• The SDP (Social Democratic Party) was formed, with Shirley Williams one of the four founding members

• The first London Marathon was held

• Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married

• Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest

• Brideshead Revisited was a TV hit

• Cats opened in London’s West End

• Susan Brown was the first female cox in the Oxford-Cambridge boat race – and her team won

• There were riots in Brixton and Toxteth, fuelled by social and racial discord. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher authorised the use of rubber bullets, water cannon and armoured vehicles against protestors.

• Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin was published in America

And the Greenham Common Peace Camp was established to protest the siting of American nuclear weapons on UK soil. Leonie Barratt and Veronica Moon, commissioned by a national newspaper, went to report on it.

18 October 1981

18 October 1981

Leonie

‘There it is,’ Vee says, unnecessarily. Leonie isn’t blind. Against the grey-brown late autumn trees, the squared-off cement of the air base, the protest site is bright with colour and sound, banners and purpose. You could miss it like you could miss a circus. ‘Do you want me to drop you here?’

When Vee proposed this job, she was half cautious and half-up herself, all ‘It’s my turn to help you out, now’. So Leonie had been half minded to tell her to stuff it, making like she’s a sister when she’s only out for herself. But she could use the work, and if she’s going to keep thinking, keep the ideas coming, she needs to be out there in the world, seeing what’s going wrong. She’s been writing something about motherhood and she knows it’s good, but if the world can’t understand that women need to escape male expectation and let their bodies be, there’s no way they are going to buy her ideas about why making mothering sacred is just another way of keeping women under control and out of the way. Friedan tried with The Feminine Mystique, so did Marilyn French with The Woman’s Room, and look what impact that’s had. Sod all. A lot of women talk like feminism has changed the direction of their lives, but then they meet a man with a better car than theirs, and they have a baby, and everything they used to believe comes out with the fucking placenta.