Women, Politics and Parties in 1960s St Ives

Sinclair, Jeanie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9823-7235 (2025) Women, Politics and Parties in 1960s St Ives. In: Artists' Colonies and Politics, 5-7 May 2025, Simonskall/Zerkall, Nord Rhein Westphalen, Germany.

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Abstract / Summary

Women came to St Ives in the years after the Second World War to to be artists and to pursue independent creative careers. Much like the women in the historic art colonies of the late 19th and early 20th century, described by Nina Lübbren in her book Rural Artists' Colonies in Europe 1870-1910 (2001), women came to St Ives in the 1950s and 1960s because of the towns’ reputation for utopian bohemianism, and the freedoms this promised.
How did feminist politics shape the creative community of women in 1960s St Ives? How did socialism and the politics of the New Left shape women’s collectivism? This paper uses gossip as a framework to explore the gendered experience of politics in the art community in St Ives in Cornwall in the 1960s. By looking at how women performed countercultural political identities in 1960s St Ives, I will show how this community created a sense of both individual and collective identity as a form of resistance to patriarchal capitalism, and how this identity was expressed and shared through parties.
As somewhere that was both remote from, but connected to, urban centres, St Ives was a place where women were able to explore alternative political views, transgress heteronormative gender roles and explore ideas of utopian collectivism. It offered women support networks, pedagogical frameworks and social spaces that made enabled women to live independently and be part of the creative economy. The party was the locus for women’s social and cultural exchange; a social space in which women came together to create and define their community. The party was a social sculpture that developed, defined and maintained these social and cultural identities, and brought people together to gossip, and in doing so, defined and strengthened a sense of community and place. This paper explores the party as a form of cultural and countercultural practice where women formed cohesive communities as a form of socialist and pacifist resistance.
Drawing on oral histories from the St Ives Archive, gossip is a powerful tool that can unearth hidden and alternative queer and feminine narratives of modernities. (Rogoff, 1996) Using gossip as a methodology reveals the importance of feminine sociability as political resistance, the party as an alternative, feminine creative practice, and the complex relationships and vital support networks that developed between women in St Ives' postwar art community.

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