Spare Rib, the radical magazine charting the grassroots feminist movement for 21 years from the early 1970s, summed up an era and a movement. Now its often challenging debates during an important period for women’s liberation, can be accessed online thanks to an ambitious project by the British Library.
All 239 editions of the magazine, which published from 1972-93, can be viewed for free from Thursday, alongside articles written by academics, activists and former contributors about how Spare Rib was run, its history and the issues it tackled.
The project to digitise the publication has been time-consuming because of the very ethos of a magazine run by a collective that accepted work from thousands of contributors. Copyright laws demanded the British Library located and gained permission from the majority of them, which was achieved after a callout for past contributors highlighted in the Guardian.
Polly Russell, curator of politics and public life at the British Library, said: “Funny, irreverent, intelligent and passionate, Spare Rib was a product of its time which is also somehow timeless. Detailed features of feminist issues such as domestic violence and abortion, and news stories about women from the UK and around the world sit side-by-side with articles about hair care [including the unwanted kind], how to put up a shelf and instructions on self-defence.
“Just as varied were the breadth of voices in the magazine; early editions of Spare Rib involved big-name contributors including Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Margaret Drabble and Alice Walker, but alongside these were the voices of ordinary women telling their own stories.
“By making this part of our intellectual heritage available online, we hope it will attract new and returning generations of readers to the magazine for research, inspiration and enjoyment.”
Until now, the magazines have been availableonly in paper form at the British Library’s reading rooms and a few other specialist libraries and archives.
The new curated Spare Rib website features 300 selected pages, with a link to the website for Jisc, a charity supporting digital technologies in UK education and research, where the entire run will be available to view.
The magazine sought to provide an alternative to traditional gender roles, tackling subjects such as “liberating orgasm”, “kitchen sink racism” and female genital mutilation.
Marsha Rowe, co-founder of the magazine, said she was thrilled by the project: “It is as if the magazine has been given a new lease of life. By making the magazine freely available over the internet, it can encourage women round the world to act together to change and be a resource in support of their struggle for rights and freedoms.”
Sue O’Sullivan, who worked at the magazine from 1979-84, said: “Spare Rib was a highly visible part of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and a tool for reaching thousands of women every single month for over 20 years.” The online magazines would not only be a wonderful resource for younger historians and feminist activists, but also for men and women “who wonder what their mothers, aunts, grannies and older friends got up to all those years ago”.
The digitisation was welcomed by Debra Ferreday, from Lancaster University’s centre of gender and women’s studies. “The importance of the Spare Rib archive can’t be overestimated. It’s a unique record of the Women’s Liberation Movement which will be of huge value to feminist researchers, scholars, students and activists everywhere”, she said.
