The Women’s Forum, Feminism & Finding Your Voice
“What would you know, you’re blonde.”
Silence. That was my response. Inside I was furious and shocked, but I couldn’t muster a word. That right there, clear as day: patriarchy. Insidious everyday sexism and misogyny. Slapping women down, making us doubt ourselves, keeping us quiet, and silencing us, our opinions, our needs, our experience, and our power. It worked. Friends leapt to my defence (Emily, Adam — thank you), but still, I could barely utter a sentence after that.
It was the 2017 election campaign, I’d been out on the doorstep in Hornsey, working hard to return our brilliant MP Catherine West to parliament. I’d only become active in the party at the start of the year, so this was my first election campaign. I wasn’t the most confident person when it came to speaking up, so canvassing was something of a baptism of fire, but with every conversation I was getting better and stronger; it felt good.
To use my voice for something I felt so passionately about, to listen to others experiences, to see the difference that our local councillors and MP were making in the community, under the burden of austerity. To see first-hand how desperately we need that Labour Government — yeah I was feeling determined and empowered.
As with all good canvassing sessions, once we were done we ended up in the pub. There we got chatting to some guys who were interested in politics and were supporters — to be clear they weren’t members.
The conversation turned to Brexit, and to my hometown of Hull — which voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. Now having grown up there, I figured I could quite possibly contribute something of value to the conversation (shocking I know). One of the men we were talking to (who incidentally had never actually been to Hull), didn’t. When I suggested that his view that everyone in Hull who voted leave was a) thick (his words) and b) believed everything written in The Sun, was a bit reductive, that was when he turned and used the age old ‘blonde’ comment.
I’m not sure whether it was my being a woman with an opinion, or my being from Hull he took a dislike to (I suspect it was a bit of both). Of course he would try and pass it off as a joke, just a bit of banter isn’t it. Except it isn’t. I had been silenced. And with it, all of my knowledge and personal experience.
I went home, and after a sleepless night stewing in my own fury, I decided I’d had enough. Now, this dude wasn’t a Labour Party member, he would however (presumably) identify as a progressive socialist. Some people reading this may be shocked that such blatant sexism would be uttered by someone who shares so many of our values, most women reading this probably are not.
The morning after I emailed Lucia Das Neves, our constituency Women’s Officer, and the rest is history. A little over a year later and I have job shared the CLP Women’s Officer Role with Lucia, and I am about to embark on another exciting year with the Women’s Forum and my fellow officer Anna Lawton. All three of us stood in the recent local elections. I am not silent anymore.
The reason I am sharing my story of how I first made contact with the Women’s Forum is because for me it demonstrates most clearly what the fundamental aim of the Women’s Forum is: to help women to use their voice.
In the first instance, having a fully constituted Women’s Forum ensures that we have a representative on our Constituency Labour Party (CLP) Executive. We have a seat at the table and can impact the debate and decision making process of our CLP.
However, more than that, the Women’s Forum seeks to find ways of engaging with and empowering women. Finding ways to help them use their skills, knowledge, and experience, whatever they may be, to help shape the agenda and the work the party does. Ultimately we want to deliver equal outcomes for women within the party, within our communities, and hopefully, when we have that Labour Government, across the country.
The Women’s Forum is a platform, and like many other organisations which focus on and campaign specifically through the prism of women, the work we do is vital.
We know that in order to affect real policy change that even begins to deliver more equitable outcomes nationally we need a 50:50 parliament. We also know that at local level we would need 12000 more women to just stand for council across the country in order to get the additional 3000 women elected to achieve gender balance in our local authorities. At current rates, it will take another 68 years for that to happen.
Though austerity has savaged all of our communities, the burden has fallen most heavily on the shoulders of women. The House of Commons Library estimates that by 2020, women will have borne 86% of all austerity measures. That equates to around a £79 billion loss in income for women and their families.
With women more likely to experience poverty than men, and 27% of lone parent families (90% of which are women) living in poverty; we see the awful consequences of this every day. Parents queuing from 3am in Wales for a school breakfast club; over a third of food parcels from food banks being handed out to children; and women making up about a quarter of the food bank user population. More women sleeping rough, often as they try to escape domestic violence, only to be further abused on the streets. This is not what progress looks like. Our leaders, our institutions, and our society need to be held to account for that.
Two women a week are murdered by a current or former partner in England and Wales — a statistic that never gets any less shocking. Though the government has just made a U-turn on planned funding changes for domestic violence refuges, charities are still concerned about the devastating impact cuts to local authority budgets will continue to have on them. Even without funding changes, in the year 2016/17 alone, 60% of all referrals to refuges were declined largely due to lack of resources. There is no reason to think the number of women and children subject to violence won’t increase, it is certainly unlikely to go down, and it will be increasingly difficult for them to leave under the current circumstances.
At current rates it will take 100 years to close the gender pay gap in the UK. Realistically, given the continued crushing impact of austerity, and the likely impact of automation on jobs usually carried out by women, making employment even more scarce and precarious; it could be twice as long. Certainly people reading this won’t see it happen in their lifetimes, nor that of their children and probably not their grandchildren’s.
The future for women, though we have made great gains, looks uncertain to say the least — some days the lives of the women in Gilead feels more like a documentary than a dystopian fictional society. And if you are a woman of colour or mixed ethnicity, disabled, gay, Trans and/ or working class, then the outlook is even more challenging. All the evidence shows that those who face multiple structural discrimination's experience even worse outcomes. For women facing any or all of these barriers this is catastrophic. (The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has lots of fantastic research on the impact of multiple discrimination's in our society — https://www.jrf.org.uk/).
The only way these and many other challenges can be addressed is to have women and their voices front and center of our policy making institutions, our businesses, and our communities. The Women’s Forum aims to contribute to making that happen. We hold events — such as our joint manifesto event with our sister Forum in Tottenham that helped shaped the local election manifesto. This year we ran a workshop called ‘Finding Your Voice’ aimed at helping women to be more confident in speaking up in any situation, but particularly in public, as well as exploring why we may find it hard to do that.
We run women only canvassing sessions to help build friendships and networks of women, as well as create a safe space for women to come together and campaign. We held a ‘Be a Councillor’ event before the selection process started in order to try to support women in making a decision to stand. We’ve held social events and worked with our MP to have events in parliament with amazing speakers who can share their experiences of campaigning, politics and working to support women.
However, there is so much more to do. Our biggest challenge, and one that is vital if we are to topple the patriarchy is increasing accessibility, participation and diversity. There is no denying that politics is pretty white and middle class. And despite Hornsey and Wood Green being one of two constituencies in the most wonderfully diverse Borough of Haringey; so are most of our meetings and events.
Equally, accessibility challenges and therefore participation for many, means becoming an active member in our party and in the Women’s Forum is near impossible. Caring responsibilities, lack of supportive provisions for disabilities, the lack of available and cheap community spaces (which often means there is little choice but to hold meetings and events in the back room of pubs and social clubs) — all of these on a pragmatic level act as barriers to making the Forum, and therefore the debate and agenda more diverse and inclusive. And that is before you even start to look at the cultural and socioeconomic reasons and privileges as to why our political institutions, including our party, are not as genuinely diverse & inclusive as they should be.
This was a clear theme that came from our recent Annual General Meeting (AGM) and will be a key focus for us as a forum and for the CLP over the coming twelve months. Other key themes that women in Hornsey and Wood Green want us to focus our campaigns and our energy on are mental health provision; adult social care; violence against women and girls (VAWG), and women, girls and gang crime — something we have already begun supporting Catherine with.
So, a lot to do, and we need you to help us, however you identify. Everyone will benefit from bringing the patriarchy crashing to the ground (suicide being the biggest killer of men under 45; toxic masculinity kills men as well as women). Women - we want to hear from you. We want your ideas, your energy, your experiences, and your frustrations, all of it. Every single woman’s voice is vital in this fight, and we want to empower every single woman in Hornsey and Wood Green to use theirs.
And once you start to speak up… in my experience, you just never know how powerful it will be.
Find out more about our Women’s Forum: http://www.hornseywoodgreenlabour.org.uk/groups/women's-forum
You can find out more about our manifesto and what’s going on in Hornsey and Wood Green on our new website.
