Lower Shaw Farm – Jan McKenley
This quilt is called ‘Lower Shaw Farm’ – a community based in Wiltshire which hosted groups. There I had one of those life-defining moments sometime in the late 1970s. Up to that point, I had never seen my cervix, had never seen my labia and had never seen a speculum as anything but a painful violation whenever it had been used in GP surgeries.
I remember going for a women’s health workshop and as part of the workshop I just can remember an image of myself: I’m lying in the arms of a woman who’s supporting me, my legs are up and I’ve got a speculum inside of my vagina and another woman is holding a mirror so I can see my cervix and my vagina and see how beautiful it is. And that probably epitomises the best of women’s liberation for me because I looked at my vagina and it was beautiful, and feminism gave me my body. It gave me my body back, and it just reminds you that in those days a lot of women felt their bodies weren’t themselves, their bodies were not theirs. And that was really powerful and it was magic. (Transcript of my interview for the British Library: Sisterhood and After website project 2013).
I believed profoundly from a very young age that I was as good as any bloke! I found my anchor in feminism and women’s liberation, then and now.
Quilt sources and support:
- Specialist support from Natalie at Harmony Quilts, Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire (October 2022).
- Books: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E Anzaldua (Published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983): Our Bodies Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1970): The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters: A Guide to Creating, Quilting and Living Courageously by Sherri Lynn Wood (Published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang, New York 2015); Instinctive Quilt Art: Using improvisional technqiues to create vibrant art quilts by Bethan Ash (Published by Batsford, London 2011). Hidden in Plain View: A Secret History of Quilts and the Underground Railway by Jacqueline L Tobin and Raymond G Tobard (Published by MIT Press,Jan 2000); A World of Quilts: designing and making contemporary quilts inspired by traditional patterns by Cassandra Ellis (Published London, 2014)
Jan McKenley
October 2022