In the 1960s, when Salli was in her forties, she gathered with friends in London every now and then to discuss feminism. Questions about women’s right were her life. At first the meetings was just pleasuring and with friends. With every meeting someone brought someone more and soon they weren’t just a couple of friend any more. Sometimes they met every month and sometimes twice a year, but the engagement for the women’s liberation was only growing. During the 1970s, she organized annual conferences in different cities around the country. Over the years, a number of demands were formulated and during the 1978 Birmingham Women’s Liberation Conference, seven demands were agreed:
- equal pay for equal work;
2. equal education and job opportunities;
3. free contraception and abortion on demand;
4. free 24-hour community-controlled childcare;
5. legal and financial independence for women;
6. an end to discrimination against lesbians;
7. freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of male violence.[1]
During this time she, and many with her, was seeing technology as a potential tool for liberation. The time went by and opinions were changing. By the 1980s, this had given way to a more pessimistic view that technology is an instrument for patriarchal control[2] but Salli never doubted. Of course she had a critical view on it and saw both positive and negative aspects on it, but she always believed in its good.
The time kept on going and the optimism and pessimism went up and down in the society within all questions that Salli cared about. When she was 75 years old she held a lecture that she called WISE Choices? Understanding occupational decision making in a climate of equal opportunities for women in science and technology[3]. During this lecture she said that we have been here before. The problem with such programmes, then and now, is that they continue to locate the problem in girls and women and not in how work is organised nor in how teaching and training are conducted[4]. She talked for one and a half hour with a nervous and old voice, but she ended strong with the words “the point is to both understand and change the world[5]”.
elsa jannborg
[1] Sally Wyatt, ‘Feminism, Technology and the Information Society: Learning from the Past, Imagining the Future’ in Information, Communication & Society, 2008, Vol.11(1), p.115
[2] Ibid. p. 112
[3] Henwood, F. (1996) ‘WISE Choices? Understanding occupational decision making in a climate of equal opportunities for women in science and technology’, Gender and Education, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 199 –214.
[4] Sally Wyatt, Feminism, Technology and the Information Society: Learning from the Past, Imagining the Future p. 120
[5] Ibid. p. 123
archandphil 
November 26, 2014 at 9:55 am
I really like how you take the text and put it into a different context. In that way also explaining its core meaning:)