Written by Lulu Shasha
The 1970 Oxford Conference: Four Demands for Liberation
27 February 1970. Five hundred women, packed shoulder to shoulder on the austere wooden benches of the Oxford Union’s debating hall. Some arrived with sleeping bags, others with babies in tow, for the first official National Women’s Liberation Conference. The energy was palpable, some of the most prominent women in Britain’s Left, frustrated by the male-dominated culture of socialist organising and its failure to confront the intersection of class and gender, claimed the Oxford Union’s debating chamber for themselves.
The four demands produced at the end of the conference were as follows:
- Equal pay for equal work,
- Equal education and equal opportunities,
- Free contraception and abortion on demand,
- Free 24-hour nurseries
These demands aimed to strike at what they identified as the core of women’s oppression, challenging the family’s role as a site of women’s subordination. At the time, women (cast as “natural” domestic carers) were expected to remain in the home, dependent on their husbands’ earnings, and so independently economically impoverished.
The conference highlighted how patriarchy and capitalism worked together: women’s unpaid domestic labour sustained men’s ability to participate as waged workers in the public sphere, reinforcing both male dominance and the wider economic system in which women were subjugated. Feminists argued that the family should no longer rest solely on women’s shoulders. Domestic responsibilities, they insisted, must be shared more equally; women, like men, should have financial independence, equal opportunities, and the freedom to participate fully in public life.
From Household Production to Economic Invisibility
Such gendered divisions between home and work, highlighted at the conference, have been extensively theorised. As it often goes, in pre-industrial societies, the household functioned simultaneously as a site of care and of production: families ran farms and small trades where women’s labour was indispensable and socially recognised. With industrialisation, however, production shifted into factories and wages became the dominant measure of value. Those excluded from waged labour (women) lost the social and economic recognition once afforded by household work. Domestic labour, though still fundamental to sustaining life, was recast as lying outside the sphere of “real” work: rendered economically invisible and naturalised as women’s duty.
In 1974 Silvia Federici pointedly remarked “not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character”. Now, her insight continues to resonate. The burden of care continues to fall most heavily on women in the caring economy – looking after elderly parents, Disabled relatives, or chronically ill children. Like housework, this labour remains structurally undervalued.
The Present Reality: Unequal Burdens and Economic Impact
Unpaid caring responsibilities fall disproportionately on women. The 2021 National Census found that working-age women do 1.5 fewer hours of paid work and 1.8 more hours of unpaid work per day than men. This responsibility for unpaid care has a direct impact on women’s economic well-being: research from across the UK shows that women are twice as likely than men to give up paid work to care, and are more likely to be pushed out of the labour market due to those caring responsibilities.
As Joeli Brearley, the founder of Growth Spurt, and online back-to-work scheme for parents has plainly put it “starting a family has a disproportionately negative impact on women’s earnings”.
The Persistent Gap: Unmet Demands After Five Decades
The gesture made in 1970, and those four very basic requests have clearly not been met today. How can women demand equal pay for equal work, when the opportunity to work is far from equal (demand number 3)? Perhaps heightening the lack of equal opportunity to work is the gender pay gap (demand number 1).
In April 2024, the gender pay gap stood at 7% for full-time employees, creating situations where it seems most economical in heterosexual families for the father (the main earner) to continue work, and the mother to enter unpaid caring responsibilities. Moreover, autonomy over women’s own bodies is not simple, and 24-hour nurseries for women who most need it are not adequate or easy to come by.
What the women of the 1970s conference were really asking was that society, as a whole, take some responsibility for the next generation of children and workers.
As Bearley had further highlighted, we live in a system where the “outdated parental leave system reinforces gendered expectations” as fathers are discouraged from taking extended periods of time off work, and so return quickly, whilst mothers are encouraged and expected to take extended time off. “This not only entrenches the idea that caregiving is ‘women’s work’, but also means men’s careers continue to progress while women’s stall.”
The Hidden Value: Care as Economic Foundation
As history has always had it, this work is absolutely fundamental to creating the conditions for the economy (inherently patriarchal) to be propped up on. In 2021 the value of unpaid care was estimated to be £162 billion. If unpaid carers stopped caring, it would take 4 million paid carers to replace the care they give. The backbone of the UK economy, it seems, is unpaid — and disproportionately female.
The Double-Think of Care: From Vilification to Mythologisation
Yet despite this, an extraordinary double-think has persisted. Women carers have been alternately vilified or mythologised in order to justify the lack of adequate support.
In the 1970s and 1980s, tropes such as “breeding for benefits” cast single mothers in need of child support as parasites on the state. By the 1990s, the opposite illusion emerged: the idea that women could “have it all“. This narrative suggested that women could — and should — juggle full careers, perfect family lives, and personal fulfilment without any structural change or collective support. Both narratives are corrosive, and both make it harder for women to secure real, stigma-free help.
Today’s Demands: The Continuing Fight for Recognition
Where the women of jaded conviction towards an inequitable system once stood in the Oxford debating hall — their coats draped over benches and children shifting restlessly on their laps — they demanded nurseries, equal pay, equal opportunities, and, crucially, recognition of their labour as part of the economy. Today’s demands disappointedly are not far removed.
On Tuesday 23 September 2025, Bristol Women’s Voice launches a new report drawing on the experiences and recommendations of unpaid carers, calling for greater financial support — including compensation for lost pension contributions and fairer access to benefits — alongside genuine employment flexibility for those carrying the double burden of paid and unpaid work. Then as now, feminists argued that domestic labour must be valued, not dismissed as something “natural” to women. That argument has not lost its urgency. Care, in all its forms, must be recognised as the essential labour it is — and women must not be left to shoulder it alone.
For more information about the upcoming report, please email us on info@bristolwomensvoice.org.uk .