£3.99
Finding a Voice
Asian Women in Britain
Finding a Voice - Asian Women in Britain
Published in 1978 and winner of the Martin Luther King award, this influential feminist book is based on interviews, discussions, and intimate one-to-one conversations with South Asian women. Conducted often in Urdu, Hindi, or Bengali (if they were most at ease in these languages) and sensitively translated, the book explores what it was like to be a migrant, a worker, and a woman straddled between two cultures in late 1970s Britain. Through women’s experiences, feelings, and analysis of their own lives, it examines family relationships, growing militancy at work, experiences of racist and misogynistic immigration policies, school life, and also friendship and love.
Key Struggles and Events of the 1970s
Some of the iconic anti-racist and working-class struggles and other key events of the 1970s, which have a powerful resonance today, are described here from the point of view of the Asian women who participated in them. Among these is the strike at the Grunwick photo processing plant, led by the indomitable Jayaben Desai, which drew support from thousands of trade unionists and feminists from all over Britain. It is today once again an inspiration for many low-paid workers in Britain’s gig economy. The book also examines, through South Asian women’s voices, the horrors of the first immigration detention centres and so-called ‘virginity testing’; issues of mental health and isolation.
New Edition and Contemporary Reflections
This edition of the book includes a remarkable new chapter titled ‘Reflecting on Finding a Voice in 2018’, in which young South Asian women in Britain describe what the book means to them today and how their lives are different, and similar, to those of the women in the original book. They write about organizing against violence against women, Islamophobia, racism of the white middle-classes, struggles against heteronormativity, battles for justice at Yarlswood detention centre, commemorating the Grunwick strike, and the ups and downs of mother-daughter relationships in South Asian families.
