My Life Story page 3   Picture on the left: Toivo, newborn, in Bristol 1961 with his parents Stevan and Monica.

When I had a one woman show in 1967 in Stockholm I found that my comrades in the Vietnam committee disapproved of the fact that I explored my sexuality as a woman in my paintings, only paintings of protest against the war were acceptable to them. I was hurt and disappointed and left soon after to go back to Bristol as my young son missed his older brother and his father. I had been abandoned by my lover and was unhappy.

In the hot summer of 1968 I found myself with my son in New York and up in New York state where I had a job as an arts and crafts counselor in a camp run by Jewish civil rights workers for deprived children from the inner city. There were children there from the ages of 8 to 18, African Americans and Puerto Ricans mixed in with Jewish, Italian, Irish children who came from better off families. A strange and dangerous mixture. Racism was rampant and difficult to tackle, as "black is beautiful" was only just becoming a concept to take seriously. There was warfare! The Black Panthers marched that summer.

I was rescued by New York anarchists who I had contacted and spent time staying with Murray and Bea Bookchin on the tenth floor of a skyscraper near the Bowery. I met many revolutionaries such as Weathermen, street fighting anarchists etc. while staying there. I just missed the very first militant feminist action - in protest against the Miss World competition at Atlantic city, but met some of the women soon after. Women were angered by the fact that in all the so-called revolutionary movements of the 60s women were still expected to make the tea and look after the children. The "Sexual Liberation" of hippiedom was also still on men's terms. I had found in the Vietnam groups in Stockholm that I couldn't even begin to speak of what the natural homebirth in 1961 had meant for me. May 1968 was the near revolution in France led by anarchist Situationists. I was involved with the anarchist movement first in Britain and then in Sweden where I worked with Provie/Provos in Stockholm and in Gothenburg. I was well aware though of the sexism of anarchist men. There were a few exceptions. Over the New Year of 1967 I took part with some Swedish comrades in an international Anarchist conference in Milano and was arrested there together with some Dutch Provos (from "provoke") after a demonstration at Piazza Duomo (cathedral square) and was deported from Italy. When the Maoists who dominated the Vietnam committee discovered that I saw myself as an Anarcha-feminist I was just about expelled. It was in 1968 also that I painted "God giving birth". I had started it before I went to USA and finished it when I came back. In 1969 my father died from cancer and I married Andrew Jubb, a brilliant but alcoholic pianist and composer who was of a Jewish family and grew up in Africa, in Zambia, which he loved  passionately. My life got very complicated as I got pregnant by Cliff Jackson my long term but occasional lover, in Stockholm and gave birth to my mixed race son Leify while at the same time I had recently married Andy. He, however, fell totally  in love with the child and all was well. A few of us founded Bristol Women's Liberation group that same year and a first women's conference took place in 1970 at Ruskin College. We had originally formed to support women at a Ford factory who went on strike for equal pay, unheard of at the time. Our one women's group expanded to many over the years and took in many grass roots campaigns and consciousness raising groups. In 1970 I took part with some paintings in an arts council sponsored arts festival in St Ives where "God giving birth" and some other of my paintings were censured and not allowed to be shown anywhere in the town. It caused a scandal and I was traumatised as I was breastfeeding at the time and felt vulnerable. I was shocked also that the artists, like Barbara Hepworth, in St Ives made no protest nor did they give me any support at all. I decided that if I was to exhibit I wanted to do so with a group of women artists so I couldn't be targeted or hunted as a witch on my own. I wrote a letter, which was published in one of the first women's newsletters of the time, asking for women to join me. We had a first collective show in 1971 of ten feminist artists at Woodstock gallery in London. Amongst the artists was Liz Moore who recently had returned from New York where she had been part of a women artists group. We became lifelong friends. Another artist, Anne, Berg, had contacted me from Manchester and together we wrote a "Feminist arts manifesto". I also produced some newsletters called "Towards a feminist revolutionary art", on a gestetmer and stencils. Our aim now was to have major show of feminist art somewhere in London. I stayed a week in London, supported by my friend John Sharkey (author of "Celtic Mysteries" and former manager of the ICA gallery) and visited galleries, the Arts Council etc. Everywhere I was met with a total lack of understanding of why we wanted a women's only exhibition and it took years, until 1973, before our dream came true. We were then at last offered a show by Peter Carey who managed the great hall/exhibition space at Swiss Cottage Library in Camden Town. In the meanwhile I had had an exhibition of my paintings including "God giving birth", in 1969 I think, at the experimental and hip Arts Lab in Drury Lane before it was shut down. Its director then was the American, Jim Haynes. We called our exhibition "5 women artists - Images of Womanpower" and the five of us were Liz Moore, Anne Berg, Beverly Skinner, myself and (Canadian) Roslyn Smythe. Peter Carey, for reasons of his own, placed the 6 feet tall "God giving birth" where it faced everyone coming into the library. Inevitably scandal broke out as the Pornography squad of Scotland Yard and the Public Prosecutor were called to the library by one of its employees, a fundamentalist Christian. The "Festival of Light" was active at the time. The complaint was that my painting was "obscene and blasphemous". I wasn't taken to court but in the meantime "God giving birth" was reproduced in many newspapers and as a result the exhibition was visited by great crowds of people. It was scary though and I thought that my paintings would be destroyed and the exhibition had to be guarded day and night. What Christians found offensive about my painting wasn't just that "God" is giving birth but also that She is an African woman. Africans and Indian Hindus who saw the exhibition all said that there are images of the Goddess giving birth in their cultures, but they were not known to me at the time. The painting had been inspired by my own experience of natural birth. It was strange that Picasso died on the first day of our show and my beloved Siri Derkert in Sweden on the last day!

 I had said for years that I experienced that ancient women were communicating with me and now, during this high state of fear and tension during our "Womanpower" show in London, I had a kind of Zen experience when I "knew" that past, present and future co-exist and that therefore it is entirely possible for ancient women to reach us now from another time/space.

 "God giving birth" was reproduced in a Swedish daily paper and as a result I was visited by a Swedish feminist artist, Anna Sjodahl, who invited me to exhibit with her in the grand state funded arts hall in Lund in south of Sweden. After many difficulties and complications, not least to do with money and how to get 30 large paintings on hardboard, to Sweden, the exhibition finally happened. We called it "Women's lives" and it was magnificent. I experienced though that women artists at the time received far less economic and other support than male artists. I could also tell horror stories about traveling with a small child, I had taken my son, Leify, then four years old with me, during the exhibition and being put up by strangers. We were lucky though that 1970-80 was the UN "Decade of women". Our exhibition was given priority because of this and it traveled to Norway and to Finland as well as to several venues in Sweden during a period of two years. In 1975 it was included in a huge exhibition called "Womenfolk" (Kvinn-folk) shown at the house of Culture in Stockholm. It showed 7 women's exhibitions in one and occupied the whole of the vast fourth floor gallery space. In the meantime I was involved in the Gay women's group in Bristol and some paintings, like the six feet tall "The Lovers'' came out of this period. I also worked with the budding Matriarchy movement that was started in London by women such as Asphodel (Pauline) Long. In 1975 I was invited to give a talk about the Goddess at a WEA class in Birmingham, run by Keith Paton of Alternative Socialism. Since I wasn't sure what I did think I spent a month, very inspired, looking through the vast notes I had accumulated from many years of reading and wrote 30 packed A3 pages. I didn't know at the time what a paragraph was and it came out like a "stream of consciousness". No way could I go through all that material during a short class. I did read a bit and afterwards was asked by several of the women if they could type out the article to be run off on stencils so they could all have a copy to read. They ran off 500 ex. and that was the beginning of "The Great cosmic Mother" book! I took part in, and exhibited my paintings, at a number of National Women Liberation conferences such as at Acton Town Hall in 1972 and took part in the "Sistershow" performed in Bristol. In 1975 there was a Womanspirit conference at Wick court outside of Bristol organised by the Student Christian movement which was radical at the time. I was invited as one of its main speakers although I am  not a Christian. I extended the Cosmic Mother pamphlet in time for the conference and gave a talk abut the Goddess as sacred Serpent which shocked many women there, especially the brilliant Mary Condren, who is an Irish Catholic and had been a nun when still a child. She had been the first speaker and we clashed but then became friends.

Years later Mary went to USA, studied under Mary Daly and wrote a scathing criticism of the misogyny of the Catholic Church in a book called "The Serpent and the Goddess".