Category Archives: Online resources

Save the date! Hatpins to Hashtags Launch 2 Sept, Red Brick Building, Glastonbury

We are pleased to announce the launch of Hatpins to Hashtags:

Sunday 2 September
Red Brick Building (accessible)
Glastonbury
From midday (programme tbc)

The event will be a welcome and launch to the whole project, opening our dynamic poster exhibition, alongside crafts, a panel debate, workshops and conversations. Do put it in your diary!

Posters courtesy of Feminist Archive South

The exhibition will be on display in the Moreland Room at the Red Brick Building for a further 10 days, accompanied by Digital Democracy training sessions and Future Feminisms workshops.

Hatpins to Hashtags is a three strand project exploring and reclaiming the tools of democracy to mobilize activism and celebrate herstory. Throughout the Autumn and Winter, Hatpins to Hashtags will also be travelling to:

Weston-super–Mare — Weston College, Conference Centre
Taunton – CICCIC, Creative Innovation Centre CIC
Bridport – Literary and Scientific Institute
Plymouth — venue tbc

We’ll be announcing dates for all these locations very soon, so watch this space for more details.

We’re also still recruiting volunteers to help us make the project happen — email [email protected] if you are interested in joining the team.

Introducing Hatpins to Hashtags: Volunteer meeting 5 June 7-9pm, Spike Island

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.

Two excellent teaching resources….

Posters from the See Red Women’s Workshop are available under a Creative Commons license.

Explore the imagery and communication strategies of the Women’s Liberation Movement…

protest

Using Archives to Teach Gender is an excellent resource that includes scans of images from the Feminist Archive North and the Marks & Spencer Company Archive which are both based at Special Collections, Leeds University. Also includes a handy links page to further resources.

As ever, the Sisterhood & After oral history project is a must and first stop shop for research into the WLM.

Sheba Press & worries about link rot

If you have encountered link rot on the internet, where links break or click through to the ‘file not found page,’ you will know how vulnerable web-based archives can be.

So when conducting research about Sheba Feminist Press, who published the important Black British feminist text Charting the Journey in 1988 and many others, it was a relief to find some information about them.

A book laid on a desk at a diagonal angle

What was slightly disconcerting was the nature of the web page, which appeared graphically old and was hosted by a US university site. It wasn’t being actively maintained and was the kind of link, you suspect, that would soon disappear.

In short, this is the rationale for reproducing the text below in its entirety from that web page in case it breaks, or vanishes.

For further information, the Women’s Library in London was donated records from Sheba Press (1980-1994) in 1995, but it remains uncatalogued and unaccessible to researchers.

Now there’s a funding bid that needs to happen!

ABOUT SHEBA FEMINIST PRESS

Sheba Feminist Press was established in 1980 — one of a handful of small independent publishers born of the UK women’s movement during the 70s and early 80s. The new feminist presses turned their backs on the high-modernist clique then firmly in control of the British book scene, and looked instead at what that world literally couldn’t see: the writing of women who hadn’t been to Oxford or Cambridge, and who weren’t necessarily white or heterosexual or middle-class, and who didn’t speak with the polished vowels of Bloomsbury. The new writers weren’t seduced by the pastoral English idyll of haywains and cottages and
servile, cap-doffing peasantry. They wrote instead about what it was like to live as an ordinary, non-privileged woman in post-imperial Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. The ordinary, non-privileged women who constituted a large part of the book-buying public found their own lives reflected in
these books, and responded with what can only be called devotion. The phenomenal success of women’s publishing was probably the single biggest factor in the dissemination of feminist ideas to
women in the UK.

Today, mainstream UK publishing has been persuaded of the marketability of women writers. Many large publishers have their “women’s studies” lists, and women novelists (some of them) get
reviewed on the literary pages, just like men. But old predilections die hard — particularly, in Britain, the predilections associated with intellectual and social snobbery: if more women writers are published now than in 1965, it remains true that the majority are white, heterosexual, and middle-class.

Sheba has a mission to challenge this persistent bias. We give priority to the work of women writers who continue to be marginalized. That means more than simply being ready to publish writing by women of colour, or lesbians, or working-class women; it means recognising the multiplicity of voices within these
communities — a multiplicity which is frequently overlooked by a world quick to categorize and dismiss. Sheba has built its reputation around its commitment to diversity, to difference, and to open and critical debate. One of our earliest titles was Feminist Fables — a retelling of myths, from a lesbian-feminist
viewpoint, by an Indian woman, Suniti Namjoshi. Published in 1981, when lesbian-feminists were universally assumed to be white, and Indian women universally assumed to be heterosexual, Feminist Fables called into question this cosy compartmentalization; it can be seen in retrospect as a harbinger of the coming
struggles over difference and diversity, which by the end of the decade had put paid to the myth of a unitary feminist identity.

This commitment to openness and to diversity has made Sheba a key player in the ongoing feminist debates around sexuality. In the Seventies and the early Eighties, many women had a new and pleasurable sense of ownership over their bodies and their sexuality; and this was reflected in the books being published.
For Ourselves (Anja Meulenbelt, 1981) was characteristic: written by a woman, for women to read, it rejected the marriage-guidance approach which had previously dominated the field (“Doctor, my
wife is frigid. Can you help me?”) and acknowledged women’s sexuality as a private source of pleasure and power available to all women. Joanni Blank’s The Playbook for Kids About Sex (first published in the US by Down There Press) adopted a similarly positive attitude; children were encouraged to explore their bodies and to experiment with masturbation, fantasy, and sexual play. These and other Sheba titles contributed to the growing acceptance of women as autonomous sexual agents, rather than eternal objects, and helped to undermine the cultural prescription of what Adrienne Rich described as “compulsory heterosexuality”.

As the old prescriptions crumbled, however, new ones sprang up to replace them. The ideological association of sexuality with patriarchal power, expressed through pornography and rape, made sex seem synonymous with oppression. For women, desire was taboo all over again. In 1988, Sheba challenged this new puritanism by bringing out the UK edition of Joan Nestle’s A Restricted Country (first published in the US by Firebrand). The publication of this collection of essays and stories about lesbian sexuality acted as a catalyst on the simmering dissensions over lesbian sado-masochism, butch-femme relationships, and perverse sexuality, and gave the UK proponents of sexual autonomy an important cultural reference point.

The following year, Sheba built on the success of A Restricted Country, by bringing out Serious Pleasure, a collection of lesbian erotica . Although the controversy over pornography and censorship continues, it is clear from the popularity of Serious Pleasure and its successor, More Serious Pleasure that there is a strong and growing demand from many UK lesbians for well-written, explicit, woman-centred erotic material. (N.B. Serious Pleasure and More Serious Pleasure are published in the US by Cleis Press.)

Today, Sheba continues to prioritize the work of women of colour and lesbians. A number of prominent Black U.S. writers have been published in the UK by Sheba, among them bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Jewelle Gomez. Sheba is now turning its attention to the exciting possibilities opened up by new technology, particularly multimedia and computer-mediated communications. We welcome the
new ease with which we can communicate with other women in countries all over the world; Sheba’s dedication to openness, fluidity, and the absence of boundaries finds a natural home on
the Internet.

Whatever the medium, the message remains the same: feminism, diversity, debate. If you would like to know more about Sheba, please write to us at [email protected]. We’d like to hear from you, and we promise to answer all messages. Sheba titles are available in the U.S. from Inland Book Co., and in Australia from Bulldog Books.

Sheba Feminist Press is a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative.

Feminist and Women’s Archives in the UK: Profile No. 1 – Black Cultural Archives

Have you ever felt confused about where to go to research feminist and women’s history in the UK? Like you had a feeling there are specialist libraries and archives, but you aren’t sure which ones to go to, or when to go because opening hours can be limited?

Its true that many archives and libraries are in a precarious position, largely due to a lack of funds to support this crucial part of the UK’s cultural heritage. This often means that opening hours can be limited, or access restricted. The Women’s Library in London is currently moving to LSE and of course our own archive is still adjusting to our move to Bristol University – and that was almost four years ago!

In this new feature on the Feminist Archive South website, we have contacted curators and archivists based at the main feminist archives in the UK, or in other specialist archives which have prominent collections relating women’s activism.

We want to get a picture of the current archive/ library landscape, and learn about the challenges these institutions are facing, and what hopes they have for the future.

The first person to get back to us was Hannah Ishmael, Assistant Archivist at the Black Cultural Archives in London. Thanks Hannah for getting the ball rolling!

1. What is the name of your collection, and where is it based? 

Black Cultural Archives, based at 1 Othello Close, Kennington. We will be moving to Windrush Square, Brixton in 2014.

Newsletter of Organisation of African and Asian Descent. Picture of three young black children with the caption 'black kids who cares?'

Front cover of Fowaad, the newsletter of OWAAD. Please credit: Ref. DADZIE/1/8/1 (c) Stella Dadzie, available at Black Cultural Archives.

2. If I wanted to access the collection, what would I need to do (when is it open, etc)?

We are open every Wednesday, from 10:00-16:30, by appointment. Please email the reading room, [email protected] for more information.

3. What type of things are collected in the BCA related to the black women’s movement, and black women from 19th Century to the present day?

We have a number of collections relating to the Black women’s movement. One of the most used collections is the oral histories of the Black women’s movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The collection contains 36 interviews with women from a range of backgrounds, but who were active in the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) that was an umbrella organisation for a number of other Black women’s groups.

We also have the papers of Stella Dadzie, co-author of The Heart of the Race, relating to her work with OWAAD and her student activities; a small collection of the papers of Suzanne Scafe, another co-author of the Heart of the Race, and the papers of Jan Mckenley another key activist.

Finally, we have the papers of the Runnymede Trust, a race relations think tank which contains a number of research files relating to issues facing ethnic minorities, and women.

4. Do you have a favourite part of the collection, and why?

Although I find all of the collections fascinating, I do enjoy listening to the oral histories. They offer a rare chance to listen to women exploring their identity and history, and to give a more human voice to the struggles of women.

Poster for an exhibition about images of black women in Feb 1986

Ephemera/36/53 (c) Black Cultural Archives

5. What are the plans for the collection in the future?

We are continuing to collect a wide variety of material, to build our collections and to be able to fully present the contributions Black people have made to the culture, society and heritage of the UK.

6. Anything else you want to say about your activities?

The opening exhibition for Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, will be focusing on the Black women’s movement, and taking the book ‘The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain’ (1985) as the inspiration.

***

If you are part of an archive, library or work in an archive relating to women’s history and want to be featured on this website, please get in touch. You can answer the six questions above, and please send us 1-2 photos as illustration.

Sisterhood and After – Launch today!

Happy International Women’s Day!

Today sees the launch of a fantastic new learning resource: Sistershood and After: An Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

On the site you can listen to a range of women who were involved in the WLM. The testimonies are organised in categories such as family and children; bodies, minds and spirits; sex, love and friendship; race, place and nation; education; equality and work; activism; politics and legislation; changing culture and the arts; who we were, who were are.

Sisterhood and After

Screenshot from the page ‘Race, Place and Nation’

As well as oral histories there are teacher notes for each of these themes, which again emphasises what a brilliant learning resource the site is.

Being able to listen to women and men who were active in the WLM perfectly complements the archival material that you can find in the Feminist Archive South. Should you wish to know more about this rich and complex part of history, you know where you need to go!