The current foyer display at The Women's
Library, curated by Dr Gemma Romain, is something of a revelation
for those of us who have an inkling that black history in Britain
didn't start in the 1950s but have been hard pressed to prove
otherwise up to now.
The first time I read Amrit Wilson's seminal
Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain I nearly wept. Here was a
history I had never been told, out of print and difficult to find,
about the involvement of Indian women in radical movements and
actions such as the Grunwick Strike. It gave me a feeling of
ownership (in terms of my feminism and union activity) and
belonging (to a radical narrative of this country) that nothing
else could. How much more exciting then, to be faced with evidence
of Indian women in the suffrage movement, based in London!
During her time as the Vera Douie Research
Fellow at the Library Gemma spent a brief but intense period of
time working with the archives held by the Library, focussing on
the interwar period, with the specific remit of exploring ways in
which Black (in this case African and Indian) individuals and
histories either appear in or are absent from these records. Gemma
looked at, read through, and most significantly - catalogued
literally thousands of documents, photographs and other
ephemera.
The resulting exhibition - a collection of 20
pieces ranging from a postcard of white actors blacked up for a
performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin to documents recording the
Jamaican feminist Una Marson's speech on black women in Britain
facing racism at the British Commonwealth League conference of 1934
- is small but deeply satisfying in their representation of the
appearances and absences of women of colour in the collection. The
objects that most capture the imagination are from the personal
collections held by the library; photographs of Agnes Maude Royden,
a feminist and peace activist, on a trip to India to campaign on
the issue of Indian Women's Rights; a letter written by feminist
and later, Liberal policitian, Dame Margery Corbett-Ashby in the
midst of the racism scandal that rocked London's feminists in the
wake of a very problematic book on Indian Women ; and a troubling
illustration from a 1937 issue of Vogue which implies that a small
black boy can be an excellent accessory to your fancy dress
costume...
In previous years I have been disappointed by
the way The Women's Library seemed to sideline black and Asian
history to foyer exhibitions like the small (but excellent)
Striking Women: Voices of South Asian workers from Grunwick and
Gate Gourmet exhibit and Heart of the Race
conference on Black British Feminism which took place in
2010, while the main exhibition space has been a sea of whiteness
that often told a skewed or segregated version of our feminist
herstory with white women front and centre and brown women outside
by the door. Happily, this no longer seems to be the case. The
current exhibition in the main space All Work and Low Pay:
The Story of Women and Work refreshingly (and reassuringly)
seems to show the female workforce of Britain very much in all its
diverse glory, and is well worth a look too.
The Women's Library, London Metropolitan
University, Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT.
The foyer exhibition runs until
31st January 2012. Admission: Free.
