From an aviatrix to a eugenicist: walking with Manchester’s Modernist Heroines

Abstract

This article offers an autoethnographic account of developing a multidisciplinary feminist local history project. In particular it focuses on the construction and delivery of a walking tour celebrating ‘Manchester’s Modernist Heroines’. These were ten women from Greater Manchester, UK, who achieved professional success in the twentieth century. The author evokes ideas of psychogeography and the dérive to produce a tour with collaboration, accessibility and public participation at the heart of its ethos. However the notion of a psychogeographical heritage tour is an oxymoron as the praxis resists essentialist notions of time and space. Additionally, the women featured did not have blue plaques, stately homes or any of the conventional badges of achievement. The focus instead was on resonances, echoes, connections and traces in the everyday landscape. Some, such as Marie Stopes, have a complex and deeply problematic legacy. Geographer Doreen Massey, born in Manchester and one of the subjects, provided inspiration with her progressive vision of space as a simultaneity of ‘stories-so-far.’ The traditional heritage tour became reconfigured as something overtly and proudly performative, participatory and fluid. The route and location contributions are anchored in is mutable, with content evolving as new stories are shared. The walk incorporates education, conversation, art and provocation. This is Feminist public pedagogy which uses the pedestrian to examine issues around commemoration, memory, gender and the right to the city. It utilises embodied creative walking methods to uncover the power dynamics that shape Manchester and offer an alternative way to view them.