Feminism

It’s hard to believe that a man who openly bragged about sexually assaulting women cares much about women’s rights (it’s even harder to believe that such a man should be elected president but there we are). So it comes as a bit of a surprise to hear of the Trump administration praising a growing women’s movement in Iran.

Women in Tehran have been protesting against the compulsory wearing of the hijab by publicly removing their headscarves and standing in a public place. Now…

Empowering women is clearly one way in which we may be able to stop climate change: not because women are more nurturing or caring but because more people equals better ideas, and because your success is never sharper than when working with other humans of many different kinds.

As a general overview of what some women have achieved in the field, Why Women Will Save the Planet should be useful to activists and non-activists alike. While there are some inspiring examples of…

Inevitably there’s been a bit of a backlash against the #MeToo movement, and sadly not just from the mainstream media, or from ‘Men’s Rights Activists’ either.

Some women who identify as feminist have declared that some of the ‘minor’ abuse women get shouldn’t be conflated with more serious charges such as rape. So some man had demanded a view of your more intimate regions of your body? Get over it! Grow up! That’s life! Don’t be a victim! Give him what for back! (Just a quick…

After reading this book, at first I was confused about the title: there didn’t appear to be a manifesto in it at all. Then gradually it dawned on me – the entire book is a manifesto, and a powerful one.

Mary Beard makes so many deeply perceptive points throughout the book that I found myself memorising page numbers to refer back to in case I ever wanted to quote her on anything.

The book is divided into two sections, both of which are lectures she has given – the first…

In one of the last poems in this book, entitled ‘To the woman on St. Nicholas Avenue whose thigh was a wilderness blooming’, Ellen Hagan celebrates a woman she saw who had tattoos of flowers and trees all up her leg. She speaks of how uplifting the sight of this ‘garden of a woman’ was, and the poem is infused with a sense of the bravery this random stranger had – to show the world how she wanted to look, and who she wanted to be. I felt like this poem summed up everything joyous and…

When I was a teenager, my schoolfriends and I would walk out from school past a timber merchants. Every time a lorry came in or out we’d get horns tooting and drivers leaning out and expressing their opinions on our bodies and what they’d like to do to them.

That’s the way it was in the mid-1970s. In my late 40s, I noticed that this was no longer happening. Great! Men had finally grown up and no longer felt the need to yell out invitations for a quickie in the car park.

Er, no…

What songs were women singing 100 years ago when they were campaigning for full access to our democratic system?

At the beginning of the 20th century, the folk songs that have always been sung were being sung all over the country. Women were still singing while labouring – milking, spinning, waulking (beating) the cloth and such like. They were singing lullabies to help soothe the babies and themselves, and singing ballads telling of love and loss.

Songs of war were everywhere…

Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring didn’t originally intend to call their book Dead Feminists. The title arose as a way to refer to their project in a slightly jokey way, ‘especially as many of the women we’ve profiled have themselves denied being feminists’. However, they wanted to reclaim and own the word ‘feminist’, and decided that the only way to do that was to use it to refer to every single one of the historic and world-changing women profiled in their book.

The…

‘There are specific ways in which people are silenced,’ Rebecca Solnit writes in her latest collection of essays, ‘but there is also a culture that withers away the space in which women speak and makes it clear that men’s voices count for more than women’s.’

Solnit is the author of the widely shared essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’, included in a 2014 collection of the same name (see PN 2574), and is often credited with inspiring the word ‘mansplaining’. In both…

Goal: Suffrage for women of Kuwait
Success in achieving specific demands: 6 out of 6 points
Survival: 1 / 1
Growth: 3 / 3

The country of Kuwait acquired independence from the UK in 1961. Women seized the moment to seek further liberation. As an act of defiance, many women burned their robes, rejected notions of female dress. A year later, the Kuwaiti parliament passed new election laws that limited the electorate to men over the age of 21, whose families lived in…

‘Suddenly, being a woman doesn’t look like such a minefield after all,’ Sara Pascoe says in the blurb for this book. She is referring to all the amazing things she has found out while researching evolution, science and the the history of patriarchy, and seeing how they relate to the way society works – or doesn’t – today. Except that makes Animal sound dry: it isn’t.

Although Sara Pascoe talks about evolutionary science a lot, she never dumbs it down – after all, she isn’…

The conference formerly known as Feminism in London is scheduled to start at nine thirty, and to make sure they get everyone there on time, the organisers have booked Cordelia Fine as their keynote speaker. We are told that she has come all the way from Australia specially to tell us about her new book, Testosterone Rex.

But it's not Feminism in London…

If you’ve ever heard, or read, people saying: ‘Oh, women have equality now, there’s no need for feminism’, then this little book will give you some of the facts and figures you need to be able to say: ‘Well, actually, there’s still lots to do’.

This book probably won’t make a feminist of most people who don’t already consider themselves feminists – indeed, they’re unlikely to pick up a copy – but there’s plenty here to help those who are already interested, particularly anyone who…

The first recorded use of the word ‘queer’ being used in an explicitly homophobic, derogatory sense was in a letter about Oscar Wilde. It’s always meant something strange and suspicious, as in the American saying ‘queer as a three-dollar bill’, or a fleeting reference to the Diogenes Club in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Only recently, though, has it been reclaimed and given a new, far more empowering definition. Instead of being an offensive term suggesting that a person is unnatural in…

A professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Robert Jensen has a long history of activism focussing on US foreign policy, progressive journalism, climate change and pornography.

With The End of Patriarchy, he makes a strong, often deeply personal, case for radical feminism, which he believes has lost significant ground to individualistic liberal feminism and postmodern feminism in the broader culture and academia, respectively. For Jensen, the central tenet of…