For more than two decades it charted the grassroots feminist movement, its eye-catching covers railing against sexism and racism, promoting good orgasms or debating the tricky question of just what to do with unwanted body hair.

Spare Rib was radical, a magazine of its time. From the early 1970s through 21 years and 239 editions, it summed up an era still regarded as important for women’s liberation.



Now, thanks to an ambitious project by the British Library, the magazine is confined to the library shelf no more, but available online and for free to anyone after the digitisation of its entire run.



The project has been time-consuming, not least because of the very ethos of a publication which was run by a collective and accepted work from thousands of contributors. Copyright laws demanded that the British Library locate and gain permission from the majority of them, which was achieved after a callout to anyone who had ever had anything published in its pages and was highlighted in the Guardian.



Polly Russell, curator of politics and public life at the British Library, said: “Funny, irreverent, intelligent and passionate, Spare Rib was a product of its time which is also somehow timeless. Detailed features of feminist issues such as domestic violence and abortion, and news stories about women from the UK and around the world sit side-by-side with articles about hair care [including the unwanted kind], how to put up a shelf and instructions on self-defence.

Marsha Rowe (left) and Rosie Boycott, founders of the magazine. Photograph: Getty

“Just as varied were the breadth of voices in the magazine; early editions of Spare Rib involved big-name contributors including Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Margaret Drabble and Alice Walker, but alongside these were the voices of ordinary women telling their own stories.



“By making this part of our intellectual heritage available online, we hope it will attract new and returning generations of readers to the magazine for research, inspiration and enjoyment.”



Until now, the magazines have been available only in paper form at the British Library’s reading rooms and a few other specialist libraries and archives.



The new curated Spare Rib website features 300 selected pages, with a link to the website for Jisc, a charity supporting digital technologies in UK education and research, where the entire run will be available to view.

Spare Rib was famous for its provocative covers. Photograph: Angela Phillips

The magazine sought to provide an alternative to traditional gender roles, tackling subjects such as “liberating orgasm”, “kitchen sink racism”, anorexia and the practice of “cliterectomy”, now called female genital mutilation. Cover headlines included “Doctor’s Needles not Knitting Needles” and “Cellulie – the slimming fraud” and articles featured women such as country and western singer Tammy Wynette and US political activist Angela Davis.

With so many different threads of feminism being explored, the ensuing debates were often acrimonious, and the magazine reflected the sometimes “painful” discussions between the collective on how best to tackle issues such as sexuality and racism. It ran from 1972, with the final edition being published in 1993.



Marsha Rowe, co-founder of the magazine, said she was thrilled by the project: “It is as if the magazine has been given a new lease of life. By making the magazine freely available over the internet, it can encourage women round the world to act together to change and be a resource in support of their struggle for rights and freedoms.”

Sue O’Sullivan, a former member of the collective who worked at the magazine from 1979-84, said: “Spare Rib was a highly visible part of the Women’s Liberation movement, and a tool for reaching thousands of women every single month for over 20 years. The digitised magazines will be a wonderful resource for younger historians and feminist activists, researchers and all the women (and men) who wonder what their mothers, aunts, grannies and older friends got up to all those years ago.”

The digitisation was welcomed by Debra Ferreday, from Lancaster University’s centre of gender and women’s studies. “The importance of the Spare Rib archive can’t be overestimated. It’s a unique record of the Women’s Liberation movement which will be of huge value to feminist researchers, scholars, students and activists everywhere,” she said.

