Mary Muldowney will give an overview of the appalling abuses that took place in many of the mother and baby homes in Ireland since the foundation of the state in 1922. The homes were supposed to provide safety and support for unwed mothers at a time when there was considerable stigma attached to having sex outside marriage. They were mainly run by religious bodies, predominantly Roman Catholic nuns, and the regimes they established had more to do with punishing the ‘sins’ of the mothers than […]
Annie Townley (1878-1966) Annie Townley: A force for socialism and peace describes a remarkable journey from working-class Lancashire textile mill worker to employment as a Bristol-based organiser in the suffrage and labour movements. In many cases using Annie’s own words, June Hannam brings to life a character dedicated to working-women’s rights and social justice. “Some of us who have been called dreamers and who believe in Socialism, wonder if it had not been better for our City Fathers to […]
Not A BRHG Event
Professor of Modern British History, June Hannam shares the inspiring journey of Annie Townley, a Lancashire textile worker turned suffragette and Labour Party organiser. This talk highlights the challenges and opportunities for working-class women in activism, focusing on Townley’s personal and emotional struggles within the suffrage and labour movements. It has been arranged by the Bristol Radical History Group.
In the early 1800s ten female convicts in Bristol Newgate Gaol (now the site of The Galleries shopping centre) were sentenced to ‘transportation beyond the seas’—Australia. While much is known about these women after they were transported, almost nothing was known of their lives, and crimes, here. In 2022-3, with funding from Historic England and UWE, we explored these forgotten stories through a series of workshops with women in HMP Eastwood Park. Sessions included creative writing with group […]
This meeting brings together local historians, and writer and director Ingrid Jones of the Bedminster based acta Community Theatre. We will discuss the process from the seed of an idea, to research, devising, scripting, rehearsal and performance. We will also consider the difficulties of doing 'history from below', researching periods beyond living memory, where to find the voices of people and how to create a script and theatre piece from this. This will be an open discussion with plenty of […]
Our defence is not for a piece of land, but for the protection of life’s ability to unfold itself (Nûda, member of the YPJ, the women’s defence units, 237). This is a meticulously researched and critically argued book from an author writing not only about but from within the Kurdish women’s movement. In the West, Dilar Dirik is one of the most prominent and articulate voices on the role of women in the Kurdish struggle for participatory democracy, ecological sustainability, and women’s […]
This multimedia display allows visitors to hear the voices of current and former staff and volunteers of groundbreaking feminist mental health service, the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. Now known as Self Injury Support, this pioneering group was started in the back of a charity shop in Easton as a feminist collective in 1986. Its goals were to listen to, support, and amplify the voices of women using self injury to cope with their experience of trauma. In 2022, as part of an oral history […]
In 2012, during the early days of the Syrian Civil War, three mainly Kurdish regions in north-east Syria were able to overthrow and remove the Assad regime through revolutionary action. Over the next years these regions would work with other parts of northern Syrian society and form the Movement for a Democratic Society. Its core values are for grassroots democracy, women's liberation, and ecology. By 2014, this revolutionary movement and its armed defence forces, known as the YPG and the YPJ at […]
Isabella Lorusso author of Fighting Women: Interviews with veterans of the Spanish Civil War will be speaking about her collection of interviews from the 1990s with women veterans of the fight against fascism in Spain in the 1930s. Fighting women is a choral book, a set of interviews conducted with Spanish women who took part in the civil war. Some took up arms and fought on the front, others joined the POUM, Free Women or different anarchist groups. They all fought against Francoism and for the […]
