We were incredibly pleased that Professor Catherine Hall was able to join us on 24 September to talk about putting the original Past & Present trail together. It was particularly fitting that we had organised the event to take place in the Birmingham Midland Institute as this was the very building that Catherine had taught women’s history in the 1970s, something that we had not been aware of when we organised the session!

Catherine reminded us that when she started out there was very little material available at that time about women’s history. Eventually the women she was working alongside at the time formed a more focused collaborative research group called the Birmingham Feminist History Group and went on to jointly publish an article in the Feminist Review, ‘Feminism as Femininity in the 1950s’ (November 1979, Vol. 3, Issue 1, pp48-65).

The first women’s liberation group in Birmingham had been established in 1969, a period of discovery when women attempted to recover other women from invisibility. Important books for them were Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the 17^th Century (published in 1919) and Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (originally published in 1930). For Catherine and her colleagues it was about changing the narrative and not just re-telling the story. They found that women’s history was being written even in the 19^th century but that its exclusion from the canon and the perception of this work as ‘amateur’ historical research meant that it had been ignored.

The creation of the Past & Present walk also came at a time of division within the women’s movement: 1978 saw the last women’s liberation conference, which took place at Ladywood School in Birmingham, after an irreconcilable split between socialist feminists and revolutionary feminists. After this Catherine became less involved in activism and more concerned with history. The Past & Present walk was to be a sponsored one, held to raise funds for the Feminist Review journal; Catherine told us that, somewhat optimistically, they had 500 copies printed off but on the day only 12 people came on the walk! Do you have a copy of the walk tucked away somewhere in a drawer or in the attic?! The walk was devised with a number of topics in mind and ways of thinking about women’s involvement in civic and domestic life. The first topic was women in politics and the trail started with a contemporary event – the May Day rally that had been held that year at the Digbeth Civic Hall on Digbeth High Street (now the HMV Institute) at which the trade unionist Arthur Scargill was challenged by feminists for his sexism. The humorous and self-deprecating tone of the walk is epitomised by the other reason for starting the walk at this location in Digbeth – it was the ‘site of the least well attended readers’ meeting which Feminist Review has had: two members of the collective, three readers’. We were relieved that we had more than 5 people come to our event on Saturday! The walk also looks at examples of the domestic lives of women, women and science and women’s employment, each example a concrete, personal one, making history come alive.

Catherine then made suggestions of areas that we might want to look at during our project – women who are part of the Windrush generation, women’s involvement in groups like the Sparkbrook Association and the Indian Workers Association, Balsall Heath and the photographs of Janet Mendelsohn, violence against women, women in business and industries, women’s writing, civic and philanthropic life and women’s roles in setting up the welfare state.

Catherine’s talk also inspired some really positive group discussions where participants revealed interesting and diverse personal stories and raised potential research areas. We hope that, like Catherine and the feminist history groups of the 1970s, our project will continue to recover women’s stories and change the narrative. For the next stage of the project we are now planning a set of skills development and research workshops which will take place over the next few months. If you would be interested in joining us or would like to find out more about the project then do please get in touch: womenshistorybham@gmail.com