Feminist Webs

Large collection of material created as a resource for practitioners, volunteers and young women involved in youth and community work with young women, parts of which directly relate to or were created by Feminist Webs, whilst other parts pre-date the groups formation.

The range of content within the collection is exhaustive, with activism, culture, difference and the exploration of difference, discrimination, consent, motherhood, politics, safety, women’s rights. Identity, migration and asylum, race, feminism, gender and sexuality, health and well-being, faith, religion and spirituality and many others issues represented.

The scope of collection is equally varied, and includes educational resources, training materials, campaign materials, promotional ephemera such as flyers, posters and leaflets. There are also a large number of publications on the same subjects as outlined above, many from the 1980s-1990s; several PhD theses and other academic articles; several runs of magazines, with titles such as ‘Working With Girls’, ‘Women Worker’s Bulletin’, ‘Spare Rib’, ‘Everywoman’, ‘Scarlet Woman’ and ‘Wedge’, as well as a a good number of single issues of other titles, some published on a local level.

Geographically, the focus of the material is in Feminist Webs home of the north west of England, with Manchester and Wigan particularly represented, though there is also a good deal of material from other areas of Britain as well as overseas, with the latter well represented in the publications. There is also material from the 4th World Conference of Women held in Beijing in 1985.

A quantity of material relating to the peace camps at Greenham Common airbase is also present, with mush of dated to 1982-1983. Included are leaflets and flyers, articles, newspaper cuttings and some photographs.

Currently by box only.

Open

Feminist Webs is a collective of women of all ages formed in 2006 in the North West of the UK to reinvigorate girls work and feminist youth work. Feminist Webs involves young women in youth groups, youth workers, academics, artists; Feminst Webs is a participatory transgenerational project. A key feature of Feminist Webs is that it seeks to reinvigorate girls work through activating histories or herstories of feminist youth work. Feminist Webs has gathered material from youth workers around the North West, and young women have carried out oral history interviews with older feminist youth workers. This material has led to the creation of the Feminist Web archive, which exists in both physical format held at Manchester Metropolitan Univesity, and in an online archive at www.feministwebs.com.