Dr Victoria Bazin

(Principal Investigator on Liberating Histories) Northumbria University

For much of my career my research has focused on the work of Marianne Moore, an American modernist poet who also had a passion for magazines. In fact, she was the editor of The Dial magazine between 1925 and 1929 and it was through her work as an editor that I started to become interested in periodical culture.

I’ve published two monographs, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity (2010) and Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine (2019) as well as several articles on feminist periodicals in the UK.

I also founded the Network of American Periodical Studies in 2015 with Sue Currell and I’m one of the founding members of the Gendered Subjects Research group based at Northumbria University. In 2016, Mel Waters and I co-edited a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review called ‘Mediated and Mediating Feminisms: Periodical Culture from Suffrage to Second Wave’.

First Encounters with a Feminist Magazine:
1973 – Ms. Magazine

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Dr Melanie Waters

(Co-Investigator on Liberating Histories) Northumbria University

Reading, discussing and writing about feminist periodicals has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my career to date. It’s always a privilege to look back over these magazines and encounter – first-hand and in context – versions of debates about women and inequality that we are still having today. My interest in feminism unites all of my research and publications. I am the author, with Rebecca Munford, of Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2014), the editor of Women on Screen: Feminism and Femininity in Visual Culture (London: Palgrave, 2011) and the co-editor of Poetry and Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2011). Victoria Bazin and I are also the co-editors of Feminist Periodical Culture: From Suffrage to Second Wave, a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review (2017). I have published articles and chapters on a range of periodicals, including Spare Rib, Ms. and Just Seventeen, as well as twentieth-century women’s writing, contemporary television and the gothic.

First encounter with a Feminist periodical: BUST and Bitch

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Dr Kaitlynn Mendes

(Co-Investigator on Liberating Histories) University of Western Ontario, Canada

For most of my career, I have held a deep interest in the relationship between feminism, activism, and media. This includes the ways feminism has been represented in the news to how feminists have used social media and digital technologies in their activism. This means I have studied both how the mainstream media represents feminists and their issues (not always very positively) and how they have taken creative control over their representations and have made real changes through their work. I have written over fifty publications on these topics, including three monographs and two edited collections, studying movements like #MeToo, SlutWalk, and feminist campaigns like Everyday Sexism.

As a history minor, I was always struck by the lack of education I received about women – and feminism – and I love that this project helps bring feminist activism to life for a new generation.

First Encounters with a Feminist Magazine: 2002 – Ms. Magazine

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Dr Eleanor Careless

(Research Fellow on Liberating Histories) Northumbria University

Since completing my PhD on the late modernist poetry of Anna Mendelssohn, I have pursued my fascination with ecosystems of small magazines and activist publishing networks which facilitate experimental feminist writing such as Mendelssohn’s. Mendelssohn was one of the editors of the women’s issue of Frendz, a pioneering example of women-led activist publishing in the early 1970s that, according to some accounts, inspired the founding of Spare Rib magazine.

This connection led me to my involvement as a Research Fellow for the Leverhulme-funded project The Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing (BOWW) based at the University of Sussex and partnered with the British Library, with a focus on Spare Rib and the feminist publishing house Virago. In this role, I led the completion of the Spare Rib map, the first digital map of the Women’s Liberation Movement and published a short history of Feminist Book Fortnight, a pathfinding feminist book trade promotion of the 1980s. Before joining ‘Liberating Histories’, I spent three months at the British School of Rome researching the transnational connections between Italian and British feminist magazines of the 1970s-80s.

First Encounters with a Feminist Magazine: 2010 – Spare Rib magazine

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Roger Newbrook

Designer and Consultant

I was born in 1967, so these magazines and the articles and issues inside them are from my formative years as a child, teenager and young adult. I first saw women’s magazines in the mid 1980’s looking at posters and postcards by Leeds Postcards in Grass Roots Books in Manchester. I didn’t actually read any however until I became involved with this project last year (2022). I was photographing the magazine covers and illustrations from the magazines to use on the website but I kept getting distracted by the articles and reviews.

Things I remembered from my childhood in particular caught my eye, along with music reviews from my teen years and the cartoons of course.

It was fascinating to read these articles but it was also a bit depressing that the issues being addressed throughout the 1970s and 80 have still not been resolved today; issues around representation, equal pay, childcare provision and equality issues generally for example.

First Encounters with a Feminist Magazine: Working on the Liberating Histories project in 2022

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