Introduction

In this chapter I explore experiences of local activism among diverse women, with a focus on care, the lifecourse and the self, as part of the patternings of the politics of everyday life I am concerned with. I follow individual research participants’ ‘journeys’ or ‘stories’ into and through local activism and action of different kinds, presenting interview and other data across a number of research projects. In so doing, I draw out common themes about how different individuals might enter and sustain activism at a range of scales. This also involves considering how different organisations and infrastructures support and position such action, particularly with regards to aspects of the welfare state. All the primary research participants in the chapter are women. While I draw attention to gender as a key issue here, as discussed in Chapter 1, I am not arguing that all women share experiences of activism and citizenship. Nor do the women discussed here share a cohesive identity. Differences around race, class, location, age, work and migration status are all apparent in the accounts presented in this chapter.

Indeed none of the organisations involved had an overall remit to focus on women, although the ‘period poverty’ project which formed one strand of the Coastal Arts project discussed in this chapter, was clearly gendered. Rather the dominance of women within groups working on issues of neighbourhood, community and family support reflects the often gendered nature of local activism (Martin et al, 2007). This relates to matters of care and gendered divisions between public and private lives, and between different forms of work, as discussed in the preceding chapters. As the analysis in this chapter will show, there are also gendered aspects in how the women discussed in this chapter entered and sustained activism on a personal level, for example in relation to being a mother or carer for others.

Crossing public and private lives in this way involved forms of what Newman (2012) calls ‘border work’, drawing together subjectivities and resources from across different spheres, including domestic lives, institutions and forms of work (Jupp, 2017). Such transitions and movements were not straightforward or painless. A number of the women discussed in this chapter entered local activism from a place of struggle, trauma and distress (Jupp, 2017).