In 1978, Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination, a collective publication by the Women’s Studies Group, catapulted feminist studies to centre stage in Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). In this chapter I shall comment on the anxieties sparked by ‘women who take issue’, which culminated in Stuart Hall’s retrospective look – in a 1990 Illinois University lecture – at the ‘interruptions in the work of the Centre’, when ‘feminism broke in […] As the thief in the night, […] interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies’ (Hall, p. 282). This emotionally loaded description reveals the implicit threat posed by the radicalism of the early feminists at the time, and the resistance with which they were met. This longer passage from the 1992 article (based on the lecture) gives a vivid impression of the tense atmosphere in the early days of the CCCS:

The title of the volume in which this dawn-raid was first accomplished – Women Take Issue – is instructive: for they ‘took issue’ in both senses – they took over that year’s book and initiated a quarrel. […] Because of the […] early beginnings of the feminist movement outside in the very early 1970s, many of us in the Centre – mainly, of course, men – thought it was time there was good feminist work in cultural studies. And we indeed tried to buy it in, to import it, to attract good feminist scholars. As you might expect, many of the women in cultural studies weren’t terribly interested in this benign project. We were opening the door to feminist studies, being good, transformed men. And yet, when it broke in through the window, every single unsuspected resistance rose to the surface, fully installed patriarchal power, which believed it had disavowed itself. There are no leaders here, we used to say; we are all graduate students and members of staff together, learning how to practice cultural studies. […] And yet when it came to the question of the reading list … Now that’s where I really discovered about the gendered nature of power. Long, long after I was able to pronounce the words, I encountered the reality of Foucault’s profound insight into the individual reciprocity of knowledge and power. Talking about giving up power is a radically different experience from being silenced. (pp. 282–3)

Hall admits to his retrospective realisation that women and feminism had no access to knowledge and power for the simple reason that their position was absent, simply not accounted for. The paradigms dominant at the Centre were epistemologically powerful in terms of class and economic analysis but were silent in terms of gender or race. Also, the objects of analysis had no particular focus on women’s issues apart from the occasional work on women’s magazines with a focus on semiotic analysis, as will be explored below.

My research is based on the digitally available annual reports of the Centre,¹ and I will also take up opinions voiced by Charlotte Brunsdon (1996) and arguments developed by Homi Bhabha in an article dedicated to Hall after the latter’s death in 2014. Brunsdon and Bhabha make both a strong case for seeing voices from positions of absence (such as the work done by the Women’s Study Group at the CCCS) as radical and provocative moments of interruption, which may open new lines of enquiry. Such emotionally charged moments can trigger constructive struggles and, via continuous negotiations, may allow new perspectives and space for change.

There were indeed silences and absences, but once women spoke up and made themselves heard, the ‘dawn-raid’ Stuart Hall remembered really took place and found its way into the annual reports of the CCCS: in a nutshell, first women tried to fit a feminist agenda into existing paradigms, like the Marxist paradigm, but later they came up with new theoretical approaches of their own. Many of the women who studied at the CCCS in its early days carved out specialised and unique fields; they did not become ‘general’ cultural studies scholars but pioneers, for example, in feminist media studies, in feminist film studies or in TV studies, among many other fields.

In what follows I will briefly introduce the history of the CCCS and its aims and then turn to women at the Centre in its early days, their topics and topics related to them, which will lead up to the volume Women Take Issue. I will then end with Hall’s affect-laden response to radical changes that were initiated by positions of absence, and what this response may mean in times of conservative backlash.

The history of the Birmingham Centre starts with Richard Hoggart (1918–2014), who was appointed Professor of Literature and Contemporary Society at Birmingham in 1962 and who founded the CCCS in 1964. Hoggart had won a scholarship to study English at Leeds and became senior lecturer at the University of Leicester in 1959. By then he had written a book on the poetry of W.H. Auden (1951) and the influential semi-autobiographical study The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (1957), in which he looked back nostalgically at a pre-war ‘popular culture’, which he saw as threatened by a post-war 1950s ‘mass culture’. He earned some reputation with The Uses of Literacy and in 1960 was a key witness at the so-called obscenity trials, when Penguin Books was publicly prosecuted for the 1960 unexpurgated publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence. Penguin Books won, not least because of Hoggart’s expert witness testimony.

The Centre’s first annual report gives some details about the CCCS finances leading back to the obscenity trials: ‘The main grant is from Penguin Books, who have generously covenanted the Centre £2,400 a year for seven years. This grant started the Centre and pays for the first research fellow [Stuart Hall] and the secretary’ (CCCS, 1964, p. 13). Stuart Hall came to Britain from Jamaica on a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he took an MA in English. He started a PhD on Henry James, which he never finished, became involved in left politics, and worked in secondary and adult education. Together with Paddy Whannel (1922–80) from the British Film Institute, he published The Popular Arts (1964), a book in which the two authors argued that popular cultural forms, such as the Western, Mickey Spillane, advertising and the television industry ought to be taken seriously within the academic analysis of culture. This book may have motivated Hoggart to hire Hall (compare Dyer, pp. vii–xxvi).

From the beginning, the Centre followed an innovative approach to cultural analysis, which was outlined in their first report under the heading ‘Scope of Research’. Central to the new approach were so-called ‘critical-evaluative studies […] of mass art, popular art and culture and the mass media. […] This field includes popular fiction, the press, film and television, popular music and advertising’ (CCCS, 1964, pp. 3–4). In 1964, it was new to analyse cultural products across diverse media without claiming to be a specialist in filmic, musical or TV analysis, as there was no established discipline that worked across media, as would later be the case in cultural studies. The first annual report therefore dutifully claimed that ‘the Centre will try to bring together disciplines of literary criticism, sociology and social psychology, and social history’ (CCCS, 1964, p. 3). The second report calls for ‘a clear definition of the contribution which the various disciplines can make to “cultural studies” (which is, properly, an interdisciplinary and evaluative field of studies)’ (CCCS, 1965, pp. 3–4). The Centre’s third report has a lengthy section on research methodology advocating that the CCCS should get away from ‘close studies of texts and events here – “social background”, “history of ideas” or “conditions of production” there’. The report continues: ‘it is our intention to try to develop an […] integrated style of work’ (CCCS, 1966, p. 8). The promotion of ‘group work wherever possible’ was also new as an academic practice at the time, as was no formal MA or PhD supervision but extensive work in study groups (CCCS, 1964, p. 4). Another important element of the work of the Centre was a commitment to extramural work or, as in the first report, ‘Links with Teachers’ (pp. 11–12).

Though beyond the scope of this chapter, the inner dynamics of the CCCS are also an area worth exploring, as they may shed more light on the place of women in the Centre. There are a number of good sources: the working practices of the Centre are described in an article published in 2015 (Connell and Hilton) and there are examples of life writing and individual reminiscences, ranging from Stuart Hall’s 1990 lecture quoted above (Hall, 1992), to contributions by individual members, such a Charlotte Brunsdon’s ‘A Thief in the Night’ (1996) or Lawrence Grossberg’s ‘The Formation(s) of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham’ (1997). Common across these reports is the observation that the inner dynamics of the Centre, and early cultural studies work in general, were characterised by what Charlotte Brunsdon called a ‘contested plurality’ and ‘the arguing of positions’ (1996, pp. 277, 283). In the words of Stuart Hall, cultural studies ‘had many trajectories, [and] many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention’ (1992, p. 278). Within this unstable territory, women were slowly carving out spaces for themselves, moving from positions of absence to positions of presence. In what follows I will go over the annual reports in chronological order, using these contemporary records as a form of evidence to document women’s work and work on women’s issues in the early days of the Centre.

In the first report women are invisible; only the secretary is mentioned (identified as ‘Miss Eleanor Insch’ (CCCS, 1965, p. 1) in the second report), who was paid with the Penguin money. The second report names two female research students, Moira Megaw, working on George Orwell and the documentary genre, and Nancy Bradburd, working on the sociology of adolescence and popular music. They are both, however, absent from the ‘Centre Staff and Students: 1965–6’ list at the end of the report (p. 22). This list gives the names of about a dozen male research students and mentions one woman as ‘Colloquial assistant’, namely Lidia Curti,² an exchange student from the University of Naples, who most likely introduced the work of Antonio Gramsci to the Centre. On Tuesdays the CCCS had a general seminar with invited speakers, such as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall or Raymond Williams. The only female speaker (among a dozen males) was the German émigré Hilde Himmelweit (1918–89), who established social psychology at the London School of Economics and who had published a ground-breaking attitudinal study on the effects of television on young people entitled Television and the Child (1958). In its section on publications the report mentions that Rachel Powell was working on a piece on ‘local radio’. As the next year’s report will show, Powell’s work (1965) would become the first ever of the Centre’s legendary Occasional Papers publications.³

The Centre’s third report from November 1966 is quite lengthy and has long sections seemingly defending the Centre’s unconventional methodologies and topics. Women now surface in greater numbers. They are employed as researchers for externally funded and designed projects: Elizabeth Glass on the attitudes and assumptions of the popular press (Rowntree Project); and the above-mentioned Rachel Powell on the relationship between television programmes and their audiences (Gulbenkian Project). The report also lists the readings done in the text seminar: there are no texts by and about women and no invited female speakers in the general seminar. There was, however, one talk dealing with women’s issues: Clive Irving, a then famous journalist, who in 1963 co-authored a book on the Profumo Affair (Scandal ’63), gave a presentation entitled ‘A Look at Women’s Magazines’ (CCCS, 1966, p. 24). This topic would be the first women’s studies-related subject matter at the Centre and an area of study that the Centre would return to.

The fourth (1966–67) and, in particular, the fifth and sixth reports from October 1969 and December 1971, respectively, are likely to have been the first ones written by Stuart Hall, and no longer by Hoggart. The fifth report shows a distinctive change in tone and a more complex diction and is also tentatively critical of Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (See CCCS, 1969, p. 2). Both reports praise Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and the fifth report quotes Williams’s definition of culture from The Long Revolution (1961), ‘culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’ (CCCS, 1969, p. 3). From the 1966–7 academic year onwards a greater number of female students started to study at the CCCS, among them American photographer Janet Mendelsohn, who produced photographic essays of the streets of Birmingham, in particular the Balsall Heath district, as part of her MA project. Mendelsohn used photography as a tool for cultural analysis with a particular focus on sex workers in Varna Road and the Indian community living in the same area.⁴

The fifth report had one of Mendelsohn’s photographs on its cover and Rosalind Brunt featured in it as a graduate student.⁵ In 1969 Brunt worked on ‘the sensitive area’ of current affairs programmes on TV (CCCS, 1969, p. 9). During Christmas term 1968 Stuart Hall gave two presentations relating to women in the graduate seminars, one on ‘Methods in Cultural Analysis: A Study of Women’s Magazines’ and another on ‘Women’s Fictions’ (p. 15), meaning the short narratives printed in women’s magazines. This shows that Hall himself played a leading role in what he would later call the ‘benign project’, namely in introducing women’s topics to the Centre, a project the women at the Centre themselves were not ‘terribly interested in’, as Hall also mentions in his retrospective quoted above. The reports clearly show that in the beginning men were deciding on the agenda and it was some time before the women at the Centre started to question that initiative. The academic year 1968–9 clearly marked a watershed, as from then onwards women’s issues and eventually feminism were getting on the radar, albeit still under male supervision and male leadership. The fifth report mentions a new ‘Working Seminar’ under Stuart Hall’s leadership, doing ‘a common project’ on the analysis of women’s magazines.⁶ The description also mentions ‘a selection of literature on “the feminine mystique”’ (p. 19), which suggests that Betty Friedan’s second wave-feminism primer, The Feminine Mystique (1963), must have been on the reading list.

The sixth report (1969–71) showed a masculine backlash, although the number of female graduate students was on the rise.⁷ ‘Boys’ topics’ gained momentum as seminars were devoted to the US American Western and graduate students’ work dealt with football and cultural values, while Paul Willis⁸ worked on ‘The Motorbike Boys’, and Richard Dyer⁹ on ‘The Meaning of Tom Jones’ (CCCS, 1971, pp. 11, 18, 17). In this period a PhD on ‘The Language of Advertising and the Feminine Role’ was completed by Trevor Millum.¹⁰ According to its description it offered a ‘detailed micro-analysis of visual communication with a firm grasp of the wider implications of advertising’s presentation of an idealised image of women’ (p. 17).

This year also saw a new addition to the reading list, Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971), which was to become a very influential feminist statement from the political left. Mitchell later became famous for her book on feminism and psychoanalysis, but for our present purposes her early monograph is of interest. Mitchell’s early work had a focus on the silence about the condition of women in contemporary socialism. In 1966 she wrote an article for The New Left Review, with the title ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ (a play on Raymond Williams’s book The Long Revolution (1961)), which was reprinted in a reworked and extended version in Woman’s Estate. While Mitchell argues that Marxism provides insights into all forms of oppression and has a lot to offer as an epistemologically sound analysis of capitalist society, she also advocates the need of a feminist consciousness: ‘The size of the “absence” of women in socialist theory and practice is immense’ (Mitchell, 1971, p. 75). She stresses that the condition of women must be seen as ‘the product of several structures’, such as ‘production, reproduction’ (in Marxist terms) and ‘sexuality and the socialisation of children’ (p. 101). All these elements are, according to Mitchell, contingent and require close attention to contextual parameters, such as time, place, and so on, of the women’s situation to be analysed. Mitchell’s work became a major influence on the work of the women at the CCCS. The topic of women’s advertising and women’s magazines from a semiotic perspective, introduced by Hall and other men at the Centre, was still on the agenda, as can be seen from the annual reports, but from 1971 onwards the focus shifts to women’s suppression, either as working women or in the family, a topic that is also very prominent in the collection Women Take Issue (1978).

In 1973–4 Richard Hoggart resigned as Chair of English and left the Centre; the university decided that the CCCS should become independent within the Faculty of Arts with Stuart Hall as its new director. In the seventh report (1972–4) genuine feminist topics start to emerge: the report mentions ‘the study of the “culture” of the family’ as a new topic (CCCS, 1974, p. 15). Janice Winship, a graduate student who would later contribute an analysis of women’s magazines to Women Take Issue, is mentioned as a contributor to extramural work on women’s roles and family.¹¹

The next report (Eighth Report, 1974–6) is the longest ever, with fifty pages, including a 1976–77 supplement. This report shows that women and feminist issues had developed from being largely absent into a powerful presence. The report lists a new subgroup, called ‘Women’s Studies’ (CCCS, 1976, pp. 16, 25–26; CCCS, 1977, p. 6) with its own reading list, mainly containing contemporary feminist texts, like Sheila Rowbotham’s Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973) or John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) based on the BBC series of the same year. The report explicitly states: ‘NB: The group is open to men’ (CCCS, 1977, p. 6). Angela McRobbie¹² joined as graduate student in 1974, and Charlotte Brunsdon¹³ and Dorothy Hobson in 1975, who would both contribute substantially to the volume Women Take Issue. The eighth report also proudly claims that ‘many of our best applicants are women and in our recent intakes we have been able to strike nearly an equal balance in the sex ratio’ (CCCS, 1976, p. 2). The report for the first time runs a general section on ‘Living in Birmingham’, where ‘those of you with children’ are addressed and playgroups inside and outside university advertised (CCCS, 1977, p. 14).

The Women’s Studies group started work on the now well-known topic of ‘images of women as portrayed in newspapers, (ranging from women in “news” articles, through to women in cartoons to women as nudes) in magazines and on television’ (CCCS, 1976, p. 1). The group, however, also dealt with a second topic influenced by debates in the women’s movement of the time, namely housework, domestic labour and the family, claiming that ‘women’s feminine roles are products of both patriarchal and capitalist society’. It continues:

The group therefore decided to take our analysis to the family (specifically from 1945 onwards) as being the location in which the two spheres of class and patriarchy are constantly lived out in women’s daily existence, where constant overlapping and intermeshing of spheres is to be found. […] Since the main location of women, even if they take part in outside production, is always within the family, it could be that a study at this point could give the group the beginnings of an articulation of the relations of Class and Patriarchy which is so badly needed for women’s theory. (CCCS, 1976, p. 16)

The group eventually wanted to limit their analysis to women in the 1960s by means of conducting interviews with housewives or having a closer look at welfare legislation to see how the notion of ‘family’ surfaces within rules and regulations.

The ninth report (1977–8) announces the imminent publication of Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination, as a result of the work of the Women’s Studies Group to develop a ‘Marxist feminist theory together with empirical work on women’ (CCCS, Jan 1978, pp. 15, 22). The tenth report (1978–9), which was the last one under Hall’s directorship,¹⁴ mentions the importance of the publication of Women Take Issue in making the Centre’s work more widely known. The report also states that ‘Women Take Issue was […] a break-through in a larger and more important sense, in that it marked publicly the strong presence of work by women on the present position of women at the Centre’ (CCCS, December 1978, p. 4). This comment refers to the introduction of the volume, which makes clear that Women’s Studies will mean a challenge to established structures of learning and will come up with new objects of knowledge: ‘[…] working from the point of view of women reveals that there is a systematic absence of this viewpoint, and the presence of whole sets of assumptions about women (and, usually, their place in the family)’ (Bland, p. 9).

The 1978–9 report furthermore mentions a new study group, exclusively devoted to the issues of family and school and the new ‘race and politics’ group founded in reaction to a ‘growth in racist activities […] at a time when there appears to be a general ideological and political shift to the right’ (CCCS, December 1978, p. 8). The so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ (1978–9) was marked by extensive strikes, while the Conservative Party, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, was claiming in advertisements that ‘Labour isn’t working’. The Conservatives eventually won the May 1979 election and Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister of the UK. This extract from the 1978–9 report, describing the political situation of the late 1970s, shows striking similarities to the upwelling of conservative populism in the present day:

The question of Law and Order, the fears around sexual politics and break-up of the family, add to the fuel and is used by politicians and the media to support the institutionalised forms of racism that exist. The economic crisis has led to unemployment and a holding down of the real wage. This appears to be a classic model for the exploitation of fears and dissatisfaction by those who seek to provide ‘simple’ and ‘immediate’ solutions to the crisis. (CCCS, December 1978, p. 8)

In times of conservative backlash, lessons can be learned from the work of the women at the CCCS in general, but in particular from Stuart Hall’s memorable comment on the feminists. As I see it, some general issues arise from the ‘dawn-raid’, in the words of Stuart Hall, from the pretty abrupt change from an absence of women and feminism to the unruly presence of women at the Centre, to the ‘interruption’. To clarify why this ‘interruption’ might be of interest for us today I will utilise the help of two critics who commented on Hall’s feminist nightmare story, namely Charlotte Brunsdon, a thief in the night herself, and Homi Bhabha in his 2014 article.

Charlotte Brunsdon wrote in ‘A Thief in the Night’:

I see [Stuart’s account] as a contribution to a continuing project for […] social change. Stuart writes about the gap between intentions – to encourage feminist work in Cultural Studies – and the unpredictable consequences of the resulting challenges to the status quo. He tries to tell a story about the materiality and particularity of power – the way it is inscribed in reading lists and psyches, as well as theoretical paradigms. (Brunsdon, 1996, p. 278)

She continues:

[the] choice of verb [crapping on the table of cultural studies] proposes to both provoke and evoke the scandal of feminism in the 1970s – to remind a theoretically sophisticated 1990s audience that the second-wave women’s movement (with its many problems) was once potent in its disruptive challenge in the name of ‘woman’ – while also registering the sense of betrayal and rejection felt by those who understood themselves as sympathetic to this feminist project. (p. 279)

It goes without saying that the ideas that were then being negotiated in the CCCS are now commonly accepted; everyone working in cultural studies pays at least lip service to gender, race or class and the way this trinity intersects. What Stuart Hall’s emotionally powerful evocation of a moment in the history of a discipline makes obvious is, in the words of Brunsdon, the insistence ‘on the great difficulty of even minute changes in practice’ (p. 238). This awareness of a never-ending project, of a continuous struggle, with theoretical positions, of the ‘wrestling with angles’ as Stuart Hall used to call the work on theory, is the issue of interest for us today.

Particularly in reactionary times a heightened awareness is needed, which calls for a struggle with positions far away from easy solutions. The so-called ‘Grievance Studies Affair’ made academic headlines between 2017 and 2018. This project was initiated by a group of people (Peter Boghossian, James S. Lindsay¹⁵ and Helen Pluckrose) who advocate ‘a traditionally liberal approach to human rights which accepts shared humanity and individuality as it attempts to eradicate prejudice and discrimination’ (Pluckrose). This sounds like a promising project, but it comes with a twist. The article the quotation comes from gives clear-cut and unambiguous solutions of how to achieve this aim. Here is a passage:

Deeply culturally constructivist arguments are often made about gender in which even biological sex – the naming of a penis as a male sex organ or a vagina as a female one – is argued to be a cultural construct. This has the hallmarks of Butler, Foucault and Derrida which is very different to a liberal, rational, and scientific approach to sexuality and gender identity which seeks to end discrimination against LGBTQ and also to understand the biology of gender and sexuality. (Pluckrose)

The ‘solutions’, it is suggested, can be found in the so-called hard sciences, which neither need ‘to wrestle or struggle’ nor ‘to construct’.

To counter this pervasive argument let me finish with Homi Bhabha,¹⁶ who in his article on Stuart Hall for Critical Inquiry shares personal memories of Stuart Hall but also argues along with Hall for the importance of ‘the refusal of final closure’ which may ‘create the very space and time for […] new voices and emergent interests’. He continues, ‘such leading-edge moments [like the emergence of feminism at the Birmingham Centre in the 1970s] are memorable in retrospect, for revealing the dramatic imbrications of affect and analysis, of anxiety and theory’ (Bhabha, p. 7). At moments in times which seem messy and show ‘signs of indeterminacy’, he further contends that ‘solidarity “without guarantees” is deeply etched in the ethical imaginary of the best work in Cultural Studies, protecting it from the purism of identity politics’ (p. 10). Looking back at the early work of the feminists at the Centre teaches us that the real work lies not in easy answers, a route favoured by liberal humanists as well as by conservative politicians, but in the radical arguing of positions and in the continuous process of contesting, negotiating, even ‘wrestling’ and struggling. The CCCS women’s move from absence to presence serves as a model of how paradigm shifts can happen, as the space an absence offers, as Homi Bhabha would argue, makes room for something new. This example, however, also shows that such powerful changes are always accompanied by painful and prolonged negotiations, continuing struggle, and never by final and definite answers.