“Thank you for sharing your stories and for making us aware and maybe helping us to see what we can do in the future.” Listening to women talk about their lives and their activism, “by being the change that they needed to see in the world”,  as one of the girls from Perry Beeches II School, referencing Gandhi, expressed it, has been an inspiring experience for the students on the oral history research part of Birmingham Women Past and Present Project.

Since September 2016 we have been going into PB II and Waverley Schools to work with an after school club of mainly year 9 students who were interested in being part of the Birmingham Women Past and Present Project. We have worked with about 20 students over the past six months, talking to them about women’s history in the City, linking local movements to national movements and training them to do video history recordings in order to do original research using women’s oral testimonies.

Over this time we have interviewed 7 different women about their lives in Birmingham and their diverse experiences; at work as mental health nurses, working for the police, as teachers of further education, as owner of a women’s record company; as activists against fascism in Spain and as part of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Birmingham.

It has been an informative and inspiring six months for us as workshop facilitators and for the girls involved. This has been I think due to the great respect both interviewees and interviewers have shown each other and how collaboratively they have worked. The interviewees have been honest and open in their responses to thoughtful and intuitive questions from the interviewers which have sought not only to find out information but to understand lived experience in a way that can be applied to their own lives.

It could be seen as depressing that girls feel a need for some help in navigating their futures as women, that their confidence and hope in equality for women and in the extent of feminism is shaky. However, the experience of listening to women talk about their lives and the decisions and actions they have taken has proved to be inspiring: “Thanks for putting into perspective what you can achieve and what was going on and how you overcame it.”

Being recorders of oral history has given the girls a chance to reflect on their own experiences, placed them in a continuing, changing history of what it means to be a woman, informed them about how women have stood up for their rights as women in the past and encouraged them to make others aware of women’s history and what impact that can have so, “women know today about the freedoms that they have and the importance of knowing the past, so that they can positively affect the future.”

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(All quotations are from recorded feedback from PB II students)