Feminism

[This is a short extract from a powerful new book by a former Menwith Hill peace camper, grounded in dozens of interviews with feminist activists around the UK. Radical Feminism provides a guide to the development of the women’s liberation movement since the 1970s, deals with the challenges of queer theory, and centres itself in the history and politics of the Reclaim The Night marches against male violence against women.

We’ve chosen to print this section on trans…

Most people in Britain, I suspect, know little or nothing about women’s struggle for the vote here. For those who know a little, I would guess that the suffragettes would be top of the list of recognised names, followed by Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Wilding-Davidson.

They might also recognise the name of the non-militant suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett, but that’s probably about it. Sally Heathcote Suffragette…

Everyday Sexism is already an important touchstone in the fourth-wave feminism that many commentators are now heralding.

The book comes out of the website Laura Bates, a young journalist, set up in April 2012 after experiencing a particularly bad week of street harassment. Since then the website and Twitter account has collected tens of thousands of testimonies from girls and women detailing the appalling level of sexism that continues to blight societies around the globe…

In 2008, Rebecca Solnit wrote a brief essay, 'Men Explain Things to Me', that went viral on the internet.

The title was inspired by an incident in which a male party host, on hearing that she had just published a book about the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, insisted on telling Solnit all about the very important  Muybridge book that had come out earlier that year – only to discover, of course that it was Solnit's book that he was talking about.…

‘Feminism,’ writes Noah Berkatsky in the afterword to The big feminist BUT... , ‘is about how gender is false; being a woman doesn’t define who you are. But it’s also about how feminism is real, and being a woman really does matter. And those contradictions are why so many people look at feminism and want to add a “but”.’

More playful than polemic, this anthology sees 43, mostly US-…

When I see a man approach and I cast down my eyes
I’m not laying down a hand, I’m not looking for a prize
It’s just a force of habit, this avoiding the male glance
’Cos it isn’t worth the trouble and it isn’t worth the chance
Of them thinking that you’re actively ‘giving them the eye’
And not simply acknowledging a fellow passerby...
And no, I don’t know what they’re thinking but I know what men have thought
And I live by my experiences and the lessons I’…

The artist Rachael House has a project where she encourages participants to draw ‘what a feminist looks like’ on paper plates. At the UK Feminista Summer School this August, there was a delightful variety of over 500 feminists for inspiration.

The conference was held on the Birmingham University campus, and that might have been why the participants were predominantly younger women, and why the tone of the event was gently academic, but older women, women of colour, working-class women…

I want to give a warning shot to anti-oppression trainers and activists. My bottom line is this: we need to stop applying theory onto people’s experiences, wielding it like a weapon to describe what we believe whether we actually see it in a room or not. It’s not smart organising, creates intense backlash, and shrinks – not grows – our movements.

An organiser recently shared with me an example of what I’m talking about.

He was working in a union that represents workers at a…

On 11 September, leading Muslim anti-war activist Salma Yaqoob announced her resignation from the left-wing Respect party which she had helped to found, and of which she was the leader. Yaqoob made it clear that ‘necessary relations of trust and collaborative working’ had broken down over remarks made by Respect MP George Galloway in relation to the rape allegations against Wikileaks leader Julian Assange.

On 4 September, CND general secretary Kate Hudson had stood down as a…

PN readers may recall that I’m a big fan of Laurie Penny (aka Penny Red). I’m an equally big fan of feminism, so I was keen to read Meat Market, her series of essays on the subject.

Penny is a serious and passionate writer, and there’s a lot to commend in this book. The opening chapter on sexualisation demonstrates how disempowering the supposedly ‘liberating’ raunch culture actually is, and how it serves commercial rather than individual interests.

Similarly, the…

Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, are two of the biggest names in contemporary Men’s Studies, writing heavyweight books with wordy titles like The Gender of Desire: Essays on Masculinity and Theorizing Patriarchy.

In contrast, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism is a short, consciously popular and non-academic introduction to feminism for men. Noting that feminism…

Fem11, the national conference of UK Feminista held on 12 November at Friends House, London gathered over 1000 feminists.

Keynote speaker Sandy Toksvig bemoaned the lack of suitable role models in children’s literature – “If Rapunzel had hair long enough for a prince to climb up, couldn’t she have fashioned a rope out of her hair to escape?”

Also criticised: the way female role models were re-fashioned to make them more “respectable”. Did you know that Florence Nightingale was…

UK Feminsta was founded in 2010 and Fem11, the national conference held on 12 November at Friends House, London was a gathering of over 1000 feminists. Mostly women with a smattering of men, and for the most part, women who don’t appear to meet the stereotype which may be responsible for some, particularly younger women, to proclaim: “I’m not a feminist”.

The keynote speaker was a very popular Sandy Toksvig who bemoaned the lack of suitable role model in children’s literature – “If…

Over the past 13 years the American artist Josh MacPhee has commissioned over 100 posters celebrating revolution, racial justice, women's rights, queer liberation, peace activism and labour struggles. Collected here in one volume – and stretching from the Diggers’ 1649 occupation of George’s Hill to contemporary actions against the arms trade – these images, as Rebecca Solnit notes in her foreword, “cohere into the radical past on which a radical future can be built.”

A sign at the entrance to the Defense and Security Equipment International arms fair warns that visitors must wear business dress. The pinstriped suits, school ties and polished shoes shroud the event in sham respectability. However, the dress code does not extend to sales staff. Here, the main aim is to entice.