"WHiST Across the Decades" Event (1) 16th July 2026 - Exploring 1980-1985
Updated: Aug 11
16th July saw the first of our monthly WHiST Across the Decades events. Each month, we'll throw a special party to help us commemorate and consider a five-year period in WHiST's history. This time, we explored 1980-85, the five years leading up to the organisation coming into being.
Rubik's Cubes, Deelyboppers and 1980s music and food
Back to the Future with Personal Stories
As well as having a fabulous afternoon, filled with a quiz, songs, museums handling boxes and a lot of dressing-up,
we collected stories from the 1980-85 era by asking participants to place themselves and their memories among the headlines in a mock-up newspaper article.
We also asked women to outline why WHiST remains important today.
Here's a selection of some of the fabulous contributions:
A Poem for Every Year
Our Heritage Project volunteer, Angela Marshall is also a poet. She's set herself the task of writing a poem themed around every year covered by our Across the Decades Events. Here are her first five poems:
1980
It should be surprising to learn
that an elite university college
founded by two Queens of England
in the fifteenth century
took 532 years to admit its first
cohort of forty-five women.
It’s not
1981
The UK became a ratifying nation of the UN’s
Convention of All Forms of Discrimination AgainstWomen.
Serving as an international bill of rights for women,
legally ensuring gender discrimination would be
eliminated across politics, economic, social and
cultural life.
To be legally held accountable for both thepublic
and private sectors.
Submitting reports to a council to showwhere progress
has been made.
Or not.
To whom is a complaint addressed, that ithas not been accomplished?
1982
november
1982
15 women and children
ten tents
and a caravan
a protest
spin off
from larger
more well known
Organisations
multi-tasking
shift-working
short term
yet homely
Educational
a different focus
secrecy
nuclear power
a link
to nuclear weapons
closer to home
less remote
the wirral
british nuclear fuels
capenhurst
1983
Seventy thousand protestors, to form a human chain.
In a decade of protest against the cold war.
Women fighting for their futures, in what was a man’s domain.
Fourteen miles long they became.
Not forgetting what they were protesting for.
Seventy thousand protestors, to form a human chain.
No weapons placed on British soil, their campaign.
The prospects for them and their children at their core.
Women fighting for their futures, in what was a man’s domain.
The remnants of the cold war were not to remain.
Vocalising just what it was they were fighting for.
Seventy thousand protestors, to form a human chain.
A visual symbol of anger, which needed no words to explain.
Protesting against the escalation of the cold war.
Women fighting for their futures, in what was a man’s domain.
There were those who sought to complain.
Didn’t see what the campaigners saw.
Seventy thousand protestors, to form a human chain.
Women fighting for their futures, in what was a man’s domain.
1984
Our men are working down the mines,
communities built around the pits.
Our villages centered on their work,
that you are tearing into bits.
An entire workforce,
you are seeking to displace.
What will our men do then?
When they’re not working at the coal face?
So we will stand here with them,
shouting loud and proud.
Although it’s not our traditional place,
we will not be cowed.
Wives, mothers and daughters,
across the country we come together.
United against the threats of closure,
This is the storm we will weather.
We will aid our men on the picket lines,
support the community left behind.
Provide help and assistance, be there.
In the silence of those closed mines.
We will not be silenced.
We will fight but with composure.
We will show we have a voice.
We are Women Against Pit Closures
1985
Cutting young girls, sometimes when they’re born.
Injuring children purely because of their faith.
Removal of their genitalia because it’s deemed unclean.
Claiming it is a way of ensuring ‘purity’.
Until now, the law offered no protection.
Cutting was deemed a right of passage.
It was often a religious misunderstanding.
So many young girls harmed for life.
It became illegal, facing five years in prison,
Or a fine. Or both.
Now protection attained, for girls in the UK
Comments