Women

If you haven’t been hiding under a rock for the last couple of months, you will have heard about the Slutwalk movement – marches organised by women in cities across the globe to protest against the huge problem of victim-blaming culture relating to rape and sexual assault, provoked by a Toronto policeman’s comment that “women should avoid dressing like sluts” in order to avoid being raped. After the original Slutwalk Toronto, satellite marches quickly sprang up across the world, under the…

After two gay men were ejected for kissing from the John Snow pub in Soho, central London, on 13 April, gay rights activists organised a mass “kiss-in” outside the pub two days later. Inspired by the kiss-in, Lauren Beamen threatened to call a mass feed-in at the King William IV pub in Hampstead, north London, after being ejected on 16 April for breastfeeding her seven-month-old baby.

On 10 March, Stirling hosted Scotland’s White Ribbon march, organised by men taking action against violence against women. The event was sponsored by Stirling Council and supported by Amnesty International. It was also supported by the local police force, so it was the first march I have been on where the police were simultaneously policing and marching (openly at least!).

Perhaps this will be repeated in the coming months when the police try to gain our support against cuts to…

Strongest experience of women’s solidarity? God, I probably think of doing stuff in Ireland. I was involved in Women in Ireland for a really long time. It wouldn’t have been about women’s issues, women’s rights. It was to do with the British occupation of Ireland, British soldiers on the streets.
We would go and stay in people’s houses in a very working- class area of West Belfast and then we’d all go on the International Women’s Day marches outside the prisons where there were women…

“To fight is not the solution. We have a mouth and a brain, we should talk.” Afghan Women’s Affairs Minister, Dr H.B. Ghazanfar
“Freedom, democracy and justice cannot be enforced at gunpoint by a foreign country; they are the values that can be achieved only by our people and democracy-loving forces through a hard, decisive and long struggle.” Afghan women’s rights activist Zoya.

Recently, I overheard a significant figure in the UK anti-war movement bemoaning the collapse…

It was a long time ago that I read The Women’s Room, nearly 30 years ago now. Another time in my life, almost like another life. Sometimes life can be like that, the feeling of having lived a number of lives in one life, like a snake shedding its skin and starting renewed.
I was given a copy of The Women’s Room by a woman who lived in a flat downstairs, I read this book that proclaimed to “change lives” when I went into hospital to give birth to my first child. At the time I had been…

Once you get past the introduction – which is poorly written and unfocused, with most of the important information repeated in the main body of the book – Long Time Passing is just what it says on the cover: a country by country breakdown of the effects of war and terror on mothers, families and society.

Each chapter – covering Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and the US – starts with a well-referenced history of recent events that have briefly appeared in the…

Western attention has focused once again on the plight of women in Afghanistan, as the result of the Shia Family Law, passed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai in March. The law, which gives Shia husbands enormous legal powers over their wives, provoked 300 women to mount an almost-unprecedented demonstration outside a madrassa run by one of Afghanistan’s most powerful Shia clerics, Mohamad Asif Mohseni, on 15 April.

Another view

Nelofer Pazira, Afghan-Canadian film-maker…

In a society where only 3% of babies are exclusively breastfed at five months (Unicef 2005), breastfeeding can seem like a political act. Certainly where I live, it’s so unusual to see a woman breastfeeding that I can’t help doing a double-take when I see it.

Kate Evans – better known for her excellent cartoon books on the anti-roads movement, climate change and civil liberties – has produced a funny, subversive, supremely helpful and reassuring book for those who want to breastfeed…

In 2008, a small group of women in Kandahar, Afghanistan, decided to gather in a public square to pray for peace with justice in Afghanistan on International Women's Day. They expected only a few women to show up, but more than 1500 women gathered in Kandahar that day. This year on Women's Day thousands of women across Afghanistan demonstrated for peace and women's justice wearing sky-blue scarves to highlight unity and solidarity across generations, languages, geographic locations, ethnic…

Short, wispy silver hair surrounds her freckled and slightly worn face. She speaks with a decisive tone, and though the tongue in which she speaks is unfamiliar to me, I was fascinated by the story of Hana Ibrahim when I met her in February at SOAS in London.

The lifelong Iraqi resident began campaigning for women’s rights about ten years ago and founded the Women’s Will Association, an Iraq- and Syria-based NGO, in Baghdad in 2004 and Gender magazine, which discusses women’s rights…

What Kind of Liberation? is a detailed critique of the US authorities’ promise of an occupation which would liberate Iraqi women. It stands out from other writings on post-war Iraq, not only because Iraqi women are its subject, but because of the transparency of the authors in setting out how their own identities, gender, politics and activism have constructed their analysis.

The book is based on interviews with diaspora and refugee women or those able to travel outside, together…

In history, women who failed to adopt traditional gendered roles have been characterised as “the bad, the mad and the good”. Similarly, narratives of mothers, monsters and whores are used to deny the agency of women who confound the stereotypes of passive victims of war or non-violent peace women, and who act with violence in the context of war or armed conflict.

These narratives have their roots in western myths: Medea, the vengeful mother, who killed all of her children; the…

How wonderful to be part of this vibrant and vital International Women's Day march in London for something we all demand: the unconditional, non-negotiable end to violence against women.

As so well expressed by the speakers, such violence takes many forms: the direct violence of beatings, rape, mutilation; the fear of what may follow; governments denying equal status; withholding the right to an existence as an individual woman; war, poverty, trafficking, slavery, threats,…

There are at least three hundred thousand widows in Baghdad alone, and a further one million throughout Iraq, with their numbers rising daily. City of Widows is a timely reminder of the continuing calamitous affect of the Iraq war, particularly on Iraqi women. It interweaves Zangana's personal story of resistance, imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein with a history of Iraq from the early twentieth century to the present day.

The promotion of women's rights was given as a…