Women Talking: Feminism and Adult Literacy Work

Abstract

One evening in Hackney, East London, nearly three years ago, a hundred people came to a party. There were many kinds of food prepared, including West Indian, Turkish, and Cypriot dishes; there was drinking; there was dancing. There was an exhibition on the walls, and half way through the evening, there was a pause, to listen to some of the people there read aloud from a book. The readers were the authors; they read aloud from pages in the book which they had written. In short, it was a publishing party, of a very unusual kind. For not only were the authors presenting their written work aloud, giving voice to the printed word; they had also edited, designed, and collaborated in publishing their own book. More than that, they had worked together in the conception and drafting of other people's writing as well as their own. The making of the book had engaged all of them in a process of dialogue with each other. The product was not only the book, printed and silent, but the reading from it, and the response to it. The book in question is called Every birth it comes different,1 and it was published in the autumn of 1980. Twenty-one people are listed as authors (including the writers of the introduction). The creation of the book, from original idea to printed result, took two years. It is not long (only seventy-two pages), but its effect on a reader is powerful, and the manner of its production challenges the conventional definitions of literature. Four other factors about the book are significant. One, the authors are adult literacy students; two, eighteen of them are women; three, the subject is childbirth; and four, the relationship of the participants requires a redefinition of the accepted roles of teacher, student, publisher, and writer. My own interest in this book is both personal and professional. I have had two experiences of childbirth of my own (my children are now thirteen and eleven years old), both in London hospitals. A collection like this of firsthand accounts of childbearing, from many cultures, over several decades, opens up an entirely new perspective on what those few hours in my life were about. I am also, by trade, a literacy worker, having served my apprenticeship during the early stages of the adult literacy campaign in Britain as volunteer, part-time tutor, and full-time organizer. In 1975 I became a founding member of the editorial collective which has published, ever since then, a quarterly paper called Write First Time, consisting of articles written by adult literacy students from across the country. During the same period, Centerprise, the publishing project and bookshop in Hackney, East London, was beginning to produce the first working-class autobiographical writing and poetry in a long series of books and pamphlets for which it has acquired an international reputation. Every birth it comes different was the result of work by members of the Hackney Reading Centre, which occupies rooms at the top of the Centerprise building. Sue Shrapnel, who worked there at that time, was also a founding member of Write First Time. Both Write First Time and Centerprise were members of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers when it was formally established in 1978 as a network of writing and publishing groups in Britain.