 Thank you for joining us for Creative Women Creative Business Feminist Publishing Design and Comics. Delighted to have you today on the last event of this fantastic three-day festival organized by the business of women's words research project in collaboration with the British Library. This is as I said the last event and it for the project which doesn't quite end yet but is nearly drawing to a close it marks the end of the most amazing three-year project working with partners at Sussex University, Cambridge University and the British Library and I just wanted to do a really public and warm thanks to everyone on that research team and especially Professor Marguerite Jolly the project lead. It's been an amazing piece of work and for me best practice in working across institutions to deliver amazing scholarship but also wonderful services and engagement and this hopefully you'll get a taste of today. This is Polly Russell and I am the lead partner for the project at the British Library but I'm also the lead curator for the unfinished business the Fight for Women's Rights exhibition which is currently staged at the exhibition although tragically because of COVID it is of course not open. It is however running until August so hopefully when all of this is over we'll be able to open the doors again and many of you will be able to visit and come and see the exhibition in person we would love to welcome you. It's absolutely fitting that this three-day festival is being run alongside the exhibition because the exhibition so much celebrates women's tenacity ingenuity and of course creativity in insisting on space on demanding rights on being heard and of course on finding out or working out ways to make a living. So I'm absolutely thrilled this festival has been running. Today's event is called How to Make, sorry it is not, today's event is called Creative Women in a Capitalist World and it features some expert game changers and challengers Roshin Boyd, Sophia, Neaza and Catherine Riley and will be chaired by Dr Lucy Dallat who's one of the project partners for the business of women's words. I'll hand over to Lucy in just one second but I want to mention a few housekeeping things on your screen there is a tab for the bookshop this will features all of publications as many publications that we could include for all of the speakers across the festival please do have a look at it it would normally feature the as a child it would normally feature a the go straight to the British Library online website because of COVID that's closed so we've linked to independent retailers this event and in fact all of the events of this festival will be available for you to view for the next seven days with your links so please do check out any that you missed over the three days beyond this festival we also the British Library of Running events which speak to lots of the themes of this festival so we have coming up next month talks with Alison Vettel the cartoonist uh the artist and writer Laurie Anderson and on the 26th of this month a talk between Gillian Tett and the economist Mariana Mazzacuto. Finally before I hand over to Lucy one more thing which is that we can't wait to hear from these panelists but we also can't wait to hear from you so please do submit questions there is a box at the bottom of your screens where you can write questions and I know the panelists and Lucy will be keen to hear from you okay enjoy the next hour. Thanks so much Polly welcome everybody to this session on creative feminisms in a capitalist world so we're here today to talk about feminist creativity and those of you who've been at the festival already for the last couple of days will have seen a lot of examples of that and perhaps experiment a little bit yourselves with creative acts like making comics. We're going to focus on two particular themes one of them is going to be the the entanglement and the possibilities of inspiration and a rich relationship between past and present so we're going to be looking back to think about creative creativity in the past and asking ourselves where do these impulses go in today's in today's world. The other big theme for us today is asking how is it possible to create creative politics and projects within a capitalist world and some of you may be really familiar with the long-standing feminist critique of the kind of the twin systems as they're often termed of capitalism and patriarchy and the idea that women are predominantly excluded as our non-binary people within a capitalist and patriarchal systems that's a very long-standing form of feminist critique but today I want to try and usher onto the onto the scene a slightly different story can I have the first slide please and ask what kinds of feminist projects we can see if we ask about the founding of business and the question of feminist enterprise that might allow us to think about creation of feminist goods you can see here on the top of the slide the feminist lipstick which is sold through lipstick lobby an American business a bit of a slick American business founded in 2017 that describes itself not as a business but in their words as quote a social justice movement for change it asks its customers to pucker up in protest there's of course a long tradition of this within women's movements and feminist movements and I couldn't resist giving you at the bottom there of the slide Sylvia Pankhurst's beautiful design for a suffragette tea set from the early 20th century it's not only goods but also services that we can see offered and traded and initiated within women's movements and here's an example of that from what describes itself very firmly as a feminist business providing housekeeping services in the American Midwest in the 1970s and we might set this alongside other kinds of feminist services such as therapy and counseling projects or feminist bans there's there's been a no end to the kinds of innovative services that have been offered we can also think about how enterprise has created really important feminist spaces we might think of the global success of feminist bookshops and and the slide shows one of the well-established ones in San Francisco and these services goods and spaces all help in making money and creating jobs for women and non-binary people and of course that's no mean feat in a world where they have often been paid less and excluded from all kinds of economic and financial advantages feminist publishers journals and printing presses have been at the core of promoting feminist ideas and feminist dreams and feminist campaigns but those who've founded these kinds of projects have faced often quite vivid and difficult choices and conundrums within a capitalist marketplace so let's dive in today to talk to our panelists about their experiences of those kinds of choices and conundrums for their feminist politics and feminist enterprises our panel today is composed of activists and innovators who've lived through and experienced and thought deeply about the trade-offs and advantages of different kinds of feminist projects and platforms and I'm really delighted to welcome them so first of all let's welcome Roisin Boyd who's an award-winning journalist who began her journalistic career when she left Dublin in 1980 and went to work for spare rib magazine she was there for three years and on leaving spare rib she returned to Dublin to work for RTE's radio program Women Today she stayed with RTE for 16 years as a presenter a reporter and a current affairs producer working on stories to do with international issues social justice and human rights and she's now a lecturer in journalism at the Technological University of Dublin we're then going to hear from Dr Catherine Riley who is a feminist historian and a writer who has taught at the universities of Lancaster and Northumbria as well as Birkbeck College in London she wrote her doctoral dissertation there on the feminist publisher Virago and that led to her first book and you can see her links to her books under the book tab above and she's in fact published very widely on women's writing and publishing interestingly she's also taken a turn into politics she was the head of communications at the women's equality party from its founding days building it up to the conclusion of the 2017 general election and she left the women's equality party there to work at a pre-Madonna festival which is a festival focused on writing creativity and ideas with a particular focus on gender and diversity and equality and she's general manager there and continues to work and publish very widely on questions of gender theory and praxis and finally welcome to Sophia Nyazi who's an artist and an illustrator and a member of one of my kind collective where she works with them on a community print workshop Rebbits Road Press in Newham as well as pursuing her own artistic work researching and producing pieces relating to housing and technology she leads workshops and delivers talks across the community but also lectures for Birmingham City so welcome to Sophia Roshin and Catherine and I'm going to ask Roshin to talk to us first about her experiences of feminist creativity in a capitalist world thanks Roshin thank you very much Lucy and I'm delighted to be here thank you for inviting me and hi everyone on the panel and hi everyone that's listening to us out there I'm in Dublin and this invitation has given me an opportunity really to to look back at my experience working in spare rib I worked there from 1980 to 1983 I left Dublin to work in spare rib so it was an extraordinary time it was an extraordinary time politically though of course we are all living in extraordinary times now sorry I'm overusing that word and I have been thinking about the fact that I lived in London and the poignancy of that for me now and for I imagine a lot of you the fact that we have Brexit now and that's made a huge impact here in Ireland and in some ways it's been very interesting for me as an Irish woman because I went to work in spare rib as I said in 1980 I was the first Irish woman on the collective the collective wasn't really particularly diverse at that stage there were mainly white women who were upper class middle class um North American and English women it changed over time but the the fact of um Brexit for us here in Ireland was we were very surprised during the debates over the last number of years at the lack of awareness of Ireland and Irish people in the UK we thought well I certainly thought it would have changed from um the 1980s so I came to spare rib in 1980 um and it was an extraordinary experience and I feel really privileged to have worked there um I feel very grateful to all the women who set it up and the women that I got to know on that collective um so talking about capitalism again I I hadn't really thought about the fact I was young I was 23 24 completely consumed by feminism by the women's movement by politics so didn't really think a lot of the time about money and I think as the years have gone on I haven't died there and probably to my disadvantage but anyway politics and change and um feminism and wanting to bring about change in society but also for women was my priority so spare rib worked um as a collective um so we were all terrifically equal there was no hierarchy but again thinking about this um when I was preparing for this talk I think there were obviously different levels but we worked as a collective and I I came across um I was looking I have the the magazines here I have them um bound very very close friend of mine got them bound for me when I left the three years and I was looking at um one of the issues where they discussed as an editorial or we discussed the fact of how we worked as a collective and in the editorial it says this is 1980 I think or 1981 we never really thought about how we worked as a collective how we made editorial decisions and there was a big controversy at the time around um sexuality heterosexism and lesbianism and and this had become really really controversial in the collective and this editorial addresses those issues and I am struck when I read it or I was struck at the honesty we were really open and there were loads of issues loads of criticisms loads of tensions on the collective but we put it all out there and I think that really is to the credit of the women working in the collective so getting back to um capitalism so I arrived in 1980 and Margaret Thatcher had just been elected the year before and so she was obviously a hyper-capitalist I was thinking about this you know going into the belly of the beast really um and for us as feminists working in the spare rib collective we're often asked oh aren't you all delighted now you have a female or there is a female prime minister elected in the UK and of course we weren't delighted it made things probably more difficult in some ways but again thinking about capitalism so this was a time of huge change in um in in Britain and I think we're seeing the the consequences of what started with Thatcherism in 1980 um but a lot of the destruction of what she said you know she said there was no society a lot of what has happened in the intervening years like if we look at what's happened with housing people living in poverty we were able the reason we were able to work for such low wages on spare rib was because there was very cheap housing so I lived in a squash a lot of the people on the collective lived in um cooperative housing now there were differences on the collective and again I think in some of the literature Lucy and Margaret have written about spare rib and how how feminist enterprises were able to survive is the fact that there were low wages um and that a lot of the labor was free we provided free labor but the reason I was able to work you know I think I got 80 pounds a week maybe it was a month I think it was a week was because I lived in a squash and some of the women were older so they probably were more established they had their own houses and some had private incomes so I think it's just interesting to talk about that how one actually does work in those sort of circumstances when you're working um to produce a magazine um but you're getting very low pay the other um the other aspect of spare rib so we were always money was always a big issue um how we would survive and we didn't really take we didn't not really we didn't take commercial ads we we just had certain long running ads so one of the ads was for vibrators and apparently there was a rumor that this might have been the reason that spare rib was banned in Ireland so one state spare rib was banned in Ireland it was never defined but the reason was never given but why it was um why it was banned but this apparently was one of the reasons um the ads for vibrators and I was looking at it today it's a very discreet ad it says what every woman I don't know if you can see it there oh yeah what every woman should know about vibrators and the other ads were for abortion advice dungarees um very very interesting to look at the to look at those ads then the other thing that happened um regarding the finances of spare rib and how we might survive so there's constant discussions about how we might survive and the difficulties we're experiencing was um that we were taken on by co-mag which were there were huge distributors and my job was which I hadn't quite realized I think before I took the job was to um work with co-mag to work with a really lovely woman called June Simmons who was the co-mag representative and to go I had to go around with her to try and persuade shops um because we really wanted to be widely distributed and until then I think we it was mainly subscriptions we're sold at conferences um places like that so distribution was a huge issue and a lot of the shops or the news agents wouldn't wouldn't take us on or they didn't know where to put us we wanted to be beside cosmopolitan because co-mag distributed cosmopolitan we said that's where we should be on the shelves but they often I think they wanted to put us up on the top shelf with the porn mags or food because spare rib you know they didn't know where to put us so this was a big issue for us to you know to be to be there with those women's magazines um so I used to go around with Jill talking to the shops and we did get wh smith I think took us on which was it which was a huge huge achievement but but we always had there were always very mixed feelings about capitalism obviously but we wanted to survive and we wanted to get the message out there and we were I was even thinking about this again today not evangelical maybe a little bit and probably nothing wrong with that but we really really wanted to get the message out to women um and when you think about it and for all of you younger people who are younger people who are watching today and this might sound really strange but it was 40 years ago so we didn't have any internet we didn't have mobile phones um so letters the actual physical letters that came to spare rib were really important and often people said that that was their favorite page and in the letters pages women and maybe when women would ring us as well they'd often say you're my only you're my only connection to other women to other feminists and that was hugely important when you think about it and it used to make it really worthwhile I used to get such a buzz if somebody rang or they wrote a letter and said your article really touched me or it connected with me because I am quite isolated a lot of women were isolated in different countries around the world and in in England um and then finally I'm probably nearly at my five minutes on my Lucy um so finally I want to finish with um one of the things that I really really was such a gift and I really appreciated about spare rib was the international connection that we connected with women all around the world and there were women working on the collective who were when I was there who were from Iran Farzaneh and Manny and they had had to leave Iran after the Iranian revolution so tragic they'd fought against the Shah and then they had to leave and they came to the UK so they worked in the the collective and then the collective changed over the years and became much more diverse with women of colour and black women working in the collective but one one aspect of this internationalism and that I really appreciate was connecting as I said with with women from all around the world but I do remember one day um and spare rib was completely open anybody could walk in we we worked in a um a converted warehouse in Clark and well close and again you would there's no way you'd be able to to afford the rents there now and this woman came in and her name was Radha Gangalu and she's from Mauritius and she said I want we got talking I did the news short said I want you to cover what is happening in Diego Garcia and I don't know if any of you have heard of Diego Garcia and the interesting thing is the sad thing is it's still a story today and a lot of the issues that we covered are still relevant today the people who lived in Diego Garcia had been forcibly removed from the island by the United States and by the British because they wanted to set up a military base there and Radha came in and said I want you to cover this story and we did cover the story and Radha was studying law at that time in in London and she went back to Mauritius where she became a judge and I always remember her telling me um she was probably one of the few people I'd actually met in this context that she'd grown up in very very difficult circumstances and she used to go hungry to bed at night and so we interviewed Radha we talked about Diego Garcia on Spare Rib and yeah so that's just one one small um story from all the different stories that we covered on Spare Rib so I'll stop now thank you very much thanks so much Rosheen that was super let's move on now to to Dr Catherine Riley Catherine I am I'm going to move smoothly from Spare Rib to talking about my um kind of introduction into the world of uh publishing and culture more generally so um I started on my thesis I'm looking at Virago which was going to be called Spare Rib books apparently and so it was uh Marsha Rowe and uh Rosie Boycott who sets Spare Rib up we're talking with Carmen Khalil this um irascible powerhouse of a woman who wanted to set up a publishing house believing that publish holding the power to publish is a wonderful thing um a sentiment with which I entirely agree so um I started looking into Virago and this uh this tension between publishing and profits um politics and profit has kind of been at the heart of my thinking and what I do ever since then so um Virago Virago's entrepreneur's kind of identified that there was always going to be this conflict but Carmen Khalil set out very deliberately to make her enterprise a profit making enterprise um and she said that it would become necessarily a feminist enterprise by virtue of making money and but she also by those I'm kind of I'm I'm convinced by that argument and I also uh she you know counted the idea that business capitalism is a male realm and I I think I'm convinced by that argument as well um so I my thesis turned into a book which is called the Virago story um and we heard earlier in the festival from Lenny who has been in with Virago almost since the beginning um and it's a fantastic a success story I think for feminism and for publishing more generally um and I was yeah I was it kind of became my life significant period of it um but taught me a lot about the publishing world and not only um in terms of feminism but more broadly um and also gave me a huge insight into different feminist ideologies and different approaches so based on that um expertise I also wrote a book um called feminism and women's writing and introduction both of them are artfully poised behind my head obviously being zoomed um which looked at the ways that feminist activism um interacts and affects the uh women's fiction so the form of women's fiction and the content um uh yeah so and I and then I was uh kind of involved in academia and teaching so moved a little bit away from the cultural world and then fell completely by accident into the world of politics as you mentioned in the introduction working for the women's equality party um but at the point I the reason I bring that up is actually the intervention the radical interventions we made um with that party and the party continues to make without me um are they're not only political they're deeply cultural so some of the some of the things that we did uh we set out to do politics differently that was a that was a premise of the party so we did actually quite madcap crazy things now when I look back so one of our first stunts was to create a big check literally a very big check and walk with it down to the treasury and it had written across it the the the sum billions of pounds that would be added to the British economy if women were free economically free to input in the ways that they could and wanted to so if childcare was for you know if work looked different and we also had campaigns like no size fits all which looked at women's body and fashion industry and body image sizing of clothing which doesn't sound very political but actually it's massively political the health budget has to accommodate millions and millions of pounds each year to combat the negative impact of girls and women's self negative self image because of the way that the fashion industry impacts um so it was it was um a fascinating and exhausting two and a half years um at the end of which um as you mentioned at the end of the 2017 election um I left um and probably I also my two books were published in the media aftermath of that which means I must have been writing the edits during that time I have no idea when I slept it was a busy period um then through knowing Catherine May who set up the women's equality party with Sandy Toxvig um I was invited to join the uh the kind of group of women who set up pre Madonna festival um pre Madonna is uh it's a UK literary festival and it aims to like to do a number of things so it aims to level up the publishing industry creating opportunities for writers that aren't heard necessarily on the festival circuit it aims to create to sort of to find new writing talents and ultimately we aim to create life-changing beautiful fun events um so our first festival was held in 2019 and it's very difficult to picture this now but we were outside and people were hugging and the sun was shining and um nobody had ever heard of coronavirus um and it was uh it was a really wonderful event bringing together editors readers publishers cooks poets musicians and to share experiences and explore ideas and we were honored to welcome in 2019 two book short listers who then including Bernadine uh Elif Shafak and Bernadine Everisto prior to her win she then became the booker winner that year um and Guy Gunnarattini, Diana Evans, Amanda Prouse, Katie Brand hugely um famous and brilliant people but also we have a programming principle which is that we uh 50% of our programming goes to established writers 50% goes to emerging writers so there's always new talent there's always new ideas floating around and we one of the things we're most proud of is that we because of the nature of the festival it's quite small it's quite intimate you you can literally walk around the festival site and speak to an agent or speak to a publisher or speak to Bernadine Everisto you know it's it's it's that kind of it's such a small scale and so intimate that everybody kind of chips into the idea and chips into that ethos so we from the first festival two people pitched their ideas to um agents that were there and now have been published by major mainstream houses um we went virtual last year um and one of our virtual events resulted in the participants being signed to Radio 4 Extra's News Jack sorry when she'd been mentored by one of our prima donnas and and we also we we launched the prima donna prize in 2019 for unsigned and unagented writers so um it's it's it's the the prizes judged completely blind um and without regard to spelling or grammar it's just looking at the world talent um and we're delighted that the winner of the inaugural prize again signed a major publishing deal and her book is coming out next year this year's prize is to be judged by Elif Shafak and June Sarpong and the the award event I think it's taken place if not at the British Library then with the British Library sometime in March and everything we do is the products of the imaginations and efforts of our founding group 17 women drawn from entertainment publishing we call ourselves the prima donnas because why not and we got together at the start of 2019 with the aim of establishing a weekend of writing ideas that would give prominence to work by women but also spotlight orders from the margins and and yeah that's what we've been doing ever since and we're very hopeful that our festival this summer the end of July can go ahead in a physical format and we yeah we'd love to welcome you all there um to Suffolk thanks thanks so much Catherine you've been very well behaved for a prima donna I must say I'm expecting some flouncing or some walking out in a minute yeah you're seeing me off camera thanks uh Sophia brilliant um I'm going to talk a bit about inc and then come back to the business aspect to um give it a bit of context so inc is a publication about women's art and activism um and we've been running it since 2013 2014 um and it's run by myself Rose Nordin and Hibba Lamara um so it's a biannual and each issue has a different creative theme and I kind of like to echo what Roisin was saying about publishing being this vehicle to really um connect with people and even though I've grown up in a in a different time where we have the internet being a young Muslim woman when we started this we found that um mainstream media channels were were kind of saying the same thing and were dictating what Muslims and Muslim women could talk about so even though we had so much access we also couldn't really see each other or hear each other so one of the reasons we started the publication was to kind of uh talk and make on our own terms so it's a very visual-led publication we wanted to invite artists and creatives to respond to a new theme um for each issue we were kind of working with the backdrop of tumblr so tumblr was really big at this time and we were noticing that loads of people instead of making their own work they were kind of just reblogging um and sharing existing work and with a magazine we were really keen to put out this invitation of creating new work initially we thought it would be a magazine which was which had contributions just from Muslim women but as we started working through it we realised that wasn't an honest representation of our actual worlds and our creative worlds so we tried to limit it to like 50 percent Muslim women and 50 percent anyone else in terms of how the views feminism or how we fit into feminism it's a term that we're really happy to be associated with it's a term that we're able to connect with other women other groups other feminists with but myself Rose and Hibba we're all Muslims so in terms of ethics and um outlook we we already have like a system in place or like a code in place coming up with this manifesto was a really helpful way of shaping what we wanted from the collective and what we wanted to be presenting to a broader public I think in terms of feminism the third point is relative is um the most relevant so it takes the aspirations and concerns of women and girls seriously and recognises and nurtures their creative work and intellectual contributions in fields where they are often undermined or downplayed so that's how I would bring feminism into as a project we also take great inspiration from organisations or projects like Sea Red Women's Workshop especially when we come to thinking about businesses and business models and how your beliefs and mission kind of relates to money and the way you work with other people in your project or company so as you can imagine we didn't make any money from Inc we also didn't have any advertising like you regime and our efforts to distribute the very ad hoc and going up to shops just checking if they would take our publication the project um and our aims were not coming out of nowhere we were all illustrators and publishing before we started our own comics so we were we were aware of the ecosystem and the areas where we could sell things um so we started the design studio to try and make some money and continue our work and we started making our own books and selling them this is a book that we made with book works about libraries so we recognised very quickly that it was taking up all of our energy and we weren't our our own creativity was kind of being sidelined so we kept trying to push inroads to making our own work and this is a publication that came about uh as part of a research trip and also talking about like going back to Roshin and thinking about an international audience and broadening who we were talking to and how we were learning we did a research trip to Malaysia and we learned a lot about publishing there and a lot of this information wasn't available to us self-publishing was very much about New York or Berlin or London or all these places so we were interested in what was happening in Asia and Rose has a connection with Malaysia so that was a place that we we wanted to go off the back of this we had been working with different art galleries and institutions and we were approached by Crate London to start a project in an old library in Manapark and myself Rose and Hibbo we myself Rose in particularly in particular were interested in risograph printing we had backgrounds in illustration but were not able to get access to these machines and because we're very DIY we thought let's just try and include this in the project and figure out how to use it afterwards and this was very much about the self-publishing ecosystem and creating ecosystems that kind of operated under capitalism but also outside of it so that we had the means of production the means of distribution the means of creating content ourselves and what we do at the press is we have open access every other week anyone from the public can come in and we teach them how to use the risograph printing press and it has it's connected to radical publishing in that lots of political parties and used to use this machine because it was a cheap way of getting colour into ephemera so it was really nice to be part of this tradition as well and the the overall effect meant what you created could be looked at as like a limited edition print so you could also make money so people who were coming to use the press could also sell the work so it wasn't just about us producing our work it was about kind of stepping away from being gatekeepers and this is just a picture of the press in action another example of how we work with local people and this was a parents group from a local school that we made seed packets with and then a group who were doing an action relating to pollution in the local area so we're trying to find like lots of applications for printing that are relevant to local people instead of assuming that they would know what it was for this is when we went to the Museum of London to take one of our machines to be printing there so really thinking about how to broaden our audiences and also make money because these larger institutions have a lot of money so that's a way that we're able to continue the other work that we do and just coming back to this ecosystem we also run a publishing fair called DIY Cultures and we ran that for five years and around 2000 people came to each edition and it was a space where we kind of explore the intersections between arts and activism but also people made a lot of money at this fair you know they would sell loads because there was such a large footfall and there was such an appetite for IRL events and it was kind of trying to bridge a gap in the self-publishing world or to create a new area where people were kind of thinking about the contexts like different contexts which use publishing and how they relate to causes as opposed to just individual artists I don't think I have time to go through these but this is the business side of things so we think very much in terms of what we give and what we take I wasn't sure if I was right for this presentation because a lot of our income is actually from grants but yeah so we take a lot of things we take money time ideas art and you can see all of the different people who are kind of involved in that ecosystem and and this and we also think about what we give so it means we're able to really easily figure out if what we're doing is on track or not so the first thing is we give we give to ourselves we give ourselves like a space to work in we give ourselves an audience means of production access to equipment training and then we extend these to other people and we recognize that even by taking money from organizations or the arts council we are also helping them because we are helping them to fulfill what their aims are you know um so I guess that's taken a while to to visualize what we're doing but that is what we are doing and we're making enough money to continue our core program but our business is very much something that's come about after deciding what our focus is and what our core aims are as a group of people um and that's what we why we always refer back to our manifesto and like what are we trying to do what are we trying to achieve it was never maximum profit because going into this we knew publishing is not how you make money and it was more about how do you create um I think rushing again it's about freedom like how do you create uh an environment system structures where you feel free you feel connected with other people um and just on that note I think working as a group and working together has allowed us to feel free in pursuing our own practices so instead of it being something that takes away from it it's actually uh enriched it a lot and nourished it and this has come about because we've decided that being full-time employees of our business is not our goal our goal is just to complete what we our main aims are and then to think about success as the kind of how do we lead the kind of lives that we want to live and how do we kind of have the relationships that we want as opposed to how do we increase how much money we're making every year and whether our project is growing every year yeah and that's the presentation thank you thank you so much Sophia that was really fascinating you've given us actually a really uh you know interesting and clear sense of this broad ecosystem that has within it grant giving organizations local authorities uh the you know the kind of the core business of selling products but also the kind of the question of values and the life you want to live and in particular great to hear about your sense of the autonomy of production and the DIY focus which I think resonates so much with uh what Roshin and Katherine also had to say so that gives us real inspiration of inspiration of past projects and present projects and I can see a bunch of questions rolling in already so I'm going to plunge straight in so that we have enough time to cover them all and I'm going to ask first of all a question um actually for Sophia about longevity now Katherine and Roshin told us about some quite um lengthy surviving projects Virago is is is still their spare rib was one of the longest um and most successful of the women's liberation publications uh Sophia umke and I didn't I didn't have the courage to pronounce it as umke before but I like it umke has um uh been been in place for seven years it's so it's kind of it's a mid-range project it's clearly not just a kind of a flash in the pan what's your feeling about the kind of the pros and cons of going for a kind of a long-standing well-established project as opposed to the kind of the fun and the inspiration of of just doing things in a in a more ephemeral sense um I think because we've done so many different things it feels like umke's gone through many phases and it's also attached to a much larger collective so there are lots of different artists and um yeah but I would say umke it didn't start off as a business it started off as a collective and as a group of people and I don't like if that ends it's a really a failure of our relationships because part of working is figuring out ways of staying in contact in in being in communication and supporting each other um yeah which is why it's a bit strange to talk about it as a business because the because it's so embedded in our lives and in our in our various practices um so we definitely think long term but we're also very adaptable and flexible because we have those cool um kind of values and beliefs and and this the way they manifest can be so different like yeah we can be a magazine and then we can be a printing press and then we can just be like an event and then we can have downtime and it means everybody because umke doesn't take up all of our time each of us has broader practice and other things so uh I don't know if that answered your question it does and I think um it introduces the the idea of emotional labour and self-care which you know ideas which really should be in there in in any talk about business and enterprise and but which you know isn't seen if we just take business to be the balance sheet right the the profits and the losses uh and actually that leads on really nicely to another question a question from Francis who asks about the personal or professional costs to pursuing your social and political uh vision I'm going to ask Catherine if she if she might um look look at this one Sophia's talked to us about um the problems of kind of sidelining yourself or even getting burnt out and the need to perform care. Catherine what's what's been your experience around the costs? I think I think that there are you know women we know there's lots written about the fact that women bear the brunt of emotional labour in the home you know that they do so much unpaved labour in the in the economy and all of the prima donnas that support the festival do so entirely on their own time um and the impact of that obviously means they have less time for the things that they might want to be doing but but they get we all as a group get so much out of it because it's what we love it's what drives us and that passion is what drives all of all of the things that we're describing all of these uh non-businesses or businesses or whatever however you would you would describe them and that that free labour um so so for example with prima donna we have received arts council funding this year we've also received local council funding and the reason we've been given that funding is because there's a belief in Suffolk and Mid Suffolk where the festival is based that we will um we'll do all the lovely cultural stuff and we'll provide a world-class literary event but the impact of that will be economic it will it will not gentrify it will it will have an impact on local economy you know it will be an influx of hard cash and and will have hard impacts positive impacts on the local people in terms of you know well-being and in in addition to the kind of economic stuff we we are about to launch an embedded outreach program in Suffolk and Stomarket and Mid Suffolk where the festival is Suffolk you know from as as a Londoner I my view of Suffolk is this very beacolic and there's lots of people with second homes and of course it's not there are there are places like that in Suffolk but there's lots of places that are not like that there are lots of places where there are hard-to-reach groups that are far away from culture and the arts and um we are determined that those are the people those are the people we want to reach through the festival as well as as well as bringing you know the big names how you know break it up. Thank you so much and now I want to turn to a question from from Lorna and this is for you Rosheen Lorna says congratulations on such a brilliant contribution and asks what might you tell us about the state of journalism today and what a spare rib would look like if it was if it was founded today? What a great question a really hard one to answer and it is something that I've been thinking about over the last few days like imagine if spare rib was online if it could be accessed that way and um yeah I think it would be it would make a huge difference but it would be very different I mean the the physicality of spare rib and um you know the actual magazine like I loved that that that was really important and the way it was designed and everything um and I love the way Sophia talks about that about you know the graphics all that was really important the state of journalism so I lecture in journalism and this is something that I grapple with a lot because I'm I'm teaching students about journalism and my colleagues as well we often think gosh what are we what are we teaching them for like is it so hard to get paid jobs in journalism but I still really really think journalism it's good journalism it's so important and we've seen in the last few weeks obviously with what's happening in the United States and the only journalist was from ITN who went in to the Capitol building I don't know if anybody seen that footage and that was so so important and he named it for what was going on so I think journalism is obviously really really important it's going through a really difficult time it of course will survive it needs lots of support it needs to diversify it's something that I'm very very involved with here in Ireland because you know media mainstream media tends to be very white and middle class and male but more female but it's not diverse it doesn't reflect what's happening in Ireland the change is in Ireland so yeah so it's really important that we value our journalists and our journalism we pay for our journalism I think that yeah so hopefully that answers it thanks very much Roshin I want to move on to another part of the kind of the literary and creative world which is prizes now Sophia and Catherine may have both thought about the kind of the role that prizes might play in in literary or the artistic world do you think prizes just set up kind of a new tier of gatekeepers are they are they a good thing do they end up focusing on just the winners and excluding all the losers what's your view I'm going to ask Sophia first what what role the prize is playing um I mean would you consider an arts council application a prize like in which case they're very important I feel like yeah they're good we have we've had lots of commissions at the press and they've all been small like 200 pound prizes to make a small publication or a poster and it's done a lot for people's confidence and I know that whenever I've got a residency or anything like that it does allow you to make time and space for your own work in a way that you might not be able to but it does reinforce gatekeeping absolutely um so I don't think that's it's never going to serve a majority of people Catherine you're you're part of an organization that awards prizes what's your view on prizes um on a completely pragmatic level I think they are a kind of necessary part of the publishing world right now we I think there's I think the figure is that there are 200 thousand new novels are published each year it's a ridiculous number of books and the what prizes do is provide the reader with a kind of kite mark so that they can find you know good literature and I think I think that can be helpful I think that because we have a diversity of prizes now like the gelat prize and the women's prize that will and our prize the premium donor prize that will spotlight writers that traditionally were left out of things like the booker and I think that they can be a useful way of filtering work and we know that they have a massive impact on sales precisely because of all the things I've just said they are also a problem because those books that are picked out as you know short list and long lists are given a disproportionate amount of publicity and that's in the detriment of the you know some some work that didn't didn't make it that year so I can see that that's a really unhelpful answer I know that but there's positives and benefits benefits and positives both both things thank you um we've got a question from Maria in the in the question feed who's asking you know how would it be possible for her and particularly her as somebody who lives with a lifelong health condition to make a contribution Sophia she's particularly keen on on on the forum that you that you work in but really this is a question for for everybody how do people who want to get a toehold want to get started in any of these worlds how do they do that Sophia um yeah this is something we've been thinking about a lot especially because the way our workshop works is that you have to come to the workshop to have an induction and that immediately um makes it difficult if not impossible for a lot of people so over the past two months we've developed an online induction pack or a remote induction pack um and as soon as lockdown's over we'll make it available in our shop so people order a pack it comes to you with all the instructions and everything you need to make your artwork for an induction and then you just post it back to us we print it and send it back to you um I I guess we're also living in a time where accessing communities and making communities online is very possible uh and a lot of the contributions that we had for work just through online submissions thanks Sophia uh Roisin I know you teach journalism you've probably you know got oodles of of bright young things out there who are very keen to get started what's your top tips for people who want to get going in the world of journalism so I always say to the students you need to read I know this sounds really obvious read really really widely across all mediums um to connect with people there are so many opportunities out there so if you have something that you're really interested in follow that like that that that will actually get you work hopefully um paid work um I was very fortunate because I did that really followed the interests you know that um the things that I was really interested in I'm not saying it's easy it's not it's really difficult but um it's really worth pursuing and um so making those connections and you know often older journalists um are very happy to help um the kindness of strangers there was very many people who helped me when I was younger so I always try and do the same now to younger journalists or even older people who might want to get into journalism or to writing thank you Roisin Catherine in the world of politics or festivals or publishing you you've spanned so many what are your tips for for people starting on uh yeah my my potted career is quite a good example of um you know following things that really as Roisin just said the thing that you're passionate about if you put your efforts into that thing whether it's blogging or you know knocking on people's doors in a virtual sense right now um just there are I know that volunteering is a problematic thing because not all of us have the luxury of being able to afford to do that but if you can spare even an hour to give to an organization and kind of get your foot in the door that is massively helpful and then you create your own networks and they they often lead to interesting and unusual places thank you uh all great tips Marta in question feed asks us what do you do about sometimes that the bar is set high in particular she's bothered about the fact that there are entry fees the prizes are there people who are kept out and what can you do to get over those kinds of obstacles I'm going to go back to Catherine there because you're most involved in prizes Catherine what do you think so with our prize we have a nominal entry fee of eight pounds which simply covers the administration of the prize and in even though we have that we are we invite people to write to us and let us know if they can't afford that and we give free entries and we've also been really really honored that uh private donors have have sponsored places for people to enter the prize so people have donated money to cover those fees and for us and the same goes to the festival actually if you which we we price the festival as low as we possibly can to make it viable but we also offer free free spaces to those who are on benefits or and in another way don't think they'll be able to afford to come so um I've completely forgotten what the oh it's about prizes and yeah I I think that there is a you know now that I'm behind one I know that you do have to you do have to put some money into it but I making making free places available is one way of quickly democratizing the whole process thanks then I think we've just got time to answer one more question which is about size now this is really relevant to us we're looking here uh Roshin you mentioned ITN right from the enormous down to Sophia's nimble uh you know autonomous DIY ethic of really quite small projects but projects that perhaps are easier to make workable in one's life um what do panelists think about the question of size should we aim big because big allows us to to do big things was Virago right to be a global success story a global company always there's something to be really said for the very small projects Sophia thoughts on size um yeah kind of coming back to one of those other questions about getting paid firstly we we did everything with unpaid for about four years and that was fine because it was fulfilling a lot of things in us that were not monetary um but then kind of when we started working with institutions we insisted on being paid for everything because we recognized that everybody else was getting paid in terms of size I think it's taken us a while to figure out kind of marry ambition with capacity and really identify what everybody's capacity is and then match that up very um evenly and that's just help to guide us but we just do what's what's in our capacity without overstretching anybody thank you uh 20 seconds left Roshin any thoughts on size yeah so um obviously size has changed a lot now with social media you know all this twitter when people have 24 000 followers or whatever um I think really you know so it's that means what reach do you have I suppose they're talking about what reached you have and I wouldn't obsess too much about it I think in spare rib if you look at spare rib it starts to small we didn't actually have very huge circulation but the impact it made was huge so really if you have something really important to say um you you reach your audience and you probably increase your size of audience or readers great Catherine women's equality party it's very small uh does it matter uh well the perfect example in politics is UKIP it was very small and look at the seismic impact it's had on on where we are now so yeah thank you we have to leave it there it's been a fantastic hour I'm so grateful Sophia Roshin Catherine it's been wonderful I'm handing over now to Professor Marguerite Jolly for just a few words of farewell but thank you to everyone who's been out there listening to us also this is about lots of thank you's um and just to throw in um I'm sure you know if UKIP can do it the feminists and anti-racists and progressive people can do much much better in a much gentler way so um before we close let me thank our truly inspiring speakers and of course you all at home for joining this critical debate and all the wrestling tangles that we we know are around us I want to thank our fabulous Chair Lucy DeLapp and Project Partner Polly Russell and if you missed anything all will be recorded and available on the British Library's website and you'll also find a place to send any feedbacks to us which will of course be much appreciated this festival has been brought to you by the business of women's words a research project partnered with the British Library that's exploring and taking inspiration from the feminist publishing revolution of the 70s and 80s and I want to say that today's speakers showed to me that the struggle continues but also solutions continue you are all finding solutions and sharing them with us so thank you all for your inspiration creativity and solidarity we hope you keep in touch