 Hello, and welcome to Memories for a Feminist Future. In this podcast, we'll be talking about what women were fighting for in the 1970s and 80s, when women across the UK realised that 50 years after gaining the right to vote, they were still tied in silken threads, without equal pay, legal or financial independence, or recognition of domestic or sexual violence. We'll also be exploring what memory can do as a political force as we look to the future of gender equality for today's generations. I'm Margaret O'Jolly from the University of Sussex and Director of Sisterhood and After, the Women's Liberation Oral History Project, launched 10 years ago at the British Library. It is my great pleasure to be with four pioneering women from that project who will debate with us. Stella Dadsie, one of the founders of the organisation for women of African and Asian descent, considered a grandmother of Black feminism in the UK. Karen McMinn, former director of Northern Ireland Women's Aid 1981-96 and a specialist in transitional justice. Barbara Jones is director of straw works in the School of Natural Building, specialising in zero carbon buildings of timber and straw, and founder of one of the UK's first women-only building companies. Finally, Sally Alexander is a historian who co-organised the first National UK Women's Liberation Movement conference in 1970, and the Mistworld demonstration that year, which you may recently seen turned into a blockbuster film. This year, 2020, with Black Lives Matter's resurgence, the politics of memory and memorialisation have become headline news, tearing down statues and monuments which commemorate slave traders. We can take satisfaction that the public is now much more aware of how important public memory is, and we at least have one statue of a woman in Parliament Square, Gillian Waring's statue of Millicent Fawcett, unveiled in 2018. My first question to you, then, is what struggle or campaign or person from the 70s or 80s would you like to see commemorated if you could? And I'd love to have a round of each of you in turn on this, but particularly liking to start with Stella Dadsie. Okay, well, you asked me to start, Margaret, and I think people will already be aware that we have one statue recently erected of Mary Seacole, which stands proudly outside St Thomas's Hospital. I think in terms of women from the 70s and 80s, the most obvious candidate would be Olive Morris, who has already appeared on billboards around London. I know there's one in Shepard's Bush and in Brixton, and although she was very young when she died and didn't stay around for long, she had an enormous impact on what was effectively the UK Black Civil Rights movement. So, Olive Morris. Thank you. Does anyone else want to come in next? Yes, I would like to. I would like to see a sculpture or a statue of a group of women demonstrating or being active, because that's how I think of the 70s and 80s. I think of collective action. So, I would like to see a group of women and we've got wonderful, wonderful feminist artists and sculptures who could make an installation or a collective sculpture. Have you got a thought of which group you think might be forgotten and shouldn't be? Well, they've been running through my head, like everyone's. I mean, like the Night Cleaners or any of the major demonstrations or Greenham. I mean, there's a wonderful image, several images in Mary Kelly's work of a glass house and which celebrates generations of feminists and all their sayings. Something like that, actually, I think would be magnificent in a public place. Yeah, that sort of feeds into what I've been thinking about. You see loads of statues all over the place commemorating work that men have done, but you don't see any of work, physical work, practical work that women have done. And very, very few people know that Waterloo Bridge in London was actually built by women. They talk about it on the boat tour and there is a small film being made about it, but there's nothing much made of it. It's not in the popular imagination. And I'd really like those women who built that bridge to be commemorated and the women who've come after them, who've done a lot of practical, physical, manual trade work and nobody even knows that they're there or were there. That's wonderful. Again, I'm going to just ask, do you know the names of any of them or the period even? No, I know that the Waterloo Bridge was built during the war at some time. I mean, that was partly why the women were doing it because men were away at war. So they got the chance, they got the opportunity like loads of women had the opportunity to do stuff in the war that they were barred from, not because they couldn't do it, but because men were supposed to do it. Like the film about Rosie the Riveter, which shows all the women who took over the men's jobs and did them extremely well during the wartime years when there was a need. Thank you. And Karen, what about you? Yeah, well, we'd like to echo that idea of commemorating and celebrating the grips of women because I think that's very much what those early feminist days were about. But there is one woman for me from Northern Ireland who really stands out and that was Ines McCormick. And she was the organiser of the National Union for Public Employees. So it was, she organised working-class, low-paid women in many of the trades throughout Northern Ireland. But she was also an incredible activist for social change and feminist and was a great friend to women's aid. And on many occasions, he made very critical contributions to supporting our work and raising the profile of the work in terms of violence against women. So I would very much support something that celebrates her ethos and values and strength and passion as a woman. Margaret, I just thought I'd add to that in the context of talking about groups. I think the women of Granik probably deserve a statue that was such a milestone in terms of worker action. And it was so unique in terms of the way the spotlight that was focused on Asian women. So I think that's an alternative for us if we were thinking of Black women. Brilliant. I would love to see all of these up. But I'm just going to say one thing listening to you all is that I think that it shows the variety of campaigns and tactics and identities and networks of feminist and women's activism of this period. I mean, women were working on the front of Black civil rights, of trade union and workers' rights, also of sexual rights, anti-violence, and completely different parts of the UK. And I think that's one element of the history that, again, perhaps needs to be a bit more publicly understood, that there wasn't necessarily even one women's movement, but a coalition of different women's movements. But the other thing I wanted to reflect on is the way that I think oral history can bring its own medium. Maybe it's not a monument, but it's a way of capturing the past that I think is very living and very alive. And one thing I've enjoyed so much about the Sisterhood and After Oral Histories is the sense of bringing to life those feelings involved in activism and in campaigning for justice, the size, the tears, the laughter, breaking out into song. I mean, I remember Sheila Kitzinger was one of them who started panting to show how a sheep gives birth as someone who was campaigning for birth, women's birth rights. And I thought at this point maybe we could reflect on oral history itself as a medium. And maybe, Sally, you could start us off, because you were a very key person in getting the Sisterhood and After project going. It was your idea, you and some others, who were there at the beginning, who wanted an oral history to be made. Could you tell us why oral history is so special for you? Because it's such an extraordinary archive. I mean, that is an archive in itself. It's a collection. It's a place. It's a location. But it's also where all the voices, different voices can be heard from so many different sources, really. And oral history, I mean, I was a historian and I was of the political generation of oral historians, which was an international movement in the 1950s and 60s following on from earlier pioneer oral history collections, like the slave narratives in America and the United States before the Second World War. But the new wave of oral history, which emerged from African histories and from across Europe and the United States, as well as in Britain, emerged in the 1960s. And I was a historian on History Workshop Journal in the 70s. And I suppose we all thought, and many of the feminist historians on that journal were active oral historians, Anna Davin, Alan Hawkins, and many others. And I suppose we thought that it would be a unique archive and a resource for generations to come and a unique opportunity because oral history reaches into the interstices of not just individual memory, but public history. Of course, I agree. Absolutely. I wondered if someone else would like to comment on oral history as a medium and method, but also maybe just on your own memory of being interviewed for The Sister and After Project, whether there were challenges or whether it was enjoyable or what you think about it as a point of view of an interviewee. For me, it was a very memorable experience. And I think what surprised me was the focus on our interview in terms of my mother's experience and that dimension of my personal, my family history and how that had in any way influenced my own political journey into feminism. So I thought that was really interesting and gave me a moment to reflect on that. And I suppose the strength and independence of my mother who was born in rural Ireland in the 1920s and left school at 14, but then come up to Belfast at the age of 17. So that was a really sort of surprising element for me in terms of this archive. But I think there's also something very valuable about oral history and its capacity to hold multiple voices, multiple narratives. And indeed, I've just finished a piece of work on a prison memory archive in Northern Ireland. And I think in terms of the context of post-conflict societies, oral history archives have something quite important to contribute. But in terms of feminism, I think that capacity to hold often contradictory or different voices and narratives. I think there's something quite appropriate about that. I'd like to come in there, Margareta, Stella. I have a very strong memory of turning up at the British Library that day, feeling quite miffed because it was a bright, sunny day. And I couldn't imagine what would take two days of my precious life to record. And it surprised me, A, how memories came back as I was speaking. I was surprised at what came to the fore. I was also surprised about the way our personal lives were brought in. And I thought the initial question I was asked, I don't know whether it was a question everybody was given, was something to do with, tell me about your name. And I thought that was such a brilliant way of bringing you into a conversation about who you were, where you came from, your ancestry, your key influences and so on. I thought it was just a very interesting process. The other thing I wanted to say was, of course, Heart of the Race, which was published in 1985, was based on oral history and involved interviewing over 100 Black women. And I can remember when the book came out, certain reviews saying this isn't proper history, you know, proper oral history, whatever next. And of course, it stood the test of time. And for the very reasons that we've already acknowledged, that it gives you access to not just the individual, but also the social and political context in which they live their lives. And I just think the system after project or archive will be a wonderful resource for generations to come. Can listening to these stories help make feminism more appealing? And Barbara, I wondered here, particularly if you could kick us off, because you talk about quite amusing, you have to say, about when you were young, you were sort of afraid of the idea of scary feminist women. And then later you said, now I've become one of these people. Could you tell us a little bit about how listening to these long stories might unpick stereotypes and fears? Yes, definitely. Because if you can hear more about somebody and more about their their life history, their lifestyle and their thoughts and opinions about why they have done and made the choices that they've made, it gives you much more context to something rather than just a bold statement that might be really scary. Like I would like to teach a women only group, for instance. So I've had I've had some quite strong reactions when I've wanted to teach just women on a on a building site from other women, occasionally, who've never experienced that that sort of thing, and who think that it may be sexist, or it may hurt men's feelings, or that they probably wouldn't enjoy it at all, because there weren't any men there. But actually, when women do do something like a women only training event, particularly in manual work, which is it often excludes women, they find they have a huge amount of fun, and they learn a lot, and they bond with each other in in a way that they'd never experienced before. And so being able to bring those ideas in through something longer, something like an oral history where you can understand where someone's coming from, if they want to run women only courses, you know, if I hadn't gone to a women only course in the 1980s, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. It was the only step up that I could get that I needed to get into something so nontraditional as manual work. Could you say a little bit about what you did in the training and introduce women and manual trades? So originally, I wanted to just be able to fix the house that I was living in, which was a squatting in North London. And I wanted to be able to put up shows. And I was really lucky to get a place on the Lambeth Women's Workshop part-time course, which was a women only course. By that time, I knew I was a lesbian. And I hoped very strongly that I would meet other lesbians on that course, because I didn't know any. But more than that, I've discovered such a love of working with with carpentry and joinery. And it promoted me on to go into do a tops training course in Enfield Skills Centre in London, which I would never ever have done otherwise. And through that and trying to make connections with other women who are working in the trades, because of course I was in the Skills Centre with only one or two other women, I came across women and manual trades, which was based in London, and joined that organisation with Alacrity. And it became one of my social groups, not just focusing on what we were doing as tradeswomen, but talking about the whole range of feminism and politics that was going on in London at that time in the early 80s. Thank you. Maybe somebody else could come in on, I guess, on some of the sort of unexpected elements of telling a life story that can challenge the stereotype. I mean, I think oral history and that sort of life story telling approach, I think it just can humanise, has a capacity to humanise people's experience and supports maybe the listener's ability to listen and to help suspend those judgments and stereotypes a little bit. And I think in terms of feminism, it certainly can help women identify with that idea of short experience, whether it's violence against women, low pay, discrimination because of race or identity. I definitely think there's a huge value in giving that personal dimension, that life story. We're not experts. We're coming through feminism in the 70s and 80s. It was about learning every day whenever I went into a refuge and we learned from each other and so being able to share those experiences, I think you can reach people much more easily. I think I would like to just say something for the literary and aesthetic qualities of oral histories, that there's something about the language, the way people speak about speech itself, about conversation, which can deliver such freshness and new approaches to some themes which might seem over familiar. So that's also, as you said earlier, Margaret, the singing and the humour and wit of some interviews, but just the aesthetic qualities of oral history, of conversation. Of course, absolutely. I'm thinking of specific moments in your oral history and Karen, what comes to mind in part is the very vivid descriptions of working in the refuges, but also quite sort of just little domestic details like, I remember Karen, you talking about wearing a Laura Ashley dress at one point to a very early student party and the feelings of nervousness at going to this party. It was before you'd got really into the movement and I think one thing is growing up stories or stories of, like you mentioned, remembering your own mother, what you learned from her or didn't learn from her and Sally, also the description of your house and sharing the house and the different cooking rotors that went on. I mean, I'd love to hear any of these little aspects that you might, you want to talk about from any of you. I think, Stella, you haven't said anything. No, I haven't said anything because I think people basically said what I would have said. I agree that it humanises people and makes their story have much greater immediacy and I certainly think that the way the questions were posed did enable us to dig deeper than one would normally expect to go. I know that when my interview was done, I'd only recently been bereaved, my mother had died a few months previously and in a way it was quite therapeutic to be able to talk about her and to reminisce about her and her influence on me. But yes, it's just about the humanisation of the story that I think all history allows for. That was certainly our experience and talking about Heart of the Race. I can remember a woman standing up at a launch event that we had and saying, you know, this is the first time in my life that I've ever heard the stories that I've heard around my kitchen table from my mothers and my mother and my aunties and my grandmother. It's the first time I've ever seen them in print and that was a very powerful statement because some voices don't get heard and I think that it's important when we think about oral history to recognise the invisibility of so many women and in the same way as Robert was talking about the women who built Waterloo Bridge, you know, there are so many women whose lives and whose realities have been hidden from us and I think oral history helps to bring that out. Well that leads me beautifully to my next question which is about listening itself. I think one of the challenges today is that there's so much noise and social media grabbing our attention and combining that with a kind of extreme politics of fundamentalism that's really worrying for I think most of us. And I wondered about oral history or other ways of listening to each other as a way to help future activists, a way to slow down if you like, a kind of slow listening combined with learning about each other as rounded people with all our ups and downs and also domestic lives and funny things that happen to us. And I wondered about that's the question is how can listening help future activists? And again I thought Karen you might be able to talk to us here particularly in relation to having worked with survivors of violence, domestic violence but also violence in Northern Ireland and your work in conflict resolution. Yeah I think you bring up a really interesting point because we do live in such a politically polarized culture you know increasingly now and again I'll just refer back to that prison memory archive which took the stories of you know a whole range of people and built it into an archive but that was only one part of the project they then took it out you know how to community engagement program where they were you know promoting the archive and had speakers at it. And so I think that's that's the other critical part isn't it is is the just the ability to sit and whether it's in your living room or in a community hall to sit and listen to the experiences of of others you know whether you're you're a curious young woman you know hoping to engage in feminism or social transformation or indeed you know in the case of Northern Ireland communities from you know different you know political divides being in room listening to maybe our nationalist community listening to the testimony of a prison officer. So I think that can be very powerful and and certainly in the work in women's aid you know some of my you know most memorable experiences were particularly when a woman just came in you know in the in the early days that she arrived was you know just giving that woman space some woman wanted to be quiet but many women just so for that for those women to be listened to and to be heard and to be believed was was so so empowering for them and and yeah so I think our capacity to listen is can be a very powerful process and and not only deepening our understanding but just rounding us more in our humanity. Yeah I I think every generation probably believes it's the first to encounter whatever issues it's engaged with and certainly in the context of Black Lives Matter. One of my frustrations is the sense that many young people today seem to think that they are addressing these issues for the first time. Now for those of us who live through civil rights, live through the 60s and 70s we know that's not the case and I think your question was about how listening can help future generations. For me it's really important that future generations listen to the voices of their elders not because we always got it right or even because we necessarily had the answers to everything but because there's no need particularly in this day and age to reinvent the wheel what we need to do is stand on the shoulders of those who went before and build on the work that has previously been done and I think listening enables us to do just that. Yeah I thought what what Stella just said was so wise I was thinking about similar things that that you don't need to reinvent the wheel and I know a lot of feminists get really cruel treatment from social media these days but anybody who was around during the time of the London Women's Newsletter fiascos where all sorts of things used to get said from all different sides of an argument written in those pages until it got so wild that we had to close the newsletter because of personal attacks and stuff like that going on you know this was the 80s and it was that's how it that's how people were reacting to things that they didn't like or hadn't gotten understanding of but I also wanted to say in terms of listening that I was very involved in an incest survivors group for many years here in Todmeden and before that in consciousness raising groups and it was an absolute fundamental part of of my feminism and the feminists that I knew to listen really listen to each other and to our stories and to share and through listening and through realizing that we might not have had the same experiences but we've had similar ones and that we have empathy for each other was a huge learning and a huge healing between us and I think I can still see evidence of that level of listening that goes on amongst my feminist friends as part of emotional development and if that if as long as we can keep that going within feminism in the 21st century then I think we're in for a positive ride yes perhaps sometimes the younger generation do have to reinvent the wheel everything that everyone said has been valuable and I agree with it but I'm thinking of my granddaughter who's one of the books she seized off my bookshelf a couple of years ago when she came to help me sort out my book Stella with yours and loved it and she's in her early 20s and I listen to her and honestly sometimes I have to keep completely quiet because I think the young do have to reinvent the wheel in their own way but they also listen and learn from older voices so I don't know that you can ever change that experience of needing to create a new political movement or even a sense of self actually and I suppose again this is where in a way activism meets life story there is an element that's so intimate and that yes I can see what you're saying there I wanted to pick up on the general response to that question about listening to say for me one of the important discoveries of the oral history as a whole was how there was so much learning around alliances and feminist learning to listen to each other activist learning to listen to each other because as Barbara said there was quite a lot of disagreement within the movement and I found very inspiring examples like the organization of women of African and Asian descent as an alliance at a coalition between women of color of often quite different backgrounds also the middle class and working class women who combine together to fight for the rights of night cleaners also as Karen you were mentioning the way that the women's movement in Northern Ireland could work across a very difficult divide between Protestant Catholic nationalists and Unionists and also Barbara you mentioned incest survivors and sexual rights campaigns and I think those could sometimes bring women together across different political backgrounds or life experiences so I think one of the points is remembering coalition as well as making coalition but this leads me to a question around the title of the oral history project sisterhood and after and I think that that for me is a question of what is after so there's moments of coalition of sisterhood but then there are also moments of needing to renegotiate that and learning how to remake it so my last question is what do we think might be recorded now from the activism that's going on around us for a future listener in 2030 or even 2130 I've often been referred to recently as an eco feminist and I think the the challenges of climate change and how we can deal with those in an egalitarian way and how we can dismantle the structures that are creating the conditions for ruining our planet and reform them into other ways I think is would be one I'd really love to see the narrative of that we're in changing times at the moment the COVID crisis has helped and hindered that it's given us an opportunity to look at different ways of living and it's also created a lot of fear about the future and about the monetary future so I think it would be really interesting to see a narrative about eco feminism and how that has has developed thank you Barbara I saw a video just yesterday which I found quite alarming it was looking at the mobilization of far right militia in I think louisville and also the mobilization of a black militia and I heard a woman who was described as a black grandmother who was fully armed with machine gun and handgun and goodness knows what talking about the fact that she was fed up with peaceful protest and felt it was now time to take up arms and it occurred to me that the voices of women particular who are involved in black lives matter in whatever capacity would be a hugely interesting resource for us to have access to in the future just as the voices of women who were involved in previous civil rights movements are still important and still resonate with us today Stella what was your view on the black grandmother who was taking up arms obviously this is in the United States my view I felt quite conflicted the part of me that feels fed up with the senseless deaths and the you know the Trump narrative felt go on girl go for it but the historian and the realist in me tempers that response because I have never yet seen a situation where violence didn't just forget more violence and I do as an educator believe that the pen is mightier than the sword so I would like to see other responses having said that and there are some very entrenched views as we've already acknowledged and I think it's difficult to know how this struggle will progress unless people see others fighting like with like I do think Trump's narrative has has encouraged this kind of warmongering and also this sense that people have their backs against the wall and I've no idea where it will go in the future but I can't say one way or the other I as I say I felt quite conflicted listening to her and I hope that America and indeed the UK which often follows suit does not descend into armed civil war I think that would be very very sad and very tragic thank you yes Sally would you like to go next well I would like for someone to create an archive of oral history of migrants refugees asylum seekers legal and illegal the many voices of women in particular but also the men who are have no way to exist legally and to work in Britain at the moment as part of our crisis centers I'm thinking of organizations like women for refugee women and I don't just mean short interviews I mean long life stories like you did for the women's liberation movement in sisterhood and afterwards Margarita you and Rachel and Polly and perhaps just thinking about work I mean this sounds I can't say it any other way it sounds so obvious that care workers I would like an archive of you know really detailed archive of care workers I couldn't agree more with Sally I think those are among the hidden voices that people rarely hear and actually when you do sit down and talk to migrant women particularly women who've made that horrendous journey across the Sahara and across the Mediterranean or indeed the English Channel what you discover is a huge resource of resilience bravery and courage and determination that rarely gets acknowledged and I'm very mindful of how important that is particularly in these extraordinary dystopian times that we're living in I've just completed a piece of work a book that's coming out shortly called a kick in the belly which looks at the resistance of women who were enslaved and I have found myself quite frequently thinking if they could go through that then we can go through this and I think that's part of the dimension of oral history that is really important that it's not just about listening to each other and learning from each other it's also about being inspired and being reminded that things have been bad before but it's because women and others have stood up and fought back that we can claim some of the privileges and benefits that we now have so I think that's an important thing to remember and nothing could be more of a resource than women who have made that trek I mean all I could really add is you know absolutely would support what Sally, Stella and Barbara have said I think you know the environmental issues are you know really such a critical challenge that we're all going to face and our children and grandchildren are going to face much more directly but I think those as Stella said those invisible people you know the refugees the immigrants and the low paid workers that have you know just carried on in the face of such indifference and such lack of support during the pandemic but maybe an archive that finds a way to celebrate you know their achievements and their contributions because I suppose at the end of the day I want to remain hopeful and I think it's very important that we celebrate those people who do strive against such injustice in the world and as you say Stella are so resilient so something that celebrates you know that achievement I suppose of women's spirit and indeed the human spirit. I think we probably should end this point thank you so much all of you and I'm of course very much agree that part of these stories is about inspiration and taking courage from other people's courage I think activism often comes not just from resisting suffering or oppression but from having the tools and the models for how to how to fight back or how to change the system but that's that's just me that's how I see it I'd like to to just formally close this by saying that the Sisterhood and After Oral History archive is publicly available and free at the British Library and you can also find over 120 clips from it and 10 short films by feminist director Lizzie Thin and teachers packs and articles on key themes in a timeline of the women's movements on the site at bl.uk slash sisterhood and also many other wonderful oral history projects listed there I'd also encourage you to go and see unfinished business the fight for women's rights a pioneering exhibition on the history of women's rights at the British Library with a host of related events across the country and online I would like to thank Polly Russell as library partner to Sisterhood and After and the Leavey Whom Trust for Funding the Oral History and also B Rowlett and Gabriella Jones for their help in making this podcast and of course our fabulous guests themselves Stella Dadsy Sally Alexander Barbara Jones and Karen McMinn you've been listening to the British Library