Modernist Heroines tour, People’s History Museum, Thursday 18 August

Five years on from the joint LRM, Manchester Modernist Society and Shrieking Violet project, Manchester’s Modernist Heroines will be revisited in a free walking tour for the People’s History Museum at 2pm on Thursday 18 August.

Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day in 2011, Manchester’s Modernist Heroines celebrated ten overlooked women from the twenty and twenty first-centuries with connections to Manchester, from the architect Rachel Haugh to the geographer Doreen Massey to the Egyptologist Rosalie David and the sculptor and designer Mitzi Cunliffe. It culminated in a psychogeographic walk around Manchester, responding to sites significant to Manchester’s Modernist Heroines, and a publication bringing together creative and critical responses to the women by contemporary Mancunians, from interviews and essays to poetry and drawing. Read online:

The Modernist Heroines tour will be led by artist, researcher and activist Morag Rose as part of a series of events running alongside the People’s History Museum exhibition Loitering With Intent, which celebrates ten years of the LRM and brings together new contributions from writers, artists and activists as well as items from the LRM archive. For more information and to book visit www.phm.org.uk/whatson/manchester-modernist-heroines-walk.

Loitering With Intent continues until Friday 14 October.

Manchester Histories Festival talk: Woman's Outlook – a surprisingly modern magazine?

I've been invited to repeat my talk about the co-operative women's magazine Woman's Outlook, which was published from Manchester between 1919 and 1967, at the People's History Museum on Saturday March 29 at 1pm. The talk takes place during this year's Manchester Histories Festival and Wonder Women series of events about Manchester's radical history and accompanies the free exhibition The People's Business - 150 Years of the Co-operative.

The talk is free but should be booked here. Facebook event.

Woman's Outlook – a surprisingly modern magazine? 

For nearly five decades, Woman’s Outlook was the voice of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, the campaigning organisation which worked to raise the status of women both in the co-operative movement and in society, and its onetime editor Mary Stott later became a longstanding editor of the Guardian women’s pages. From its origins in Manchester in 1919, Outlook provided an enticing mixture of articles addressing both the personal and the political, combining fashion, fiction, features and recipes with advice for working women – in many ways, not dissimilar to the content of women’s magazines today!

‘Woman’s Outlook: a surprisingly modern magazine?’ will explore some of the key issues addressed in Outlook, and look at how the magazine encouraged women to get involved in campaigning for a better world. Topics covered by Outlook such as female representation in parliament, equal pay and healthy eating remain highly relevant today, and the talk will end by considering whether the type of content provided by 21st century women’s lifestyle magazines has really changed much since the days of Outlook.

Research for the talk was undertaken in the National Co-operative Archive in Manchester, and I also conducted interviews with some inspiring women who were members of the co-operative women's movement at the time.

Please pass this on to anyone you think might be interested.

Woman's Outlook talk during Manchester Histories Festival, March 29 2014

I've been invited to revisit my talk about co-operative women's magazine Woman's Outlook to go alongside the People's Business exhibition currently on show at the People's History Museum, which celebrates 150 years of the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS), forerunner of today's Co-operative Group. My talk will take place at the People's History Museum on Saturday March 29 at 1pm, to coincide with the bi-annual Manchester Histories Festival, which is always jam-packed with talks, tours, events and other history-related excitement spread out across Manchester. It is free to attend.

Woman's Outlook: a surprisingly modern magazine? 

Between 1919 and 1967 the women of the co-operative movement had their own magazine, Woman's Outlook. Providing an enticing mix of the personal and the political, Woman's Outlook was surprisingly similar to women’s magazines today, and its concerns such as women's representation in parliament, equal pay and healthy eating remain ever-relevant.

For more information about this, and other events taking place alongside the exhibition, visit www.phm.org.uk/news/the-peoples-business-events.

The exhibition runs until 11 May 2014, and among the artefacts on display is a Co-operative Women's Guild banner.