User:WomensVoice



Coventry, England - Sheila Hilda Walsh 1913-1998

The real historical truth about the 1960s upsurge of the Women's Movement

Women's Movement

Sheila Hilda Walsh was the founder of the Women's Movement. In the 1960s there was no political party that represented women' interests or gave any priority to improving their position. She campaigned successfully to change the law in Britain. Her ideas gathered pace and spread around the world. Born in Manchester in 1913, she moved to Coventry just before the Second World War. She was already a committed socialist. By the early 1960s Sheila Hilda was aware that the position of women had declined after the war, and that women and children had unequal rights which had not progressed since the time of the Suffragettes.

Matrimonial Homes Act 1967

In 1962 when she was seeking a divorce, she decided that she would start her own political movement, which was known as the "The Committee for Civil Rights of Women and Children of Broken Families". Later she used her first hand experience of injustices in the law courts to campaign successfully for changes in the law. She produced leaflets, fly posters and later a magazine called "Women's Voice" in order to communicate the message, as she found it extremely difficult to get local or national newspapers to print anything to do with the subordination of women in society. She built up a membership of women in Coventry. They campaigned tirelessly to show up the economic plight and dire poverty of women and children once the husband had left. He was entitled to all the properties, from the roof over their heads to the beds they lay on. With no protection or right under the law they were usually left destitute. She persistently and vigorously attacked these medieval laws and with constant badgering of Labour Members of Parliament (a great many of them not wanting any changes) she eventually managed to alter public opinion. The first sign of this was the change in the law set out in the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 and the Matrimonial Property and Maintenance Act of 1958.

After the Matrimonial Homes Act was passed in 1967, the name of the movement was changed to "Women?s Total Freedom Movement", and a network of women's groups grew up in Western Europe and North America. In Britain the Equal Pay Act became law in 1968, and laws followed soon after to give women a right to maternity leave, to ban discrimination in employment on grounds of sex, and to protect employees from arbitrary and unfair dismissal.The main aims of a women's political partyMany groups of women set up all over our country and much later in Europe,America and other parts of the world. The Women?s Total Freedom Movement's main aim was to gain strength and to publicise the need to have a women?s party with a voice in Parliament and electing their own Parliamentary Candidates. But for this to come about a union needed to be formed of all the small women?s groups. Sheila Hilda wrote to all these groups to recommend an alliance and suggest that a conference be set up. This was arranged in 1970 at Ruskin College, Oxford, as the "Oxford Women?s Conference". At this Conference it became quite obvious that there where many saboteurs there disguised as authentic women's groups that where intent on playing tricks to obliterate, enfeeble and engulf the genuine women's groups by tactics of shouting down, heckling, filming with bogus crews, and allowing no one on the podium but their own impostures.

It is now our genuine belief that these women lackeys where orchestrated by one or more of the established political parties who were afraid of a political party consisting only of women. Their main aim was to infiltrate the whole women's movement and to smash it by diverting attention away from political issues of human rights towards gestures and doctrines which the press could be trusted to sensationalise. They where rewarded for their obedient spoiling tactics with good positions in universities, politics, journalism and television, and their organisations were well funded. But these bogus infiltrators could not stop the momentum of change which had built up over a decade of intensive political campaigning. As the architect of the 1960s Renaissance of women's movements Sheila Hilda managed to accomplish many of her aims and through her efforts brought about many changes that would have been unthinkable a decade before. Through her was instigated a whole new era which provided the atmosphere for the birth of numerous socially conscious groups, including Battered Wives, Shelter, Virago publishers for women writers, nursery and Gingerbread groups. But over the last two decades, despite the well publicised advancement of a few individual women, the position of women in general has not advanced. Equal pay has been circumvented by contracting work out to companies which only employ low paid women. Employment protection legislation has been made ineffective by over-use of temporary contracts. The cause started by Sheila Hilda Walsh has still to be fully achieved, and still needs the efforts of women world wide to achieve it.