Moira Macdonald

Recorded on 20.05.2019 by Carmen Talbot.

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

All I knew was that there were women, first of all at school that I felt attracted to, and then at university. And it wasn’t until a long time afterwards… that I actually realised there was a name and that I was a lesbian… and that was a revelation to me. And I certainly couldn’t talk about it to my family at all… at all. I mean, to her dying day my mother never knew. I’m sure they knew cos of course when I came to this country and Vicky and I got together we would go over there for holidays and I’d write about her. And from then on everything I’ve done as an activist has been… I mean, she’s one of these amazing solid people. So… we were both fairly feminist… as you can imagine. A woman had been assaulted… um… and so we wanted to hold a reclaim the night march. And we marched from down on the quay up Forestreet because there were two things – one, the woman had been assaulted and two, there were proposals to open a sex shop in Exeter… Exeter didn’t have one at that time. And…. obviously we felt… this was not wanted. In fact I’ve got a photograph of myself and two other activists in the cottage in Thorverton… making posters for the sex shop protest as well. So, um… so there was this group of us who acted… some involved at the university cos at the time at Exeter University there was quite a strong number of women in the English department… very good feminists… and we used to meet up. So Vicky and I wanted to help with these things, but also we wanted to see if we could start a women’s centre in Exeter because we didn’t have one and if you don’t have a women’s centre for everyone to (inaudible) with, its difficult for everyone to keep going… um… and we got involved with these demos um… but also started looking around with another woman, there were three of us, and we eventually found a place for rent. There was a small… house which we managed to get hold of to rent and I remember we found a woman who was a solicitor and we visited her and she made sure we got the tenancy all sorted out so we could start it as a women’s centre, and it was run with volunteers coming in and there was a rota. And it… was very useful. The trouble was the further we got into the eighties and going on into the nineties, Thatcherism was beginning to bite really deeply and women bore the brunt of a lot of… in a way women are bearing the brunt of a lot of austerity now. There’s always been a women’s movement and there always has been in Exeter… but I’m not sure places like Devon Records Office know that. And that… if they don’t know it then people in the future aren’t going to know it either. So, I’m feeling a different sense of responsibility at the moment… um… because if I’ve got it then all those women who feature in it will feature somewhere… I’m just wondering where they’ve all got to.

Notes:
Find out more about Reclaim the Night – http://www.reclaimthenight.co.uk/previous.html