Paper Women

Paper Women Progress, and Thank you

2011-06-20T04:13:00.000-07:00

This is a BIG Paper Thank You to Carolyn Dougherty, Jess McCabe and all of the really useful, exciting, and all round interesting comments on the F Word (the pointers towards people working on similar ideas especially useful!)

http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/06/new_feature_wom_1

In the spirit of this new found think about Stuff, Paper Women would like to hold a meeting/discussion/preparation for an action in Bristol some time this summer (or this rainy season as the case may be...): probably before August.

If anyone is interested please email me at paperwomenbristol@gmail.com

xxxxx

p.s. Paper Women wrapping around Samuel Morely are Still There!!

Paper Women Remains...

2011-05-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

As of Yesterday, Paper Women remained, very much as remains, around the Samuel Morley-- surviving the rain and the winds of your average Bristolian Summer.

The rain and wind have made the names all the more beautiful (the Scratched Rosalind Franklin, the Crumpled Diana Ross...)

Another of Bristol's Statues is having some attention this week, with Edmund Burke becoming the home for a protest camp in support of the Spanish protests, and one PW definitely supports this use of public art/space!!

xxx

Re-Facing Bristol!

2011-05-22T03:13:00.001-07:00

Samuel Morley, the Cloaked Horseman, Queen Victoria, and the exceptionally bizarre Dung Beetle All got Paper Womenised!

Paper Women's Saturday in Bristol...

2011-05-22T02:48:00.000-07:00

In recognition and celebration of the faaabulous exhibition, memories, and event that was/is/will be Sistershow and Sistershow Revisted, PW Bristol took off her dressing gown, oiled her creaky bones and actually went out on a Saturday Night, for the thrill of refacing Bristol's Boooring Bronze statues with mountain climbers, poets, singers, writers, artists, scientists, activists, revolutionaries, mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers, professors, scientists, classicists, myths, question marks, and you...

We made beautifully paper women with hats, trousers, bustles, tu-tus, all tall, short, skinny, fat, soft, hard, ragged around the edges or more neat. A Big Thank You to the creativity and scissor-skill of one PW!

SATURDAY 21ST MAY 2011 FROM 7PM

2011-05-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Saturday 21st of May 2011, from 7pm Paper Women take over the Centrespace Gallery (6 Leonard Lane) in Bristol for an evening of sharing memories, stories, laughs and snacks, making, and re-making Paper Women and some good old cultural activism!

Come along and bring: paper, thread, string, wool, glitter, pink , feather boas, a sense of humour and memories and names of women to share, make and re-face Bristol!

email paperwomenbristol@gmail.com for more info

And a BIG THANK YOU to Debi Withers for this!

las mujeres de papel... in bronze: photos

2011-05-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

las mujeres de papel... papewomen in spain

2011-05-18T01:24:00.000-07:00

Clara Campoamor (1888–1972): Anna Jonsson's Seville Sculpture.

Walking through the hot streets of Seville at the weekend, like you do if you're a Paper Woman in need of sun and cerveza, I came across this sculpture.

The 2007 sculpture is by Sevillian based Swedish artist Anna Jonsson (http://www.annajonsson.com/) and celebrates the life and work of Spanish politician, feminist and women’s reformer Clara Campoamor.

Born into a working class Madrid family, Clara began work as a seamstress at 13. She worked to get herself into law school and continued working to support her degree. At the age of 36 she successfully completed her law degree and four years later, 1928 she established the Federation of Women Lawyers.

In 1931, in spite of being unable to vote in the election (because she was a woman!), Clara stood for a seat in the Constituent Assembly. Her staunch, impassioned advocacy of women’s rights met with oppostiton from the conservative religious parties, and the men on the left who felt she was doing disservice to worker’s rights by focussing on women... In spite of all the opposition, Clara secured equal legal status for men and women in the constitution.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Clara fled to Switzerland, fearing her life. She remain there in exile for the rest of her life. She was repatriated only after her death, with her ashes being buried at San Sebastian.

Anna Jonsson’s beautifully intricate sculpture embodies some of the key ideas of Paper Women. Books engraved with “Historia el limbo” (History in Limbo) and “Historia Invisibles” (Invisible Stories), and keys and locks, and Anna and Clara’s names written onto bronzed books—this is the commemorative practice which Paper Women seeks!

Muchas gracias Anna y Clara--- for remembering to us why it is we care and for showing us who to do it!

That's the way to do it-- Rosie the Riveter!

2011-03-28T02:18:00.000-07:00

A big thanks to Carolyn Dougherty for pointing this out (and for being an all round ace PW!).

In 2000 a visual artist (Susan Schwartzenberg) and landscape architect/environmental sculptor (Cheryl Barton) unveiled a huge memorial sculpture, landscape and archive at the site of the Kaiser 2 shipbuilding yard, San Fransisco Bay.

The first piece of commemorative landscaping in the US which honours, acknowledges and re-interprets a chapter of US (and global) history which is as crucial as it is forgotten.

Rosie the Riveter Memorial: Honouring American Women's Labour During WWII, the clumsiness of the title gives exactly what the landscape gives, a memorial honouring the 18 million women whose labour in factories, steel mills, lumber mills, transport, offices, hospitals. As one of the quotes imprinted into the platform walkaway: "without us, without women, there would have been no Spring in 1945."

Schwartzenberg and Barton's landscape does what the Whitehall monument fails to do, they build a monument that is both symbolic and has faces of women, women's names, women's voices. In creating a whole commemorative landscape based around a walkway the length of of ships keel inscribed with a timeline and quotes from women workers sandblasted into granite. The more sculptural elements are drawn from blueprints, suggesting unfinished forms of hulls. The steel walkway and sculptural friezes are surrounded by two gardens of rockrose and dune grass.

What really makes this landscape hauntingly present are the porcelain enamel panels where memorabilia, letters and photographs of/from women workers archive and commemorate the complexities of the life of the millions of "Rosies" working on the frontline of the "Home Front".

This landscapes constructs and re-constructs a memorial to the lives and works of women which self-consciously plays with the processes of commemoration and erasure of memory: it plays with the "construction metaphor exploring the symbolic connection between building ships and the reconstructive processes of human memory"-- and it is just fabulous!

For more information see: http://www.rosietheriveter.org/memdes.htm

Paper Women Marching for an Alternative?

2011-03-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday many Paper Women went to London to make their bodies (tired, sweaty, thirsty) shout against what is happening by a government who just doesn't think. Or at least doesn't think about how people, and how women, live, and struggle to live.

Walking and Booing down Whitehall a monument struck two PW's as a sort of silent monument to what this whole project is about. In Whitehall, the supposed place of "democracy", the place of power, the place where hundreds of "actual men with actual faces" are displayed and commemorated (to quote a Paper Woman's perceptive recognition), there is one monument commemorating women. And:

"it's literally commemorating no one, just empty suits of clothes. A very striking image of women's erasure actually set in stone"...

So women can only be present in places of power as long as we are symbols, as long as we are generic, as long as we don't have faces, as long as we don't have individual bodies, as long as we are only hanging clothes...

So although this PW was truly inspired at the beauty and energy of yesterday's march (and not just because she could shout wanker loudly and flout police commands and just walk across Westminster Bridge with so many other women, and men, collected under countless banners which all kinda said "This is Shit"...), she is disheartened that an alternative to women being erased as just face-less-body-less-name-less-nothingness-symbols, is just marched by and somehow late...

Enough gloom! Paper Women ARE STILL on George Leeman three weeks later--- and this is a very small march towards an alternative!

***************************************************************************

Paper Women Still There!

2011-03-20T02:37:00.001-07:00

In the two weeks since the Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism in York (http://www.feminist-cultural-activism.net/) Paper Women are still re-facing statues. See photos here: http://paperwomen.blogspot.com/p/campaigning.html

Alice Tredwell--The Accidental Railway Engineer

2011-03-20T02:21:00.000-07:00

As part of my research for a conference paper about the 'engineering diaspora' from Britain in the second half of the 19th century, I spent a few days in the Institution of Civil Engineers' archives reading the obituaries of engineers of the period. In the obituary of James Berkley I found the sentence: 'In connection with this undertaking mention should be made of the courage of the widow of Mr. Solomon Tredwell, the Contractor, who, after his too early decease, determined, for the honour of her husband's name, to continue the works, and with the efficient aid of Mr. Clowser and Mr. Adamson, did complete them most satisfactorily.'

Naturally I was curious about this woman who became a Victorian railway engineer by accident, and was lucky enough to find her on a family genealogy website. Her name was Alice Tredwell, and she had travelled to India in 1859 with her husband Solomon, who had been awarded a construction contract on the Great India Peninsula Railway. He died within two weeks of arriving, and Alice, assuming responsibility for the contract, worked with Swainson Adamson and George Louis Clowser to complete the Bhore Ghat Incline. This line went through some of the most difficult terrain in the country and required the construction of substantial engineering works including 2.25 miles of tunnelling and eight masonry viaducts.

photo of Alice from this site:

http://www.allen-family-tree.co.uk/solomon-tredwell.html

images of the line from this site:

http://picturegallery.imeche.org/AreaIndex.aspx?ViewArea=10

Betty Radice

2011-03-05T05:36:00.000-08:00

Betty Radice, translator and editor of the Penguin Classics from 1964 to 1985, was born in Hessle, near Hull, in 1912. Newland High School, in Hull, like nearly all schools for young women, did not offer Greek to its students, but Betty was not deterred, and took sufficient instruction (on her own initiative - she learnt all her Greek grammar on the train to and from Hull!) to enrol to read Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford from 1931 became one of the first women to be “recognised” as a woman and a student, and therefore eligible for a degree.

She was a brilliant student, but in the political climate of the mid-to-late 1930s she felt it an indulgence to stay in Oxford for a further degree. She married in 1935 and that status meant she was not permitted to apply for a grant at the one of the (for her) now nearby London universities. She worked as a tutor and school teacher and raised her four children.

In 1959, she became assistant to Penguin Classics editor, E.V. Rieu, after he read, enjoyed and commissioned her translation of Pliny's Letters, which is still in print, and a standard volume, as are many other of her translations. It didn't harm matters that they were also close neighbours in Highgate, north London. Betty quickly became indispensable and was the obvious choice to take over on Rieu's retirement in 1964. Her list included maintaining and revising old, and commissioning new translations. These were from Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Old Norse and others. She managed to expand the series enormously, taking great pains over all her books, looking after the occasionally-precious needs of translators (including Robert Graves), and working absurdly hard for little financial reward and through troubling times for publishing (particularly in the mid-1970s).

Despite this, she was able to continue the legacy of the Penguin Classics, to make available to a mass audience inexpensive editions the best of world literatures. Betty was a prolific letter writer and diarist. Bristol’s Penguin Archive (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/penguinarchiveproject/) holds the “Betty Radice Papers” –a collection of papers from her time at Penguin. Her diary shows her to be hard-working, fiercely intelligent and witty—with the occasional swear word written out in ancient Greek. She died suddenly in 1985.

2011-03-05T04:18:00.001-08:00

We're at the Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism, and have just found out about a sister project in Edinburgh: VENUS ENVY. Take a look at them here:

http://www.craftscotland.org/Default.aspx.LocID-cftnewkec.RefLocID-cft04e001001.Lang-EN.htm

Mary Taylor (1817-1893)

2011-03-05T04:12:00.000-08:00

Born in 1817 a Red House at Gomersal, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Mary soon rebelled from her traditional, wool-merchant roots. Leaving the confines of the West-Riding she taught boys in Germany, and one her own went to New Zealand, where she mountain-climbed, set up a successful shop in Wellington and wrote out-spoken feminist books.

One her return to her “old country”—West Yorkshire—in 1860 Mary continued to write- contributing to The Victoria, a magazine which was the cornerstone of 19^th century feminist thinking. Charlotte Brontë was drawn to Mary’s inspirational and powerful voice and warm-hearted friendship.

Mary called for women to earn money in order to seek financial, physical and spiritual emancipation from men.

When she returned to West Yorkshire in 1860, Mary contributed to the history of the women's movement by writing articles for a magazine called The Victoria.

In her articles Mary outlined her feminist views, for instance calling on women to earn money to look after themselves so they were not dependent on men.

Mary was truly ahead of time and her renegade call for freedom and action was celebrated in 2007 when there was an exhibition at Red House commemorating the life, words, and actions of this feminist who refused to settle for anything other than herself.

Paper Woman of Stone!!

2011-03-05T03:06:00.000-08:00

Eleanor Coade (1733–1821)

Famous for inventing "Coade Stone"-- a durable stone, which looks "new" even today. But less famous for being an unmarried pioneering business woman, forced to call herself "Mrs Coade" for the sake of propriety and respectability.

Her factory, one the site of the present-day Royal Festival Hall and a list of her clients was a who's who of British nobility. Indeed, she was so respected that the oh so fashionable Gentleman's Magazine published a "substantial" obituary, writing that she deserved commemoration in great detail. However, unable to excavate details of her private life, Gentleman's Magazine resorted to celebrating her stone, rather than letting the private, hard-working, passionate woman behind her "artificial" stone.

Mary Bateman (1768-1809): AKA the "Yorkshire Witch"

2011-02-13T01:45:00.000-08:00

Mary was born into a "respectable" but poor Yorkshire farming family. She went into domestic service in Thirsk- but was discharged for theft. After working in York she fled to Leeds without pay or possession, again being charged with theft.

In 1792 she married John Bateman, after a three week courtship and her lists of thefts and frauds increased. He left her to join the supplementary militia, and abandoned to her own resources, Mary set up a fortune telling business in Leeds (1799). Channelling a "Mrs Moore" Mary became famous for miraculous healing, warding off evil spirits, and pocketing money.

However, the spirits appear to have left Mary in 1809 when she was charged with the murder of Mrs Rachel Perigo of Bramley-- through poison, evil wishes and spells.

After a sensational trial, Mary was executed by hanging at York Castle in front of a crowd of thousands, who paid to see her corpse and cut of pieces of her flesh for charms. Her skeleton now resides in the Thackeray Medical Museum in Leeds, for all to look at

Mary's life and afterlife embodies the skeletal frame of re-reading women in history: so often visible to many, scrutinized by many hands, but the complexities of their circumstances, their lives and bodies; their own words, seem rarely spoken for themselves.

Amy Johnson CBE (1903-1941)

2011-02-13T01:22:00.001-08:00

Born in Hull, Amy graduated with a degree in Economics from the University of Sheffield, gaining an "A" grade pilot licence in 1929, and becoming the first woman to gain a ground engineer certificate and work for the Air Ministry, and she made a guest appearance at the first Butlins in Skegness (1936). Oh, and she became the record holding first woman to fly solo from the UK to Australia: from 5th to 24th of May 1930. And her records didn't stop there: she flew to Moscow in 21 hours and continued on to make record time in a flight to Tokyo, and she broke the solo flight time from London to Cape Town in 1932.

In 1938 Amy divorced her husband and took back her maiden name, domestic life didn't give the flying ace enough air to breathe. With the break out of war, Amy became a first officer in the Air Transport Auxiliary.

In 1941 Amy's plane was shot down in thick fog over the Thames estuary. The details remain foggy, was she transporting spies or shot down for making the wrong signal and being mistaken for an enemy plane? Her body was never discovered. On 14th of January a large service was held in her honour at St Martins in the Fields in London. To commemorate this extraordinary woman the University of Sheffield commemorated a building in her name, and there is an Amy Johnson Way in York.

Amy's risk taking, record breaking, and high flying, pushed the limits of technology and gender norms of her time, she exemplifies the flying spirit and passions of women for all times.

Spring Clean

2011-02-12T12:20:00.000-08:00

The crocuses are blossoming and the birds are singing again-- which means its time for a big Spring Clean... and like every good woman, paperwoman's house got a little messy in 2010-- bear with her as she attempts at cleaning (which apparently means getting even messier).

Bristol's Bonny Battler

2010-10-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

Jessie Stephen (1893- 1979)

“Too many assumed that the victory of women’s suffrage would bring other benefits automatically. When the women were glorying in this new found so-called freed, we were only just beginning.”

Such was the voice of Jessie Stephen: trade unionist, pacifist, politician, militant suffragette, domestic worker, socialist, reformer, Scotswoman, born-again Bristolian and “Independent Woman”- who featured at the age of 81 in an issue of the collective feminist publication Spare Rib (1975, feb), challenging what it meant (and means) to be a political active woman. Her awareness of the need for continuing, radical, change for women in society extending beyond the vote, and pay equality marks the sentiment of this “bonny fighter”.

Born into a large working class Scottish family, Jessie was raised in left-wing and radical working class politics. The eldest of eleven children attended Socialist Sunday School and was the vice chairman of her local Independent Labour Party at 16. Jessie became active in radical women’s and workers politics whilst working as a domestic servant and witnessing how the men ‘Upstairs” treat the women “Downstairs” like slaves and sexual play-things. Joining socialist and suffrage movements in Glasgow she clandestinely acid attacked postal boxes, “damaging property not bodies,” and avoided prison. Her militant and radical politics along with choosing to live “Independently” opened Jessie for attack by tabloid press such as the Daily Mail.

However, Jessie’s strident working class beliefs and “battling” activism saw her establish herself within Bristol “Co-Operative Wholesale Society” and in 1952 she became the first woman president of Bristol’s Trade Council. She received the TUC gold badge in 1953, an MBE in 1977, and an educational trust has a scholarship for women in honour of her and other women’s trail blazing political and social work. Bristol has honoured her with a blue plaque and in 1995 held an inaugural lecture in honour of her entitled “Women in European Politics”

She died in June 1979 of pneumonia and heart failure having lived on Chessel Street, Bedminster.

Daughters of the Said

2010-10-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

It has been a while, and like all Paperwomen, we've blown about, scattered, been screwed up, written on, posted, sent to London, re-sent to York, received, and arrived: here I guess a little later than hoped but arrived nonetheless. (perhaps, arrived a little less is better).

A paperwoman got to thinking about why she was afraid to do this, afraid to write and stick her faces and names on bits of concrete, metal, and men. Nothing arrived. Until, walking through

Arnos Vale cemetery on the first proper Autumn day, she saw what she had been hiding from: memorials to women, hundreds, thousands, of women in different states of ruin, none carrying their words, or faces, or dreams, none showing themselves: "Daughter of the Said"; "Sister of the Said"; "Widow of the Said"; "Wife of the Said" ... the Spoken, the Said, must have known a lot of women. Something in that saying, made her think and listen to the silence "of the Said" who are not said in their own right, who have never "Said Themselves" or each other.

So from one paperwoman to another... Paperwomen are arriving, the Daughters of the Said are slowly peeking through the ruins and the brambles, whispering their selves...

2010-06-08T04:39:00.000-07:00

Mary Baker/Princess Caraboo (1791-1865)

In April 1817, a distressed young woman appeared at the door of a cottage in Almondsbury, near Bristol. She spoke no English, and, baffled, the villagers sent for Mrs Worrall, the wife of the local magistrate, who lived at Knowle Park. Taken to live with Mrs Worrall, the stranger swiftly became the talk of the town. Her physical appearance and diet were described in The Times in graphic detail, down to the several shawls she wore, the way her chin stuck out, her skill at fencing and her appetite for vegetables. Her language was indecipherable; but she made it known that her name was ‘Caraboo’ and her homeland ‘Javasu’, she seemed to have been captive on a boat and to have escaped near Bristol.

Samples of her writing were sent to scholars all over England, who were mystified by it. Artists were fascinated by the young woman; Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery still has a portrait of her today in its collection. Her ‘exotic’ appearance and mysterious origins played into contemporary Romantic sensibilities. The fashion for ‘exotic’ people was far from innocent; it was grounded in a belief that non-Europeans were inferior.

In June, one Mrs Neale was reading the Bath Chronicle, and was surprised to recognise the detailed description of Caraboo; she was her former servant – not the daughter of a king, but of a cobbler from Devon. Her real name was Mary Baker, and she had made a living on her wits and imagination, in and out of workhouses and casual labour. As Caraboo, Mary had charmed and astonished England. Now Mrs Worrall helped her to sail to Philadelphia, where she was given an excited reception (and tall tales were told about her journey there – in one she encountered and ensnared Napoleon, only to refuse his hand in marriage.)

By 1829, Mary was back in Bristol, where she lived with her daughter and forged a new career for herself; breeding leeches to sell to the General Hospital. She died in Bedminster in 1865. A blue plaque marks the house that she lived in, in Princess St, Bedminster. She was also the inspiration for a 1994 film starring Phoebe Cates and Jim Broadbent. Paper women celebrate this resourceful woman who, despite her humble origins and difficult life, became a national sensation, enchanted the aristocracy, and played on early nineteenth-century tastes for the ‘exotic’ to make a new world for herself.

For an online version of the popular book about Mary Baker which appeared in 1817, see http://www.resologist.net/carabooa.htm

A Poem Paper Women!

2010-06-07T09:02:00.001-07:00

Because this poem by Pat West is so beautiful and so 'fitting' for the project, the poem has become a Paperwoman in her own right!
The poem was published in a collection by "Rive Gauche" entitled Women Poets: writing and performing in Bristol in the 1990s (1997). A truly inspirational collection of voices!

For more information about Pat's poetry take a look at this website:http://www.patvtwest.co.uk.

Mah Ar-Pennants Over Tomorrow (For Hilda Murrell & All Spinsters Who Protest)

2010-06-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

Men' s names are carved in stone.
Their weighty legacy: a mantra
A song sheet of permanence
A dozen names in the first line alone-a found poem!
BRISTOL MAYORS: ROGER CORDEWANER 1216
ADAM PAGE 1217 MARTIN UNDINYATE 1218
JOHN D'HUILE 1219 ROBERT HOLBURST 1220
ROGER DE STANES 1221 WALTER MORRIBRAY 1222
JOHN DE BERDEWYKE 1223 JAMES DE ROWBOROWE 1224
WALTER DE WINTONE 1225 HUGHE DE FAYERFORDE 1226
JOHN DE MERSHEFIELDE 1227.
What, then, are these? These stitched rags
Our careful hands have assembled? What show, what tell
What want to say with our fragments of old frocks,
Waving them? Are we
Clotho Lachesis Atropos
She who weaves who spins who cuts-
What do we want to write on the sky in colours?
I am wanting to write a poem about banners-these
Proud pennants hoist on our rigging, signifying
We are under commission, not tied up, hold empty
Our passage likely to be aimless
But in full sail, hull down for the future-
A fleet of us!
-& I am walking the street thinking about my poem
When, in the huge red engine
The delicious arm of the fireman in his white T shirt
Turns the wheel off to a disaster, faster, FASTER....
I remain pavemented, kerbed, whilst he makes the wild dash
The grand gesture & I think
Ah, the magnificence of men! Such fire!
Such bravado! How can it be curbed, their strong arm,
How re-programmed into service-our service?
How can women stitch them up, cut them down to size
Weave them back in?
Women's hands wave in their wake.
Their incredulous experienced hands
Whose texts are not written on walls but decay
In locked drawers, undiscovered libraries
Where the word lies in liberty, hands
Of forgotten women who turned over
The leaves of their lives with the enraged scorn
Of the overlooked.
Men have hands, too.
Will they ever stitch or forever unpick?
Our hands hold & sustain.
Aloft lift the cloth
Unfurl fluttering hope
-our remedy of rage-
Over tomorrow.

PVT (Pat West)

[Commissioned for a celebration of Women's Banners,
hung in the Bristol Council House Grand Hall 1987]

Muse on the Night Before

2010-05-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

So she hit the streets last night, the statues, the bridges and the soil. One thing that was striking about her first big night on the town was that it was mostly men who looked, laughed, defaced her names, faces, body... perhaps this says more about the people on Bristol's streets late at night than something more political, something more ....
I hope all the shes lasted the night and this hot hot day, and who would have thought pink was Cary's Colour!

Keep your eyes open, your hearts thinking and your hands typing paperwomen...

archive ennui?

2010-05-16T04:41:00.000-07:00

Paper Women's lives began at many intervals. She has no single origin or mother. This is important for her identity-- an identity which she believes as challenging the process and performance of a notion of the 'archive'.

But, as she grew up it became clear to her that this identity of an Archival 'Otherness' was as fragile as her paper form. However much she tried to origami herself away from what the archive of stone tradition told her she should be (historical women= white, caring, wealthy, conforming to the tradition she is written in...), she found she repeated the same history, the same language, the same impossibility of difference, the same stone positions without the possibility of erosion.

With this repetition of the same which Paper Women began to feel forms the notion of archive, tradition, history, culture, identity, she became bored- archivally bored. And began to demand fresh archival breath to make herself feel alive...
Being formed from books, newspapers, journals...hearsay... Paper Women are always on the edge of repeating the identity she challenges-- paper can only be made from the mulch of hard grown trees.

So it is all the more important that she changes her form and shapes herself anew. Always. And uses her re-cycled body to show that archives are not fixed, and tradition and 'greatness' isn't limited to a limited and limiting stereotype of what a 'woman' is.

Paper Women is not a single identity- she is only through all of you.

Little Steps...

2010-05-14T06:42:00.000-07:00

Today paperwomen have made their first little steps on the streets of Bristol... Around College Green, Park Street and Whiteladies, little pink ladies are making their presence felt. Wrapped around Queen Victoria, under bronze feet, hidden in nooks and crannies of the Museum, little signs, little women poke their heads...

Annie Kenney

2010-05-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

Annie Kenney (1879-1953)

‘Our country is the land of heroes...’

Annie was working-class woman from Lancashire who heckled Winston Churchill, faced hunger-strikes, force-feeding, derision from her middle-class sisters in the suffrage movement, but fought for the needs of working women in Bristol-always pursuing the quest of finding herself in images different from the one’s she was given.

Working in a mill from the age of 10 gave Annie a sense of comradeship and an understanding of the forgotten needs of working women, become the first working class head of the Women’s Social and Political Union
In Bristol Annie found her place in the hot-bed of left-wing politics and the ever growing women’s movement. She organised big meetings, lobbied politicians, and fostered support among Bristol’s women. In the 1911 a sign on her door read: ‘House full - no vote - no census’—until women could vote, they did not count.

Annie endured prison and humiliation so that women could count and so politics wasn’t limited to upper class men in London.

In her quest to find herself she rocked our land of heroes- and did not stop until all women could have the opportunities to find themselves as heroes too.

Sarah Guppy

2010-05-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

Sarah Guppy (1770-1852)

Have you ever thought why your teapot shouldn’t also boil an egg or keep the toast warm?

Inventor Sarah Guppy did and made it a reality. Born in Birmingham, on marrying she came to Bristol. She lived in Queen Square and Prince St and her son, Thomas Guppy, became an engineer. Sarah discussed her patented work on safe foundation techniques and suspension bridges with Thomas’ good friend, a certain Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who later designed Clifton Suspension Bridge and developed the S.S. Great Britain. She later offered her expertise to the directors of the Great Western Railway and helped them make embankments safer. By influencing and advising the young Brunel, Sarah’s place in the history of British design and engineering should be assured, quite apart from the fact that she was a creative genius, who also invented a candlestick that guaranteed candles would burn longer and device that allowed one to undertake strenuous exercise in bed. She registered her last patent at the age of 74: a method of waterproofing ships. And in her fifties she married a much younger man-- challenging expectations in her private as well as public life. In 2008 Sheila Hannon wrote An Audience with Sarah Guppy as part of the celebrations for Brunel 200. The one woman show (performed by Kim Hicks) involved 21st century technology to celebrate Sarah's intellect and innovation, in her own right!

Since 2006, there has been a commemorative plaque at her former home in Clifton, 7 Richmond Hill and a portion of public green space which she purchased remains nearby.

Mary Carpenter

2010-05-13T08:30:00.001-07:00

Mary Carpenter (1807 – 1877)

In 1846 Mary opened a ‘ragged school’ in a Lewin’s Mead tenement, to satisfy the simplest needs of the destitute youth of Bristol. This meant warmth in the day and a little food, reading and writing, and generally a glimpse of opportunities alternative to those the street offered. However, the scheme wasn’t popular. But Mary was adamant: “It is a mistake to imagine that because the children are ragged, the education need be ragged also.” The school later moved to St James’ Back and catered for a broad range of ages through the day and into the evening. Against corporal punishment, she taught religion in a radically non-sectarian manner. Her kindness, a revolutionary approach in the day of learning by rote and the slipper. cane or worse, pre-echoes much that is taken for granted in primary education today. Through her progressive methods, Mary became a well-known figure and travelled widely, often at invitation, and especially in India where she campaigned for women’s education. But despite this, money was never easy to come by. Her achievements did bring her to attention: Lady Byron, the poet’s widow, more than once helped out when finances were low, purchasing Red Lodge, which Mary ran as a school for delinquent and troubled girls. Mary wrote a book on reform schools, and you can see a plaque dedicated to her in Bristol Cathedral.

Lily Valentine

2010-05-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

Lily Valentine

At the turn of the 20th century Queen Victoria ended her reign as the longest serving British monarch, the first radio successfully received a radio signal and the Wright Brothers were busy inventing the first gas-motored manned aeroplane. At the same time, one Bedminster woman moved into 78 Windmill Hill Road, accompanied by her nine children and their drunken father. With another child on the way she led a busy life, working day and night to feed, clothe and wash the children. Monday was wash-day and it began at 5AM, while Tuesday was reserved for the ironing. There wasn’t any hot running water, any detergent, and no washing machine. Instead she heated water on the stove and used carbolic soap; a wooden dolly, a wash board and a mangle served instead of electric machines. There were no electric or steam irons and no crease-resistant fabrics. The washing had to be kept damp until it was smoothed out. This was done with one of two metal irons which were heated on the stove in turn. She cooked meals in large heavy cast iron pots on the coal powered stove, which had to be kept constantly lit. When shopping for groceries she went by Shanks Pony, otherwise known as her own two feet, visiting the butcher, the baker and the grocer in turn. One day, she threw her cruel boyfriend out of their house, threatening him with an oil burning lamp. He never returned to that house, but they both continued to live locally and the children grew up fit and well. Their names were Liliy, Kate, Ivy, Rose, Queenie, Gladys, Bert, Fred, Walter and Ernest.

Victoria Hughes

2010-05-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

Victoria Hughes-(1897-1978)

“My Job was to take pennies and not to moralize.” Words Victoria wrote thinking back on her life...

Born on the day of Queen Victoria’s jubilee her life stands in contrast to the pomp, decadence, and wealth of some, and shows that dignity, kindness, compassion- and a thirst for life- rarely come with a crown.

She was a sell-out author, has her name in the Dictionary of National Biography, a Bristol Blue Plaque, and was a dare-devil cyclist on Gloucester Road into her 70’s.

Victoria was as a toilet attendant on the Downs from the depressing 1930’s to the swinging Sixties. Along with working hard to support her family, she supported the hundreds of prostitutes who worked nearby on the notorious ‘Ladies Mile’.

In a time when state support or social kindness was scarce, Victoria showed compassion and generosity to some of Bristol’s most vulnerable women. No moralizing sermons of reform were served up; just hot tea and a chat- a place of calm and safety.

At the age of 80 she published her memoirs, Ladies Mile, causing scandal for respectable Bristolians. But her honest, sad, humorous, words of thirty years supporting Bristol’s prostitutes- as well as keeping her toilet spic and span- sold out fast. And gave a voice to so many women silenced by society.

With a characteristic modesty Victoria closed her book with these words:
“...it helped to shape my character, showed me the importance of being employed, and gave me a special understanding of the “outsiders” of society.”
An understanding we should all learn to love.

Dorothy Hazzard

2010-05-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

Dorothy Hazzard

Born in the 1590s Dorothy Hazzard was a religious reformer who came to prominence during the 17th century. As far as it is known she was widowed in her 30’s and left with eight children. She ran a local grocer’s shop and remarried in her late 40’s. Her new husband was a Reverend but she did not agree with all of his teachings, once leaving his church in the middle of his sermon, never to return to it again. Dorothy believed in private individual worship and did not like many of the established church’s customs. So, she set up her own prayer groups, attended mainly by women. For twenty years they met in each other’s houses, despite suspicious hostility from the local community. She was even charged with the crime of ‘meeting for impure purposes’. But Dorothy continued to go it her own way and In 1640 she set up what was to become Broadmead Baptist Church.

Dorothy and her husband were generous with their house and would take in as many as three families at a time while they waited for ships out of Bristol. They also delivered many babies in their home for those women who did not like the religious birth ceremonies of the day.

When the Civil War broke out in England and up and down the country musketeers and cavalrymen fought to the death, Dorothy’s religious views led her to side with the Parliamentarians. Not one to be left on the side-lines, she led a group of women to barricade the Frome Wall when it was attacked by Royalists in 1643. Dorothy Hazzard died in 1675 still fighting for what she believed in, no matter what people thought of her.

Hello!

2010-05-13T07:09:00.000-07:00

Thanks for visiting Paper Women! Although we're a work in progress we hope that this blog can be home to many other women. We have started doing some research- from poets to leech breeders, sufferagettes, school reformers, inventors and toilet attendents.
If you want to find out more and start thinking about your own Paper Women, please email paperwomenbristol@gmail.com
.... Keep those eyes peeled for paper women populating the streets of Bristol...