Women's Fightback, Feminism

We believe in joint struggle, an interview with Rula Daood

Rula Daood is National Co-Director of Standing Together, a grassroots movement mobilising Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice: standing-together.org Rula spoke to Kelly Rogers. Rula Daood’s first foray into political activism took place in a bakery in the southern coastal city of Ashdod during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. As the air raid siren sounded, she found herself surrounded by strangers. Picking up a copy of the Israeli daily Haaretz , she began to read an article about the situation facing children in Gaza. One of the...

Women and the miners' strike 1984-5

The 1984-5 miners’ strike is a moment ripe with lessons and with stories that are devastating and inspiring in equal measure. Among them is the incredible story of the coalfield women. The women’s support movement whirred into action only a few short weeks after the strike began on 6 March 1984. Support groups were set up in every coalfield by local women, predominantly the wives, sisters and daughters of miners. They would keep the strike going for 12 long months. Class In Never the Same Again , published in 1987, Jean Stead wrote about the traditional values held by those in the mining...

Lessons from Mexico

Verónica Cruz Sánchez is the founder of Las Libres, an organisation based in Guanajuato, Mexico, which campaigns for universal access to free, safe and legal abortion. Since 2021, and the repeal of Roe v Wade, Las Libres have been supporting women in the US to access abortions as well. Verónica spoke to Camila Vergara. What is Las Libres? Las Libres is a feminist organisation in Guanajuato, Mexico, that I and other feminists founded 23 years ago. In 2000, the state decided to criminalise abortion even in cases of rape, the only legal exception previously. There were big mobilisations against...

Exile and the fight for democracy

Olga Karach is a Belarusian dissident, who helped to found the human rights group “Nash Dom”, Our House, in 2005. She lives in exile in Lithuania, from where she has run the organisation since 2014. Olga spoke to Michael Baker. Our House We are a peace-building, human rights-focused, feminist organisation. More than 80% of our activists are women, and we do a lot of advocacy campaigns within Belarus, as well as in Lithuania and Poland. In Belarus there is a list of prohibited professions for women. That list used to contain 252 professions. It’s been lowered now, to 186. In our opinion there...

Women in revolt!

• Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-90 8 November 2023 to 7 April 2024 Tate Britain This is an exhibition born out of love, respect and admiration. It is loud, proud, angry and gritty. It gives space and voice to those traditionally excluded: “working class [women], women of colour, the queers and the punks”. It is trans-inclusive, intersectional and socialist focused. It is groundbreaking and rule breaking, audacious and unapologetic. It brings together the work of over 100 artists alongside feminist-activist artefacts and ephemera in an exhibition of art, social history and...

Dee Dickens: Medusa

Dee Dickens (she/they) lives on a mountain in Wales with her husband and their two shedding familiars. They are a PhD student and a neurodivergent bringer of chaos. Her writing deals with what others leave unsaid in the hope that it gives someone, anyone, a voice. The Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon. - Jane Ellen Harrison I watched the moon that night as a single stone hewn from the rubble my temple, my eaving, once was, dug into the small of my back. As my hair weaved itself to nest on my face, to protect you from my eyes. As my blood hissed on tarmac. As...

A note on brothel-keeping

Between Parades (pictured) is from Caroline Coon's collection Brothel Series , which depict her experiences as a sex worker. These paintings focus on the friendships forged by sex workers; a feminist answer to brothel scenes painted by artists such as Picasso and Manet. Decrim The English Collective of Prostitutes' new report, Proceed Without Caution (2023), highlights how, under current laws, sex workers are forced to choose between keeping themselves safe and risking arrest, or avoiding a criminal record and putting themselves in danger. It is an offence for a person to loiter or solicit in...

On reading Annie Ernaux

When, in 2022, Annie Ernaux became the first French woman to win the Nobel prize, the conservative newspaper Figaro disparaged the decision to award the “high priestess of autofiction” for a “lifetime spent writing about herself,” while Le Nouvel Observateur caricatured her as “Madame Ovary”. It is true that Ernaux’s books are relentlessly personal, each plumbing the depths of a particular period, event, or relationship in her own life. The illegal abortion she sought as a twenty-three year old student, her first sexual encounter, a year-long affair she had with a married man, her mother’s...

Champion of outcasts: Lisetta Carmi

• Lisetta Carmi: Identities 20 September to 17 December 2023. Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art Lisetta Carmi (1924-2022) said that she “took photographs in order to understand”, and it is this humanism and empathy that Identities , exhibited by the Estorick Collection in London, sought to capture. The exhibition was split into two rooms, both featuring her work from the 1960s. The first contained her study of two working-class communities: the dockers in the port of Genoa and women in a cork factory in Sardinia. As Carmi’s friend Giovanni Battista Martini wrote: “Wherever there was an...

The Roma struggle for health

Recent legislation — namely the Police, Crime, and Sentencing Act (2022) — gives the government new powers which are intended to push out the Roma way of life. Roma-government relations have become more strained as a result, and access to resources a harder and more weary battle. The Act does a number of things, the most problematic of which is the criminalisation of “trespassing” on public and private property. At the same time as attacking the right to protest, it clamps down on the act of traversing land, a central element of Roma culture. It is one of the worst attacks on the community in...

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