The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour

Dedicated to

Margaret Pearson and Wilma McCann Emily Jackson Irene Richardson Patricia Atkinson Elizabeth Southern

Jayne MacDonald

Elizabeth Device

Jean Jordan

Alison Device

Yvonne Pearson

Anne Whittle

Helen Rytka

Anne Redferne

Vera Millward

Alice Nutter

Josephine Whitaker

Jane Bulcock

Barbara Leach

Katherine Hewitt

Marguerite Walls

Isabel Robey

Jacqueline Hill

Welcome to F= and The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour.

We’d like to share with you what we found out, who we met and what we made together as we explored the Northern landscape of women’s history. We have met women across time and place who hold knowledge and wisdom in different forms. We have followed conversations and ideas, paths and waterways; we’ve read diaries, letters and books, we’ve asked questions and listened to answers and through an embodied process of experiencing, understanding, thinking and feeling our way, we have understood the deep relationship between politics, nature, creativity and women.

The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour believes in the revolutionary act of connecting people, to empower us all to feel able to speak up and to find common ground. We use art to make visible and listen to voices of the past present and future. Patriarchy has tried to disconnect us but histories continue and together we can reclaim the discarded, repressed and brushed aside. It just takes a sideways view, an opening of the third eye, to see what really lies before us and inside of us. In this we make space for the clarity and understanding that we all hold within us.

In our journey we have discovered that women are holding the past, present and future. They are from many generations and times and they are all here now, ready to share their knowledge and experiences. They thread through the moss of Lakeland mountains, in the waters of the lakes, are lightly slumbering in the megalithic portal of Pendle Hill and resonate through the streets of the city.

The histories of women are also in the houses, libraries, museums and personal archives. Memoirs, paintings, family heirlooms and objects are potent with their voices of protest, memories of pain, love, anger and joy. Through The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour we hold up our ear trumpets to their message, we listen and share with new generations.

We look to the past, as conduits in the present, so we can walk together into the future.

LEEDS, PUT UP YOUR HANDS! Leeds has been pioneering in addressing women’s issues through radical politics and action in its communities, often combining creative and activist methods to publicly speak out and make change in the city.

F= live in Leeds and so walk in Leeds most days. Every year we take part or organise an International Women’s Day walk.

F= were inspired by the feminist organisations in Leeds of the 1970’s and 80’s from the Pavilion, the UK’s first women’s photography centre to Leeds Animation Workshop, Vera Media, Reclaim the Night and Leeds Women’s Aid and the radical legacy of Leeds School of Art. Many of these are documented and archived at the Feminist Archive North and some are still active in changed forms.

So we started ‘The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour’ with visits to the Feminist Archive North to find out more about the Reclaim the Night marches. The Reclaim the Night movement is now international and it all started in Leeds in response to the police reaction to the Yorkshire Ripper murders. In Liza WIlliams’ recent documentary: ’The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story’ the journalist Joan Smith described the police investigation as a “conversation among men about dead women.”

The ‘Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group’ organised a number of marches. The group and other feminists had criticised the police for victim-blaming, especially the suggestion that women should remain indoors at night. Eleven marches in various towns across the United Kingdom took place on the night of 12 November 1977.

They made the point that women should be able to walk anywhere without restriction and that they should not be blamed for men’s violence.

The Feminist Archive North is housed in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

Stepping in with the encouragement of Jalna Hanmer, an activist, academic and founder member of Feminist Archive North, we explored. The archive is sacred, valued, but available to learn from and act on.

Wearing our purple gloves and opening the archive boxes we sifted through years of female power.

From the Feminist Archive North website: The Women’s Liberation Movement was a major factor in social change, from the groups and demonstrations of the 1970s to the activist policy work of the 1980s and 1990s. The 21st century feminist revival is a strong and vibrant force today. In our collections you can find out where ideas began, and how feminist politics were put into practice. The Feminist Archive has the original sources.

LEEDS Our archive contains a wealth of contemporary material in local, regional, national and international collections donated by individuals and organisations.

There are personal and organisational papers, conferences, pamphlets, journals, newsletters, dissertations, oral history interviews, audio tapes, films, posters, badges, tee-shirts and banners. They cover all the issues raised by and responded to by the feminist movement. Our aim is to spread information and develop current and further activism.

The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour ends by crossing Woodhouse Moor, away from the Feminist Archive North at The Brotherton Library and arriving at The Chemic Tavern on the opposite side.

Woodhouse Moor is a significant site of women’s history in the fight for equality and the fight against violence to women.

On Leodis - a photographic archive of Leeds, we discovered this text:

On 28th July 1908 a group of women carrying placards and banners took part in the Women’s Social & Political Union’s Procession to Woodhouse Moor where a huge rally was held. On a fine Sunday, 28th July 1908, they began their march from the Town Hall. Bands played on Woodhouse Moor where thousands of people, both men and women, had gathered to listen to the various speakers from the 10 platforms. One of the most famous of the suffragettes to address the crowds was Adela Pankhurst, daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and sister of Sylvia and Christabel, all leaders of the British Suffrage movement. Also speaking

was Emmeline Pethick Lawrence who in 1912 was arrested with her husband and Emmeline Pankhurst for taking part in a window smashing campaign. They famously went on hunger strike while serving prison sentences. The day on Woodhouse Moor was a great success with a resolution put advocating ‘Votes for Women’. It was carried by a huge majority as reported in the Leeds Mercury.

Kit and Anna Sheppard are the current licensees at The Chemic Tavern. ‘The Chemic’ is a calm, non judging place, in 2015 it was officially listed as an Asset of Community Value. Anna and Kit have been a huge support to F= allowing us to host events and do photoshoots. Anna shared a timeline of the licensees of The Chemic Tavern, equal numbers of men and women have held the license since 1866. We believe Anna and Kit are our conduits in Leeds. With them we celebrate the history of public, activist feminism in Leeds that has shaped the landscape around us and empowered us to organise, teach, make and explore together.

Significant Women’s Organisations in Leeds are: Reclaim the Night Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group Leeds For Change Pavilion Women’s Health Matters Leeds Womens Aid Together Women Basis Yorkshire Womens Lives Leeds Getaway Girls Behind Closed Doors Womens Therapy Leeds Joanna Project Leeds Sexual Health Skyline

WALKING IN WALKING IN THE ARCHIVE THE ARCHIVE I was born in Leeds, although I haven’t lived here all my life.

When I walk in Leeds, I am confronted with my own autobiography, and just as Rebecca Solnit walks in Wanderlust, nearly every street, every building or stopping point confronts me with a memory of a past self.

The park where I laid on the grass till the wee hours talking; bars in which I used to dance; the hospital where both my children were born; every workplace of every job (whether minimum wage as a student, or the places where I now teach) jostle for my attention, exist in parallel, mapped on to my present day city—inescapable. These histories walk with me.

I tried to escape my autobiography. As part of my research, I am walking in the footsteps of others. I have followed Sophie Calle, and other artists who follow strangers, as a way of seeing a city through someone else’s eyes. To put down the weight of your own history to follow another, is to substitute that repetition for a new and fresh track. In the name of art, heritage, psychogeography or psychoanalysis, it is a well trodden path, through which strangers become familiar.

In 2018, I completed a six-week residency at the Feminist Archive North.

Like opening a Russian doll, I found the boxes that I needed housed in Special Collections, at the Brotherton Library inside the University of Leeds. I had read Carolyn Streedman’s Dust. Opening the boxes and bringing the material into the light, I inhaled particles of the past.

Steedman notes that nothing happens to ‘this stuff’, the objects in an archive, until they are activated through reading or other use.

There is a question of too much, or not enough, light. Light has the potential to destroy the objects. The documents are already faded form their life before the archive. They were scribbled on, folded, and languished in piles. Ink is no longer allowed. The boxes are acid-free. You don’t need to wear gloves. In fact, it is now thought that wearing gloves might mean that documents are unintentionally handled more roughly.

White cotton gloves can catch on fragile documents, and also collect dirt.

A group of women were Reclaiming the Night. I have hazy television memories of women marching in the dark, but I must be inventing this, for I was too young in 1977. But slowly the women emerge from the boxes. They are yellowed with age, but are still shouting for a curfew on men. With their arms aloft, thumbs and index fingers meet, hands spread wide and flat. They are dancing, they are in fancy dress, they write songs that proclaim that ‘the streets are ours’. They eradicate male violence on those nights with their close, physical contact, and with their torchlit walks, for they are stronger together.

As I lean in towards the box, fragments of poetry can be heard; they have an accent, and they curse as they type, some keys register a stronger impression than others. They tell of police violence and injury to women. They will be heard, from the gallery, and the women will be acquitted because a feminist would never use the word ‘cunt’.

Flash is not allowed: not even a copy stand with fixed lamps- the shadows of the approved lighting in the room fall awkwardly onto the pages making an evenly lit document impossible. The headlines shout about the spectacle of women protesting. Words are thrown at the women but fall only on the collective ear. Their feminism is radical, or it might be revolutionary, but either way it is up for debate because words matter.

In her book, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, Lynne Segal considers the duality contained in the idea of Feminist Utopias: they are ideal societies or ‘dreams’, that at the same time, contain an awareness of their own idealisation, and therefore their difficulty/impossibility. But still we dream, and still we protest, ‘Same Shit, Different Century’. In fact, the point is, that the resistance is in the repetition.

Segal observes that history does not guarantee the progress of women’s struggles to instate their individual private experiences and desires into public space and politics. Rather, she issues a reminder of how essential it is to keep reinventing utopias, that are reflective of the age.

‘If there’s no dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.’

Emma Goldman

We agree to remove the names of identifiable participants.

We also amend some spelling mistakes (but only to make the text more legible) many are left, as evidence of the labour of the record, that relied on word of mouth and hand posted flyers and a network of trusted women.

Someone comments that they can hear the voice of the archive.

Joining their historical counterparts, ten posters are deposited in the archive and placed in a plan chest drawer: but at night, they slip quietly through the crack between the drawers, towards the light. They rustle carefully around door frames, the quality of the newsprint making a crisp sound, like so many commuters reading on a train. They reach the outside, and paper-thin they are smacked against a number of walls where they land.

The posters follow the route of the walk. They mark the progress of the procession as it winds its way through the night to City Square.

As the light of the morning arrives, they are spattered with rain. They stick, then eventually become wet and heavy.

Over time parts of the images fall away revealing other posters underneath. Someone sprays graffiti in red, a scrawled sentiment that echoes through the ages.

Walking in The Archive by Helen Clarke with artworks in response to the Feminist Archive North

As Catholics, we’re not supposed to go to fortune tellers.

But we live in the shadow of Pendle Hill. The pull of the soothsayer is too strong to resist.

We are three generations of women seeking affirmations from strangers. My mum and her two sisters would see a lady in Barnoldswick. They would speak of her in whispers.

Or if there were men in the room, they would ‘me-mo’ their conversation. The silent talk of the cotton mills.

TRIGGERED

“She’s still the best”. “Well worth travelling for”. And then, after the reading, “What did she say about the trouble with your *INSERT NAME OF TROUBLESOME SON/DAUGHTER” As a child I would sit in silent expectation hoping to hear my name mentioned. It never was.

Barnoldswick was only 5 miles up the road but the women didn’t drive so one of the men would have to take them. It was always my dad. Uncle Kenneth wasn’t afraid to say that he refused to take his wife to see a witch. No one would even dare to ask Uncle Frank. So my father sat in the car and smoked whilst the three sisters paid a lady with long, dirty fingernails to gaze at their tea leaves and then into the crystal ball and tell them what their children would be, who would fall pregnant, who would be laid off, who would suffer ill health.

The first fortune teller whose palm I crossed with a tenner told my fortune through the Tarot cards. Tarot was the one tool of divination that my mother disapproved of. She believed that Tarot invited evil spirits. On this occasion I felt she could be right. The Tarot reader told me, “You’ll always feel disconnected on this earth because your parents were going through a troubled period when your mother became pregnant with you. She took something.”

As Catholics, We’re not supposed to kill our children. The Tarot reader had to be wrong. My mother disapproved of contraception of any kind. We siblings, three girls and a boy, were each born seven years apart. We joked that the reason for this was that mum must have only agreed to sex once every seven years when my dad got the ‘seven year itch’ and threatened to leave.

As Catholics, we’re not supposed to lie. My mum would shout, “I hate liars!” if we ever told a half-truth or a mis-truth. So I asked her.

“Mum. I saw a fortune teller and she told me something about when you were pregnant with me.” I’m watching her face now and she stares out of the window. “She said you tried to get rid of me because you were going through a rough time with dad.”

Still staring, she said “In those days there was a woman in the village you could go to for a potion,” My mother didn’t lie.

late with it because you have an app on your phone and you‘re never without your phone. Nowadays you can have a medical abortion if you’re under nine weeks and three days pregnant. Frankie was six weeks and three days.

The nurse gave Frankie two pregnancy testing kits after she’d given her the abortion pills. One to check in three weeks and one to check in five weeks. Just in case it hasn’t worked.

As Catholics, we’re not supposed to kill our children. I couldn’t kill my daughter, Frankie, but I did try. The morning after pill is not as reliable as people think. I could not believe that any tiny seed of a human being could survive the chemical attack of that evil pill. I had never been so sick. But my beautiful daughter did survive and from the moment I knew she was here to stay I loved her with the love of a mother who has a lot of making up to do.

As Catholics we’re not supposed to go to fortune tellers. Frankie was at a friend’s birthday party when she was sixteen and a friend of the mother was giving private palm readings instead of party bags. She told Frankie she would marry her boyfriend and they would have twins. They’d only been together for a few weeks but the twins bit made me think there may be some truth in it. From being four, Frankie would often say that when she grew up she would have twins and she would call them Hassan and Hassan. We would laugh hysterically but she was deadly serious. This was her truth.

As Catholics we’re not supposed to kill our children. My sweet girl may be an eighteen year old woman now but she’s still my baby. The mini pill isn’t as reliable as people think. Even when you’ve never been

Two years since Frankie saw the fortune teller. Two weeks since she took the abortion pill. Two weeks of bleeding. Two weeks of clinging and crying from two women. Mother and daughter.

Palm reading is not such a mystery. You just need to know what the lines mean.

Your left hand represents the fate you were born with. The right, how you’ve changed your destiny. The lines representing your children run from the base of your little finger to your marriage line. If they are very short then they indicate a miscarriage or abortion. A line that forks into two at the end represents twins. I will live in fear of Frankie seeing an unscrupulous palm reader who will read twins on her left palm and an abortion on her right.

As Catholics, we’re not supposed to be superstitious or use spells for protection.

But we live in the shadow of Pendle Hill. We are three generations of women who fear seeing a single magpie. We would never bring a peacock feather into the house and we always throw spilled salt over our left shoulder into the eye of the devil. We ward off evil at every turn.

Eight years ago, when Frankie was ten, we visited the Venice Biennale. In one of the gardens stood a white, stone plinth or trig as we would call it here, inscribed by the artist Miranda July. Frankie jumped up onto the trig, as children do and I snapped a photo of her innocent smiling face and her tanned, lanky legs in her little pink sandals, standing atop the stone. I read the inscription on the trig and my heart tore.

THIS IS MY LITTLE GIRL. SHE IS BRAVE AND CLEVER AND FUNNY. SHE WILL HAVE NONE OF THE PROBLEMS THAT I HAVE. HER HEART WILL NEVER BE BROKEN. SHE WILL NEVER BE HUMILIATED. SELF DOUBT WILL NOT DEVOUR HER DREAMS.

Please let it be true, I silently begged.

This week, as Frankie lay beside me in my bed, I tried to joke, “Well, standing you on that bloody trig in Venice didn’t work. did it?”

Today I have climbed Pendle Hill, secretly and alone. I had to see the trig and although I’d rather have carved the words into the stone, it was enough to whisper an incantation and send it out; triangulate it to the mother above me and the daughter below.

WE ARE WOMEN AND WE SHALL LOVE AND HURT AND HEAL. WE WILL NOT LET OUR SINS AND THE SINS OF OUR MOTHERS BREAK US FOR WE ARE GENERATIONS OF LOVE AND WE ARE STRONG.

By Sally Poulding for Frankie.

“Please know that the only thing that can break me is you being broken.”

¬The writer Alice Nutter and her daughter Mae Milburn have a conversation about names.

ALICE: So, I’m from Burnley, which is in Lancashire, when I was looking for a punk name, I wanted something that were relevant to my life. I’d actually been named after princess Anne.

MAE: Oh god.

ALICE: I knew all about the Lancashire witches, you could see Pendle hill from our street, so I chose Alice Nutter and liked it so much I changed my name by deedpoll.

Whereas, when I named you…

MAE: Well, my name feels empowered.

It’s after Mae West.

ALICE: Yeah, I chose Mae West because she stuck out at the time, she was bolshy. She got a Hollywood deal for writing films when no other women wrote their own films. I wanted to give you a name that felt powerful. You’ve got Mae Rose Milburn, you’re at liberty to change it but it’s a name you can do something with.

MAE: Yeah. It’s got that power in it which ‘Alice Nutter’ has, being a witch to me means trying to have

some control over your life when you’re not meant to have any.` ALICE: Well, Alice Nutter was a landowner which was strange in those times. She had a dispute with Roger Knowell over some land. I think that could have been why she ended up hung because you know, she wasn’t just a wife, she had disputes with powerful men.

ALICE: I want you to know where I’m from. The older you get the more your family history seems important to understanding who you are. Because we’re not isolated we’re all linked to other people and what came before. I partly named you after a woman that wanted to adopt me when I was a child, Auntie Rose. She was really good to me and loved me even though we weren’t related. I just wanted to always remember her in life, by giving you her name I feel you carry through the love she gave me. Her name was Rose McGuire.

In the autumn of 2018, I was fortunate enough to be involved in a project organised by the F= art collective which focussed on ‘exploring and making visible Northern women’s experiences across time and place.’ 1 This project brought them to Ambleside and to me, as one important strand of my own work has been the recovery of marginalised women’s voices within Cumbria. Our starting point was the life and work of Harriet Martineau, however, our rich and enriching conversations soon broadened out to encompass other women writers who visited, walked and wrote about these Northern landscapes, but whose accounts of place and lived experience have tended to be written out of, or marginalised within, mainstream narratives.

Women Writers and the Lake District Dr Penny Bradshaw (University of Cumbria)

At either end of the main Wordsworthian Lake District period (1799-1850) and flanking it like bookends are two women writers of extraordinary cultural status and importance – Ann Radcliffe, the Gothic novelist and travel writer, and Harriet Martineau, the novelist, philanthropist, journalist and travel writer – who made a significant mark on the way we think about and respond to the Lakes landscape, but whose contributions continue to be downplayed. Radcliffe visited the Lakes in 1794, some 5 years before Wordsworth took up residence in Grasmere, while Martineau settled in Ambleside in 1845, just 5 years before Wordsworth’s death. In both cases, these women capture and respond to a moment of transition, and offer a re-imagining of the landscape and its meanings.

At the point at which Radcliffe published an account of her tour of the Lakes she was the most famous literary figure to visit and write about the region since the poet Thomas Gray, some quarter of a century earlier. One of the most obvious differences between her text and the picturesque travel literature which had gone before is that here the male guide is replaced by a female tourist. In a sense Radcliffe becomes the heroine of her own story as she describes her physical and often difficult journeys through this landscape - via horsedrawn carriage, by pony and on foot.

Radcliffe had made her name as the creator of an incredibly popular and distinctive kind of Gothic fiction, and she reads the Lakes through the lens of her Gothic imagination. The clouds rolling along the top of the Lune valley are ‘like smoke from a cauldron’ and Kendal is seen ‘white-smoking in the dark vale’ with the ‘outlines of its ruinous castle … just visible through the gloom.’2 She also overlays the natural and architectural landscape with literary references which emphasise the landscape’s potential for magical

interpretation, witchery and fantasy. Keswick, then the busiest tourist centre within the Lakes, is re-imagined as ‘the very region, which the wild fancy of a poet, like Shakespeare, would people with witches, and shew them at their incantations, calling spirits from the clouds and spectres from the earth’ (p. 137).

Alongside this fantastic dimension is a reading of place shaped by contemporary socio-political concerns. In Kendal, Radcliffe draws attention to a recently erected obelisk dedicated ‘to liberty and to the memory of the revolution of 1688’ and reads this as ‘testimony to the independence of its inhabitants’ (p. 98). Kendal thus becomes a gateway into an ideal social region in which a spirit of independence and liberty remains strong, and this is reinforced by her later description of a small cottage as a place of ‘simplicity and peace’ in which the inhabitants live in ‘honest independence’ (p. 107). In the mid-1790s, affirmation of such values amounted to a powerful political message, since for many intellectuals the ideals of liberty had been thrown into question by the recent brutal progress of the French Revolution.

Like Ann Radcliffe, Harriet Martineau was a writer of considerable reputation and standing before she came to the Lakes and her own Lake District writings would, in turn, come to shape perceptions of the region in the second half of the nineteenth century. Martineau’s arrival in the Lakes coincided with her near-miraculous recovery from a painful gynaecological condition, which had left her incapacitated for several years. The importance of being able to engage physically with nature once more is central to her experience of the Lakes. In the early stages of recovery, her first instinct was to creep ‘out of doors, and lay on a bit of grass a few yards square’ and, following her move to Ambleside, she became an indefatigable walker – often getting up at dawn and setting off on full day excursions.3 Martineau makes a number of contributions to Lakes literature, but most significant is A Complete Guide to the English Lakes (1855) which would be reprinted several times over the next 30 years. A sense of newness of perspective is apparent from the outset; she writes that this spot is so changed by the coming of visitors and ‘by other circumstances, that a new guide book is wanted’ in which the sights are given ‘a wholly new description.’ 4 Martineau enthusiastically embraces the changing face of the Lakes and this is signalled in her opening comments about the new Windermere railway, to which Wordsworth had been forcibly opposed. She rejects such ‘loud … lamentations’ against the coming of the railway and claims it is ‘a great thing that steam can convey travellers round the outskirts of the district’ (pp.

3-4).

Martineau here presents the Lakes as an evolving cultural landscape – a landscape which is shaped by its various and

ever-changing inhabitants and visitors. Unusually, given the marked rise of literary tourism in the nineteenth-century, she places comparatively little emphasis on the writers and literary texts which had brought the region into such prominent focus, offering instead a more rounded account of a landscape inhabited not just by bards but by tourists, boatmen, hoteliers and dalesmen. Her holistic vision and inclusive impulses are also evident in the fascinating way she weaves together practical details such as the absence of baths in Ambleside hotels (‘a singular deficiency when there is so much of company on the one hand and of water on the other’ p. 43) with passages of landscape description, local anecdotes, legends and ghost stories – the latter often amounting to detailed and lengthy accounts of spectral sightings.

As in Radcliffe’s Observations, an underlying socio-political message also runs through the book. This is manifested in both reflections motivated by traces of a more ancient past, such as her observation that the ruins of Furness Abbey ‘offers one more warning of how Time shatters thrones, dominations and powers, and causes of the glories of the world to pass away’ (p. 26), and in her support of a modern and inclusive Lakes, to which visitors of all classes are welcomed. Here and elsewhere she is critical of those ‘cultivated residents, who really did virtually assume that the mountains and vales were somehow their property, or at least a privilege appropriate to superior people like themselves.’ 5 Like the F= project itself, Radcliffe and Martineau’s accounts utilise an ‘embodied process of experiencing, understanding, reading, thinking and feeling’ (‘Live Your Best’). Their work reveals a shared enthusiasm for community and lived landscapes, for the magical possibilities of place, as well as an interest in social concerns and democratic principles.

Talking about their work and exploring such connections is a way of recovering women’s histories, lives and words within the present. In terms of informing the future, Radcliffe and Martineau remind us that this has always been an evolving and negotiated cultural landscape – open to multiple imaginative, philosophical, physical, and gendered responses.

Given the recent identification of the Lake District as a ‘cultural landscape’ with World Heritage status (UNESCO, 2017) it would seem to be more important than ever to foreground these negotiations and to make visible the work of writers whose challenges to existing readings of this landscape encourage us to bring to bear new perspectives of our own.

‘Live Your Best’, The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour (Leeds: Leeds Art Research Centre, Leeds Beckett University, 2018) Ann Radcliffe, Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland, ed. by Penny Bradshaw (Carlisle: Bookcase, 2014), p. 91 and p. 94.

Harriet Martineau, ‘A Year at Ambleside’, in Harriet Martineau at Ambleside, ed. by Barbara Todd (Carlisle: Bookcase, 2002).

Harriet Martineau, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes (Windermere: Garnett, 1855), p. 3.

Harriet Martineau, ‘Lights of the English Lake District’ in An Independent Woman’s Lake District Writings, ed. by Michael R. Hill (New York: Humanity Books, 2004), pp. 423466 (p. 458).

a quick outline of some of our discoveries in ambleside...

When we first started planning ‘The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour’, Jo told us about Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)-a journalist and writer, She said HM had this connection with Ambleside and she was an advocate of MESMERISM. (Liz, Casey and I had never heard of her).

I listened to an ‘In Our Time’ episode in which Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Harriet Martineau who, from a non-conformist background in Norwich, became one of the best known writers in the C19th. She had a wide range of interests and used a new, sociological method to observe the world around her, from religion in Egypt to slavery in America and the rights of women everywhere.

She popularised writing about economics for those outside the elite and, due to her popularity, was invited to the coronation of Queen Victoria, one of her readers.

These are notes I made while I listened ear trumpet embroidery necessarian HM didn’t believe you were born a sinner she didn’t believe in hell she wrote novels about community ‘the manchester strike’ she was very popular and successful went to U.S. for 2 years wasn’t an original thinker but she could popularise to measure society by how happy it makes people unmarried Carlisle mocked her she used her name unlike the Brontës she said of ‘Villette’ that Charlotte had no right

to make readers so miserable HM did not support birth control didn’t think the poor should have children anti marriage a woman like this should not be talking about sex and sexual restraint a cartoon depicted her as a witch that nobody would want to marry briefly engaged but he died liked blokes set up an all female house ate with her servants globes and maps for servants democracy ‘the woman question’ ‘society in america’women were subservient cautious about suffrage advocated women’s work

female autonomy women in charge of their own bodies at post mortem is was discovered she had a huge cyst growing inside her ‘how to observe’ how do they treat women? disabled get on top of a high point so you can see how the land lies/how the land is used aiming for happiness she knew dickens treated his wife badly disagreed factory legislation

mesmerism heals her she writes letters on mesmerism ‘mesmerism does work’ church and medics are cross with her seen as a witch her brother publicly says she’s wrong so she never speaks to her brother again didn’t like it when people made the personal political she wrote an immense amount literature history of england sociology short stories for children novels

journalism she was innovative and experimental at the time wrote for the moment perfect interdisciplinary grandmother to first wave feminism in the late nineteenth century useful for thinking through liberalism

Jo told us about the Armitt Museum and Library and the curator Deborah Walsh.

So F= headed to Ambleside to explore. We discovered the Armitt Museum and Library was dedicated to celebrating the legacies of inspirational women -Beatrix Potter, Charlotte Mason, Mary Louisa Armitt and of course Harriet Martineau!

Harriet was 43 when she moved to Ambleside and stayed until her death in 1876.

The Armitt Museum and Library holds safe an archive of letters written by Harriet to her friend Mrs Ogden and a substantial collection of her books. Pouring over them we entered her world.

Deborah Walsh lives in Ambleside and believes that if Harriet was around today the issue she’d be most concerned about would be the ‘second home’- Deborah says that is the most important social issue currently affecting Ambleside.

During our time in Ambleside we’ve been lucky to develop our friendship with Jan Moss -staying in her house, talking politics and painting together. Jan is an artist and travel writer.

Deborah and Jan told us about the book ‘Harriet Martineau at Ambleside’ by Barbara Todd.

F= keenly read Barbara Todd’s book. In the prologue, Barbara Todd writes clearly and confidently an overview of Harriet. Formally and factually, Barbara introduced us to Harriet. Barbara paved the way for ‘A Year at Ambleside’ by Harriet Martineau which was also published within the book . Barbara set the tone. So when it came to reading Harriet’s words we were informed and ready. “A Year At Ambleside”

by Harriet Martineau, introduces the reader to the sensitive but determined nature of Harriet and her assiduous approach to everything.

Harriet introduces the reader to Ambleside with love.

Jan and Deborah then told us the fantastic news that Barbara Todd lives in Ambleside in the house Harriet designed and built for herself, ‘The Knoll’. From Jan’s garden we looked across the field to ‘The Knoll’.

We were then blown away by the revelation that Barbara Todd (Babs) lives with her wife Maureen Colquhoun.

Maureen and Babs’ relationship started in 1975, Babs was the editor of Sappho magazine at the time and Maureen was the Labour MP for Northampton North.

Maureen became the first openly lesbian MP. Before they retired Maureen and Babs were energetic working mothers who campaigned passionately for women’s rights. For example in 1979, Maureen introduced the Protection of Prostitutes Bill into the House of Commons, turning up with 50 prostitutes in order to campaign for the decriminalisation of prostitution. Later when living in Ambleside Maureen served on the Lakes Parish Council. Equal Rights runs

through her political activity. She argued that members of the park authority should disclose their membership of the Freemasons.

Homophobic idiots couldn’t handle the brilliance of Maureen and Babs-the pathetic press hounded them when they lived in Hackney-paparazzi hid in the bushes trying to take photos of them.

Understandably London life lost it’s pull, the Lake District called them and they decided to move to Ambleside.

So one hot day last summer during ‘The Erotic Power of F= Conduit Tour’ we spent a lovely afternoon in the house that Harriet built! ‘The Knoll’ in Ambleside.

We laughed and chatted with Barbara Todd and Maureen Colquhoun. The following passage is an excerpt from our conversation. They describe how they came to live in ‘The Knoll.’

BABS: Yes I had some friends there, I’ve made friends there, yes, because I was a walker, I’d sprained my ankle and I was hobbling about and this woman started to talk to me, I was sitting in the little restaurant, I didn’t know Maureen then, well it was a tea place, you know, with my copy of Wordsworth in my pocket, MAUREEN: Typical BABS: it was the anniversary of the Wordsworth, it was his bicentenary, that’s right, so that was in 1950 CASEY: Wow BABS: And I was hobbling about and this woman saw this and said ‘what’s happened to you?’ and I said ‘well I’ve sprained my ankle and I came up for the Wordsworth celebrations,’ and she said ‘well, how are you going to get there? Hobbling like that?’ and I said ‘I’ve no idea! I just wanted the ticket,’ and I’d bought a ticket which was a big commemorative ticket for the Wordsworth Trust. I was at school you know. And she said ‘You can come and stay with me,’ out of the blue. She took me to the Wordsworth Trust with her the next day.

So then I’d been coming to the Lake District for a while and we were looking over the other side at the Kirkstone, and our easter holidays were only a week and were over and we both had to go back to London. And I said:’I don’t know why I am saying this Maureen,’ it was raining, there weren’t any mobile phones in those days so we kept having to go into a post office to ring a number about a house that was going and we didn’t see anything we could either afford or we liked.

MAUREEN: We couldn’t afford anything.

BABS: But anyway I said -(you know how rainy it can get, you’ve been through the rainy bits here, it was like that) and I said ‘I don’t know why I am saying this but have you the energy to drive over the Kirkstone Pass and let’s drop down near Ambleside side and look there’ and Maureen said ’But you’ve never liked Ambleside, you said it’s a horrible little touristy village’ and I said: ’well I know but before we go home let’s just try’ so we came down to an estate agents just down the road here and I saw this house up on the notice board and I said ‘Maureen I think that’s Harriet Martineau’s house’ well I didn’t know much about Martineau then but I’d read about her and she said ‘well let’s go and have a look at it’ So in the drizzly rain, we walked up this driveway and the sun came out, and we saw the view from the terrace and I said “we’re having it, go and get the money” **laughter**

Later, Babs told us to go and see Anne Mathieson (a hypnotist and retired GP living further down the way from Jan). ‘The Knoll’, Jan’s house and Anne’s house all sit happily in a dip in the land looking up at Loughrigg on the edge of Ambleside all within sight of each other.

Anne’s warm welcome entrances us every time and as we step into her house we enter her world and her very different slower time we call ‘Anne Time’. Here Anne winds her grandfather’s grandfather clock. The winding of the clock often punctuates our meeting, reminding us to slow down and be present. It’s ticking and tocking setting ‘Anne Time’, it’s pace and rhythm.

Outside of Anne’s window can be seen a California Redwood. The seed of this giant was brought back from America and planted here at Wraysholme by Mrs O’Brian, a previous owner- a powerful woman-the first woman to serve on the local council. The tree and Anne Time become profoundly linked through natural rhythms, through generations and across the world.

Here is Anne’s writing about the Unicorn, her spiritual guide who comes to her when she hypnotises herself.

‘Anne’s unicorn embroidered into a tablecloth as part of Live Your Best, Ambleside, November, 2018’

MY GRANNY HAS A UNICORN Anne Mathieson

“My Granny has a new kitten.” “Mmm,” said Hannah, “my Granny has a Unicorn.”

It is true. I expect it was always there but I discovered it seven years ago on the eve of an operation. It seemed prudent, having made all practical arrangements, to harness my own Unconscious to make the best of the endeavour.

Jung’s writing had taught me that we have an archetypal Healer within, so relaxing with closed eyes I waited for mine to appear. What came to mind was this Unicorn. Politely and gently I explained that actually it was the healer that I sought, opened my eyes, closed them and tried again.

The Unicorn grazed on a flowery meadow, alert and calm.

“Are you my Healer?” There was no reply but it had been a silly question-I mused and wondered-how were we to collaborate.

Understanding dawned and very useful it proved to be for that occasion. Look at me, sleek and vigorous, not like those Lions, the pride lazing slothful overfilled with fresh meat. Unicorns graze herbs, grasses; translate for you salads, grains and fruit in season. Note the horn, magic or course, finely pointed. Imagine a touch of horn tip heals, another touch banishes pain. Naturally it worked.

The Unicorn stays with me though I lend him sometimes.

A touch of the horn brings understanding, sometimes a mere glimmer but moments of surprising illumination.

The day of the British Lion Empire Builder is ended but perhaps there is a need in the world for the touch of the tip of a Unicorn’s horn.

WE GIVE THANKS TO THESE WOMEN

Mary Shelley Selina Thompson Judy Chicago WomanHouse

Betty Friedan

Caroline Criado-Perez

Georgia O’Keeffe

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Laura Bates

Louise Bourgeois

Shulamith Firestone

Jennifer Skip

Suzanne Lacy

Adrienne Rich

Laurie Penny

Sonia Delaunay

Susan Faludi

Audre Lorde

Sheona Lodge

Gloria Steinem

Yoko Ono

Valie Export

Susan B. Anthony

Harriet Martineau

Maggie Berkowitz

Joumana Haddad

Virginia Woolf

Martha Rosler

Kat Banyard

Guerilla Girls

Emma Kunz

Naomi Wolf

Patti Smith

Gee Vaucher

Germaine Greer

bell hooks

Doris Lessing

Alice Walker

Jacky Fleming

Maggie Nelson

Eve Ensler

Barbara Todd

Eileen Myles

Susie Orbach

Maureen Colquhoun

Rebecca Solnit

Dr Helen Castor

Anne Mathieson

Simone de Beauvoir

Kate Millett

Janet Moss

Mary Wollstonecraft

Malala Yousafzai

Donna Haraway

Artemisia Gentileschi

Dora Montifiore

Sara Ahmed

Hilma af Klint

Margaret Atwood

Ana Mendieta

Josefina de Vasconcellos