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Beyond feminist loneliness: A researcher explores publishing in the UK Women’s Liberation Movement

Feminism is sustained by collective organising, but women have often been driven to campaign by a sense of loneliness. This is my surprising finding while working with the research project The Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing (BOWW), based at the University of Sussex and partnered with the British Library and University of Cambridge. As a Research Fellow I have been part of a team, led by Margaretta Jolly, exploring feminist publishing in the UK Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1970s and 80s. We have been uncovering a hidden history of feminist enterprise in the many magazines, journals, imprints, bookshops and other small creative businesses which the movement enabled – and which also enabled the movement, despite its general antipathy to capitalism. This includes the publisher Virago, Wasafiri Magazine of International Contemporary Writing (both still going today) and Spare Rib magazine (1972-1993), the leading publication of the WLM. 

What has emerged for me, however, is the very personal way in which publishing also supported counter-publics in which feminists discovered each other and created alternative cultural networks. This is evident in Spare Rib, which strove to reach and connect women who would otherwise ‘remain isolated and unhappy’. The listings pages of Spare Rib, where consciousness-raising groups, events, jobs and lonely hearts were advertised, were an especially important forum for feminists to meet and connect with other like-minded women. 

Analysing these listings closely, along with correspondence sent to the busy letters pages of the magazine, has been one of the pleasures of the fellowship for me. While seemingly ephemeral in contrast to, for example, feminist poetry, which I’ve published on as a former student of English at Sussex, these listings and letters have many stories to tell. The first digital map of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, which I helped to create, tells hundreds of these micro stories. It dramatically reveals the reach of a movement famed for its decentralised activism, and shows how the women’s movement was a site of exchange in which economic trade – of feminist jewellery, healthcare or manual labour as much as books or music – was as crucial as the trade in ideas and feelings and care. 

The map also makes very clear the close relationship between lesbian and feminist identities and desires during this period, something I reflected on in a British Library podcast on lesbian leisure and lonely hearts advertising from the 1980s to the 2020s. We have also been fascinated by the different interests and hopes of rural and urban women – Lucy Delap and I reflect on this here. 

The two images you see here show some of my favourite entries – News from Nowhere, a feminist bookshop based in Liverpool, advertising for a ‘full time worker’ to join their collective; and the wonderful ‘Wild Lilies B&B’ based near Swansea ‘for lesbians in love. Windy walks. Continental breakfasts. Don’t delay’. 

This map is now permanently hosted on the British Library’s free educational website as part of its rich Spare Rib resource and I urge you to explore it and discover not only the lonely feminists of Sussex but all the enterprise, activism, groups and networks that enabled them to connect to each other through media and through trade. 

For those curious about today’s activist entrepreneurs – and the communities they help to make – Creative Women, Creative Business: Feminist Publishing, Design and Comix, organised by the BOWW project this year, is watchable on the British Library Player. 

This article was written by Dr Eleanor Careless, a Research Fellow for the Business of Women’s Words project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based at the School of Media, Arts and Humanities. 

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