Category Archives: Feminism

Feminism

Women Against the Cuts protest tonight

November 30, 2010 – 11:19 pm

It was seriously cold, it was seriously snowing, and Westminster was swarming with police, but there was a great turnout this evening for the first Women Against the Cuts event (about 150 or so at its peak I’d judge).

I’m afraid this rather blurry photo is all I have as evidence, because although it wasn’t on the schedule I did spend quite a bit of the evening on megaphone duty…

women against the cuts

There was a choir (a definitely higher class of protest), although my favourite chants were along the lines of “non-doms are shite”, and was really pleasing that so many of the protester took what I suspect was for many their first turn at a megaphone to deliver a personal message about their anger to the treasury.

For an organisation that only started around six weeks ago it was a magnificant effort – the next organising meeting is on Thursday and after that I’m sure much more will be planned.

Permalink | Comments (8)
Feminism

Women Against the Cuts Session at the Coalition of Resistance meeting

November 28, 2010 – 11:14 pm

Went to an excellent session at the Coalition of Resistance national organising meeting yesterday run by Women Against the Cuts, which packed something like 80 women into a very small school classroom, with very small chairs! Among the groups whose members/reps were there were Feminist Fightback, the Older Feminist Network and the Radical Statistics Group. There were also two women who told us how they met at the first-ever Women’s Liberation march in London – the age range was about as wide as it could have been.

The session agreed to call for the addition of the following paragraph to the Conference Declaration:

“Acknowledging that women absorb many of the additional pressures from the cuts, the Coalition will strongly support efforts to defend services particularly used by women, and women-specific services. It will particular acknowledge the difficulties suffered by women from diverse communities, including women with disabilities, women from ethnic minorities, and pensioners.”

The conference committee, however, was faced with (depending on which account you believe, either 14 or 20 amendments), so the huge meeting (fairly enough) – some 1,300 strong – agreed to refer this to the Council elected at the meeting.

The session also called for the Council to be at least 50% female, a call that was acknowledged in the plenary session. The people who put themselves forward were 37% female – and I spoke to the organisers afterwards and strongly urged them to either reopen nominations for women or co-opt women to achieve gender balance – so we’ll see….

I had been asked to propose the motion, so here are some of the key details from the speech I never got to make for that:
* Independent House of Commons Library research has shown that the cuts will hit women twice as hard as men: two-thirds of the direct cuts will be forn by women, £11bn of £16bn.
* Over 65% of public service workers are women, and they make up 75% of local government workers, where the job cuts are likely to fall the hardest
* Benefits make up one-fifth of the average women’s income (one-tenth of the average man’s)
* 1m more women than men claim housing benefit – they make up 60% of the total
* 25% of women in their 50s have caring responsibilities

Permalink | Comments (3)
Books Feminism

Reclaiming the F Word – a survey across, but not judgement of, contemporary feminism

November 8, 2010 – 11:31 pm

First published on Blogcritics

I read Reclaiming the F Word, the much-awaited book by the former editor of the website The F-Word, some months ago when it first came out, indeed even went to the launch in a West End club, but hadn’t found time to write up a review (not enough long train trips recently – at least not ones where I’ve been fit to do any more than sleep).

It wasn’t what I expected – I’d been predicting something more analytical, which tried to present a path forward for feminism and a vision of the future. That’s definitely not what it is.

Rather it’s a snapshot of today – based heavily on a survey of 1,265 feminists, self-described (I was one of them). There are descriptions of types of feminism of today, and surveys of views, but very little in the way of judgements of worth or value.

But provided you take the book for what it is, it’s a valuable work – certainly highly useful as an introduction to modern feminism, and as a guide for those thinking about becoming involved in feminism work but not quite sure where to start. (And with the detailed result presented in an appendix, no doubt invalulable to future historians, and as a source for present-day sociologists.)

It’s also heavy of pointers to further reading, namechecking many of the feminist books and writers of the past decade or so. There’s also plenty of basic facts and figures on women’s status and position, if sometimes they feel a little random,

Adding to the “introduction to feminism” feel,each chapter finishes with a list of possible actions the reader might take, ranged across levels of radicalism and effort.

The focus is slanted towards the UK and the West, but there’s enough discussion of the critical problems of women in the developing world to ensure that any reader new to feminism at least gets a sketch of the international dimension.

But if you’ve been around for a long time, as I have, you won’t find much to surprise you.

It was in the appendix that I found, for me, the most valuable data. The survey question that asked feminists to rank their concerns by importance put inequality in work/home/education top, with well over 600 respondents, and “violence against women” at about 600. “The body”, primarily abortion and reproductive rights was third.

All of these were well above “popular culture” including responses relating to objectification/sexualisation, the issue that I think is consuming far too much time and energy in current feminist efforts.

While I’d class myself, when pushed, as a radical feminist, rather than as a Marxist/socialist one, I think these campaign in attacking the end result of hyper-capitalism are failing to get anywhere near our real problems, which lie in our extreme consumerist culture, for which the use of sex as a commodity to sell pretty well anything at all is merely a logical outcome.
read more »

Permalink | Comment (0)
Feminism

Scottish Women’s Aid – impressive, but threatened…

November 8, 2010 – 10:54 pm

I spent (a very packed and interesting) weekend at the Scottish Green Party conference. More on this shortly, but one of the highlights was learning more about women’s issues in Scotland.

Scottish Women’s Aid had a stall at the conference, and a very hardhitting campaign with its “Save Violence Against Women” pledge. Up until now, they’ve had funding and support that we can only envy in England.

The Rape Crisis Specific Fund has provided £50,000 per rape crisis centre per year across Scotland to ensure a basic level of service, also funding the creation of five new rape crisis centres. The Children’s Services Fund has provided more than 100 children’s workers.

But they are clearly concerned that cutbacks mean this is all at risk.

Steady funding has, however, enable them to build real political muscle and lobbying capacity – again something that in England we can only envy.

They had an excellent paper from the Scottish Women’s Budget Group, which campaigns for Gender Budget Analysis in public spending decisions and budget-setting processes “as a means of ensuring both compliance with the requirements for gender impact assessment (Equality Act 2006), and as a means of ensuring political commitment to gender equality are translated into decisions about resource allocation and budgetary commitments.”

A Women’s Aid report identifies just over £8.3m a year spent by the Scottish government on violence against women, the current allocation of which will run out in March 2011. (A study in the UK in 2008 estimated domestic abuse costs in England and Wales £40bn per annum.) A study, also there, found that the cost savings in providing housing and support to women fleeing domestic violence was almost £19,000 per individual women, twice the cost of providing support.” Additionally: “When women threatened by domestic violence were able to access support services and leave an abusive partner, the risk of further assults was reduced by 80%.”

They also had an interesting summary report from a census conducted over 24 hours on September 24, 2009. In that time 365 women and 360 children were in Scottish refuges, 642 women and 307 children and young people were being supported by Women’s Aid, 101 women contacted Women’s Aid for the first time, and 12 women and 5 children had to be turned away from refuges due to lack of space. Sadly, four women had to be turned away because they had “no recourse to public funds” as a result of their immigvration status. “Most are forced to return to their partner.”

Permalink | Comment (1)
Books Feminism

Being positive about feminism: a new academic study

October 30, 2010 – 5:21 pm

I learnt about the existence of Jonathan Dean’s new book Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics, from an interview with the author on The F-Word. That great group blog is one of its three specific subjects of study, the others being Women’s Aid and the Fawcett Society. Since I’ve just become a trustee of the latter, it seemed essential to lay hands on a copy. I blanched, however, when I looked at the price on Amazon – £54. £54! Luckily, as a member of the London Library I had a plan B, which was to get them to buy a copy (also fitting in with my ongoing campaign to ensure it has a good feminism collection.)

That’s a pity, for while this is clearly an academic book, with a conclusion dense packed with political theory that’s going to be accessible to only a few (I may come back to it if I can find a time when I’m less tired – a debate about Deleuzianism, “Lacanian theorists of lack” and post-Gramscian political theory” extending my knowledge of political theory into 21st-century debates with which I’ve not previously engaged), the bulk of the text, the study of the three feminist institutions, is perfectly readable, useful and well worth the attention of anyone involved in contemporary feminism.

That’s particularly because this is broadly a positive story. Dean sees a strong resurgence in UK feminism particularly in the past half-decade. He in part accepts the broadly charted narrative of decline up to that point, although he does see it as being based on somewhat simplistic and problematic definitions of what an authentic, radical, autonomous feminist movement is and might be, suggesting that there’s been too strong a focus on what the feminist movement of the early to mid-Seventies was as a perfect model, any deviation from which has automatically been defined as a decline.

Using radical as a term for demanding significant change, rather than the specifics of “Radical Feminism”, he finds elements of real strength and drive in each of the three institutions that he studies. He also notes that a more recent model for identifying an authentic political action, as advocated by Zizek and Badiou among others, which is “a ‘heroic’ conception … predicated upon sudden rupturing and clearly visible instances of political contest; anything else is implicitly viewed with suspicion and risks being cast as ‘inauthentic’.” Dean adds that this approach “betrays an almost theological – and undoubtedly resolutely masculinist – standpoint” and “a political purism which strikes me as ill-equipped to grasp the locatedness and inevitable messiness of processes of feminist political articulation”. (p. 170)

On Fawcett, he says:

“…there are two main logics at work within the organisation …At one level, the organisations is strongly underwritten by a political logic of claimmaking directed at political elites in which – one may argue – a more radical feminist critique is absent. However, by contrast, the eveness of this logic is undermined by a logic of radicalistion that has become especially apparent since late 2005. This logic of radicalisation… refers in particular to Fawcett’s recent efforts to cast their demands within the context of a broader intervention into the public gender debate, situated within a more forthright affirmation of feminism.” (p64-65)

On The F-Word, he finds that while it is open to criticism of being very individualised and lifestyle-focused, he sees an increasing trend over its development whereby “the self-identity as feminist need not occasion a drift into apolitical complicity with logics of individualisation but, rather, translates into a more engaged political awareness, feeding into increased radicalism”. (p. 162)

On Women’s Aid, he’s also broadly positive, but in a passage that I found very interesting, for it reflects much of the difficulties I have in engagements with much local “community consultation” (indeed a meeting I was at all this morning on the future of the King’s Cross area with Camden officials and local volunteers), Dean looks at, however, engagement in government processes is, for “Women’s Aid as expert” problematic.

“I want to raise the question whether the organisation’s enthusiasm for multi-agency work, coupled with its position as an ‘expert’ voice, renders them partiallty complicit with the logics of what we might call ‘interest group pluralism’. In a manner that may curtail the organisation’s vitality and radicalism. … interest group pluralism refers to a mode of governance in which various actors are engaged in processes of making political claims which are then adjudicated by the government apparatus, and is thus symptomatic of what Zerilli and Arendy refer to as the domestication of politics to ‘the social’. A further dimension of interest group pluralism, as Iris Marion Young has pointed out, is that it tends to reduce politics to a process of rule by experts who are delegated responsility for particular issues.” p. 121

read more »

Permalink | Comment (0)
Feminism

Future female? A Fawcett discussion

October 9, 2010 – 10:10 pm

To the Fawcett AGM this afternoon – business briskly conducted, we turned to an interesting debate, with the broadranging topic of “what might a female future look like?” Speakers were Mary MacLeod MP (Conservative), Jean Lambert MEP (Green Party), Baroness Kate Parminter (Liberal Democrat) and Rushanara Ali MP (Labour).

I haven’t heard Kate speak before (she said she only uses baroness when she has to) and she was very impressive, as was Jean Lambert, who took the generally appointed Green role of doing the blue sky thinking. Her discusion of how we need to change our whole view of and attitude towards work went down very well, and what a workinglife means, as did her line: “Why does everything that looks interesting have to wait until you retire?”

Kate has an interesting background – RSPCA with the hunting ban, Campaign for Rural England, and she only went to the Lords in July, but is clearly enjoying the experience. She spoke a lot about women “self-selecting out” from running for parliament, as she’d done herself, and was very keen on the idea of job-share MPs as a way of getting around the problem of the role’s pressures. She called on Fawcett to move the agenda forward on the issue, and added: “I know for a fact the No 10 policy unit is thinking about it.”

House of Lords reform was an important opportunity, she said: “let’s set the test for the reform to be that it must end up with a 50/50 gender balance.”

She also referred to the importance of the portrayal of women in media and sport, particularly for girls. “I want girls to feel they can say yes to all life has to offer them.” She called for the 2013 revision of sports broadcasting to ensure that at least one all-female sport is regularly shown. And she noted that in looking at secondary schools for her daughter, she found that one she had otherwise liked offered cheerleading as an after-school club. “I want that to stop.”

Referring to the impact of cuts, clearly the primary concern of the meeting, Jean came up with a powerful line that sums up much of the stupidity of where we find ourselves: “A strong social security system is an essential foundation for a strong economy.” Fawcett has powerfully taken legal action over the government’s apparent failure to fulfil its requirement to do gender audits of its decisions, but Jean added, a useful thought, that campaigners should also think about the obligation there is for this on local government, where many of the final detailed decisions about cuts will be made.

Kate also made an important democratic point (against her own side) about the making of announcements about many important policy decisions at party conferences, where they “can’t be considered in the round”, as in parliament.

Rushanara went on a specific attack – no doubt justified – about the government’s recent dropping of “go orders”, under which domestic violence perpetrators can be forced to leave the home for two weeks while the victim decides what to do, in part on grounds of cost. Jean added that this should be considered on human rights grounds – the right to safety – but that even if you chose to look at it only on financial grounds it made no sense, since the cost of dealing with the damage done to victimns and their children could be far greater than that of earlier intervention.

There was a very interesting intervention from the floor from one of the half a dozen males in the packed Toynbee Hall – he came up with the memorable line that what we’re now “living in a man’s museum”. (I think lots of people wrote that down.)

Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »