What are the 21 Revolutions?

The women of the Second Wave had stolen all the best titles… Spare Rib, Heresies, Off Our Backs, Trouble and Strife, Herstories. And how do you encapsulate the two decades and the fast approaching 21st birthday of the sole women’s library in Scotland and hope, at the same time, to capture the work of 21 diverse women writers and poets and an equally varied group of 21 visual artists? Oh, and the programme’s connection to the collections, from dime novels to DVDs, t-shirts to feminist art journals…

One early submission to the then unnamed programme, a poem by Vicki Feaver, focussed on the first wave suffragette pocketwatch from our archive with its beguiling reversed declamation ‘Vote for Women’. Feaver’s poem relates the passage of time, the literal revolutions of the clock face to the inexorable breaking down of barriers to women’s rights by feminists. The Library team, in reflective mode as we approached the 21st anniversary was moved to consider each year as a revolution closer to achieving its own vision, to create a home worthy of all of Scotland’s women and their documented  histories. Finally, as more works arrived, we could see each as a revolt of sorts to the, small but significant celebratory statements of the creative and cultural strengths of women.

So – 21 Revolutions: a grand claim but a proud one.