Dundee Women’s Festival 2011

Elaine with her daughter's copy of The Economist

GWL was at the Dundee Women’s Festival in March, organising workshops to complement our mobile exhibition “Between Future and Past”. At the Women’s History Bring and Tell workshops in the afternoon, Elaine told us about her admiration for her daughter, and Sheila brought some beautiful photographs of her mother as a young woman when she worked in the Dundee Jute Mills.

Sheila with pictures of her mother

Her mother started working there when she was 12, when some children went to school in the morning and then worked in the Jute Mills in the afternoon. We talked about how difficult life was for women then, how things have changed (or not!) and about some of the pressures facing young women today.

In the evening a showing of the F Word provoked some lively discussion. We asked the women what they would campaign for now and the new campaign “demands” included “Freedom for young girls – they don’t have to wear pink or play with Barbies”and “Freedom from stereotypes”. This was a great workshop and would have gone on much longer if the building hadn’t closed!

This entry was posted in Blog, National Lifelong Learning Blog and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

One Trackback

Post a Comment

Your email is kept private. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use some HTML tags and attributes.