A three-day event will highlight the lives and achievements of almost 90 women, many of whom have been forgotten or little recorded by history.
An exhibition titled Celebrating Women’s Lives Through the Years will be staged from today (October 30) to Sunday at Redhills Miners’ Hall in Durham.
It is part of a three-day programme of events called Resist and Resolve, staged by the National Women’s Action for Positive Change, which emerged from activities in Durham two years ago to mark the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike.
The project originated in plans to mark the 100th anniversary of the miners’ lockout. After the end of the 1926 General Strike, many miners stayed locked out from work for months in their bitter dispute with coal owners who wanted to cut wages and increase working hours.
Heather Wood, author of a book on growing up in the pit community of Easington and who is one of the Positive Change group, said an aim was to highlight the often overlooked women who supported mining families and communities during that struggle.
“With so little written about these women, we have been researching their stories and hope to bring their contribution to wider public attention,” she said.
“The event has now grown into a celebration of women across the generations, recognising those who fought for change in the past and those continuing that work today.
“They didn’t all think the same way, and they didn’t all live the same kind of lives. But there is a thread running through their stories. They got involved.
“They organised. They resisted. They stood their ground. They helped others. They spoke up and, in their own different ways, they changed things. That is where the name Resist and Resolve comes from.
“It is about the courage to resist what is wrong, but also the resolve to keep going – sometimes when change takes years, sometimes when you don’t even live to see the difference you’ve made. This exhibition is about remembering those women.
“But it isn’t only about looking backwards. We want to inform and educate, but most of all we want to inspire.
“We particularly hope younger women will read these stories and realise that you don’t have to be famous or powerful to make a difference.
“We know there are many more stories out there. Some will be in archives and old newspapers, but many will be in people’s homes – in photographs tucked away in drawers, in letters, family stories and memories that have been passed down. We want to find those women too.
“So we will keep looking and keep adding to what we have started. Whatever comes out of Resist and Resolve will not simply be put away when this weekend is over. We want it to grow, and we want the stories we discover now and in the future to become part of it.”
The weekend’s programme is a women only one, with a mixture of events celebrating achievements and offering opportunities to come together.
The exhibition will be launched from 7pm tonight (Friday) with an evening of music and food.
On Saturday, events will run from 10am to 3pm, with stalls, speakers, music, comedy and poetry. Performers include Lizzie Lovejoy, Jen Strike and Marie Little. There will also be a screening of the film Heard Not Hushed.
Sunday’s programme will offer an opportunity to rest and relax with guided sessions featuring breathing, sound and laughing yoga.
Free weekend tickets for women are available through the Redhills website, or they can simply turn up on the day.
Among the women featured in the exhibition is Lisbeth Simm, born in Cramlington in 1870, who toured mining towns and collieries to persuade working-class women that politics also belonged to them.
The daughter of a miner, her father-in-law had been involved in the 1865 miners’ lockout and was evicted from his colliery house.
Lisbeth qualified as a teacher through the pupil-teacher system and became one of the North East’s most determined organisers following the founding of the Women’s Labour League in 1906.
She travelled from place to place holding meetings, speaking to women and setting up branches. Her work reached directly into the Durham coalfield. By the end of 1908, Lisbeth had established eight branches.
She also campaigned for the vote for women and became involved with the North East Society for Women’s Suffrage.
Heather said: “She wrote for women. She organised them. She spoke for votes for women, but also about wages, housing, hungry children and the work women did every single day and she challenged the idea that the men should do the politics while the women made the tea.”
In 1919, she was chosen as one of two women sent to Australia by the government’s Oversea Settlement Committee to investigate opportunities for British women who might emigrate.
In 1946, when she was in her seventies, she left Britain for America. She settled in Los Angeles, where she died in 1952, aged 82.
Also featured in the exhibition is Isabel Brown, born in South Shields in 1894. Her father was a manual worker. A scholarship gave her the chance to train at Sunderland Teacher Training College.
She joined the Labour Party in 1918 and, in 1920, the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain. She was among the small number of women involved at its foundation and went on to become one of the party’s most formidable organisers and public speakers.
She travelled to Moscow to study at the International Lenin School and returned to Britain shortly before the General Strike of 1926. She was subsequently arrested for sedition and imprisoned for three months after a speech attacking the government’s treatment of workers.
By the early 1930s, she led the British Committee for the Relief of Victims of Fascism.
When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Brown travelled to Spain and was at the centre of the British response. Within weeks, a British medical unit left for Spain with doctors, nurses, medical supplies and equipment for a field hospital.
She later became National Women’s Organiser of the Communist Party. In 1940, she was seriously injured in an air raid and spent months in hospital, with her injuries affecting her health for the rest of her life.
