Fen Women at Fifty – Virago’s first book

By Mary Chamberlain

Photos by Angela Phillips

I first met Angela Phillips, then a photographer, in 1971 when I joined Women’s Lobby (later, Women’s Report Collective) of which she had been a founder member. Our aim was to raise awareness of women’s issues and to lobby for reform and changes to the law. At the time, I was living in an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire fens. Anna Coote, another member of Women’s Lobby, suggested I use the opportunity to write a portrait of the village, a feminist counter to Akenfield, Ronald Blythe’s hugely popular portrait of a Suffolk village published in 1969. What’s more, she said, she would introduce me to a friend of hers who was starting a feminist publishing company. The friend was Carmen Callil, the publishing company, Virago. I met with Carmen, sent her a sample chapter, and she commissioned what would become the first book published by Virago Press.

If the women’s movement was about exposing and changing women’s lives, it was equally about understanding and celebrating those same lives, ‘hidden,’ in Sheila Rowbotham’s words, ‘from history.’ Men had been naturalised as the movers and shakers, and history had been naturalised as their record of choice, reflected in and generated from the kind of records which survived in the archives. Women’s history did not exist. The conventional tools and sources proved inadequate for the new kind of women’s history with its focus on reclamation and reinstatement. Feminist historians had to look elsewhere and to think laterally. Fenwomen was a child of these particular moments – as was Virago, a project to dissent and reclaim, affirm and assert. Never again, we thought, will women’s achievements be lost to posterity.

Rural women had been particularly neglected (they barely appeared in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield). Rural studies focused on the men whose labour was visible and active. Country women did not feature, except as chatelains of great houses. I wanted Fenwomen to be a study of the women as labourers, and as labourers’ wives, of their daily struggles to survive, as custodians of their social worlds.

What was important was the hum-drum, the routine, the everyday rituals and chores, never recorded precisely because they were ordinary, obvious and common. And yet it was through the habitual, mundane tasks of washing, cooking, feeding, nursing, cleaning, gardening, childcare, as well as in the often lowly work of paid employment carried out within the home, or without, that women lived their lives. Such labours were deemed not worthy of historical enquiry because they were women’s work, taking place within the home or in extended domestic spaces such as the public washhouse. Yet those tasks were the gel which kept families together, and the social networks which women created kept communities in order.

Women’s history aimed to change the historical agenda. In the absence of other documentation, oral history was the obvious choice.  I bought a simple tape recorder and asked around—at the Post Office, at the Church and chapels, with my neighbours—for anyone willing to talk to me about village life. Word got around, recommendations snowballed and my quota sample, though small, became representative of the female population of the village at that time, of its class structure, occupational profile, and age cohort.

This was the first time I had interviewed anyone, and at the time (1973) there were no guidebooks on how to do it. I used a mix of what I can now identify as a life story approach—inviting people to talk about their lives from earliest memory to the present—and more straightforward interviewing on a particular topic. I transcribed the tapes myself and edited them into a coherent and literary form, grouping them into themes. I learned a considerable amount in the process—not just about the skills of interviewing and editing but also about lives of which I had been ignorant, lived with courage and ingenuity.

Oral history could not only reclaim the past for women, and shape a different historical agenda, it could give them authorship of that past. Today such ambitions seem both naive and patronising. The intervention of the professional historian is there from the first research question to the last full stop. Over the last 40 years oral history has generated a sub-genre of critical thinking and debates on the nature of memory and the construction and interpretation of the oral historical document, and its presentation to, and interaction with, a readership. Back then, however, revealing lives hitherto unexposed, whatever the merits of the medium through which it was done, seemed, and was, a worthwhile, open, honest and revolutionary endeavour.

It was obvious there should be photographs to represent visually what had been documented orally. Women’s Lobby – and more particularly, Women’s Report – wished to raise awareness on the condition of women in the here and now. Angela Phillips was the obvious choice as she was, then, documenting women’s lives and the women’s liberation movement. Angela came to the village capturing in image the world of rural women of the fens, from the very old to the very young, and much of the street and shop life in between. It was an everyday world, hidden in plain sight. Flower growing was the major occupation at that time of the women in the village, and the images of Wendy Davies (née Beckett) aka Janet Hornigold, as she harvests the flowers are particularly memorable for here you see, not the romance of the bouquet, but the sheer backbreaking slog of production. Wendy’s mother works on her knees weeding. Women recall the cold and the wind, how they would pad their clothes with newspapers to keep themselves warm, or travel in gangs to work under a gang master. Others recall going into service either locally or in London, the gruelling hours worked and the humiliations endured for housework had to be invisible, and those who carried it out, hidden from view.  In similar vein, my neighbour hangs out the washing on a particularly windy day. She has two children under three and the demand for laundry is consistent and persistent. We see women chatting in the street and must remember the support strategies which kept families alive—the neighbour arriving with food, or clothing for a family with nothing, the silence maintained in the face of authority—as well as the gossip which kept tabs on reputations and appropriate behaviour. In impoverished communities, reputation could often be the key to support, whether official or unofficial. Immoral behaviour—or what was perceived as immoral at a given time—would have sanctions attached. Conformity was in everyone’s interest.

Sadly, Angela’s photos were not reproduced in the Virago 50th anniversary edition of Fenwomen, which is why it is such a pleasure to have them hosted here, and on my own website www.marychamberlainbooks.com

The village when I lived there was on the cusp of change as it moved into the orbit of commuter land and with it an influx of outsiders who changed the topography, class structure and demography of the village. A population of 1,454 in 1971 had expanded to 2,600 in 2021 – a staggering growth. In the early 1970s, when the research was carried out, most villagers worked in some agricultural capacity although even then the shift from the land was discernible. Now, over half (and of those, most are men) work in some higher or intermediate managerial capacity or in the professions, and over a third commute more than thirty miles to work. Women predominate in the intermediate and semi-routine occupations, characterised by low pay and reflecting a lack of employment choices. The young people commute to manufacturing or retail jobs in Soham, Newmarket, Ely or Cambridge, although such work is dependent on access to a car.

The smallholdings and farms have been consolidated into large agricultural plants. In 2011 only thirty men and sixteen women worked on the land. Figures on the numbers working on the land in the 2021 census have proved elusive, and are omitted even from the 2022 Neighbourhood Plan. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is temporary, migrant labour which now satisfies the seasonal requirements of agriculture. There is one commercial flower grower left in the village.

There is a post-script: The launch of Virago, and Fenwomen, in 1975 met with considerable critical acclaim and interest. It was also considered fair game for the boys. Days before publication, the News of the World carried an “exposé” headlined “Why Mary unveiled a village’s love secrets”. Subtitled “There will be red faces on the farm when this book comes out.” The villagers, none of whom had a chance to read the book, were outraged. The damage was compounded by the Cambridge Evening News, which continued the offensive and generated much malicious mischief in the week that followed. The scandal has now, perhaps, died down and it is Fenwomen which is now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. The News of the World was forced to close down in 2011 when its greed for sensationalism finally crossed the line of legality.

# The full set of photographs from Fen Women can be found in the photo archive on the HOWL website.

# Virago published a special 50th anniversary edition of this book – now considered a ‘classic’ – in September 2025, cover by Eleanor Rose, a thoughtful and new introduction from Alexandra Harris. ‘A fascinating insight into 20th century rural life.’ Laura Hackett, Sunday Times August 2025