Lola Furniss reflects on her curation project: ‘Visibility and Resistance: A Curation Honouring the Lives of Working-Class Women in England, 20th Century to Present’, which is now available on the See Yourself on the Shelf webpage. Its accompanying exhibition is located in the University of York’s JB Morrell library, to the right of the entry-way help desk.
Reflecting upon this curation process, I am compelled by the undertaking of this task as both an intellectually rigorous and profoundly personal endeavour. At its core, the project sought to centre the narratives of working-class women in England from the twentieth century to the present, with an explicit emphasis on intersectionality. While the curation cannot claim to be exhaustive, it aspires to initiate an enduring diversification of the University of York’s library spaces and to reinforce the presence of working-class women’s voices in academic and cultural spaces.
Intersectionality remains at the forefront of decolonising approaches to curation. As theorised by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality illuminates the ways in which systems of oppression, such as patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, and xenophobia interweave and operate to produce compounded forms of marginalisation. Applied here, it prevents the reductive treatment of class or gender as isolated categories, instead recognising how these identities implicate others, including race, sexuality, and ability. This approach tailored the selection process, ensuring the materials reflect the multiplicity of working-class women’s lived realities. In doing so, the curation attempts to resist homogenisation, foregrounding the intersecting structures that both constrain and ignite resistance across different historical and cultural contexts.
During this process, I have explored the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes a valuable archival or scholarly resource. I have included foundational works such as Pamela M. Graves’s Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 and Elizabeth Roberts’s A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 to provide essential historical context. Though, in addition, I included Juno Roche’s A Working-Class Family Ages Badly and Sabeena Akhtar’s edited collection Cut from the Same Cloth? Muslim Women on Life in Britain, and Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns to accentuate the intersectional dimensions of identity, articulated directly by working-class authors. The inclusion of zines, addressed in a dedicated section of the reading list, alongside cultural histories like Selina Todd’s Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution and community-based works such as Speak Out!: A Brixton Black Women’s Group Reader facilitated a multidimensional engagement with the lived realities and artistic protest by working-class women. This approach highlights the value of platforming the complexity of working-class experiences, communicating a powerful, prideful embodiment of resistance.
Additionally, in my research I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the features of online archives and websites, with distinctive efforts to support independent publishers and amplify online histories that can be difficult to locate. I also drew upon recommendations from other universities undertaking similar initiatives to diversify their collections, as well as materials from the York and Leeds public libraries. These external resources yielded a wide range of compelling materials that broadened and enriched the curation as a collective body of work.
As I mentioned in my introductory post, there is an impressive political import inherent within the act of curation, making it an imperative task to avoid reductive or inaccurate portrayals of working-class women. This project reinforced the fundamental obligation to foster spaces within academic institutions that validate working-class women’s narratives as crucial to both intellectual discourse and activism. Ultimately, without the women highlighted in this curation, the plight for change would lack critical historical continuity, knowledge through experience, and the perspectives necessary to acknowledge and advance the emancipation against oppressive systemic hierarchies.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the University Library team for their unwavering support and expertise throughout this project. Their guidance was invaluable in navigating the logistical and technical considerations necessary for bringing the curation to fruition, both within the library’s physical display and the LibGuide. I am particularly thankful to Antonio, Ilka, Dave, and Kirsty for their meaningful and constructive guidance during our meetings, and for their dedication to the success of the project; to Kenny and the purchasing team for facilitating the acquisition of my newly selected materials; to Ned for his careful assistance with social media promotion; to Laura and Lydia for their contributions and recommendations with the archival material; to Ben for his willingness to stick with me throughout my many copyright queries; and to Steph and Siobhan for their patience and essential guidance during the LibGuide creation process. The generosity, warmth, and care of each member of the team have been integral to my productivity and execution of this task. I am also indebted to my family for their insight on the topic, for sharing working-class struggle and protest stories throughout my life, and for compelling me to engage thoughtfully with the topics and intricacies of systemic oppression.
Looking forward, I envisage this curation as a living collection that invites continual interaction and development by future scholars and students. I hope that it contributes to sustained efforts to create intersectional library collections that are more inclusive, nuanced, and representative. Most importantly, I hope it inspires ongoing critical inquiry into the ways working-class women’s stories are told, preserved, and valued. I encourage you to explore the collection, engage with its materials, and cardinally, contribute to the ongoing work of expanding working-class visibility within academic and cultural spheres. Thank you for your attention, and for taking time out of your day to interact with my curation!