Political Motivation – Feminist Library

Hello. Welcome to another episode of Political Motivation here on the women's radio station. I'm Rosie MacLeod. This is the station that connects women all over the globe from our studio here in London. In this show, I take a look at the grassroots campaigners working to make the world a better place for women and girls. This week, we're taking a look at an invaluable relic of women's history, the Feminist Library in South London. Intersectionality has been at the heart of the library for quite some time. Yeah, if we don't cover our own history, if we leave it up to the people that have the power and the resources to decide what they want to record, we'll continue to be washed out of it forever and ever. And then it said that if we don't pay from 12,000 to 30,000 pounds in rent, which was more than our annual budget at the time, we will be out by the 1st of March. Because as feminism develops, the way we classify things and the way we look at things from a feminist perspective changes and develops. We'll be finding out why the library is the brainchild of three to six women in a London basement, why there are gravestones in the library's office, and how we almost lost the library right before Christmas 2016. You have probably heard the cliche that history is written by the victors, but what about that unilluminated side of history, the trace of the messages preserved in the archives and libraries? This is where women's history fits in. It is the side of history lived and experienced by those powerless to shape its course. Entering the library is like stepping back in time. There are no computers to help you find a book or an article. Past copies of Spare Rib adorn the walls and there's a dated poster that mentions an Irish section because it predates the notion of post nationalism. After what can only be described as seven years of hoarding, the the library was formalised in 1982. Here I am speaking to two of the volunteers to get the library's vital statistics. I'm here in the periodicals room of the Feminist Library and I'm delighted to be joined by volunteers Rose and Magda. Hi. Hello. So is the library staffed completely by volunteers? No, but almost completely. And it's volunteer led. So the management group are entirely voluntary and the majority of the openers are. So we've got three members of part time staff, but apart from that it's, yeah, completely volunteer run and indeed was. Apart from one other time in the 80s, we had one paid member of staff and apart from that it has been for the whole of its 43 year history. So archiving and activism since 1975, that's your tagline, is that when it began? 1975? That's right. It began in 1975 by a group of women who I don't think set out to set it up as a library. It was basically the idea was to have a central hub where you could have all the newsletters. So if you look around this room, you can feel the history, because these newsletters, there was a local women's liberation newsletter at the time in every major city, and that was before the Internet. That was the way they communicated. So to have a central hub where all this documentation could be held and could be referred to was very, very important because that's if you came to feminism and you wanted to know when the next event was, when and where things were happening, this is the kind of information that you would need access to. So how and why did the library come about? Well, the story goes, and there are a number of versions of the story, that somewhere between three and six women were in a basement somewhere in Lond in 1975 and were involved in this kind of tremendous movement of the second wave and all of this exciting stuff that was going on. And it dawned on them that if they didn't record their own history, it would simply be obliterated. Like, you know, they were fighting uphill battle as it was. No one was going to be recording this on their behalf. So if we wanted to know our history, we had to preserve our history. And as Mag said, they began collecting all of this stuff that was going on and it didn't. I didn't know, indeed until we were talking 20 minutes ago that that didn't formalize until 82. So you've got seven years of committed hoarding for political reasons, which I think is quite impressive in and of itself. And yeah, we've been doing it ever since. So in 2016, I got an email that said you had 5,000 books and resources here, but I've heard it's actually far more than that. Yes, Indeed. We've got 7,000 books that are part of the official collection that are cataloged and classified, plus about 4,000 that are being cataloged and classified at the moment. In the periodicals room, there are 1500 titles, which translates roughly. I don't know when it was counted last time, but as far as I know, it translates roughly into 10,000 items. On top of that, we also collect ephemera, which are flyers, posters, badgers tote bags, you name it, anything. That's basically a record of what happens in the feminist movement at a time. And there are about three or four thousand items in that collection. Some of it is being gathered as we speak. So it's very hard to keep an exact count. And then we've got about, I think, at least 30 archival collections that come from different groups, different feminist groups, like the Women's Budget group, for example, that are not stored here at the feminist library, but are stored at the Bishopsgate Institute for us, because we don't have the space, unfortunately, or the funding to look after archives. But, yes, it's a very extensive collection of the women's movement. And talk to me about the different sections, because I personally am a factual reader. You have nonfiction, prose, poetry. What are the different sections that you have? Well, there's the main collection, which is predominantly political, but arguably covers anything that is nonfiction. And that makes up the majority of the books. And there are. Yeah, I mean, most of it would come under politics, but there are sections on art. There are sections on health, work a lot. And we showed you earlier the cataloging system that at the point at which the collection started, you know, women was just a section. So there was, you know, got Jewish women, lesbianism, Irish women, all of this kind of, you know, all of these subsections within that. The people hadn't thought to kind of separate us out as a category of our own at that point. Then there's. Yeah, fiction and poetry, which is wonderfully easy to use because it's just alphabetical and therefore doesn't require a cataloguing system. Then the periodicals room. Oh, and are relatively new, I believe, as in they've been being collected for a while, but they've been ordered quite recently by our wonderful volunteer, Lily, which is the zines. We also have a whole stockpile of ephemera, everything from posters and stickers and badges through to gravestones, which is a bit of a story in and of itself. Rather a sad story, I suppose. But there was a protest, I don't even know how many years ago, where a bunch of women did an installation with gravestones marking all the women's spaces in London that had shut down through lack of access or lack of funding. And we still have the gravestones, some of which are in the office. All the places listed on those gravestones have closed. Each one of them represents a lost space which serves as a rather stark reminder to how precarious our 43 years still is, which is very sad. And you were almost on that list weren't you 2016 threatened with eviction, which I understand you've now recovered from. Yes, we had a very, very interesting year in 2016. We thought we were going to get thrown out at the beginning of the year. Actually we got a letter notifying us of that on the 23rd of December. Yes. And then it said that if we don't pay from 12,000 to 30,000 pounds in rent, which was more than annual budget at the time, we will be out by the 1st of March. But the council did not realize at the time, I think, is that the 1st of March was the first day of Women's History Month. So we have managed to gather about 16,000 signatures on our petition. We took it to the council and we protested outside their offices and we managed to push them back. Is there a foreign section? Because I saw you have Irish, but is it all English language material? No, and in fact that's something that we're working very proactively to increase our foreign language section, specifically because of where we are quite close to Ullerfield Castle. There's a big Latin American community here and we had a festival last year organized by a number of women in the library, many of whom were also part of the Latin American community, called the Latinx Festival. And that brought together all sorts of things. And we have a Spanish language book club that meets every month. And yeah, we've got a reasonable Spanish language section, not so much in Portuguese, but we are very open to receiving more books. So most of our collection is built on donations. People donate books from. Yeah, from their own collections for various reasons. So, yeah, we would say we would be very grateful to receive things in any language that anybody wishes to give it to us. So we've talked about the number of books and periodicals that you house here. How far back do they go? Because I know that after the Second World War on mainland Europe there was a huge boom in journals. Some were quite short lived, but notwithstanding a huge shortage of ink and paper, people continued to write and submit. And so how far back do they go? So most of our collection, like we talked about before, was started in 1975, so the women that collected it were mostly concerned with collecting information about the women's movement, as it happens. So most of it is kind of mid-70s onwards. And the bulk of the material, actually, as far as I have been able to make out myself by looking at the stuff, is from the 80s, but I do think that we have some older materials. We had a donation recently of about four boxes of books that date back to the 18th century. We passed them on to Bishopsgate directly because we're not in a position financially and in terms of resources to look after fragile stuff like that. But I'm sure if you look closely at the collection, you'll find some more gems like this. Now, as alluded to in that clip, the library has struggled with the issue of its premises in recent years. Currently, it is looking to relocate. Here's volunteer Magda to give us the lowdown. So we have a new space lined up that we're moving to, which is actually quite exciting, even though we're sad to leave this place after 32 years of being here. You know, it's a piece of history. The new space is bigger and it will allow us, you know, as you can see, very much needed space for expansion. And it's also part of a buzz and community center named after a woman. So we're quite excited at this point to move. But we do need to raise at least £30,000 to move, and we'll launch a crowdfunder in about two weeks time to be able to afford that move. So it's exciting, but a lot of work ahead of us. So if you wish to support the Feminist Library in its quest to find a new base, head to Crowdfunder.co.uk and search Help the Feminist Library build its new home. That information will also follow at the end of this program. So what does the library mean to the women who volunteer their time there? And what are the values of the institution? We do think of feminism and women's liberation as being of the 1970s, but there's that old chestnut that the first casualty of the First World War was the Edwardian lady. You heard that one? I haven't heard that one. But I would argue that this is a fight that goes back to basically the beginning of time. Yeah, I think probably my most historic interaction was in my first year of university and we were given the option to write an essay on whether. So Juana, who was a Mexican nun back in the 17th century, I believe. Sorry to interrupt. Was she the one who said, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers? Oh, God, I've no idea. Yeah, it was a first year essay. I only had to get 40%, but she. Yeah, whether or not she was a proto feminist and she wrote a series of very eye fluttering, eyelash fluttering letters to some powerful somebody and it was basically flattering his ego greatly. But in a bid to make education something that young women could access, she wanted to teach women to read, you know, and this is going back, you know, where. And basically she had discovered that the only way that you could get an education as a woman was to become a nun and be cloistered and therefore unthreatening. So you could have educated women so long as they didn't go out or interact with anyone. And she was remarkable, you know, she made her life's work to educate other women and was a devout reader and I think would have liked this very much. So, yeah, I think we've been going in various forms for a very long time with our quiet resistance and not so quiet resistance. My cousin told me there's a petition to get more women on the history syllabus in schools. I think that'd be great. I. Yeah, I studied philosophy and throughout four years, so three years undergraduate, one year masters, not a single woman made it onto the primary reading list. In my Masters at a very, you know, I went to name and shame, the University of Essex, which is a very left wing, very progressive, great university, and I loved it there. And I didn't feel in any, any way bad about being a woman in that space. Well, no worse than I do in any space. But, yeah, you know, there wasn't. And as an undergraduate, if I remember rightly, twice women appeared and they were Martha Nussbaum and Iris Murdoch and both on the same course actually taught by the fantastic Mike Weston and everywhere else just. Yeah, in the primary reading, it wasn't a woman. There were women in the secondary readings. Being young and ignorant, I thought, well, I guess we didn't do very much. And then I came out, out into the world and I started reading people like Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir and was like, oh, no, actually, women have been writing seminal philosophical works for a really, really long time. And the lack of inclusion of that in stuff that was based around 19th and 20th century philosophy is just a big oversight. To credit the University of Essex, though I do believe that things have moved on since my time because they do now have. Well, last time I was in contact with the university, they had a number of people writing their PhDs on feminism and philosophy. So obviously the ground is shifting. But it was noteworthy, and it is noteworthy that not just women, but people of color, different, you know, there was no Eastern philosophy on this. And to be fair, like, continental philosophy is a geographical delineation, but. But, you know, huge. The majority of the world is unrepresented in our history and kind of going all the way back to why the library was started. Yeah. If we don't cover our own history. If we leave it up to the people that have the power and the resources to decide what they want to record, we'll continue to be washed out of it forever and ever. So, yeah, I think it's great if people are making strides to say, no, this is not the entirety of our history and you need to start incorporating other stuff because, yeah, it would have been great to see more women philosophers at the point at which I was contemplating being a philosopher and thought that overwhelmingly this was something that men with elbow patches did. Where I grew up in Bedfordshire, we did all this local history, but they had the raf, Stambridge and the Bedfordshire Land Girls army, and it was huge and it was worth. Glenn Miller did one of his last gigs before he went missing, and because it's women's history, we didn't cover it at all. And it just made me so angry. Just because something is written by a woman doesn't make it feminist. So when you're a feminist library. But is it perhaps more womanist or. I mean, the French have a word for this. We don't have a word for it. It's la vie en feminat. Life as a woman. Is that. Does that capture it more accurately? Yeah, it's a very interesting question because I think, you know, going back to how you started the question, our collections policy is very much in a state of flux and it very much, I think, reflects the state of feminism at a given time. So it might have been different at the beginning, but I think it's very much what you're saying now. Most of the literature, just because of, you know, of the nature of the feminist library that it is. The feminist library is feminist in here. But we do have some writing by women that is. Could be called controversial, but because it was written at a time when writing as a woman was controversial in and of itself, we believe it's still worth having and celebrating that as a form in and of itself, even if the content might not be so agreeable with everyone. But we try to reflect the nature of feminism as well as we can. And I think, yes, it's not a straightforward question to answer, but I think it's a bit of both, if you like. Do you have any sort of criteria for the materials that you accept and house? Yes and no. It's a complicated one. I mean, one of the things about a space like this that is overwhelmingly volunteer run and led is that it's constantly evolving and it's constantly firefighting, you know, so we have all sorts of ideas about what we'd like to deal with in our management meetings and our strategy and all the rest of it and how we're going to run the library. And then we end up talking about kind of, you know, how the bills get paid and all of this kind of practical stuff that enables it to carry on. And you realize you've run out of time to deal with some of these kind of policy issues. So it's done on very much a case by case basis by a group of women that form the collections team, all of whom are volunteers. And if there's something that is controversial, they will then open that up perhaps to the wider management group and other people and will, you know, make a decision. But it's in a very ad hoc way. I think it's important kind of what Magda was saying about that there is problematic material in the collection. But it's worth pointing out that we have a community policy and the library kind of runs on two tracks, which is that there's the collection and the library, but there's also the community space and the community that interacts with that library. So we have a very inclusive and supportive space for the human beings that are in the library and are trying to find different ways that we can all interact with that history, including the parts that are problematic. That is not problematic amongst the people. That's a lot of problematic, but it is, it's difficult. We got a wonderful idea from a social centre in Glasgow that we went to recently that we can start putting stickers on things that contain stuff that is triggering or problematic in some way or whatever, and that people, that can be an interactive process with people using the library and using the material, they can be like, oh, you know what? Actually this is difficult, but I think it's important for us not simply to censor and sanitize our shared history and pretend, well, that because you don't move on from something, you don't create something different by distinction. Discarding and. Well, not discarding is the wrong word by denying something, you do it by interacting with it and confronting it and challenging it. So I think you can have something that's problematic in a collection and you can talk about why it's problematic and that creates a space for people to move forward together and that, that's quite important. But then, yeah, so I think, I think that's a tricky thing because you can't do that with the community. Like, we try to have a non confrontational space with the community that can be confrontational with material and with ideas. Well, ladies, thank you very much for speaking to me. Thank you very much. Thank you. So once again, if you want to help the Feminist Library raise the necessary funds to relocate, head to www.crowdfunder.co.uk and search help the Feminist Library build its New home. Thank you for listening. You can listen again at www.womensradiostation.com where you'll find the links to other previous episodes. My Twitter handle is Rosie McLeod 4. If you want to tweet me or find out the latest updates on my programming. And you can also listen again on my MixCloud page. Just head to www.mixcloud.com and search Rosie MacLeod. That's all for this week, but I do hope you'll tune in next time for another look at the grassroots campaigners making the world a better place for women and girls. I'll leave you with a track from Buckinghamshire artist Hannah's Yard. And this is with youh all the Way. Add a touch with the fire in your heart that meant so much. As feelings fall apart don't give up if you turn your back on life you'll come unstuck, yeah Losing sight When feelings hit the ground just hold them tight with the ones you love around you'll be alright the happiness you found is still inside yeah I can see it in your eyes. Some trees won't be the sky no way back don't come from night it's okay we're with you all the way. All the way we're with you all the way. 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