Rachel Thomson
This seems to have been the question of my week. On Sunday I went to the launch of a new project/ archive/ website called HOWL – the History of Women’s Liberation. The main aim of HOWL is to collect and publish the memories and stories of feminists involved in any of the many layers of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement. In contrast to the more ‘elite’ projects such as the British Library oral history collection – this is a user driven crowd sourcing project as older feminists are invited to click and communicate by adding their own stories. In the words of the organisers:
Let the rich, united, divided, contradictory, joyful, difficult, amazing, ordinary and banal years of the WLM be recorded in our own words. This is our story. Our history.
A favourite of mine shared at the launch was this memory from Wendy Knight – giving her personal version of the feminist slogan ‘ it starts with you sinking into his arms and end with your arms in his sink’. So this is a collection of activist voices for activists. It spreads its web wide and seeks to be inclusive – perhaps ‘more inclusive’ than other projects. But you need to be connected in order to contribute your story.
Also this week I reviewed a book – which was made from the testimonies of women who were teenagers between 1950-80 – so probably the same generation of women involved in the HOWL project. The voices in Hannah Charnock’s book Teenage Intimacies young women, sex and social life in England 1950-80 were sourced from panellists of the Mass Observation Archive responding to a series of relevant directives and a group of women in the Exeter area who agreed to take part in oral history interviews. Charnock is keen to emphasise the everyday nature of teenage lives rather than the spectacular rebellions – the ordinary subterfuges and recalibrations of sexual mores that made a ‘quiet revolution’ in intimacies that for example saw illegitimacy lose its meaning and power as social censure. These young women were not activists, but they did want more for themselves in terms of happiness, pleasure and fulfilment than what they saw in their parents example. And their parents knew enough to turn a blind eye and hope that daughters avoided the mistakes that blighted their own lives. Silence, awkwardness and learning by doing is the motif of this book.
And thirdly, I spent a very happy morning in a group of women convened by textile artist Vanessa Marr in order to create my own duster-art using visual material from the 1950s gathered in the Brighton art school archive. Our group of middle aged women searched through idealised images of house work, kitchens and domestic technology imagined by advertisers for a new kind of female consumer. Our task was to cut and stitch onto dusters to create collages that both animated the archive and created connections between past and present. In the group we joked about the material, about our own favourite recipes, reclaiming the rooms of children leaving home – whether a tall or short plumber was to be preferred. We touched on parenting and questions of domestic labour. As we chose material we also chose narratives, stories we might tell. I started by focusing on the men/ husband who seemed to frame the elegant domestic goddesses in the advertisements. There was something nasty in their sharp suits and postures. I was thinking of Mad Men and Alfred Hitchcock – misogynist men and captured wives. But as my collage took shape I saw my men as floating as they do in the opening titles of Madmen. The absence of their women literally unhinged these bodies. We began to joke about our men as captives themselves, admitting that for two of us at least it is the men in our lives that do the lion’s share of the house-work while we pursue careers in the public sphere.
So, the moral of the stories? That we need to be able to move between loud sources that capture and portray images that powerfully shape narratives and quiet sources – which may in fact be almost silent, but which include a reworking and recalibration of the everyday while avoid the spectacular. That in order to get to these more complicated places we need to work with and through sources, they do not reveal themselves immediately – not even to ourselves.