Why I Will Not Be Rising With One Billion Rising This Year Or Any Year

This post was originally posted on Fiending for Hope  Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence and racism. A note on the content of this post: this post will mostly be a collection of excerpts and links to posts from women of colour. I do not want to silence them, and I think it’s important…

Women and Indulgence: Yoghurt Advertisements and their Female Focus

by Amy Calvert   Years of dedicated advertising has created a strange myth about women’s eating habits. It seems that women, all women, cannot get enough yoghurt. Apparently, we love the stuff. It’s the perfect low-fat ‘treat’ to enjoy during a female bonding session (yoghurts are mandatory here, didn’t you know?), a sumptuous treat to…

Mary Elizabeth Braddon- the feminist?

By the Secret Victorianist ‘If the Victorians had had airplanes, these are the books they would have read on them’. This is my default response when trying to explain away my geeky obsession with nineteenth-century sensation fiction, or convince people my blogging life is not so very different from my (marketing) day job. There’s a…

Review of Gilmore Girls and the Politics of Identity: Essays on Family and Feminism in the Television Series, edited by R. Calvin

by Claire Sedgwick Calvin, R. (ed) Gilmore Girls and the Politics of Identity: Essays on Family and Feminism in the Television Series Jefferson, McFarland, 2008 As an English Literature student, contact hours were seldom during my undergraduate degree and whilst I wouldn’t want to understate the hours I spent reading, writing and revising it would be a…

Fight for the Right: the Birmingham Suffragettes

by Nicola Gauld Freelance Project Manager   Fight for the Right: the Birmingham Suffragettes was an opportunity for young women living in Birmingham to explore the activities of both sides of the suffrage campaign, militant and non-militant, in Birmingham in the early 20th century. Female students aged 12-15 from two local schools, Kings Norton Girls’…

PETA: Patriarchy Exploiting The (female) Anatomy

There is an unimaginative and overused motif in the media today- the heavily sexualised and idyllic female body- simultaneously painting an unrealistic picture of perfection for young girls and women and alienating these girls and women from their own bodies, because they cannot match up to the impossible ideals of such images of computerised faultlessness.…

On the radical notion that we are our bodies

by Helena Horton 'Trim that tum!' 'Banish those bingo wings!' 'Beat your body into shape!' 'Tone those pins!'- I could find you unlimited phrases from Hello!, Cosmo, Grazia et al that refer to our bodies at 'the other'. And this isn't a weird coincidence, or a strange turn of phrase. The patriarchy, along with its…

How Prisoner Cell Block H helped me more as a woman than radical feminism

by Jemima (Twitter: @notahappyhooker) As a teenager I described myself as a Feminist. I also described myself as a trot; did my Barota project from a Maoist perspective; railed at my friends perpetual diets; and for some reason had little success with boys. My Feminism was mainly formed from reading the Guardian, but that put me in contact…