Rock Against Sexism event in Manchester this Saturday

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

This Saturday Mancunians, and other interested parties, will have the exceedingly rare opportunity to hear writer and cultural commentator Lucy Whitman talk about her involvement in Rock Against Sexism. The event, which is taking place at the Friends Meeting House on Mount Street, is free to attend, but you do need to register. 

I first became aware of Lucy Whitman (neé Lucy Toothpaste) through reading Jon Savage's England's Dreaming when I was 15. She was later quoted as a secondary source in my series of punk women essays for The F-Word, which ran between 2010 and 2011.

I hadn't been able to locate Lucy in 2009 when I was researching the series, though I did try.

In the end, she tracked me down and we met for the first time in 2010. An interview piece, based on that first meeting, was eventually published on The F-Word in 2011.

At the time of our interview, Lucy had been interviewed by a number of writers, most recently Helen Reddington and Daniel Rachel, about punk, women and punk, fanzines, Rock Against Racism and Rock Against Sexism, but she had yet to write her own account of the period. Something that, in 2019, she does intend to do.

The event in Manchester should be highly interesting, and will shine a light on an area of cultural history that is rarely discussed. Rock Against Sexism was a much smaller organisation than Rock Against Racism and, as such, it's often hidden from history.