International Women’s Day 2022
Manchester Histories and music charity Brighter Sound have been working with year 9 students from Manchester High School for Girls for IWD22.
The students explored Hidden Suffragettes as part of International Women’s Day. The project included a visit to Manchester Central Library with Manchester Histories to look around Archives+, an archive centre that brings together statutory, university, voluntary and community archives and heritage in one place. They also looked at old film footage from the North West Film Archive, talked about the suffragettes, the movement and women’s rights to vote.
They explored lesser-known women who contributed or influenced the movement, looking at Indian Suffragettes of the British Suffragette movement in more detail. This included women such as Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, Madam Bhikaji, Lolita Roy and Cornelai Sorabji.
This was followed up by taking part in a full day workshop with Brighter Sound and artists Iora and Sarah Yaseem, creating new music in response too and inspired by what they found out. They performed the new work at the end of the day to an audience of teachers and year 7 students with great success and talent. The new music will be released at a later date.
The project is part of MADE, the Manchester Cultural Education Partnership, to explore, through arts and culture, stories, themes, people and groups that are currently underrepresented in the National Curriculum.
