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Reanimate this! The 1979 working mothers interviews.

Rachel Thomson and Ester McGeeney

With the support of the Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL) we have explored the possibility of using the reanimating data methodology to work with a new body of material. This time our archive is a collection of 150 tape recorded interviews generated in 1979 by feminist researcher Sue Sharpe capturing conversations with working mothers across Britain. We wanted to know whether the reanimating methods that we forged in the RAD project might work with a radically different data set, and to explore what kinds of possibilities for creating new knowledge these encounters might create. To do this we brought together a group of academics, artists and practitioners working in this area for a participatory workshop. In advance of the workshop we listened to snippets of audio and then working together we creatively engaged with the material, talked with original researcher Sue Sharpe and explored possibilities for future connections and ways of working with the archive. 

As part of setting the scene for the workshop we briefly shared the core of the reanimating method including a definition of the ‘time-bind’ – an emotionally felt connection between past and present – which we found to be an essential part of connecting current audiences with archived materials. We also shared examples of the playful methods we had developed during the RAD project that allow participants to have fun exploring the words and meanings of conversations long ago. In our work for the RAD project we have characterised these as: reasking, revoicing, recollecting and collaging. For this event we decided to use the collage method given that we found it to be the most accessible of the approaches and with the least ethical risks. This approach invites participants to work with printed materials from archives (e.g. interview transcripts, archived magazine articles, leaflets, fieldnotes etc)- to cut out words, images and phrases that stand out to them, to make connections and create new images, stories and poems. Participants can include their own words but the method doesn’t demand this of them. It allows us to work anonymously, reusing the words and images created by others. 

In the working mothers workshop we wanted to work with images as well as extracts from the conversations with working mothers. We looked through copies of Spare Rib from the late 1970s, extracting and copying pages that in some way captured the interest at the time in work, labour and child care. We also transcribed and anonymised extracts from three interviews conducted by Sue Sharpe with working mothers in 1979. Participants were given cardboard, glue and scissors and invited to chop up words and images and to make their own poems inspired by the materials. Those joining online were offered the chance to do something similar working with the blackout tool that we have used in our online reanimating data workshops.https://blackoutpoetry.glitch.me/ . 

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The activity focussed our attention on the material and its possibilities. The room was full of energy as we all found our own time binds. Several of us read out our poems or displayed our collages. We found we had started to build a collective analysis that spoke to how contemporary concerns resonate and reanimate agendas around working motherhood in the past. 

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The workshop also provided us with an opportunity to talk with researchers Sue Sharpe who had conducted the original interviews. Sue kindly agreed to respond to questions that we had crowd sourced in advance, using a padlet to collect questions that the group wanted to ask. We were fascinated by how this research – undertaken for a ‘trade’ book commissioned by Penguin – was distinct from an academic social science project. We felt the passion and the politics in the material, but also the friendliness and informality of the tone. We wanted to know how Sue found the women, why she had asked what she asked, what the women understood by their involvement.

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Sues’s responses to our questions gave a rich account of the social, political and interpersonal context of the study and the importance of this contextual information was felt in the quality of the discussion that unfolded afterwards. This felt similar to moments in the RAD project where we found that opportunities to meet and interrogate the original researcher (Rachel) enabled a new generation of women to connect with and feel the lived politics of the past.

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As Sue reminded us, the interviews were undertaken 45 years ago, and some aspects of Sue’s memory were quite fuzzy. But Sue has her own archive including notebooks, contact details and tapes carefully kept. Together we were able to begin to build a picture of a unique and important project that has enormous value for us today – historically, methodologically and ethically. Moving forwards we are hoping to work with Sue and her archive to find ways of making  this collection available to a wider community and to reward the care that she has shown in preserving the precious materials.

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1979

Mark Erickson

1979 was the pivotal year in the post World War 2 UK for employment and employment relations. Many commentators will cite 1979 as being the beginning of neoliberalism in the UK, with the new Conservative government bringing in ideologically-driven policies to reconfigure the relationship between state and society. We can still feel the effects of this today in the form of the legacy of public service privatizations (water, energy, telecoms, housing) and a shift in societal attitudes towards more individualist and consumerist positions. Yet these seismic shifts have been underpinned by changes in modes of employment, the labour market, and industrial relations.

We should note four key transformations whose emergence can be dated to 1979, all of which are presaged in the Sue Sharpe Working Mothers archive. Firstly, deindustrialization; the demise of the UK’s heavy industries had already started but now picked up pace as coal, steel, shipbuilding and large-scale car production all went to the wall. There was an attendant steep rise in unemployment to peak in 1984, which remained high (above 7%) until the late 1990s (https://www.statista.com/statistics/280236/unemployment-rate-by-gender-in-the-uk/). Secondly, trade union decline. Trade union membership reached its peak in 1979 (13.2 million) and then went into a steady, and ongoing, decline (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy 2022: Trade Union Membership UK 1995-2021: statistical bulletin page 5). Thirdly, fragmentation of careers and an end to ‘jobs for life’ dramatically changed the experience of many workers in the UK, and saw the dismantling of historic occupational communities. Fourthly, the feminization of the workforce takes off in 1979 with women increasingly being drawn into full-time and part-time work, a trend that has increased year on year since 1979 (ONS 2019: 7). 

The long term changes to work and employment that started in 1979 are still at work today, and the consequences of these transformations are still not fully understood. Looking back to help us look forward is a vital task if we are to be better equipped for the coming changes that the UK labour market and workforce will face. 

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Reanimating folk

Rachel Thomson

On a Sunday in October  I went to an amazing show – based on an oral history project called Sweet Thames lead by Sam Caroll and Zoe Bliss of Star Creative Heritage. The project was interested in capturing the still living history of the London folk scene rooted in skiffle clubs, that emerged in London in the 1950s and went through a revival in the 1970s when participants began to focus on documenting and embodying the songs of the British isles. This period of revival involved an intensive collecting, study and performance of this oral tradition as well as invention of new songs. For the Sweet Thames project interviews were conducted with 26 people involved in both the original and revival scenes. These testimonies were shared with performance artist Ewan Wardrop who saturated himself in the material, condensing and sculping it into a verbatim performance piece that involves moving fluidly between voice, song, dance and recorded material to share an account of this movement that is multi-vocal, funny and moving. 

The audience for the event at Lewes Con Club was made up of a range of people, but a predominance of older, greyer white folk who knew the words to the songs – members of folk clubs. And the first half of the event was by folk club rules, with individuals invited to take up floor spots and to introduce and sing a single song. Those that contributed each explained their role in the folk club movement and chose songs of significance to share – with the audience joining with the chorus. The first time I experienced this – when I first moved to Lewes 10 years ago and attended the weekly folk club at the Elephant and Castle I was genuinely unnerved – as those around me broke into soft song – knowing words and breaking the fourth wall of the stage. Now, more familiar with the proactice, I find it comforting and moving – a kind of call and response that captures the democratic ethos of the clubs and a sense of a living tradition that is collective and embodied.

After a break and a chance to look at the exhibition, Sam Caroll introduces Ewan and explains how she engaged him to be part of the project sitting one night around the fire at a music festival. She held back from telling us more, saying simply ‘it is really something’. Ewan began with a digital recorder, explaining how it contains hours of talking, voices. He pressed ‘play’ and shared a short audio collage of fragments from interviews. The stage was bare and well lit, with functional chairs stacked and a pint sat on a barrel – looking like any folk club. As Ewan begins we understand that his testimonies include members of the audience who we have recently listened to sing and reminisce. We recognise the cadence of their talk and their preoccupations. We find out more about how the skiffle movement began, how its roots in black American music were obscured and how folk in the 1950s forged a bridge with blues and calypso that could be crossed in both directions. Music was made on stage from a box, a broom and a string. Rhythms were danced on a wooden board taking us back to the clubs but also to the many times and places where popular song and dance were practised by ordinary people as a way of connecting with each other.

Women’s voices were also conjured, communicating a sense of the gender regime of the scene, as well as their passions for research, community and the emotional currents of song. We spent time reflecting on battles over ‘tradition’ and why certain clubs developed rules that encouraged a focus on material from the British Isles and a focus on songs rather than singers or performances. The practical rules of the club scene (from bans on eating on stage, through the layout of the room, to the selling of raffle tickets) were given due attention as part of a concern with the mundane and the unnoticed. We heard about how ‘starry’ American musicians were taken aback and delighted when performing at Cecil Sharpe house by the quality of the chorus when the room sang back to them with rich harmonies. And we the audience echoed the experience by singing back the chorus then and there. As Ewan’s performance came to its climax the focus settled on the capacity of song to connect us over history and place. The interlocutors reflected on the liveness of the scene, and the aging of the participants. Rarely had recordings been made, and now people were beginning to die. We listened and joined in with a recording of a 100 year old man who himself was joining in with singers stretching back into time. There was not a dry eye in the house. 

The event and the project did not describe itself as ‘reanimating data’ but I recognised it as such. And understood that our attempts to reanimate can be seen as part of a tradition of oral performance and song where joining in, adapting, and making the material alive again involves a practice and a community – a bridge across which material and people can flow. Unevenly, awkwardly. The use of recorded material, verbatim theatre and audience participation together worked brilliantly and enabled so much more to be communicated that was simply on the page.

This link takes you to Ewan Warthrop’s performance at Cecil Sharpe House

https://vimeo.com/840443841