"It would be a tragedy if the still embryonic Women's Liberation Movement in this country sank without trace into the amniotic fluid of niceness, but already I detect some signs. The women directly concerned with organising the March 6 demo, though they point with pride to the massive WL movement in the US seem not to have learned very much from the performance of their American sisters. They bend over backwards to be fair. ('We must be very careful not to assume that if a woman is refused a job it is sexual discrimination' — why? It's not our job to worry about fairness.) They talk too much about wanting to be taken seriously; they say too often how much they deprecate extremes and shudder with refined horror at bra-burnings, and at SCUM and WITCH. Not at at the image we want, they say, metaphorically crooking their little fingers and adjusting their petal hats. We don't want to go to jail, or worse, be laughed at. The tendency among these ladies is to sneer at the Germaine Greers of the movement and, indeed, it is easy enough to carp at sweeping genralisations and lack of careful factual research. But anger, neurosis, insights , obsession and extremism is where it is at and women will have lost the battle before it has begun if they reject all this and concentrate their energies only on concrete injustice. Reforms like equal pay, equal job opportunities, free contraception, better nursery schools, have needed implementation as long as I can remember, and armies of hard-working, dedicated women have been pushing them forward as long as I can remember, too, and a great deal longer. The only new ingredient Women's Lib had to offer was the intellectual recognition of an imprisoned psyche, and the realisation that when that inner battle is fought and won, concrete injustices crumble at the roots. And that is not done by being nice. American liberationists did not surge into life thinking of the other chap's point of view or making constant efforts to be fair, moderate, cool and ladylike. They succeeded by being prejudiced, unfair, immoderate, uncool and devastatingly unladylike and they came up with the only symbolic image of the movement so far (em) bra-burning. A small and risible thing, perhaps, but their own."