Documenting Feminist Testimony in the Age of Social Media – #ShefFemStories

Since beginning to work with the volunteer-run Sheffield Feminist Archive (SFA) through the School of English MA work placement module and the Careers Service AHEAD scheme, I’ve learned more about Sheffield feminist history than I ever thought possible. Having access to documents and oral histories relating to women in Sheffield has given me access to voices that may otherwise be buried in dominant narratives of the past. In this blog, I would like to introduce you to our latest campaign, #ShefFemStories, which brings an online dimension to the SFA, beyond our physical archive and oral histories collection.

Before working with the SFA I had no idea that suffragette Adela Pankhurst had made Sheffield her home for a time, and crashed the Town Hall Cutlers’ Feast in protest in 1908. Nor did I know much about the Women of Steel, who are commemorated by a community-funded statue in Sheffield town centre. (Documents, artefacts and information regarding this and much more can be found in SFA’s special collection in the Sheffield Archives, or on our Timeline of Sheffield Feminism, which I helped to develop.)

Although I have learned a lot from our physical archive, one of the most vibrant and fascinating parts of the collective’s work is the Oral History project. This is an ongoing effort to capture the experiences and memories of those involved in feminist activism in Sheffield, past and present, for future generations in the city to access.

Women’s experiences are often the parts of our collective history that are ignored, brushed aside or simply not documented in the first place; documenting oral testimony is an excellent way for to combat this absence of voice and experience, before these stories are lost to us forever.

Preserving women’s oral history is an important endeavour, but traditional methods of doing so may fail to capture shorter or more nuanced forms of testimony that, when accumulated, are equally important. I began to wonder, is there a more effective way of gathering feminist testimony for an archival project in this online age?

I realised that many people may not feel as though they have enough to talk about to warrant an oral history interview, or that their experiences aren’t “important” enough to be documented in full. In fact, this is a trend we’ve seen with many people (especially those who identify as women) approached to do an oral history interview. However, at our stall for The Woodland Heritage Festival, people were very keen to fill out “I am a feminist because...” cards (now accessible in our archive):