Deborah Coughlin wants to change the future by learning from the past
- Text by Tom Fenwick
- Photography by Tom Oxley
#44 – Deborah Coughlin
Forthright, opinionated and very funny, Deborah has been respectively an artist, musician, writer, editor of The Feminist Times and bandleader of alt-choir Gaggle; a lynchpin in the UK’s renaissance in feminism. But there was a long period of time when she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life; she just knew that she didn’t want to be told what she couldn’t do.
If there’s one through-line connecting everything she’s worked towards, it’s been the desire to create something that celebrates women. A gap, which Deborah firmly believes can be bridged by looking to the past for answers.
“And what a wonderful theme to work with because there’s a huge void to be filled. I think sometimes we tend to take one step forward and two steps back, because we don’t pay attention to women’s history, so it ends up getting erased or forgotten. I mean, just imagine gravity had been discovered but no one had told the next generation. Well that’s what happens with the women’s movement – gravity keeps getting discovered and then forgotten about because we don’t listen to the women who came before us. We need to remember we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This is just a short excerpt from Huck’s Fiftieth Special, a collection of fifty personal stories from fifty inspiring lives.
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