Caroline Blackwood: On the Perimeter

Just after Britain's been congratulating itself on 100 years of some women being given the right to vote - oh, weren't we so enlightened! - this book from just 34 years ago probably gives some idea of what attitudes to suffragists were really like.

Caroline Blackwood visited the peace camp at Greenham Common in March 1984 and the persistent thread of her short account is the sexualised abuse directed at the women. Auberon Waugh (whose comic viewpoint on "relentless women's issues" Matthew Parris has recently praised and mourned) alleged that the women smelled of "fish paste and bad oysters". The press had described them as "belligerent harpies", "a bunch of smelly lesbians" and "screaming destructive witches". Every night British troops protecting the American base would shout abuse at them. Youths from Newbury would attack the camps, pouring pig's blood over the improvised "benders" in which the women were trying to sleep. Bailiffs would wilfully destroy every possession they could.

It's really not far from the kind of abuse that women's suffrage campaigners had been suffering just 80 years earlier and of course it says more about male fears than it does about the actual conditions at the camp or what the women were actually doing. What the women were actually doing looks to have been incredibly boring. In Blackwood's account, they saw themselves as witnesses, rather than agents. Of course they knew they could not stop deployment of the missiles but they could ensure that it was noticed. They were a small voice against the threat of nuclear annihilation.

One of the more amusing aspects of the book is the account of court proceedings. Women would be charged for various offences and the cases would then descend into drawn-out arguments about the details of what happened and the reliability of prosecution witness being asked to describe accurately, so that there should be no reasonable doubt, what had happened in the darkness months ago. Undoubtedly, one of the women's tactics was to tie the court system up with these ridiculous hearings.

There was even an echo of the "cat and mouse" treatment received by suffragists. The conditions at the camp were so appalling that some women wouldn't mind too much a short stay in Holloway, just to get warm and dry. Sentence over, they'd return to the camp with renewed vigour.

It's possible to argue that the women's views were wrong and their tactics were badly chosen, I suppose. Blackwood questions and disagrees with one particular practice as unnecessary and unhelpful provocation. But the reaction to the camp, from the authorities and from individuals, now seems so excessive; it's hard to believe it happened.

And yet in similar circumstances today, we know exactly the people who'd be condemning and slandering the women involved. Many of those who've recently sought to borrow prestige from female emancipation, as if it were something freely given by an enlightened state, would be piling into the scrum of disapproval. There'd be an army of frothing men lining up with their sexual disgust barely disguised as common sense and "good-natured lightheartedness, even kindness" about "relentless women's issues".


Caroline Blackwood: On the Perimeter Flamingo Books, 1984