Mind the Gap

Ok, I think it’s time to shut up shop here.

Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda

And a very happy Yule, Christmas, Solstice, secular winter festival to you all.

We’ll be back for further feminist adventures in the New Year.   

I haven’t done many group updates this year. Since a lot of people say they like our blog because it’s connected to a real-life feminist group, I will resolve to do this more often in the New Year.

Possibly, I’ve said less on this subject because we’ve had less to cheer about. We haven’t achieved as much in 2007 as in previous years.  We did manage to keep the monthly discussion nights going and had some good socials. We’re also pleased with our web developments and feel that the decisions we made about the blog were correct.  But we were disappointed by our inability to hold events for International Women’s Day and the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women.

I think the problems we’ve encountered are largely due to the fact that we’ve expanded faster than our capacity to keep up with it all and found ourselves with a lot of members who want a lot of things, only a handful of people doing the administration and a serious lack of structures and processes!  So, now we really need to go back and look at the way we organise and run the group. In the New Year, we’ll be making some changes:  

The Action Group needs to function as the core administration and planning force in the network. It would be lovely if a lot of members felt a sense of ownership and stepped forward to take on responsibilities, but thinking realistically, that isn’t going to happen, at least not yet. We have more development work to do first.  If we’re going to run the network effectively in the meantime and cut stress to the people doing the running, we need to get a lot more organised, better at sharing responsibility and supporting each other. One thing we are going to do, from January, is plan out all our activities a year in advance, which will hopefully improve the way we organise in general and get rid of that horrible sense of lurching from one crisis to another. 

We’re going to make more effort to ensure people have positive experiences at meetings and discussion nights. This means we’ll be introducing a simple code of conduct with expectations on behaviour and making sure we welcome and introduce new members properly.  Ideally, I think we should try and make sure the chair or facilitator has a support person in the room to give them a hand with keeping things on line.

We need to improve communication with members of the network and find ways to encourage them to take more ownership and get more involved in the organisation. This will take time.  

I would also like 2008 to be a year of bridge-building and reaching out. The network remains predominantly white, middle-class and university-educated and we’re concerned that we may be unintentionally perpetuating the kind of exclusionary behaviours and limited perspectives of which white, middle-class feminism is often accused.  As a group, we are going to work on making connections with other women’s groups and organisations and become more open-minded about engaging with people who don’t identify as feminists. We are aware that a lot of women don’t feel they can identify as feminists for various reasons and so it may be a good idea to shift the focus more towards looking at how we can work together for women’s rights, whatever we call ourselves.  

 In terms of actions for next year, we want to send more energy producing independent feminist media.  We have plans for a zine on women and mental health and a short zine, or pamphlet, aimed at young women who don’t know much about feminism.  We also want to improve our engagement with older feminists because we’re particularly concerned about the loss of feminist history. Hopefully the discussion nights will continue and we’re going to be throwing their organisation more open to members of the network.  There will be definitely be more socials to foster friendships between members because one thing we agreed upon at the Activism meeting is the importance of feminist friendships in doing activism.                                  

The 50th Carnival of Feminists is up at the Jaded hippy.

Defend the Abortion Act - Campaigning for a Woman’s Right to Decide

This public meeting will kick off the pro-choice campaigning to defeat anti-abortion amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill currently in parliament and to support any opportunities to advance women’s abortion rights.
The meeting will hear a range of short contributions from invited speakers followed by time for contributions thoughts and ideas from the floor.

See Abortion Rights UK for more information.

There’s a Ladyfest in the pipeline in Manchester for November next year.

For those of you who don’t know Ladyfest is an arts and music festival promoting/supporting women in art and music and providing a platform for feminist discussion and workshops. To find out more, join the mailing list by emailing ladyfestmanchester(AT)yahoo(DOTco(DOT)uk and putting ’subscribe’ in the subject line.

There is also a myspace page : www.myspace.com/ladyfestmanchesterand a facebook group (search ladyfest manchester).

The next Feminist Activist Forum meeting will be on Saturday 26th January in London.

Check out the website for further details.

Each year, 3 million women across the UK experience rape, domestic violence, forced marriage, trafficking or another form of gender-based violence and there are many, many more who have suffered violence in the past. They deserve specialised support services, such as refuges and Rape Crisis Centres, yet Map of Gaps, published by the End Violence Against Women Campaign and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, graphically shows the postcode lottery in these essential services:

- A third of local authorites across the UK have no specialised services at all
- Only one in ten local authorities have services for ethnic minority women
- Most women in the UK don’t have access to a Rape Crisis Centre

Ask Gordon Brown to take urgent action to end the postcode lottery by taking a minute to sign our Downing Street e-petition at http://petitions. pm.gov.uk/ violenceservices /

Please pass this on to your networks and link the petition to your websites and blogs.
 
To download Map of Gaps visit www.endviolenceagai nstwomen. org.uk

An interesting site for women’s groups and organisations.

Women’s Resource Centre

From Abortion Rights UK

Following the Queen’s speech on 6th November the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is speeding through the Lords. Although the Bill itself does not address abortion, it is expected that anti-abortion Peers and/or MPs will table a number of damaging amendments to restrict women’s rights to abortion. In addition pro-choice MPs are expected to table amendments to improve the law for women.  The Bill has already had its First and Second Readings in the House of Lords on 7th and 19th November respectively.  A stream of anti-abortion Peers took part in the debate and attacked current rights with pro-choice Peers speaking in defence of the 1967 Abortion Act. Pro-choice MPs are planning to table amendments to improve the law during the course of the Bill in the Commons.

Please go to the Abortion Rights UK website and read the lists of amendments to the act which both pro and anti-choice MPs are going to propose here

Remember, the Anti-abortion lobby is very well-organised and will mobilise to lobby MPs, so we need to make sure they also hear from the pro-choice majority. Abortion Rights UK have advice and sample letters to help you lobby your MP here  

Well, I’m off to some relatives for the next couple of weeks, and since the computer there is powered by two mice running around an adorable little wheel, I’m not going to be posting for that time.

A couple of things I wanted to post about quickly (before I have to catch my bus).

First of all, I wanted to register my disapproval of the following quote from a well-known comedienne in last Friday’s Guardian women’s page (don’t have time to find the link):

“[for Christmas] I want a housekeeper and a mute chauffeur.”

I know a lot of women get stressed out because of having to do everything at Christmas, and it should be a feminist statement for successful, powerful women to come and say how they don’t have time for such trifles as housework, except, er, not. First of all, housework isn’t trifles, it’s your ability to feed yourself and scrub those e-coli virusses off your toilet. If you don’t do it, someone else will have to. Ideally, the labour will be shared among housemates. So, I won’t say it’s unacceptable to want servants with a disability that makes them shut the fuck up so you don’t have to interact with their common as fuck arses on a personal level. But it does, however, make you a dipshit of the highest order. Pardon the strong language.

Secondly, I wanted to say something about this post in the F-Word. I agree with everything there, but I don’t really see why there shouldn’t be movies about the rich minority as well as the less-than-glamorous minority. Of course, the latter are grossly under-represented, but to be honest, do you really want them represented in the format of a fantastical ITV2 drama the way Belle de Jour is? I think the problems with this programme lie elsewhere. As the editor of Loaded said prior to the first series, it’s a fantasy, and it’s a female “empowerment” fantasy, that has very little bearing on reality. Most people will be able to see that. There’s a lot of stereotyping of prostitutes - as the chilling banter around the Ipswich murders last year more than proved - , but “rolling in gold and enjoying every single fuck and living on champagne and caviar” generally isn’t one of them, usually. What is problematic, however, is the idea that prostitution can be empowering at all, however much money you’re making from it. Also, I want to see similar points made about period drama. What, so everyone in the 18th and 19th Centuries wore vast frilly dresses and giggled a lot, except for a few shit-caked villagers dressed in brown, who talked with cartoonish West Country accents? And history (like, chartist insurrections and things) only happened as a colourful backdrop for the main charaters’ stories of love and misadventure. What a lark!

Which brings me to my last point, yesterday’s Guardian interview with Celine Dion, where the interviewer was quite surprised to find “one of the most powerful women in show business” so submissive in her outlook. Will people please stop saying that singers and actresses are awesomely powerful? To make a seasonal analogy, foie gras sells for a fortune. The geese get plenty of corn stuffed down their necks, and you couldn’t make foie gras without their invaluable contribution. But are they powerful? No, they’re not. I don’t want to compare my fellow women to geese, of course, but in the case of show business, I’m afraid the most famous ones often have a similar role.

And that’s all I have time for at the moment. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone! (I’m sure Winter will be holding the fort while I’m gone).