#084

Scary Little Girls

 Sally Jackson FiLiA volunteer in conversation with Becca Morden from Scary Little Girls 

greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk

Sally: I'm really pleased to be joined by Becca Morden from Scary Little Girls. We're going to talk a little bit about Scary Little Girls and about the Greenham Common exhibition and, because of that, we're in kind of a special place. Could you tell us a little bit about where we are today?

Becca: Well, we're in Butterfield Green, which is just round the corner from my house, and it's one of these amazing spaces of which there are quite a few around Newington Green and Stoke Newington in general, that were very run down and have been put back together and really made beautiful by the community.

Lots of different action groups and volunteer groups operate in this area and they just do these wonderful things or they suddenly go, let's have that back as a shared communal space that's beautiful and green and there's an orchard on this side of it, and it just means that families and dog walkers and locals gets to enjoy this lovely place just thanks to the kind people who live around here and thought it could all be better.

Sally: And that's proper community, isn't it, coming together?

Becca: Absolutely. Which, you know, a good bit of theatre should feel like that, I think and obviously it's hugely linked to kind of Greenham. 

Sally: And historical links to this area as well, as far as feminism goes. 

Becca: Oh yeah. All the radical dissenting types were all around here. We're about five minutes away from Newington Green, which is where Mary Wollstonecraft, who's one of the first radical feminists, big thinker, 18th century thinker, one of the first, probably the first female travel journalists. Amazing woman. She had her school for women, a big proponent of education for women. So yeah, I walk past big sign every day that says ‘birthplace of feminism’ chuffed and smug.  

Sally: A great way to start the day, isn't it? It's a good area. There's no surprise with that sort of inspiration then that you're involved in the work that you are. Can you tell us a little bit about Scary Little Girls? 

Becca: Yeah, sure. So we're a feminist theatre company and production hub. And we've been going for about 20 years actually, which makes me feel really old to say it. I like to kind of say, I think for about the last 12 years, I've been saying for about 15 years, so it's been going about 20 years and I founded it after drama school kind of actually in a slightly me too-ish way.

I was very badly sexually harassed and bullied at drama school along with every other woman in my group and any woman that came in contact with my group. It was an awful time and I'd had a really great time at University. A very left wing university where I was on women's committee and it's one of the few universities that still has its women's officer and stuff that, so it's really right on, really good.

So my two experiences basically, and my very strong desire, my love of stories, my strong desire to see more women in the arts, all came together as a Venn diagram and I started my own company.

 We are constituted to always employ more women than men. So like we have to always be structuring in backstage and on stage, you know, to be against the level to try be making a small difference again to level the playing field.

Sally: And that's great that it's on all levels as well. So what, whatever aspect of the arts, the technical, the backstage, the front stage. 

Becca: All of it. Yeah. So men are very, very lucky to get to work with us. Always have to be like super nice men. Cause as soon as you start to just think about it differently, there's so many wonderful for women to employ.

You kind of go, why wouldn't I just keep employing them? They're great. And then a very occasionally one guy will sort of sneak through the net and they're always like divine and very well trained. We're very, very lucky. And sort of our raison d’etre is to try to not compromise on message, but not compromise on quality either. We feel the standard of the art has to be really, really high. Especially if you have a political message. You can't really get away with it being shoddy or polemic because people are going to be looking at you with harsher eyes.

But equally, if you're going to make a very high class piece of art, you are also not necessarily making the world a better place or you're colluding with the way the world already is if you take the cheapest, easiest route, the sexist gag, the no diversity in your casting, the blah blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.

So we are trying to do both. 

I started off as a mainstream actor. I had an agent, I did telly, I did blah, blah. I went to a very high level drama school, which was horrible, as I mentioned, but it was very high end and I don't feel like anything I made at that time has left the world better than I found it.

And what I feel now is that at least I get to make work with lots of amazing people, mostly women. I don’t think that everything we do is perfect or high art or whatever. But I do feel like I stand by the effort and the quality of the people. And I feel like it's stuff that I'll look back on and go, okay, that made a difference. That was better. That's left the world better than we found it. 

Sally: I would imagine working in that way, on one level the production itself makes a difference to whoever comes to view it, but also it must have a positive effect on those involved in it.

Becca: We get a lot of fantastic feedback from who we work with and from audiences actually. Sometimes we do stuff that's, what I find sometimes is our work is quite hard to sell, but any audiences that come absolutely love it. And everyone who works with it loves it. And then sometimes I think that's just being in the arts though, sometimes you have an idea and think this is it, this is going to be so easy to make and then it is for a couple of years and then it just doesn't anymore.

And then you start off something else thinking this sounds great to me, but no one will come and see it. And it sells out.

 It's just really hard to know what audiences are going to do. what I do feel proud about with us is that once they're in the doors, I think we're very good at marrying up ethics and politics with joie de vivre making people kind of arrive and leave wanting to do something about it. Leave wanting more and wanting to do more. And I think that's quite important that that creates activists. That's the message of sort of like, in our revolution they will be dancing sort of thing. There's a big role for that in getting people to actually leave and imagine and know that a better world is possible and want to be part of creating that world.

That's kind of what I'm trying to do with our work.

Sally: And I think sometimes people need permission to take that next step, don't they? 

Becca:  Yeah. I think that's definitely a really good point. Yeah, definitely. Art can be fantastic for hitting you with all the most painful things. Getting you in touch with stuff that otherwise you might avoid, but it can also be a thing that creates change and makes you want to be a change maker. It makes you want to go, oh, I'd love to go to that party. I actually had a great time.

We used to tour this fantastic all female cabaret that we went all over, like very posh bits of Shropshire and things like that.

And we never said, this is a feminist cabaret, you're only going to see female comedians and when I say feminist, I mean there's not going to be any nudity either. Like you're going to listen to women all night being awesome cause no one would come to that, especially in like rural, touring sort of communities.

But because we didn't say that, we just sold it as comedy cabaret and music, all these people came who were staunchly of a different political agenda and they loved it and they got drunk and we had fun with them. And then they’d go ‘You’re all women aren't you? It was great.

Some stuff we do is much more overt, like the Greenham project that we'll talk about. But some stuff we do is just like, we're just going to do it. And afterwards you’ll work out it was all women and it was all feminism, and you loved it. So there's room for both in the arts, which is great, isn't it?

Sally: I understand as well with the work that you do, you take it to, to kind of non-traditional venues. So we're not talking about everything being put on in a theatre. 

Becca: No, you are right. We really like that a lot so again, once you start to think about diversity, I think it's a gift that keeps on giving in a way.

 I started with the idea of like, we started to try and articulate in our teams that I couldn't be, so when we were casting, we were like, so a good rule of thumb to try and explain what we were trying to do to people who are coming on board, like writers and directors who might work with us for the first time, we'd be like, so for example, we tried to make me, Becca, not the oldest or the fattest person in the room. So for an actress, I'm not particularly thin at all for, I'm quite big actress, like a big sized actress, but as a person in the world, I'm like a dress size below the average. So I'm not particularly big person in the world, but in the world of acting, that's huge.

So we tried to make this sort thing of like, I mean we made this up just for my 40th birthday, and now I'm 42. But again, it's very, very easy to go to mainstream theatre and see people who are much smaller than size 14 are much younger than 40 and not much of anything else. If you see any women in it at all, of course.

So you start with going, let's have more women in it. Then you start going more women who are different looking and then you start to go, well, different looking, I mean, I've really just started recently, the last few years to work with people who are very, very high end professional actors with disabilities, and I'm kicking myself all the years I missed out on their amazing art in my own work. But because I just didn't know, it hadn’t occurred to me, that this was a part and I didn't know how to work with them. And now like, well, shame on me. And now again, the art just evolves because it's got more lived experience in it. And that I think then rolls out into how you choose where you want to work and who you want to see you.

You grow up, you know, dreaming of poss drama school, then going into the RSC and blah, blah. And actually you will only be seen by a very, like a very specific type of person. But we would still be lovely to do it. Don't get me wrong, I’m still very up, for anything that might come my way like Queen Margaret. I feel like it's still yours if you want it. 

However, I think there is this thing of like, actually you start to get almost like a personal challenge of it. How will these people who I go to my local pub who are never going to see me, how are they ever going to see this?

Now that I know Ted, I know that he'd love this, but he just doesn't have the idea of it. He'll never come. So then you start to work on stuff that you can make. It doesn't need trap doors, doesn't, it doesn't even, lots of stuff we make. We’ve made big mid-scale tours that need everything and it's lovely. 

We've also got a whole body of work that doesn't need even lights or sound, but just turns up, is really packed with great performers, great writing, energy. And you can drop it into a library. You can drop it into a pub, you can drop it into a school.

 We do these whole things like living literature walks, which actually just use where you are as set. So Newington Green, we were just talking about, we hid performers all around there. All doing pieces that were either by Mary Wollstonecroft or sort of related to radical feminism. So someone doing a Maya Angelou piece, we had someone signing, using BSL sign, to put across some Mary Wollstonecroft, but all sorts of things that would, it was just lovely and some songs, some suffragette songs and all sorts, and people were on a, basically a treasure hunt to find those.

No sets, no costumes. It was just, here's these interesting places in this interesting place that you might not have been. And even if you know it really well, we're taking you to these places here you've never been before that aren't usually open to the public, and you're going to find these fantastic actors in there and it's going to be really nice.

Even the concept of theatre can be so prohibitive. It's so much owned by an elite class that, to deconstruct all of that and start with, while the building is weird, there are weird rules in a building. There's weird rules to sitting in an audience. How do we deconstruct all of that?

The way we started to relearn about it actually was being commissioned to do a lot of work in libraries in Cornwall. We did some really lovely projects that the Arts Council funded in Cornwall, where I'm from and where a lot of my work is based, about looking at how to use libraries as a touring network because there's very little money in Cornwell and there's very little venues. 

But every library is everywhere, and they're all accessible. They're all great. so you can have very diverse audiences in there. And we realised that as soon as you get an audience in the library, they behave completely differently. And they're really receptive in a way that people are not in a theatre, are kind of either on their best behaviour or they haven't come because the behaviour they're expected to have makes them uncomfortable or just doesn't make sense to them, or they're worried they're going to do something wrong.

No one thinks about that. If you go to your library or your pub, it's yours. And if someone else is there doing some art. They're kind of on your turf, and if they do it well, you fall in love with them. And it's great if they don't do it well, you go out to the bar and buy another drink, or you leave your library and go and read a book or whatever.

 I actually really like that and I think it does take a certain level of bravery as an actor, as an artist or a company coming in. But once you've tried it, you never want to look back because there's just permission given both ways, audience to performer.

I think we should all be trying to get into theatres and create again in theatres. We could be learning so much from playing in alternative spaces and also from playing alternative audiences who honestly, by and large are much more honest. Because they're not just doing the rules than going to the bar and going, well, I have to say I'm shocked and appalled or I'm very disappointed, or whatever, they're just going yes or no right in the moment. And it's lovely. It changes how you perform. It's very nice.

Sally: There's a huge integrity to it as well because it's very honest, isn't it? 

Becca: Well, I like to think so, obviously. I think it has really great lessons, but I also think there's the craft of theatre.

But there is like, there's techniques that you learn from playing big. The big strange space that is a traditional theatre. 

What I like is the idea of both. I like that no one gets stuck doing one. Our industry, the mainstream part of our industry is so snobby and cliquey, you know, oh, well you can't have this part cause really you are a singer dancer, but, but now you're a singer dancer we can't possibly put you in for this. Or, you only play villains. So, you know, just stupid stuff like that. 

It's like we've all got all these skills, actors and performers and everyone in the crowd, like the backstage, all the backstage team, the whole worlds of who makes stories. They work so hard and they make themselves better and stronger and they collaborate.

And I just think if you share a lot of experience, you get way better creative experience, both to work in and to watch. And for me, that goes across the board in terms of the kind of people you work with, the kind of spaces you play. It just makes everything more interesting. 

Sally: Absolutely. Can, can I talk to you a little bit about one of the projects that you had that just immediately made me think, Oh, I wanted to see that. I want to find out more. And it's called Wild Woman's Hour. So I know Jenny Murray's involved. 

Becca: No, although they were very nice and we phoned them about it. We tried to get them to just do a piece on it. 

Sally: We tried to get into FiLiA every year for some reason they’re just not coming out. 

Becca: Well, they are inundated. They are liberal. And so have their agenda of things that they know they can do, they still get in a lot of trouble for stuff they do, do.

It's very unfair, isn't it? We can dismiss them as liberals and then the people are like, Damn, damn harpy witches. But they have to plough a very middle course, I guess. But yeah, they were very supportive when we said we're doing this. So they said, you have permission to do it, and then they said people do, do versions of our show all over the world though, so we can’t make a show about you doing it. And I'm like, damn, not as visual as you thought. 

So yeah, Wild Women’s Hour is a lovely thing. It's a radio thing so we basically, it's quite old now. It's 10 years old at least. But in Cornwall there's one amazing, there were a few and there's only one. But it's an amazing women's rape crisis and domestic violence centre, and we worked with them and a local community radio station that has airwaves, which is really hard to get. They're devoted. They're not Ofcom and they have to work very hard. they're very, very, very good. They're really lovely and we worked together to create a package where women from the domestic violence centre could be trained as journalists. 

We got professional journalists down and we trained them in the whole thing, the editing process, the interview process, the presenting process, the digging out the stories, like everything, everything, everything. And they created their own version like we could at World Women's Hour, but they create their own monthly, hourly show it, it ran, it won awards from the European Social Forum and the BBC because it gave them a whole set of transferable skills and it also created some really lovely, very high level local programming. It was really nice. Yeah. And it ran for a few years, reliably every month. And then as people came and went, little packages sort of drop off and you think, oh, maybe that's it done now. And then suddenly someone will start up again and it's really lovely. 

So on and off it's still going. That's happiness. Yeah. Every time it's like, it's a bit like every time a woman needs it, it's there and they do a really good job of handing each other over the skills. So they train each other. They train new people when they come in as well.

So it was a really nice skills swap in terms of we facilitated them to become really good at this thing that we'd brought people down who could teach them. So it wasn't these people coming in and doing it well for them it was them then to do it and doing themselves. It's lovely. 

Sally: Clearly as well as the actual technical skills, self-esteem, self-confidence. 

Becca: Actually, that was a really big part of it. You're right. I mean, we took them to the awards ceremony when their shows won awards. You know, not just National Awards, the one that was given out by BBC that they won, but they also won one from the European Social Forum. So it was about like projects all over Europe. 

And these women that had been through like, I mean, a lot. The Centre has this fantastic poetry book by these same sorts of women called He Underestimated Me. And it just sums it up amazingly, the ways in which they've been brutally oppressed over a, some of them for a very long time, some of them by multiple abusers. And then to be stood there getting international awards. From, I'm going say, I mean, generous and say D-list celebrities, but from important people, that was really great. I was really proud to just have gone with them and seen that. That was really nice.

Sally: That's fabulous. So talking about fabulous women … 

Becca: Yes, that's my favourite thing to talk about. 

Sally: Let's go to Greenham, shall we? So one of the pieces that you do is this touring exhibition about the Greenham women. So tell us a little bit about that. 

Becca: Well, that comes out of a bigger project, so I'll start with that if that's okay and then come back to it. I'll sort of sandwich it because we've got stuff coming up as well around it. 

So, I was a Greenham baby. Visited as a child basically. My mum was a local CND activist, got arrested and stuff like that. She was very cool. And then she went to Greenham and she took me with her.

I have really great memories of things like embrace the base, like amazing, amazing stuff there with all women and my dad would make sandwiches for the crèche and look after the kids so my mum could do this stuff. And when you when you talk to Greenham women, they're either gay or they say, oh, I was married at the time. Of course I'm not with him now. And then you know that he didn't make the sandwiches or they say, oh! yes, he made a cup tea when you came in. He's just upstairs now. So the men that managed to stick in there were the ones that bloody just went, anything you want to do, darling, this seems amazing.

And not for me. Like, I won't have a walkie-talkie or Right. I'm not to be trusted. And they would make sandwiches and run the crèche. All that stuff and they would bring supplies and they were the great men. 

So basically there's obviously loads of stuff that I think is interesting about Greenham, and we could talk about that for hours.

But essentially it's a hugely successful piece of activism that radicalises a generation of women who then have children and radicalise them, or if they don't have children or as well as, or whichever, they also then become social workers, there were teachers, lawyers, barristers, nurses, doctors. There's a really high level of the kind of caring and progressive professions that they go into. So these women like change our society on a very fundamental level. 

I now speak to women younger than me. So anyone I speak to under 40 never heard of it. And I'm like, how come?  It’s still actually going on.

Lots of those women are still active, they're still in campaigns and they're still in life, how can we already not know they did this? This is the biggest female only activism since suffrage. How dare we as a culture not know about it? It's cultural robbery for women not to know that that sort of stuff is possible and to be constantly having to reinvent the wheel because we won't let them see their own presence, their own history.

Sally: It’s quite purposeful isn't it? How can you have so much happen and it not be talked about. It’s not on the curriculum  

Becca: Not only that it’s so smothered. Lots of women have come up to me since I'm doing this project who are students who have been studying politics and social change and doing all sorts of things. They're looking for this and they're saying, this wasn't even on our syllabus.

You're like, Well, how dare they? That was my closest to being a swear there. Sorry. How dare they? 

So, me and my wonderful, wonderful co-coordinator who's a fantastic one called Kate Kerrow, she's actually a fantastic playwright. we train together. She's a wonderful actor and now she's a fabulous player and novelist. She's just really, she's amazing, amazing writer. She runs an amazing online resource called the Heroine Collective. 

So, she and I got together with good friends, we were talking about it and we decided pitch this project (to funders) And the project was, we wanted to interview, I think we said originally, like 50 Greenham women, and then turn that into a pop-up exhibition and a website where they would be forever accessible. You could Google it and you would find it. 

But of course they put a shout out there. I mean, fantastic. The (funders) who we worked with closely in the Southwest, which is lovely. They’re brilliant and totally have supported it all the way through and funded it. So we got the funding thing, but actually when we put the shout out, like so many more women than we thought came forward.

And so we actually interviewed, I think there were over a hundred women now from all different backgrounds, all different walks, like all different ages. Some on their own, some in groups, some with parents and or, or children. Some women that lived there for years. You know, some women that just went once and then like carried Greenham home, you know, took it into their lives and never looked back.  Every single type of experience you could have had if you'd been there, we've got in our archive. 

Just last week I interviewed a barrister who put together their court cases and came up with the idea that it was self-defence because they were defending like it was so clever, we were all in danger and they had to be protected. They were doing something because it was a present danger to them and to everyone they cared about. So it was a self-defence argument and it allowed these huge show trials where they got people in to prove how dangerous every single level of making a weapon was. They got human rights lawyers from South Africa in to talk about the uranium workers. So like really clever. 

 So the project is basically about how having an archive for that, that lasts for ever. The more celebratory side and the more immediate side and the stuff I suppose that comes out more from me and Kate being creatives, is the pop-up exhibition. There's three other people that are involved in that, which is Christine Bradshaw, who's our fantastic photographer. There's Rachael Miles, who's our academic and artist who is working with us from the University of West England in Bristol. She's made the exhibition, designed and made it, she's great. And there's also Sarah Llewellyn, who's our sound designer. 

So the way the pop-up works is that it's hosted by usually one of us as a volunteer and a Greenham woman just there to chat to you all day.

And it really is just a little popup, but we've made it quite an intense, like immersive little thing. So you get table with Greenham woman and volunteer and some postcards and bits and pieces but also then you get this tent that you sit in and it's the tent itself is printed with archive.

I won't tell you too much about it because it's just a piece of art in itself and it's come from all the stuff that the women collated themselves, their own photographs, their own memories. There's stuff on there about women that were killed, like a woman that was killed and there was never any justice for it.

There's loads of celebratory stuff. There's loads of the actions, the date life of the camp. It's an amazing to just stand and look at. But then if you go inside, there's a piece of sound art on some headphones, which is beautifully made by Sarah Llewellyn and it's about 15 minutes long. Probably eight or nine voices, at the whole collection. There’s hours and hours of footage, but they are wonderful and she managed to make this arc that just gives you this amazing view of like the day to day stuff, the police interactions, the actions, the breaking into the base, the court cases, but also their sort of wisdom, their spirit, their opinions.

God, it's lovely and you can really hear how different all the women are and yet, how much they unified around their actions and how much they all collectively like gained from the experience, the solidarity and having your mind blown in the same way of suddenly living where there are no men and you only have to look after yourself and each other.

And what that change is like, this massive, almost impossible to fathom if you've never experienced it and most women never experience it. And it is really radical and it really changes how you then perceive everything else you're told to do. It makes you re-evaluate I think everything that you think you should or shouldn't do. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's been dropped from consciousness because it is hugely effective for women to go oh, I don't need to have any man's permission for anything. I can just do. I can just make a better world myself. This is great. Far too dangerous. 

Just dangerous enough. So, yeah, it fits perfectly for FiLiA. It's great. Perfect environment for it.

Sally: FiLiA is one of the places where the touring exhibition can be seen so anyone coming to the conference can see it - 

Becca: With the chance to talk to our Greenham women and to hang out with us and to look at the postcards and the portraits that Christine Bradshaw has that has gone all over the country doing for us of the women now.

And to look at being, enter the world of the tent. It's really nice. I think it'll be lovely. I'm really looking forward to it. 

Sally: You’ve just done Manchester, is that right? 

Becca: Yes, that’s right. We've got a really great website, but the moment, it's a holding page as we build it. But it's got the tour exhibition down the side of it, it is greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk if you look at that, that's got where we're going and some of the places we're going have got talks. So I know for example, that we're going to do a talk at the Greenham Common, one of the really great things about the Greenham peace movement is that they managed to get cruise missiles not to be held at the base. Pretty awesome. But then they just stayed on a load of them didn't leave. That was like only halfway through the camps history cause it's like 20 years. And the reason that they stayed was because they wanted the land to be given back as common land, which I just think is brilliant. So they basically succeeded. 

It is now common land again back from the back from the military. 

A whole other set of volunteers and very sweet people there have turned the command tower that was the centre of the hub of control from the military side, into a little museum. Which is hilarious. 

Half the locals love the Greenham women, half the them love the military. So it's just like a cafe for everyone. It's like a little museum space, like, and on the walls it's like, it's all painted a fairly neutral colour and on the walls there's like a quote from Commander so and so, so and so, and then ‘you can't kill the spirit’ by the Greenham women like all painted up on the same walls. It's hilarious. I really love it. I really love it. 

And I love the people that run it. They're a really lovely bunch. 

Anyway, they're having us for two days and we're going to do a talk there on the 6th of October that, probably several Greenham women and will join us for that.

There's quite a lot in the area. It's just, that'll be really nice when I think they come and see us for that. Come and see us at FiLiA. 

We're doing a lot in Cornwall because I'm down there and I've got a big base on that and there's a lot of peace activism and climate change activism down in Cornwall.

 They're not up yet. They're being finalised. There'll be a whole run of things in the Southwest so that's worth having a look at. But actually that all be in December.

I guess the next thing we're doing is we feel like this is just the beginning. So we are hoping that we can extend the exhibition dates. We're hoping we can program some live interactive stuff around that. So we want to commission some new art around it, we’re fundraising at the moment to get people like Jackie Fleming and Diane Goldie to make new responses to the work. 

 Actions around the pop-up so that Greenham women who are artists can come along and show their own work or so we can have singalongs. Cause song and music is a huge part of Greenham.

Lots of the Greenham women have said -  How can we all see each other again? How can we be able to give join and feel some of the spirit that we had in those campfires? So we're trying to make those, and we need money for that. We need money to sustain the existing exhibition.

We're going to also put in for lottery funding from the Heritage and the Arts Council probably to extend the exhibition and to do a really great job disseminating the archive. 

So I'm going to go back to the Heritage Lottery and say, oh, can you please give us more money so we can change, so we can now look at just the archive itself and make it into podcasts. Make it into a board game. I want to try and get somebody to try and make it into a, into a computer game. Our own avatar and you give her own buzz card and put her in whatever dungarees you want.

Sally: I want to play that game - 

Becca: I know, me too. So there's always ideas for stuff I want to do next.

And if anyone's listening and wants to help with anything, please come and help me. And what we really need immediately, because you've totally overspent apart of anything else, and we're now like slightly in dubious funds position we really need to get people to help us with our GoFundMe campaign.

It's all leading to big plug, sorry. 

Just Google Greenham Women GoFundMe, ours comes up on the GoFundMe site and we are just trying to make some money to basically to do those kind of live parts to get the women back in the room and get people interacting with them and to keep the conversation going and get the pop-up out further.

And just kind of building the momentum of getting that conversation to exist. and getting as many audiences in and getting as many young people in. So that conversation can never, ever be lost again. 

Sally: It’s so important we don't lose this history. 

Becca: Oh God. It's vital. Yeah. Because otherwise you would just basically men get to stand on the shoulders of giants and our giants are all there. They're deliberately hidden from us and this is a way we can go -  here are your giants climb on their shoulders, they're ready for you. They just want to see what you're going to do next. Fly my pretties. You know? 

Sally: I think for me it's, the importance of it is not, it's interesting, you learn something, but actually it inspires women to do something about it and we need that spirit back 

Becca: Absolutely. Yeah, we do. Absolutely. And women do it. Like, it's not like we don't, but if you can just bring all the powerful elements together, you can do more, can't you?

It's also really interesting, I think, because the law and the police and the state, they learned a ton from Greenham. They changed a lot of laws because of Greenham and they made it harder to do this stuff. And, and every time people make something harder you evolve and adapt and, and become better so that you can outsmart them when you need to.

And if we are not as activists sharing those amazing lessons that the Greenham women have got to give us, then we are just not evolving. And the police in the state are evolving instead. 

As we know, like as radical feminist, I believe that the institutions themselves are institutionally sexist. So I don't want the institutionally sexist institutions to get better at doing sexism. I want us all to get better at changing those things. Going back to the root, peacefully deconstructing the stuff that doesn't work and building the kind of really fantastic world that we know we actually all deserve and could live in full of fat, happy women. 

Sally: It sounds like a wonderful place to finish. Thank you so much, Becca