We interviewed a panel of feminist activists from Nottingham. Here they talk about their introduction to feminism and feminist magazines, how feminism influenced their professional practice and promoting local activism and local events through the feminist magazine network.
OK, I’m Victoria Bazin and I am PI [Principal Investigator] of the Liberating Histories project and I’m joined by Mel Waters and Eleanor Careless and women activists from Nottingham who are going to talk to us about their experience of reading women’s movement magazines. So can we start with just a brief introduction:
B: My name is Barbara Hewitt
T: I’m Tina
L: I’m Lee
V: And I’m Val.
Thank you very much okay so first of all, maybe just a sense of what magazines you’ve been reading or you were reading…
T: When I was a teenager I wanted to read Honey but it was too expensive I think and my posh friend had it but we didn’t. I think Jackie was accessible and then like, you know, 60s hippie stuff International Times was a thing. I made my parents get The Guardian from whatever they used to get, Daily Express but while I was at home I made them get The Guardian. My brother used to read the New Statesman so I used to rake through that. Then at University I think I got involved with the left, kind of, so then it was the left press like Black Dwarf, International Marxist groups sort of magazines, um Red Mole, Socialist Challenge. Then we had a magazine called Socialist Woman.
Spare Rib was widely available and then I started getting (because I became a sort of frantic activist for a few years, kind of left stuff and women’s magazines were mainly so that I could get the information about the stuff that we were organizing into them. So that’s why I like something like Women’s Report where they’ve got events in, and you know send writing letters to all the other magazines to get events or campaigns in or reading reports of events and campaigns and now I can still read The Guardian and New Scientist and um you know I still like magazines but I don’t read any ones that are called women’s magazines anymore. I don’t even know what they are or where they are. Can’t think of any.
LH: Any other magazine the things that you’re reading? Does anyone remember their first encounter with a women’s movement magazine?
V: I can say that my first encounter was with Spare Rib, and it’s a Newcastle story because I come from the Northeast, I come from the North Pennines and Newcastle, because I knew the city and that was many miles away but I used to go on the bus and I came across Spare Rib in W H Smith. We used to only go there three times a year but I must have been attracted to it in some way. There was something about it and then I would say, I tried to get it as often as I could. So that was my encounter really. So I would have been probably about 14 at the time, 14, 15 yes, just getting interested in ideas and things but living in very isolated little village. So the impact is quite interesting isn’t it? that you can see something you know, you’re changing at school, adolescence, you know there’s something going on out there but you’re not quite sure what it is but you were attracted by something. There must have been something in Spare Rib at the time you know, we’re talking about the 70s. There must have been something there.
B: I’m trying to remember when Private Eye was available in [W H] Smiths because that was another one that you looked to see if it was there. Because there was an argument whether Smiths would hold these magazines; Private Eye, Spare Rib. Some did and some didn’t.
L: I think Smiths had Marxism Today didn’t it?
T: Yeah yeah. I think that was widely available. it was quite mainstream
L: Yeah. I think the same for me. I was quite influenced by Jackie and then Cosmo, Cosmopolitan. And I think in terms of specifically feminist magazines it would be when I was at university, when I left home and I came across stuff, and it would be through being involved in campaigns. So my first campaign at the University was to do with nurseries, “the nursery campaign”, and then meeting other women and from those other women being given magazine. So this friend Anne Crowther gave me Women’s Voice. So it was it was really through other people, rather than and perhaps being at an event when people were selling stuff but that was more like the “male” socialist papers rather than the sort of women’s only stuff which was really through friends I think, and then through the contact with the Women’s Centre in Nottingham.
B: my experience was very similar to Tina’s. The additional bit which actually perhaps had more influence on me was literature. So Marge Piercy was a very big influence on me in the early 70s from a personal feminist perspective.
LH: Were any of you active contributors? Tina, you were saying you were looking to send in material about your actions and campaigns. Anyone sending letters, anything else?
T: Trying to get reports in, and information in, and reports of a conference of an event, or saying, you know come to this so it was like, sometimes quite a lot of words but it was more, it was very instrumental, functional, you know. And the stuff that we wrote that was like um, it was like, you know feature length. That was for conferences. So if there was going to be a conference on sexism, education, equal pay or something on abortion, it will be a paper or an article for a conference not in a magazine because it was campaign-based really.
LH: Yeah.
L: In the 80s I took part in a round table discussion for Marxism Today around um women’s equality officers and equal opportunities policies within local authorities. That was my main contribution.
LH: It’s interesting to see how things shift as well and start to move into certain times. We were talking to a local activist who was working for the local council and how feminist ideas and values informed the way she did that job, you know, and she talked about the changes the significant changes that they made um to the kind of culture of the local council. It’s very interesting.
Can you remember how you felt when you were reading these magazines you know. Were there any particular feelings that came through the magazines or do you remember experiencing any strong feelings coming from your engagement with these periodicals?
B: Well actually Cosmo. I can still remember how exciting it was to read about sex [laughter] and from women’s perspectives. It was the first time I ever saw it in print, yeah.
LH: Well that’s interesting yeah, because one of the things we’re also thinking about are those periodical networks, so how the periodicals talk to each other and it’s not really just feminist periodicals that talk about feminist issues because it did spread into mainstream magazines.
And doesn’t UK Cosmopolitan launch in the same month as Spare Rib? I think so, yeah. This is really interesting, it’s interesting that you remember Cosmo.
V: The magazine particularly means that you’re not isolated; that there’s somebody out there that shares your ideas. And I think that’s true of the feminist magazines’ journalists as it is of some of these other offshoots. Because I was a midwife the association of radical midwives setup and they produced a magazine and that was very important really because you realize that suddenly, what you were thinking your professional practice others across the UK were also thinking and I think that’s the beauty isn’t it of the fact that a magazine leaves you less isolated. It confirms that there’s other people out there thinking the same way as you are and it is changing professional practices as well at the same time.
LH: so how specifically would that work? You’re all working in jobs and using magazine magazines and you know were there particular ways in which you felt what you were reading about was changing the way that you were operating professionally?
T: Again it was more like specific. Like for example um there’s an article by Glenys Lobban on sexual stereotyping and reading schemes. I don’t know where I read that but it was probably in this, you know, I don’t know. It wasn’t in Spare Rib I don’t think. But things like that informed your practice because you don’t start looking at your reading schemes and make, you know. We put an exhibition on at the Teacher Centre and spoke at NUT [National Union of Teachers] conferences about that sort of thing but I can’t unpick you know, the specific things.
LH: So it was more that it was in the atmosphere and…
L: I think that’s right. Our lives were so busy there wasn’t a distinction between the campaigning, your work and your home life. Everything was all about the same thing.
T: Down the pub or on the picket line.
L: Yeah it’s all to do with making change in some way and so yeah, it did definitely influence my teaching practice. And in those days you just did, I just did whatever I wanted in the classroom nobody knew what I was doing. So it’s very different now and then I was really lucky because I worked for a local Authority in the women’s’ equality unit so I was able to be paid for campaigning. So, you know, it’s just that was your whole life.
LH: Yes these networks were feeding the activism and I guess the magazines were just part of all of these materials.
L: Yeah, very much so, giving you information.
B: And all the conference papers, there were huge numbers of conference papers.
V: And newsletters
B: Yeah, yeah [laughter]
T: A lot of self-produced stuff which I guess you know is duplicating and, I mean, we’ve got a whole, we had a whole set of things here about issues in Nottingham, not actually necessarily feminist things but, you know, somebody would draw the cover and then they would be typed and duplicated and distributed. That sort of self-produced stuff was, you know, quite significant but a big part of stuff was self-produced and so the printed things that you know came out every month would be interesting but they weren’t what we were doing.
B: Yeah, because we would have to hand those out at all sorts of events
LH: Were you making things then?
B: Yes, producing and distributing
T: yeah.
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