December 10, 2025

The history and importance of Reclaim the Night

Maise Riley details the origins of Reclaim the Night, why it was important then, and why it continues to be important today

‘Reclaim the Night’ is a protest tactic that has been used internationally by feminists to challenge inaction to violence against women and girls. Within Britain, Reclaim the Night is often associated with Leeds and Peter Sutcliffe, The Yorkshire Ripper, after the police advised women to stay off the streets at night to avoid violence. This article aims to introduce the origins of the march, the women’s liberation movement and the history of it in the UK.

The Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain developed towards the end of the 1960s as a decentralised movement of different women with the goal of radically transforming the status of women in British society. The movement was coordinated through the annual National Women’s Liberation Conference, held from 1970, which developed their strategy and demands, including:

Equal Pay – the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970 but didn’t come into effect until December 1975.
Equal education and job opportunities
Free contraception and abortion on demand
Free 24-hour nurseries
Legal and financial independence for all women – Women were entirely dependent on their husbands and were not legally independent. If a woman presented at social services as homeless because she was escaping sexual violence, she was not considered homeless as she had one to go back to and could not claim welfare support.
The right to a self-defined sexuality – there was a pressure on women to start and maintain a nuclear family, if women left the relationship because they were lesbians, this was used against mothers to block them from seeing their children.
Freedom from violence and sexual coercion regardless of marital status – Marital rape and other abuse was not recognized if it occurred within the home.

Initially second wave feminism did not identify class struggle as a key area that their oppression was linked to, but this shifted as women engaged more with organising their workplaces and socialist/ marxist feminist understandings of women’s oppression. There were criticisms of many left parties for failing to properly recognise women in their analyses of class society. Within the CPGB, the Women’s Department engaged in trade union campaigns, produced the LINK journal and crucially pushed the party to engage further with women’s liberation as vital to socialist revolution.

Feminists in Britain were well organised at the grassroots and had a strong network of different groups, keeping in-touch through different newsletters, magazines and conferences. They organised services in their community such as creches, provided sexual health advice and community-ran shelters for women fleeing domestic violence and rape.

The root of Reclaim the Night goes back to ‘The International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women’ conference held in Brussels, on International Women’s Day 1976. The tribunal focused on publicising the deep-set violence and oppression women across the world undergo at the hands of men. This ranges from domestic violence, rape, femicide and medical crimes such as forced sterilisation. 2000 women attended the tribunal and were horrified at the snapshot of violence against women and girls the various testimonies revealed.

From England testimony was heard focusing on forced motherhood, the treatment of lesbians and the oppression of immigrant women and their efforts to unionise and demand better wages (see Imperial Typewriters Dispute, Leicester 1974 and the Grunswick Strike, Willesden 1976).

Importantly, the tribunal was not focused on shocking attendees with a grisly gallery of brutality and leaving them apathetic to feeling like fighting for change is possible. As part of the discussion, identifying solutions to the different manifestations of male violence was vitally important and as a result of the tribunal many feminists started campaigns for women’s refuges, national strikes for women and one group of Dutch feminists joined the campaign to release Yvonne Wanrow, in America.

Bringing together so many women was deeply empowering and strengthened international solidarity amongst feminist women across the world. At the end of the conference, strengthened by sisterhood and outraged at what they had been through, attendees held a candlelit march through Brussels to express their fury and defiance to male violence. This inaugurated the tactic as a way to take back space and demonstrate that women should not have to stay at home and avoid going out at night to avoid being victims (and it’s important to note that many are victims of violence at home as well).

Attendees returned home and brought the experience of taking to the streets for a night-time protest with them, which inspired marches across Belgium, Italy and Germany with a synchronised Reclaim the Night march held across West Germany 30^th April 1977 to change the narrative around Walpurgisnacht, a night where it had become tradition for men to go out and harass women.

In Britain, the Women’s Liberation Movement magazines and newsletters played a crucial role in spreading the word of the marches. Spare Rib reported on the marches in Germany after picking it up from their publications.

The idea of holding a march was suggested by Sandra McNeil, a London-based WLM member at the ‘Towards a Radical Feminist Theory of Revolution’ conference in Edinburgh, after seeing it in Spare Rib. It wasn’t initially picked up on as an effective tactic that could be used by the movement, but some of the Edinburgh based feminists in attendance are reported to have held their first Reclaim the Night march in the Meadows parkland shortly after the conference.

Members of The Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group brought the idea back to their group and decided to try and coordinate a national march. At the time Peter Sutcliffe (or the Yorkshire Ripper) had not yet been caught by the police. It took the police half a decade to catch Sutcliffe, who was free to commit violence across Yorkshire between 1975-80.

Women were given the advice of ‘don’t go out alone and don’t go out late’ as their only response to the violence, effectively imposing a curfew. This angered feminists, who sought to respond because women should not need to restrict their freedom to stay safe. By the time of the first march in Leeds, November 1977, Sutcliffe had already claimed the lives of Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne McDonald and Jean Jordan. The police considered the murders a low priority as some of them worked as prostitutes and therefore ‘deserved it’, until Jayne McDonald was murdered, aged only 16.

Feminists worked with the Chapeltown Women’s Liberation Group and the WIRES Collective, a group that organised the writing, printing and circulation of the WIRES newsletter for the movement. A notice was put in WIRES by the Leeds feminists for a Reclaim the Night march on the 12^th November 1977 inviting women over Britain to join them as well. The newsletter was available on subscription with over 1000 copies being circulated to women’s liberation centres and groups around the country. Through WIRES, organisers of marches in other cities were updated on the development of the plan for Reclaim the Night.

The women in Leeds purchased flaming garden torches, made badges and banners, printed leaflets and planned two marches on either side of the city, in Chapeltown and Headingley, that met in City Square.

The march started late in the evening as this is when women felt particularly unsafe at night. Leeds City Centre was not built up in the same way then as it is now so the women knew they could hold a rally and make speeches in City Square.

The two routes were chosen for a reason. In Chapeltown the route highlighted where some of Sutcliffe’s victims had been found; 30-40 women joined the march from the Chapeltown Community Centre. Headingley was chosen as the other route as this was a dense area, home to the student population, and similar numbers joined them.

One participant of the Chapeltown route gave the following testimony:

‘As we passed the Eagle the men were just coming out. Closing time. And they saw a bunch of women walking along. And started towards us going, “Women get out of here!”  We advanced on them with our flaming torches. And our slogans. And they shrank back. We were shouting the slogans which are still shouted today on Reclaim the Night marches: “However we dress, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no!”; “Women Unite, Reclaim the Night!”’

Taking to the streets was an incredibly empowering experience, and made them realise they could and should demand more. Women in Leeds had particular reason to want to take to the streets and the participation of women across the country raised the profile of the issue of violence against women and girls.

After the marches, Spare Rib featured reviews from the different cities involved and the experience of women in taking to the streets, however it was barely reported on across national newspapers.

Marches occurred in: Bradford, Bristol, London, Lancaster, Brighton, York, London, Guildford, Salisbury, Manchester and Newcastle.

Organisers of the march in Leeds found they became a target with their telephones tapped by the police – to test it one organiser discussed a (fake) march for a specific day occurring in Hyde Park on the telephone to another member, and on the day given the police turned up at Hyde Park with horses! The strength of the women’s organisation was intimidating the police, and it prompted a disproportionate response for daring to ask for safety. Feminists in Leeds and across Yorkshire continued to organise marches in response to violence against women.

It’s important to note that Reclaim the Night is a tactic not just used by feminists in Europe. In India in 2024, Moumita Debnath, a 31-year-old trainee doctor was sexually assaulted and murdered at RG Kar Medical College after going to sleep from working a 36-hour shift in a seminar room by an employee of the college. The murder was covered up by the hospital initially telling her family she had taken her life.

Reclaim the Night marches were organised in response to this across West Bengal, with thousands going to the streets and demanding better protection for women at home, in public and in the workplace.

In response, the Indian Medical Association also held a nationwide 24-hour ‘withdrawal of services by all the modern medicine doctors irrespective of sector and place of work’, with the demands of safer spaces for doctors to rest after work; better hospital security; strengthened legal protections for medical workers; family compensation and a proper investigation into the crime. The junior doctors at RG Kar Medical College continued their ‘withdrawal of service’ for 42 days with massive public support for their marches and rallies.

Nearly 50 years on from the first Reclaim the Night marches the murder of Sarah Everard by serving Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021 prompted a resurgence of Reclaim the Night with women taking to the streets once again to hold vigils and marches. In Clapham, this led to arrests and some of the women being convicted of breaking COVID lockdown rules behind closed doors through the Single Justice Procedure, the cases were dropped but it continues a pattern of over policing women protesting violence.

1 in 10 women reported being less likely to report an assault to the police as a result; the Casey Report later found the Met police to be institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic.

We are witnessing an epidemic of violence against women and girls across the world, it’s estimated that globally, nearly 1 in 3 women have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence. In 2024, around 50,000 women and girls were killed by an intimate partner or family member.

In Britain, reported crimes of violence against women and girls increased 37% between 2018 and 2023.

Many of the key demands of women’s liberation movement have not been achieved. Some on-paper provisions have been given such as equal pay, marriage equality and the right to vote but for working class women not a lot has changed. Women make-up 50% of the workforce but dominate low paid and precarious jobs.

The only solution to the increasing feminisation of poverty and violence against women and girls is the overthrow of capitalism. Social democratic reforms have progressed women’s rights to a point, but our oppression is a necessity for the capitalist system to maintain class relations that uphold capitalism through super exploitation and the double-burden.

In the response to this rising violence, we must not hide away, now more than ever it is essential we have strong and organised working class women’s movement to fight for our liberation and freedom from class oppression.

Save the date – The Communist Party of Britain and the Young Communist League will be holding its annual women’s conference on 7^th March 2026, in London and online. Anyone that is interested in building the women’s movement and learning more about Marxist Feminism is invited to attend.

Maise Riley is Chair of the Young Communist League

Find more at the sources:

https://erenow.org/modern/radical-feminism-feminist-activism-in-movement/4.php

https://www.dianarussell.com/f/Crimes_Against_Women_Tribunal.pdf

https://www.peopleshistoryofleeds.com/blank-1-1