Women walking in the word

Monday 8th March 2021 

Monday 8^th March is International Women’s Day. London-based artist Alisa Oleva has posted an open invitation on the Walking Artist’s Network mailing list to celebrate the day “by walking to a place in your city/town/village of an important women’s presence”. Oleva’s instructions continued:  

What places in your neighbourhood are connected with the women of your residence, with their contribution to the life of the community? Streets, monuments, buildings, parks, benches … We invite you to a walk to these places from where you are now. In this way, together, around the world, we will put these important places on the map to identify and manifest them, to show and mark how many women are investing in the creation of the places and spaces in which we live. 

International Women’s Day is also remarked by BBC Radio 3 through their re-broadcasting of an edition of Words and Music, titled “Women Walking”.ⁱ An introduction on Words and Music’s website shares the motivation of its producer Janet Tuppen:  

The female observer of city life; the girl wandering in the countryside; the woman adventuring on her own: these are modern concepts. In centuries past, to be a woman walking alone would have caused more than a few raised eyebrows!  I want to explore instances of women walking alone either literally or figuratively, examine perceptions of their behaviour, and hear from these women in poetry and prose.  

I decide to weave together Oleva’s invitation with Words and Music. On Monday 8th March, as instructed by Oleva, I leave my flat at 9am, and post my first photo to the Telegram group. It is wet; very wet. I insert my headphones, press play and set off (to Gustav Mahler’s “Ging Heut’ Morgen ubers Feld (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen)”). I have chosen to walk to the statue of Mary Barbour, some three miles south. As I walk, I listen to words written by Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Lauren Elkin, Carol Ann Duffy and Robyn Davidson, amongst others. Of the 19 accompanying musical tracks, just two really add a spring to my step: Grace Jones’s highly appropriate “Walking in the Rain” and Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson’s “Poor Wayfaring Stranger”. It is no coincidence that these are the only non-classical tracks on the programme.ⁱⁱ 

The route to Mary Barbour takes me across the West End and then alongside and over the multi-laned Clydeside Expressway which is sandwiched between railway tracks on one side and grey, dreich River Clyde on the other. I look for the presence of women in the spaces around me. Glasgow – Scotland’s largest city – has only four statues commemorating women: Queen Victoria, philanthropist Isabella Elder, Spanish Civil War heroine Dolores Ibarruri, and political activist Mary Barbour. This last is a very recent addition to the cityscape, unveiled on International Women’s Day 2018. The words of women walkers from across the centuries pour into my ears, keeping me company: 

We passed by some men who were working in a barge; they shouted to us, and invited us to come to them. We walked away and took no notice, but repeatedly on our journey we were spoken to, and I could not help contrasting the way in which men looked at us with the usual bearing of a man towards a well-dressed female. I had never realised before that a lady’s dress, or even that of a respectable working woman, was a protection. The bold, free look of a man at a destitute woman must be felt to be realised.  

Being together, we were a guard to one another, so we took no notice but walked on. I should not care to be a solitary woman tramping the roads. (Five Days and Five Nights as a Tram Among Tramps, by ‘A Lady’, 1904)iii  

I rarely walk wearing headphones, whether day or night. I like to hear the sounds around me, avian and human alike. (Being alert to the wider environment is ingrained training.) I post to Telegram a few bold images of women encountered on the railway arches and witness messages from other women walking in other places (London, Toronto, Manchester, Rome, Mariupol, Kyiv, Kryviy Reg, Carlisle, Ontario…) Time and space, histories and geographies, enfold and entwine, walking women the thread that both binds and orientates us.  

I had made for myself a frock coat, in heavy grey cloth, trousers and waistcoat to match. With a grey hat and large woollen cravat, I was a perfect firstyear student. I cannot say what pleasure my boots gave me: I would gladly have slept with them, as my brother did in his youth, when he put on his first pair. With those little ironshod heels, I was steady on the pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world. Moreover, my clothes feared nothing. I ran in all weathers, I returned at all hours, I promenaded in all the theatres. No one paid attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise. (Memoirs, George Sand, 1804-1876)^iv 

I cross the Clyde and walk along Govan Road, passing by the abandoned graving docks which testify to a once thriving shipbuilding industry and which resist, for now at least, encroaching gentrification. Very few people are out walking. I reach Govan Cross and there stands an indomitable Mary Barbour, leading a parade of equally disgruntled agitators. Barbour was the main organiser of the women of Govan’s successful rent strike in 1915 and a key figure in the Red Clydeside Movement. Here, her hand is outstretched, perhaps symbolising resistance and defiance and gesturing towards a better future, which feels a long way off still. [Image 4] Reaching up to place my hand in Barbour’s and struggling to take a photo, a homeless man offers to take it for me, reassuring me as he does so that he won’t steal my phone. I post the image to our Telegram group, adding a fist emoji. Femmage made, I retrace my route home. 

Monday 15^th March 2021 

The following Monday, I return to the statue of Mary Barbour. It has been transformed by ribbons and flowers. A week on from International Women’s Day people across the UK have been holding vigils for Sarah Everard, a woman who disappeared on 3^rd March (while walking home). Her body was found in a wooded area on 10^th March, and a serving police officer was charged with her kidnap and murder.  

Walking home the previous week, I had listened with a sense of deep affinity to this extract from The Girl Who Goes Alone, by Elizabeth Austen: 

Here’s the thing about being a girl 

and wanting to play outside. 

All the grown-ups grind it into you from the get go: 

girls outside aren’t safe.  

The guy in the car? If he rolls down the window and leans 
his head out, run 
because the best you can hope for is a catcall, and at worst 
you’ll wind up with your face on the side of a milk carton. 

Even when you’re a grownup girl, your father—because 
he loves you— 
will send you a four-page article about how to protect yourself 
while standing at the ATM, while travelling unescorted, while 
jogging solo, 
an article informing you how to distinguish phony police 
and avoid purse snatchers, pickpockets, rapists, and thugs. 

The extract ends with the wonderful things the girl who goes alone claims for herself, including daybreak, moonlight, “the curve of the earth”. It ends with these final lines: 

The girl who goes alone says with her body 
the world is worth the risk.^v 

A week later, as I pace again the rhythm of these closing words, they trip me up. Why is the risk of encountering an enchanting world attached to the act of simply being a girl who goes alone, and why is it my body which registers and signals that risk? I will walk, I will walk still, but the point is, that shouldn’t in itself be any sort of risk.