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 […]
In April 1986, a group of women drawn together by their experiences of trauma, self injury and punitive psychiatric treatment started the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. An explicitly feminist user-led and volunteer-run listening service for women suffering mental health crises, it offered callers space to talk about their pain and how they endured it. Through listening without judgment, BCSW showed women a solidarity they had rarely experienced. Amplifying their voices, it began to forcefully […]
Not A BRHG Event
BRHG are very pleased to invite Isabella Lorusso to speak about her book at International Women's Day in Bristol. Saturday March 2nd - 15:30-16:15 - Lady Mayor's Parlour, City Hall 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 emancipation of women, and together they achieved […]
Swell is both a waterbiography of Jenny Landreth’s personal swimming experiences, and a history of women’s struggle to gain access to indoor baths and outdoor beaches and lakes. She pays tribute to her many “foremothers” who campaigned for women to enjoy freedom of movement and excel through the emancipatory activity of swimming. These included the doughty Elizabeth Eiloart, novelist and representative of the Ladies National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge, who successfully […]
The pandemic of crises that nationalistic hostility and capitalism unfailingly deliver is seemingly intensifying. While the asymmetric Israel-Palestine conflict is currently the most prominent flashpoint, two 2023 films recently screened at the Cube Microplex deal with the global ramifications of the still critical situation in Syria. The action in the Rojava Film Commune’s Kobanê takes place on Syrian soil, featuring a world-changing episode in the conflict whereas, nearer to home, Ken Loach’s […]
