Author: Celia Burgess-Macey Year: 1970s
Leaflets produced by teachers at a North London School
I learnt to ride a bike aged six. In my teenage years I cycled the lanes of Leicestershire with my best friend. When I came to London aged 18 in 1963 I brought my bike with me. Since then I have never been without a bike or motorbike. When I was teaching at Dalston’s Princess May Infants in the 1970s I rode my motorbike to work and at the end of every day the children crowded round at the gates to watch me leave, never tiring of this strange sight. As a woman I took my bike for granted and still do.
It was not always thus.
My grandmother, Beatrice Harland, grew up north of Manchester in the late 1800s. Her father was a non-conformist Unitarian minister whose parish included villages North of the city. He cycled to visit them and young Beatrice accompanied him on her bike. This was so scandalous a sight for the villagers that they threw stones at her. She went on to join the suffragette movement in Manchester.
By the late 1970s the women’s movement had begun to make inroads into schools. Groups of mainly women teachers got together in working parties, projects and support groups advocating for change. I was in such a local group of anti-sexist teachers in Hackney. We met at the teachers’ centre and looked at how schools treated boys and girls and shared positive ideas and resources. It was inspiring to be working together. In 1979 I was teaching at Princess May Infants and I decided to take a closer look at the reading scheme we were using: Breakthough to Literacy. Ironically, this had been promoted as a radical reading scheme because it featured working-class children. What shocked me was that the illustrators frequently portrayed deeply conservative and sexist behaviour. I wrote an article about my work entitled ‘Breakthrough to Sexism’ which was published in 1981 in the radical journal Teaching London Kids TLK — my first piece of published writing. One of the statistics stuck in my mind. There were 26 examples of boys riding bikes as compared to two of girls. Then I came across a storybook published by Sheba called The Ten Women Bicycle, set in Victorian times where women were working in a bicycle factory but could not ride bikes to work because of harassment by men and boys. This reminded me of my grandmother’s story. The solution the women in the book find is solidarity. They make a bike for ten women and collectively ride it to work.
In 1981 I was writing a report for ILEA on the implementation of anti–racist and anti–sexist teaching strategies in primary schools. As part of my research in classrooms I persuaded one school to try out an anti–sexist teaching project focusing on bikes. Children in Year 3 and Year 6 classrooms analysed their own teaching resources in relation to the depiction of children and bikes. The boys were delighted to find so many depictions of themselves as confident riders of bikes, but many of the girls were angry that so few girls appeared in the books. The Ten Women Bicycle story was read to the children. The children discussed this as a group in class and decided to make their own books using photographs of themselves with bikes. The next move was to contact the women’s bicycle workshop in Lenthall road and persuade a woman (Heidi) to run bicycle maintenance workshops for girls and boys separately. Children brought their own bikes into school to work on them or in some cases borrowed bikes. The Year 3 children decided it was important to make a book that featured the same number of boys and girls which they called The Fair Book of Bikes. But the ten year old girls, who in interview had complained bitterly about harassment by boys, decided to make a book called The All Girls Book of Bikes, featuring their thoughts about bikes and photos of themselves working with Heidi.
Classroom based projects like the above were mushrooming around the country in the 1980s, as schools were required to develop anti-sexist policies and review their materials for racist and sexist bias. Anti-sexist and anti-racist resources and reading materials were published and listed for schools. There were national conferences and NUT working parties. There was a Schools Council Sex Differentiation project. There were Women in Education Groups and publications like GEN: Challenging Racism and Sexism in Education published by WedG — the Women in Education group. There was the Women’s Education and Resource Centre, a women-only space that provided a meeting place for women’s groups and a collection of resources. We came so far before the Thatcher government and the right-wing press attacked us for ‘political correctness’, undermining family values, promoting homosexuality and operating as ‘race spies’ in schools. The clock was definitely put back as focus shifted to promoting the three Rs. Campaigns around equality and culture and identity were presented as dangerous distractions from the business of learning! But we did not go away. We are still here riding our bikes!
Reprinted with permission Write women into history, Hackney Howlers