In the third and final part of Rosie’s testimony she talks about moving to Newcastle and finding local networks via women’s magazines, her work with the Workers Educational Association (WEA) and “magazines” she reads now.
Before I go on I just want to ask you Rosie if you remember any of the names of the newsletters that you produced or were they just called newsletters, feminist newsletters from Luton or something…
No, no I really got involved in it when I moved to Newcastle which was in 1976. And that was about a time of yet another attack on the abortion legislation and I got involved in something called the Corrie, well it was the ANTI-Corrie campaign but we called it the Corrie Campaign and we had a newsletter and I can’t remember what the title was… no and it won’t be in the minute book, no. It was a campaign newsletter I think we called it something like “Kill the Bill” but you know that is really guessing.
Well you know as I said before you have really so succinctly managed to respond to all the questions that we had on the website. I don’t think we’re going to be having to do very much editing of this but I want Mel just to come in, just in case Mel’s got a question for you Rosie. I’ll bring her in…
I have to echo all of that! I’ve been riveted. You speak so fluently about it. It’s like your thoughts are already formed and you’re just open your mouth and out they come. I was struck by the extent to which what was in these periodicals just “made sense” to you. It was almost common sense because of the context in which you were reading them and because of your mum’s experiences. Also it’s great to get a sense of where these magazines fit in a network of other magazines as well. You know, that you’re looking at the feminist periodicals next to something like Woman’s Own and seeing some of those overlaps. I suppose a question that I might ask is do you still read any magazines? Would you look at things on the Internet?
Oh that’s interesting because the answer is yes but I haven’t actually thought about it as reading magazines still and that’s because it’s internet based I look at the New Statesman quite regularly I follow The Conversation, NPR is very interesting as is The Guardian and I also subscribe to the New York Times which is slightly weird I’m not quite sure how that happened! So yes I’m reading a lot of magazines on the net and also I’m exploring the material that’s out there. I’m a WEA tutor and I’m currently teaching a course on community activism, we’re a group down in South Shields, so each week we take a different topic and that means that I’m actively going out and looking for current material around that topic. And I’m stunned by how much there is, not just the individuals blogging about stuff or commenting on it on social media but the way that the magazine model has been adopted as the website model for so many campaigns and organizations. People are very aware that you get people involved by getting them to contribute, by getting them to respond, and that whole business of the comments section at the end of every post is actually doing the sort of thing that the liberation magazines did and that… I think I’m uninclined to credit them with actually originating that idea. It brings you back to the website. So again and again I find myself revisiting sites that I stumbled across by accident.
Yeah I think you’re right about that engagement model where the magazines were constantly soliciting feedback weren’t they? And you’re right that it’s all about the likes and the comments online. You mentioned how much material there is out there do you think that diminishes its impact? I suppose one of the things about the women’s liberation magazines that you’re seeing in the radical Bookshop is that there aren’t that many of them and that you’re part of a more exclusive Club
Yeah I think that that’s very much a factor and I think you tended to read it from cover to cover. With online material our attention span is far more of an issue and the tendency to dip and browse is far greater. With the magazines, because they were rare and precious things, it was once a month very often that you get hold of anything, and you might dip into it over the course of a month but by the end of that time you would have read it from cover, including all of the small ads at the back and the contact information. It sounds silly but reading a list of addresses and contacts with groups right around the country gave you this sense of being part of a much wider movement. That was really very important and it gave you this sense that you could find people wherever you went. Mine was the generation from my community… that it sounds old coming from an Irish background which that’s a huge dispute migration… but we were the group who moved to work. We were the group who moved to get really good jobs as opposed to just any job at all. It’s quite interesting if you look at my siblings, they’re all sort of professional in one way or another to differing degrees. Coming up to Newcastle for the first time, that there was a group up here and somebody had a contact and a way of finding people like me, and the discovery that there was a radical Bookshop up here as well. That made it feel far less intimidating you know and that gave you a social network and a social context very quickly.
Thank you Rosie, thank you for taking the time to do this because it’s fantastic for us to start to build this archive of readers testimonies and to listen to readers experiences and as I say, you’ve been so lucid and coherent and you’ve given us a fantastic testimony so thanks very much for doing that.
It’s a great project really interesting what you’re doing
Yeah well thank you
Thank you so much Rosie thank you bye
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