A visit to Vancouver in Canada this week made me remember one of the basic but almost forgotten pillars of feminism – anti-hierarchical, collective working. And in remembering it, and seeing it in action, I have come full circle and learned to love it again.

Vancouver Rape Relief, founded in 1973, is the best example of collective work I have come across in my 35 years of feminist activism. The 20 members, who are a wide range of ages, ethnicities and class backgrounds, share responsibility for crisis work, running the support and education groups, financial and membership decisions, and the planning of feminist activities. They even have collective responsibility for deciding which allies can support the work of the organisation.

VRR must be doing something right. It has outlived all other direct service provision for women, and has women knocking on its door asking to be considered for the training programme that would enable them to become a collective member. VRR is a hotbed of radical politics, and is widely respected within the broader left, and within the women’s movement.

There was a total resistance to the cult of the individual

When I joined what was then the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1979, the leftist traditions on which it had been built still prevailed. Our groups were all collectives, their hierarchy being pro-capitalist and patriarchal. Having bosses and workers served to keep working-class, poorly educated, and black and minority ethnic women at the bottom of the ladder. Because feminism was for all women, went the mantra, we should be more concerned about the women in the basement than those cracking their carefully coiffured hair against the glass ceiling.

In many ways collective working was successful. Working-class women like me were afforded as much respect for informal skills as the women who were eminent professionals, and we recognised we could learn from each other.

But there were some hilarious moments. I recall a collective meeting about setting up a weekly telephone support service for lesbians. It was decided that each collective member would volunteer to take turns manning the phones at their own home, until we could raise the money to rent a space. One of the members did not have a telephone in her house, but insisted she was being discriminated against and “oppressed” by being left out of the rota.

There were other problems. Whenever the media wanted a quote from a feminist organisation, the collectives always missed out in favour of those with a hierarchical structure. All decisions had to be made by consensus, so if the journalist’s deadline was the next day, it was no use explaining that our next meeting was a week on Thursday.

The idea was that all work would be shared equally among the collective members. If you joined a Rape Crisis centre, for example, you could be answering the phone to a distressed woman who needed to disclose appalling sexual violence, cleaning the kitchen, or delivering leaflets.

Collective living was also encouraged. Unlike today, when most of us, gay or straight, seem to be railroaded into monogamous coupledom and marriage, back in the day we often lived in groups, bonded by our political activism and vision, raising each other’s children and sharing tasks and late-night discussions. There was a total resistance to the cult of the individual, and, until the Thatcher government declared war on society, no dog-eat-dog narcissism was tolerated.

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But this model was not well-known for praising the achievements of the individual, which disproportionately affected those of us not born with a sense of entitlement, sort of betraying the objective. Slowly the collective way of working petered out, and the movement became professionalised in line with non-feminist structures. We had to apply for funding, as we could no longer afford to work full-time voluntarily, which meant we were under pressure to keep the funders happy.

Feminist collectives are still around, albeit thin on the ground. Most can be found on the internet, which means that members do not have to endure the downside of such ways of working, such as sitting in endless meetings, unable to reach agreements, and taking days to produce one leaflet, because someone objected to the word “seminal”.

In these times of neoliberalism, working collectively could signal a new way forward. For the fractured left, it is increasingly obvious and important that we need to forge new alliances in order to defeat the march of uber-capitalism. We could perhaps all learn something from the good old days of the women’s movement.