Susan Hemmings
Girls are powerful book
I joined the Spare Rib collective towards the end of the 70s as I approached my forties, so I was one of the oldest there and I had a teenage daughter, Lisa. While there was a lot of discussion about intersectionality, which we then called multiple oppression, ageism was not seen as high up on that agenda. But there was definitely feminist activity going on in schools, with both primary and secondary school girls all over the UK protesting and taking direct action about boys’ sexism, low expectations, and control over what they could and could not wear, specifically the banning of trousers. There was also a real change by women youth workers to radicalise youth work with and for girls.
We began to make these voices heard, specifically in Issue 75, and we coined the phrase Girls Are Powerful (and published a book of girls’ writings with that title with Sheba Feminist Publishers. This sold widely and was taken up by Penguin in its second edition. Even today I come across women who say as girls it changed their lives. It went to a follow up edition, True to Life, which Sheba also published. And there was a Girls are Powerful badge which sold in its thousands. All this many years before the Spice Girls and the concept of girl power.
Meanwhile at the end other end of the age line, older women were also writing in about how their experiences were not acknowledged enough, and we encouraged them to write in: they wanted to have an older feminist network. We got about 200 letters, and thus the Older Feminist Network (OFN) was formed, and a new book of some of their writings, A Wealth of Experience – Lives of Older Women, which I also edited, was published as a Spare Rib project in 1984, again much loved and still relevant and in existence today.
Out of the Older Feminist Network, which was fundamentally an SR project, was organised the Older Lesbian Network, which still exists today. Both were formed out of the typical WLM conferences of the era, and meetings followed using workshops and newsletters typical of second wave feminism. Young feminists, some of whom took part in the day to day work of producing Spare Rib, set up a magazine, Shocking Pink.
So now in my eighties I am pleased to have been a Spare Rib collective member who was committed in bringing these voices to the fore, inspired both by my lovely long suffering mother who spent one summer at our scruffy office sorting out a backlog of administrative paperwork, and my amazing and inspiring daughter, then a teenage girl on the cusp of her own exciting life.