Women’s liberation

This is the speech that I gave in the opening plenary of Workers' Liberty's 'Ideas for Freedom' event in 2013 - originally published here.

An article from 27 September 2005:

Today, I am pretty annoyed by reading articles about the Portman group's report about boozing and the trouble it allegedly gets you into.

These are biographical notes on the 'Red Countess', Constance Markievicz, prepared for the London Socialist Feminist Discussion Group on 10 October 2008. Also attached are two one-page files giving a timeline of her life.

Constance Georgine Gore-Booth was born on 4 February 1868 at Buckingham Gate in London, the elder daughter of Arctic explorer and adventurer Sir Henry Gore-Booth, 5th Baronet, and Lady Georgina née Hill.

In England and Wales, women are killed by current or former male partners at the rate of two a week. Click the names highlighted in this poem to read the stories behind the statistics.
Thanks to Counting Dead Women for its work in telling these truths.

Her name is Reeva
Reeva Steenkamp
Not 'Oscar Pistorius' girlfriend'
Not 'model'
Not 'reality TV star'
Her name is Reeva

Her name is Reeva
She was not just a model
But also a law graduate
She was not just a reality TV star
But also a campaigner against violence
The story is about her killing
Not about his fame
Or it ought to be

An oldie from the 1980s, a decade of Thatcher, Reagan, crap haircuts and appallingly sexist washing powder adverts. They are not exactly bastions of feminism now, but in the 1980s we were subjected to images of women descending into hysterical panic because 'The dirt says hot but the label says not' (Ariel), their whites had failed the 'window test' (Daz) or were not 'bluey-white'.