Women Archives - Bristol Radical History Group

Annie Townley (1878-1966)

Dedicated to working-women's rights and social justice

June Hannam will bring to life Annie’s remarkable journey from working-class Lancashire textile mill worker to employment as a Bristol-based organiser in the suffrage and labour movements. June Hannam is the author of the BRHG publication Annie Townley: A force for socialism and peace.

Partners in crime

Collusion between Church and State in Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes

Mary Muldowney will give an overview of the appalling abuses that took place in many of the mother and baby homes in Ireland since the foundation of the state in 1922. The homes were supposed to provide safety and support for unwed mothers at a time when there was considerable stigma attached to having sex outside marriage. They were mainly run by religious bodies, predominantly Roman Catholic nuns, and the regimes they established had more to do with punishing the ‘sins’ of the mothers than […]

Annie Townley

A force for socialism and peace

By June Hannam

Annie Townley (1878-1966) Annie Townley: A force for socialism and peace describes a remarkable journey from working-class Lancashire textile mill worker to employment as a Bristol-based organiser in the suffrage and labour movements. In many cases using Annie’s own words, June Hannam brings to life a character dedicated to working-women’s rights and social justice. “Some of us who have been called dreamers and who believe in Socialism, wonder if it had not been better for our City Fathers to […]

For International Women’s Day—Annie Townley

A force for socialism and peace

Professor of Modern British History, June Hannam shares the inspiring journey of Annie Townley, a Lancashire textile worker turned suffragette and Labour Party organiser. This talk highlights the challenges and opportunities for working-class women in activism, focusing on Townley’s personal and emotional struggles within the suffrage and labour movements. It has been arranged by the Bristol Radical History Group.

Forest of Dean Women Take The Lead

By Phil Jones

From Bristol….to Botany Bay

In the early 1800s ten female convicts in Bristol Newgate Gaol (now the site of The Galleries shopping centre) were sentenced to ‘transportation beyond the seas’—Australia. While much is known about these women after they were transported, almost nothing was known of their lives, and crimes, here. In 2022-3, with funding from Historic England and UWE, we explored these forgotten stories through a series of workshops with women in HMP Eastwood Park. Sessions included creative writing with group […]

Turning local history into theatre

The story of Hannah Wiltshire

This meeting brings together local historians, and writer and director Ingrid Jones of the Bedminster based acta Community Theatre. We will discuss the process from the seed of an idea, to research, devising, scripting, rehearsal and performance. We will also consider the difficulties of doing 'history from below', researching periods beyond living memory, where to find the voices of people and how to create a script and theatre piece from this. This will be an open discussion with plenty of […]

Kurdish Women’s Movement

History, Theory, Practice

By Dilar Dirik

Front cover of Kurdish Women's Movement featuring woman in landscape

Our defence is not for a piece of land, but for the protection of life’s ability to unfold itself (Nûda, member of the YPJ, the women’s defence units, 237). This is a meticulously researched and critically argued book from an author writing not only about but from within the Kurdish women’s movement. In the West, Dilar Dirik is one of the most prominent and articulate voices on the role of women in the Kurdish struggle for participatory democracy, ecological sustainability, and women’s […]

Voices of the Bristol Crisis Service for Women

This multimedia display allows visitors to hear the voices of current and former staff and volunteers of groundbreaking feminist mental health service, the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. Now known as Self Injury Support, this pioneering group was started in the back of a charity shop in Easton as a feminist collective in 1986. Its goals were to listen to, support, and amplify the voices of women using self injury to cope with their experience of trauma. In 2022, as part of an oral history […]

Bristol and the Rojava Revolution

In 2012, during the early days of the Syrian Civil War, three mainly Kurdish regions in north-east Syria were able to overthrow and remove the Assad regime through revolutionary action. Over the next years these regions would work with other parts of northern Syrian society and form the Movement for a Democratic Society. Its core values are for grassroots democracy, women's liberation, and ecology. By 2014, this revolutionary movement and its armed defence forces, known as the YPG and the YPJ at […]