This project had all come about because of a late-night conversation with Leonie and Bea, when they’d been talking about how the world was, or wasn’t, changing. Neither Leonie nor Bea were sanguine. They were worried about schisms in the sisterhood, and in the never-ending impossibility of getting the patriarchy to stay dismantled, when they did manage change.

But Vee felt – feels – differently. She sees herself as an example of change as it’s happening – a woman in a man’s world, and she might not exactly be accepted in all quarters, but she’s here. Vee looks back at that year at the Colchester Echo now and can’t believe what she put up with.

Look at her now. Look at the world.

Women are rising up. They are shouting for equality – real equality, no more being underpaid or struggling into ridiculous clothes or feeling as though getting married is anything other than an outdated patriarchal notion that nobody needs. Equality, true equality is coming. It’s in the legislation, it’s in the literature, it’s in Spare Rib and the flares and ponchos that feel like freedom. It’s in the air at the Women’s Liberation Front meetings, where more and more sisters come, with more and more stories of what they are protesting, what they are refusing to put up with. It’s thrilling, and too many people are missing it.

Leonie and Bea had been sceptical of her view. They still see Vee as a junior, beginner feminist, a little sister. Vee had cited the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Opportunities Commission, but Leonie and Bea had looked at each other, smiled, and then explained, rather too patiently, that it wasn’t enough; that it might even stop the sisters from rising up the way they should because they think equal rights for women is all taken care of.

But Vee had known she is better qualified because she’s closer to reality than her privately educated, clever friends. So she had set out to change their perspective with photographs. And the more photographs she took, the more she stopped thinking about making an argument against what Leonie and Bea thought. They would always run rings around her, intellectually. But she could show what she meant. She could track change, show the broadness of women’s lives, the scope of them, their power.