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This article uses a spatial framework to explore socialist and feminist activism by mixed sex revolutionary organisation Big Flame (1970–1984). It focuses on a Big Flame ‘base group’ embedded within the working class community of Kirkby, Merseyside. It adds to the growing historiography on women-centred community-based organising to situate Big Flame amongst the groups across Europe engaging in activism around spaces for new types of politics. Activists used ‘the second front’ to engage with feminist debates and challenge gendered discourses. These initiatives, as well as having a socio-psychological impact on the activists themselves also formed part of what was to be the ‘personal and collective liberation’ which Gerd-Rainer Horn outlined as a key legacy of 1968. This article will suggest that Big Flame’s prioritisation of feminism and experience enabled them to blur the boundaries between the private, public, social and intimate everyday experience. The use of oral history interviews sheds light on the inner world of activists’ subjective experience as they navigated the complexities of the discursively connected structures of gender and class. Women in Big Flame documented their own autonomous feminist experience and as Big Flame made the personal political for working-class women on the estates, these expressions made their unseen activism as women visible.

‘Notes on a Community Struggle’ Big Flame, the Kirkby rent strike and the ‘mass struggle of housewives’