Books

Sweet Freedom relates the history of the women's movement as one of the most far-reaching political developments of our time. examining its success and its failures, the authors chart the revolution that has penetrated every aspect of our economy and culture, our language and our consciousness, and the forces of reaction ranged against it. Enthusiastically received as the first - and still the only - work of its kind, Sweet Freedom has now been extensively revised and updated. In trying to answer the question 'where is the women's movement now?', the authors have provided an account of the dramatic developments of the 1980s. These include Greenham Common and the peace movement; the action of the miners' wives strike during the strike of 1984-5; the growth of the Black women's movement; new controversies over reproductive rights; the campaign against sexual harassment; and the pioneering work of the women's committees in the metropolitan and local authorities. Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell have played an active role in the women's movement since its early days, and in this personal account of its progress they show how far women have advanced and what gains remain to be made. '...enormous value as an "interim report" on the activities and impact of the twentieth century's second feminist movement.' Ann Oakley. 'An admirable work, a very sensible, shrewd, fair statement of the economic problem and its social background.' Mary Midgley, New Society  ' A well-written, hard hitting and closely argued work.' Philippa Toomey The Times  ISBN 0-631-14957-0  ISBN 0-631-14958-9 (pbk) Available from amazon.co.uk
A brilliant expose of poverty and politics in Britain today. In 1937 George Orwell published The Road To Wigan Pier, an account of his famous 'urban ride' among the people and places of Great Depression. Fifty years later we are living through a second Great Depression, and this time the journey north has been made by women - like Orwell a journalist and a socialist, but, unlike him, working class and a feminist. Wigan Pier Revisited is a devastating record of what Beatrix Campbell saw and heard in towns and cities ravaged by poverty and unemployment. She talks to young mothers on the dole, to miners and their families, to school leavers, battered wives, factory workers, redundant workers, discovers what work, home, family, politics and dignity mean for working-class people today. Out of this comes her passionate plea for genuine socialism, one informed by feminism, drawing its strength from the grass roots and responding to people's real needs.  ISBN 0-86068-417-2 (pbk) Available from amazon.co.uk
When suspected sexual abuse was diagnosed in a total of 165 girls and boys by paediatricians in Cleveland, Britain was confronted with a crisis of vast proportions. The government's response was to organise a judicial inquiry not an inquiry into the phenomena, but the response to it. The crucial questions - were these children abused and importantly, how in the future can we identify and protect endangered children - were obliterated by professional conflicts and political panic. The real questions were not part of the brief. A decade later, in this fully revised edition, Beatrix Campbell asks if we were angry with the wrong people, why were the children's advocates the target of our anger? Why, even though the police were criticised, was no one disciplined? She reveals undisclosed documents written after the report which indicate what was only coded at the time, that the government and the health authorities believed that the doctors were probably right. Why wasn't that addressed then - and after? That is the scandal and tragedy of Cleveland.   'Riveting... Campbell's account is intellectually fascinating and the only one I've seen which presents dispassionately the conflicting outlooks of the Cleveland participants... her natural honesty shines like a star' Susan Crosland, Literary Review ISBN 1-86049-284-3 (pbk) Available from amazon.co.uk
What is Britain becoming? Four successive Conservative governments, a boom and two recessions have wrought seismic shifts in British social and political life. Beatrix Campbell has looked at the landscape of late twentieth-century Britain through the window of the 1991 riots and uncovered a crisis of gender and generation, policing and politics. The explosion of lawless masculinity in cities as disparate as Oxford, Cardiff and Tyneside cannot be explained away in conventional race riot stereotypes. The target was, as much as anything the community itself. How do the firebombing and running fights relate to our new patterns of work, crime, consumerism, welfare, urban space and personal relationships? In her conversations with joyriders, police officers, community activists and 'ordinary' citizens, Beatrix Campbell has probed the new forms of offending, defending and sending. This compelling and uniquely researched enquiery brings feminist analysis to bear on the history made and lived in our cities. Beatrix Campbell has exposed the personal and political at street level and written a benchmark book for this era. ISBN 0-413-45411-8 (pbk) Available from amazon.co.uk
In this powerful, incisive book, acclaimed political  writer and thinker, Beatrix Campbell, explores the life and death of Diana, Princess of Wales, providing the first feminist analysis of the role Diana played. Diana's only qualifications for her arranged marriage were her body, her face, her fertility, and her virginity, and the world assumed public ownership of her as it followed and assessed her every move; never before had a young woman been subject to such scrutiny. Life under surveillance from the palace and the press was a paradox - Diana gained a simultaneously powerless and extraordinarily powerful position. Campbell demonstrates how Diana used her royal status and high public profile to promote radical causes with which she identified, including campaigns on such issues as AIDS, eating disorders, battered and dying women and children, and finally landmines. But most important  - and unprecedented in this century - she exposed the coldness and cruelty of the Royal Family. She invited the media into her life; talked about the pain she had endured and called the future King to account .In doing so, Campbell argues, she detonated the 'magic' and 'myths' of the royal  family. It was sexual politics, above all, that ignited a new wave of Republican feeling. Campbell also explores how Diana aroused the enmity of the establishment, including a media that was largely hostile on the grounds that Diana should not have the right to publicity when she wanted publicity, and privacy when she wanted privacy. Diana died, Campbell argues, hounded by a posse of men who refused her the right to say yes when she meant yes and no when she meant no. But Diana was mourned by millions of women; women who identified with Diana's life and who, consciously or subconsciously, understood the messages of her death.     ISBN 0-7043-4585-4 (pbk) Available from amazon.co.uk