About Harpies and Quines

Harpies and Quines

Harpies and Quines was a Scottish feminist magazine published in Glasgow between 1992 and 1994. Devised by women, written by women and for women, it set out to be Scotland's new feminist magazine: a forum for Scottish women's voices and priorities, produced as a glossy, popular title rather than a campaign newsletter. It was the first attempt to create a glossy, popular Scottish feminist magazine, humorous and irreverent in tone, combining stylistic subversion with practical campaigning and a localised editorial voice.

In only two years the magazine attracted national publicity, won a publishing award, survived a legal challenge from a far larger rival and published sixteen issues or more before its directors declared voluntary insolvency in 1994. It remains the best-documented Scottish feminist magazine of the 1990s.

Founding by seven women

The magazine was founded by seven women living and working in Scotland, including the journalist and broadcaster Lesley Riddoch. The founding group comprised two community workers, two journalists, an illustrator, a film editor and a graphic artist, together with a film and television art director. They were later joined by a wider collective of contributors and organisers. It was launched on a wave of enthusiasm, goodwill, donations and the unpaid efforts of a great number of women.

The original Glasgow-based collective included Lynne Bryan, Stella Coombe, Jackie Erdman, Fiona McGregor, Fiona Montgomery, Lesley Riddoch and Cas Stewart. The magazine's first issue editorial declared that the time was right for an idea that had been in the mind's eye of lots of women for a long time: a Scottish feminist magazine that was neither the men's world dished up daily in newspapers, nor the unreal existence described in some women's magazines, nor the London-based perspective offered by the rest. It promised to campaign for the rights of women, to take a cool, hard look at the reality of Scottish women's lives, and to re-own the word feminism.

The name

The name Harpies and Quines was both a sly parody of the glossy women's magazine Harpers and Queen and a statement of intent drawn from Greek mythology and Scots dialect. In Greek myth, Harpies are part-bird, part-woman creatures, the personification of storm winds. According to the collective, quine is Scots for an independent young woman, a uniquely non-pejorative term for a young woman. In Riddoch's explanation, harpies and quines represented a spectrum of femininity from the monstrous to the innocent, between which most women lived their lives.

The contrast was built into the design: in the logo, Harpies appeared in a jagged, slanting font while Quines followed in a rounded and neat one, a visual rendering of the two extremes of femininity each word represented.

The Harpers and Queen lawsuit

Shortly after the magazine's launch, the publishers of Harpers and Queen objected to the name and attempted to sue for infringement of trademark. The action was unsuccessful: after a media backlash in favour of the smaller, beleaguered title, Harpers backed down. The episode gave the small independent magazine the kind of front-page, UK-wide publicity it could not have afforded to pay for, and Harpies benefitted from the free publicity generated by its much richer opponent's misstep.

Contents and campaigns

The magazine's contents included features, news articles, a Women Worldwide section, health coverage, reviews, listings, letters and creative writing, together with regular columns that mixed humour with campaigning: Clitoral Awareness, Steamie Tales, Dinah Diner reviewing Scottish restaurants, Agony Aunt Veronica, and a crossword. In issue 4 the column Wanker of the Month was introduced, in response to high levels of misogyny in the mainstream media.

Its campaigning coverage ranged across the politics of its moment: the 1992 general election analysed from a feminist perspective in the first issue, UK party politics and local Scottish politics, legal aid, child support, Women's Aid, abortion, sex education, single mothers and the Timex strike. The magazine gave sustained support to Scotland's groundbreaking Zero Tolerance campaign against violence against women in 1994, instigated by Edinburgh District Council Women's Committee. The Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995 also shaped its content, with articles focusing on the use of rape as a weapon of war in the former Yugoslavia. From issue 8 it published a regular Riot Grrl page, reflecting the Riot Grrl zine activism then spreading to the UK from the United States. From the first issue it set itself up explicitly to challenge not only traditional mainstream media but London-centric feminist media.

Design and production

Harpies and Quines had a distinct aesthetic drawing on Celtic iconography and mythology. The cover of the first issue, designed by Alan Mason, depicted a pattern of Celtic knots over which a heavily tattooed, Pictish figure was superimposed, and Celtic patterns were repeated in headings and borders throughout the early issues. Early issues were printed with a single colour on the cover and otherwise in black and white; issue 5 carried a stark black Zero Tolerance campaign cover, and from issue 7 the magazine published multi-coloured covers for the first time, showcasing the work of Scottish artists. Inside, content was presented in two columns with italicised headings and illustrated with black and white photographs, illustrations and cartoons, and the collective lampooned the conventions of the magazine cover model. The magazine was typeset by EM-DEE Productions and printed by Scottish County Press.

Frequency, price and circulation

Issues 1 to 8 appeared every two months; from issue 8 the magazine became monthly, after a readership survey in issue 4 and reader feedback supporting the change. The cover price in 1992 was £1.50. Circulation was estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000. Its ISSN was 0966-2995.

Distribution was a running theme of its early editorials. The magazine was set up on a commercial footing, but declined distribution by John Menzies, then the UK's biggest distributor of print media, on the grounds that the company took more than half the cover price of magazines. Instead the collective relied on subscriptions and hand-delivered copies to newsagents, bookshops, student unions, shops and arts centres, regularly issuing calls for new Harpy vendors, and copies were also stocked in Oxfam shops across Scotland. From issue 11 the magazine was distributed by Fleetwood Distribution, and in 1994 it signed a deal with Fleetwood, a move seen by some as a compromise.

Money, support and awards

The magazine was started with subscriptions, donations, a small Community Enterprise Strathclyde grant and £3,000 from Lesley Riddoch's mother, Helen Riddoch. It received the support of public bodies including Glasgow District Council and Edinburgh District Council Women's Committee, and of feminist groups including Women in Publishing and the Scottish Abortion Campaign. In issue 4 the collective announced a successful funding bid of £15,000 from Community Investment Strathclyde, allowing it to hire a development worker, and proposed creating a Harpies and Quines Community Business. The magazine generated additional income from the sale of T-shirts, and in 1994 ran a controversial but successful billboard campaign. Listings were published free.

Recognition followed: in 1994 Harpies won first prize in the New Venture category of the Women in Publishing (UK) awards, and it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

Closure and afterlife

Despite the awards and the publicity, several sets of circumstances led the directors of Harpies and Quines to declare voluntary insolvency in 1994, after publishing sixteen issues, with some accounts suggesting as many as eighteen. The financial contrast with its feminist predecessors was stark: researchers have noted that Spare Rib, launched twenty years earlier with £2,500 in 1972 money, would have cost at least £500,000 to launch from scratch in 1992, while Harpies was assembled from subscriptions, donations and one small grant.

The magazine was not entirely finished. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the last issue, Harpies and Quines published a one-off special edition. Its history has since been documented by the Liberating Histories project and the Scottish Magazines Network, and Glasgow Women's Library marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2017, finding it as relevant as ever.

Legacy

Harpies and Quines lasted only two years, and researchers have pointed out that brevity and small budgets, not lack of quality, explain why Scottish feminist magazines received less academic attention than Spare Rib or Ms. Its run demonstrated both the demand for a Scottish feminist voice distinct from London media and the difficulty of sustaining one commercially in the early 1990s. As a Glasgow magazine that put Scottish women's priorities, humour and campaigns into glossy magazine form for the first time, it remains a key document of feminism in Scotland in the decade before devolution.