Seeking supporters for Spare Rib
Spare Rib featured in Sunday Times – Janie in centre of photo which is by Angela Phillips
Janie Prince
As women we are well tuned into a monthly cycle and at Spare Rib we were all tuned into the production and birth of a new monthly edition of our magazine. Spare Rib did not have any financial backers – for its existence it relied on the income from news stand sales and on subscription sales.
I joined the collective when the magazine had reached issue 44 – in March 1976 – and I stayed for about two years, until I left to train as an acupuncturist. My job at Spare Rib was to increase the subscription sales. Why a subscription? Well, when you have one person subscribing for a year, you know you have sold 12 copies…one for each month… and you don’t have to pay any commission as you do with a news stand sale, and, more importantly, you have that money up front, which makes it easier to budget. It makes sense!
So it was decided to give over the whole of the inside cover of the back page, and later the whole back page itself, to a subscription advertisement. Previously, the subscription form didn’t figure so large! Now, each month I had to come up with an idea and find someone to execute my ideas – to design the page.
This was a challenging task. First the idea, monthly: how to communicate the tremendous benefit to the magazine of having subscribers; not being boring each month with a spiel of the benefits of subscribing; and then finding someone to translate my ideas into a lively, interesting, eye-catching page. Funnily enough it was the last part that was the easiest.
Collective members Jill Nicholls & Ali Fell enjoying Janie’s subscription pages! Photos and montage by Mark Rusher
Happily subscription sales increased as did news stand sales and the magazine was on a somewhat less precarious footing by the time I left.
All this is a long time ago….40+years…and I no longer have copies of the magazine. A couple of years ago I looked online at the British Library site to see the work I had done. Yes, Spare Rib was on line but not the subscriptions page!! (Some people say that they could see the subscription pages online – but I searched and searched and couldn’t – mysteries of the internet!)
Now you can’t even access the magazine on line but have to go to the British Library in person to look at their set of hard copies. So, sadly, there are now no easily available examples of the work which I did. You can no longer see Spare Rib online (at time of writing, Feb 2024) because, after all the incredible work that went into getting articles, photos and artwork cleared for copyright and the whole thing digitised, Brexit meant that the EU / UK copyright laws changed and the British Library, being ultra careful, was fearful that the laws that had been followed for collecting and digitising SR wouldn’t hold, so they took it all down. Now you can just read about SR and see some texts, I believe.
But I am so proud to have been part of it – it is quite extraordinary what we achieved: an independent magazine covering such a huge range of current news stories affecting women worldwide and topics that had not been covered before – all in the days before the internet. And we were so young – mostly still in our twenties. Extraordinary, really.
*************
And dipping my toes into consciousness raising
Janie Prince
In the late 70s and early 80s I dipped my toes into a couple of women’s groups, in London where I lived then. One group was formed around the time of the publication of Susie Orbach’s book Fat is
a Feminist Issue, the main ideas of which were widely discussed. When I see photos of us now, I am puzzled quite why we were as concerned as we were – by the obesity standards of today we would all have been considered a pretty healthy size! However, inevitably as women subjected to endless opinions as to how we should look, we were ready to have a good look at all the pressures and their effects on us.
But I didn’t stay in that group very long.
The other group was a regular consciousness raising group in London, consisting of women who already knew each other a little through Spare Rib. This group did not last long for me either, because once, in a meeting at my own house in South London, one of our members launched an attack on me for knitting in the group meetings…not paying proper attention. It all felt worse than school and shortly afterwards, I left.
But in a way, just being at Spare Rib was like being in a permanent CR group – exposed to ideas, arguments and information about how women were treated all around the world. It has stayed with me for life.