But the author is dead! Life writing in English Studies

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Hearing her: comparing feminist oral history in the UK and China

This article compares the China Women’s Oral History Project, directed by librarians at the China Women’s University in Beijing, and Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project, directed by scholars at the University of Sussex in the UK. While the projects share aspects of method, our practices wrestle with distinct historiographical structures which are entwined with a history of state feminism in China and with dissenting, nongovernmental networks in the UK, as well as differing institutional contexts. As we have sought to develop a relationship as feminist oral historians, we have had to decenter our own frameworks to understand the local conditions under which we each work. The article concludes by analyzing what we share: the wish to find progressive spaces within universities and national funding structures, particularly as oral history work connects with community activists

Purpose, power and profit in feminist publishing: an introduction

Introducing a special issue about the business aspects of feminist and women’s movement publishing, this article surveys the perennial tensions between cultural and political aims and the economic models necessary for sustainable operation. Addressing a range of beloved periodicals and book publishing ventures, including Spare Rib, Ms, Red Rag, Virago, Des Femmes, Honno, Sheba, Bogle L’Ouverture, Onlywomen Outwrite, The F-Word, The Vagenda, Feminist Frequency, Feministing, The Establishment, Crunk Feminist Collective and Cassava Republic Press, I identify a shared scene of hopeful activist enterprise within a complex ecology embracing the market, public funding, philanthropy as well as the feminist ‘gift economy’ of voluntary work and bartering. I argue that, where ventures failed, they nevertheless generally acted as socially responsible businesses, producing publications with a long tail of value which includes and exceeds the economic. I apply this lens to the case of Women: A Cultural Review itself, revealing its former incarnation as a feminist arts magazine Women’s Review, which ran from 1985 to 1987, and the way its meaning, purpose and value has been preserved under new ownership. This raises general questions about the business of academic publishing, university markets and the paradoxes of platforms which enable protest about the terms of their production

Travelling through time - Voyage dans le temps

ALISON JOLLY AND HANTANIRINA RASAMIMANANA: THE STORY OF A FRIENDSHI

The making of Mamatoto: Virago, The Body Shop and feminist business strategy

This article explores a collaboration between Virago Press and the Body Shop (TBS) to shine a light on feminist and women’s business, what they have shared historically and how they could work together in late twentieth-century Britain. It uses as a lens the 1991 sale of a Body Shop book, Mamatoto: A Celebration of Birth, to Virago Press. The processes and outcome raise thorny questions: how can political commitments lead to business innovation? How can business support political aims? What kinds of deals can be done between divergent ‘activist’ businesses, and what kind of identification between feminist entrepreneurs supports such deals? Mamatoto, sold alongside a range of mother and baby toiletries of the same name, was important to Virago commercially at a time of economic precarity and expressed TBS’s growing interest in combining marketing with social justice campaigns. Yet the book’s representation of women in developing countries points to neo-colonial elements in the white, middle-class ‘mama market’ of the 1990s, a market which TBS especially cultivated but which contradicted the principles of the women’s movements Virago aimed to serve. The Mamatoto deal thus arguably involved political compromise, even if it was good business. Yet, the partnership also reflects the strategy and strengths of both Virago (established 1974) and TBS (1976) as enduring and iconic women-centred businesses. TBS simultaneously pioneered fair-trade initiatives and a ground-breaking practice of ‘social’ audit, while Virago was developing more inclusive, multi-cultural and transnational approaches to its work, including in a contemporaneous production of a cookbook with the development charity Oxfam. Understanding their struggles to align value chains and combine purpose and profit remains positive and instructive for would-be feminist entrepreneurs today

Survival writing: autobiography versus primatology in the conservation diaries of Alison Jolly

Donna Haraway’s ecological visions frame this exploration of my mother Alison Jolly’s writings as a primatologist of ring-tailed lemurs. My mother, I propose, chose auto/biographical modes to unsettle anthropomorphic and Western perspectives and to enhance conservation efforts in Madagascar. I find solace in this and in Haraway’s ideas about survival as publisher of Mum’s diaries after her death

Researching women's movements: an introduction to FEMCIT and sisterhood and after

This article offers an overview of two research projects that are concerned with investigating the histories, social organisation and impacts of women's movements. It introduces FEMCIT (Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: the impact of contemporary women's movements), a transdisciplinary, cross-national European research project, and Sisterhood and After, a UK-based oral history project, outlining their specific research questions, foci and research designs. The article raises a number of key issues that arise in researching women's movements that are then taken up in the eight paired papers that follow: method and research design; difference and diversity; place, space and nation; and understanding impact

Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?

Exploring what is at stake in the common lament that letter writing is dead, we cautiously celebrate a new age of ‘e-epistolarity’. In doing so, we build on our collaborative article of 2006, ‘Letters as/Not a Genre’, to consider the ongoing pacts, politics and arts in written relationship and the mixed methods that academics might adopt in analysing the growing archives of digital and digitised communication. As with our earlier piece, the essay is written as a dialogue, enacting our view that epistolarity enables the performance of self, though one that depends quite obviously on another

Curating women’s business: a feminist publishing perspective

This article takes the form of an interview with Polly Russell, the Lead Curator for Contemporary Politics and Public Life in the Manuscripts and Archives department at the British Library 2015-20, who is also British Library partner to The Business of Women’s Words project, led by interviewer Margaretta Jolly. Russell discusses if and how archival practices capture radical business histories and how they could be developed to further connect and communicate them. This includes debates over enhancing collection records, privacy, law and reputation management, and links with professional and social movement networks. She points to the creative use of archival materials from Virago, Spare Rib and other feminist publishing businesses in a digital map, radio programmes, schools and professional training workshops, and a major public exhibition at The British Library. We conclude by considering the future of the radical business archive in an age of digital technology

Once a feminist: Lynne Segal on Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen text could be a theory, a novel, an artwork, a performance, a poem: one that had stimulated, or even revolutionised, their ideas. As we hoped, this project has created a selection of texts central to our many and different experiences as feminists. I used to say that Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year was the story of my life, in my early twenties, as if I was just a creature of time and circumstance. I read The Garrick Year sometime between October 1965, when my first child was born, and the end of 1967, before my marriage disintegrated. Like the heroine Emma Evans, I married a successful actor, had a child, and followed his career—which in the novel led Emma to Hereford for a summer season of plays