Sheila Rowbotham’s reflections on writing Women, Resistance and Revolution remind us of how historical events are retold in the form of incomplete and particular narratives. These narratives are always shaped through capricious and specific personal and collective memories. The personal and political entanglements of the teller offer different perspectives of an event or period, as they bring specific details into view to a greater or lesser extent. Whilst multiple threads form the stories told about feminism and its histories, attempts to trace and gather these threads have all too often, and perhaps unsurprisingly, offered overarching and reductive accounts that risk the erasure and invalidation of the very events they attempt to represent.I can remember thinking in the early 1970s, when I was writing Women, Resistance and Revolution, that if you were part of history you could write a full account. In retrospect this appears naïve. For, however much material you collect and read, you are going to select. In ordering chaos to create shape and structure, we inevitably ignore and exclude. To remember is an advantage because it gives an understanding of the context in which ideas and actions developed. But memory can also play tricks with perspective, because you are distanced from some lines of argument and embroiled still in others. (Rowbotham 1989: xi–xii)
The very familiar frameworks for discussing feminist histories in terms of waves or generations, and the linear, progressive temporalities upon which they are often founded, have been subject to much critical attention. Numerous thinkers remind us that these well-worn accounts often struggle to express the multitude of feminist thought and activity, or to accommodate diversity and differences, as they find the range of feminist thought, experience and relationships difficult to convey (e.g. Hemmings 2005, 2011; Roof 1997). Lynne Segal (1999) has noted that dominant accounts of feminism and its histories often offer ‘sobering examples of how the past is read through the concerns of the present: invalidating earlier meanings and projects as well as erasing their heterogeneity’ (1999:11). Such accounts are saturated with the difficulties of attending to feminism’s diversities and accounting for its actors’ various personal and political investments. Holding on to the specificity and heterogeneity of the stories from which a picture of feminism and its histories are woven, whilst being able to convey something of the interconnection and convergence of these accounts, is one of the challenges of writing feminist history that both Rowbotham and Segal discuss.
It is these intricate, specific, personal and political moments in women’s narratives and memories of becoming feminist that I am concerned with in this book. I take feminist women’s stories as a starting point for understanding the complexity of their investments in feminism and the various accounts of its pasts, presents and futures. I am not attempting to remap feminist histories to offer an alternative yet equally static account. Neither do I claim to offer a comprehensive picture of the fast-moving and ever-changing landscape of contemporary feminist theory, politics and activism. This is something others have done in recent years in relation to Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa (e.g. Hernández Castillo 2010; Nyhagen Predelli and Halsaa 2012; Redfern and Aune 2010; Roces and Edwards 2010). Rather, this book looks to the voices of some UK-based feminist women to understand how a feminist political consciousness is formed, felt, experienced and remembered.
These women, aged between 20 and 35, are unlikely to have been independently active in the UK-based feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. I therefore also ask how the dominant narratives generated about recent feminist histories are taken up, negotiated, accepted, resisted or ignored in these personal accounts. Considering the function and interrelation of personal and collective narratives of feminism, this work goes some way to understanding the ways in which dominant narratives are (re)produced and sustained.
This book emerges amidst a wealth of fascinating and important work that rethinks and challenges how we think, write and speak about feminism, its histories and temporalities (Browne 2014; E. Freeman 2010; Hesford 2013; Hemmings 2005, 2011; McBean 2015; Wiegman 2000, 2004; Withers 2014, 2015), and it will be evident in the following chapter that the work of Victoria Hesford, Clare Hemmings and Robyn Wiegman in particular has been influential on my thinking. I offer a distinct contribution to these conversations in my return to women’s voices. The stories we tell about our lives are fundamental to the processes of identity formation and negotiation. These stories are never formed in a vacuum but interwoven with numerous accounts that we adopt, resist and rework as part of the process of making sense of our place in the world. It is through the narratives and memories shared by the women I spoke to that I seek to trouble and disrupt overarching narratives by looking at the diversity and differences, as well as points of continuity and convergence, amongst them. I therefore take women’s stories as my starting point for understanding how they develop a feminist consciousness. Although this might be considered a problematic approach that requires the negotiation of the tension between the feminist commitment to ensuring women’s voices are heard and the critique of the privileging of certain voices (Hesford 2013; Wiegman 2000), I believe that that personal narratives are crucial to understanding the formation and articulation of identities.
I am drawing therefore on a narrative tradition that has been foregrounded in much feminist work as a means of contesting and disrupting accepted historical ‘knowledge’ (Cosslett et al. 2002) and that contributed to the destabilisation of and departure from a realist tradition (Riessman 2008). This book is a continuation of this narrative work and, in particular,a defence of its usefulness for thinking about feminism and its histories in the face of important critique (e.g. Hesford 2013; Wiegman 2000). In particular, I see narrative theory and methodology and the related attention given to memory as offering a means of understanding how people make sense of and order the different experiences, feelings and relationships. Barbara Misztal (2003) places a concern with memory at the centre of sociological enquiry when she says:
[I]f the role of sociology is to investigate the different ways in which humans give meaning to the world […], and if memory is crucial to our ability to make sense of our present circumstances, researching collective memory should be one of its most important tasks.’ (2003:1, cited in Smart 2007:38).
The processes of narrative and memory are formative of our experience of the present. Methodologies that attend to these processes offer ways of exploring how we make sense of the world and so enable us to consider the various and complex ways in which feminism and its histories are received and processed. This challenges any tendency to depend upon dominant and homogenising accounts when talking about feminism.
My methodological choices were guided by the conviction that narrative and memory are central to human experience and that, in highly varied and complex ways, these processes act as a means of making sense of the world and our place in it. Multiple methodological approaches that attend to this ontological position have been explored and developed over recent decades (as discussed by Elliott 2005; Radstone 2000, 2008; Radstone and Schwarz 2010; Riessman 1993, 2008). Each places value on listening to the accounts individuals give about their lives as a valid means of sociological inquiry, taking this seriously as a means of exploring the relationship between the personal and social. The cases I discuss in the following chapters were selected firstly from a number gathered via narrative interviews1 (Wengraf 2001) that incorporated a discussion of photographs selected by the women themselves, and secondly, a memory-work group (Haug et al. 1987).
The interviews were deliberately loosely structured, with each of the women given ample opportunity to talk about any experiences, events, people or places that were important to their story of becoming feminist. To begin, they were asked simply to tell their story. Following this, they shared and discussed the images they brought to the interview. These included personal photographs and public images, and for some of the women, books, jewellery and other objects. Finally, I asked some further questions based on notes taken during the interview up until that point to encourage expansion upon the topic.
Photographs have particular significance to narrative, memory and identity, and many thinkers have explored the ways in which they shape, reproduce and conflict with dominant narratives and mythologies (Finch 2007; Hirsch 1997; Kuhn 2002; Spence and Holland 1991). For this reason, researchers across disciplines are increasingly using visual methodologies to explore issues of memory and identity (Del Busso 2011; Gillies et al. 2004; Mannay 2015; Reavey 2012; Silver and Reavey 2010; Warr et al. forthcoming). The photograph for Marianne Hirsch (1997) and Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (1991) offers the opportunity to explore the juncture between the personal and social, recognising that even these very intimate possessions are never fully personal. As Spence and Holland write:
Family photography can operate at this junction between personal memory and social history, between public myth and personal unconscious. Our memory is never fully ‘ours’, nor are the pictures ever unmediated representations of our past (1991:13–14).
Photographs form part of socially and culturally inscribed processes of collective remembering. One example of this comes from the work of Janet Finch (2007), who argues that photographs operate as a way of ‘doing family’, or performing actions that are socially and culturally understood as constituting family practice. Taking and keeping family photographs is a means of displaying family at a personal and social level. The personally significant photograph of a child’s birthday party, for example, is given meaning through repetition and social endorsement and so understood on both a personal and collective level.
It is Annette Kuhn’s (2002) work that has been particularly influential on my inclusion and interpretation of the photographs in the research. Kuhn views the photograph, and its production, organisation and display...