Researching with the community - uncovering a hidden history

 Welcome, today, we are absolutely delighted to welcome our colleague from the University of Portsmouth, Dr. Laurel Forster.

Laurel is a reader in cultural history at the University of Portsmouth.

She has interest in women's culture, print media.

You'll see that she's published extensively on Women magazine, for instance, and obviously feminism.

She's published on the representation of women in a range of media, including film, television, radio and women's writing.

She's worked on May Sinclair, a modernist writer, and she's also particularly interested in the way periodicals serve women's political and personal aspiration.

She's just released the book.

I'm sure she's going to talk about it.

And she's worked also extensively on Portsmouth's women.

So I'm really excited to discover this hidden history of Portsmouth's women and to see whether this brings a number of interesting conclusions on national issues and certainly international issues of feminism as well.

So Laurel without further ado the floor is yours.

And everybody, as you know, use the chat box for questions and answer the floor is yours Laurel.

Thank you much.

And thank you also to to Leila and to He for the opportunity to talk about the project.

So I wasn't going to talk too much about my book.

I'm really going to try and focus on the on the project that we carried out in Portsmouth.

The point of this project was to bring women's activism in Portsmouth to light to shine the light on the feminism and feminist activism of the city.

So the city of Portsmouth then, dominated by its naval base and its dockyard, has traditionally celebrated and commemorated the achievements of men and was considered a little touched by feminism.

So this project, through collaboration with local groups, sought to explore the different ways that feminist grassroots activism of the British women's liberation movement did make a difference to the city and its surrounding area.

So the project was called Women's Community Activism in Portsmouth since 1960, the hidden history of a naval town.

And its main aim was to interview 50 women from the Portsmouth area who had participated in activism during the period of the women's liberation movement.

So Sue Bruley, Therese Johnson and I worked with local community groups, the local history centre in Portsmouth City Library and the University of the Third Age, to rediscover the history of feminist campaigning in Portsmouth since the 1960s.

So this was suitable for a heritage lottery fund because of the way it involved the local community, but one of the drawbacks of an HLf project is that for various reasons, you more or less hand over the running of the project to the people that you employ, the project workers and the volunteers.

And they were brilliant.

But, you know, there were some aspects that I'll talk about those later.

So Sue Bruley and I have both written extensively on the women's liberation movement.

But the project started a long time before the 2019 HLF fund in 2014, we had a Portsmouth University conference called Situating Women's Liberation Historicism Movement, and we had academic speakers at that conference but we also had local women, non-academic women who we encouraged to address the whole conference and talk about their personal engagement with female politics.

We published the academic papers in a peer reviewed journal, but we also followed the community enthusiasm for a local history project focussed upon Portsmouth women.

And this was evident from the conference.

And so began a process of a structured collaboration which would become the Heritage Lottery Project.

We had various Women's Liberation Witness days, and this brought together the local activists to talk about their experiences in a semi public forum, and we hosted these at the university.

People gave their personal testimonies and other women came forward with long forgotten activisms and fellow female campaigners were remembered.

News of the project spread by word of mouth through Portsmouth.

It's a tight knit community.

And these early testimonials, we thought about these and we try to transpose those individual life stories onto the more general struggles that women face living and working in a naval city, and then on to even broader national women's liberation movement concerns.

So we had the initial research findings.

We brought together different groups and we developed partnerships with those different groups.

We developed a methodology for engaging, marginalised and underrepresented women's groups.

And we had our promised output's of interviews, public talks, training events, community centre visits, touring exhibitions and so on.

And all of this community activity reawakened an awareness of a feminist history of late 20th century Portsmouth.

Lectures, memory days, touring exhibitions or the talking table and the teachers pack all of these enabled communities to hear these new narratives.

There was also an intergenerational aspect to this, and we trained over 20 younger volunteers in interview techniques and oral history practise, and we enlisted the help of older volunteers, too, from the University of the Third Age.

And lots of these women had great archiving skills and they they worked with the Portsmouth Evening News Picture Library that it has and the city's history centre.

So fundamentally, what we did was to take national issues of the 1970s women's liberation.

We did our research to find out how these were translated locally to the area and to local people.

So now I'm going to share my slides.

Screen.

I just need to.

So can everybody see those? Not yet, but I'm sure it's coming up.

Let me see if I can.

Yeah, yeah, yes, yes.

Good.

So it's a nerve wracking moment, is there, from the start, right? All right.

Right, I can see Leila, but nobody else, I can see a small picture of me and and that's just fine.

So anyway, first slide, just to say that my research interests are in feminism Leila's already introduced me, women's cultural history and the representation of women in the media.

Very briefly.

That's me.

So now I want to move on to my next slide.

And the normal way of doing that isn't.

Isn't working.

And.

No.

I think on the on the left side, Laurel of..

Here you are.

Oh, yes.

Thank you very much.

Yes.

Right.

So I've taken some of these slides from the public lectures that we gave.

And I thought people might be interested to hear the voices of some of the women that we interviewed.

They're absolutely fascinating.

And just to say that from the second of these the public lectures that we gave, we had over 150 people attend and we were blown away by that.

And it just demonstrates the level of interest locally in this project.

So so this was our project.

So some of the interviews were about what the local women's groups did, a kind of general consciousness raising, and here these two images illustrate different aspects.

So you can see on the left hand side, Portsmouth women's lib had a little stand, a little stall, as it were and this is in the tricorn centre no longer there.

And that's Celia Clarke, so an image from the time and on the right hand side is a meeting in a local hall about housing.

And what was really interesting was when we use some of these images to prompt the memories of our interviewees, some of the women that we interviewed could recognise themselves in that town hall meeting on the on the right that you see there.

So to come to to one of our interviewees, Benita.

Describes how she took a group of women down to the Southsea common, dressed as old fashioned charwomen to start cleaning up the common with dusters and mops.

And this was just a consciousness raising thing, you know, to bring that hidden work of women's housework to light.

And here she is talking to me on the phone with the friends that already got together.

We wanted to bring in more people and we didn't have any mechanism for proclaiming ourselves or who we were.

And one of the things we did has this mad idea.

And we decided we'd all go down on the common with our mops, with our buckets, with our brushes, with our headscarves, with a child along if we could and we would clean the common and we would wash the blades, clean the seats and go up to people and brush them down which they weren't too sure about.

It was great fun, but there were only a few of us and obviously there were only seven people on the common at the time we went.

And then when we got their attention, we endeavoured to let them know about the fact that consciousness raising group did exist, that they were welcome, they were more than welcome.

We would it would be lovely, great to hear from them.

And or two people did respond by actually coming to the group, not masses of people, but some.

Yes, it worked.

And we had a lovely time.

And so and so Benita then led a consciousness raising group where women went along and and talked about their lives, about their ambitions, about the things that restricted them.

And you can hear in that lovely interview, you can hear Sue Bruley, who did some of the most wonderful interviews of the project and of course, initiated and and worked with the rest of us for the for the project.

And the next person I want to introduce is Estelle, who also was very involved in the ideas of feminism.

And this is what she has to say.

But what in fact, we did discuss in the women's group and was housework, who did it, who cleaned the toilet? Why? Child care issues and why these tasks were done only by females.

We discussed women's work and prejudical working practises, and we talked about unfair expectations of the family and our parents.

So we did all kinds of things, know we really had a rounded We really had a rounded kind of group.

But also one of the things I particularly remember is that we draughted a bill of women's rights.

We were a collective.

But what in fact, we do discuss in the women's group...

so what Estelle goes on to say is that her group got together a manifesto, a statement that they wrote collectively to express their sense of oppression within their marriages and their lives.

So when we heard this these sorts of interviews, what we tried to do in the project was to guide it along the lines of the the demands that were made in the 1970s by the women's liberation movement.

There were four then there were six demands.

And as you know, these were along the lines of equal pay, equal educational rights and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, free 24 hour nurseries, legal financial independence for all women, the right to a self-defined sexuality and so on.

So when it came to these different aspects, for example, work.

We try to think.

About so we looked locally and we try to think about what kind of work and in Portsmouth dominated, as I've already said, by the naval bases and the dockyard, wages were often kept purposefully low.

So work in light industry like these local factories just off the island of Portsmouth were better paid and highly prized.

But you have to be able to get there.

So you have to have some kind of transport.

And we looked at these factories such as Johnson and Johnson, and as I said, some of these don't exist anymore and we did our research on a national scale.

And we looked at women's magazines like this really important Women's Liberation magazine, so everybody's heard of Sparerib.

Not so many people have heard of Women's Voice, which was aimed at the working women.

And they had articles about some of the strikes that took place in our local area, in the Portsmouth area.

And so we were able to research things like the equal pay strike at Havant that took place.

There was also plenty to say about the university in the 1970s, too, and we had we had some lovely interviews, one of which was with Sylvia Horton.

We tried not to lean too much on the university sources.

This was meant to be a project about Portsmouth City and its local area.

Now, the university is a really important part of the city's working life, but we didn't want to we didn't want it to dominate.

And if we've got a moment, let's just listen My first year or second year, the Head of department was a man called David.

He called me in and he said, 'I've had a complaint and I think I ought to mention it to you.' He said, 'there is somebody who disapproves of you wearing trousers.' It was a man, obviously, and you came.

I think everybody else wears trousers.

So he said, well, I just thought I'd let you know.

So I said, OK.

So the next day I went in in a bright yellow trouser suit.

They never said anything again.

And the next time and this was ridiculous.

This was some years later.

And there was a woman called Liz Rick who joined us.

She was an economist.

And we were constantly moving around offices because we were in Mercantile house.

And we moved into this office with a male member of staff.

His name was Forfranzis.

And I had taught Forfranzia...

And so I'll cut that short.

But Sylvia goes on to talk about some of the some of the sexist comments, but also some of the supportive things that happened in the university, too.

But the idea, can you imagine, of being told that you're not supposed to wear trousers to work.

Amazing.

Now, another interviewee, Muriel Alan.

Was absolutely fascinating.

She was the first female prison governor of a man's prison in Britain, the very first female British governor of a men's prison, and at the time, Portsmouth, and it was Portsmouth, Portsmouth, that she got the job.

This was a high security prison.

And in her interview, fascinatingly, she revealed that she used the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 to challenge because she knew that she was well qualified for the job.

And she invoked that act and said, well, this is the Sex Discrimination Discrimination Act of 1975.

And she used that in her interview to to press her case for being the first female governor of an all male prison, which just shows as a single illustration how important those acts were for some women.

I know those acts weren't perfect, but for some women, you know, this made a huge difference.

Her interview is absolutely fascinating.

But because this is Portsmouth we wanted to include women from the Navy and the period of our work in the project covered the moment when women went to sea on naval ships with the men.

And Liz Walmsley was a really interesting woman.

She talks about her work and she brought a equality to naval uniforms because when she started, the the men of a certain rank had a particular kind of uniform and the women of the same rank had a lesser uniform.

And her work was to bring the women's uniforms up to the mark of the men's, but she also challenged things like everyday speech in the Navy and the inherent sexism of the Navy.

So she's interesting on all of those fronts.

She talks about what it was like though being one of the first women to to go to sea on a ship.

That is there was 99 percent men.

And in one in her interview, she talks about being spat at on the street when she was in uniform and the wives of the men who went to sea on the boats who that had some naval women didn't like this, and so she stopped wearing her uniform in public.

And this was really interesting because it reminds us that not everything was always lovely in the sisterhood of the second wave of feminism.

And we should remember that aspect, too.

So her interview's really, really interesting.

Housing was a big, big issue for the women's liberation movement and an enormous issue, and problem, in Portsmouth, and this was another area that that we wanted to cover.

Portsmouth is known to have poor housing stock, cramped housing, and there was much campaigning by women to get the local council to improve housing and to augment the green areas within the city.

And these are some of the photographs from from the time.

Another area of great importance in the women's liberation movement was sexual and domestic violence, and this is one of the original four demands.

Portsmouth is a city with high rates of sexual and domestic violence and women campaign from very early on and they fought long and hard to set up a rape crisis, telephone line and PARCS the Portsmouth Abuse and Rape Counselling Service and the Portsmouth Refuge.

And in fact, Portsmouth was one of the first cities to have one of these refuges to be set up across across Britain.

1981, they finally got planning permission to set it up.

There was a very strong peace movement within Portsmouth, and we interviewed some of the women Quakers who campaigned endlessly for peace.

We interviewed women who belonged to CND and SCAN (Southcoast Against Nuclear Navies) And of course, because Portsmouth is close to Greenham Common.

There were lots of women from Portsmouth who were engaged with the peace movements in the Peace Protests at, who spoke for our project, and these women supported the demonstrations against nuclear missiles.

They were involved in the camps.

And you can see some of the women that we interviewed sort of holding the line there in that central photograph and they set up the memorial garden.

Rosie Bremner and Nikki Skinner talked about how they were arrested for campaigning and their motivations for campaigning, some of the women talked about how they could hear those lorries carrying the missiles from Portsmouth docks thundering past in the middle of the night, carrying those missiles to Greenham Common.

And all of these testimonials and interviews we we have captured and recorded and kept as part of the project.

And then.

We also wanted to include all or as many as we could of the the different groups of women within Portsmouth.

There's great diversity in the city.

We worked with Bangladesh communities.

We worked with Marie Costa from the African Women's Forum, and we were able to interview the women of the Chinese Women's Association.

And they were fascinating.

They came over some years after their husbands to help with their husbands businesses.

But because of language difficulties, they had all sorts of problems, such as accessing health care and organising education and so on.

So hearing these women's stories about how they had to work really hard to improve their lives, you know, has been has been absolutely fascinating.

And then.

Just my last slide, because I've not included everything, of course, just to say that I've I've written a little booklet.

Anybody who's interested is very welcome to to have one.

I've got loads of them.

And that summarises most of the interviews.

So I've got a few more things to wrap up now.

I think I've stopped sharing my screen.

So just to say there were some areas that were harder to reach, I guess any project like this is never going to cover everything.

We we we managed to get hold of some women who were supporting and representing diverse sexualities.

But this these weren't easy to find and not so willing to interview.

We had some there are some within the project.

We have a few women who were involved in feminist art and crafts and writing.

And I've got yet another interview lined up with somebody who was involved with the bookstore movement and with my interests in magazines and print media I'm particularly interested in that.

We didn't manage to interview any women who worked in the dockyard.

We know that there were plenty of women who did work work in the dockyard.

And we ended up with a lot of interviews about current environmental issues, so whilst the this is hugely important, it's current history, you know, it's it's now and we also had lots of willing interviewees who are members of WASPI, the women fighting for equality in their pensions.

Again, really important, but a more recent campaign.

So just to summarise then, the end results, the project had a wonderful reception and it's done much to place women's pioneering action at the forefront of Portsmouth's history.

We retrieve the lived experience of women from the shadow of a male dominated conventional history and have added further layers, hopefully paving the way for current generations to see their home city in a new and more inspiring light.

We've increased awareness of women's activism through all the public engagement activities at various city venues, so we gave talks at Southsea Library, for instance, and all sorts of places, and people were really enthused to carry on their own research.

There's a lot of interest in local history in Portsmouth.

For older people, it brought back memories and for children, it was really good for them to see their mothers in a different light.

We had one child write on one feedback sheet, but she was so impressed that her mother had been arrested at Greenham Common and she hadn't known that until her mother spoke at one of our talks.

And that recognition is really important.

The interest in this is still ongoing.

I've given talks and podcasts and I'm due to give a talk at the Portsmouth FiLiA conference, which is the feminist charity that's coming to Portsmouth in October.

And the Imperial War Museum wanted to include all material on Greenham Common in their learning packs that they've distributed.

But what we've done with all of these interviews, and there's so much more work to do, but what we've done is to make a permanent archive in the city library, and that means that it's open to all.

Anybody can access it there.

And I'm working with Marie Costa and the city council to create a bronze artefact in the Guildhall Square, which will commemorate all these women, but I guess for me, the thing that really stands out is the self-respect and the self-esteem of the women involved.

It was so important to have their own contributions recognised, to have their friends and families and communities recognise and understand the difference that they made, and to know that they made Portsmouth a better place as part of their women's activism.

And in our end of project video, they talk about this and what it means to them and to have their their stories told publicly and recorded and kept.

They talk about what it means to them really very movingly.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much, Laurel.

That was absolutely fascinating and certainly very, very relevant.

I was very impressed with your presentation when you touched upon a number of issues which are still relevant today.

You know, equal pay, sexual life, housing, the same questions are here today, the exact same questions.

And I have a first question for you.

I know we're receiving questions in the chat box already, but to what extent did they identify or do they identify today with more national concerns? I suppose they did.

But were they very different very particular, because, you know, Navy town, you you mentioned or were they also relating to a very national and probably international issues, as you know, pacifism, for instance.

Well, I think when it comes to the Greenham Common, that was obviously a nationally known moment of activism and resistance, and it drew women from all over because it was so close to Portsmouth, lots of they organised sort of day day bus rides to go and and help and participate and be part of it.

And some of the women stayed there.

But on the whole, I think that there wasn't as much connection with...So the women's liberation movement has often been thought of as being London centric.

And I think that an amount of work has been done over the past few years to prove that that just wasn't the case.

I don't think that the the women from Portsmouth who were active in the 1960s and 1970s, 1980s necessarily linked up on a national scale because, of course, there was so much to do in the city.

And as you know, Portsmouth is a is a place where generations remain.

So it's you know, it's a tight knit place.

So I think that there wasn't as much linking with the national programme.

But I think what what we wanted to do was very and Sue Bruley has done a lot of work on regional feminism and we wanted to make those links.

So now I think that there are campaigns for, there are still campaigns of green spaces in Portsmouth and there are lots of environmental issues too.

Thank you so much for the first question from Tony.

Thanks, Laurel.

Was there any connection between religious practises or beliefs and the women's experiences? That's a very interesting question, and I'm not sure I got an answer for you.

Certainly the Quaker women that we interviewed believed that campaigning for peace was part of what they should do and formed part of their beliefs.

But we had Anglican women, Methodist women, who had perhaps come to preaching or lay preaching later on in their lives.

And and they tell the stories of their lives and how how that how it was integrated into what they felt was important to them.

So whilst I haven't answered the question directly, what I hope I've done is, is show that we had a number of different denominations who came forward to talk about the importance and significance of religion in their lives.

Yes.

Thank you so much, Laurel.

I have another question for you.

To what extent these women you've already responded in your presentation, but to some extent, to what extent again, these women share their experiences with their children, their daughters.

Is it influential today amongst their community, the young girls of Portsmouth's, or is it not influential? It was it was really interesting because the project, because we because it was designed to go out to the community and employ members of the community, up-skill them, teach them about oral history and interviewing.

So we had lots of younger women interviewing older women.

And I think that was a really powerful aspect of it.

So we did have that sort of intergenerational thing going on.

And I think that younger women were definitely interested in the stories of the older women and interested that it happened in their city too.

Bringing that history to life, really.

And are these women still very much involved in certain feminist movement today in the city or they're retired? Yes.

Well, one of the reasons that the project felt so urgent was because if you were a 20 year old woman in the 1960s or the 1970s, you're quite elderly now.

And so it was really important to capture some of these histories before before they disappeared.

Yeah.

And the last question for me, although we have a question is coming up, but maybe the last question for me, what about the men? Because I personally like when feminism is actually embraced and probably fought for by men rather than women.

So we had yes...

So we didn't interview many men, but when we gave the public lectures and so on, we had lots of men participate and were really supportive.

So, yeah, and we had we had men on our committee running it.

So.

Yeah, yeah.

Men men were an important part of feminism in Portsmouth, they were.

Very good.

We have a question from Ben Davis, our colleague.

Thanks, Laurel.

Fascinating how supportive or not were working class men and male partners, did they help or hinder, discover the lines, discovered lines of solidarity? It seems that Ben and I had the same question in mind.

Yes.

Well, what can I say to that? I think mixed.

So some men were helpful and supportive and went on the marches and helped to campaign and and distribute the leaflets and and get the meetings together.

Yes.

And others less so because it's Portsmouth's.

We were able to interview a whole load of women who had partners who were serving some in the Falklands War.

It's really interesting to listen to what those women did and how they supported each other, whilst those battles were being fought.

Some of those are really very moving.

Yeah.

A question from Tony now.

Another question.

I would be interested in knowing the demographics of the interviewees.

What was the voice of the migrant worker, the migrant woman or racial minorities in the media? Would you.

Sorry, I don't understand.

Well, yeah, so he said I would be interested in knowing the demographic of the interviewees and then he asked about the voice or where the voice, I suppose, where the voice of the migrant woman or racial minorities heard.

And then he says, in the media.

So you mentioned you interviewed a number of precisely a migrant or diverse woman.

But yeah.

So the project spans a lot of different minorities.

We got a lot of different minority groups in Portsmouth.

It's a multicultural city.

We've interviewed a lot of women from different communities.

Lots of the women that we interviewed from those different communities are the ones who are currently doing the work.

And because this was really meant to be a historical study and we interviewed, and I've worked quite extensively with Maria Maria Costa, who is the chair of the African Women's Forum.

So I've worked with her quite extensively and we wanted to interview the Chinese women's community group because they knew they were here for, you know, they they came over very early and have battled against the systems.

And so this was quite a struggle.

And some of our some of our work force with the informal group, which is called Chat over Chai in Portsmouth, and that is open to all minority women.

And that's where we launched some of the artwork that Mandy Webb produced for the group.

So I think on my last slide, if you saw that wall with all, which is vaguely a map of Portsmouth with all those women's names on it, Mandy Webb produced that as a piece of artwork for the project, which was fantastic, and then launched it at the Chat over Chai.

Try to all those minority groups.

That's a lovely name, Chat Over Chai.

We can borrow that probably.

Excellent.

Another question from our colleague, Melanie Bassat.

Thanks for an interesting talk, Laurel.

I was wondering about the impact of your project.

I think you discussed that a little bit.

But did you have any indication that it inspired new women's activism in Portsmouth? This is a new women's activism.

I think it encouraged the groups that were already in action.

So, you know, I mentioned WASPI, mentioned the Green Spaces group.

We interviewed people from all of these all of these groups and their voices have contributed to the archive.

But I think that the work in general, sort of put a marker down to say this is what the women of Portsmouth have done, and that in itself I think was encouraging.

We also interviewed women who are fighting against the use of plastics, women who are fighting against the use of waste.

So current projects as well.

I focussed here on the historical projects because we intended to try and link them to the women's liberation movement.

But we have also interviewed quite a few women who are currently working.

Very interesting another question is, when do you teach these to your students, I suppose you do you talk about your research, although you might teach broader things, but what's the reaction of young girls and young men actually from the city or not from the city? We have a relatively varied student audience.

Yeah, they are very interested.

And you know what it's like sometimes sometimes you can talk about your research and you can bring it to the fore.

So if I'm talking about the power of interview or the relationship between what happens in the media and of course, I work a lot with women's magazines and the individual and whether the interview or the testimonials sits between those, then then I use examples of this and it's good to be specific.

I think the students are interested, whether they're from Portsmouth or whether they've come to Portsmouth for their three years.

I think they are interested in in some of the history of the city.

And in relation to that, because it always fascinates me as well.

You know, feminism probably has changed the way young women embrace feminism.

Do they relate to that or do they relate to slightly different more, I don't know, combative, aggressive? I don't know whether it's the term feminism.

Well, I guess I hope that.

Well, I mean, what can I say about combative feminism and.

I think on the whole that feminism has expanded to include everybody and that's what I hope.

And so when I when I teach some of this stuff, I sort of try to talk about how the project itself focussed on a project focussed on historical women, because women were particularly concerned with a number of these issues.

But now that feminism and equality is seen to benefit all I'd like to make it much more encompassing.

Yeah, it does benefit all, as you said in your introduction, at the same time, you know, the fight is far from being over with questions of pay or violence.

We've seen that during a pandemic in particular.

So are these students and young woman you probably interview for your other project aware of that? Well, I think I think they are, but of course, as I said, we had lots of younger women doing the interviews and so nobody so the women who were doing the interviews and involved in in those processes, they heard it first hand.

And I think for some of them it was quite revelatory.

Yeah.

And some of them had no idea of the battles that older women had to fight.

So that was really good, really informative.

Thank you so much, Laurel.

I'm conscious of time and I know everybody's busy, but it's been such a fascinating discussion, Laurel.

Thank you so much.

And I hope you're going to show that students it's been recorded, as you know, it's going to be available on the website of the university and research futures so we can disseminate broadly.

Because as you explain, there are many lessons for us locally, but also nationally and internationally.

Thank you so much, Laurel.

And I'd like to thank the audience for being such a great audience, asking questions, and also my team in particular He, Gloria, Olga, Barnaby and Claudia.

Thank you so much, Laurel, again.

And we'll see you very, very soon.

Thank you for having me.