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Welcome to the Women’s Liberation Music Archive! One year on from the launch of the site on May 1^st, 2011, we thought visitors might like an update on how the project is doing. If you haven’t visited the site previously, we hope you find it interesting.

Firstly, we’d like to say a big ‘thank you!’ to everyone who has made the development of the archive possible by sending material to the collection in the past year, or sent us much-appreciated comments. We’re happy to say the archive is gradually expanding with new and developing entries – please check out the ‘What’s new in the archive?’ page for details. We are grateful for all the feedback we’ve had and pleased that the archive has had thirty thousand visits from all around the world. The WLMA is now archived for preservation in the British Library’s special collection on women’s issues.

Publicity We’ve had some publicity for the archive this year – e.g., from the Guardian music critic, Alexis Petridis – and are happy to get more: if you would like to help with spreading the word, let us know – we can supply our flyers for your gigs, etc.

The WLMA has recently joined Twitter. We will use it to direct people to content in the blog, network and publicise events, so please consider following us @WLMA_1

Don’t forget you can advertise your gigs, music releases, etc, on our ‘Events’ page, which gets lots of visits.

Donating material and helping the site grow Our intention now is to carry on growing the project, to fill in existing gaps and create more entries. We also hope to widen our contacts to enable the archive to be more representative.

If you have digitised material you’d like to donate to the archive, do let us know. If you have something you would like to exhibit in the forthcoming Music & Liberation exhibition, please send this to Debi by July 2012. You can contact her at exhibition@hammeronpress.net

In March 2013 some of the material collected for the exhibition and the archive will be deposited in the Glasgow Women’s Library, so please do consider sending us physical artefacts for inclusion by January 2013.

Access for visually impaired people We regret that progress on improving access for visually impaired visitors to the site has progressed more slowly than we hoped. Due to lack of funds and technological expertise we began by using a free site, which, we discovered, was not amenable to widgets necessary for good access. We have made changes to the site such as changing the fonts to sans serif and adding descriptions of images in Alt Text for Screen Readers. We are working on better ways of providing access to the music tracks and plan to improve this further. We welcome people who have relevant expertise to get in touch if they can help with this and, as with other aspects of the site, any feedback and advice on this issue is always welcome.

Exhibition: Music & Liberation An exciting piece of news is that in January Debi heard that her application for Heritage Lottery Funding has been successful. The funds will be spent on making a touring exhibition, Music and Liberation, which draws on the histories in the WLMA. The exhibition will tour the UK later this year at these venues: Butetown History & Arts Centre, Cardiff 9 – 25 September 2012; Bureau Gallery, Manchester, 27 September – 25 October 2012; Glasgow Women’s Library, 29 October – 26 November 2012; Space Station Sixty-Five, London 30 Nov – 13 Jan 2013.

The HLF grant will pay for the high quality digitisation of audio and audio-visual material, including live performances, studio recordings, practices and TV appearances of Women’s Liberation music makers. A CD album of music included in Music & Liberation will be produced, and ten new oral histories collected. The music, films and oral histories will be available to watch and listen to at the exhibition. Ephemera and artefacts such as posters, songbooks, t-shirts, instruments and fliers will also be displayed. There will be a number of events that will take place as part of the exhibition, so we will keep you posted! If you live near Cardiff, Manchester, Glasgow or London and want to take part, please get in touch. So far Debi has recorded oral histories with Jam Today 3, the York Street Band, Maggie Nicols, Deirdre Cartwright, Barbara Stretch, Caroline Gilfillan, Angie Libman, Jana Runnals, Alison Rayner and Ruth Novaczek. Excerpts from the interviews will be placed in the archive site so please keep checking back to hear people’s stories and see what new material has been added.

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Thanks for visiting – do get in touch with us with your ideas, information and feedback! Email us at wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com

A huge ‘Thank You!’ to everyone who has kindly contributed material and given us permission to reproduce their work ~ thank you all for your generosity.

We hope this site will be a useful and interesting resource. We have promises of more material to come and are looking forward to that. This is an open-ended project and we will continue to add material as and when we receive it – so if you haven’t yet sent us info but would like to, no problem! The archive has always been seen as a work-in-progress and once the process of networking, gathering material and mapping women’s music during the 1970s and 80s began, we realized how much there is to document, and that this is – hopefully – just the beginning!

How to navigate your way around the site: information about bands, musicians and musical projects is gathered under names listed alphabetically on the A – Z pages above. You will also see, on the right of the screen, under the heading ‘blogroll’, a list of relevant websites about women’s ongoing music-making, feminist activism and other archiving projects, enabling you to follow up information found in the main pages. The ‘search’ field will direct you to all pages featuring the object of your search. You can read more about the project’s aims and scope on the ‘About the archive’ page.

As you will see, there is quite a lot of info on some musicians, bands and projects and little or none for others. Please help the archive to grow and to fill the gaps! Feel free to leave a comment on the blog. All support in achieving the aim of creating an archive which will be as comprehensive and inclusive as possible is much appreciated. We welcome personal stories, photos, anecdotes, memorabilia – and, especially, of course, audio/visual material.

We will post regular updates here on the home page to let you know about new material as it’s added. Please contact us for any further info, to provide feedback and to send us material you feel should be included.

Many thanks again to everyone who has encouraged and enabled this project to get underway.

‘Women have always been told to look nice, work behind the scenes and shut up. Quite rightly, women have disobeyed. We’ve grouped together, created music, written lyrics, sung, recorded, performed, organised and showcased our talent in our own way for as long as we have existed – which is forever. Our music is political because our visibility is political, our strength is political and our unity is political. Official records have written it out of history. Music mags, radio shows, Best Of lists, festivals, popular history, newspapers and many awards shows have ignored or marginalised the enormous contribution women and feminism have made to music at all levels and in all genres in one massive act of erasure. The truth is that feminism has changed the world and is changing the world. The Women’s Liberation Music Archive celebrates and restores its rightful place in culture. And it’s freaking cool.’ ~ Bidisha

‘This is an invaluable record of how, in the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement,  the message was in the music as much as in the spoken and written word.‘~ Sheila Rowbotham

 THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MUSIC ARCHIVE

Feminist music-making from the 1970s and 80s

Press release for 1^st May, 2011

 An exciting new online resource is launched today: the Women’s Liberation Movement Music Archive, at https://womensliberationmusicarchive.wordpress.com

This project documents the bands, musicians and musical projects that were part of, or influenced by, the great burgeoning of cultural creativity generated by the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1970s and 80s.

During this era, women’s music, film and theatre groups, visual art, literature, performance art, street theatre and other activities proliferated, fusing artistic activities with politics to develop and express feminist ideas. Feminist bands and musicians were not solely about providing great entertainment but embodied a world-changing commitment to putting politics into practice and advancing women’s rights. Challenging sexism and stereotyped gender roles, their lyrics and style reflected the values of the WLM. They were a vital and integral part of the movement, yet are often omitted from or marginalised by the media and historical accounts. Many operated outside the commercial mainstream or alternative circuits – or indeed were oppositional to them – and are not widely known about. Most were self-funded, grassroots groups who worked on a shoestring and many were unable to create lasting material.

Concerned that this part of women’s history is at risk of being lost, Archive Co-ordinators Dr Deborah Withers and Frankie Green believe the achievements of these music-makers should be mapped and celebrated. This work-in-progress collection comprises testimonies and interviews, discographies, gigographies and memorabilia including photographs, videos, recordings, flyers, press clippings and posters, plus links to ongoing women’s music-making and feminist activism. The project is an independent, voluntary and (as yet) unfunded venture. Funding possibilities and a safe eventual home for the physical archive are being investigated.

All women who were involved in women’s music – as solo artists, in bands, as DJs, MCs, in distribution networks, recording studios, photographers, journalists, events organisers, etc – are invited to contact and contribute to the project.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com

An exciting new project is about to be launched: the Women’s Liberation Movement Music Archive. Gathering together information about the women musicians, feminist bands and related projects of the 1970s and 80s in the UK and Ireland, an online resource will document this important history through memorabilia including photos, posters, videos, recordings, discographies, gigographies, lyrics and musical scores, press clippings, reminiscences and interviews.

Are you a woman who was involved in any way in the bands or musical projects which flourished at that time? Were you an instrumentalist, singer, sound technician, DJ, recording engineer, roady? Did you run a distribution network or organise or write about or photograph events? Did you dance in the celebratory circles at women’s events as an audience member, or go to the skill-sharing workshops run at conferences, youth clubs and schools encouraging women and girls to play music? We want to make visible the activism and achievements of this time and ensure they’re not written out of history. If you would like to share your memories of that time when women’s creativity fused art with politics, and entertainment with protest, all in the cause of feminism – or you know a woman who does – the archive wants to hear from you!

Please contact us: Frankie Green and Deborah Withers at wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com