Suffragette Legacy Conference

From BBC’s The Village and David Bowie’s Suffragette City to Femen activists and Pussy Riot, the suffragette legacy is everywhere in modern culture, but as the home of Emmeline Pankhurst and numerous other brave women, we wanted to ask where modern day feminism and suffragettes intersect in Manchester today.

As part of the Wonder Women Radical Manchester events celebrating International Women’s Day 2014, the conference will bring together academics, artists and activists to present, perform and share how their work is affected by the suffragette legacy of feminism. Papers or submissions were very welcome from any background, but special consideration was given to anyone who directly engaged with the Manchester history of the women’s movement. Within an interdisciplinary context we hoped to explore if, how and why the movement still matters in politics, academia, the arts and other aspects of modern Manchester. Our fantastic delegates have indeed showed us that there is still a lot of unexplored suffragette material, from music to prisons, literature to craft.

Leading up to the event we will be tweeting from @SuffragEvent with sneak-peaks into what our performers, speakers and participants will be doing. We will also be blogging at http://wonderwomenmcr.blogspot.co.uk/ sharing links to the people involved and preparations.

Provisional Programme is as follows

Registration from 9:30am

10.00am Introduction and scene setting by People’s History Museum Director Katy Archer

10.45am First session (Chair: Anne Louise Kershaw)

* Alison Ronan “Women, Peace and the Vote 1914.18”

* Sarah Feinstein “An Archive of Our Own: Women’s Revolution per Minute (1977-2005) – A Radical Feminist Music Distribution Network and Anti-Capitalist Business Model”

* Ben Halligan “Slutwalk”

* Ian Miller “The Suffragettes and Prison/Hunger Strike”

* 'Proud to be Me' project

* Rebecca Smith

Lunch not provided, The Left Bank Cafe at the museum will be availble to delegates who wish to purchase lunch

1.30pm Second Session (Chair: Katy Archer)

* Steph Pike, Poetry performance

* Katherine Chan, “International Suffrage”

* Bernadette Hyland “The Suffragette Legacy”

* Bronwyn Lacken “Telling Women’s Stories: Writing and Activism”

* White/Davies Masks in the Townhall

Break

3.30pm Third Session (Chair: Camilla Mørk Røstvik)

* Stefanie Sabathy A fictional conversation between Suffragettes and Modern Women

* Nicola Gauld, Sima Gonsai “Fight for the Right: the Birmingham Suffragettes

* Alison Ronan and Sue Reddish, Video and Workshop

5:00pm latest, close of conference