The first time the Women’s Liberation Movement landed squarely in the imagination of the British public was 1970. Twenty-two million people watched the Miss World host Bob Hope on TV being flour-bombed by protesters, after he joked that he was “very happy to be here at this cattle market” of contestants.
The next 20 years would see women invent equally headline-grabbing ways to call out the patriarchy. In Leeds in 1977, when police told local women to stay indoors after dark during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, protesters took to the streets to Reclaim the Night. When US nuclear missiles were stored at Greenham Common, Berkshire, in 1981, a group of Welsh women established a peace camp that would last for two decades. The night that Margaret Thatcher’s government passed the notorious Section 28 law in 1988, banning the “promotion” of homosexuality, lesbian protesters abseiled into the House of Lords.
