International Women’s Day 2024 at City Lit

Women and City Lit

Throughout our history, City Lit has played a significant role in educating women. Empowerment through learning, regardless of gender, has been at the centre of our activities.

Since we opened our doors, thousands of women have benefitted from City Lit’s broad and flexible courses, managing study alongside work and other responsibilities. Our inspiring alumni include best-selling authors Malorie Blackman and Anna Burns, visual artist Susannah Goulding, and Lucille Lewin, founder of high street fashion brand ‘Whistles’.

As an employer, City Lit is committed to equality and inclusion. 66% of our Governing Body, 50% of our Executive Committee and 63% of all staff and tutors are women. We’re proud to be champions of women from all walks of life.

City Lit is honouring International Women’s Day on the 8th of March 2024 with a diverse programme of events running for several weeks. This will include art exhibitions, poetry readings, and talks.

Over the coming months, we’re also offering an exciting range of courses that explore and celebrate the significant contributions made by women to life, society and culture. Our in-person and online courses will cover topics such as politics, philosophy and literature.

Our events and courses aim to put the spotlight on remarkable women across arts, culture and social history. We hope that you’ll join us in celebrating the achievements of women in the UK and across the world.

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Susannah Goulding exhibition at City Lit

Our International Women’s Day programme will feature an exhibition by former City Lit student, Susannah Goulding. ‘This Delightful Woman’ explores Goulding’s ongoing experience of living with terminal cancer. It addresses the way patients receiving treatment for cancer are addressed, treated, and spoken about. It aims to challenge stereotypes and give a voice to the authentic lived experience of those living with the disease.

The exhibition features digital media, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film and writing. Through this multidisciplinary approach, Goulding takes us on a journey. She examines the emotional and psychological experience of treatments and medications. By incorporating body scans, objects, textures and images of medical spaces, she encourages us to consider our relationship with our bodies.

Her honest, tender and shocking work challenges the matter-of-fact, clinical view of illness, where patients can be treated as ‘passive victims’. It also explores the possibility of autonomy, empowerment and self-expression for people with cancer. Reflecting this year’s International Women's Day theme of 'inspire inclusion’, the exhibition creates space for patients’ voices, feelings and perceptions to be considered.

In Goulding’s words, “I explore the experience of a liminal space, between the disease, its pathology and its treatment.”

On International Women’s Day there will also be a poetry reading from Goulding’s accompanying book, This Delightful Woman, written by the poet and psychoanalyst Julia Evans in collaboration with the artist.

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The State of Her: Artist Talk by Heidi Wigmore

The day will also feature a free, lunchtime artist talk in Cultureplex from visual artist and City Lit tutor Heidi Wigmore. ‘The State of Her’ is an overview of Wigmore’s studio-based drawing and creative practice. The talk delves into how she challenges, resists and critiques stereotypes of the female form, creating her own visual language in the process. 

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