A cause for celebration: Digitisation of all 239 issues of Spare Rib
Great news that the British Library has digitised the archive of one of the most important magazines of modern times: Spare Rib.
If you don’t know it or haven’t seen the publication, you are in for a treat. As the British Library’s politics and public life curator Polly Russell says, Spare Rib was “funny, irreverent, intelligent and passionate… a product of its time which is also somehow timeless”.
//Front cover, first issue, July 1972//
//Issue 55, February 1977//
Meanwhile, Debra Ferreday at Lancaster University’s centre for gender and women’s studies stresses: “The importance of the Spare Rib archive can’t be overestimated. It is a unique record of the women’s liberation movement which will be of huge value to feminist researchers, scholars, students and activists everywhere.”
Spare Rib was launched in 1972 mainly as a means of communicating the ideas percolating out of the burgeoning women’s rights movement, but in one way it can be seen as a reaction to the discrimination rife in the male-dominated British underground press (Rosie Boycott, one of the founders, had worked at Friends magazine alongside the likes of Barney Bubbles).
//Issue 61, August 1977//
//Issue 147, October 1984//
///Rowe and Boycott at Spare Rib offices, 1973. Photo: David Parkinson//
It may seem incongruous now, but Spare Rib was celebrated within the pages of men’s magazine Club International, when it still maintained the intellectual curiosity of the launch issues which faded as the 70s progressed. The late photographer David Parkinson took the portrait of Boycott and co-founder Marsha Rowe which appeared in a 1973 edition of CI and is included in the digitisation.
The final issue of Spare Rib was published in 1992. A revival attempt by Charlotte Raven a couple of years back came to naught; she in turn launched the short-lived Feminist Times which closed last summer. See here.
Read about the online manifestation of Spare Rib here.
The archive is available to view via the Jisc, here.