In 2007, five women met in Taree at the cafe Raw Sugar for breakfast; a nurse, a teacher, a women’s refuge worker, a school assistant and I, an author and retiree. The original three are members of the Australian Labor (not Labour) Party. Therefore, although the meeting was not politically driven, the conversations had little to do with knitting tea cosies or cooking. It was not long before it was realised that talking was not enough; we were just going around in circles. Socialist Women for Justice was the answer.
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Grand Matriarchs Worldwide
Let us meet, inspire, support, connect, network, mentor, learn, think and plan.
In our homes, families, schools, community neighbourhoods, villages, town, city, country.
Yes and worldwide via the internet so come blog on this website and tell us what is possible.
We do this now, wherever we are, in every way, every day, in all that we do.
In the small and big tasks we undertake daily in child and maternal health, girls education.
Resisting bias and taking steps to prevent and eliminate violence against women and children.
With our collective activism we can achieve in all the ways that we are already familiar with.
Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project
Each of the 60 women activists recorded for this project campaigned for equality and freedom in the 1960s, 70s and 80s … Given that the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain was a mass movement involving thousands of women from all over the country and from all walks of life, selecting just 60 to record was a challenge … These women demanded that struggles for gender rights be won at home as well as in the public sphere. They describe their own experiences as girls, socialised to expect less than their brothers. They also describe a rich range of political heritages that informed British feminism, from Black Power to Gay Liberation to socialism and disability rights.
Fergie and the Funeral
Of all the celebrities that went along [to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Ferguson’s] presence seemed the most apt. Her heyday in the mid-1980s coincided with the zenith of Thatcherism, and the confluence of the two is not surprising. On the contrary, the Duchess of York is one of many examples of women in the royal family coming to epitomize the zeitgeist of their period. Royal women have long served as a heavily gendered repository for the nation’s hopes and aspirations, their public personas becoming inextricably linked with contemporary ideals of femininity. I
Virtue & Vice: Reflecting on Women’s History at Hardwick Hall
… we also wish to highlight moments from the lives of less visible, but equally resourceful, women: Jacqueline Vautrollier, for example, wife of the Huguenot refugee printer, Thomas Vautrollier, who ran the printing business when her husband was away from London, and again after his death. We consider too the domestic and professional clothworkers who made the materials which went into the magnificent hangings and tapestries brought together at Hardwick.
Media & The Woman … The Right to Write & Be Read – Part 3
The worst anecdotes, just as Dr North reported, came from colleagues in commercial TV newsrooms, with some truly shocking me. In one case, a 30 something reporter, winner of a recent prize in investigative reporting, told me how she asked privately not to work with a particular producer due to his insistent lewd comments and behaviour. She asked her superiors that her name not be mentioned as she did not want to make a formal complaint. The man was not only told of her complaint but he then turned the tables on her warning colleagues and cameramen against her and making her work life impossible. She has now moved and is working at the public broadcaster. Another described standing open mouthed as an executive, in his late fifties stood beside her and worked his way through a list of pretty much every older woman in
Media & The Woman … Reflections on the Right to Write & Be Read – Pt 2
I, like so many correspondents of this era have had to revolutionize the way I work – from an often barely daily deadline and workload to a virtual 24/7, stand alone operation. As Vice President of the Foreign Press Association in London, 125 years old this year, I have been intrigued thinking back to the old guard, the newspaper correspondents, pretty much all of them male, who filed once every couple of weeks from the outposts of the empire, including often horrendous theatres of war, to newspapers back home.
Media & The Woman … Reflections on the Right to Write & Be Read – Pt 1
The fight was never ending to get placement for stories about equal pay and equal opportunity, welfare, reproductive rights, balancing family life, stories about childbirth, about breast feeding into the paper, let alone onto page one alongside the nation’s male dominated political affairs. One year, this same colleague reminded me, childcare fees rocketed by 25 per cent in one go – none of us even had kids then but she remembers it took a full week of lobbying to get an editor (whose wife happened to be a feminist and mum of two young children) – to agree to running the story, let alone putting it on page one where it belonged.
Mapping Famous Women’s Lives – Writers & Artists in London’s History
I understood Miranda Seymour’s lovely description of being at Shelley’s house on Skinner Street, where she found herself “walking the streets of London in a daze. There are no paving stones beneath your feet, no cars, no office blocks. You hear the clatter of iron wheels, smell the horse dung, see, in a sudden swish of black silk and the glimpse of a shawl, Mary and Claire hurrying down a narrow street towards the carriage where Shelly is waiting in 1814, to lead them to adventures such as these two impatient, headstrong young women have only read about in novels.” So walking around, A-Z in hand, locating the Skinner Street house and Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft’s place of marriage and burial, opened London up to me in a new and wonderful way and I realised the historical wealth of women’s lives that were quietly contained in this great city.