Summer Newsletter 2011

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The venue has level access on ground floor via The Headrow entrance, with a lift to all floors and wheelchair accessible toilets.

Tickets cost £5, or £4 for concessions, and may be bought on the door; online at www.leedsfilm.com; at the Box Office at The Carriageworks in Millennium Square between 10am and 8pm Monday to Saturday, in person or by telephone 0113 224 3801. Tickets must be collected at the venue from an hour before the screening. For guidance on any age restrictions please ring the box office.

It was a great evening. Lovely to meet old friends and make new ones –  surrounded by chatter and the warmth of friendship as I poured drinks and welcomed people. There were two brilliant exhibitions – one from Bradford Peace Museum and one of items from FAN’s Helen John collection including the t-shirts shown in our last newsletter. The video of Don’t Trust Menwith Balls was really interesting – partly being reminded of the history of it but especially the articulate young women being interviewed. A wonderful richness. Then Helen John – although I’ve read a lot about her I’d never met her or heard her speak before so wasn’t sure what to expect – and she was magic. So witty, so down to earth, so inspiring; telling great stories and making it all so accessible. There was a great sense of it never being too late to get up to such political mischief. I wish I was a writer and could write her biography – that’s a project that would be well worth doing … any takers?

Lynette

Gender, Sexuality and Adult friendship

 2nd July 2010

 Lancaster University

 http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/gws/event/3197

 Friendships are important relationships in people’s lives. They are a source of companionship; they form the basis of many social activities and play a role in creating peoples’ life expectations and aspirations. Friendships also help us form our identities and can be an important source of support, help and information. It has been argued that friendship has replaced traditional kin and community relationships in post-modern society (Giddens) as such friendship is often constructed as freely chosen informal relationship and this version has obscured the ways in which friendship interaction and friendship groups are imbued with socio-economic, gendered, classed and racialised processes.

 During this conference we seek to bring together researchers who examine contemporary, empirical material on adult friendship, who view friendship as a social, temporal and cultural relationship with a specific focus on gender and sexuality. Depending on the outcome of the conference, there may be an opportunity to contribute to a publication on adult friendship.

 In this conference we hope to address questions and issues around the topic of gender, sexuality and adult friendship, which may include the following:

 How do gendered processes operate in friendship groups?

 What are the relationships between friendship, sexual relations and romance?

Are friendships still seen as secondary to sexual relationships in adult life?
How are adult friendship and friendship opportunities created and maintained?

 Have expressions or patterns of friendship changed?

 What role does friendship play in queer communities?

 What role do resources play in the creation and maintenance of friendships?

 How can we best address the difficulties in conceptualising friendship, social networks and sociability?

 What other types of friendship are there other than the best friend relationship?

 Please send an abstract [150-250 words] to Lia Kinane l.kinane@lancaster.ac.uk by  30^th of March.

Join us on 9th March, from 5-7pm in the Brotherton Room, Special Collections, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Further information and directions are available here.

by Jenny March

I’ve seen some great exhibitions at the Women’s Library and this was no exception. Highlights for me included posters from the See Red Women’s Workshop, some feminist fashion including a child’s knitted jumper with women’s symbol and, my favourite, the diary of a feminist from the time showing all the meetings and events she was involved with, as well as more mundane entries like ‘move house.’

The exhibition guide is the size of a broadsheet newspaper and is hard to read when walking around the exhibition but makes a great souvenir. It has all the main text panel information, along with photos of key objects (some great ones of the posters for you to display at home) and quotes. There are a great many quotes in the exhibition, which I really liked, which came from ‘Once a feminist: stories of a generation,’ by Michelene Wandor (1990) and from a series of Women’s Liberation Movement Witness Workshops, which Feminist Archive North was involved with in Leeds. FAN also appears in the Chronology of the movement, displayed on one wall, and as a resource for further information. There is a board inviting visitors to comment on how the seven demands of the movement have been achieved and what future campaigns could focus on.

I found the exhibition really showed the energy behind the women’s liberation movement’s campaigning and the spirit of the times. It was a very positive exhibition and, for me, as someone too young to have lived through the ‘70s, it was really good to get an idea of the everyday life of a feminist activist then. It helped me to gain an idea of the context for the material I worked with at FAN, although most of my focus has been on the peace camps of the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was also interesting to see newspaper coverage of Reclaim the Night as we recently had a RTN march in Leeds.

This exhibition comes highly recommended. I’ll leave you with my favourite quote:

“There were so many women knitting and sewing because we spent hours in meetings. Hours and hours in meetings.” Sally Alexander.

“This bumper Newsletter celebrates Women’s Activism …” with pieces on the Bolton Archive coming to FAN, the Helen John collection,  collaboration with Leeds and Wakefield Co-op Area Committee, Justice for Women and FAN’s online Learning Journey – a great collaborative effort.

Newsletter no4 09-10

Every year for the past 8 years I have signed up for a Walking Women holiday, and some years, more than one. I’ve met wonderful women and interesting women, and as always happens when women get together I’ve learned new jokes, new remedies for aches and pains, picked up gossip and emulated some good walking gear and joined in rants and raves, and, but not so often, mulled over issues with other feminists – interestingly, this more openly feminist discussion is happening more often now than 8 years ago.

I’ve watched the business expand from holidays solely in the Lake District to its present Europe-and-beyond coverage. The new Spring Brochure for 2010 lists holidays in: Lake District, Snowdonia, Northumberland, Peak District, Scotland, Yorkshire Dales and Moors, Wye Valley, Shropshire, Cotswolds, Cornwall, Somerset, Dorset, Sussex, Berkshire, Channel Islands, Nepal, La Gomera, Spain, Crete, Turkey, – and I happen to know there are others to come this year in Tuscany and I think, South Africa. There are also holidays snowshoeing, and Alpine and Crosscountry skiing.

Why am I promoting this outfit? Because this is feminism in action, sisters! Successful and vibrant… Good value for money…. Caring and non-competitive and professional in its ethos. Walking Women was the brain-child of Diana Clarke, homeopath, who by 2000 was realizing that her work was depriving her of walking opportunities. She tells me she just woke up one morning and thought, ” It’s got to be women’s walking holidays.” And from her Leamington Spa base she had set up Walking Women by the end of April, 2000.

I wanted to write this blog today, November 12th, 2009, even though it may not get posted till next week, because today’s the day when Diana hands over her business to someone else. Walking Women will in future be run by Sue Donovan from her base near York. So it’s an important day. And a day for looking back and appreciating, as Diana retires after 10 years. Diana’s new business venture was hard hit by the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001 but she recovered and went on expanding, as more and more women came and returned for the happy experience Walking Women provided. The walks are graded, professionally guided, well accommodated, recorded by the guides in words and photos, and feed-back is encouraged. The brochures come out twice a year and are available on line, as well as a newsletter and newsflashes for bargain holiday; and there are holidays for lesbians. Diana herself has been guiding as well as managing, and now is looking forward to just enjoying the guiding; she’s signed on for 13 holidays this coming year.

Walking with women is, especially if it’s new to you, an empowering experience; as one woman remarked to Diana, “It’s a quiet revolution.” So many are radicalized by it, including women coming out of difficult marriages, widows who’ve been so used to a man blocking the view in front of them as they walk along that they remark on the improvement with astonishment and increasing appreciation, and any woman reacting to the standard comment from passing males, “Where’s yer men?” (Yes, still, I know…) When this happened to my group walking on Guernsey, one woman immediately replied, “They’re cooking the meal”, which is not bad but we munched over it all the way back because it didn’t reflect how cross we were. So, hours after the event, we came up with: “We could tell you but then we’d have to kill you!” It was the heterosexual women in our midst who enjoyed this the most…It is still, sad to say, a revelation to some women that they can enjoy themselves in the company of other women. And many of the feed-back sheets that I’ve peeked at, remark ‘haven’t laughed so much for years’. Another constant theme is that women feel ‘looked after’, and I know from various conversations that that is the draw of the Glenthorne Christmases – women doing it together and for each other instead of catering for others. I think I only truly appreciated what a gem Diana is when I watched her running a quiz one evening, with 40 women being noisy and unruly and Di managing it all with grace and good humour and clearly enjoying herself.

This is my tribute to a wonderful woman, a generous, thoughtful, practical feminist who, for goodness sake, is also blessed with business acumen and entrepreneurial skills, which she used to benefit women. This is the woman who, when my hovercraft from Poole to Guernsey was cancelled, rang round no less than 30 B&Bs in Poole until she found me. A fixer, a problem-solver, a heroine for me and hundreds of happy Walking Women! All of whom will join with me in wishing her well in the future, and in supporting Sue’s new ownership: catch Walking Women on: www.walkingwomen.com

It’s WES’s 90th birthday this year! It was set up just after WW1 to support women who wanted to continue in engineering after the war – having been encouraged into engineering work to ‘help the war effort’ they were then expected to meekly go back to their homes and kitchens, but many had got a taste for the independance and the interesting work. WES has an interesting history – Amy Johnson was President from 1935-7, and it was involved in the Electrical Association for Women (set up in 1924 to encourage women to use electrical apparatuses in the home!).

The opening speaker at the conference was Dr Wendy Schultz, a Futurist – http://www.infinitefutures.com/ - a great speaker and a fascinating talk envisoning possible futures – from the fairly inevitable to the too fantastical.

It was an interesting week of reunions for me. The conference was at Surrey University in Guildford, where I’d got my first (electrical engineering) degree and I’d gone down the previous week for a university reunion there. Why do some people love reunions and others hate them? Is it silly nostalgia or are you taking stock of your own personal, mental archive?

Lynette Willoughby