Women's History month starts 1st March, and Feminist Library faces eviction!

Message from The Feminist Library collective

Join us on Wednesday 24th February, at 6.30pm at 160 Tooley Street, London SE1 2QH, where Southwark Council's Budget setting meeting will take place. 

We will be handing in our petition there – 13000+ signatures so far.

Link to Facebook event for demo here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1214836021970098/

Dear Friends,

The Feminist Library is in an emergency situation, facing eviction in the near future after 30 years in the current building!

We request that you show your support by spreading the word far and wide and by telling your friends how much the library means to you. Other ways that you can help us immediately include:

- Sign our petition https://you.38degrees.org.uk/p/savefeministlibrary 

- Send letters to Southwark local councillors and Southwark MPs: Neil Coyle, Labour Party Member of Parliament for Bermondsey & Old Southwark (the Feminist Library’s constituency) Tel: 020 7219 8733. Email:neil.coyle.mp@parliament.uk; Helen Hayes, Labour Party Member of Parliament for Dulwich and West Norwood Tel: 020 7219 6971. Email: helen.hayes.mp@parliament.uk; Harriet Harman, Labour Party Member of Parliament for Camberwell and Peckham Tel: 020 7219 4218 Email: harriet.harman.mp@parliament.uk

- Donate to our Emergency Fund that has been set up to ensure that the Feminist Library collection's future is safe regardless of the final decision of the council on our current premises
http://feministlibrary.co.uk/support/emergencyfund/;

- Offer a hand with the campaign (we are always on a lookout for new volunteers, but at the moment we urgently need help with events, media, marketing and premises work).

- Send us a brief testimonial saying how much the library means to you, especially mentioning if you have used it, attended events there or been a volunteer.

- Tell us if you are a Southwark resident, so we can contact you for specific help locally.

Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you need any further information: admin@feministlibrary.co.uk 

A couple more things before the end of March

A. exhibition of feminist silk screen posters at Chats Palace

https://whatischatspalace.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/not-a-cupcake-class-in-sight/

Mainly 70s/80s material produced by feminist print collectives like See Red and Lenthall Road Workshop.

Chats Palace, 42-44 Brooksby’s Walk, London E9 6DF

<< Enlarged Lives – an exhibition of feminist related original silk screen posters is now on the walls of Chats Palace bar. Fragile Archivists invited Jess Baines, a researcher and member of See Red Women’s Workshop, to reflect on the experience of the women's movement during the 1980’s. Here is her response.

Collectively and individually these few posters provide wonderfully suggestive clues to some of the feminist and lesbian cultural activity of 1980’s London, as well as to the context in which it took place. Most of this activity had been set in motion a decade earlier as part of the women’s movement desire to come together and unravel the limitations of our own lives, not just through talking and protest, but creatively through writing, image making and performance. >>

B. Two meetings on politics of technology coming out of the Luddites 200/Breaking the Frame discussions.

-----------------------------------------------------------

/*1. 28th/29th March. ***Women’'s Gathering* on gender and the politics of
technology, focusing on reproductive technologies*

*2. Radical Science and Alternative Technology*: /From the 70s to the
Present.
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*1. Women'’s Gathering* on gender and the politics of technology,
focusing on reproductive technologies,

6pm March 28th – 4pm March 29th 2015,

The Feminist Library
meeting room, 5 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7XW.

At the first Breaking the Frame gathering in 2014, women started developing a feminist analysis of the intersection between gender and the politics of technology and how it impacts on all aspects of our lives,
e.g. in food production, work, surveillance, digital technology, and health.

At this event we will continue that process, focusing on reproductive technologies. Public debate in this area has mainly been framed as science versus religious reaction, which tends to ignore any feminist analysis. We shall be asking: are these technologies of benefit to women, and if so, which women, or do they risk our health and integrate our bodies further into the patriarchal capitalist system?

Join us to explore the issues with an outstanding set of speakers:

Jalna Hanmer and Stevienna de Saille on a radical feminist analysis of reproductive technologies
Rahila Gupta on sex selection and abortion
Donna Dickenson and Carolin Shurr on international and commercial
surrogacy
Miriam Zoll on the impact of IVF on women
Outline programme
<http://breakingtheframe.org.uk/womens-gathering-28th-29th-march-2015/>

Venue is disabled accessible, recommended minimum donation £5

All self-defining women welcome. Cheap vegan food.

For more information or to book, contact info@breakingtheframe.org.uk or
visit http://www.breakingtheframe.org.uk


*2. Radical Science and Alternative Technology*: /From the 70s to the Present./

April 11th , 1pm to 5.30pm,

Feminist Library, 5 Westminster Bridge
Road, London SE1 7XW. Free.

In our highly technological industrial society, key issues hinge on the politics of science and technology. In the 1970s and 80s the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science and the alternative technology movement campaigned against harmful corporate and military uses of technology, for 'appropriate technology' and for 'science for the people.' These perspectives are critically needed in the current environmental crisis, whilst surveillance, automation and workplace hazards continue to be major issues.

Speakers:

  * *Introductions*: Hilary and Steven Rose (BSSRS), Peter Harper
    (Centre for Alternative Technology), David King (Breaking the Frame)
  * *Energy/food politics*: Les Levidow (BSSRS), Helena Paul (Econexus),
    speaker from Anti-Fracking Movement
  * *Social control/surveillance*: Jonathan Rosenhead (BSSRS), Jim
    Killock (Open Rights Group)
  * *Work hazards*: Sue Barlow (BSSRS, women and work hazards group),
    Eve Barker (Hazards Magazine), tbc

For more information contact luddites200@yahoo.co.uk or visit
http://www.breakingtheframe.org.uk

and Reminder: Picket London Metropolitan University - Sack Bob Lambert
(see previous posts on undercover policing) 

Next picket: March 27th. 
... Another former officer involved in the undercover policing scandal has just been sacked by a university. Anglia Ruskin University, has confirmed it will no longer employ former DCI Gordon Mills after he was exposed as one of the senior police officers who colluded with the illegal Consulting Association, responsible for the blacklisting of trade unionists in the construction industry.
Blacklisted workers and campaigners hailed the ARU decision as a massive victory.
Anglia Ruskin have taken a clear decision, whether from ethical motives, or from fear of protest and bad publicity - employing someone with Mills' record could no longer be an option. (n the light of this - how long can London Met stand by their increasingly dubious position that Bob Lambert is an appropriate person to be teaching in their institution?
PROTEST to the people who run London Met, and demand that they sack Bob Lambert.