Writing from the Edge: Seeing Glasgow as an Outsider Within

Over the course of the twentieth century Glasgow’s inner-city was transformed by policies of slum clearance, relocation and utopian construction. By the late 1960s, the city was clearing 15,000 units of housing a year on the basis such dwellings were ‘unfit for habitation’ (Robertson 1992, p.1115). The city council's approach to slum clearance was for most of this time guided by late-Victorian ideas of public health (Robertson 1992, p.1116) – a hangover from city’s first major clearances in the 1860s, when issues such as overcrowding or poor sanitation were linked to other forms of ‘immorality’, such as sexual freedom or religious dissent. These constant cycles of displacement made life difficult for the women forced to live in the city's slums, whose experiences were either sensationalised in press and social reportage or reduced to stark government statistics. This paper is about how historians might better locate and retell the stories of these women by adopting Patricia Hill Collins' viewpoint of the 'outsider within', using one's own experiences of marginality to give voice to theirs.