Author Archives: feministarchivesouth

Action Photos from the Feminist Print Media Workshop!

Last Sunday we held the second Feminist Archive South workshop which explored the history of print media in the Women’s Liberation Movement.

After a brief tour of magazines such as Spare Rib, Shocking Pink, Red Rag and Bad Attitude, newspapers such as Outwrite and Shrew, Enough: The Journal of Bristol Women’s Liberation and Fowaad! the newsletter for the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, we leapt into action and made our own publication.

A trip to a local stationery store is planned to reproduce it, and copies will be available at future workshops!

Archive Workshops – Now Full!

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Due to a fantastic response to the call for participants for the archivist shadowing workshops, all the places are now full!

Thanks to all who have booked a place and expressed interest – its really encouraging to know that there is an audience and need for these activities, it helps us for future funding bids.

Big apologies though to anyone who has missed out – we promise to run similar programmes in the future.

Workshop information 9 June

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While the next Feminist Archive South workshop is this Sunday, 11 May from 1-5pm at Mshed and will explore the history of feminist print media, we have details of another workshop below….

Sunday 9 June 2013 @ MShed 1-5pm. All welcome.

Bristol: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement facilitated by June Hannam and Kath Holden from the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network.

Most women took part in ‘second wave feminism’ at a grass roots, local level. How do we find out why they became involved and what they hoped to achieve? Can we recover their voices and, if we do, how can we interpret them?

This workshop will look at different ways that historians can try to recover women’s voices. The first part will look at documentary evidence, including newsletters, pamphlets and photographs. The second part will focus on oral testimony: participants will be invited to compare summaries, full transcripts and original recordings of interviews. The workshop will explore memory and the ways in which participants construct different stories of the movements in which they took part.

June Hannam is an emeritus professor and Kath Holden a visiting research fellow in history at the University of the West of England. They are co-chairs of the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network. They both have research interests in gender history. June Hannam specialises in labour and feminist history and Kath Holden in oral history and history of the family.

Recent publications include Katherine Holden: The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914-1960 (2007) and June Hannam, Feminism (2012).

Archivist cataloguing update – April/ May

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Sarah Cuthill, the project archivist, is sharing the process of cataloguing Ellen’s archives for this blog. This is her first report….

The first month, about half of which was spent at Ellen’s house, where the papers were in much better order than anticipated! Originally covering the floor and tables of the first floor lounge, the archive comprises journals, business files, research papers, conference papers, badges, correspondence and ephemera such as fliers and posters for relevant events. Most of the papers were in folders or in homemade magazine files made by Ellen out of washing powder boxes. Eventually I boxed the collection up into cardboard grocery boxes from our local organic shop.

Ellen quietly added extra piles of papers over the days. It was a boon, and a novelty, to have the owner of the papers there with me to explain how various organisations grew out of each other and where she was involved. As well as Ellen’s own research, there are important runs of papers relating to Women’s Aid and the Women’s Centre. We spent one morning with Ellen giving me a potted history of her life since coming to Bristol. My primary mission in these first weeks has been to survey the papers and make a quick list of what is there I did this with pencil and paper which I then typed up at home.

Two and half weeks in, we transferred the papers to my house in 18 cardboard boxes. The next step is to arrange the papers into logical categories, and to rebox them. This is to be done with the help of archive shadowers who will join in and learn about the archive as well as the archive process.

Feminist activism – temporary, invisible, documented

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Feminist activism is often omitted from histories, and the majority of mainstream media. One of the main reasons why the Feminist Archive was set up was to ensure that there is a safe, secure place where documentation of feminist movements can be collected so they are less likely to be forgotten.

Feminist activism can of course take many forms. But it is those activisms which are underground, subcultural and temporary that are particularly at risk from erasure from the history books.

This photo of a vibrant piece of graffiti located at the St Werburghs-St Pauls underpass near the M32 junction taken on 5 May 2013 with a smart phone, encapsulates all these aspects of feminist activism.

It is likely that this image, which has clearly been made to capture the attention, to force passer-bys to look again as the combination of text and colour emits a message of hope and social transformation, will be washed away by the council at some point in the next few days, weeks or months.

It will leave no physical record that can continue to tell the story of how this piece graphic communication intervenes into public space, and defiantly offers an alternative to the messages that are paraded on billboards, encouraging nothing more than a culture of excessive consumption and economic exploitation.

Everyday mobile technologies like smartphones (which of course are intimately bound up with capitalism), are tools to document these brazen messages that offer people the chance to dream, hope, live and create otherwise.

If you see other examples of feminist graffiti, please send them in and we can share them on this site.

The FAS on Shout Out

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[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/90190244" params="" width=" 100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

Feminist Archive South Trustee Deborah Withers was the guest on Bristol Community FM‘s LGBT radio show Shout Out on Thursday 25 April 2013.

She talks about the current workshop programme, and the wider Heritage Lottery Funded project to catalogue Ellen Malos’ archives.

Ellen in 1973 on her commitment to the women’s movement

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[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/90150471" params="" width=" 100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

Monica Sjöö talks to Helen Taylor about being a woman artist in 1973-1974

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In 1973 and 1974 Helen Taylor and Brenda Jacques decided to embark on an innovative way of information sharing amongst feminist groups in Bristol. They stated: ‘it seems that the small weekly groups and specific campaign groups within Bristol Women’s Liberation don’t really know what the others are doing. Our only means of communication is through the newsletter which, though informative, can only give an outline of each group’s activities, and can suggest little of the feelings and experiences of the women involved.’

Their answer to this problem was to create a tape-slide and audio presentation that would be used in groups and on Radio Bristol’s ‘Access’ programme. They took photos of the Bristol Women’s Liberation activities and asked women the following question: ‘What difference has the Women’s Liberation Movement made to you in your daily life, in your relationships, your day-to-day routine, & your feelings about yourself as a woman, as well as your political awareness and activism?

One of the women they interviewed was Monica Sjöö, who died in 2005. In the extract below she talks about being a woman artist and the difference that women’s liberation makes.

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/90145938" params="" width=" 100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

What can history do? What does history mean to you? What does history mean to us? – Call for Contributions

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The Feminist Archive South have funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to create a pamphlet that explores how feminist, women’s and other radical histories shape lives, understandings of social change, collective dreams, hopes, disappointments and imaginations.

The pamphlet will be published for the end of the Ellen Malos’ Archives project in September 2013. It will be distributed to schools, further education colleges and libraries in Bristol, the South West and further afield on request (we have limited budget for distribution but can provide free copies should you want some).

We invite people to explore these questions in whatever way they wish, but please do think about the question of what history can do, what it means to individuals and what it can possibly mean to communities, collectives or whatever other way you want to envision/ interrogate/ reconfigure/ think about ‘us.’

Contributions should be written in a non-specialist language as it is envisaged that a wide range of ages and backgrounds will read the pamphlet.

We want to use the pamphlet as a space to explore the practicalities of history making – for example running discussion and memory groups, oral history projects, grassroots archives (on and offline), exhibitions and other ways individuals and communities explore, recover and use history to understand their identities, where they live or the cultures they belong to.

If you work for a feminist or women’s archives, please consider a contribution that tells us about your collection – we plan to have a directory at the back which lists archives and libraries where people can find out about history.

You may also want to consider if digital media has had an impact on the question of what history can do, and how it is shaping individuals and communities right now.

Other contributions can be in the form of

Visual art e.g., Illustrations, photos, cartoons, posters
Essays and critical writing
Philosophical reflections
Telling radical histories
Profiles of archives, collections, museums, projects, websites/ web resources
Practical ‘how to’ articles – e.g., how to use an archive, how to work with historical sources, digital archiving and information management
Creative Writing, including poetry
Interviews with interesting projects
Interviews with people in your community

All written contributions must not exceed 1500 words

All images must be sent as JPEGs 300 DPI

Deadline for contributions

15 July 2013

Please send contributions to [email protected] and contact us for further information

Archivist Shadowing Workshops – Call for Participants

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Ever wanted to know how an archivist catalogues a large collection?

The Feminist Archive South is offering a unique opportunity for people to shadow the project archivist as she catalogues Ellen Malos’ collection.

Ellen Malos was a key figure in the Bristol Women’s Liberation Movement. The first Women’s Centre opened in the basement of her house in 1973, and her work supporting vulnerable women has been recognised through an Honoury Doctorate at Bristol University (2006), and in the naming of the Next Link Women’s Safe House, ‘Ellen Malos House’ (12 June 2007). Ellen’s archive comprises rare historical material, including documents that have shaped some of the most significant legal and policy transformations within British history relating to gender quality.

You can attend up to four sessions with the archivist, and they will take place during weekdays in the day-time. You do not have to attend all sessions – although if you want to, this is also fine!

This is a great chance to informally learn the skills, practices and knowledge required to do archival work. You also get the chance to look at a load of interesting material about feminist history!

Even if you do not want to pursue archiving as a career, these activities will be relevant to people interested in the history of gender equality, in particular activism relating to women’s aid and violence against women.

Sessions will take place from April-June 2013. Please contact us to arrange a session.

Participation bursaries are available to cover things like childcare, travel and accommodation costs (if coming from outside of Bristol). Please let us know about this when you make an enquiry.