Women's Fightback, Feminism

Describing herself as having been "brought up by women with house bricks in their handbags", London-based poet Nadia Drews says that she "has always known femininity with a hard edge when unclasped". Her poems, she says, are like the girls she grew up with, bleeding but bolshy. Nadia's poems have been published in various fanzines. She is a regular performer on picket lines and at fundraising gigs organised by Poetry on the Picket Line. Cassie Clusky ’s come for tea It’s okay ‘cos she’s asked her mum Her mum says ‘get home ‘fore it’s dark’ That’s when the bad lads with slavering dogs come They...

“Wild factory girls… half-drunk and yelling the lowest music hall songs, and dancing like wild creatures”. So said the Bermondsey Parish magazine in 1900. Such sententious accounts of young working-class women’s behaviour were widespread as women gained limited independence through factory work. In the workplace they were seen as “cheap and docile labour”, and in the trade union movement they were largely invisible. Will Thorne, a leading trade unionist at the time, declared that “women do not make good trade unionists.” And yet, the young factory women of Bermondsey, in the hot August of 1911...

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

In May 1934, Joseph Stalin received a letter from a Scottish communist called Harry Whyte. Whyte was a journalist, working for the USSR ’s English-language paper in Moscow. He was also a gay man whose boyfriend had recently gone missing. His letter opened with a question, whose answer would shape the future of the Soviet gay community: “can a homosexual be considered a worthy member of the Communist Party?” Whyte’s decision to move to the Soviet Union in 1932 had partly been an attempt to escape Scotland’s anti-sodomy laws. The world’s first socialist state had removed all homophobic laws...

In May this year, two women were stripped naked and dragged through the streets of Imphal, the capital of Manipur state, before being gang raped by a mob of men. The backdrop to this incident is the ongoing ethnic violence between the Meitei people, who are the majority in Manipur, and the Kuki-Zo tribe, a minority. So far, over 130 people have died in the conflict and more than 35,000 have been displaced from their homes. It was Meitei men who raped two Kuki women. Rape is the fourth most common crime against women in India, the weapon of choice for some men. Women and girls from Adivasi...

New sexual consent legislation came into effect in Spain in October 2022 – “La Ley de Garantía Integral de la Libertad Sexual” – stating that sexual consent must be explicit and cannot be assumed to have been given. Previously, victims of sexual abuse, harrassment and violence had to prove violence, threat of violence or coercion, or demonstrate that they had resisted the perpetrator. Under this new law, popularly known as the “Only Yes Means Yes” law (“La Ley del Solo sí es sí”), various lesser crimes have been recategorised as sexual assault. A range of behaviour that previously was not...

September marks one year since the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman who was killed in detention following her arrest for allegedly violating Iran ’s compulsory hijab law. Her murder sparked the most significant protests against the Iranian regime since the 1980s and the strength of the uprising prompted the Iranian regime to take the notorious morality police off the streets. CRACKDOWN It has been confirmed that more than twenty thousand people have been arrested and hundreds killed in the subsequent crackdown, with the real number expected to be much higher. Sentences...

In the wake of the imprisonment of Carla Foster a motion was put to Sheffield Heely Labour party for the decriminalisation of abortion. The motion included the sentence “It is vital that Labour collectively support progressive legislative change, including decriminalisation and reform to allow women and pregnant people to control their own bodies,” recognising that all pregnant people — including trans men and non-binary people — have a right to reproductive choice. An amendment was put to delete the term “pregnant people”, on the grounds that it could be seen as “offensive”. The individual...

The campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s which defeated a series of attacks on the 1967 Abortion Act offer a model that we can learn from. In 1975, the National Abortion Campaign (NAC) was set up to campaign against the White Bill, the first in a series of Private Members’ Bills in the 1970s and 80s which sought to reduce term limits. The NAC was made up of activists from the Women’s Liberation Movement, the socialist left and the labour movement, and it had two aims: to defend the Abortion Act and win real reproductive freedom. The NAC was clear that abortion was a class issue; they knew that to...

In Germany, abortion is covered by section 218 of the criminal code. It stands as an “offence against life”, alongside murder and manslaughter. It is only exempt if it is carried out during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and if the woman has received counselling from an authorised advisor and has waited three days before the procedure. Until July 2022 a significant legal obstacle to abortion was section 219a of the criminal code. This law prohibited publicly offering, announcing, or advertising abortions. In practice this meant that doctors were prevented by law from informing patients that...