A young woman sits in a waiting room, reading. The book – Eric Hobsbawm’s Labouring Men – prompts the obvious question: ‘What about the women?’ And we soon see. They’re apparently nowhere. She’s called and sits on an isolated chair facing half-a-dozen middle-aged men comfortably secure behind a line of tables. Sally is a candidate to study history at London University and some of the panel have already pencilled in marks for her looks. They press her on her background. She has no A-levels, only a diploma from Ruskin, the trades union-sponsored college in Oxford, and she’s a single mum. But she’s cool, focused, and articulate – and gets in.
She studies hard, and keeps up her activism. At the first women’s liberation conference at Ruskin, she organizes women cleaners; with a bunch of arty anarchists, she decides to attack, with paint and flour-bombs the Miss World contest, which, in 1970 attracted the world’s largest TV audience.
