Where does public mood live? How can it be stimulated and how is it apprehended? In this essay I explore these questions by considering the so-called 'winter of discontent' at the end of 1978, a set-piece in British history-telling in which public dissatisfaction with trade union power supposedly propelled the election victory of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Ben Highmore suggests this 'mooding' underplays the pleasures and excitements of that period to tell a story of the failure of the left. This essay concurs, by tracing feminist campaigns over abortion rights which came to prominence during that same year, in which 'discontent' expressed a positive trajectory of ascendant reproductive control. Drawing on new oral history materials, I recast an emphasis on class, but also reveal tensions within the Women's Liberation Movement over the place and nature of emotion, showing how some supporters of abortion rights had to wrestle with their own conflicted responses, often in silence. I conclude by considering the status of minority social movements as mood-measurers.
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