Actresses and arsonists: Women who won the vote – BBC News

~ mcequality

Margaret Bondfield was one of very few working class women who rose to the top of the suffrage movement.
Born in Chard, Somerset, in 1873, the second youngest of eleven children, she became an apprentice at a drapers in Brighton aged 14.
There she saw how the daily grind wore down the women workers and affected their self-respect. She observed they were left with little time or energy to pursue interests away from work, with many girls seeming intent on getting married as early as possible in order to escape the drudgery.
Ms Bondfield left Brighton and went to live with her brother in London – working, again, in a shop. She became an active trade unionist and was shocked by the working culture of long hours, low wages, poor diet and requirement to “live in” in often dismal dormitories.

via Actresses and arsonists: Women who won the vote – BBC News

The Inherent Feminism of Restorative Justice – All Rise – Medium

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In 1996, legal scholar Carrie Menkel-Meadow wrote that oppositional presentation of facts — that is, the adversarial system as taught through the Socratic method — may not be the best way to arrive at the truth. “Polarized debate,” she wrote, “simply distorts the truth, leaves out important information, simplifies complexity, and obfuscates rather than clarifies.” Menkel-Meadow explained that “truth is illusive, partial, interpretable, dependent on the characteristics of the knowers as well as the known, and, most importantly, complex.” Likewise, criminal justice scholar Katherine van Wormer lamented in 2009 that the adversarial system hearkens back to “primitive practices related to combat”; Australian professor and former attorney Kate Galloway called it a “performance piece.” Restorative justice, by contrast, has been called humanistic.

via The Inherent Feminism of Restorative Justice – All Rise – Medium

Does Pardoning Britain’s Suffragettes for Lawbreaking Really Honor Their Efforts? 

~ mcequality

Of course, there are the opponents with laws-are-laws arguments; “Instinctively I can see where that campaign is coming from so I will take a look and see if there is a proposal that I can take more seriously,” home secretary Amber Rudd told Good Morning Britain. “But in terms of pardoning for arson, for violence like that … that is a little trickier.”

But there are other objections, too. Before the announcement, historian Fern Riddell—who’s got an intriguing book out in April about the radical activist Kitty Marion—wrote a piece for the Guardian about how the women’s suffrage movement in Britain encompassed both peaceful protests and more controversial direct action

via Does Pardoning Britain’s Suffragettes for Lawbreaking Really Honor Their Efforts? 

The totally normal, completely unsurprising lack of women at CES

~ mcequality

For many women at CES, the lack of female representation in the keynote wasn’t surprising. It wasn’t even solely the CTA’s fault. A 2016 study by the National Center for Women and Information Technology found women held 57 percent of all professional occupations yet only 25 percent of all computing jobs. These figures were even lower for nonwhite women: Asian women held 5 percent of jobs in the computing industry, black women held 3 percent and Latinas held just 1 percent.

via The totally normal, completely unsurprising lack of women at CES

MeToo feminism is victim culture, not courage | Comment | The Times

~ mcequality

Moreover, modern feminism has put the Victorian sexual double standard into reverse. Tearing up the old sexual order, women liberated themselves to behave with as much sexual licence as men. Yet when men now misinterpret the signals because there are no longer any rules, women accuse them of failing to treat them with sufficient respect. And even when men grossly misbehave or even attack them, some women choose to remain silent and use such men for their own advantage.

Female emancipation was all about giving women control over their own destinies. Now they have that control, they are presenting themselves once again as powerless victims of male oppression, even while benefiting from being presented as sexual objects. In 1995, Thurman was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 sexiest stars in film history, in 2004 she featured in Maxim magazine’s “Hot 100” and in 2013 was named one of the “100 Hottest Women of the 21st Century” by GQ magazine.

Millicent Fawcett and even Emmeline Pankhurst would surely not have said to Thurman: “me too”. They would have said: “not in our name”.

via MeToo feminism is victim culture, not courage | Comment | The Times

Suffragettes 100 years on: Meet the women fighting for females in 2018 – BBC News

~ mcequality

Officers in the city now define misogynistic hate crime as “behaviour targeted towards a woman by men simply because they are a woman”.
That includes things like wolf-whistling and cat-calling.
“I think it’s very easy to say this is the end of flirting, but I don’t think that’s true,” says Martha.
“I think if you’re flirting in a way which you feel might be touchy ground, then you’re flirting in the wrong way.”
Martha ran around 40 training sessions for police on misogynistic harassment and now wants the rest of the UK to follow suit.

via Suffragettes 100 years on: Meet the women fighting for females in 2018 – BBC News

Unused ticket: The suffragette story in seven objects – BBC News

~ mcequality

Under the slogan “deeds not words”, some activists smashed windows, threw stones and burned buildings. Once imprisoned, they would go on hunger strike.
Their refusal to eat led to force-feeding – where a tube was forced up a striker’s nose and down the throat before food was poured in. Sometimes the feeding pipe was put in incorrectly and food would be forced into the lungs, which can be fatal.
Force feeding attracted public disapproval – and eventually the government brought in a bill known as the Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed seriously ill hunger strikers to be released until they regained their strength, when they would be re-arrested and jailed again.

via Unused ticket: The suffragette story in seven objects – BBC News

We Harpies Want More

~ mcequality

Scores of women have felt raw, disheartened, and fatigued by the #MeToo news cycle over the past months for the obvious reason that these are transmissions of suffering and for many, reminders of exclusion. But the relentless news coverage is further disconcerting because these tales of horror are making some companies a lot of money, often by allowing one writer to dismiss and denigrate accusers in the same pages where another writer first broke the allegations.

via We Harpies Want More