In the second part of Rosie’s testimony she talks about her mother’s experiences and outlook, how the culture of a community can change how people think and how women’s magazines influenced the style of mainstream media.
In a way, a lot of the questions have already been addressed. But I did want to go back to… you mentioned your mother. I wonder whether your mother did engage with feminist magazines or some of the ideas from the feminist magazines or whether you had any conversations with her about it?
Lots of conversations. She was quite open to the idea that women needed opportunity and she was a typical migrant mother. She wanted her kids to do well. She assumed we would take on a very traditional domestic life but that idea of having a life outside the home was particularly important to her. My father was abusive. My mother left, for the last time, taking us when I was 14. She was a single parent making an income working first as a cleaner and as a chamber maid. So there was not a lot of money around. She GOT issues like “violence against women”, the opportunity that women could have a job that would pay them enough to be independent if they wanted to be and discussions around those subjects were very easy. Very often it was my mother who was saying “you’ve got to make sure that you can walk away if you want”, “you can make choices if you want”, “you have GOT to work hard at school because you are the oldest and older children always work harder”, “and you have got to take responsibility for the rest of the family because when I’m gone, that’s your job!” and you just saw it as part and parcel of what you were reading in the magazines. She was quite resistant to actually looking at the magazines themselves… particularly after the picture of the guy with the bananas! But when you talked to her about the ideas that were in there, yeah, that was absolutely… what’s the phrase I’m looking for… that just really reinforced stuff she was already thinking.
It’s so interesting isn’t it Rosie because we’ve got this sense in which, suddenly, second wave feminism started in 1968 (and in fact our project starts the) but in fact a lot of women were politically active way before then but also women like your mother who were “switched on” and were fully aware of how important, in particular economic equality was.
I think that you can’t underestimate the degree to which how the culture of a community has an impact on how people think. Luton is a very diverse area. I grew up with lots of South Asian, East Asian and Afro Caribbean people in the community round me. It was not a town free of racism by any means and certainly the Irish community is not free of racism but I made friends. I remember my friend Maheswari who is Punjabi talking to me about being a girl and then a young woman in a community that had very set ideas about what women were going to be like and about the way that sat so oddly with what she perceived as powerful and “in charge” women in her own family. That discussion with other people and in the magazines about how women were persuaded to see themselves as in charge, when actually, they weren’t, was really quite important. What did Betty Friedan call it?
The Feminine Mystique
Yes, that’s right. That thing that’s wrong that you can’t put a finger on. That’s what the magazines did. They were full of people articulating “that thing” that was wrong and they were doing it in a very accessible way. I was reading Sally Alexander’s book on Becoming a Woman recently and I really enjoyed it but at 16 that would have been rather heavy going for me. What Shrew and Spare Rib in particular did for me was give you other people’s experiences. That business of personal storytelling. You connect to what you hear about another person saying about their own life and then you’ve got a context to slot it into. Magazines were brilliant at that, absolutely brilliant.
I was going to say, do you remember contributing or sending in a letter or in any way being more involved with the magazines than just reading them?
No. What I did, and what I think a lot of women did was get involved with producing your own local material. And that took the form of endless turgid newsletters that people were talking about the library meeting, you know. The fact that you have something to say doesn’t mean you know how to say it. But it seemed really important to have local news networks, particularly in the era before the internet. It’s had such an impact on how we can communicate and organise things. And I think one way or another I have been writing, contributing to stuff ever since. And that’s very much about that model of coming together and organising things that you got from the magazines.
At the moment I an editor of the North East Labour History Journal which is something I’ll come back to as because I think this project will be a really interesting article sometime. But that’s just one of a series of publications. But that’s just one of a series of publications that undoubtedly owe my… that I owe my involvement in to the magazines because the striking thing about them was they were written by ordinary people. You didn’t look at it and think “oh, she’s a journalist”, you thought, that’s somebody from a group somewhere writing about what they’re doing or that’s somebody describing their own life and that was a style of journalism that started to change the media quite radically in the years that followed. And that’s very much about the women’s magazines.
I’m trying to remember the article in… but I can’t remember which magazine it was in… Somebody did an article about washing up and about washing up bowls. Completely trivial, very funny but it actually set you thinking about how did you organise your own life so you actually had time and you could feel good about your environment but you weren’t endlessly locked into housework. And you did not see that sort of writing in the other women’s magazines.
My mother loved magazines like Woman’s Realm and Woman’s Own, we got those weekly and you could see the start to changing attitudes to women and women’s lives as the 70s rolled on. And the material that was in the women’s liberation magazines started to become the sort of articles you would see in those other magazines, alongside all of the other things. They still carried on with the recipes and the knitting patterns and that started to feel like something you could emulate in your own writing. So certainly in terms of history my interests are very often about the personal record and the recollections of people living through a particular event.
One of the things I used to do before Lockdown was go into schools with “domestic collections”, handling collections and costumes and literally get children to step into the lives of women from the past. That has a huge impact, putting on the sort of clothing that somebody wore gets you moving differently and makes you realise what their life would have been like. Wearing eight layers of petticoat in a muddy field tells you more about the experience of trying to do daily labour than almost anything else will do.
Sorry I’m going off the point again.
It was a way of approaching the world that came from those magazines and it was a way of approaching the world that my mother could connect to and that gave us a chance to talk about my ideas about what it meant to be a woman in a way that might not have been possible otherwise. She was heading there but I would never have thought to articulate a discussion about housework for example in terms of politics.
That’s fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Tell us your story?…
If you would like us to include your story in our archive,
check out this page to find out how to get involved…