WOMEN MAKING HISTORY

A collaboration between the Golden Oldies and SHRAVIKA SATSANG MANDAL group, Year 12 students from Haberdasher Aske’s Hatcham College, the Museum in Docklands, the Women’s Library, Rachel Warrington and Ceri Buck.

Come and see our film and zines Saturday 8th March – International Women’s Day

There will also be talks from writer of Hero, the toughest girl in London Catherine Johnson, poetry from Dorothea Smartt and Joanna Ingham from the Women’s Library

1.30 – 3pm FREE, the Museum in Docklands

I want to tell you about this project I’ve been working on over the last month. We’ve been based mainly at the Museum in Docklands and we called it Women Making History. The people involved have been women from a group of elder women from the Caribbean (the Golden Oldies) and a group of elder Asian women from East Africa (SHRAVIKA SATSANG MANDAL). We’ve also been with a group of teenage women from a school in New Cross. The main focus of the project has been to tackle the question of how experiences of women have been represented in history, and especially in relation to the Museum in Docklands itself. Interesting in most of the galleries there are hardly any women evident in photos and text. However, in the Sugar and Slavery exhibition there are more women and they seem to be women who campaigned against slavery, both of African and European origin. Now, the way we went about tackling this project was to ask the elders what they were doing at the time of the photos depicted in the galleries and the responses were really insightful. Most women at the time of the Docklands at War exhibition were in the Caribbean or East Africa and the Ugandan women and the woman from Zanzibar recollect having to black out windows because of German plane expeditions, and all women talk of food shortages because of the war … suffering that is little heard of in the cosy wartime nostalgia stories from the British mainland. Some women were shocked at the lack of representation of Black and Asian men also. One woman asked ‘Where are they?’ Who was doing all the work in the docks at this time? Of course there were Black men here’ (and this is a theme that Catherine Johnson covers in her book Hero, the toughest girl in London, an action-packed story of a young mixed race woman’s struggle to find her father, an escaped slave, in late 18th century London). Apart from tackling this issue of representation, the women have also been writing and speaking their own stories and we’re putting all of this material into a zine. We had a trip to the Women’s Library, Old Castle Street, Aldgate to look at their collection of objects, books and zines. We chose to make a zine, alongside the film that is also being produced, for a variety of reasons related to its inclusive form – anything and everything goes in zineland; great for attempting to represent the messy, chaotic and non-linear of women’s time. See more below.

The most pleasurable thing of all has been sharing stories, food and time together to get to know other women from different communities and different generations. It really has been that simple. Get a mixed bunch of women together in a space and wonderful things happen. I feel privileged to have been there

The purposes of the zine are many and various:

In it you will find representations of our lives through objects that we have chosen because they are special to us. You will find our evaluation of whose experience isn’t represented in the museum You will find words from discussions about what it means to be a woman in our culture in terms of:

• Having a baby,

• Seeing images of women used to sell, advertise, glamorize,

We see images of women used to sell, advertise, entice, glamorize and symbolise. We never see ourselves (some comments were …)

‘None of the women here is old, everyone is active and engaged, interesting and involved. The media puts any woman over a certain age into a corner and ignores them or misrepresents them. There is no representation of the woman here.’ ‘

Women are sacked for looking older. They need to look like the trophy wife. Men are considered to be better as they get older’ ‘As a woman, I am very successful at selling things, like my pepper sauce, peanut drops, coconut cakes. I feel I am better at this because I am a woman. I can relate to people as a woman and that helps too. I feel very proud because I raise money for the project I work with, not for my own pocket.’ (this young woman is 90, sorry, but I have to divulge that!)

‘The media misrepresents people and gender roles to make money, not to be honest. There is a lack of race representation.’

• Being mis or under represented as women,

• Doing housework, • Getting older,

• Female friendship and sisterhood

You will find stories about who we are, how we know each other, how we maintain our communities and how we have come to be here.

You will find the answer to the question ‘How do I want to represent myself?’

You will find evidence of the above collected in this zine.

Zines are a perfect home for our experiences because zines are about living joyfully who we are without concession to pressures from outside. Zines are a space for creativity, for urgent live-giving messages of support to friends and to oneself, a space for angry rants and practical how-to sharing of information, knowledge and wisdom. Zines are distributed across networks of friends and groups, often free of charge. Zines are made for the love of it, not as commercial venture. Zines are a space where the logic of the market does not figure.

Through these images and words, we invite you to make a significant leap away from evaluating achievements based on the best … the most … the tallest … the loudest, the first to reach Everest, the fastest car to drive the earth, the first to reach the Americas …. And into an appreciation of women’s time, of the relational, the small-scale, the domestic, the inclusive. In this sense, we are inviting you to ‘think differently and think small’ by producing something together that needs to be handled, given a close read and that can be taken back to your home. Museum in Docklands, West India Quay, E14 4AL (at the end of the quayside, after the row of restaurants, opposite the floating church) West India Quay DLR (2 mins) or Canary Wharf DLR / Jubilee line (10 mins)