21st March Women’s History Month special event March 2023
What would Wonder Woman do? A personal journey of empowerment and allyship
A personal account of her career journey from Annmarie Lee
Head of Customer Services, Library and Learning Resources
Birmingham City University.
Be inspired by her wisdomDespite the title of the talk slides 7&8, you do not need superhuman qualities to become a leader. Take a look to see if these more common qualities apply to you. They stress the need for empathy and compassion to be a strong leader and are followed by inspiring quotations from strong women including Jacinda Arden and Michelle Obama. The slides then stress the need for allyship from men and women to achieve these goals and focus on the qualities a good ally might have
Males Allies and suffrage history
In this presentation Dr Gillian Murphy, Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship, LSE Library
looked at some of the archives relating to men who were involved in the women’s suffrage movement eg Hugh Franklin, George Lansbury, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence to name a few. The Women’s history month 2023 Male Allies padlet
prepared by Heather references some of the digital and online biographical sources available for some of these.
Shocking girls, riot zines: stories of feminist self-publishing throughout LCC Zine Collection
Eleanor Parker and Blanca Garcia Paja presented some of these voices, stories and revolutions that populate LCC Zine Collection, one of the largest in the UK. For background information on the history of the collection see
Gathering the Margins: The London College of Communication Library Zine Collection by Ruth Collingwood and Leila Kassir
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/art-libraries-journal/article/gathering-the-margins-the-london-college-of-communication-library-zine-collection/B9FEE0CD1F4CF6A2370054E36F6843CF
The talk began with an overview of the history and importance of zines . It referenced the work of Stephen Duncombe (1997) Notes From the Underground, that zines can be defined as ‘ non-commercial, nonprofessional, small circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves’ . They stressed their importance as a means to give voice to often marginalised voices. The examples presented on screen showed how the self publication of the early materials represented the personal input of the authors, in fact, links were made with the 19th-century scrapbooks made by women which also gave voice to their feelings.
In the 1970s access to photocopiers enabled second wave feminist collectives to produce examples of materials like Scarlet women in their own homes.
https://lcczinecollection.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2021/03/29/scarlet-women/
https://librarysearch.lse.ac.uk/permalink/44LSE_INST/1n1upld/alma99138793110302021
Moving onto the 1980s examples were shown of the punk influence in works such as Shocking Pink
https://www.grassrootsfeminism.net/cms/node/165
16 issues were published of this zine written by and for young women with an emphasis on topics like contraception, abortion, sexuality, lesbianism / queer issues, violence against women, It really is astonishing to believe such insightful and provocative topics were tackled by such young women. More can be explored on the Liberating histories project website which is tracing the history of women’s magazines
https://liberatinghistories.org/
Moving onto the 1990s they introduced
Bikini Kill. the two zines, were published in 1990 and 1991 and created by the members of riot grrrl band, they showed how these contained personal ‘girl power manifestos
https://lcczinecollection.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2021/03/26/bikini-kill/
https://librarysearch.lse.ac.uk/permalink/44LSE_INST/1n1upld/alma99138864110302021
from 2000s they showed examples of Doris
https://lcczinecollection.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2021/03/30/doris/
Doris is the long running perzine started by Cindy Crabb in 1991. A candid, raw and beautiful expression of Cindy’s world and discussed the importance of Ladyfest as a radical alternative festival for female empowerment
https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/7875/
alissnet.com 