Courtesy of See Red Women’s Workshop

Capturing the voices of a generation of feminist activists, ‘Sisterhood & After’ is a new oral history archive and website which launched at the British Library on 8th March on International Women’s Day, and provides a free and relevant major resource to anyone interested in the history of feminism. The oral history project was also partnered with The Women’s Library, which advised it, and directed by Margaretta Jolly at the University of Sussex. It was funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

Each of the 60 women activists recorded for this project campaigned for equality and freedom in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These women demanded that struggles for gender rights be won at home as well as in the public sphere. They describe their own experiences as girls, socialised to expect less than their brothers. They also describe a rich range of political heritages that informed British feminism, from Black Power to Gay Liberation to socialism and disability rights.

Wages for Housework c.1975 Designed by B. Warrior

Given that the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain was a mass movement involving thousands of women from all over the country and from all walks of life, selecting just 60 to record was a challenge. Some of our interviewees are well known – Susie Orbach, feminist psychotherapist and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Jenni Murray, the voice of Radio 4’sWomen’s Hour for example. But we also wanted to capture the stories of women who dedicated much of their lives to fighting for gender equality but were not in the public eye. Karen McMinn, Director of Northern Ireland Women’s Aid from 1981–1996, for instance, described the risks involved in protecting women from domestic violence during ‘the troubles’, while Rowena Arshad, Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Scotland 2001-2007, talked about co-organising a pioneering black women’s refuge in Scotland. We also recorded interviews with Barbara Jones about working as a builder and being a member of ‘Women in Manual Trades’, with Una Kroll, a one-time surgeon who played a key part in the Movement for the Ordination of Women and with Sue Lopez, one of the most prominent women football players in the 1970s who campaigned for women to be allowed to use Football Association pitches. The oral histories with these women last, on average, 7 hours and set the circumstances and consequences of a person’s activism in a biographical and social context.

You can access the full life story recordings at the British Library but for a snap-shot of the archive log onto the Sisterhood & After website (bl.uk/sisterhood). The website has over 120 audio-clips taken from the oral history recordings, 10 bespoke films reflecting key campaigns and an Interviewees Page which includes a biographical sketch and portrait for each narrator.

Polly Russell, Lead Curator, Social Science and

Margaretta Jolly, Project Director, University of Sussex (c) May 2013

Dr Margaretta Jolly
Margaretta Jolly is the project’s award holder and the project director. She is Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. Margaretta’s main interests are the art and use of life narrative and feminist cultures and histories. Her book In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, was joint winner of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK book prize, 2008, and she co-directs the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research.

Dr Polly Russell
Polly Russell is a Lead Curator in the Social Science department at the British Library. Polly is responsible for collections relating to Human Geography and Anthropology and her research interests include feminism, oral history and food. She was the main British Library link for the project, working closely with the project team and library colleagues.

Project Team

More about the whole team behind the project is available in the ‘About’ section on the website: http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/about.html (accessed 13 May 2013)

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I did not watch any of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, but media coverage of the event was difficult to avoid.  In the days that followed, discussion shifted away from Thatcher’s life and politics towards scrutiny of the service, both in terms of content and composition – who was there and how they behaved.  My thoughts did likewise.  Initially I felt very guilty about this.  Despite having a bona fide research interest in fashion, pondering the ongoing saga of Sam Cam’s headwear at official events made me feel complicit in a conspiracy to shift the focus away from addressing the harsher, more challenging issues that Thatcher’s legacy has left behind.

A few weeks on, I still feel reticent about proposing a socio-cultural analysing of the funeral, but as a historian of modern Britain I do think that it was an interesting moment in which many of the themes and tropes that have dominated the recent past were evident.  This is not meant to detract from talking about events such as Hillsborough, or the miners’ strikes, or the Falklands-Malvinas conflict (to name but three).  Nor is it meant to distract from considering the repercussions of Thatcherism in the twenty-first century.  Others will, quite rightly, continue to devote pages and air time to such issues.  In this post, however, I would like to briefly reflect upon celebrity attendance at the funeral, particularly the presence of Sarah, Duchess of York.

Photographs showing various famous faces, from Shirley Bassey to Terry Wogan, Joan Collins to June Whitfield, making their way into St Paul’s Cathedral seemed incongruous.  Apart from the fact that the huge grins displayed by a number of supposed mourners seemed inappropriate for the occasion, the public imagination does not associate Thatcher with celebrity culture.  This marks her funeral out as different to other comparable events of recent years, namely the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton and the 1997 funeral of Princess Diana.  In both those cases, the relationship between the figures involved in the service and their celebrity guests was generally well-known.  For instance, pictures showing Prince William and David Beckham, or Princess Diana with Elton John, were already commonplace in many newspapers and magazines.  In contrast, how many times have you seen a photograph of Katherine Jenkins and Margaret Thatcher on the front of Hello! or Now?  

This difference is not about royalty, but generation.  Thatcher and the paparazzi-celebrity circus are from different eras.  During her premiership, there was not the same pressure on politicians to court celebrities as they do today.  It was only in the mid-1990s, when ‘Cool Britannia’ and New Labour shared a cultural moment that we became accustomed to seeing prime ministers standing alongside pop stars and the like.  Thatcher belongs to a time before that, hence the celebrity roll-call at her funeral seemed out-of-place, inconsistent – a collision of two worlds as far apart as BBC computers and I-Phones. 

Yet I would argue that there was one exception to this: the attendance of Sarah, Duchess of York.  Of all the celebrities that went along, her presence seemed the most apt.  Her heyday in the mid-1980s coincided with the zenith of Thatcherism, and the confluence of the two is not surprising.  On the contrary, the Duchess of York is one of many examples of women in the royal family coming to epitomize the zeitgeist of their period.  Royal women have long served as a heavily gendered repository for the nation’s hopes and aspirations, their public personas becoming inextricably linked with contemporary ideals of femininity.  In the 1950s and early 60s, women’s magazines presented Queen Elizabeth II as a typical young wife and mother, albeit one with an exceptional role to carry out.  At the same time, they depicted her sister, Princess Margaret, as the ultimate girl-about-town, a common stereotype in magazines of that period.  By the early 1980s, the concern over Lady Diana Spencer’s virginal status highlights the extent to which she represented a swansong for a highly mythologized image of innocent femininity that seemed to be in terminal decline (if it had ever really existed).  The cultural landscape was very different by the time Sarah Ferguson married the Queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, in 1986.  In many ways, Fergie, as she was widely known, embodied these changes.  Lauded and subsequently loathed by the British media, many of the adjectives used to describe her also evoke the decade’s Thatcherite culture: flamboyant, extravagant, loud, brash, vulgar, self-absorbed, nouveau riche, on-the-make.  She had her moment at the same time as the yuppie stockbrokers who guzzled champagne in the City, and in large part has Thatcher’s policies and radical vision of a new social order to thank for that.  Regardless of her actual age, she is as much a child of Thatcher as anyone born in the 1980s.  As a result, I was not surprised that she attended the funeral on 17^th April.   Moreover, seeing as she has already been involved in a biography of Queen Victoria, I would not be surprised if the Duchess of York produces a book about Thatcher.  Indeed, I believe it would be a fitting tribute.

Rachel Ritchie (c) May 2013

Dr Rachel Ritchie is an Associate Research Fellow at Brunel University.  She is a republican who dreams of writing a magnum opus on royal women since Queen Victoria.  She also collects Andrew and Fergie wedding memorabilia (it’s a very niche market). 

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Along with colleagues on the AHRC-funded project ‘Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe’ (1), I have spent the last year or so working towards a new exhibition at the wonderful Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. The exhibition, titled ‘Virtue and Vice’, opened in mid-April 2013, and has been well received by visitors — especially those lucky enough to visit on Saturday 13th April to experience a surprise quartet singing in the High Great Chamber!

Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire ©National Trust

The exhibition has a number of key aims. We want to remind people of how profoundly the religious and political changes of the 1500s shaped the lives of women and men in England, and to shed new light on the multiple points of contact – both intellectual and material – between England, Europe, and the rest of the world. Finally, in a strand drawing heavily on my own research, and which speaks most directly to members of the Women’s History Network, we want to challenge people’s assumptions about women’s lives in early modern England and beyond.

Hardwick Hall is a wonderful venue at which to contest the orthodoxy that women in the early modern period were ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’, to quote a now well-worn critical formula. Hardwick Hall was built by the redoubtable Elizabeth Shrewsbury, better known as Bess of Hardwick, who proclaimed her ownership and achievement by topping each of its four towers with her initials, those then mounted with a countess’s coronet.

Bess’s history is a fascinating one, and more light is being shed on it by the Bess of Hardwick letters project run by Alison Wiggins at the University of Glasgow. (2)

Bess of Hardwick ©NT/Angelo Hornak

This portrait, painted by an anonymous artist in the 1550s, shows Bess at around the age of 30. The exhibition highlights the French and Spanish influences in Bess’s elaborate clothing. ©NT/Angelo Hornak.

Bess’s very exceptionality, however, presents an unexpected challenge. Visitors to Hardwick are entranced by Bess’s story, but often encouraged to believe that she was unusual – perhaps even unique – in a period in which most women could not own property, assert their own rights, or enter into political and cultural life. By interweaving Bess’s story with crucial details from the lives and activities of other early modern women, our exhibition suggests that Bess was exceptional more in the scale of her success than in her status as a determined and astute operator within shifting social and cultural constraints.

Two gripping stories are those of Mary, Queen of Scots, held prisoner by Elizabeth I (Bess’s friend and patron), kept under the stewardship of Bess’s fourth husband, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, and moved frequently between his many properties, and Arbella Stuart, Bess’s granddaughter, in line for the throne, and caught amidst conspiracies and plots to establish her as a Catholic queen. Yet we also wish to highlight moments from the lives of less visible, but equally resourceful, women: Jacqueline Vautrollier, for example, wife of the Huguenot refugee printer, Thomas Vautrollier, who ran the printing business when her husband was away from London, and again after his death. We consider too the domestic and professional clothworkers who made the materials which went into the magnificent hangings and tapestries brought together at Hardwick.

Catechism ©NT/Robert Thrift

This little book, printed by Thomas Vautrollier, was found behind the dining room panelling at Hardwick Hall in 2003. It is a French catechism: a vivid reminder of women’s crucial role in religious education within the home.

The exhibition highlights the way in which early modern women appropriated popular religious orthodoxies and stories in order to reflect upon and articulate their own experiences. By tracing the ways in which women, including Bess, stitched versions of these stories, we also want to argue for the importance of the decorative arts – too often dismissed as constrained, ‘feminine’ practices, within our broader cultural heritage. At the same time, however, I have tried to incorporate some of my current research, which emphasises the extent of women’s influence on household religion (extending out across the estate at grand houses like Hardwick) and the extent to which contemporary commentators recognised and celebrated women’s ability to affect religious (and hence political) change. Finally, the exhibition reflects upon women’s reading in early modern England. We know little about Bess’s reading – famously her 1601 inventories list only six books – but by drawing together the varied evidence of how women read, as well as where and what, we are able to suggest the importance of literate practice to a growing number of women during the English Renaissance.

Helen Smith (c) April 2013

Helen Smith is Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of York. She is author of ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012), and co-director of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe’. She is currently working on a book-length project investigating ‘The matter of early modernity’.

1. www.york.ac.uk/conversion (accessed 14 April 2013).

2. http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/fundedresearchprojects/bessofhardwick/ (accessed 14 April 2013).

Find out more about the exhibition 

http://europeanconversionnarratives.wordpress.com/tag/hardwick-hall/

Download 'Virtue and Vice' app for android phones 
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rustymonkey.virtueandvice
(version for iphones soon available)

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Globally, things are better, but not much.

Howard University’s Professor Caroline Byerly used a sample of almost 2000 editorial and administrative to conclude that in 2011 36.1 per cent of the world’s journalists are women. Her figures reveal that women’s participation in management roles might be creeping upward, now to 26 per cent of governing roles and 27 per cent of top management jobs around the globe in 2011, but that is still just one quarter of the whole.

Dr Louise North’s published research – and my rather unacademic Facebook foray – also show that the news industry in Australia continues to embody what she described in her academic paper as a “blokey and ego-driven” culture that’s for the most part ignored – and systemic and ongoing gender (and race) inequity permeates the workforce.

This was probably best illustrated several months ago when one of Australia’s best known female TV journalists and presenters wrote an excoriating speech which she titled ‘Dear Mr Sexist’. Driven to fury and what she described as an inferno in her belly, Tracey Spicer recounted the male excutive that shouted across the newsroom at her: “I want two inches off your hair and two inches off your arse.” And the radio executive, who, during a job interview said: “There’s a reason why you don’t hear women on commercial talkback radio. No-one wants to hear the whiney sound of a female voice. Us blokes get enough nagging at home!” And then there was  the station manager who came down after her first night news reading, saying: “You need to stick your tits out more.” On and on it went,  the executive who pointed at her forehead wrinkles and said it was time to give the youngsters a  go, the sacking by email just after she had given birth to her second child (fought in court and won) and a litany of other stories so awful, you would be hard pressed to make them up.

Tracey Spicer’s experience reminded me of the editor who, on hearing I had been appointed Europe correspondent, pointed at my eyes and said: ” …‘a spell in the northern hemisphere out of the Australian sun will do your face wrinkles a world of good.” I hate to tell you but this one came from a woman.

During her 2012 research on women and newsroom culture, Dr North interviewed 600 female journalists in Australia  – the biggest study of its kind. Her findings revealed that a staggering 57.3 per cent had been sexually harassed in the workplace, with the majority reporting that this had happened within the last five years. North found  the problem infected all newsrooms although the commercial TV sector seemed to have higher rates than newspaper newsrooms or the national broadcaster.

Ironically, all this research has emerged around the time that Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, rebelled with such spirit against the mysoginistic culture she perceives both in the Parliament and among the media that report politics. I’m sure few of you would have missed that speech but you might not know that it went viral on Youtube globally, sparking headlines in Europe, America and the developing world but was virtually ignored by the Parliamentary reporters until they realised their blunder.

Which brings me back, sadly, to where I began – my informal ask-around for anecdotes about being a woman in a modern newsroom.

In a moment of odd serendipity, about 24 hours after I posted a request for my colleagues’ observations, a debate exploded about The Sydney Morning Herald‘s rebrand and renaming of what was previously called the ‘Daily Life’ section into ‘Women’s Perspective’ while the more masculine sections were rebadged ‘Executive Style’ – as if women can’t be executives. This move outraged not just the paper’s readers but the section’s editor herself who risked her job and broke ranks to blog about her own internal arguments against the name change with the all male editorial team. Hundreds of women tweeted and wrote comments along these lines: “Do you think it could have even been possible for you to decide on a more patronising tactic to show exactly which sections of the newspaper you think matter and which don’t?”

In this case, the men were forced to capitulate and the sections returned to its less offensive name.

While all this was going on, my colleagues started to email me: the first one arrived from an Australian colleague I worked with in Sydney, who spent a decade in the Middle East in Jerusalem and is now a well known TV face in Europe. She is also married to a reporter and described her conversation with an editor, requesting a payrise: “The editor looked at me outraged and said, what?! I have just given your husband a rise.”

Another told of internal 2012 research quietly testing  suspicions that a new section editor was commissioning only men to write cover stories and this was then checked against by lines. “In a year or so of his editing that section there were zero cover stories from women, 100% from men,” my colleague wrote. “When we confronted him, he seemed genuinely shocked and seemed not to realize he had done this. We figured that perhaps it was personality related – he was not comfortable talking to women. . .net result was the same though. Zero result for us women”.

Another, currently stationed in the Middle East, described the first words of a new chief of staff as she reported back about a story: “ So luv, is it a ball-tearer or a blue-veiner?” She was quck to add that despite this, he turned out to be a “good bloke”. Another described a particular editor’s penchant for coming up to her and the younger women on staff and massaging shoulders while looking over copy. One remembers, as a young cadet, being warned by the trainee counselor that part of working in a newsroom was playing “the game” after she raised feeling uncomfortable with this behaviour.

The worst anecdotes, just as Dr North reported, came from colleagues in commercial TV newsrooms, with some truly shocking me. In one case, a 30 something reporter, winner of a recent prize in investigative reporting, told me how she asked privately not to work with a particular producer due to his insistent lewd comments and behaviour. She asked her superiors that her name not be mentioned as she did not want to make a formal complaint. The man was not only told of her complaint but he then turned the tables on her warning colleagues and cameramen against her and making her work life impossible. She has now moved and is working at the public broadcaster. Another described standing open mouthed as an executive, in his late fifties, stood beside her working his way through a list of pretty much every older woman in Australian TV journalism. With some, he asked rhetorically why they hadn’t just stepped aside, others he observed he felt sorry for them, still others he said blatantly that they were too old and shouldn’t be on TV. It was her second day on the job and she chose, like so many of us, to say nothing.

The stories keep coming in.

I haven’t painted a particularly pretty picture although all of us – young and older – agree that it’s much, much better than even ten years ago. In Australia, Julia Gillard’s feisty diatribe against sexism appears to have touched a nerve and many of you might have read about the extraordinary social media campaign #destroythejoint that harnessed collective female anger against a particularly mysoginistic radio host – and the subsequent loss of millions in advertising as commercial sponsors realised the dollar effect of women scorned.

And so, I leave the last words to one of my youngest colleagues – a TV reporter – and a colleague at the other end of the totem pole, one of the few very senior women media executives in Australia. The youngest put it this way: “My perception of ‘this day and age’ is that it is better, much better. Less overt stuff goes on and most men are much, much better in the workplace than they were.” But, as we all know – and researcher Dr Louise North has confirmed – when it does go on, unfortunately, too many women are finding that it still doesn’t pay to rock the boat.

My executive colleague was succinct in her verdict and I quote her email directly: “I asked all my most senior colleagues what a pair of testicles would mean to them in this industry. They all answered, without bitterness or rancour that being male would mean a minimum of $50,000 a year to them. And these women included a Sunday newspaper editor, an investigative editor, a chief sub editor, a magazine editor, Most were on well above the 140,000 range – so this was a significant proportion of salary.”

“The sad thing,” reported my friend, “is that nobody was ANGRY. They all answered with a kind of quiet, tired acceptance of fact.”

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

References:

Caroline Byerly, 2011, pp. 9, 219

Hyland, 2010

Louise North, 2009

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At the Herald, I’m told, it wasn’t until World War II that the very first woman was even used as a general reporter. Her name was Neil Bedford (no, you didn’t hear wrong, it was Neil!). She emerged from the women’s section, home to most of the female staff, after so many men left to go to war, including about two dozen Herald men sent off as war correspondents. For similar wartime reasons, a second woman, Molly Luke became the first staff female photographer. Neither stayed very long after the war ended: who knows if they were given the choice to stay or were pushed back into the home by the returning men?

During the ’60s and ’70s, there was a trickle of women doing general news and features, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the first woman general news subeditor was appointed. My wonderfully helpful former editor told me that the men’s reluctance to appoint a female was that male sub editors tended to – and I quote – swear quite colorfully – as edition deadlines approached. Hilarious when I think how my team, lots of them women, used to turn the air blue at edition time. And it wouldn’t be until the late 1970s that a woman staff photographer was appointed – and management at the time had reservations even then because of “possible problems” – and I quote again “created by men and women sharing a darkroom”!

Funnily enough, the first woman chief of staff ever appointed to the paper was on deck when I was a rookie. I remember she was the one who sent me home to change clothing when I arrived at work in jeans. “You must dress always ready for the possibility that you could meet the queen,” she said.

Yep that was said, in Sydney, Australia in 1982. This was the same boss who refused to deploy me to the teams covering bushfires not long after saying ‘not appropriate, you’re a young woman’.

Extraordinary as it may seem, the Herald‘s first female Chief Sub-editor was not appointed until the late 1990s and a woman Managing Chief Sub-editor (in charge of all editorial production) was appointed in the 2000s. I won’t even bother going into the continuing rows over women reporters who in some places are still fighting to enter male territory such as football dressing rooms. How do you cover sport if you are not allowed to report the traditional end-of-game press conferences?!

Fast forward a century and the world of news is unrecognizable and I, like so many correspondents of this era have had to revolutionize the way I work – from an often barely daily deadline and workload to a virtual 24/7, stand alone operation. As Vice President of the Foreign Press Association in London, 125 years old this year, I have been intrigued thinking back to the old guard, the newspaper correspondents, pretty much all of them male, who filed once every couple of weeks from the outposts of the empire, including often horrendous theatres of war, to newspapers back home.

No, they did not have Google, sat phones, laptops or the safety that comes from immediacy, and a part of me remains open mouthed at the hardship they encountered. But the other part of me believes honestly that the modern correspondent – and the new demands of a 24 hour news cycle as well as the inhuman amount of information we have to scan and filter every hour – means our professional lives, in some ways, are tougher. For women correspondents, it was the legendary 20th century author and journalist Martha Gellhorn who broke the gender barrier nearly 80 years ago. And today, unfortunately as we saw with Marie Colvin – women are losing their lives alongside the male reporters as they document the wor;d’s conflict zones. Some of the greatest chroniclers of war in our generation are women — among them CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the BBC’s formidable Kate Adie, Alex Crawford from Sky, Lara Logan from CBS News – and many, many others.

Last year, Logan – who survived a horrendous attack at the hands of what she described as “300 baying men” reporting in Cairo joined 40 other media women in a book which graphically described the special additional risks they’ve faced over the years — and offer their advice on how to prepare for these dangers and best do our jobs.

Their words and experiences provide a powerful reminder that female journalists often offer a different take on war and conflict and unlike many of their male counterparts, remain utterly unimpressed by the whiz bang of the boys toys, knowing only too well that “collateral damage” means people: men, women and so often, little children. Like them, I believe that understanding makes them better journalists.

In all this, there is one fundamental that has changed very little and that is the presence of women at the pointy end of news, the place where the decisions are made – in executive offices, in the publishers’ suite, in the boardrooms of big media companies.

Returning to Dr Louise North’s work published in August 2012 in Australia, we learned that not one woman was entrusted with the editing role in a daily edition of the nation’s 21 metropolitan newspapers although three currently edit weekend editions – as I did before being posted to London.

Similarly, in broadcasting, women’s exclusion from leadership roles is evident although public broadcasters fared slightly better. But even at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), equivalent of the BBC, it wasn’t until 2009 that they appointed the first female director of news, Kate Torney. On morning and drive time radio shifts, commercial and public radio is dominated by male voices.

At CEO level, 23 of 24 of the big mainstream media companies in Oz are men – the only woman runs a regional network outside Sydney. Back at my old paper, of the 13 member executive team, 11 are men. The only women at that level are the chief legal counsel and human resources CEO.

And this is in the new world, a nation just 200 years old that prides itself on being open minded, easy going, classless!

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

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Asked to speak at the WWAFE House of Lords seminar, as I first began to muse about the issue a few weeks ago, I decided to put a call out on Facebook to elicit some observations from the many female colleagues I left behind in Australian media – and the many more I have met since my posting as a foreign correspondent to London in 2008. How did they see their profession when they began? Have things changed for those of us who are well into our careers?

And what about the youngest cohort, those who have entered the fray as the digital revolution continues to shake the industry to its core?

While many of us have busted barriers to report from war zones the world over, how many women have managed to infiltrate media boardrooms or editor’s offices and publisher’s top floor suites?

That first call out for anecdotes was an incredible eye opener. I thought I might glean a few good stories, even a few jokes. But what I heard, often messaged almost with a sense of apology to me in private, saddened and shocked me.

Before I head down that path, let me tell you a little of my own professional trajectory. I began as a young, trainee journalist on Australia’s oldest and most august broadsheet daily in the middle of 1981 – the last undergraduate, Italian born and the only non Australian rookie. Six months later, a colleague of Hungarian Jewish background joined as a trainee and she – a trailblazing feminist – and I laughed the other night about being The Sydney Morning Herald‘s ‘token ethnics’ of the time. When I started at the paper, stories were written on manual typewriters, every page of the eight-ply carbon paper allowed to contain just two paragraphs to ease the sub-editing and production process. Every day, we bloodied our thumbs pushing pins through the great wads of paper that made a whole article. The paper’s printing presses thrummed to life three or four times throughout the night but once the last edition was in bed that was it, another day was over. I will always remember the excitement of the facsimile machine and what we called gram machines, great big heavy drums that transmitted photographs via a telephone line at the speed of a snail on tranquillizers.

Now, as a correspondent covering Europe for Australian newspapers just two decades later, news can break and I will be able to get it out, into the ether or on our websites, sometimes in seconds. These days, the news cycle runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and have filed stories from the strangest places: Congo River, the remotest foothills of the Himalayas, an earthquake torn mountain village in Italy and from 40,000 feet above the earth in a plane carrying Pope Benedict and a cabal – I’m not sure that is the collective noun for Cardinals!

In an effort to quantify change specifically for women in media, I hunted down a former editor of the time, one of Australia’s finest – and, it turns out, something of a newspaper historian. He told me that in the year I joined The Sydney Morning Herald, there were 180 journalist writing the paper – of which 39 or 22 per cent – were women.

Thirty years later, work done by Australian academic, Dr Louise North, and published last year reveals that there has been a slight improvement – but women still occupy only 30 per cent of the editorial positions at the Herald. There has been a technological – but not a gender – revolution.

I’m fairly sure that the year I began in what I still feel is the best job in the world was also the year the paper celebrated its 150^th birthday. Three decades – 30 years! – would pass before the first female editor was appointed – and she lasted less than two years, removed in a purge in 2012 which saw her replaced with two men!

Chatting to colleagues and editors who also began their careers in the 1980s, I realized that my generation was at the pointy end of huge changes for women in news and yet most of us were pretty much oblivious that what we were doing was trying to change the world. One reminded me with great gusto of the daily battle in news conference – the place where editors, mostly male, meet twice a day to create the newslist and place stories. The fight was never ending to get placement for stories about equal pay and equal opportunity, welfare, reproductive rights, balancing family life, stories about childbirth, about breast feeding into the paper, let alone onto page one alongside the nation’s male dominated political affairs. One year, this same colleague reminded me, childcare fees rocketed by 25 per cent in one go – none of us even had kids then but she remembers it took a full week of lobbying to get an editor (whose wife happened to be a feminist and mum of two young children) – to agree to running the story, let alone putting it on page one where it belonged.

Over the next decade, we fought and won a battle for purpose built childcare at work, we watched the election of a trickle of women to the nation’s parliaments, seethed with fury as the first female Deputy Opposition Leader in a Lower House was literally driven out of politics by the mysoginist language and political attacks by a Premier who is remembered also as one of Australia’s most erudite, eloquent and reforming QCs.

And national research shows still that in Australia today, women even now manage to get just 30 per cent of newspaper bylines on page one – and it’s the same percentage if you look at the main focus of news stories. As my trailblazer colleague says it’s still ‘news about blokes, by blokes.’

And yet, eight years ago, when I was appointed Editor of the Saturday edition of the Herald – the one with the biggest circulation and fattest income – the last thing I thought of myself was being a pioneer. I remember feeling that somehow, I had not earned it, was a fraud soon to be found out, felt amazingly thankful when my salary was given an unexpectedly big hoik. I suspect a male colleague would have asked for even more, out of principle. It’s funny because looking back, I now see that I was – and still am – one of a mere handful of women appointed to executive, decision making positions in Australian media – but somehow I didn’t feel I deserved it. I don’t think I am alone in these secret misgivings and thoughts.

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

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Several years ago, I had the opportunity of a weekend stay in central London. This led to my wondering what I’d like to do there. A visit to one of the usual places – museum, gallery, theatre – would be a good standby but I also wanted something more, something behind the glitzy city façade: a more personal, more exploratory, more emotionally engaging experience of London.

I’d been reading Miranda Seymour’s compelling biography of Mary Shelley’s extraordinary but in many ways deeply sad life. It was such an engrossing read that I felt I’d grown close to Mary and wanted to stay with her for a little longer, wanted ‘more’ of her life. Mary Shelley has deep connections with London: born in Somers Town, she’d visit her mother’s grave at nearby St Pancras and at age nine, she moved to a house in Snow Hill, in the then city’s bookselling area. These places I wanted to find, as a way of acknowledging my respect for her achievements and, well, for simply surviving the life she’d had. As Seymour says in her preface, “Places… are the key to understanding” and, at that moment, I could only agree with her.

The house in Chester Street SW1, where she died, can be found in the Blue Plaque guide but not 41 Skinner Street where she spent some of her most formative years and, indeed, met and fell in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley. And so I decided to spend an afternoon of that weekend in London, tracking down these houses and finding my way around the back streets of London.  Here began the first of many journeys to discover, as Seymour had earlier found, that “what begins as a curiosity becomes obsession”. I understood Miranda Seymour’s lovely description of being at Shelley’s house on Skinner Street, where she found herself “walking the streets of London in a daze. There are no paving stones beneath your feet, no cars, no office blocks. You hear the clatter of iron wheels, smell the horse dung, see, in a sudden swish of black silk and the glimpse of a shawl, Mary and Claire hurrying down a narrow street towards the carriage where Shelly is waiting in 1814, to lead them to adventures such as these two impatient, headstrong young women have only read about in novels.” So walking around, A-Z in hand, locating the Skinner Street house and Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft’s place of marriage and burial, opened London up to me in a new and wonderful way and I realised the historical wealth of women’s lives that were quietly contained in this great city.

Years ago, working with one of the GLC Women’s Committee groups (where are we all now?)  I tried to initiate some research on Blue Plaques for women  because I was exasperated by the endless number of plaques to blokes of whom most of us hadn’t even heard, yet there were so few plaques to credit the many remarkable and famous women in our history. Today, there are more Blue Plaques to mark houses of significant women but it’s still disproportionately a male preserve. For instance, at 46 Gordon Square where Virginia Woolf lived, there’s still only a plaque for Maynard Keynes. I wanted to revisit that idea of commemorating women’s contribution to our culture and history by marking their existence on a map of London, simply because others have not done so – though I would like to credit Jennifer Clarke’s In Our Grandmother’s Footsteps, Virago Guide to London of 1984 and Katherine Sturtevant and Kate Murphy’s, Our Sisters’ London: 19 Feminist Walks, Women’s Press, 1991, for sharing that endeavour.

There have been so many wonderful women who have lived in London at some time of their lives or other, that I have grouped them together thematically. Rather than a relatively cumbersome book to carry about, with pages to flick through, backwards and forwards, I designed a pocket sized map for portability, using quality paper for durability and environmentally friendly inks and printing processes because they are available. The first map is on historical Women Artists because they were my first passion. (The second map is on Women Writers, with other categories to follow.) Inside, the map has addresses how to visit houses (many of which still stand) where the women lived or worked, providing transport details and directions. The map also provides biographical information and a short contextualising summary about women artists. I’d like to acknowledge Professor Griselda Pollock at Leeds University for her inspiration and the insights that contributed to the women artists’ material.

The Women Artists map locates the homes of artists including the hugely successful painters Elizabeth Vigee Lebrun and Angelica Kauffmann, as well as other less well known artists like the American Patriot and sculptor, Patience Wright, whose C18th waxwork of William Pitt still stands in Westminster Abbey. I have covered a range of artistic practice, from goldsmiths to bookbinders, needleworkers to history painters in order to avoid the traditional primacy of Fine Art which can often obscure the predominantly female arts and crafts skills. Famous artists are included alongside those it might be a pleasure to discover for the first time. The second, Women Writers, map follows a similar concept of including ‘stars’ with less well known but equally interesting women from the C17th to C20th who have lived and worked in London.

The maps are intended to be an enjoyable and useful tie-in for historians, researchers, practitioners, students or those with a personal interest in the subject or the women.  It’s to enable us to more easily explore our past by combining cultural pilgrimage with the pleasures of biographical history, allowing for a more intimately engaged and targeted experience of London, beyond the usual landmarks.

The map is an all women project with graphic artist Timi Van Houten designing the layout and illustrator Judy Stevens contributing the striking original portraits which bring the women to life on the page. Together with the text, I hoped to make a positive contribution to the women’s movement by validating our history and achievements in a concrete and user-friendly way.

And finally, the idea is to offer the Women Artists /Women Writers in London  maps to select women’s organisations and institutions only to sell, should they wish,  in order to contribute to their under- funded, valuable work.

Julie Harper (c) March 2013

 Julie Harper  taught English, Film Studies and Art History at a 6th form college for many years and now combines freelance English skills tutoring with fieldwork for an independent research company.

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Women and politics was high on the agenda at UN CSW 57, with attention being paid to politics in its broad and narrower sense. ‘Gender Sensitive Parliaments’ , discussing and debating the way to chage the culture of parliaments to ensure their responsiveness ‘to the needs and interests of both men and women in their structures, operations, methods and work’ was one topic holding enthralled all attending that side event. Another CSW 57 side event, also run by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU),  covered the way in which parliaments around the world have taken steps to ensure representation, or greater representation, of women as members, as cabinet members, as speaker, as whips, and in other posts of parliamentary authority.

Aotearoa/New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant women the vote, acceding in 1893 to women’s demands for the introduction of real democracy, where ‘democracy’ had, in the past, referred to government by men alone. South Australia was the first state-entity in the world to grant women not only the vote, but the right to stand for Parliament. In 1894 the South Australian Parliament had before it a Bill to extend the vote to women and one member, seeking to disrupt the process and impede passage of the Bill, introduced an amendment whereby the vote would be complemented by the right to stand. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for the democratic cause, the Bill passed – with both rights included.

In 1902 Australia became the first country in the world to extend the vote to women, along with the right to stand for Parliament. In 1903, three women stood in the Australian election. Although none succeeded, Vida Goldstein – the first woman to register to stand for the Senate, gained a goodly swathe of votes. She stood three more times over the years, up to 1920, despite not gaining a seat.

Just as men do not accept that the right to vote is sufficient – Parliamentary representation must be possible for all men, or at least all men are entitled to seek parliamentary places – neither do women accept that the vote is enough. Democracy means that women and men must have the right to vote for women or men as members of Parliament. Democracy means that women and men must have the right to stand for Parliament.

In the 1970s, the Australian Women’s Movement raised the slogan: ‘A Woman’s Place is in the House – and in the Senate’. This encapsulated the demand for democratic representation: women should be able to take their place in the lower house, the House of Representatives, and in the upper house, the Senate. The demand extended, too, to the state and territory legislatures when they came into being in the Northern Territory and the ACT (Australian Capital Territory – Canberra).

Although women were elected to state Parliaments, beginning with Edith Cowan in Western Australia in 1921, the numbers were few. Women were elected to the federal Parliament for the first time in 1942 – Dorothy Tangney going into the Senate, and Enid Lyons into the House of Representatives. In the 1970s for the first time three women sat in the House of Representatives – Joan Child from Victoria, Ros Kelly from the ACT, and Jeanette McHugh from New South Wales, being elected in 1983. Although Joan Child had been elected earlier and other women had sat in the federal Parliament from other states at other times, Jeanette McHugh was the first NSW woman ever to be elected to that Parliament.

Why so few, and why has it taken so long for women to be elected? Australia has for the first time a woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, yet this came about not by chance but through the Australian Labor Party’s adoption on affirmative action in the parliamentary sphere. In the late 1980s, the ACT led the way, adopting a 50% standard in local legisature elections. There, the voting system enabled this to be introduced relatively simply: with two seats, Canberra and Fraser, and a ‘list’ system, the proposal was that lists should be constructed on a ‘woman, man, woman, man’ basis down the list. Women gained first place on the ballot because that is the way the party voted, so that there was no need to promote women artificially over men on the lists. Yet the principle was established.

It was more difficult in the states and NT, and federally, for Tasmania (with the Hare Clark system) alone operates under a system similar to that in the ACT. All other jurisdictions operate on the basis of ‘one seat, one member’. In the 1980s, however, ALP women organised to ensure passage through the ALP National Conference of a resolution committing to a quota of 30% women preselected for all state and federal elections. Joan Kirner, first woman Premier of Victoria, was a leading figure in this struggle. She and others established Emily’s List (Early Money is Like Yeast – it helps women rise) to provide funds for women candidates who adhere to feminist principles, in particular the right to abortion.

The UN CSW 57 side event looking at getting women into parliament covered a number of ways in which parliaments and legislatures have sought to effect this change. The British Labour Party runs ‘women’s lists’ – where women only are entitled to stand for selection – and not only in unwinnable seats. Women’s lists must be run in winnable and safe seats, too. Burkina Faso adopted a policy of granting public fund bonuses to  political parties succeeding in having women elected under their banner.  Other countries have set aside a certain  number of parliamentary seats for women, some have introduced quotas – which must be met by having women stand and win seats representing general constituencies, some have simply called ‘quotas’ ‘targets’ – on the basis that ‘targets’ are more palatable than ‘quotas’ which is taken to imply the use of coercion or at least a firm hand. ‘Targets’ as seen as ‘softer’, something to be aimed for rather than (necessarily) achieved.

It may be significant that it is generally ‘newer’ democracies that have taken the most significant steps to ensure women’s  parliamentary membership. Whether they have set down rules in constitutions or statutes, or simply articulated policies, many African countries, in particular, are leading the way to ensure that parliaments are not populated by men alone. In this, they are following rapidly in the steps of Scandinavian countries, with Rwanda having topped the list in having more women than men in the parliament and cabinet. Beginning with a quota requiring no fewer than 30% of women in parliamentary seats, at the first election under that regime, women held 44 of the 80 seats.

In the 1980s, Senator Susan Ryan of the Australian Parliament commissioned research into voters’ views of women and men parliamentarians. The outcome was salutary. A majority said they preferred female to male politicians, as they believed the former to be ‘more trustworthy’ and ‘honest’. Voters were more prepared to put their and their country’s future into the hands of women. Clearly, political parties which do not recognise the importance of promoting women into parliament and thence into positions of authority and power at all parliamentary levels, are missing a sigificant feature of politics today.

Promoting women into safe and winnable seats will bring to the parties so doing, the opportunity of taking power and governing the country. On the basis of Senator Ryan’s research, they will also be ensuring that the country’s governance will be all the more positive, productive and progressive.

Jocelynne A. Scutt (c) March 2013

Jocelynne Scutt’s book, Taking a Stand – Women in Politics and Society, was published in 1996 as one of the ten volumes, so far, in the ‘Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives’ series.  In the volume, women speak of their involvement in politics, whether standing for parliament, campaigning for women’s rights, engaged in the struggle to end violence against women, or as members and officials active in the trade union movement.

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What problems do archives raise in trying to reconstruct the lives of women who leave no written record? My first contact with these problems relating to sources can be traced back nearly 40 years ago to my post-graduate studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada. As part of my Master’s course I took a module on Slave Societies.  The tutor, Michael Craton, had written a seminal text on slave resistance  in the Caribbean, Searching for the Invisible Man.  It was this text that gave me the inspiration for the research into African and African Caribbean slave women that was transformed into my first book.  Where was the ‘Invisible Woman’ and what was her contribution to slave resistance?  What I discovered was that slave women were far from ‘invisible’;  they  existed in parliamentary papers and reports, contemporary published accounts, illustrations  and unpublished diaries, plantation records and ship’s logs and registers in various archives. But such sources revealed the slave woman of the white imagination, what Maya Angelou described as a ‘fabulous fiction’ of multiple, predominantly negative, identities.

Archival sources and published accounts provide descriptions of slave life refracted  through white, mostly male, eyes and, on the surface, reveal more about the preoccupations, prejudices and fantasies of contemporary observers than the realities of slave women’s lives. The same may be said of accounts by white women, pro-planter and abolitionist, for whom female slaves reinforced their own sense of racial and class superiority.  Additionally, such sources recorded only aspects of slave life that directly related to European interests. Slave owners had little interest in the culture of the slaves unless it directly threatened those interests. Moreover, there is evidence that slaves were keen to protect certain aspects of their lives from prying white eyes.

Nevertheless, we can glean insight from archival sources by reading them against the grain and with a fresh eye.  For instance the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a small-scale slave owner in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth century, are often cited in relation to sexual exploitation of slave women and related cruelties.  Yet his diaries can also enable us to piece together the lives on his long-term slave ‘wife’, Phibba, and her close female kin, their entrepreneurial activities and contribution to the slave community life.  The women in Thistlewood’s world were clearly immersed in the shadowland of African rituals of which whites had little knowledge or understanding.

Thistlewood’s diaries are exceptional in their richness and detail but, in general, when working with archival and other sources, we can only catch glimpses of women’s inner, private lives, as opposed to their public persona as economic units of production and reproduction.  Thus such sources provide but limited insight into how female slaves subjectively experienced the trauma of enforced migration and the Hobbesian fabric of their everyday lives. Can we ever really get into the minds of women such as Thistlewood’s ‘Old Sybil, bit with a spider….delirious [and] singing her country’? Arguably, to gain a more rounded understanding such women’s lives and those of their free descendents in the African diaspora, we must also incorporate interdisciplinary sources such as anthropological and archaeological evidence.  Perhaps more controversially we need also to draw on oral traditions, and ‘sites of memory’ which embrace cultural forms such as dance. The value of such sources in reconstructing the histories  of oppressed groups who leave few written records now has fuller recognition. Searching for the ‘invisible woman’ also demands a degree of what the late Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘imaginative empathy’ to compensate for absence of sources.  But in using less conventional approaches one is exposed to criticisms stemming from a deep prejudice on the part of historians (often male) who are wedded to the archives and orthodox history writing. This raises the question as the whether there is a hierarchy of subjects deemed suitable for allegedly ‘real’ historical research. At the top of this hierarchy are studies of essentially masculine power and privilege, for which ample archives exist, whilst working class, Black and indigenous women, marginalized or absent in such archives, are located at the bottom.

My latest research has moved on to the lives of African and African Caribbean women in the era of late colonialism post 1918 and I have made extensive use of the rich archival sources at LSE relating  to colonial development and decolonisation.  Sources for this period are plentiful. However, I have encountered similar problems with the ways in which African women are represented in white writings and archival collections such as personal diaries.  The official archives are either silent on women or reiterate historical stereotypes going back to the slave era. Women focus primarily when they are seen as a barrier to modernizing development policies, or a threat to colonial stability as with the Women’s War in Southern Nigeria in 1929.  An important development in this era is the expansion of archives left by women. This reflects the emancipation of women after 1918 which enabled them to more fully participate in academia and the colonial project. Yet white women continued define their own superior identities in relation to African women with whom who they found little common ground and this is reflected in archival collections.

In conclusion, I have always had a difficult relationship with the archives, in particular the allegedly authoritative, official archives.  I recognise the importance of archival sources but also the need to subvert them, to read between the lines, and to go beyond the contemporary discourses and knowledge frameworks in which they are embedded.  I am irritated by dismissal of what are regarded as less valid sources that can help illuminate silences in history, particularly the invisible women of the past who are usually not part of the consciousness of the originators and gatekeepers of archives. This raises important issues relating to the very nature of archives; is there a gender bias in the way they are selected, catalogued and prioritised in relation to historical worth? Who determines what subjects are historically valid?  Are women’s archives, including the letters, diaries, life memorabilia of ordinary women, regarded as less valuable than men’s as sources of ‘authoritative’ history?   Here lies the indispensable value of the Women’s Library as a unique resource to protect and promote sources for researching women’s and gender history that can challenge the masculine bias in archival and other sources that are fundamental to working with the past.

Barbara Bush (c) March 201

Barbara Bush is convenor of the Women’s History Network and Emeritus Professor, Sheffield Hallam University. 

This was my contribution to a panel discussion on ‘Working With the Past’, organised by Asiya Islam, Equality and Diversity Adviser, London School of Economics and Political Science,  on the 12th March to celebrate Women’s History Month and to promote  the rich Women’s Library archives, recently relocated to LSE library. The other panel members were Sally Alexander and Kate Murphy and the three brief presentations generated a lively discussion about archival research. Thanks to Asiya and her colleagues the evening was a great success.

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