Speakers for 2010

Cath Elliot, trade union and feminist activist, blogger

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Charlotte, singer songwriter
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Eleanor Lisney, Disability Awareness in Action was born and bred Malaysian Chinese. After her studies and marriage in England, she spent a considerable time in France being wife, and mother of two lovely children in France before her continuing studies and work in the USA. She returned to UK after her divorce.

Eleanor is passionate about access and works for inclusive travel for women and Disabled people, setting up a social enterprise, Connect Culture, connecting inclusive travel with different cultures including disability culture. As an information specialist and access advisor, she works for Disability Awareness in Action, an information network on disability and human rights providing information and evidence to support disabled people in their own actions to secure their rights ­ at all levels: local, national, regional and international.

She is the access coordinator for the Million Women Rise Rally 2010. She is a member of the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women) working group for Women Policy Forum (W.A.I.T.S), in Birmingham and on the Executive Committee for the Council of Disabled People, Warwickshire and Coventry.
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Femi Otitoju,
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Jennifer McDermott, Cassandra Learning Centre
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Judith Adorkorach, CARE International, Northern Uganda
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Leila Parnian, Iranian Women's League
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Michelle Daley is a freelance trainer and consultant in disability equality and diversity issues and has played a key role in promoting and influencing the inclusion of disabled people in the mainstream.

Michelle is a survivor of special education and now campaigns for an inclusive education system. She is also a founder member of the 2020 Campaign. For a number of years Michelle has actively worked at the grass root level addressing issues such as access, education, independent living and cultural diversity. She has worked for a number of organisations both at local, national and international level to develop, promote and implement policies on equality and diversity.
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Justice Hotep, artist, actress, film director
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Patsy McKie, Mothers Against Violence
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Sarah Bennett, singer
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Sharon Facey, Cassandra Learning Centre
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Shatha Besarani, Iraqi Women's League UK
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Suswati Basu, student, writer, and activist is a student at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London studying Mandarin and History. She credits the support of her mother for the ease in which she has self described as a feminist for years. And Suswati proudly proclaims an insatiable interest in the rights of women in London and beyond.

Suswati's activism takes many forms. She is a member of London Feminist Network and when in London regularly participates in LFN's annual 'Reclaim the Night'. In the university milieu she is a member of The Women's Society at SOAS (and was for a time the organisation's president), and she had a major role in organising protests against university women's participation in beauty pageants. Currently working closely with the Women and Girls Network, she hopes to represent the reality faced by young women today. She regularly organises fundraising events and publicly speaks about the problems within a professional institution.

Suswati has been working with local women activists in China and laying the ground work for future research based trips to the East.

Originally published in Subtext magazine, written by Debra V. Wilson
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Vivienne Hayes, Women's Resource Centre
Vivienne Hayes is the Chief Executive of the Women's Resource Centre (WRC). WRC is the national umbrella body for the women's voluntary and community sector, providing capacity building services to member organisations working to improve the lives of women, and consulting on and responding to government policy affecting the sector. She studied sociology at Warwick University, Women's History at Essex University and more recently Management at Westminster University. Vivienne's first inspiration comes from her mother, a working class woman who left school in her early teens to work in a factory, but who impressed upon her children the importance of education and an open mind. Vivienne has spent the last 20 years working in the women's sector, both delivering and managing services. Her passion is to support and improve the life experiences of women and their children, and most of her work has focused on this. Having grown up during a time when feminism and equalities issues were firmly on the agenda, Vivienne recognises the need to continue to raise these issues at a time when things seem to be slipping back in terms of progress for women and the whole equalities debate.

Vivienne is a Trustee of Rosa, the UK women's fund and has recently been appointed a commissioner of the Women's National Commission. She is also Chair of HEAR, London's regional equalities and human rights VCS network.
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Zeinab Burma, Sudanese Mothers for Peace
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The F-Word   

contemporary UK feminism 7 March 2010

Million Women Rise 2010

By Jess McCabe
Thousands of women marched through central London yesterday for Million Women Rise, to demand an end to the “continued daily, hourly, minute-by-minute individual and institutionalised male violence enacted against women worldwide”.

The third Million Women Rise was just as inspiring and amazing as ever, as chants of “women, join us!”, whistling, shouts and singing reverberated through the crowd of women from across the country and beyond. It’s also great to see The Independent ran some photos!

Only one issue cast a pall on the day - the MWR organisers’ reluctance to make it public and clear on their website and flyers that trans women are welcome on the march and included in their signature chant, “One woman, One song, One body, One love”.

They say sit back - We say fight back!

They say silence - We say justice!

They say submit - We say don’t quit!

Power!

Power!

Power to the women

Cos the women got the power

Sister, can you hear it?

Getting stronger by the hour

Say it once, say it again

No excuse for violent men!

Say it once, say it loud

We are women, we are proud!

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 London ~ Sunday, 7 March 2010

The rights of woman: How far have they advanced?

Tomorrow is the 100th International Women's Day, and women everywhere this weekend are marching, celebrating and protesting. Emily Dugan on the journey of the century
Thousands of women joined the march in central London yesterday to demonstrate against continued male violence against women and to raise awareness of the issue (Jason Alden)

It was in a dingy socialist meeting hall a century ago in Copenhagen that women from 17 countries gathered and launched the idea of a day which would champion the rights of women. All over the world this weekend women are marching, celebrating and protesting, not least in London where last night thousands of people thronged Trafalgar Square to mark the 100th International Women's Day.

The theme chosen this year is progress: the progress women have made in the past century, and the long journey that many have ahead of them. The latest statistics on the lot of women in Britain and around the world suggest that some undoubted gains over those 100 years have now stalled, or been reversed, more recently.

Just 19.5 per cent of the MPs in Britain are women; a record so poor that it puts the UK 69th in the world for our proportion of female parliamentarians – behind Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. Of course, 100 years ago women had no vote and would wait almost another decade to get a single MP with no Y chromosome, but equality is further off than it might appear. According to a hard-hitting report by the Fawcett Society to be published tomorrow, at the current rate of progress it will take 200 years to achieve an equal number of women in Parliament.

When it comes to implementing the laws of the land, women have even less say than in Westminster – and are now losing what little input they had. In 2008/09, the number of women applying for Queen's Counsel was at its lowest level in 10 years. Higher up, there is only one female judge on the UK Supreme Court and just 15 of 109 High Court judges are female.

The picture is not much better for those at the other end of the legal system: two-thirds of the women in prison are there for non-violent crime, compared to 45 per cent of men; and since 1997 the female prison population has soared – increasing by 60 per cent, as opposed to a 28 per cent rise for men.

Although women's freedoms in Britain are clearly manifest and to be celebrated, some women have yet to benefit. The broadcaster and parliamentary candidate Esther Rantzen says: "There are still women in this country who are forced into marriages, very subservient to the men in their families – I'm told there are women who are told how to vote by men. I'm very aware that the freedoms I was brought up to prize – equality of education, equality of ambition – aren't available to all the women in the UK."

There are also reasons to be troubled by the numbers exposed to violence. Some three million women in the UK undergo rape, domestic violence, trafficking, forced marriage and other violence every year. Twenty per cent of people still believe it is sometimes acceptable for a man to hit or slap his girlfriend if she is wearing revealing clothes in public.

But one cause for concern is more intangible: how women are perceived and how they see themselves. Natasha Walter, author of The New Feminism, is worried: "The eagerness for change has slowed. I think we've slowed down because of complacency: there was a feeling that the argument's been won and we've got the policies in place. Also, there's been a cultural change resulting from the mainstreaming of the sex industry, which has narrowed the options of young women as to what being attractive is."

All this is arguably a side issue for the five million or so women living in poverty in Britain. Women have 40 per cent more chance of being poor than men, with the gender pay gap still at 16.4 per cent for full-time work and 35 per cent for part-time.

The figures from the Fawcett Society suggest that Britain has some way to go before its society can be considered equal. Ceri Goddard, the Fawcett's chief executive, says: "Since the first International Women's Day, the feminist movement has achieved some pretty totemic successes – the right to vote, an equal pay act, and more access to education and work. But, for all the strides we've made, many of our successes are fragile: for example, after the increases of 1997 we might well end up with fewer female MPs this time. It's clear that we still need a major push to get women's equality away from the margins and into the centre of the key debates."

Campaigners yesterday highlighted the universal challenges faced by women around the world. Of course, the hardship and challenges faced by women in Britain can seem almost insignificant when compared to that tackled daily by those living in countries blighted by poverty, oppressive regimes and institutionalised misogyny. In the developing world, access to education, proper health care and basic freedoms can be forever blocked if you are born female. On the following page, the IoS has highlighted six personal experiences that illustrate some of these of these issues.

Ellie Levenson, author of The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, says the solution lies in choosing the right battles. "Internationally, there are huge issues about women being denied basic human rights – from female genital mutilation, which also happens here, to women not being allowed to go out on their own, being denied passports or not allowed to drive. Domestically, we have fights for equal pay in the workplace. In the home, while men do more child care, there are other areas such as care for the elderly and even cleaning."

The charity Concern, whose Women Can't Wait campaign will be launched tomorrow, draws attention to the fact that, for the first time in human history, there are more than a billion people going to bed hungry every night – and the majority of these are women. Phoebe Asiyo, a women's rights advocate in Kenya who is now the UN Development Fund for Women's goodwill ambassador, said: "Women are still more likely than men to be at risk of hunger because of systematic discrimination. It is unacceptable that though poor women produce the majority of food, they make up the majority of the world's hungry."

But there are reasons to be optimistic. In Britain, though the pay gap persists, there are signs that it is closing. Women's median weekly earnings for full-time employment rose by 3.4 per cent between 2008 and 2009, men's rose by just 1.8 per cent. In health care, life expectancy for women in Britain continues to outstrip men's. Opinions are changing, too. A survey for the Government's Equalities Office, to be released tomorrow, shows that 63 per cent of Britons believe there are too few women in Parliament.

Worldwide, some 39 million girls are denied even a primary education, but in the UK girls consistently outperform boys at school.

So are things still improving for women? That is certainly what the historian Lisa Jardine believes. "Britain loves to think things are slipping back, but things are systematically improving for women – it's just that we expect more. Women's expectations will stop being 'realistic' when they reach absolute parity with men. I don't know when it will happen, but it will happen."

Million Women Rise: Thousands join the march through the streets of London
If the theme was oppression, the mood was anything but. Whistles, songs, chants and cheers drowned out the regular din of a Saturday lunchtime on Oxford Street as thousands of women rejoiced in their collective – if temporary – power. Men on the pavement watched open-mouthed, unsure what to make of the colourful spectacle of yesterday's Million Women Rise march in London.

Monique Stretton could have told them. The 21-year-old from Leicester says that, for her, turning up was all about showing any of the three million women who experience violence every year in the UK they are not alone. "Hopefully, people who need help and who walk past will realise there is support out there and make that phone call," she says.

All along the route from Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, people are transfixed by the display of female solidarity. Camera phones flash as passers-by capture the moment. Bizarrely, it's mainly men who are taking pictures. "It's always the men," says Amy White, 24. "They take them while clutching on to their girlfriends."

Marchers like Amy and Monique embody the latest wave of women who are standing up for their rights, specifically in this instance not to be abused. They are young and passionate about their cause. "It's events like this that make people realise there is a feminist movement. It's celebratory, not angry," Amy adds.

For Sabrina Qureshi, who started the marches three years ago, the events are about raising awareness of violence against women. "I'd just had enough. A young woman I used to work with saw a man attack a woman in the street and she felt really powerless to do anything. So we decided to march to increase our visibility and to show that there is a way forward, a shared vision of a world without violence."

Qureshi adds they are helping to empower a whole new generation. "My three-year-old niece, who has been on all three marches, now calls herself a 'super she-ro feminist'." What she made of the event is not clear but four-year-old Zayna, who came with her mum, Syreeta Loney, was definitely impressed. "It's very big." Which, one hopes, sums up the impact it will have had.

Susie Mesure

'Parity with men will happen...'
It's clear women can do anything boys can do. What's disappointing is men aren't interested in doing everything women can do. Why isn't every union campaigning for men's rights to equivalent paternity leave?

Bea Campbell, Feminist and Green Party candidate

Things are systematically improving for women – it's just we expect more. Women's expect- ations will stop being 'realistic' when they reach parity with men. It will happen.

Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London

All over the world women are raped, buried under veils or stoned to death. Middle-class women here have got it made. They should be standing up for women without a voice.

Claire Rayner, Agony aunt and vice-president of the British Humanist Association

We are at the stage of reassessing: women's rights are becoming women's choices. A lot was done quickly, heads down. It's time we got our heads up, looked round and made choices.

Jane Robinson, Social historian

There are huge issues about women being denied basic human rights internationally – from female genital mutilation, which also happens here, to women not being allowed to go out on their own.

Ellie Levenson, Author, 'Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism'

Liberty belle

By  ANNE SUMMERS
Read also: "Arrogant, misnformed Sydney playwright Louis Nowra's character assassination of Germaine Greer serves only to remind of her ageless value for women"

IN MID-1970 I went to a seminar on The Female Eunuch where I met a woman who had covered her copy of the book with brown paper and had to hide it among her shoes so that her husband would not see it. I have often wondered since if that woman became one of the legions who gained the courage from Greer's book to leave a marriage that had been contracted on the basis of inequality.

Whether you admire Greer or find her infuriating or, like many people including myself, you have both reactions, often simultaneously, there is no getting around the fact that she was and remains a brave and passionate advocate for liberty, especially for women.

She has always been a flamboyant figure, not afraid of upsetting or shocking people, willing to be assertive and argumentative and to stride in polemically where others are too timid to tread. At the same time, she has chalked up impressive scholarly achievements as both a teacher and a writer of books on literary subjects including female artists and Shakespeare's wife.

But her greatest achievement is, of course, The Female Eunuch, published 40 years ago, still in print, translated into 12 languages and a book whose influence is impossible to exaggerate.

Sometimes a book changes everything, and this was such a book.

It was part of a wave of books that created and defined the emerging women's liberation movement, a gathering storm of female protest that eventually morphed into the more sedate equality-seeking feminism that still battles on today. There was Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone and the reader Sisterhood Is Powerful edited by Robin Morgan. All were incendiary, life-changing books that were eagerly devoured by a generation of women on the cusp of self-realisation. But none had the impact of The Female Eunuch.

There were two reasons for this. While the other books were mostly about attacking the patriarchy and, by extension, men, Greer had ''feminine parasites'' in her sights: ''What they can tolerate is intolerable for a woman with any pride.''

Greer wanted women to change as much as she wanted to tear down the patriarchy; she was not about giving women excuses for failing to be free.

Secondly, there was Greer herself. She epitomised the coming together of the sexual revolution of the '60s with the women's movement of the '70s. Whereas the other early feminist writers tended to be dour and earnest, using words as their their weapons, Greer was sexy and provocative, willing to pose naked, her body part of her armoury.

Whereas Kate Millett attacked Norman Mailer, describing him as ''a prisoner of the virility cult'', Germaine Greer flirted with him during the infamous and memorable ''Town Bloody Hall'' debate in New York in April 1971 when Mailer chaired a discussion of his provocative essay The Prisoner of Sex before a rowdy female audience. (The event was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus and is available on DVD.)

Greer was often, and still is, attacked by other feminists for not toeing the party line. Back then, it was for what she wore (revealing too much flesh for the puritans of the movement) and for being ''male-identified'', which used to be a crime in the early days of a movement that was still trying to define itself and its parameters. But Greer always was, and remains, an iconoclast and an individualist rather than a foot soldier of feminism.

She is, in fact, a true Australian larrikin, which is a huge part of her charm.

Even so, I heard her speak in Sydney last year, at the launch of her little book On Rage, where she spoke movingly of the ways in which women's stories had sustained her and nourished her and made it possible to write every one of her books. In saying this, she seemed to be putting herself into the movement, and there is no doubt from the huge crowds (of mostly women) who pay to see her whenever she makes a public appearance in Australia that she is very welcome. We are proud of her, and glad she is one of us.

Although not everyone thinks so. Just this week she has been the subject of a cruel and very personal attack by the Sydney writer Louis Nowra, who wrote that, these days, Greer ''looks like a befuddled and exhausted old woman'' who ''has become a grotesque character called Germaine Greer''.

Apparently Louis is upset because Greer failed, all those years ago, to make his mother a feminist. Other women read the book and left their husbands, he writes; his mother stayed with her violent husband and ''festered into inexplicable fury''. She had to be rescued by her son whose court-room testimony put his stepfather in prison. Nowra has clearly never forgiven Greer but just as unkind as his words is the cover photograph of the magazine which brutally captures all the lines of life on her face.

Greer is 71 this year. She has chosen to age naturally, and not resort to plastic surgery or the injections of poison that young women are deluded into imagining will improve their appearance. She ought to be applauded.

Instead we have an editor, smirking from the safety of his extreme youth, seeking to ridicule her.

It's a cheap shot.

Greer herself said of The Female Eunuch in 1970, in the summary introduction: ''If it is not ridiculed or reviled, it will have failed of its intention. If the most successful feminine parasites do not find it offensive, then it is innocuous.''

She might not have expected that, 40 years on, she would still be a target but you don't write a book that changes the world without making enemies.

Anne Summers' latest book is The Lost Mother (Melbourne University Press), annesummers.com.au.

Guns out for Greer

Read also "Australian Women proud of Germaine Greer, a brave and passionate advocate for liberty, notably fow womens emancipation"

 London ~ Wednesday, 3 March 2010

'Germaine Greer? She has no idea what makes women tick,' says Nowra

40th anniversary of 'The Female Eunuch' provokes astonishing attack on seminal text of women's liberation

"Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate."

 UK-US ~ 4 March 2010

Burma may save its tigers and not its women

• STOP all forms of violence against women;
• STOP attacks and persecution against ethnic nationalities and groups;
• RELEASE immediately and unconditionally all political prisoners;
• GRANT access to UN agencies and NGO humanitarian groups;
• PROVIDE access to and cooperate with United Nations and human rights organizations to monitor human rights within Burma;
• RATIFY all human rights treaties…;

• IMPEL Burma to comply with the ASEAN Charter and international legal obligations and human rights standards;
• INVITE the ASEAN Human Rights Commission to submit reports covering particular issues related to Burma;
• SUPPORT the establishment of the ASEAN Commission for Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children, including consideration of the situation in Burma;

• URGE states to take collective action to ensure the implementation of SCRs 1325, 1820, 1888,and 1889 guaranteeing women’s full participation in post conflict reconstruction and freedom from all forms of sexual violence;
• URGE the UN Security Council to refer Burma to the International Criminal Court,

• CONTINUE to actively engage with the peoples of Burma inside and outside the country and to mobilize public pressure at all levels to raise consciousness of the crimes and violations being committed by the Burmese military regime against the peoples of Burma, especially women and children.

 Walking Amongst Sharp Knives

Cora Weiss