Housing, Culture and Women's Citizenship in Britain, c.1945 to the present

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This project will develop and extend the impact activities created by the current AHRC project 'Feminism, culture and women's lives in Britain, c.1945-c.2015'. The study on which this project builds examines in detail the relationship between women's lives and feminism, specifically within the cultural sphere. Findings from this work demonstrate that women across several generations share concerns about their vulnerability within the domestic sphere and housing market. Social housing, in particular, has emerged as a key concern. It has become clear that women have frequently taken a lead in campaigning for better housing provision. In addition, participation in housing campaigns has been a key means by which working-class women have engaged in civic life and affected political change. At the same time, many women expressed frustration at the lack of opportunities for them to express their views on housing, both within and beyond their neighbourhood, or to challenge the agenda and objectives of housing providers and policymakers. This is felt to have become much harder since the privatisation of most social housing. Follow-on Funding will assist women tenants in north-west England to express their views and encourage a wide range of audiences to listen to and learn from their experiences.To achieve this, we will develop the impact activities created by our existing AHRC project. Our project created a theatre group, the Delaney Theatre Group, for women tenants in a Salford tower block. The women used this group to produce and perform a play which drew on their experiences of everyday life since 1945, entitled 'Sweetly Sings the Donkey'. This aspect of our project indicated that cultural participation provides a means for women to articulate their concerns and aspirations in ways that they found fulfilling and which enhanced their emotional wellbeing. The play was performed to c.240 people, including housing workers and policymakers, and audience feedback indicated that the performance had altered spectators' understanding of working-class women's ability to make a positive contribution to civic and cultural life. We propose to use Follow-on Funding to further develop the impact of this activity by touring 'Sweetly Sings the Donkey' to theatres and arts festivals which have expressed interest in hosting a performance.We also propose to use this model of cultural participation to enable a larger group of women to reflect on their housing experiences. The current AHRC project has focused broadly on women's relationship to cultural life and feminism. Follow-on Funding would enable participants to develop cultural activities that focus specifically on their experience of, and concerns about, social housing. This will be achieved by expanding the membership of the established Delaney Theatre Group to include a wider range of women, including clients of our new project partner Salford Women's Aid. By broadening the Theatre Group's activities to include writing, the Group will go on to write and perform a new play focused on women's experiences of social housing, which will draw on oral history testimonies created during the original AHRC project.The original project developed strategies designed to enhance working-class women's cultural and civic participation. These strategies were devised in consultation with project partners and with members of the Shadow Cabinet. Follow-on Funding will enable us to develop more targeted policy recommendations which focus on how to encourage women tenants' participation in the design, maintenance and governance of their neighbourhoods. This is timely given local and national concern over the provision and governance of social housing following the Grenfell Tower disaster in June 2017. Follow-on Funding will allow us to accept invitations to write and present two policy papers on this subject to the City of Salford Mayor and to the Shadow Cabinet.