Events | Activist Legacies Roundtable

Victoria introduces Marsha Rowe
of Spare Rib

Marsha Rowe opened the Activist Legacies Roundtable with a reflection on the origins of the magazine Spare RIb.

LH: I’m absolutely delighted and thrilled to introduce to Marsha Rowe, who was of course, one of the founding members of the Spare Rib Collective, the longest running feminist magazine in the UK. And as we know, this is an incredibly influential publication. So over to you, Marsha. Thank you very much for coming. [applause]

MR: To address just a few of the interesting questions put to me by today’s organizers, I’m going to start with the founding framework of Spare Rib.

The first thing to say is that Spare Rib would never have happened if it had not been for Oz magazine, on which I started work in 1964, in Sydney, as the secretary.

Oz was a black and white satirical magazine challenging the era’s stifling conformism, hypocrisy and racism. In 1967, two of the editors who’d travelled to London, published the English version of Oz, which became the iconic magazine of the underground press of the sixties counter culture.

These radical publications were called the underground press, not because they were hidden and secret, but because they were the vehicle in those pre-internet days for youth movements in many countries to communicate their views in opposition to the all-prevailing mainstream media.

It’s also significant that the counter-culture was just that, an expressive cultural movement. It did not attempt to establish an alternative society, so much as it attempted to change social values. It was for freedom of the mind, spirit, and imagination, as well as sexual freedom. And it was dominated by men.

After travelling, I re-joined Oz in London, and I worked on the notorious Oz Obscenity trial of 1971, in defence of the School Kids issue, which was written and edited by school children.

So how did Spare Rib happen?

In November 1971, inspired by the incipient women’s liberation movement, I called a meeting of women who worked on the underground press. At the third meeting, January 1972, I suggested that we start our own women’s alternative magazine, and Rosie Boycott, who had dropped out of university and found her métier when she joined her boyfriend to work on the most recent underground press publication, a newspaper called Frendz, agreed to join me.

We published the first Spare Rib 50 years ago, in June 1972. And during those early, pre-publication months, what I understood from my first direct experience of the women’s movement, was that as well as being expressive like the counter culture, for example, in terms of feminist protest and consciousness raising, it was instrumental. The women’s movement took on the state, campaigned to change laws, and engaged with every aspect of life, from medicine to education to health to paid work. It asked the questions that had never been asked, for example of history, of social organizing, or artistic production, and set about creating narratives of knowledge and centres of organization that took women as the starting point. Love, personal relationships, childcare, family life, even identity itself, were part of the mix. Inner and outer worlds, and their interaction.

I’m re-stating all of this, which I’m sure you already know, as a reminder that back in 1972, it was a man’s world, almost unrecognizable compared to today. Women’s place was secondary and this was reflected throughout society, and in women’s magazines. I wanted Spare Rib to change and challenge that assumption. Women were not even expected to be interested in the news. My aim was to publish a magazine that would have the recognizable features of traditional women’s magazines, but with different, feminist accented content, and in addition to incorporate a news section. Spare Rib would take up where the underground press left off. It would be an alternative women’s news magazine.

It would not be a campaigning magazine, since that would limit it to specific targets, nor would it be restricted to seeking equality with men, since that would be based on the world as it was. And, most important, I wanted the magazine to be available to any woman around the country, and to do so it would have to be acceptable to the big distributors.

I knew about the pitfalls of the underground press, in terms of limited distribution, the pressures put on printers, and the persecution at the hands of the police and the establishment. Spare Rib had to be different in all those respects. The solution lay in the design of the magazine, and in producing a dummy issue to start with. Within weeks, we had two designers. First, Sally Doust, whom I’d met when I was working on Australian Vogue. Sally was English and had returned to London. Through the underground press, we also had Kate Hepburn, who’d been part of the art school radicalism of the sixties.

Finance.

Also on board at that stage was the underground press accountant, Pat Leaver.

We’d immediately sought out quotes from printers, researched paper costs etc, and with Pat, put together a start-up budget, with an annual forecast. We decided to limit the design to the cheaper option of two colours, in addition to black and white, and we were able to print a dummy that included the page costs for advertisers. We used the dummy to raise money, and to persuade the big national distributor, Seymour Press, to take us on, and to sell the first advertising.

Again, without Oz, we’d have been nowhere. Oz had many supporters, especially among the radical arts and literary circles of the sixties, all of whom I’d met at the Oz soirees and money raising ventures.

I was able to invite them to a money-raising party. They put cheques into a hat. We raised nearly a third of our budget, and calculated that we could manage for a year. We were determined to be professional, to publish on time each month, and to pay contributors the basic NUJ rates. We found a small office in Soho being vacated by the Time Out designer, took the lease and set up a company. We then hired Marion Fudger, who’d been at Record Mirror, to sell advertising.

Pat, the accountant, had twins at the same time as Spare Rib hit the newsstands, and resigned, so there were five of us, the two designers, Rosie and me, and Marion. Over the next six months, two more women joined the staff, Rose Ades and Rosie Parker.

I found a woman photographer, Angela Phillips – who took the cover photographs both for the dummy and the first issue – at a conference called in March 1972 by the National Abortion and Contraception Campaign to defend the Abortion Act, which was under threat at the time from a few members of the Tory Party.

At first the structure at Spare Rib was hierarchical. Rosie Boycott and I were co-editors and took decisions. But that suffocated the voices of the others. Eventually, we separated out the roles, and for Issue No.13, I became the editor, Rosie the news editor. That lasted for about five months, then I resigned to form a collective, allowing everyone to participate in the weekly meetings. Each of us took editorial responsibility for different sections of the magazine, according to personal interest, and we devoted a portion of each meeting to the practical issues of production, distribution and the finances. We shared out tasks like collecting the post and the office cleaning by rota.

Marion once commented that at each meeting we had an emotional discussion first – as if people had to get their feelings out there, before we could move onto editorial. Rosie Boycott remembered it as having to have conversations about conversations. It wasn’t plain sailing, to learn to argue ideas, and we required if not a consensus, at least a majority, to agree when it came to decision over content.

You could say that publishing the magazine was an activism in itself. Marion, for example, went on to be music editor and did a huge number of pioneering articles about women in the music industry.

Rosie Parker eventually became involved in a women’s art history group. But for the first few years I was the only one who participated in women’s groups outside of the magazine. It was, after all, a 24/7 job, bringing out a 48-page magazine every month. And, I myself, became a victim of the 1971 Immigration Act when, as editor in 1973, an interview with me in the Times led the Home Office to give me two weeks to leave the country. I did, six months later, attain residency, but I realized that I was as vulnerable as my underground press colleagues to establishment hostility to feminism at the time.

And my first issue as sole editor was the one time that W.H.Smiths refused to stock the magazine – because of the back page advertisement for a Dory Previn record, with lines from her song about Hollywood, which prefigure today’s MeToo movement, beginning ‘Who do you have to fuck to get into this picture.’

Spare Rib was always going to be a relatively small magazine compared to the mass market publications such as Women’s Own, but we knew, like the underground press, that each issue would be read by many people – that is, if it was not hidden behind a sofa from a threatened male in the household.

And we told ourselves that we were abreast with the changing times in a way that other magazines were not. They continued to prey on women’s insecurities. The English version of Cosmopolitan, which was started the same year as Spare Rib, had an editorial policy that if you’re not a sex object you’re in trouble. It was all about pursuing or keeping a man, adding sex to the previous mix ‘of a pretty face, smart clothes and a deft way with the omelette pan’, as the writer Sally Beauman once put it, Collective work was liberating. It was the ‘means’ if you like, to the ‘ends’ of producing a feminist publication. I think now that there is an argument to be made for structuring collective work in such a way that the means don’t become the ends. Certainly, by the early 1980s, the intense, confronting but necessary discussions over personal politics in the collective, especially to do with issues of racism and power, became so time consuming that, as I learned, accounts were not done for two years. I was no longer involved in the magazine by then, but its success as a business faltered, and inevitably that affected its future. However, the fact that Spare Rib was published for over twenty years, until 1993, is a tribute to everyone who worked on it and contributed.

Copyright Marsha Rowe 22.9.2015