The Baby Makers: Making History 2024

The Women’s Art Activation System (WAAS) is excited to announce their new project The Baby Makers: Making History

Working in partnership with Museum in the Park, Stroud, the project is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.  

The Baby Makers: Making History sets out to establish reproductive and birth histories in the Museum collection as a little-recorded but important part of our collective heritage. 

Working with key partners Stroud Against Racism, and Stroud Local History Societies, we have been uncovering diverse memories and experiences to do with the maternity services, fostering and adoption, loss, and birth-related stories across the District.

Collaborating with Stroud Against Racism we explored Black and diverse histories of birth and maternity, culminating in a new display in the Museum foyer. Launched for Black History Month with most of the input from particpant Dee Guthrie, the display has been attracting many very positive comments and responses.

Another focus is on stories from before the 1980’s and going back as far as memory will allow. Working with Stroud Local History Societies we have been finding out what giving birth was like in Stroud over the decades and how practices and meanings have changed over time.

Thanks to National Lottery players we are now able to collect new material for the Museum in the Park archives.

We will be making a film and artwork to showcase the histories, featuring as part of Black History Month at the Museum in October-December, and with a project celebration event in November also at the Museum.

Workshop participant making a drawing at the Museum in the Park Collections Room 2024. Photo © Sarah Dixon/The WAAS

What’s Next?

On November 13th we are holding our launch event – all welcome to drop in and out or (optionally) sign up to take part via Eventbrite.

Successful Workshops in July

As part of the Birth Histories project “The Baby Makers: Making History” we held two workshops.

We are so deeply grateful to those awesome women who showed up and shared their stories. They were all powerful and moving, and are enriching understandings of Stroud’s social and maternal history.

Sunday 7 July 11am-1pm – Black History – Birth and maternity in Stroud

Supported by Stroud Against Racism and open to all who have a recent or older story to share, about Black history and histories of childbirth and reproduction, involving Black folks and people of colour, of any heritage.

Wednesday 10 July 11am-1pm – Pre-1980’s stories

Supported by Stroud Local History Society, and open to all who have a story from the 1980s or before.

Both events were held in the Collector’s room at Stroud’s Museum in the Park.

“It was a lovely experience – thank you”

Workshop participant – birth histories

What Happened At The Workshops?

At the events we showed some items from the Museum collections, to start conversation, and we offered materials and prompts for writing, doodling, collage and other ways to express yourself. With permissions, we recorded audio and video material for the project. This is not compulsory and written consent has been sought for everything we will use.

We had some really rich a powerful conversations, learning about practices of birth in the past, reflecting on how things have changed, and making new connections. We also encountered powerful conversations about the experiences of the Windrush generation in Stroud, and their descendants.

We are bringing missing histories into the Museum collection and changing the future for the public visitors and researchers.

cutting cloth at the Museum
New textile work being created by a workshop participant as part of an exploration Black maternal histories in Stroud. Photo © Sarah Dixon/The WAAS
Young woman (Minnie Annie Harper) wearing a tall black hat, young boy in boater (George), and two elaborately bonnetted babies (Leah Beatrice b.1888 and Laura Ellen b.1889) in a pram. Photographed by Merrett Bros. from Russell St. Stroud. From the collections of Museum in the Park, Stroud