A spotlight on 'Spare Rib' magazine and Greenham Common.
When I sat down to write on the 1980s from the perspective of Glasgow Women’s Library I was looking for something that would help me to reflect on our own grassroots and activist history.
I wanted to acknowledge that as the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to the lives, histories and achievements of women, we are not only a depository for many inspiring stories but also an organisation rooted in and contributing our own courageous origin story: in Adele Patrick's words: 'an act of resistance to the masculinised culture of Glasgow in the mid-1980s'. The Women's Library grew out of an initiative called 'Women in Profile' set up in 1990, in the wake of Glasgow's successful bid for European City of Culture, by a group of female activists and artists, including current creative development manager Adele Patrick. They were determined to take this moment of directed international attention to show that Glasgow's cultural offer could be more than, in Patrick's words: 'stale, male and pale'.
I wondered how these ambitious and furious beginnings, in a moment where feminism itself was experiencing a backlash, could be related to histories of activism that had directly preceded it. What support mechanisms did this determined, unfunded group, set up in a small windowless basement in Garnethill, imagine they could draw from different moments in feminist history? Being here in the warm and welcoming future of those early dreams for a national resource, I wanted to think and know more about the voices of protest that speak through the library's unique archive, donated by an ever-expanding supporter base over its 28 years of collecting.
With these questions in mind I went to our handling collection, which contains many boxes of the now iconic and well-thumbed women's liberation magazine 'Spare Rib'. In keeping with our history of struggle and celebration this magazine, spanning the whole period of the 1980s and beyond in either direction, rumbles from cover to cover with protest and solidarity. Emerging from the underground press in 1973 the bold mission of 'Spare Rib' was, in the words of founding member Marsha Rowe, to create 'a new language for both image and word to establish women's changing identity'. This broad ambition carried the magazine through two decades until its last editions in 1993. Given this time-line 'Spare Rib' presented me with the opportunity to view the 1980s through a new and radical lens. It also offered a thread of connection between the National Library, who have a full run of 'Spare Rib' in their online journal archives, and our own idiosyncratic collection.
Like so much exploratory archival work I started to make my way through the 1980s editions of 'Spare Rib' with an open focus, looking for stories of women's protest culture to emerge. I was curious to see how the familiar, broad strokes of history at the time — from the UK — specific economic and social changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979 to the general backdrop of clashing ideologies played out on the international stage — would be represented by this outsider voice. To ask: how far are we now from those second wave feminist perspectives and from the social, economic and environmental challenges they were struggling with?
The magazine never appeared complacent in their representative politics
The 'Spare Rib' I found felt both of and ahead of its time. With inspirational political activists like Angela Davies gracing its cover pages in the 1970s 'Spare Rib' felt firmly intersectional and international in focus, with news articles on women's activism from all continents. This commitment to representing diverse perspectives meant that 'Spare Rib' did not shy away from controversial debates (articles in solidarity with Palestinian women sit side-by-side with calls to confront anti-Semitism) and was not afraid to voice ambivalence about the wider voices of feminism.
Arguably much of the feminist movement in the early 1980s was still to respond to calls for a consideration of the crossroad of barriers presented by race, class and sexuality in representation. Yet the presence of 'Spare Rib' in our archive seemed to give lie to the rigid categorisation of the feminist waves — which can too easily fall into progress narratives that see us moving out of a white, middle-class feminist dark age towards increasing diversity. I felt that the magazine was engaged in an ongoing struggle to scrutinise who spoke from its pages and fearless in publishing this struggle with difference. The magazine never appeared complacent in their representative politics but instead open to criticism and restlessly asserting diversity and inclusion as something that takes careful and continued attention. In this it seemed to evidence second wave feminist scholar D M Withers' assertion that delving into the archive reveals a rich and complex 'compost', adding depth to the easy simplifications delivered by the histories that accumulate on the surface. What this small section of our collection seemed to show was the complexity beneath the short hand we come to use — a whole ocean beneath the waves.
As I became immersed in this 'Spare Rib' ocean one particular campaign seemed to gather momentum as the years and issues progressed: Women's Peace Activism and the occupation of Greenham Common. From early coverage in 1981 'Spare Rib''s commitment to Greenham Common and peace activism is evidenced by the sheer volume of articles: with 36 reports and special focus pieces appearing in the years between 1982 and 1987. Interest seemed to peek peak in 1982 with Greenham making the pages in 10 out of its 12 editions that year and remaining steady so that by 1985 it was still possible to read about peace activism related to the camp in nine out of the 12 issues.
Beside 'Spare Rib' content Glasgow Women's Library has an interesting collection of materials relating to Greenham, including a fascinating unpublished memoir from the camp. I was interested in the light 'Spare Rib''s international and intersectional focus would shed on this important and long long-lived moment of protest. Our insider account of Greenham relates its beginnings in August 1981 with:
'A woman in mid-Wales who conceived of a plan for a woman-led walk from Cardiff to Greenham Common, staying in church halls on the way, and raising awareness of nuclear weapons which were planned for the USAF base there — land-based cruise-missiles. Originally there was no plan to stay for any length of time, just a demand for a public debate.'
The walk arrived of September 1981, and their demands were ignored, some of the women chained themselves to the main gate. Most of the walkers returned home, but others stayed on, forming the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp.
The memoir goes on to describe the writer's own entry point to the camp, asserting that no one woman could have a complete picture, yet in describing the 'gift' of a lasting feeling of 'personal and group empowerment' she echoed many other accounts of Greenham activism. It was this gift of empowerment over time that caught me, gleaned from a sense of urgency that I felt relates strongly to the environmental consciousness that is rising to meet our current climate crisis. If today movements like Extinction Rebellion see us as facing the end of the world, a precursor to the urgency of this green thinking can be seen in the peace movement.
In a book we have at the library; 'Greenham Common: Woman at the Wire', published in 1984, founding camp member Helen John relates a moment in a meeting 'seeing all those young people there whose futures were going to be damaged, trying desperately to do something to stop it. My generation had not really worked hard enough to prevent this happening'. Equally, another early participant, pensioner Barbara Doris reflected 'nothing else seemed worth doing while the threat of annihilation was so real'. Just as now, visionary activists from our own futures like Greta Thunberg point to the very real prospect of extinction so then, years of Cold War and experiential knowledge of nuclear disaster led activists to similar conclusions. With nothing less than extinction on the horizon people were inspired, as the book says, 'to look for new ways of making their political voices heard'.
Beyond these individual accounts of the move into activism 'Spare Rib' was also an early contributor to the debate, and helpful in joining the dots, between the specific issue raised by Greenham and larger environmental concerns. Ever a pacifist publication, set against military imperialism in its many forms, 'Spare Rib' had been doing groundwork on the nuclear issue even before Greenham activism started in earnest.
The February 1980 edition ran with a suitably glowing, pink cover and the headline: 'Nuclear power gets under your skin'. The detailed four-page article inside proved as expansive as the effects it was reporting. We are informed of health risks caused even by a normally functioning nuclear reactor (and given a detailed account of how such reactors function/malfunction) as well as the costs of accidents and the layers of damage caused by the disposal of nuclear waste, traveling to us through the ground, on the winds and in the oceans. For example through dumping in the Irish sea, considered 'the most radioactive sea in the world', nuclear waste enters the food chain, from lichen to fish of all breeds, where it is concentrated, contaminating human populations with radiation far from nuclear sites (all of which are located on a handy map of the UK).
In this way far-flung communities like the Inuit people of northern polar region are connected to the dangers of nuclear waste through the kind of ecological awareness reminiscent of Nan Shepard's first law of ecology: 'Everything is connected to everything else'. In a 'Spare Rib' article from the February 1980 issue, lines are drawn between plutonium, one of the by-products of nuclear power and military development with 'the world's first commercial nuclear power station, opened by the Queen in 1956 at Calder Hall in Cumbria intended primarily to supplement the production of plutonium for the British weapons programme'. With this insight it's easy to see how Thatcher-era involvement in the arms race would have encouraged huge levels of government investment and secrecy surrounding these sites.
'Spare Rib' analysis is keen to think about how this implicates a nationalised industry like nuclear power, tying it to a distinctly non-feminist organisational structure: a capital intensive hierarchy 'where a few men at the top make all the decisions', quoted from page 40 of the February 1980 article. In contrast, feminism is posited as something that advocates for empowered individual and local decision-making. Moving from a top-down system of command towards decentralisation and a radical rethinking of all forms of actual and symbolic power. They diagnose the current system as one out of harmony with the living world; working through extraction and exploitation. Instead of this, the writers suggest cooperation as a different relational mode. Appearing way ahead of the times, the article suggests that we design energy systems that work with rather than upon natural renewable forms like wind, sunlight and waves, adapting technologies to the specific localities and people where they are situated. These diversified, co-operatively developed forms of energy are envisioned as the perfect metaphors for feminist organising.
In later articles from the same year parallels are drawn between the discipline and structure of the nuclear family and that of the nuclear state. In a 'Spare Rib' editorial, collective members Lucy Whitman and Ruth Wallsgrove expand on this theme highlighting a division between the private life of the home, a realm defined through acts of care gendered as female, and public life where single-minded aggressive acts are validated. This division, also a hierarchy, with care at the bottom, is seen as underpinning the 'nuclear mentality'. 'Spare Rib' is keen to analyse all the places this division is perpetuated highlighting the ways we are sexed by war and imperialism as well as the ways these are interconnected.
This broad web of thinking on the nuclear issue continues into 1981 with coverage given to many women's disarmament groups from different UK locations including Clydebank, Cumbria and Suffolk. In November 1981 Greenham Common is one of the movements that joins this list, with its status as 'women-only' or 'women-led' still up for debate. Reading on the developing Greenham activism, first through this accumulation of 'Spare Rib' attention and then in the books and memoirs we have in the library, I was struck by just how well the activism, from blockades and occupations through to die-ins and other performance stunts, both brought to life and complicated these early 'Spare Rib' readings of the ideologies driving 1980s politics and culture. The many women who supported the camp were prepared to put their bodies on the line at the Commons anchoring the abstract thinking encouraged by years of Cold War propaganda into direct action, forcing the authorities to confront and engage with the movement for peace and capturing public imagination in the process.
One activist tactic was to harness exactly those homely associations that 'Spare Rib' cite as part of the division underpinning nuclear mentalities. For example, the 'embrace the base' action of December 1982 involved 30,000 women gathering around the perimeter fence of the base to link arms in what could be seen as an act of care. The action started with occupants at the camp writing 300 letters to spread the word and encourage people to join them in encircling the base. Amidst this huge feat of organisational prowess, enabling so many women to hear, travel and be supported in coming together to transform the 'negative and destructive purpose' symbolised by the perimeter fence with 'positive healing energy', individual women left parting messages on the fence, according to the book 'Greenham Common: Women at the Wire'. Some hung household items like baby clothes and family photos whilst others evoked amateur craft skills by weaving wool between the wire.
This evocation of the everyday became an ongoing tactic at the camp bleeding into informal chit-chat with police officers on the other side of the fence and adding dark humour by transforming protests into child-friendly teddy bear picnics. In this way the activists worked through the small and everyday. The evocation of ordinary life gained potency next to the threat of imminent death that both motivated and underpinned all of their actions. This ordinariness was also an entry point for many of the women into activism and helped gather sympathy for the cause with a broad range of people. Perhaps in line with this public sympathy, early press coverage often painted protestors as well-meaning but misguided. In this way Greenham protest tactics were disarming through sheer contrast to the silent all-encompassing menace of nuclear weapons they were confronting.
[The women] positioned themselves as carers for the natural world
The camp, organising itself into small hubs, named after rainbow colours, at each entry point to the base was a brightly coloured motley counterpoint to the dull and regimented military operation it surrounded. In various written accounts women confess to drawing energy not only from each other and the activism but from being so exposed to the elements. Through their non-violent stance they positioned themselves as carers for the natural world. Despite enduring the wet, cold and muddy conditions that came with that position the overwhelming message was that this different living arrangement, close to the elements, was mutually beneficial. In playing with life and death symbolism the activists appeared in direct opposition to the Prime Minister at the time who, in initiating a war in the Falklands, asserted:
'When you have spent half of your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment … it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.' (Margaret Thatcher, 14 May 1982)
Where Thatcher worked to separate issues, Greenham women were making threads of connection. They were tirelessly present at the military base with their camp fire and cooking equipment. And also ventured out at key moments, including President Reagan's state visit, when they organised a die-in outside the London stock exchange, shutting down transport routes in central London. Thirty years later with environmental activists employing similar techniques I was struck by how far we have come from Thatcher's understanding of the term crisis and yet how close we still are in our foreign policies and alliances. To Thatcher, entering political life meant abandoning the small complexities of home. The women at Greenham were keen to offer a shadow narrative and to remind everyone that she was still doing hosting work in welcoming American cruise missiles.
Considering the 'haunting domesticity' of these and other acts Alexandra Kokoli, a feminist scholar writing extensively on the intersection between art and activism, points out the tension between this symbolic embrace of 'the archetypical affinity between gentleness and nurturing' and emerging feminist analysis, not least in the pages of 'Spare Rib', which was deconstructing these same myths.
Certainly perhaps for this reason 'Spare Rib''s embrace of Greenham was tentative in places. So in an article in 1983 that compares two struggles, Northern Ireland and Greenham Common, the writers admit that the non-violent activism at Greenham, a kind of niceness that absorbs anger, is a cause for suspicion 'because we know such niceness conceals rather than confronts the power of the state' — from 'Spare Rib', August, 1983. Yet in other places 'Spare Rib' gathered critical mass around the issue by evoking the division of labour. In an article called 'Nursing the Bomb' in August 1986, the experiential knowledge of those embroiled in the everyday reality of dealing with the aftermath of war is drawn detailing medical campaigns, led by nurses, against nuclear weapons.
In a special peace edition in May 1984 'Spare Rib' raise another critical issue around Black women's participation in peace activism. Determined to offer multiple perspectives on Greenham 'inside and out' six reporters took to the streets to interview different women on their perceptions of the camp. They are honest in registering the lack of a working-class voice, or understanding of the camp, as well as of black voices. They speak to one Black woman who was involved who listed several pertinent issues her friends have raised. She is quoted on page 19 of the May 1984 edition:
'The main reason, I feel, is that black people have so many causes to fight for in this world in which we still exist, fighting against racism and sexism, fascism, imperialism, unemployment, poor housing, capitalism. To these causes Greenham does seem elitist, isolationist. Black women I feel support Greenham but cannot easily support Greenham outside the base now.'
In another article called 'A black woman in the peace woman' Amanda Hassan confirms that as one of the only Black women at 'embrace the base', she was subject to a different level of police violence than her white companions and felt frustrated that this racism wasn’t acknowledged. In speaking more widely about the peace movement she also voiced frustration that it did not reach out enough to ask her about her Guyanese roots and activism in the Working People's Alliance.
To me these specific criticisms are crucial and still applicable today. Is ecofeminism too essentialist to have wide appeal? Is the environmental movement damaged by the dominance of middle-class, white voices? I felt that 'Spare Rib' had done important work to raise these questions for me and that without dismissing them, or implying there isn't more work to, I also wanted to do some careful research beyond these surface impressions to look at where Greenham might have begun to find answers. In the same 'peace' edition from May 1984, authors of the magazine also offered a summary of press coverage on Greenham from a broad range of newspapers, including the conservative spectrum given handy labels: 'the pseudo objective Times, snobby Telegraph and absurdly reactionary Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express'. The article charts a movement in the right-wing papers that is telling. In the relatively early days of 'embrace the base' the 'Daily Mail' perceives the activists, perhaps in their homely associations, as respectable, making sacrifices for the sake of their children, and of no use to feminism. Yet as Greenham stubbornly persists its location outside of the home, in the mud, becomes more and more problematic.
Like a penny dropping it seems to become clear that there is something truly subversive in this relocation of the home, which is more and more uncomfortably out of place. So by August 1983 'The Sun' asserts 'they ought now to recognise a duty to the families they have left behind'. Gradually the camp begins to reimagine itself as women only reversing things by asking men to perform supporting roles and holding a mirror up the expected division of labour just as mirrors were held up to the base in acts of protest. The press response is to reassert the importance of 'domestic, marital or maternal ties' — quoted an article in 'The Daily Telegraph' from January 1983. As the women slip out of domesticity there is a metaphorical jump to associate the soil and dirt with loose morality, disease and disorder. The camp is described as everything ordinary people and democratic nations should be weary of. It is 'a grubby commune' 'squalid, disorganised and above all muddy'. Within all these associations lesbians are frequently referred to in shocked undertones, as if to imply as the 'Spare Rib' researcher Ruth Wallsgrove suggests on page 21 of the May 1984 issue, that 'no real woman would live there'.
This crossing over and between the proper divisions set up socially is nowhere better symbolised than in the Greenham women's engagement with the fence. Where they start by making a ring around it this apparent reinforcement is deceptive. Kokoli writes in her 2017 'Pre-emptive Mourning Against the Bomb' article in the 'Oxford Art Journal' the security fence was 'challenged, transformed, materially and affectively invested'. Echoing the sentiment expressed in on page 159 of 'Greenham Common: Woman at the Wire' that 'defencing is about the removing the barriers that divide us and therefore accommodate conflict', Kokoli writes:
'The artist-protesters at Greenham Common exploded the symbolism of the fences of Greenham Common by wrapping them into their knitted webs and tearing into them, as if they were made of yarn.'
As coverage of Greenham continues beyond these inside/outside perspectives 'Spare Rib' begins, like the camp itself, to return to a wider view. By 1986 Barbara Norden is writing in 'Spare Rib' on Greenham women's attendance at the Moscow Women's Peace Conference. Beyond unpicking tabloid controversy over the delegates being part of a larger Russian propaganda machine Norden writes, on page 45 of the September 1987 issue:
'Greenham has now made links with wider struggles, and is about changing the nature of society that gave rise to cruise … It is a vision of peace that makes links with many international struggles, particularly Black struggles.
This move is about Greenham showing the wider solidarity that Amanda Hassan asks for in her encounter with the peace movement. It's also about recognising that the threat of extinction is not new for many indigenous cultures facing imperialism. For example in February 1983 'Spare Rib' covers the plight of people in Diego Garcia, the largest of 60 small islands in the Indian Ocean. Quoting U S naval officer on the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean in shifting the global balance of power we see how the islands have become a tool in an abstract power play, with the inhabitants forced to move, their everyday lives wiped out as land is acquisitioned for nuclear testing and the ocean for waste disposal.
Years later in reflecting on her experiences as a peace activist, Jean Hutchison talks in 'Spare Rib' about her attendance in the Nuclear Free Pacific conference. Her story, published in January 1985, goes some way to expressing the difficulties in encountering difference. On page 21 it relates a sad start confronted with a Maori woman who asked 'What is this white woman doing in the Pacific? We've seen enough of white people in the Pacific'. By relating her experiences at Greenham she did not erase the differences between them but was able to make a bridge over the difficult ground of difference, so that by the end of the conference she had expressed solidarity and received an embrace from the previously hostile woman. Hutchinson writes 'I mean British people deserve to be treated in that way; white people have mucked up the Pacific — and I was very moved that the sort of power of what's happening to women was overcoming that.'
Thatcher's embrace of the Falkland's war was of an issue that could be won or lost — something black and white to gain election points over. The Greenham women were keen to stress that it is exactly this kind of simple dividing up and taking sides that allows conflict to thrive. This understanding leaves me with no easy measure for looking back now to try to define the camp in terms of its lasting successes and failures. In some ways Greenham was certainly a failure, unable to gain the hoped for televised debate or to stop the missiles arriving at the base. In many ways it embraced this failure even at the time, opening itself to ridicule through the persistent presentation of small and handmade symbols, knitting needles and origami cranes, which spoke a different language to the final and certain threats delivered by nuclear weapons. This cross purpose language, difficult to translate and often misunderstood, did achieve something though. It enabled the women to act in the face of a kind of terror that is still with us in different forms. What's more, between them the women were able to create a language that left them unscathed and surviving long after Thatcher had left the seat of power.
I like to think of this relentless survival next to the work of Rebecca Solnit, who in a book called 'Hope in the Dark', published in 2004, writes on the difficult-to-predict consequences and trails that can be triggered by single acts of defiance. In an article for 'The Guardian' in July 2016 she expresses some of this sentiment:
'The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant stays asleep.'
Solnit pulls a lot of hope from this ability to continue in the dark uncertainty of a present moment. It is the kind of hope that I have read in many of the women's stories from the Common. It is also there in descriptions of what they have since gone on to do as a result of the energy derived from playing a part in that protest. In Solnit's poetic language of light and dark in 'Hope in the Dark', she also mobilises the past in the face of future difficulties 'The past is set in daylight and it can become the torch that we carry into the night that is the future.'
As daylight streams through the windows onto the mezzanine at Glasgow Women's Library, populated by green boxes pulled out by many different readers, I'm thinking: what else from the past is here in the archive that could shine further light? As a space, the Women's Library is a very long way from the rain and mud evoked by descriptions of Greenham. On the other hand it is another kind of commons that has survived. In Greenham trees helped make campfires and alternative houses. They also, in a very real way, provide the material to create books and zines. Both Solnit and the Greenham activists seem to assert that for movements to grow they need light and soil as well as continued care and attention. I hope that in the Glasgow Women's Library and in the rich compost that is the archive we have all these things to offer.
Suggestions for further reading come from both the Glasgow Women's Library and the National Library of Scotland collections.