I want to talk about feminist socialism, rather than socialist feminism. As a student in Oxford, I directly witnessed and participated in the first conference of the Women’s Liberation Movement, held in Ruskin College in 1970. My whole world was shaken. My vision of the world up to that point was very hierarchical. For women it meant climbing up the hierarchy: being in there, getting up there, and so on.

The way feminism emerged at that point completely turned that over. It challenged those hierarchies, fundamentally.

There was a cartoon saying, “Equality? We’ve got something better in mind.” And that was the idea: that we weren’t actually about “equal opportunities,” or equality within the existing system — we were about something entirely different, and we were experimenting in the process of creating this radical alternative through our daily lives.