"To the sisters I always wanted": Women, writers’ groups, and print culture in Glasgow, 1980-1988

This chapter explores women writers’ groups in the 1980s. It adopts a case study approach to examine one specific writers’ group, the Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers, which ran in tandem with a mixed-gender group. Drawing on the group’s only anthology as well as oral history interviews, the chapter traces the ways in which class and gender intersected for the women who took part, a narrative which has often been overlooked in critical considerations of women’s writing in Scotland in the 1980s. The chapter also locates the group within wider transformations in women’s studies and women’s literary culture in Scotland during this period, emphasising the importance of movements which advocated for the valorisation of women’s literary voices, while acknowledging how these movements sometimes elided issues of class. By contrast, the chapter foregrounds how the writers’ group movement intersected with feminist consciousness-raising groups to bring a new wave of women in schemes like Castlemilk into communion with many of the central ideas of the Women’s Liberation Movement. As this chapter will argue, women’s writers’ groups provided women with a space in which they could transgress traditional gender roles, reconceptualise their homes, neighbourhoods, and relationships, and defy accepted ideas of literary value.