Sally Jackson from FiLiA meets: Some of the volunteers.

I’m Sally Jackson, one of the volunteers at FiLiA, and I'm really pleased to be here at the Working Class Movement Library, to chat with some of the volunteers about the work that you're involved in and how that's going to work alongside us with the FiLiA conference later this year. So if we can start off just going around the room, seeing who's here from the volunteers, can I start with you?

Sally (Volunteer): My name is Sally. I started volunteering here about five years ago when I came up doing my PhD, which was a collaborative project between the library and the university. 

Ken: I’m Ken I think I've been volunteering here for about eight or nine years. I used to do a lot of cataloguing, but now I'm in the exhibition team. So I have little time for anything else. 

Neil:I’m Neal, I’m married to Sally and I trotted along behind her when she came here and she came over here to do work here and I became peripherally involved, first of all, putting a lock on the door. And then I was asked to do some photography. And since then I've been drawn into this business, the exhibition business. I'm totally unqualified for it, having no background in history whatsoever, but I muck along.

Chris: I’m Chris I was a civil servant for many years, took early retirement and did what I actually wanted to do when I was 19 a degree with the Open University in History.  Just after I finished that, about 12 years ago, I got involved with this place. They've not been able to get rid of me since. 

Sally Jackson That's the funny thing about volunteering isn't it? 

Could you tell me a little bit about how it actually came about how it started? 

Ken: Well, it began with the Frau’s, Ruth and Eddie Frau, who, I mean, you could probably remember the dates Chris, but Ruth died more than 10 years ago, she was in her 90s. Eddie died a few years before that. 

They started collecting books just as a hobby, they were keen on collecting books and they were both keen on collecting books about working class history, which they realised had not really been covered much by historians.

Gradually their collection grew and grew became enormous and they were forced out of their house because it was full of books and Salford City Council eventually made this building, which used to be a nurse’s home, available for them to keep that library in. And that's how the Working Class Movement library got started.

Sally (Volunteer):  When they have just a box in their own house, they used to open the house up to anybody who wanted to go. So if you're a student at any of the local universities, you could just go and have a look at what they had got. And the spread was from books to documents, to posters, to banners. 

Ken: Things were given to them. Sometimes they didn't want things, but people gave them all sorts of artefacts. And so the building is full of those as well. Although Ruth said, this is a library it’s supposed to be books, but it's got lots of other stuff in it as well. 

Sally (Volunteer):  From what you're saying, their ethos was very much around sharing that learning and getting that working class history out because it's not always the first history that we read about, it's normally completely suppressed. 

They were friends with the Eddie Thompson and Dorothy Thompson as well, who were very much on the same lines, Dorothy did a lot of work on charters as well.

Ken: I think one thing they were aware of was that the materials about working class history, people didn't know it was available and that's why they collected it. Historians had often overlooked it because they didn't know there was this wealth of material there. They didn't have diaries and letters so much as they have with other people.

Sally Jackson: But some of the things we've been really lucky to be able to have a look around and the richness of some of the sources that you have. I was taken, for instance, around some of the hand written newsletters that have obviously then been run off and copied. I think there's a real connection when you see someone's handwriting rather than a printed page about the effort that individual people have put into it. 

Sally (Volunteer): When cleaning out granny's attic, the pieces of paper are thrown away and the book club books, thousands, are kept, the strike papers, pamphlets -

Ken: It's often people coming to the door with cardboard boxes, you know, grandad's died and I thought this might interest you and a lot of it, is not necessarily relevant, but very often there’s the hidden things hidden in it are real gems. 

Sally (Volunteer): And usually the things that they didn’t think would be useful. 

Sally Jackson: That in some ways is a call out for people to have a little look in them often see what is there.

Ken: One of the speakers here said never throw anything away.

Sally Jackson: And we talked a little bit about how working classes have been hidden from our physical histories, but even within that, sometimes women have been hidden within the working class. So what are some of those things, do you think that people may not be aware of about the role the women have played in working class history or that particularly come to life for you? 

Chris: Well, how much they were involved and how much had been written out even within the trade union movement and the socialist movement. They do tend to be written out. And there does tend to even amongst those people that agreed with equality in principle, all white men sitting in a room deciding what sort of equality and they make the rules.

 And if you should look at events like Peterloo. Everyone knows that Henry Hunt was going to be the speaker, but how many people know that Mary Fildes was going to be speaking as well? She was in the female suffrage movement and I think that they were supporting male suffrage. 

Ken: I think one of the problems is possibly that, a lot of the leaders and activists were women, but in a society where the women couldn't hold many official positions, they weren't judges or lawyers, they weren't MPs. although many of the male activists didn't have official positions like that, it tends to be through those channels, through official channels that historians take note of that, but they don't tend to notice so much. Women got up and spoke. They led marches. They took part in marches, but there weren't individual names known who were then recorded in some sort of official journal.

And I think that's one way in which women have been side-lined in history, although they were actually there and very active. 

Sally (Volunteer): So, absolutely. So it's not that they weren't part of it. 

Ken: It's just that it wasn't recorded so well. 

Sally (Volunteer): Yeah. And I sometimes were just denigrated for what they were doing strikes and things like that, there were women on the picket line or, you know, fighting with the police or whatever it was, you know. 

Ken: Even within the women's movement, suffrage and suffragette it was the middle-class women that had names.

And there's a difference between suffragists and suffragettes and this myth that goes around that it was a reward for working in the first world war when almost all the people working for the first world war, the women working, were excluded from the franchise because either they were under 30 or didn't meet the prominent qualification.

So this middle class myth has gone on, especially around the Pankhursts that the suffragist movement has sort of been a written out, 

Sally (Volunteer): There was suffrage movement in Manchester, 1866. Lydia Becker started the Manchester Women's Suffrage Committee, which was the first women suffrage organisation. The Pankhursts came along much, much later than that and just started to get more publicity for it. Not in the way that a lot of women approved of. 

Sally Jackson: There's been a lot of talk around the Pankhursts and everything that was achieved by that as if it was one movement. And again, I think it's really important that you say this movement started prior to that, but also continued with working class women being involved.  What were some of the things going on that the working class women would have been involved in at that time?

 Ken: Well, there were marches and meetings going on all the time. The suffragists were promoting those.

Sally (Volunteer): But there were working women as well in loads of other directions weren't that they were trying to get them into unions. A lot of them were trying to get mother and baby clinics started and things like that.

They had a much wider range of demands for women than the suffragettes had, although maybe the Pankhursts initially were included in that kind of that direction. They diverged, went more into the middle-class campaigning.

Chris: Once middle-class women got the vote, they didn't campaign after 1918 for all women together. And I think also the class element shouldn't be forgotten, especially the history of the law of property ownership and women not being allowed to own their property. And it goes to their husbands and the wages, even for working class women, being the property of their husbands.

So you have elite white men writing a law that says that a woman has to give everything to her husband when he married her, because she's no longer a person in her own right. She's an appendage, you know, part of his property. And I think that sort of gets written out when people are talking about women campaigning for the vote, because it's so much deeper and it's so much rooted in society that wealth that equates to power and traditionally property was your wealth. And if you're not allowed any property, you can't have any wealth because wealth is linked to power still unfortunately, then women were written out on multiple levels not just having a vote. 

Sally Jackson: And it sounds to me as well, that some of the things that are priorities for the working class women were the practical needs, you know, improving the everyday lives of women, as well as the voting, the mothers and babies 

Chris: Yeah. I mean, if you watch your children going hungry, dying, no clean water, no sanitation. It put things in perspective more than whether you can vote for an elite white man, every time the general election comes round. 

So I think it has to be so much deeper than that. And also the is written out that the working class men, the majority in the trenches didn't have the vote until 1918. That's sort of written out as though we didn't really count because you know, everyone celebrates middle-class women getting the vote. They write out the fact that in the first world war working-class men were conscripted, forced by the state to go to war, but had no say in choosing the government that chose whether there was a war or not.

So I think the class thing tends to be suppressed. 

Sally Jackson: And I think as well, nowadays, we tend not to talk so much about class. It's almost an illusion that we, you know, however many years ago that Cameron said about the classless society. And of course the reality of everybody's lives may not reflect that.

Chris: We all went to Eton or Oxford didn’t we!  But yes, different lives, different ones, different worlds. 

Sally Jackson: So, that brings us on really nicely to an exhibition that I know that you're planning, that we're really pleased is actually been opened at the time of the conference. People get an opportunity to pop in particularly around suffrage, can you tell us a little bit about what that's about and what people can expect to see? 

Chris:  It’s called Votes for Women, or just for ladies or just ladies, just to emphasise the fact that it's not the anniversary of women getting the vote it’s the anniversary of middle-class women getting the vote. 

Ken: I find the issue about class in relation to the suffragists suffragette movement very interesting, but confusing because it's become quite obvious to us that for titled ladies who are involved and I'm using the word ladies there because it was off the time. At the same time, lots of working class women in the north of England and elsewhere we're campaigning, but the suffragists and suffragettes don't divide on class lines. 

One of the great leaders of the suffragists was Charlotte Despard and her husband, no her brother was it Sir John French, chief of staff in the first world war, she was a peace campaigner as well, ironically, but another was Millicent Fawcett. These women were wealthy and some were titled. And if you look at the number of suffragist organisations and suffragette organisations, there were lots of women from all classes of society. And I think that the division was not real. I don't think the division was along class lines. I think what is forgotten is that a lot of the suffragists supporters were working women especially around the Northwest of England. And they were very important.

 Chris:  And they couldn’t just take time off work, to go protest or to go to jail. 

Ken: That's one of the things I've found very interesting about looking at the suffragists and the suffragettes, not just the different levels of society involved, they went right through, you know, the MPs wives campaigned as well for women's suffrage as well as some of their husbands.

But also lots of men were campaigning and there were men standing for parliament on the suffragist tickets, they were campaigning. They were standing for parliament purely in order to get votes for women. And there were writers and academics and members of the armed forces. These men were also campaigning. And that again, that's been forgotten. And it’s been really interesting to uncover all that information. 

Chris:  Somehow the entrenched misogyny isn't really that unexpected. You don't have to be satirical writing about it. You just need to quote them.

They are so condemned with what comes out of their mouth. I mean, you've got some lovely quotes. 

Neil: Yeah. Would a woman that being of such short sight whose mind is always so taken up with whatever instances that lie nearest to her, be capable of framing anything pass muster as a great generalisation.

This is a guy called Sir Almroth Wright.  You probably haven't heard of, he wrote a very influential book called The Unexpurgated Case Against Women's Suffrage. Some things he said border on the obscene, he really does imply that women have physical disability, which affects their mentality. So they're not able to engage with really serious problems. And hence can’t qualify to rule the country or to engage in high-level politics. It’s extraordinary.

Chris: Victoria was ruling the country and she disapproved of it.  

Sally (Volunteer): It’s amazing how Queen Victoria is seen as competent and capable, but no other woman because of their femininity and this idea that it was sexual frustration. 

Ken: Some male politicians did patronize Queen Victoria, Palmerstone, Gladstone. Disraeli patronised her massively, he said all she needed was flattery. 

Sally Jackson: So I'm just reflecting that comments like that quote at the time were not necessarily considered to be unexpected. 

Ken: Some women did actually take the same view. They were afraid that women's character would somehow be altered. You know, they thought women should be caring, compassionate, gentle and so on and that this would disappear because they'd be involved in the harsh realities of politics and so on. And so they would stop being women in this idealised view of what a woman is. 

Sally (Volunteer): And this idea that they were very properly represented by their husbands. You know, as if you could say nowadays, you know, blue eyed people can't have a vote they’re presented by brown-eyed people.

Or people of certain religions shouldn't vote because the people of whatever religion we approve of can represent their ideas. To us it seems absolutely bizarre, but then it was thought normal at the time. 

Sally Jackson: And, sadly here we are in the 21st century still with some decisions for instance, around women's reproductive rights being made by a group of men. So we haven't moved that far in some ways.

Neil:The quote was actually from a very eminent immunologist in fact he is celebrated today by the British medical association as one of the greats. But his ideas on women were extraordinary, he had no idea really how the physiology of women’s, minds and bodies were related. Nothing at all.

Ken: Perhaps he didn't ask them properly, didn't ask for their opinion.

Neil:He thought spinsters intellectually limited because they're sexually frustrated, these ideas were accepted, widely. 

Chris: Especially if it's a medical doctorate or that gave him great credibility. 

Sally Jackson: Thinking back to the exhibition and one of the things that struck me when I was here before is there's also very much the nature of a celebration of the women that were involved in the shouting about those stories that may have not been. 

Chris: It's more than the Pankhursts and, um, wanting to promote the Sylvia Pankhurst and what she did because she worked with working class people in the east that women in the east end, she's sort of written out, you know, her politics nowadays wouldn't be fashionable and the mainstream write out any one on the left, working with working class, whereas Christabel and Emily, it's all focused on them. Middle class women, middle-class vote. And so in the exhibition, I think we've got a whole board on Sylvia. 

Ken: Yes, indeed. I think one of the points of course, is that the suffragettes, Emily Pankhurst and Christabel Pankhurst and the rest were absolutely brilliant at publicity.

They could seize the headlines all the time and being militant, breaking windows and attacking pictures in art galleries not necessarily physically attacking, but harassing the prime minister as he walked up the street. I mean, this was bound to get them into the papers and this is what's remembered.

I think that they're brilliant publicity. They had all sorts of stunts and some of them were incredibly clever, but the fact is that they grabbed the headlines then and they've held on to it ever since. So that now, you know, if a TV documentary looks at the suffragettes, it's always the Pankhursts because they were so marvellous at promoting themselves on their cause which is good.

Sally (Volunteer): Always suffragettes, never the suffragists.

Ken:  But it leaves open the question now, how was it, how in the end how did women's suffrage succeed? How did the campaign succeed? And it's not absolutely certain that it was the militants with all their publicity seeking who finally swung it in the end.  I don't know whether we'll be absolutely certain how.. 

Sally (Volunteer): Some MPs actually voted or delayed the women's suffrage because of the Pankhursts.

Chris: There’s also the other argument that they only got the vote after the war, because they didn't want to return to the to the arson and to the destruction of property, property is so much more important than people that there was before the war. So there's both arguments and there's no way of knowing.

Ken:  I think in the end, actually, I'm inclined to the view that the reason why the Act was passed in the end was because the main parties in parliament thought it was to their electoral benefit. That’s usually the reason for electoral reform. There'll be more votes for us in this. 

Neil:  I think that motivation in opposing the franchise was because they saw the franchise was, what 8 million women on the electoral roll with no certainty at all that they were going to support the liberals. 

Chris: Yes, but they're quite happy to change their mind as political expediency calls, it’s not a principled position. 

Neil:  Churchill, particularly fascinated throughout those 20 years, depending whether Clementine had a go at him, in which case he became a suffrage supporter, 

Chris: Or whether he was harassed on the street in which case they were terrible people. 

Ken:  Most of it, the quotation I found about him, he was complaining about how he’s been treated personally at meetings by suffragettes and I'm never going to vote for them. I'll never give them the vote because of that, because of their behaviour, a bit like a school teacher.

Sally Jackson: What other things might people be interested inthat's happening here at the library?  

 Sally (Volunteer): There's the autumn programme of talks as always the Invisible History talks and there's various events and there's a Women's Conference going on. Chris has just got the leaflet 

There's a talk on the more than just the Pankhursts, the wider suffrage movement.

We've got loads of these whole packages leaflets here on the website and see what’s going on.

Neil:  There's a huge amount of work goes on here by volunteers. We're just a tiny section of the volunteers. Most of the volunteers involved in running the mechanics of the library, cataloguing classification, beavering away in various rooms. We rarely see them unless they come down for a cup of tea. It seems to me an extraordinary boring life, but is actually very enjoyable because the books are so interesting. I've done it myself. You end up with one book in half a day. You could have done 15 books and you've only done two because you started reading the book.

Sally Jackson: When I was here last time, you look around and I have this picture of the stairs. There's a woman sitting at the table, absolutely engrossed in a book. And it was just such a beautiful picture and kind of summed up what was available. You pick up something and it would just capture your imagination, before you notice it would be hours later.

Chris:  It’s the tangents, you know, you're looking at something and if you talk to Alan, the semi-retired librarian, particularly and he’ll say if you want that there’s this, this, this, this, and this. 

When I first came here. You are around the kitchen table with the other volunteers, for whom the people you read about on the shelves was someone whose lap they sat on where they were young, you know, and always had sweets in that pocket. So, and that sort of thing, and they've become much more people, not just figureheads. 

The Arts Humanities Research Council applied for funding as a joint project. And I was the third of three doing it. The first one did Shelly. And the second one was the influence of teachers within the communist party.

So there's collaborative work and people come here from all sorts of other organisations to use the resources here. And we're talking about perhaps more students coming over in the future. 

In the book over there is a comment from someone from Italy. Last week, we had an American, a few weeks ago we had a Japanese. We get quite a few Swedish people. The Americans come up always interest in Thomas Payne. Yeah. But they always want to go and see the civil rights and all of the, the banned letters going back and forth and Payne and all the English people that come in it's for The Rights of Man

When I was going to say, when you get students come across and you get out the banned copies of the letters, and you sort of say it was the blog post for the day and they say - Oh, I get it now. 

There’s the radical readers, very popular.

Supported by Maxine Peak our trustee, very practically involved. And Christopher Ecclestone.

 Ken:  There was a particular counsellor who said, you said it wasn't a proper library because it wasn’t a lending library. 

She was interviewed on radio or television for something entirely different, but she got, she managed to get that in.

She managed to get Sheila Hancock involved as well.

Sally Jackson: Yeah, thanks so much for your time this morning, it's been really interesting to chat to you and I hope it really encourages a lot more people to come and visit you when they are up here. Or I can't believe there are local people that don't come and visit, but unfortunately, sometimes you don't even know what's on your doorstep.

So it's such a marvellous resource and we're so pleased also to be working with you with the conference and having you involved in that. So thank you.