Posters courtesy of Feminist Archive South
As some of you may already know, we are extremely pleased to share the news that Feminist Archive South has been awarded over £50,000 by the Government Equalities Office as part of the Women’s Suffrage Centenary Grant Scheme for our 3 strand project Hatpins to Hashtags.
Read more about the project in the blog post below this one.
Feminist Archive South would like to invite you to a volunteer meeting to discuss the project on Tuesday 5th June, 7-9pm in the Associates Space at Spike Island.
Please come to the front doors at Spike and one of the FAS team will be there to let you in (the Associates space is upstairs and you need a pass to get through the doors).
The meeting will be an opportunity to hear more about Hatpins to Hashtags, share your thoughts and ideas, collectively organise and join the network of people working on the project.
Hatpins to Hashtags aims to increase knowledge of UK democracy and contribute to greater gender parity in local and national politics through three interlinked project strands: digital engagement, educational workshops and a touring exhibition. These events will celebrate the historical legacy of suffrage and the WLM and bring untold feminist narratives to light. They will also work to engage groups underrepresented in politics and civic life, particularly LGBT+ people, those from lower-socio-economic backgrounds, and those living in rural isolation, with caring responsibilities or homebound due to a disability.
If you plan to attend, drop an email to [email protected] so we know how many people to expect — and please share this email far and wide with anyone you think may be interested!
If you have any access needs, please do not hesitate to contact us. Spike Island has disabled access throughout the building and you can find a statement about accessibility on their website. If you can’t make the meeting, don’t worry — we will be organising more soon and please feel free to get in touch with any thoughts in the meantime or suggestions on the most accessible times of the day/week we can hold meetings.
Once again, we’d like to say a really big thank you to all of the brilliant volunteers who have been coming to the workshops and giving their time to digitising our collection of 1000 posters.
OTHER EVENTS COMING UP….
There are a few spaces left on the digital archiving poster workshops TOMORROW, 16th May and two more on 20th June and 18th July from 2-5pm at Special Collections in the Arts and Social Sciences Library, University of Bristol (accessible). Please email [email protected] to sign up for a workshop.
Also:
Tuesday 5th June: Translating Latin American Feminisms Workshop
A workshop exploring feminist translation strategies and the rich and varied collection of Latin American feminist magazines, posters and pamphlets. Participants will be invited to translate from Spanish and/or Portuguese to English. Led by Ellie O’Connell and Dr Katie Brown.
If you would like to write for our blog get in touch via email, Facebook or Twitter.
The Feminist Archive is delighted to announce that it has been awarded over £50,000 by the Government Equalities Office as part of the Women’s Suffrage Centenary Grant Scheme.
FAS was one of 8 standout schemes to be awarded a share of the Large Grant Fund designed to “celebrate 100 years of women’s suffrage, educate young people about its significance, and encourage more women to participate in public life so that they have an equal voice.”
As well as the Women’s Suffrage Centenary, 2018 marks the 40thanniversary of the the Feminist Archive South which was established in 1978 to document the histories of international feminist social movements active between 1960-2000. Including over 160 metres of diverse archive materials – oral histories, pamphlets, posters, the personal papers of women activists, periodicals– the archive tells the story of how activists struggled for gender equality and realised the increased participation of women in public life. Alongside our partner archive based at the University of Leeds (FAN), we hold one of the most significant collections of women’s activist histories in the UK.
The Women’s Suffrage Centenary project aims to increase knowledge of UK democracy and contribute to greater gender parity in local and national politics through three interlinked project strands: digital engagement, educational workshops and a touring exhibition. These events will celebrate the historical legacy of suffrage and the WLM and bring untold feminist narratives to light. They will also work to engage groups underrepresented in politics and civic life, particularly LGBT+ people, those from lower-socio-economic backgrounds, and those living in rural isolation, with caring responsibilities or homebound due to a disability.
The Feminist Archive would like to express our gratitude to the Government Equalities Office for funding this project and congratulate the 7 other winning projects. You can read more about the Women’s Suffrage Centenary Grant Schemeand other projects here and follow our news and project developments on Twitter and Facebook.
We are slowly migrating our audio cassette-based collections to digital files and we thought we’d share some of the fruits of our labour here.
The Women’s Radio Workshop programme ‘Women and Music’ provides a rare and unique insight into women’s liberation music making.
The programme features ‘seven women who play and write music’ including Rosemary Schonfeld, Jana Runnalls (Ova), Andrea Webb, Janie Webb, Judya Manthis (sp?), Lawrie Strike, Louise Marsden, Rosie Fisher and Sarah Gillam.
For more background on music making and the WLM visit the online Women’s Liberation Music Archive, in particular read the introduction to the Sisters in Song book. The physical WLMA has been deposited in the FAS and is in the process of being catalogued – check back soon for updates on this!
For now, enjoy!
We are very excited to be supporting Translation/ Transmission: Women’s Activism Across Space and Time Film Season, that is taking place across March 2014 at the Watershed.
Translation/ Transmission brings together well-received and less well-known films that will be shown together for the first time in a season that explores the potential of film and feminist media to translate across the boundaries of language, genre, time and culture.
Translation/ Transmission features activist documentaries and women filmmakers from the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, Jamaica, Palestine, Germany, Vietnam, USA, Iran and France/ Cameroon, highlighting the diversity of different feminisms across geographical locations and historical moments.
Screenings will be enriched by discussion from activists, academics and artists; audiences will be invited to participate in discussions about the role played by feminist artists and filmmakers in rendering visible forgotten histories and marginalised experiences.
We are excited to be sponsoring the screening of Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair and In Our Own Time which is taking place on Sunday 16 March at 1pm.
Check out the full programme.
Please note that the text below is from the British Library, NOT the Feminist Archive South. Respond to the address given below – [email protected]. Thank you!
Few titles sum up an era and a movement like Spare Rib. The magazine ran from 1972-1993 and for many women was the debating chamber of feminism in the UK.
The British Library has recently embarked on a pilot project to assess the feasibility of digitising the complete run of Spare Rib magazine. Although the entire run of the magazine has always been available to readers at the British Library and other libraries, digitising the copies and making them freely available online would transform access for researchers and the wider public.
As Spare Rib is still in copyright, in order for this project to go ahead it is crucial for the British Library that all Spare Rib contributors (including illustrators and photographers) grant permission for their material to be digitised and made available online for non-commercial use. The contributors and Spare Rib collective members we have spoken to date have been very positive but we still need to contact a great number of former contributors to ask their permission to digitise their content.
The British Library is undertaking a feasibility study between now and the end of December 2013 to see whether this will be possible. Without sufficient permissions to digitise the project will not go ahead.
If you were a contributor to Spare Rib then we want to hear from you! Please get in touch for more information by contacting [email protected]. If you could specify the approximate date you were a contributor and the name by which you were known that would be very helpful.
You many be interested in this film by Josh Sierra which explores the archival challenges of the born digital era.