In the first part of Rosie’s testimony she talks about her first encounters with Shrew in the early 1970s in a radical bookshop in Luton. She talks about her mother and her Northern Irish Catholic background, the importance of childcare and her interests in equal opportunities and equality for women.
This is Victoria Bazin and I’m joined by my colleague Mel Waters and we are doing an interview with Rosie Serdiville for the Liberating Histories project which is all about readers’ experiences of feminist magazines. So, Rosie I was wondering if you could start us off by telling a little bit about yourself…
Okay, well I’m 67 years old, I live in Newcastle and have done for the last 40 years but I was born in the south of England in a town called Luton. I’m a historian so I’m currently working for Tyneside Irish Centre running the Cultural and Heritage team, which involves a fair amount of work with older Irish people, doing welfare work particularly, and keeping people connected to each other. Those two sets of activities reflect my background nicely. I have had a lifetime working in the voluntary sector in one way or another and have had a lifelong interest in the welfare and history of women. I come from an Irish background which featured large numbers of very strong-minded women but was by no means the matriarchal society that is sometimes suggested for people from that background. So it was a very interesting set of circumstances that triggered my interest in equality in general because my family are Northern Irish Catholics but in particular, equal opportunities and equality for women.
Excellent, thank you very much for that background information that is going to help us understand why you’re interested in feminist magazines in the first place. We were wondering whether you might remember your first encounter with a feminist magazine
Oh yes, your recent session in the library was enormous fun and one of the things I loved about it was the fact that you were taking around hard copies of magazines including Shrew which was the first one that I ever encountered it will have been 1972-73.
A small radical book shop had opened in the area of Luton that I was living in and a woman who was involved there had copies of the magazine which I think she must have been bringing down from London. She’d been a member of some of the London groups before she moved to Newton, and I just remember opening it and thinking “whoa!” not only are there other people who think the way I do, but actually there is a range of viewpoints on women’s lives, particularly that idea of the personal being political, that I hadn’t really thought about them and that made it very appealing. I started actively seeking out more material as well as getting involved with a women’s group that was forming at the Bookshop. I was very young I mean 16 ,17, something like that and it was just a revelation to see that there were other people who thought the way I did and who were so very different from the rather zany image that was being portrayed on television at the time. You know and in particular that image of the bra burning being all that there was to the women’s movement yeah.
The first time I read an article on I think it was child care, you know, that you could feel the cogs engaging. I come from a typically large Irish family. I have four siblings. My mother is one of ten. My father was one of six. So any family gathering involved hundreds and hundreds of children, or so it feels, and that gives you a very active appreciation of the impact that child care, or the lack of it, and the responsibilities of, it play in women’s lives, and that combined with my mother’s experience of married (which had gone disastrously wrong in her case), it left me with a desire to explore those ideas about how relationships and equality expressing relationships has an impact on your economic life, your freedom to work, your freedom to achieve, your capacity to look after yourself and your children as well as on the way that people perceive you.
Thank you that’s very interesting Rosie you know particularly your insight into the role of the radical Bookshop so many women have told us , that that’s the first time they saw a feminist magazine and the bookshops were the places where you could see magazines that you wouldn’t otherwise see yeah very interesting
Spare Rib I think was the first magazine to actually go into places like W H Smiths and that was kind of an inspired move because that simply weren’t places where you could find that material. The local library certainly didn’t carry any kind of radical magazine. They were not going to do that in a town like Luton in that era, and at that age it’s very difficult to connect to networks you know, at 16 I had no idea that you could do things like joining a political party, let alone getting involved in a campaign group. Seeing the development of community politics in those magazines was kind of a revelation as well because it started me thinking about empowerment in broader terms, as part of the community. This was the period when the Irish Community was quite beleaguered, particularly people who had Northern Irish accents. It’s I think fairly commonplace now to realize how many people gave up those accents after the bombings that happened on the mainland but even in a town like Luton which had an enormous number of Irish people there was still that memory of the early days of coming to Britain and of being perceived quite negatively. The museum in Luton these days actually has a reconstruction of the sort of room in a boarding house that an early Irish migrant would stay in, complete with the sign on the wall saying you know “no dogs, no blacks, no Irish”. That experience of discrimination was not one that had any kind of outlet. It would be I think, a couple of years after that, that organizations like the “Irish and Britain” or whatever it was called, a group set up to campaign against discrimination, would get formed and all the way through that process of thinking about discrimination you always have this background knowledge that it was seen as a subject of humour. And that was very much how the issue of women’s equality was seen even amongst the radical circles that I started to move in.
So the Bookshop generated a women’s group but also connected me with networks of people who were for example campaigning against fascism because, um now what was it called back then? it wasn’t the BNP, erm National Front, yeah, the National Front was becoming an issue in Luton and if you know anything about the history of the town that has become a marked phenomenon down there. And that experience of going into groups and talking about women’s equality and women’s participation as part of the wider agenda of political action, reinforced that sense that you could not get a hearing unless you forced one. I think everybody who’s sat particularly in a trade union meeting at any time in the 1970s will have recounted that experience of your idea being repeated by the guy sitting next to you and being heard for the first time. Now what was really interesting about women’s magazines was that they described that. But it was a huge range of issues some of them things that you didn’t think were going to be relevant to you. At 16 and a virgin the discussion about sexuality kind of, was very interesting but you know I didn’t get the mechanics of it quite frankly. And there was a kind of education role that was played by those magazines there as well. The sex education that we got at school was about the mechanics words like “pleasure” were not used you know, it just wasn’t assumed that you needed to know about that. I can remember one particular illustration that sort of summed it up and it got me to real trouble at home I think I mentioned it to you on the talking Library session there was a picture in an early edition of Shrew the challenge the sort of 19th century porn image of the woman with her breasts resting on a tray of apples and this was a bearded very hippie-ish guy with his penis resting on a tray of bananas, and it was funny, it was making a point about objectification, and about body image, and it was also just explicit you know, like a naked bearded guy with hair all over.
Unfortunately when my mother caught sight of that particular issue, she was like “Whoa! this was not a good news”. I think she was very dubious about what was going on at the Bookshop and the people I was associating with as a result of that, but I was fortunate because coming from that background, radical politics was not an unusual phenomenon. My mother came to Britain because she wanted to train as a nurse and the Northern Irish hospitals had taken their quota of Catholics for that year, and that idea that society, British society could actually be unfair and unequal was something that we grew up with you know. And while my mother… my father was I was going to say was apolitical but we never had the discussion. My father was one of those… a very typical quiet Irishmen. With four women in the house he never got a word in edge ways. There was a sense that you could challenge the perceptions of how the world was working around you, that it was all right to do that, and that was quite widespread in that Community.
I can remember a discussion at my secondary school, which was a Catholic Secondary School, obviously employing teachers who did not come from our background and for some reason the subject of Northern Ireland came up and the teacher was talking about rubber bullets and was under the impression that you were talking about something that was basically like an ordinary bullet but tiny. One of the guys brought in a rubber Bullet. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one they’re about six inches long the diameter will be… what’s that? about three inches, and they have a metal casing and they’re very, very hard rubber. So what sounds quite innocuous, is actually a very, very nasty piece of equipment. And I can remember the teacher just looking at this and looking at the class and asking how we knew about this stuff and where this had come from. And it was fine to have that discussion about this weird background that so many people in Britain didn’t know about at the time with an Englishman who just assumed that it was fine for these kids to have viewpoints they have experiences like that. And it never occurred to me that that was quite unusual in the teacher I think because of the school was just full of people like us, you know they got used to it. Sorry I’m rambling…
No not at all. You’re answering all the questions in a very seamless coherent way. So in a way, a lot of the questions have already been addressed.
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