Learning on ScreenSisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project
However, the very richness that makes the collection so valuable to researchers, can, for less specialist audiences, be an impediment. Not everyone is able to visit the British Library to access material and, even if they were, the volume of material available in any one of these recordings, even with transcripts and summaries as guides, requires significant navigation. For this reason, written into the funding application for the SAA project was provision to create a website and ten short films to be hosted on the British Library’s Learning platform.[2] Working closely with colleagues in the Learning Team, the website was designed for secondary school and undergraduate students, feminist activists and lifelong learners. Though the basic template for the website, involving a homepage and thematic sub-pages, was determined by the library’s pre-existing website infrastructure, decisions about what to present of the complex and contested history of the WLM involved much discussion. Just as choosing 60 people to interview from the thousands of women who were central to the movement was a challenge, creating the website took almost a year’s collective work. Ultimately we were guided by the content of the recordings and the website took shape under ten headings with each of these sub-divided into two or three more. A section on ‘Politics and Legislation’ contains sub-sections on ‘The Political Representation of Women’, ‘Feminist Critique of Political Culture’ and ‘The Impact of Legislation on Women’s Lives’ for example. Or a section focused on ‘Education’ has sub-sections covering ‘How Girls were Taught and Socialised’, ‘Sex Education’ and ‘Women’s Studies and Women’s History.’
‘If this lady was a car’ photograph © Jill Posener (courtesy of the British Library)
Each of these thematic areas is populated with contextual information, images, cartoons and photographs as well as questions to instigate discussion, but what brings the website to life are its 125 sound extracts, selected from the oral history recordings, and the ten bespoke films which we commissioned from feminist filmmaker Lizzie Thynne. [3] These sound extracts and films represent the diversity of experience and views of the WLM activists. Site visitors can hear, for instance, Pragna Patel, co-founder of Southall Black Sisters, describe a ‘reverse march of shame’ to the house of a domestic abuser. They can listen to Una Kroll, 86 year old campaigner for women’s right to be priests, describe her struggles with the church. Or they can discover Rebecca Johnson, life time peace activist, recounting the strategies of Greenham Common women. Johnson’s story was one that Thynne selected for filming, for its obvious visual as well as oral drama. Return to Sender follows Johnson to the monthly women’s peace camp at Aldermaston where nuclear weapons are still being made, and to the now tranquil common where feminists had previously helped to secure the successful return of cruise missiles to the US twenty years ago. This film also draws on the plentiful footage available of the Greenham protest – something that we discovered to be painfully absent for much of the rest of the Women’s Liberation movement. One of our most interesting discussions was about Thynne’s much more intimate filming of National Abortion Campaign coordinator Jan McKenley at home. The feelings behind the slogans shows McKenley reflecting on her personal experience of abortion and the importance of being able to grieve while upholding a woman’s right to choose. McKenley remembers too the importance of a women’s health group in allowing her to cherish her own body. We decided to present the film in four linked parts across the website’s sections on ‘Activism’ and on ‘Bodies, Minds and Spirits’, framed with questions that ask viewers not only to think about the complications of liberation and reproductive rights, but whether they themselves might be able to ‘imagine feeling differently, as you grow older, about some of the life choices you took (if you were lucky enough to have choices)?’
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[1] For more information, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhlwr/research/sisterhoodafter and http://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/impact/cultureandsociety/bwlm
[2] The website can be accessed at bl.uk/sisterhood
[3] http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/conversations/archive2013/thynne/
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