Learning from our elder sisters

The joy of learning from the sisters who came before us

I have been thinking of starting a substack for ages and it has never quite been the moment. But I am currently living my absolute best life and I want to tell all my sisters all about it. And since I am no longer on Twitter (rubbing my face in that hellhole every day was not feeding my soul), I need a different place to put my thoughts. So here we are.

I have been interviewing women. Interviewing feminists, actually. Second-wave feminists, who have been generous enough to spend their time telling me about the work they did with their sisters back in the 1980s when I was busy being born. I am doing some research about women’s experiences of learning and teaching skills from which we are traditionally excluded, such as manual trades. I’m finding out about the grassroots women’s skills-sharing projects of the 1970s-1990s, and also asking women about their experiences of learning and teaching in mainstream mixed-sex settings.¹

Last week I interviewed six women who were involved in the Tyneside Women’s Non-Traditional Skills Centre, which ran from 1985-1988. It was an incredibly ambitious project which provided 40 women per year with full-time fully-funded skills training, as well as paying attendees a living allowance for the year, plus funded childcare so that they could attend. Each year for three years, 15 women did a year’s training in carpentry, and 25 in computing. (This was back when most people had never used a computer before, and knowing how to use them was a powerful skill to have in the workplace).

The project organisers were feminists and were grounded in the women’s liberation movement. The training was for any local women who wanted to learn, but women without formal qualifications were prioritised for places, as were black women. Many of those who attended were local working class mothers.

I interviewed women who were involved as participants and those who were involved as organisers. In each case, I was asking them questions about something that happened nearly 40 years ago, and yet the passion and clarity with which they recounted it was spectacular. I got the strong impression that being part of the Non-Traditional Skills Centre about was much more than carpentry and computing.

I’m only just getting started with this research, which will take me around the country to meet women from all sorts of other skills-sharing projects. But my first reflections from my conversations with the women of Tyneside are that their experiences within the Non-Traditional Skills Centre created a sense of power and possibility that happens when women have space to support one another to reach our potential. Learning and being in a woman-only space made it possible to dare to believe that they could be the kind of people who could do things that they had always been told were not for them. And they thrived off it. The courses were oversubscribed and had incredibly low drop out rates, and when the funding came under attack, course attendees lobbied local authorities to protect the centre that had become so precious to them. Many went on to work using the skills they had learnt, and, perhaps even more significantly, several of the women I spoke to told me how the opportunity to be with and learn from other was like having their eyes opened to a new way to see the world.

Sadly male-dominated local authorities still chose to cut the funding in 1988—on the basis that the Centre would not admit men. Plus ça change. But the time I spent learning from these women has filled me with such hope and inspiration. They were organising from within a vibrant, powerful women’s liberation movement, and from that position they made things happen that really changed women’s lives, including their own.

On the train home I returned to Victoria Smith’s wonderful book Hags, and reflected on how much courage and strength can be taken from the achievements of the sisters who have gone before us. As Smith points out, preventing younger women from learning from our elder sisters is a powerful tool against women’s liberation, so for younger women to take it upon ourselves to do so must be, in itself, a threat to patriarchal power.

When I asked the women of the Tyneside Women’s Non-Traditional Skills Centre whether they thought such a project was still needed today, they all answered very quickly—Yes Of Course. They were sad that the powerful space they had made had not been allowed to endure, and that the things that felt possible then now felt, if anything, less possible.

I’m in my thirties and pretty much my whole life has taken place in a long anti-feminist backlash—patriarchy coming down so hard on the strength and energy of these women who were organising while I was being born. But hearing their stories gave me such hope. They believed that things could be different, and that belief spurred them to get together and make it so. We can do that again—all it takes is the courage to think a world beyond patriarchy is possible, and the trust in one another that we can get there together.

1. I am doing this research as part of my postdoctoral role at the University of Oxford, where I am employed in the Oxford Martin School’s Women’s Equality and Inequality Research Programme https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/womens-equality-and-inequality/