Eve Setch on The Feminist Library (1998)

The Feminist Library

Written By: Eve Setch
Date: January 1998

Published In London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter Issue 2: Lent term 1998 

The Feminist Library was founded in 1975 as the Women’s Research and Resources Centre and is one of the few remaining women’s libraries and archives left in Britain. It was originally set up as a centre for researchers embarking on areas of work in the in the new field of women’s studies. Since then this resource has been extended alongside the field itself and the library book, journal and archival holdings have burgeoned.

The Library houses a collection of materials on and by women. The holdings now extend to over 10,000 books, both fiction and non-fiction, 9,000 pamphlets, 1200 articles and 1500 journals. These cover a whole range of subjects, for example work, health, sexuality, women’s history, art, and literature. Not only are many current publications held in the library, but it has a number of rare imprints published form the 1970s onwards. Many of these are self-produced articles, pamphlets and journals that cannot be found in conventional libraries and bookshops. The library still receives various journals such as Trouble and Strife and Feminist Review as well as holding standard past stocks including Spare Rib. The collection has an extensive international element containing many journals and books from other countries, for example Ms from America, Mujer Fempress from Chile and publications from the EEC and United Nations organisations for women.

A major strength of the library is its holdings of posters and ephemera from the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s. It holds many papers from the national women’s liberation conferences, including a unique transcript of the first women’s liberation conference held at Ruskin in Spring 1970. It also has many papers from regional and sectarian conferences from these decades. In addition, there is an extensive collection of women’s newsletters, many simply ‘gestetnered’ sheets of coloured paper, which were produced by and for women within certain groups. Such newsletters are an invaluable resource and context for anyone looking at the women’s movement both past and present. They contain evidence of the thoughts and opinions as well as the activities of women involved in the movement and give a clear sense of debates as they were being experienced. The library is always looking for material and would welcome donations from women who were, and/or still are, involved in the movement.

The Feminist Library produces a newsletter 2-3 times a year which is sent out to members. It includes news, reviews and articles on areas of interest to library users.

Although for a period during the 1980s the library was funded by the GLC, it lost this source of income in 1988. The building space is now funded by Southwark Council, but the library is entirely run by volunteers and relies on membership fees and donations for its continued existence. We would welcome anyone who wants to visit and help keep this valuable resource open.

[Edited to add - for more on The Feminist Library today see here: https://feministlibrary.co.uk/]

Welcome to the LSHG Newsletter (1997)

Welcome to the LSHG newsletter

Written By: The editor
Date: September 1997

Published In: London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter Issue 1: Autumn 1997 

Welcome to the long-promised newsletter of the London Socialist Historians Group. From now on, it will be published three times a year, at the beginning of the autumn, spring and summer terms. It will be distributed for free for as long as this is possible.

The aim of the newsletter is to let all the socialist historians in the London area know what all the other socialist historians in the London area are doing. It also aims to keep us informed of the outside world, and the outside world informed about us. Its success is therefore dependent on news and notices being sent in for publication. This first issue is really nothing more than a diary of events, but there is scope for the newsletter to become much more in future issues.

There is a theme running through this year's series of New Socialist Approaches to History seminars. There has been something of mini-boom in books by socialist historians - at least in contrast to the recent past. The authors of a number of these books have been invited to discuss the issues they raise. Seminars this autumn therefore include Sheila Rowbotham on the history of women in the twentieth century, Rick Halpern on the Chicago meat packers and Ian Birchall on Gracchus Babeuf. This theme will continue in the spring term. Additionally, this term, Tom Behan will give a paper on the political crisis in Italy in 1948.

Following the success of our one-day seminars over the last three years, with more than fifty participants attending the Writing History seminar last May, another will be held next year, on May 9th, this time around the theme of Political Change. As wide a range of discussion as possible is wanted, and the call for papers is reproduced overleaf. Those with something to say should start preparing their proposals.

Book Review: Telling Lies About Hitler (2002)

R. J. Evans, Telling Lies about Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, (Verso, 2002)

Written By: David Renton
Date: September 2002

Published In London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter Issue 16: Autumn 2002 

Richard Evans was an expert witness for the defence in the libel action brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt. In her book, Denying the Holocaust (Penguin, 1994), Lipstadt had named Irving as a Holocaust denier. Irving sued, and took the action to the High Court. In April 2000, the judge ruled against the action, branding Irving a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history. Richard Evans' book, Telling Lies about Hitler, is made up of two sections. The middle is a condensed version of Evans' 740-page witness report. If this is the substance, then it must be placed in context, and the beginning and final chapters serve that role.

The last chapters include an account of how Irving responded to the evidence in court. At first Irving denying everything, then he sough to filibuster, seizing on the most inconsequential points, while neglecting the main ones. Ultimately, Irving was forced to accept the claim (which mattered most to Evans) that he had consistently lied, falsifying documents, in order to try and shield Adolf Hitler from responsibility for the Holocaust. The examples of deceit which Evans gives include mistranslating the sentence “SS leaders must stay” to “the Jews must stay” (in a document which did not mention the killings), or claiming that a “stop” order (placed on one train-load of Jews being sent from Berlin to Riga) proved that Hitler opposed all killings from the start. Evans demonstrates that such deliberate mistakes are legion in Irving's work, serving always to legitimise the regime.

Some of the most angry pages of this book are those in which Evans criticises those journalists who were arrogant enough to interview Irving, and to think that they could knock him down - without doing even the most basic research - and therefore allowed this fraud to outwit them. Similar criticisms are also applied to a number of right-wing historians, operating on the cusp of journalism and the historical profession, who made the same mistake, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Stuart Nicholson, John Erickson, Donald Cameron Watt, John Keegan. All of them wrote as if Irving was “one of us” and Lipstadt was not.

Throughout this book, Richard Evans adopts the patient, deliberate tone of a man with an overwhelming case who asks only for the time to be heard. It becomes clear from his account that the defeat of David Irving in court was also a victory. It was a triumph for the accurate memory of the Holocaust, against people who wanted to use the action to throw doubt on one of the most important events in twentieth-century history. It was also a success for the standards of professionalism, accuracy and rigour in the historical field. This impressive book deserves the widest possible readership.

A query on Eric Hobsbawm and oral history

We have received this query from Brian Smith relating to Eric Hobsbawm and oral history - if anyone can help Brian please contact Keith Flett at the address above - many thanks 'I have a vivid memory of reading something by Hobsbawm to the effect that when he started to research the late 19th century history of the British Labour movement, via veterans [ie those active in the late 19th and early 20th century labour movement who Hobsbawm presumably spoke to while putting together Labour's Turning Point (1948)], he quickly realised that he had to know more than they did about the subject if they were going to be useful. Unfortunately I can't remember where I saw it, and Richard Evans tells me he never has. I wonder: would it be possible to put a note on the socialist historians site? I am sure someone there knows about it, and it's a very useful quotation!'

SHS meeting - Legacy of Empire

Legacy of Empire – Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel 

Socialist History Society Public Meeting

 Speaker: Dr Gardner Thompson

Saturday 25 January, 2pm @  Red Lion Hall, Basement, Tresham House, Red Lion Square, entrance via Lamb’s Conduit Passage by Conway Hall, Holborn, WC1R 4RE

It is now more than seventy years since the creation of the state of Israel, yet its origins and the British Empire’s historic responsibility for Palestine remain little known. Confusion persists too as to the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In Legacy of Empire, Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain’s role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel. Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their rule in Palestine after the First World War.

Despite evidence and warnings, over the next two decades Britain would facilitate the colonisation of Arab Palestine by Jewish immigrants, ultimately leading to a conflict which it could not contain. Britain’s response was to propose the partition of an ungovernable land: a ‘two-state solution’ which – though endorsed by the United Nations after the Second World War – has so far brought into being neither two states nor a solution.

 Gardner Thompson is a historian of British colonialism and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He earned a BA in History from Cambridge University, an MA in East African History and Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a PhD on the British Colonial Rule in Uganda from London University. Thompson taught History in Uganda, and then in London where he was Head of the History Department and the Academic Vice-Principal at Dulwich College. His other publications include Governing Uganda: British Colonial Rule and its Legacy

https://socialisthistory.wordpress.com/2020/01/08/legacy-of-empire-meeting-jan-25th/

Report: Socialism and Freedom (2008)

[This report originally was published in the London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter July 2008 no. 32. but is only being put online now as it was for a few years long presumed lost - it is here being republished from Ian Birchall's own website.  We always welcome the opportunity to put up material from the early issues of the London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter online, as our archive only goes back so far - please get in touch with Keith Flett at the address above if you have such material - thanks]    

“Socialism and Freedom”

This report appeared in the London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter July 2008 no. 32. This is not available on-line. As far as I know this is the only published report of this event.

For those interested in the history of the French left a fascinating event took place on 27 April at the Gimpel & Müller gallery in Paris. The two surviving members of the Socialisme et Liberté (Socialism and Freedom) resistance group, Dominique Desanti and Simone Debout, gave an account of their experiences; they were joined by Denise Pouillon, widow of Jean Pouillon, who had been in the group, although she personally was not involved.

All three participants were well into their eighties, but their memories seemed crystal clear. The presentations were transparently honest; when they were unable to answer questions they had no hesitation in acknowledging it. To someone like myself who is profoundly sceptical of the value of “oral history” it was a striking affirmation of the contribution it can make.

The reason for holding the event was recent allegations that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had played no role in the resistance and had been little better than collaborators. Such charges, made by the ascendant right in journalistic and academic circles, are part of a project to bury Sartre, Marxism, May 1968 etc.

Socialisme et Liberté is generally associated with Sartre, and indeed almost all the historical discussion of Socialisme et Liberté occurs in works devoted to Sartre’s political development. But though Sartre played an important role on his return to Paris in March 1941, the group developed from an earlier grouping Sous la Botte (Under the Jackboot) founded the previous year by Raymond Marrot, an unaffiliated Trotskyist.

The group was small – perhaps fifty members in Paris and another twenty in Grenoble. Oral testimony is crucial since none of its publications survive. (One did not push old leaflets under the bed if a visit from the Gestapo was possible.) Yet there may have been as many as a dozen monthly issues of its publication, produced with a Roneo duplicator and (stolen) stencils of the sort older readers may remember from the 1960s and 1970s.

The group was politically diverse. Some of its members were Marxists, either Trotskyists (often not affiliated to any Trotskyist organisation) or former members of the Communist Party who had left on anti-Stalinist grounds at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact or earlier. Other, like Sartre, did not call themselves Marxists, but were willing to work alongside them.

All this was taking place before the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. The Communist Party was not actively resisting and the rest of the left was in some disarray. So though the group was indeed small its achievement in establishing an illegal propaganda centre was not insignificant.

The Russian entry into the war, according to those involved, changed everything. But it was some months before the group was wound up; Sartre was eventually convinced by de Beauvoir that to continue meant risking lives which did not belong to him. Some members, like Desanti and her husband and Debout decided to join the Communist Party, which after the Liberation involved them in a sharp break with Sartre. But even after Sartre withdrew, some members kept the group, now reverting to its original name of Sous la botte, in existence for some time.

One of the most remarkable details that emerged was that the group distributed leaflets aimed at German soldiers. As far as I know this had not been mentioned in earlier accounts of the group (and hence my own comments on the question in Sartre Against Stalinism (2004) are mistaken). Desanti wrote the leaflets in German, and they were left in the first-class carriages of tube trains, which were at the time reserved for German soldiers. She recalls that they were framed in humanistic terms, stressing to the German soldiers that the resisters were not their enemies.

This was thus an anticipation of the more systematic work done by the Trotskyists around Paul Widelin in Brest, who later produced a German-language paper addressed to German soldiers and sailors. This contrasted sharply with the Communist Party slogan of chacun son boche, which saw German soldiers simply as a target for violent action.

The event was filmed, and it is hoped that a video and/or transcript will be made available on the internet.

Ian Birchall

Socialist History Seminars Spring Term 2020

The London Socialist Historians Group have announced details of seminars for the Spring Term 2020.

We have pencilled in these seminars for Mondays at 5.30pm in Room 304 Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London WC1.

These will be confirmed later depending on whether the IWGB dispute at Senate House reaches a satisfactory conclusion.

Socialist History Seminar Spring Term 2020

Monday 17th February Martin Hoyles, Ira Aldridge, black actor in Victorian London

Monday 2nd March tbc

Monday 16th March Rhys Williams, Tom Mann in Australia​

For more details please contact Keith Flett at the address above.