The Second Wave: The National Joint Committee

Abstract

From the 1960s, women in the Labour Party continued their traditional campaigns on behalf of working people, bringing to their arguments a new emphasis on the need to fundamentally change attitudes about women’s place in social, political and economic life. They were both influential in bringing issues to the fore and themselves influenced by what came to be called ‘second wave’ feminism. The term second wave (a phenomenon following the first, suffrage-centred wave) illustrates the opinion, once commonly held, that the appearance of a sizeable feminist movement at this time was a sudden development. It is now more generally accepted that the continuity of feminism was underrated and that the second wave feminist movement was a natural and relatively gradual development from currents of feminist thought throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, the SJC, now renamed the National Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organizations (NJC), was never isolated from these social trends, and as has been shown: ‘By the late 1970s, most of the demands adopted by the inaugural women’s liberation movement conference meeting at Oxford in 1970 … had found their way into Labour’s policy discussions’.¹