulled from screening by the directors-general of the ARD (an organisation of public regional broadcasters) only an hour before it was due to air. The special had gained media attention in the days prior. Der Spiegel even needled NDR, the regional broadcaster responsible for producing Panorama, saying ‘On Monday this week [11 March], if the NDR hasn’t yet gotten a stomach ache, the television program “Panorama” will show a documentary made by the French-residing journalist Alice Schwarzer. The film shows an abortion performed using vacuum aspiration.’¹⁰⁰ Unsurprisingly, the broadcaster received various letters of complaint from the public, including one sent by Cardinal Julius Döpfner, the chair of the German Conference of Bishops, as well as the Archbishop of Munich and Freising.¹⁰¹ Döpfner’s protest, alongside the fact that he pressed for charges for the illegal abortion filmed for the report, was one of the main reasons it was pulled from air. In solidarity with Schwarzer, the other Panorama journalists refused to allow their reports to be shown in the episode and for 45 minutes only an empty studio was broadcast.

Despite these responses, the Letzter Versuch campaign was successful, albeit short-lived. The Panorama scandal provoked a mass media response and resulted in even more protest, catapulting Paragraph 218 into the public eye as never before.¹⁰² At the third reading of the Criminal Code reform, the ruling coalition changed their support for the indication model of abortion and instead backed a time-limited law. In June 1974, the Federal President signed a bill allowing women to obtain an abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy for any reason, so long as it was performed by a doctor and following prior medical consultation. However, the constitutionality of the new law was quickly challenged by the national CDU and its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU), as well as the minister presidents of other federal states. In 1975, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe struck down the new law on the basis of the constitutional guarantee of the sanctity of life. In place of the new reform then, the Indikationsmodell was introduced, allowing women to obtain an abortion only under certain conditions. In 1976–five years after the publication of the ground breaking ‘We Had Abortions!’ statement–this new law came into effect. This was also the same year that the first domestic violence shelter opened in West Berlin.

The legacy of this abortion rights campaign is complicated. The legal defeat resonated throughout the women’s movement in West Germany and left its mark on the years to come, including on domestic violence activism.¹⁰³ Although the hopes for unrestricted abortion were defeated and the broad-scale coalition for women’s rights largely dissolved afterwards, activism against Paragraph 218 brought women in West Germany together as never before. Reproductive rights fomented the feminist movement and opened the door to a broader examination of the ways in which society limited, regulated and controlled women’s bodies, choices and lifeworlds simply because of their gender. Paragraph 218 activism was also a gateway to address related issues of birth control, women’s health and sexuality and even violence against women.¹⁰⁴ As Alice Schwarzer has argued, while the failure of the abortion rights campaign was ‘a dark hour in the history of women’s struggle’, it was also ‘not a total defeat. The §218 campaign shook women awake. The fight against compulsory motherhood must be thanked for making women realise what §218 has to do with their stunted sexuality and being underpaid in their jobs.’¹⁰⁵

Abortion activism also underscored important political lessons for activists. Since the late 1960s, women’s political organisation had largely taken place without men. Groups like the Aktionsrat and the Weiberrat excluded men in order to create spaces where, unlike the student movement, women could talk freely and share their ideas. Reflecting on this, Bovenschen argued that ‘what was so astonishing for us was that we needed to separate [from men]. We had to separate ourselves and that had no great programmatic foundation, it was just so that we could get to know one another. We kicked men out forcefully, in order to make this happen. We had to separate, in order to initiate the understanding process with one another.’¹⁰⁶ Notwithstanding the coalitions that were built with men, especially male doctors, over the course of the abortion campaign, separatism and autonomy became entrenched as fundamental principles of the New Women’s Movement.¹⁰⁷ If anything, the failure of the state and Leftist politics to acknowledge the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies and define their own life choices, only made feminists more determined to work without men and the state.

The politics of separatism and autonomy not only shaped the way women organised, but also how they approached women’s emancipation. In this way, feminism in West Germany became less about being equal with men and more about creating a world in which women could define their own success and not be bound by patriarchal norms and worldviews. As the 1976 Women’s Year Book argued

women should break into male-dominated fields. More women in politics! More women in the sciences etc. Men should get involved in the traditionally female fields (the household) … Women should be able to do what men do. This idea of women’s emancipation formally remains, because what men do is not conceptually challenged. The principle of “we want to too” or “we can too” measures emancipation against men, and in doing so defines what we want against men. … The fight against women’s [traditional] roles cannot become the fight for men’s roles.¹⁰⁸

This approach to women’s rights, with its emphasis on autonomy, separatism and anti-authoritarianism, led to a significant transformation of feminist activism by 1976, which the literature has described as a turning point for feminism. In comparison to the mass mobilisation of the Paragraph 218 campaign, the years spanning from 1976 to 1985 have been labelled by scholars as the ‘women’s project movement’, with activists working to create spaces for the performance of an alternative, feminist womanhood.¹⁰⁹ Women’s centres, bookstores and cafes proliferated throughout West Germany during this period, as activists attempted to put the politics of West German feminism into everyday practice. The exclusion of men, non-hierarchical structures and Parteilichkeit (solidarity among women), to name a few, were key parts of this practice of living feminism. More fundamentally though, activists designed these sites as an alternative venue for womanhood and its expression outside of the patriarchy of the Left-scene and the state. As the 1976 Women’s Year Book warned women: ‘The idea of entering into and mixing as equals in male institutions will not break the thousand-year-old power of men, will not bring into question their values that hide within every fibre of these institutions.’¹¹⁰

But the abortion rights campaign also created challenges for feminism going forward. This was a major defeat for a years-long feminist campaign and women’s emancipation was still not universally accepted. Abortion was contested by Christian Democrats at both federal and state levels. Religious leaders, especially Catholics, also opposed abortion. Although the liberal press, including Der Spiegel and Stern, had supported abortion rights, they nevertheless continued to brazenly objectify women and frequently used gratuitous female nudity to bolster sales.¹¹¹ Moreover, the rise of left-wing terrorism, of female terrorists and the confrontational, militant tactics used by feminist activists during the Paragraph 218 campaign created a widespread conflation of female violence and an excess of women’s emancipation. As the works of Clare Bielby, Katharina Karcher and Patricia Melzer have shown, in the popular imagination and the media, feminism was linked with violence and fears of violence.¹¹² This was not only rhetoric or fear-mongering: on 18 December 1975, 12 members of the West German state security searched the rooms of the West Berlin Women’s Centre supposedly looking for an anarchist. In the process of the search, however, they also took the names of all the women present at the centre, went through the records of the women who had visited the centre for pregnancy counselling, sketched a floorplan of the centre, made notes of the posters on the walls and finally they took all the women without identification to the station for processing.¹¹³

In light of the defeat of Paragraph 218 and the turn towards project-based activism, it is not wholly surprising that scholars posit 1976 as a liminal threshold for feminism in West Germany. But while the campaign to decriminalise abortion may have largely come to an end, as domestic violence activists in Berlin would discover, it had left a lasting impression and would continue to shape feminist practices.

The movement to tackle domestic violence in the Federal Republic began in the winter of 1974. The initial successes of the Paragraph 218 campaign had already proven tenuous: the new law permitting first-trimester abortions was under judicial review and the Constitutional Court was only months away from declaring the law invalid. And yet, the New Women’s Movement, which had coalesced so strongly around the issue of reproductive rights, was blossoming. Despite its limited success, the Paragraph 218 campaign galvanised other women’s issues in West Germany and the plethora of issue-based projects and groups emerging in the mid-1970s proved that the women’s movement would endure.

One such group emerged at the Berlin Women’s Centre in Kreuzberg, which had already been a significant locus of feminist activism against Paragraph 218. Known as ‘Projekt Frauenhaus’ (Project Women’s Shelter), the group’s precise membership in these early days is difficult to ascertain. What we do know is that it initially consisted of five women, of whom most came from the wartime or postwar generation. Importantly, they all worked in the social sciences or social welfare and had, either professionally or through their engagement with the women’s movement, experience working with ‘battered women’.¹¹⁴ As such, they were not only well aware of the serious issues women faced in the home, but knew that there was very little effective support available to women living with a violent husband.

The group was determined to change this reality. By creating a shelter and counselling service that would operate as ‘part of the women’s movement’ and not as part of the state or welfare system, they sought to empower women to leave abusive relationships.¹¹⁵ For activists, this program of autonomous, grassroots feminist support stood in stark contrast with the work of institutionalised and state-run social and welfare services, which feminists argued provided women with ‘almost no chance of becoming independent and re-integrating into society’ and only left them vulnerable to further violence.¹¹⁶

At a time when there was very little critical public engagement with gender-based violence, the shelter group’s first task was to unmask it. For two years, the group researched, organised, discussed and campaigned against domestic abuse. They worked to get public and political recognition that domestic violence was a serious issue of women’s inequality and that support services were urgently needed. They also spent time investigating how to organise and run a shelter, looking at international shelter projects and best practices. By mid-1975, they started a public campaign, hanging posters and giving out pamphlets on violence against women. They created a bank account for donations and slowly started to engage the popular media.¹¹⁷ They also participated in international feminist events, attending the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes against Women held in Brussels.¹¹⁸ The group itself grew larger, reaching 15 members before the opening of the shelter in 1976.

In doing so, these shelter activists also claimed domestic violence as a feminist issue. Just as Paragraph 218 campaigners linked the criminalisation of abortion to the broader ways in which women’s lives and bodies were controlled, feminists made domestic violence into an issue of women’s rights and their fundamental inequality to men. As the shelter project’s proposal to the Berlin Senate began ‘The general discrimination of women in all areas of society finds its most brutal expression in the humiliating and life-threatening abuse they experience in their private lives at the hands of men.’¹¹⁹ The fact that men could beat and kill their wives with impunity, that women were not listened to or helped, that people could hear or know what was happening to their neighbours and friends and do nothing, served as proof that women were not equal and that patriarchal structures and power imbalances served to keep women down. The shelter project was aimed at challenging this patriarchal order, not only by exposing it, but by supporting women to become empowered. As an early piece on the shelter project argued, ‘We are of the opinion that women must begin to help, protect and defend themselves.’¹²⁰

Feminists used these radical critiques to challenge and contest the prevailing social order. Since the establishment of the Federal Republic, women’s roles were primarily based in the home, as mothers and as wives. This was not only a cornerstone of the post-war political rehabilitation of West Germany, but also reflected the long-standing political tradition that, since the 19th century, tied liberalism to a patriarchal sexual-moral order in Germany.¹²¹ Despite legislating women’s equality in the 1949 Constitution, West German policy and lawmaking had been guided by conservative, Christian patriarchal norms that delimited women’s roles to the family.¹²² Given this historical legacy, how would the feminist challenge resonate publicly and politically? How would West Germans respond to the creation of spaces where women and children could go to escape their violent husbands and fathers? Would domestic violence be taken seriously as a sign of women’s inequality? Moreover, what would be made of the feminist orientation of the shelter project, especially in light of the failure of Paragraph 218 reform?

Projekt Frauenhaus would open its domestic violence shelter on 1 November 1976. The first of its kind in Germany, news of the shelter spread quickly in the West German media. Most news outlets drafted their articles based on the information given to the German Press Agency by the shelter organisers. This included providing the phone number and mailing address of the shelter for any woman in need of help.¹²³ The tabloid Bild, however, took a different approach. Rather than use the information provided by the organisation, Bild sent an undercover journalist to the shelter under the pretence of being a battered woman. In the article ‘Women’s Shelter: I was happy once I was outside’, the journalist reported

women and children who can’t laugh … a massive kitchen and–women. One stares off into space, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Before her on the table a cup of coffee. Others are arguing. It’s about the cleaning duties for tomorrow: who is mopping the stairs and whose fault is it that the toilets are always clogged. And in the middle, children. I have hardly seen a smile. … The bathroom is filthy. The whole house is filthy … The only way of spending the time: television or books like Women’s Fight in the Soviet Union, or bickering.¹²⁴

This report clearly plays on gendered and class-based stereotypes of battered women, as broken, working-class individuals, not living up to middle-class ideals of femininity. But it also critiques the feminist orientation of the shelter, presenting it as a hotbed for communism, reminiscent of the earlier mocking depictions of women student activists. To add insult to injury, the article also gave the physical address of the shelter and told women to first contact their local council authorities. In doing so, they put the lives of all the women at the shelter at risk and upheld the power of the very institutions that had left women unprotected for so long. How much then had really changed between 1968 and 1976?

Over the course of the late 1960s, feminist politics spread throughout West Germany. From the Tomatenwurf to the formation of groups like the Berlin Aktionsrat and Weiberräte, women in West Germany were beginning to see how their lives and choices were shaped by their gender. But it was the emergence of a movement to decriminalise Paragraph 218 in the early 1970s that brought the feminist movement in West Germany into the public consciousness. Enmeshed in transnational networks, West German women took up many of the issues feminist movements in the West fought over. Women’s health, reproductive rights, motherhood, sexuality and violence against women were all key concerns examined by the New Women’s Movement in West Germany. However, at a time when patriarchal gender roles still very much governed society, feminism and women’s organising were also incredibly destabilising to this status quo. They upset the gender order and in doing so shook the foundations of the West German state. Indeed, this was the very intention of feminist activism. Actions like ‘We Had Abortions’ were meant to challenge and critique the existence of gender inequalities.

Echoing this, the mainstream press sent contradictory messages about the nature and consequences of feminism and women’s emancipation. Women activists had been mercilessly mocked and objectified in the media in the late 1960s, thereby pacifying their resistance and the challenges they presented to the established gender order. Moreover, as women engaged in militant protest and even terrorism, newspapers conflated female violence with women’s emancipation. Although this changed to some extent with the campaign against Paragraph 218, as magazines, such as Stern and Der Spiegel, and the television programme Panorama supported the cause, this is not to say they wholeheartedly supported feminism or women’s emancipation. Alongside publicising feminist campaigns, the media, in particular the commercial mass press, also perpetuated the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies. For example, despite having published ‘We Had Abortions’ in 1971, Stern continually used highly sexualised and objectifying images of women on their covers. In 1978, this even led Alice Schwarzer, alongside her magazine EMMA, to press charges against Stern for damaging the honour of women.

When the women’s shelter movement emerged in 1974, they had to deal with this complicated inheritance. On the one hand, this process was productive. The years of feminist theorising and practice helped to define the way they approached and understood domestic violence. On the other hand, when they came to approach the government for funding, they also faced a legitimacy problem. Not only did mixed messages abound in the media about women’s emancipation, but it was just over a year since the Constitutional Court had determined that the new abortion law was unconstitutional. Although there had been strong public support for the reform of Paragraph 218, there was still significant resistance from the CDU and the Catholic Church, as the Panorama scandal had revealed. What’s more, the defeat of the new abortion law in 1975 deepened scepticism of the effectiveness of feminist approaches. This posed a particular problem for the SPD, who had changed their platform at the last minute to support unrestricted abortion. In the lead-up to the 1976 election, the SPD faced a difficult choice. Would they again back feminist activists?

The following two chapters detail the evolution of Projekt Frauenhaus. They explore the politics, principles and, most importantly, the transformation of feminist domestic violence activism. From its radical origins, a well-established system of social care emerged in the Federal Republic. Politicians, across party divisions, came to accept the need for shelters and supported feminist domestic violence activism–something that never happened with abortion rights. Part of this transformation was due to the resolution of the challenge feminists and feminism posed. But this is not to say that feminist politics of domestic violence were seamlessly taken up. Instead, the evolution of domestic violence activism involved a long-standing process of negotiation, as activists attempted to resolve anxieties and legitimise feminism, which, as the next chapters reveal, ultimately involved the dilution and deradicalisation of feminist politics.