Too old for liberation? Older women’s experiences of feminism during the long 1970s

In 1979 the feminist magazine Spare Rib featured an appeal for letters to form the basis for an upcoming book which sought to explain the issues of feminism to a wider audience. They asked for women to send in letters they had written to their mothers attempting to ‘explain what feminism means and offers.’ Whilst the majority of women in the feminist movement were aged 21 to 40, the implication that older women were unconscious of and disconnected from the causes of women’s liberation was not entirely accurate. This paper explores the minority of older women who were involved in the feminist movement, as well as those who were channelling ideas of feminism through different causes, to expand understandings of the demographic of Women’s Liberation and explore the experiences of older women during the long 1970s.