British Women

Protest

New York Times Service

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LONDON A growing number of British women are loudly complaining. They don't like how women are treated.

Not since the turbulent years before World War I, when an English suffragette, Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst, launched a civil disobedience campaign and later when her youngest daughter, Sylvia, denounced marriage and defended unmarried mothers, has Britain felt so many vibrations coming from women who want change.

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A new group of militant British nurses is protesting often, and furiously, against their exploitation. Women in factories are demanding equal pay with men. Artists, writers and students suddenly saying women are oppressed. And Vanessa Redgrave, the actress, has stirred up the feminist movement-perhaps in a dvertently-by announcing that she does not intend to marry Franco Nero, the Italian actor. He is the father of the child she is expecting in September. HILARY RAWLINGS, a 25-year-old-student who

lives in a communal house in London, is a member of the National Liberation Workshop. Its aim is to organize women into a political force that it hopes will at least dent a society where, in their opinion, women are regarded only as sexual objects or as submissive, second-rate hum an beings.

A pretty girl with long reddish hair and large brown eyes untouched by mascara, Miss Rawlings considers the exploitation of women's bodies in advertisements to sell everything from shaving cream to cigars to underwear is part of a vast male conspiracy to keep women inferior.

The techniques of a similar American feminist movement, witch (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell)-which is campaigning more overtly-is admired by Miss Rawlings and her support-

ers.

"In this country-oh. it's an old threatening trickyour sex is attacked because you are demanding basic civil rights." Miss Rawlings said, “to be called a suffragette-to many people, it means being a lesbi-

an.

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The oppression of women was the theme of a play this spring in London's Little Experimental Arts Laboratory which gave its author,

Jane Arden, a certain notoriety here. She says it is the theme of her life, too. The cast in the play stripped naked before the audience but this not surprisingly, didn't arouse as much attention as Miss Arden's fierce convictions.