Autonomous Archives and reframing feminist heritage in the context of Covid-19

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the existing inequalities experienced by women and gender-diverse folks have been further exacerbated through factors such as heightened workloads, additional caring responsibilities, and increased emotional labour. It is thus all the more crucial to capture the experiences of women, whose voices and stories have been historically underrepresented in the archives, as they live through this world-historic moment. Yet, in the face of successive lockdowns, how have community archives adapted to the challenge of recording women’s lives as they experience further marginalisation in real time? Taking Sheffield Feminist Archive (SFA), a grassroots community archive dedicated to documenting Sheffield women’s lives and activism, as its site of investigation, this chapter investigates how the pandemic has brought about generative and unconventional ways for women to tell their stories autonomously. Specifically, it explores ‘Women in Lockdown’, a participatory digital archiving project which invites local women and feminists to produce short oral history testimonies, diaristic accounts, artistic responses, or ‘Pandemic Postcards’, which reflect their experiences of life locked down. At a time when resources are spread more thinly than ever, and the pandemic has cast a long shadow of uncertainty over the future of many grassroots heritage organisations, the DIY ethos and non-traditional collecting methods that characterise this project, as well as the methods of community archivists more broadly, offer vital tools and new possibilities for undertaking feminist heritage at the margins.