IT’S a bit of a cliche to hear the rallying call that women should be raising our voices and amplifying those of other sisters.

We do, of course, whenever we have the time, energy — and often, the rage against injustice.

We run campaigns, sign petitions, speak out in public and in the media. We have diaries stuffed with conferences, seminars, podcasts, and endless meetings in the limbo-land of Zoom.

Well, here’s a call to arms of a different mettle: we need to be sitting at a keyboard and writing. We need, as old-school journalists would say, to get some ink on the page.

We know too well that women’s lives have been “hidden from history.” Socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham gave us a book with that very title, in 1973.

The author recently gave a talk via the Socialist History Society about her memoirs. There are three, covering the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s: “Promise of a Dream”, “Daring to Hope” and “Reasons to Rebel”. (Her talk is here: socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/?p=1740)

Rowbotham says: “I wrote these because I wanted to record and bring into view the radical people and movements and ideas which have influenced me, in the hope that younger people might find them interesting, and begin to look at the recent past in more detail.”

Here’s a writer who emerged from an academic background, but decided to write in a voice that’s accessible, and inclusive. There’s always been an air of the reporter in Rowbotham’s work. In Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (another essential guide on our bookshelves since 1973), she wrote: “A woman who used to live in a flat above me would talk of how she wished she could work part time in the factory she’d been in, before she had children, just for the company. Having money that’s really your own is important, too, because it means you have the right to tell a man where he can get off.”

Authentic voices, and real stories, have the power of testimony. Reading a memoir which has made its way directly from a woman’s heart and guts to our minds is the perfect delivery of information. Emotion carries the detail, the facts and dates, and the happenings. All good storytellers know this.

I’ve taken a few examples from my own bookshelves, so here’s a swift tour of the good and the great of memoirs and biographies.
Top of my list will always be the breathtaking Out of Africa, by Danish author Karen Blixen (her pen name, Isak Dinesen), for its vivid descriptions of the country around her coffee farm near Nairobi. Falling in love with a country, and its people, could be a tough idea to convey. Blixen writes of sounds, smells and sights — all without falling into the trap of cloying purple prose.

Some of you will know the film, and it’s very fine. The facts fall prey to Hollywood, mainly in the casting of uber-straight Robert Redford, playing Blixen’s love, Denys Finch-Hatton, who was almost certainly gay or bisexual. 

Here is the story of a strong woman, often failed by men or by the patriarchy at large, who survives and thrives.

As Blixen was capturing her extraordinary life of the early 1900s, a future activist and writer was born in Pretoria. Mary Benson published A Far Cry: The Making of a South African in 1989. This melds the battle against apartheid with a moving and personal account.

I often teach a writing class, aimed at helping so-called ordinary people to tell the stories of their families, communities, and experiences. These rarely turn out to be ordinary. I advise starting a story with a “moment,” something which encapsulates a character, or a setting, or a moment in time.

Benson starts her compelling memoir with a scene, filmic in intensity, of her father keeping calm in a terrifying summer storm.
Her allusions are never contrived, but on the next page, we’re told that the family home was next to a jail, sometimes the site of hangings.

“We were surrounded by symbols of a system that was to become infamous. A system which I was to spend much of my life opposing, and of which — at the time — I was totally oblivious.”

Writing our own stories can be tricky. In my experience, partly as a ghostwriter, there are far too many women stymied by imposter syndrome. So many feel that experiences are too prosaic, too humdrum. My best advice, as an editor: snap out of it. I’ve spent months with would-be biographers, and there’s always a moment when an extraordinary narrative emerges.

More than 40 years ago, I was editing the diaries of an elderly woman in a south Wales pit village. She wanted to leave a properly written account of her life, for her grandchildren. Among her mementoes, I spied the distinctive colours of a suffragette medal, the inscription reading “Hunger Strike.”

She’d never told her family of the torture she endured in 1910, and didn’t include that trauma in the biography. Her story, her choice.

A personal heroine of the biography genre is Angela V John, author of Rocking the Boat: Welsh Women who Championed Equality, 1840-1990.

Of the occasion when the future Lady Rhondda spoke in that fine old Valleys town of Aberdare (declaration of interest: it’s my hometown) “she had mice thrown on the platform, along with herrings, ripe tomatoes and cabbages. Sulphurated gas, snuff and cayenne pepper pervaded the hall.”

Not only did John produce superb stories of these diverse women’s lives, but she wrote each chapter in a different style. 

Similarly, Leonie Caldicott wrote Women of our Century, which includes the life of Dora Russell. She cites this champion of women’s rights first meeting her husband-to-be. 

“We did this famous walk over the Sussex Downs, because Bertie wasn’t allowed near the coast in case he signalled to the Germans or something. Neither then, nor later, was it the world-famous genius in Bertie Russell that I loved.”

Another self-identifying “ordinary” woman to write about extraordinary experiences is Ursula Martin, also featured in this paper.  

She walked nearly 4,000 miles around Wales, wrote a book about it, and later embarked on a trek across Europe. The new account is One Woman Walks Europe, From Wales to Ukraine and Back Again, and is filled with humour, bravery, and the complex relationship between our yearning for community and relationships, juxtaposed with the challenge of solitude, fear and exhaustion. Oh, and some of her journey carried on through Covid lockdown.

One book I’ve occasionally put down, but only to applaud its contributors, is Anne and Betty: United By The Struggle, bringing us the lives of Anne Scargill and Betty Cook.

Scargill was arrested, Cook had her knee fractured by a policeman’s truncheon, but they battled on. 

The women had met on a coach to the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, and would co-found the Women Against Pit Closures movement.

Cook says, of the miners’ strike which radicalised and energised them: “I was determined I wasn’t going to sit and cry during the ’84 strike; I was going to get up and get involved.”

The two invited author Ian Clayton to help with the memoir, and he says: “It was hard to write, and emotional. Anne and Betty have not had easy lives. It was upsetting at times to see them trying to find the words to express disappointments, letdowns and the situations where they knew the right thing to do and nobody was listening. 

“It was also exhilarating to hear them talk about the times when they went into battle and refused to back down.”

Libraries are packed with men’s accounts of their lives, and those of other men. Historian Bettany Hughes cites research showing only 0.5 per cent of recorded history is about women's stories.

Men blowing their own trumpet (other horns are available, some men seem better suited to the tuba, for example) dominates, and we need to put that right.

I’ll teach my free writing class, “What’s Your Story?” to any comrade sisters who want it.

A final word from Betty Cook: “We were just two out of hundreds and hundreds of women. We’re telling the story on behalf of all the others, and hopefully they will write their own history, even if it’s in a little notebook for the family. It’s very important they chronicle what happened. 

“Women’s history has been ignored over the years and if we can encourage working-class women to write things down it would be brilliant.”

Register your interest in What’s Your Story? classes: lynnewalsh999@gmail.com.