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captured hundreds of badges, narratives and histories at GWL and in many outreach locations
including women who are now Members of the Scottish and Westminster Parliaments, women aged
between 93 and 19 and women who had been collecting badges for between 40 years and 4 months.
The badges they donated ranged across territories including anarchism, Greenham Common,
women’s health campaigns, LGBT activism, radical feminist and Trans identifications and party
political and union membership.
GWL trained its staff and volunteers in capturing oral histories and recorded women, mainly in
video testimonies. 9 Teams of project workers and volunteers set up ‘pop‐up’ stalls at events
including LGBT Pride Glasgow and the Women’s Scottish Trades Union Congress Conference and
other gatherings where we might find badge wearing women or women with stories of significant
badges. Each of the interviews offered up qualitatively rich often unexpected insights into women’s
lives and histories. A theme that recurred throughout was the significance of buying and wearing a
badge at a significant point in the formation of individual and sometimes group identities and the
pride and risks involved in this. Women spoke of the act of badge wearing in ambivalent terms of
fear, empowerment, and solidarity with other oppressed groups and anxiety about the consequences
of its message being ‘read’. For example ‘Ellen’, stated:
I’m scared that I’ll run into bad people who’ll pick up on this badge [ a small badge that
connected her to the Trans Youth Group she has recently joined] and will give me abuse
for it. So yeah, I think it takes a lot of effort and boldness to wear badges like this which
say, “I’m proud to be different, I’m proud to be who I am, I don’t want to be like you.”
For ‘Vivian’, a well know radical lesbian feminist recalling her favourite badge ‘Don’t presume I am
a heterosexual’ and the uniform wearing of badges in the white heat of second wave feminism in the
1980s she recalled ‘The politics were written on the person.’ On the tube in London, one would ‘Read
everybody’s badges and you would know who everyone was.’
For many of the interviewees one badge could trigger a detailed reminiscence, recalled in
elaborate detail of a period in some instances many decades in the past, the symbolism of the badge
encapsulating period of intense politicisation as in ‘June’’s badge, found on a visit to Palestine and
evocative for her of a time when the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict graphically
unfolded triggering her consequent broader politicisation and identification as a feminist.
Women’s badge collections were often delivered to us in boxes and bags that designated them as
domestic treasures, and the episodes and stories they were associated with were discussed as
treasured memories regardless of the associations they frequently had with struggles, injustice and
forms of oppression.
Some project participants brought in very many badges and used them to discuss milestones in a
wide diversity of campaigns and activities where they had been active. ‘Catherine’ had been involved
in women’s and feminist campaigns for over 40 years and donated a remarkable array of badges and
shared her own perspective on a rich chronology of women’s and equality activism from the birth of
the women’s aid movement, rape crisis, reclaim the nights and other important landmarks in the
feminist story of Scotland. ‘Emily’ donated a similarly eclectic range of badges that marked her
involvement in campaigns around health, housing and anti‐apartheid and anti‐racism.
She had first seen her favourite badge; ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ pinned to the bars of a hamster
cage at a friend house. Thinking that Nelson Mandela was the name of the hamster her innocent
enquiries about Nelson had led her to a lifetime of campaigning for civil and human rights.
I came to Glasgow. And Nelson Mandela had been freed, I had been at a rally previous
to that on Glasgow Green […] I was in and out of hospital, every time I wasn’t in hospital I
was doing something worthwhile […] I had come to Glasgow Green, being at a rally with