Introducing the Feminist Collections
The Feminist Archive (East Midlands) was conceived by the Nottingham Feminist Archive Group, a collective of local women, some of whom were active in the Women’s Liberation Movement in Nottingham.
In 2018 they embarked on a project to interview the women they were still in contact with, succesfully obtaining funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund (the Voices of Nottingham Women Activisist), and along the way began to gather archive materials and feminist magazines. They were passionate about ensuring students could access the history of women’s activism in Nottingham, so they approached Manuscripts and Special Collections to ask if we could provide a home for the materials they had collected. They also set to work developing and preserving the feminist magazines at the Women’s Centre Library. In the process, they identified many duplicates which were kindly donated to our new Feminist Publications Collection (FPC).
Scope of the collections
The material reflects the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement from the 1970s onwards, covering all issues raised by and responded to by second wave feminism in this locality. The collections are unique to Nottingham which had a significant WLM membership. They show where ideas began and how feminist politics were put into practice. There is evidence of the role local women played in establishing a women’s centre for the city (one of the oldest in the country), material demonstrating the pro-active stance women in the region took in respect of peace campaigns, and the role undertaken to support miners and their wives in the 1984-1985 strike. The archive also demonstrates the strategic operational role that the Nottingham Women’s Liberation Group held in the Movement’s national conferences, the National Abortion Campaign and the Childcare Campaign, and evidences involvement in the Labour and Trade Union movement, for example in relation to the campaign for Equal Opportunities and the Women’s Working Charter.
The collection covers a variety of topics including family, health, employment, social policy issues, women’s aid, militarism and peace, the politics of the Women’s Liberation movement, lesbianism and the arts.
Browse
Descriptions of the contents of the collections can be browsed as follows:
Collecting
The bulk of the material in the collections was accumulated over a number of years by individuals and organisations as women activists from the 1960s and 1970s have downsized and/or cleared properties. Many of the donations were prompted by the process of being interviewed for the project. This material was transferred to Manuscripts and Special Collections in 2021. Further donations have since been made, some directly and some via members of the Group. The duplicate magazines from the Women’s Centre were donated in December 2022. The first tranche of interviews, transcripts and summaries were transferred in September 2023 with further additions on a regular basis.
We continue to collect materials and welcome further donations/interviews.
Our aspiration is for the collection to document a wide range of women’s activism from the 1970s onwards from across the East Midlands, in keeping with the East Midlands focus of Manuscripts and Special Collections’ Acquisition Policy.
Explore
You can find out more about the East Midlands Feminist Archive and Feminist Publications Collection via the following:
News
The Nottingham Feminist Archive Group is embarking on a new project to research the history of Nottingham’s Lesbian Centre, the Black Lesbian Group, and Lesbian activism in the East Midlands in the 1970s-1990s.
If you have any relevant photos, flyers, posters, papers, or memories you would like to share, we would love to hear from you.
To keep up to date with our latest news we send out a monthly(ish) Sisters and Supporters email newsletter. Please contact us to be added to the mailing list.
How to contact us