Hello, my name’s Ella Lyttle, and I am a history student at Glasgow University. I am coming to the end of a short but sweet placement here at Glasgow Women’s Library. Three weeks with my head stuck in green boxes filled with documents that more-often-than-not have no rhyme or reason to their filing, the joy! But that’s what being an archivist is all about… or so I was told by my lovely team members when I expressed this confusion.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been looking through the Edinburgh Women’s Centre Archive, exploring a myriad of materials spanning more than 20 years from 1971 to 1992 – materials recording the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The Centre itself was in operation from the late 1970s until the early 80s. With room for 20 people, a small kitchen and at a cost of £8 a week, it functioned as a focal point for a number of feminist groups operating in Edinburgh at the time. Workshops were scheduled to discuss feminist theory or issues relevant to the Lothian area. The centre also acted as an information outlet on activities and discussions circulating within the wider Women’s Liberation Movement. Consequently, documents from around the world can be found within the archive, providing an invaluable insight into this pivotal era of feminism.
The thirteen boxes and hundreds of documents were certainly daunting at first. However, reading such emotive personal accounts, analysing the issues and feminist theory of the time (much of it still relevant today), and learning of the many and varied feminist activities that took place in the Lothian area, has been a fascinating process. With the general lack of research on Women’s Liberation within Scotland, this latter point is of particular importance. A plethora of issues are covered within the archive, providing a number of opportunities for further research. Though, as just one woman with only 100 hours to tackle it, I chose four I felt had particular relevance to Edinburgh Women’s Liberation groups, these are Reproductive Rights; Work and Employment; LGBT rights and Child Care.
So, this is the first of the blogs I’ll be writing on my time at GWL. See you in the next one where we’ll be looking at how the Edinburgh Abortion Campaign fought for women’s reproductive rights.
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