00:01:11.720We spent that day exploring magazines like Shocking Pink, Spare Rib, Scarlet Women, Shrew, Women's Report, Outright.
00:01:20.120All of those magazines that were written by women and for women.0.60
00:01:24.340And this is confession time for me. I actually remember reading Spare Rib back in the day and returning to the magazines really took me back to the sixth form common room and the debates we were having about the militant tendency in the Labour Party and also the stomach churning feeling of being 16 again.
00:01:43.040Well, I don't have those same memories, but when we went to the Feminist Archive North,
00:01:48.920we had our hands on these amazing magazines and we felt like we found this treasure trove of
00:01:54.280material that needed to be explored in much more depth. The women in these magazines weren't the1.00
00:01:59.720angry, humorless, hungry-wearing stereotypes that we're all familiar with. They were motivated1.00
00:02:05.120instead by a range of feelings, including anger, but also feelings of loneliness, of hope, of joy,
00:03:05.160It's an AHRC-funded project based at Northumbria University
00:03:09.360and partnered with the Women's Library LSE.
00:03:12.880And it was at this point that Eleanor came on board.
00:03:16.580What I loved about Victoria and Mel's project
00:03:18.920was the way it retells the story of the women's liberation movement
00:03:22.680through the lens of feminist magazines
00:03:24.480and how those magazines shift or change our understanding of that history.
00:03:29.480And these magazines do complicate the stories we tell about the time.
00:03:33.860Certainly they illustrate that there were many forms of activism and many kinds of activists.
00:03:38.640Yeah, they're really good at doing that work of recording the on-the-ground grassroots activism taking place across the UK.
00:03:47.860It's a kind of micro-history of the women's movement that sheds light on all kinds of issues and campaigns that have essentially been forgotten about.
00:03:56.600We see the debates that are taking place behind the scenes, the non-events, the hidden labour that goes into organising meetings, rallies and protests.
00:04:08.360And reading through the periodical lens disrupts the idea of feminist progress.
00:04:13.580The story of feminism is the story of unfinished business, to borrow from the words of the British Library's recent exhibition.0.74
00:04:21.200As we know, many of these fights are still going on.
00:04:24.320All the work being done by feminists now, such as the fight for reproductive justice, Me Too, the actions of groups like Sisters Uncut and campaigns against violence against women and girls, you can see all these issues in women's movement magazines from the 1970s and 80s.
00:04:42.160So in this series, we are tracing these lines of resistance from the late 1960s all the way
00:04:49.200into the present. We are asking magazine makers about the feelings behind the headline campaigns.
00:04:56.820How do magazines stimulate hope, joy, anger, and other emotions? How do they mobilise women
00:05:03.960as activists? How do they create activist communities and activist identities? And in0.99
00:05:11.460the answers, we hope to tell a new story of the movement, detailing how these magazines
00:05:17.480actively shaped feminist debate and feminist feeling.
00:05:25.960Right, so to kick off this series, we're starting off with a conversation on two very
00:05:31.700influential periodicals from the 70s and 80s. One is Spare Rib, which remains the best known
00:05:38.080and longest-running magazine of the women's liberation movement.
00:05:42.040In a sign of just how influential it was,
00:05:44.220you'll hear it mentioned in almost every episode of this podcast.
00:05:48.180So, of course, we felt like it was a great magazine to begin with.
00:05:52.540And the second is Outright, an anti-racist, anti-imperialist
00:05:55.960and internationalist newspaper dedicated to providing news by women for women.
00:06:02.080And the topic on the table, internationalist feminism.
00:06:06.000So, Eleanor, you're taking the lead with this interview.
00:06:09.240Why begin with internationalist feminism, and what is it exactly?
00:06:14.160It's kind of a complicated answer, but a bit of context might help, so bear with me for a moment.
00:06:22.580In 1929, writing in the Women Run Time and Tide magazine,
00:06:50.600the launch of the International Black Book Fair
00:06:53.360and the International Feminist Book Fair.0.86
00:06:56.600So this international turn was driven by a sense of anger at the whiteness0.82
00:07:01.380and sometime narrowness of the mainstream women's movement.
00:07:04.940But it was also driven by initiatives such as the Greater London Council's
00:07:09.460funding of hundreds of feminist projects in the early 1980s,
00:07:13.840including the publications we're talking about today, Outright and Spare Rib.
00:07:18.680We wanted to focus on internationalist feminism in our first episode
00:07:22.920as a way, as Victoria has said, of exploring how looking at feminist magazines
00:07:27.980can shift our understanding of the women's liberation movement.
00:07:31.860The internationalism of this movement tends to be overlooked and underplayed.
00:07:37.540So we're going to hear from the wonderful Sue O'Sullivan,
00:07:41.240a member of Spare Rib from 1979 to 85,
00:07:45.040and before that a member of the Red Rag Collective, a Marxist feminist magazine,
00:07:48.980And from the brilliant Shaila Shah, a founder member of Outright, international feminist newspaper, which ran from 1982 to 1988.0.51
00:07:58.960Before that, Shaila worked for two years on WIRES, the internal newsletter of the women's liberation movement.
00:08:05.160We're bringing these icons together to talk about all things feminist internationalist, plenty of mixed feelings, divisive breakfasts and burning the midnight oil.
00:08:18.980So my first question for the both of you is,
00:08:27.760do you think it's fair to say that up until the 1980s,
00:08:33.600the women's movement tended to look inwards rather than outwards?
00:08:45.780We thought the women's movement in the UK was concerned mostly with UK issues.
00:08:51.860It had also kind of sectionalized into particular, for want of a better word, tendencies, the socialist feminist, the radical feminist, the revolutionary feminist.
00:09:02.260And there were lots of single issue campaigns for nursery provision, abortion rights, violence against women and so on.
00:09:11.300But actually, very little concern for what was going on for women elsewhere.
00:09:17.800And we thought there should be more concern given Britain's role in many, many parts of the world.
00:09:26.280Yes, I tried to have a quick scan through the thousands of articles from the 70s and 80s, which I didn't succeed at very well, the old spare rib issues.
00:09:37.820And I was a bit shocked by how lacking in international issues the 70s were.
00:09:47.040I had imagined that they were perhaps scarce, but I didn't imagine that I wouldn't find many.
00:09:55.580Although it was interesting to me because in the earlier years of Spare Rib, the internationalism was expressed through the struggles that women were having here.
00:10:09.860So ones, as I said, around abortion and so on, extended to different countries but didn't take in in the same way what was happening in different countries, if that makes sense.
00:14:20.980OK, there's a very strong photograph here
00:14:23.800and that would have been kind of collectively chosen.
00:14:28.080We had set up an editorial collective.
00:14:30.140Everything had to pass through that collective.
00:14:31.920There was no editor. So probably 10, 12, 15 of us would have together thought this was the best
00:14:40.160we could offer at the time. Very few of us had worked on magazines previous to this.
00:14:46.360So for most of us, this would have been our first attempt. And we must have thought, OK,
00:14:53.040a photograph, a cartoon, a bit about what the media doesn't reflect on, thereby what we were
00:15:00.480going to reflect on but not making that explicit enough. There's a lot going on there. Sue I was
00:15:06.800wondering what your reaction to this front cover is and or if I don't know if you would have
00:15:11.140encountered it at the time and perhaps how it would compare with a spare rib cover of course
00:15:16.060they're quite different looking publications. I mean I was very aware of outright I think we all
00:15:21.740were at Spare Rib definitely saw the first issue. I think the difference was, and what I was
00:15:30.800quite wedded to, was that Spare Rib had this fantasy of being all things to all women and
00:15:43.000to representing both daily life, small affairs of women in this country, and larger, much larger
00:15:51.740larger concerns of the world and internationalism.
00:15:57.180And so I see this very much setting out what outright wanted to do.
00:16:04.260But I would have thought too much print on the front cover.
00:16:09.640And I would have thought, oh, where are all the other things about women's concerns,
00:16:15.560the daily life things, which you weren't in the same way concerned about.
00:16:21.240that wasn't your aim so we were very different that leads me into my next question actually
00:16:27.380which is that outright was a newspaper spare was a magazine and is this an important difference and
00:16:33.000did the newspaper format which is as you say sue more text heavy more information based
00:16:37.300did that allow for a more international focus there's something appealing about a newspaper
00:16:43.900format because it's very approachable and you feel like you can read it because it's not going
00:16:53.740to overwhelm you. But I don't remember feeling that much. They were both feminist. That's what
00:17:02.000concerned and appealed to me. What did you feel? Well, for us, it was quite deliberate
00:17:07.700that we have a newspaper format. This would be very different from all the regional newsletters,
00:17:13.640feminist newsletters that were floating around, the single issue newsletters, you know, the cat
00:17:19.560calls, red rags, etc. And of course, Spare Rib, which was a monthly magazine and a well put
00:17:25.180together monthly magazine. And I worked for two years on The Wire's internal kind of women's
00:17:32.160liberation news and exchange service. That was an internal newsletter. We wanted something that
00:17:37.880was going to be more out there, a bit more popular. We had big ambitions for how we were
00:17:43.580going to distribute this paper, not all of which were realised. But still, of course, it wasn't an
00:17:50.580internal news exchange. It was very much with an external focus. And we thought the newspaper
00:17:56.840format was more conducive to that. Right. Whereas we were much more based, if I understand it
00:18:04.900We were much more based in the very original idea on taking a traditional women's magazine format and subverting and stretching and breaking that but keeping that traditional women's thing.
00:18:21.900But for the same reasons, to appeal to a wider audience and to push out with the messages and stories and experiences of women's liberation.
00:18:38.720And ours was taking inspiration from the left agitational newspapers and thinking, we need one of those.
00:18:45.400And that's why having it in a newspaper format.
00:18:47.640Brilliant. So yeah, I think that's a really interesting connection between the two that you're both occupying different media formats, but with a similar purpose to reach all women, or more women, as many as possible.
00:19:01.420Sue, I had something I wanted to ask you about.
00:19:04.020So in 1981, the Sparrow Collective looked back on almost 10 years of producing this astonishing magazine,
00:19:11.880because it was, you know, the longest running feminist magazine in Britain.
00:19:15.620And the collective reflected, and I'm just going to quote here,
00:19:19.400they reflected that they often found themselves variously accused of being too lefty or not lefty enough,
00:19:25.720too man-hating or not man-hating enough
00:19:28.880or too parochial or too international.
00:19:32.940I was wondering if you could say any more
00:19:35.600about how the magazine navigated this tension
00:19:38.720between the local and the international.
00:19:40.980And when earlier you mentioned the way that Sparrow
00:19:43.220perhaps tried to be all things to all women,
00:21:28.780It sort of makes me hyperventilate with a bit of anxiety
00:21:34.460because it was a very anxiety-producing time,
00:21:37.300but we were trying to meet criticisms around the fact that the collective had been all white
00:21:44.420and didn't represent in any way women from different parts of the world.
00:21:50.840Well, one of those different parts of the world that had been represented more was Ireland,
00:21:56.080but we didn't have an Irish woman on the collective.
00:22:00.580So we hired Roisin Boyd from Ireland to come and join the collective.
00:22:06.800Roshin was an absolutely lovely and fantastic person.
00:22:11.320But boy, did we put a lot of weight on her, which I think was unfortunate that we weren't.
00:22:18.520I've been in other situations where this has happened, where somebody is supposed to come in and represent something, but the support mechanisms for that person aren't there.
00:22:31.180But Roisin came in and became, which she has told me many times since then, she felt quite resentful because she was expected to carry the Irish story authentically in the spare rib.
00:22:48.300And speaking of collective members, I'm sure I was wondering if you could say any more about the members of Outright's collective in the early days.1.00
00:22:54.940Completely different from that of Sperib because it was majority black and third world. And that was one of the guiding principles that it would always be majority black and third world in the collective. And it was all this in inverted commas, of course, black third world women. I'm using that term because that is the term we used at the time. And that was what was current at the time.1.00
00:23:17.580Yes, and it was in 1982, wasn't it, that Swarib received Greater London Council funding for the first time
00:23:23.880and that enabled Swarib to hire two black women, I'm using black in the same sense that Shiloh was then,
00:23:29.280onto the collective for the first time, known as Fazanay and Mani, two Iranian women who were known by pseudonyms.0.70
00:23:36.380And of course there were other women who came from other backgrounds.
00:23:40.480Arati was from the Indian subcontinent, and there were black women who were born and raised in this country who came in.
00:23:49.640Again, this is a kind of simplistic way of putting it, but we were inviting women to join this Bare Rib Collective.
00:23:59.720But it was as if we were saying to those women, come and join us at the table.
00:24:05.960we hadn't thought fuck all about changing what was on the table or you know getting rid of some
00:24:14.000of the people who were at the places at the table I mean I subsequently worked on Sheba Feminist
00:24:21.020Press which is a book publisher and their position by the time I was part of the collective was as
00:24:27.940Shaila describes. It was committed to being a majority of black women, as we used the word in
00:24:36.740the 80s and 90s. Yeah, it was a time of real reconfiguration and change, that moment in the1.00
00:24:41.98080s. It was a wonderful moment in many ways, wasn't it? Yeah. So, Shaila, I'm wondering why
00:24:49.600you decided to have a majority of black and third world women on the collective and why that was a0.88
00:24:53.760founding principal of the newspaper? Given the aims of Outright, that we wanted to bring in0.99
00:24:59.780international news to what would mostly be a UK readership, but not entirely, because we distributed
00:25:06.100Outright in as many international spaces as we could. So when we first started, just to give you
00:25:13.960an example, we wrote to all the women's groups functioning in different parts of the world
00:25:21.040that we found in ISIS. Now, ISIS was an internationalist magazine, which was being
00:25:29.740produced either in Switzerland or Italy at the time. That's how we first established contact.
00:25:35.500We also had lots of personal contacts. Others had contacts because of their particular work
00:25:41.680that they were involved in in the UK. And then we started exchanging magazines with many of
00:25:48.540these countries where they did produce newsletters or they used to send us their press releases.
00:25:53.620It was utter joy when we even got photographs. So we must have had a photograph. I can't remember
00:25:58.980who would have sent us this photograph that we published in the first edition,
00:26:03.280but somebody must have actually sent it to us. So that's how we managed to get the kind of news
00:26:10.520that we did. You had lots of local sources on the ground. And that's really fascinating to learn
00:26:15.440about that international network and I guess the same question I could perhaps ask Sue because I
00:26:21.300guess you touched on this earlier this question of how do you find local sources who can report
00:26:27.580on events happening in different parts of the world and it sounds like perhaps that's something
00:26:31.640Sperib struggled with a little bit more. I mean I was thinking about what we did cover in news
00:26:38.600because, of course, Sparib always had its news section.
00:27:02.220obscene and brutal searches and physical examinations and stuff.
00:27:08.480Those were covered quite well, and there wasn't a problem because it was a news story in a sense.
00:27:17.260And if we wanted someone to write about it who was experiencing it, it would have been a problem.
00:27:23.060But, yeah, I mean, we had one occasion where someone who was deeply involved in Latin American politics spoke Spanish beautifully and had spent a lot of time in this particular country, wanted to write an article.
00:27:41.780And there was a huge argument about whether she could do that.
00:27:46.900And her position, which Roshin reflects on in her article, too, her position, which I had a lot of sympathy for, was these women are involved in a liberation struggle.0.56
00:27:59.480They are putting themselves on the line every day.
00:28:04.220They need and want international solidarity.
00:28:11.620And she was not an egotistical woman, so it didn't come across in that way at all.
00:28:16.060They've asked me to please write an article about what's happening and so on.
00:28:21.660But the other side of the argument was that for something so important, something so fundamental,
00:28:29.320it had to be someone from that country in that struggle.
00:28:34.900So I think it was much more hit and miss for us.
00:28:39.460Suze brought up the issue about languages.
00:28:41.920And of course, this was very important because between us, we did speak very many languages, which was a great help.
00:28:48.720So there was an Arabic speaker, Farsi speakers, and so on.
00:28:53.380So that was a big advantage that we had.
00:28:57.040This did also mean that coverage in certain areas, depending on who the collective members were at the time, was kind of greater and better than maybe coverage of other areas.
00:29:08.860So the articles we had from various Latin American countries was kind of quite comprehensive.
00:29:17.520And this is because our Chilean collective member, Teresa, kind of plugged into very many of these networks.
00:29:28.800You know, if I look at any edition of Outright, I think the majority of articles would be on international issues because that was the aim.
00:29:36.820And, you know, there we did succeed in kind of keeping to one of our founding principles.
00:29:44.100Yeah, it's an incredibly strong focus throughout Outright, as you say.
00:29:47.860This sort of makes me think of the ecologies of feminist magazines that existed at this time.
00:29:53.260And it's astonishingly rich, both in the UK, but obviously outside the UK as well.
00:29:58.020And I know that, Charlotte, you already mentioned that you worked for WIRES, the national women's information newsletters, before you came to Outright.
00:30:06.040And Sue, in a moment, I want to ask you about Red Rag as well.
00:30:09.700But I wonder, Shaila, if you could say any more about working for WIRES before you came to Outright and how that sort of led you in a way to Outright.
00:30:18.340Well, working on WIRES meant you were in a way at the centre of, you know, some of the arguments and conflicts, etc., that were going on within the women's movement.
00:30:29.440But you were also at the centre of receiving news about all the positive achievements,
00:30:34.280because Wires was a kind of clearinghouse.
00:30:36.380There was no editorial policy, except that we had to print everything that came in and was submitted,
00:31:34.260But, of course, there I learned a bit about, you know, just gathering things together, putting them together on the page, although that was, as I said, A4.
00:31:44.020So, yeah, it was a very interesting time.
00:31:47.680It also helped me make a lot of contacts nationally through wires.
00:31:52.680Yeah, brilliant. And so you can really see all these forces coming together and producing this fertile ground for the production of an international publication like Outright. And I'm wondering, Sue, firstly, what you might remember of Sperib's relationship to publications like Wires? Because, of course, Sperib was, again, very different, very visual, very much meant to appeal to the reader in WH Smith's. And Wires, as you say, Shiloh was very internal, very informative, text heavy. It was really for the already initiated.
00:32:19.680We read them all. We had them all. We got them in the office and wires. It was, at some points, almost 100% tirades and accusations and, you know, all sorts of things. So, of course, everyone ripped open. It was, they were, came, wound up and with some tape or something.
00:32:52.620Many of us were absolutely riveted by everything that was going on in the women's liberation movement.
00:33:01.320And then, yes, prior to working on Spare Ribs, you worked on Red Rag, a Marxist feminist magazine.
00:33:08.380And can you speak a bit about your memories of working on Red Rag and how different that was to Spare Rib?
00:33:14.180Well, I was thrilled to be part of the Red Rag Collective.
00:33:21.380I had had my first experience in writing for these same newsletters we're talking about,
00:33:28.840so I knew that I would be very pleased to be putting together something for publication.
00:33:37.000But at the same time that Red Rag was publishing, in the 70s, what Shaila has referred to earlier, the kind of the development of different splits and strains and tensions was also developing, and questions of internationalism were coming up as well.
00:34:00.080So what would we cover on red rag? And that I found very stifling in the end, I think. I've looked at the letter of resignation that I wrote, and I'm semi-embarrassed by it.
00:34:16.960But, I mean, what the hell, it was of its time.
00:34:21.760And it felt as if some of the more party, CP, Communist Party aligned members on the collective who were very important, very important.
00:34:35.560They started it and they were excellent women in terms of what they could bring and write about and so on.
00:34:41.340But they felt that really we should be, as a magazine, concentrating on women's issues completely.
00:34:50.440Whereas some of us who were non-aligned, we wanted, I think, probably more than your position, which was that a feminist should be concerned with all the issues.
00:35:04.540So you were at Red Rag for a few years.0.99
00:35:06.620And then it got to the point where you felt that, yes, that there was this something of a split in the collective between the women who were part of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the feminists who were not necessarily part of the party and what that meant for the sort of issues you could cover.
00:35:22.140And that led to writing quite a long resignation letter, which was published in Red Rag, issue 11.
00:35:32.160Yeah, it's a fascinating letter to read, and it really brings out that tension that you describe with the Communist Party women, who in some ways, surprisingly, were more inward-looking than you wanted to be.0.73
00:35:43.640Yes, yeah, and trying to take on some amount of self-criticism. Maybe not the best ones, but, you know, trying to. The CP women, as I said, were very important because they were the originators of red rag.0.81
00:36:02.160And although it was not a Communist Party official magazine in any way whatsoever, they were independent.0.98
00:36:10.280For instance, they used to caucus at our National Women's Liberation Conferences, but they never called it that.
00:36:19.400They just all happened to have breakfast together with no one else from the collective.
00:36:25.600And, you know, that kind of thing, I think people who were members of the CP didn't get why that rubbed some of us up the wrong way.
00:36:38.480Because then when we would say that, they'd say, well, we're not caucusing, we're not caucusing.
00:36:42.880They'd say, yeah, but you're meeting for breakfast every morning of the conference.
00:37:12.040And speaking of difficult feelings, I wanted to ask you, Shaila, about the feeling of anger, which seems to be a very prominent emotion in Outright.
00:37:20.720I just wanted to quickly read from the first issue where the collective wrote that in capital letters, we need to have our own media.
00:37:29.460We need to let out some of our anger at the ways in which the media in this country is an insult to us.
00:37:36.240Do you remember a feeling of anger propelling the first issue?
00:37:40.280Maybe not propelling the first issue as such, but a general feeling of anger being marginalised.
00:37:46.900We were the others. We were the othered, which is why we had come together in the way we had.
00:37:54.320So there would have been anger about that, about being made to feel invisible,
00:37:59.820marginalized, issues of racism, colonialism, imperialism not being taken as seriously as
00:38:07.400we would want to. I mean, today there's a maybe not such a new word for it, but not a word we
00:38:12.580to use at the time, intersectionality.
00:38:15.760But that is what outright did without calling it that,
00:38:20.280because of who we were, where we'd come from,
00:39:07.740um did they get lost probably not in our first year of production there were no paid workers
00:39:18.780so we were all kind of doing everything till we realized you know that someone was better at kind
00:39:28.000of doing some of the bookkeeping and someone was better doing something else or keeping the
00:39:32.820subscription lists growing and so on and so forth. Once we had paid workers, they took care of a lot
00:39:40.660of the admin in the office, you know, distribution lists, subscriber lists, correspondence, magazine
00:39:48.120exchanges, etc, etc. And then the rest of the collective was kind of the editorial collective.
00:39:56.420Now, there was a bit of a division, but actually, it made things a bit more comfortable,
00:40:01.660Because when we met as an editorial collective, we could actually talk about what we wanted to put into the paper, what we received, the quality of it, if any of us were going to be writing articles, and many of us did.
00:40:19.140Before that, there would have been a kind of jumble of roles and responsibilities.
00:40:23.660And then when we used to come together overnight, a weekend, it would be a kind of Saturday all day and Saturday night when whoever could stay up all night and didn't have childcare responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera, we would all be in the office.
00:40:41.120That is when we would lay out the paper, the 16 pages that we had.
00:40:47.160and then at the end of it the following morning we would take it to our printers and these were
00:40:52.560printers that printed private eye and also printed socialist workers east end offset and then we would
00:41:00.140go to pelicis in bethel green road for breakfast and that was that was great fun somebody would
00:41:06.380make a huge bean salad sometimes there might be a bottle of lambrusco if i remember right
00:41:11.640on the go. And of course, lots of coffee. And we finished at five or six in the morning. And that
00:41:18.020was a huge, lovely collective effort to all be there pulling an all nighter, but not at a,
00:41:25.520you know, not at a club, but actually putting out right together, exhilarating.
00:41:30.400Just amazing. What are your memories of Spareable Nighters?
00:41:33.660Oh, I mean, it was fantastic. I had two little kids. And until halfway through my time on Spare Rib, I was also living with the father of those children, a husband, as a matter of fact.
00:41:50.800And then all this stuff while I was at Spare Rib, we split up, and so I was undergoing all kinds of adolescent things.
00:42:01.960So staying up all night for an all-nighter was having a new adolescence or a young thing.
00:42:09.460Because there's something incredibly satisfying about laying out and making it.
00:42:19.140And we made it with cow gum and with blue pencils and with the sheets.
00:42:26.460And it was something so satisfactory about seeing the shape of it.
00:42:32.660And in Spare Ribs' case, most of the time it was a race to make the train that you had to get to put the boards on the train to the printer.
00:42:43.660It's amazing how physical this work was, especially to hear about it now in the digital age.
00:42:47.940But laying out, you're talking about having, you know, big boards, aren't you, where you'd paste the text and the images and you'd be able to move them around if you wanted.
00:42:55.620And you had to have razors, you know, scalpels.
00:42:59.500So if you had an article and for some hideous reason, which happened all the time, there was a sentence over or a hanging word at the end, you had to get your scalpels out and manipulate the lines and squeeze things in.
00:43:15.580That's right. We did exactly the same thing.
00:43:19.840I mean, people working today on even print magazines, they would have no idea about the skills and the time and effort and the expense it took to actually manufacture these.
00:43:34.180Because this is what we were doing. We were creating tangible objects, weren't we?
00:43:38.940Which were then being reproduced at the printers.
00:43:41.280But also people did say, I can't remember what wiser person than me said to me, look, we aim to be as good as we can, but if we make a mistake, we can correct it next issue.
00:43:54.400And that was sort of something that I thought, yes, I mean, we are trying to be right and to be as good as we can.
00:44:04.700But a mistake in those circumstances, if necessary, can be corrected.
00:44:19.080The visual design changes, of course, over the issues.
00:44:21.900And people learn how to do things in different ways.
00:44:24.120I mean, Sparib went through several different redesigns, I know.
00:44:26.920And I think if you look at the different International Women's Day covers from outright over the years,
00:44:31.020you can really see, like, the increasing visuality of the magazine.
00:44:33.820Yeah. But I should add in here very quickly that what I've been talking about from the late 70s when I joined and up, let's say, to 85, 86, changes hugely when the last permutations of the Spare Rib Collective came in.
00:44:57.040It was internationalist, but it was also kind of seems to distance itself from a lot of other aspects of the magazine. And it certainly wasn't trying to be all things to all women, I would say.
00:45:12.440Yeah, it really undergoes really quite radical changes at this time. And I mean, I was going to ask both of you, what do you think happened to that promise of a more international feminism by the late 1980s, by which time Outright had come to an end and Sparab was shortly to also cease publication in the early 90s?
00:45:34.840It's kind of a bit of a difficult question for me to answer.
00:45:39.260Once the outright came to an end, it partly came to an end because many of us were quite tired.
00:45:44.880We'd lost our funding. We couldn't go back to just sustaining it on a voluntary basis.
00:45:51.340Some of us needed to earn money. We needed to get jobs, etc., etc.
00:45:59.340But I think on the international front, lots of international forums have since been set up, there have been conferences, and of course today the world is a different place because so much of it is happening online.
00:46:12.360And I'm sure there's an exchange possible if you want to look for it.
00:46:28.760Yeah, thanks to the internet. They absolutely couldn't do that then. So, yes, I think the possibilities are much greater. But today, for me, from what I see, the women's movement is fractured.
00:46:46.000although I do see that there are some young feminists
00:46:49.440taking an interest in periodicals like Spare Rib and Outright1.00
00:46:54.520and, of course, the project that you're involved in,
00:46:58.200which did surprise me that there was this interest
00:47:01.300in what had gone before rather than what is coming next
00:47:05.940or what people are involved in here and now.
00:47:11.880Well, I mean, I have maintained for a long time that Bear Rib was not just a reflection of the women's liberation movement, nor was it an instigator of the women's liberation movement.
00:47:29.840It was somewhere between and somewhere, you know, the energy flowed back and forth.
00:47:36.100And that the movement as a social movement was not just fractured, but I would say dying out.
00:47:48.400And that doesn't mean that there aren't projects, there isn't interest, there aren't exciting things happening, but we're in a different historical time.
00:47:58.740And that kind of excitement that carried us along and the social conditions that meant that women on outright and women on spare rib, many of them, could claim benefits, live in squats, and get by, not forever, but, you know, for that time.
00:48:24.760that isn't true anymore so i think the conditions have really changed i agree about online but i
00:48:34.020also think that the loss of a sense of collective energy is something that we really used i mean we
00:48:45.160use collective energy to keep going and to keep our our ability to keep slogging away at things
00:48:53.660up. And I just don't think that happens now. And we live in a world dominated by fucking
00:49:00.060global capitalism. I mean, it's just one. It's the one. And I mean, a lot of women I know feel0.99
00:49:10.620they have to struggle to keep some of the social services that the state provided in the 80s going.
00:49:17.720you know things are in a pretty dire state so i think the fact that there are these groups and
00:49:25.800younger women interested is fabulous yeah i'm trying to learn history's lessons from the past
00:49:31.520i suppose but i'm also just to sort of i guess maybe a closing question i'm really interested
00:49:36.440in the role that the magazine or the newspaper play in this activist landscape and especially
00:49:41.040what you were talking about, Sue, the way that perhaps individual energy can become a more
00:49:48.360collective energy, perhaps in part through objects like the newspaper or the magazine.
00:49:53.420And I'm thinking here as well of Shaila, what you were saying about that extraordinary
00:49:56.420experience, collective experience of staying up all night, putting the magazine together
00:50:01.020and, you know, sort of looking back and seeing how the movement did have this shift in the
00:50:05.880I'm wondering how significant you think the role of the feminist magazine or newspaper was to the increased internationalism of the women's movement at that time.
00:50:16.960One way I'd like to answer that would be to think about the effect that Outright had, not just on readers in this country, but on readers in other countries.
00:50:26.760because that is partly what we were seeking to achieve was this news exchange, you know,
00:50:34.040for Outright to be like a kind of clearinghouse.
00:50:37.760And if I may, I'd like to read out some letters that we had from people at the time that we were closing.
00:53:09.180And fear not, we will be revisiting the lesbian sex wars in a later episode.
00:53:18.280That's such a great conversation, Eleanor.
00:53:21.620I love that we end with that throwaway reference to the lesbian sex wars.
00:53:27.760It's lovely to hear them laughing as well, because through that conversation,
00:53:31.920there were some really quite intense moments, you know,
00:53:34.820when clearly Sue was reflecting back on her time at Spare Rib
00:53:38.920and how difficult some of those conversations were.
00:53:41.420But she was so insightful, wasn't she?
00:53:43.520I mean, she really gave us a sense of how hard they were trying to work
00:53:47.820at changing the magazine but she also gave us a great insight into I suppose a sense in which
00:53:54.340she felt that they weren't really addressing the key issues and she's recognising there I think a
00:54:01.720sense of perhaps feminists at the time kind of inviting other women into the movement but
00:54:09.520actually there was maybe something structurally problematic about the movement itself. Yeah there
00:54:15.780was a great moment wasn't it talks about bringing people to the table but not changing what's
00:54:19.540actually on the table that's right yes yes still stuck with the table yeah yeah how how wonderful
00:54:26.500to have those two titans in the same room together with their wealth of experience and and actually
00:54:33.660that shared sense of solidarity which you know is still felt very sort of real and concrete today
00:54:39.900you know what i really liked you know right at the end where after shiloh was reading the letters
00:54:46.500from disappointed readers readers who were disappointed with outright folding and sue
00:54:53.560lets out a little yay and that is the optimism of the feminist isn't it yes the magazine
00:55:00.140has folded but the movement goes on yeah and actually speaking of those letters um one of
00:55:05.660The letters mentioned that the ravages of Thatcherism in the 1980s, which refers to the dramatic social and economic changes under Margaret Thatcher's premiership in Britain at that time,
00:55:17.460which included the advocacy of free market economics, the rise of the city, a culture of entrepreneurialism, very deep cuts to public bodies,
00:55:25.520including the Greater London Council, which funded outright and also provided funding to Spare Rib in the early 80s,
00:55:32.520which enabled Sperib, in fact, to hire its first black collective members.
00:55:37.080So that question of funding and the loss of funding that occurred under Thatcher's government
00:55:43.480is really critical to these magazines and whether or not they survived.
00:55:50.960So that brings our first episode to its close.
00:55:54.540There are many other things that were mentioned in this episode,
00:55:57.460from the lesbian sex wars to questions of funding feminist magazines,
00:56:02.080which are going to come up again and again