We have brothers, sons, lovers – but they can’t live here!’ The happy home shared by 26 women

With residents aged from 58 to 94, New Ground is the UK’s first cohousing community exclusively for older women. Setting it up was an 18-year battle – but with soaring numbers of people living alone, is this an idea whose time has come?

Chipping Barnet, a leafy suburb of north London, is an unlikely location for a feminist utopia. Yet it is here, at the top of the high street, past the Susi Earnshaw theatre school and the Joie de Vie patisserie, that you will find Britain’s first cohousing community exclusively for women over 50. The purpose-built development is entirely managed by the women who set it up as an alternative to living alone.

New Ground’s entrance, all glass and bold typography, could easily be mistaken for a co-working space, as could the common room I am ushered into. Everything is bright, airy and spotlessly clean. The walls are lined with sleek white bookcases and a cinema-grade TV screen. The only clue as to the residents’ demographic is an unfinished 1,000-piece jigsaw on a table overlooking the large garden.

Hi all,

I’m really pleased to announce that the process of organising meetings outside of London has been successful so far. So, if you are a radical/rad-aligned/gender critical feminist, anywhere in the UK, who is interested in meeting other rad etc women (adult only) in real life, please message me.

Also, if you are based in or around London/the South East, and would be interested in meeting other rad etc women in a WOC-specific group, and/or and LGB-specific group, please get in touch too.

Getting offline, building communities, and talking to each other is the first step to change.

Looking forward to hearing from you all!

I'm really glad more straight women are talking about weaponised incompetence, but I find it interesting how we never talk about it within the context of consent education.

The Liberal feminist idea that men need to be educated on the concept of consent, as if they don't know that rape is wrong, is infantalising and naive. Just as a man might make a show of incorrectly cleaning something to avoid being asked to do it again, a man will feign ignorance of a woman's refusal as a way to avoid accountability.

Men know what the word "No" means, they know that rape is wrong. They do it anyway because they believe that they can get away with it.

A single woman or girl is harmed every one of them should be charged.

If you’re in the UK and haven’t signed this petition yet, please do:

Pass it on to your mothers and sisters if you’ve already signed

Webinar on Tuesday https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prostitution-pleasure-for-men-pain-for-women-tickets-296266921337 Anti-prostitution event in Nottingham

10th of April 2024

This is brilliant for us uk radfems!

Petition: Require jurors in rape trials to complete mandatory training on rape myths

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/641404

UK residents/citizens pls sign 🙏🏼🙏🏼

For more than half a century, it was just a rumor. As London’s river boat pilots passed by Waterloo Bridge (“The Ladies’ Bridge,” as some of them called it) they’d tell a story about the women who had built the bridge during World War II. But the idea that women had been largely involved in building Waterloo Bridge wasn’t included in any official history of the structure, or detailed in any records. During the new bridge’s opening ceremony, on December 10, 1945, then-Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison had declared that “the men that built Waterloo Bridge are fortunate men.” It wasn’t until 2015 that the hard work of these women could be confirmed, by the historian Christine Wall, thanks to a series of photographs she found.

Eight years prior to her discovery, Wall had collaborated with the filmmaker Karen Livesey on a documentary called The Ladies Bridge. It explores the stories of women working on Waterloo Bridge and records first-hand the experiences of a variety of wartime workers who were women. “There was jobs galore. There was absolutely jobs galore. You could go anywhere,” recounts one woman in the film.

Watch The Ladies' Bridge here

Sticker still there four days later. This is a high traffic area, so very pleased to find it still up.

Women-only creative sessions in Leeds, England!

It's so funny to me that JK Rowling, a lifelong leftist and advocate for women's rights is a pariah for her views on trans people and everything she says is worthless (even when speaking on something unrelated to trans issues.)

Yet here is one of the leftist UK subreddits happily praising Frankie Boyle a man who has spent his entire career making "jokes" at the expense of women and disabled people. And no, this wasn't the distant past either, as recently as last week he was doing a delightful routine about raping Holly Willoughby.

There's so many examples of this, men being given the benefit of the doubt or people being able to separate the art from the artist, whereas a woman stepping a toe out of line is crucified.

Any ideas for books, podcasts or groups for boosting confidence specifically as a woman? I want to stop people pleasing and worrying what people think of me.

Multicultural societies can be great, but there's one condition: different cultures must be willing to learn from each other and respect each other's values.

If people from one culture are open and welcoming, but people from the other culture want to enforce their own rules and take away people's freedom in the name of their religion, then the results are going to be catastrophic. This is why Europe is suffering right now and it's women who will pay the highest price.

Wondering what I mean? Let's have a look at some statistics:

Poll: 46% of French Muslims believe Sharia law should be applied in country

Over 40% of UK Muslims support “aspects” of sharia law

If it doesn't terrify you I don't know what to tell you. It surely terrifies me as fuck.

Like many people in Britain, you probably watched with horror the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade, thinking, “Thank goodness women could never be prosecuted for having an abortion here.”

But let me tell you, it already happens here.

Two women are currently awaiting criminal trial in England for abortion-related offences, both facing charges that carry a maximum sentence of life. At least 17 women have been investigated by police over the past eight years for having had abortions.

In Oxford, a 25-year-old mother of one is facing trial for allegedly taking the drug misoprostol – one of the two pills routinely prescribed by doctors to abort a pregnancy. But her baby was born alive and she was subsequently reported to the police. She is being charged under the Offences Against the Person Act, a law passed by parliament in 1861, before the invention of the lightbulb and before women had the right to vote. The law states that a woman must be “kept in penal servitude for life” if she procures an abortion.

Another woman is facing trial after she took abortion pills she obtained from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) by post when rules were relaxed during the pandemic to allow this. She was allegedly 28 weeks pregnant at the time and is facing charges of “child destruction” (note the visceral language) under the Infant Life (Preservation) Act from 1929, which also comes with a maximum life sentence. She could spend the rest of her life in prison.

We so often think that the 1967 Abortion Act legalised abortion. But it did no such thing. It partially decriminalised abortion in England, Scotland and Wales, so long as strict conditions were in place, such as a confirmation from two medical practitioners that the pregnancy had not exceeded 28 weeks (subsequently reduced to 24 weeks in 1990), or that the termination was necessary to prevent injury or mental harm. Any abortion outside these criteria is still a criminal offence.

We know that it is overwhelmingly vulnerable women who are investigated and prosecuted for having abortions. One woman collapsed in the dock when she was sentenced to two and a half years in 2015 for taking tablets she had bought online to induce a miscarriage after the 24-week period of gestation. The court heard that she had “a history of emotional and psychological problems”.

Another woman, a mother of one, ordered pills online to induce an abortion in 2019 after her abusive boyfriend had told her not to go to the doctor. She had believed she was eight to 10 weeks pregnant but after a traumatic miscarriage in her bath tub, where she has described sitting in an inch of blood, she realised her pregnancy had been much further along. She was arrested in her hospital bed and served two years in prison.

These are just some examples of women who have faced trial: there are multiple other women who face gruelling police investigations. In 2021, a 15-year-old girl was investigated for a year after suffering an unexplained stillbirth. Her phone and laptop were confiscated during her GCSE exams, she was self-harming, and the investigation only ended after a coroner concluded that the pregnancy ended due to natural causes. Another woman was arrested in hospital last year and kept in a prison cell for 36 hours after a stillbirth at 24 weeks, and is now suffering PTSD. My question is this: if a woman has had an abortion late in the gestation period, or a traumatic miscarriage or stillbirth, should she go to prison or should she be offered support from medical practitioners at what is clearly a horrendous time, both mentally and physically?

Women in 2022 are being shackled by a 160-year-old law made at a time when we were not even allowed to set foot in the House of Commons. Urgent reform is needed to protect more women from harm, which is why organisations such as BPAS and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) are calling on the director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, Max Hill QC, to drop all charges against these women. The RCOG this month has gone further, calling on ministers to finally legalise abortion. There is absolutely no public interest in sending vulnerable women to prison for terminating pregnancies. Instead, these prosecutions will only serve to put off women seeking help from doctors because they might get arrested, pushing more women into unsafe and underground options.

Meanwhile, according to the criteria of the Abortion Act, a woman has to show that she would suffer grave permanent injury to her mental health if she did not have an abortion after 24 weeks. Why should women still have to pathologise themselves as mad, hysterical, unfit or suffering to legally access healthcare?

The state currently has a triple lock on women’s bodies. By not legalising abortion it has the right to force pregnancy, birth and motherhood upon us. Look to the rules on organ donation: it is illegal to donate people’s organs after they die (however desperately they are needed by people on waiting lists) without their permission. The law at present, which denies women the right to abort a pregnancy on their own terms, is to give us less autonomy than a corpse.

Link | Archived Link