Modern Women: 52 Pioneers by Kira Cochrane

An extended version of a BBC Arts article I published earlier this year. The original piece is here.

It’s not often that one book weaves together the stories of a Russian cosmonaut, an American pilot, a German Resistance fighter, a Kenyan environmentalist, a Japanese mountaineer and an Icelandic pop star. Kira Cochrane’s book Modern Women: 52 Pioneers achieves such a feat. A beautifully produced, inspiring and revelatory edition of potted biographies, it crosses disciplines, countries and centuries, with one aim: to celebrate “women who led really big lives, who broke down boundaries, who make us think differently about the possibilities for women,” says Cochrane.

Modern Women: 52 Pioneers includes celebrated figures like TV mogul Oprah and architect Zaha Hadid, photographers Lee Miller and Dorothea Lange, scientists, athletes, artists and international activists “who pioneered the fight for LGBT rights, who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement, who championed equality and freedom.” Cochrane says it was important to “make sure there was a really big spread of representation, geographically and historically. I [also] wanted to bring to life the stories of women who’re often unheard.”

Cochrane is quite the modern pioneer herself. She is Opinion editor at The Guardian, one of the world’s most-read broadsheets, as well as the author of two acclaimed novels, The Naked Season and Escape Routes for Beginners, and editor of the feminist anthology Women of the Revolution.You could say Cochrane’s glittering career is an indication of how positively things have changed for women over the centuries. The acknowledgements at the end of the book are a sisterly and grateful roll call of Cochrane’s equally-celebrated women peers, colleagues and allies in the British media.

However, reading through the stories of the women in Modern Women: 52 Pioneers, whatever the woman’s profession and whatever century or country she’s working in, discrimination, sexual violence, betrayal, belittlement, abuse, marginalisation  and injustice - perpetrated against men by women - are perennial obstacles. The book reminds us how far we’ve come, how much is possible for women, and yet how much still stands in our way.  

I’m interviewing Cochrane at her home on a rare day off. At the end of the garden is a beautiful white wooden writing shed, its desk and floors stacked high with hundreds of in-depth studies of the lives and work of the women in the book. The stacks represent “this huge swathe of biographies, written by other women, over the last fifty years. What’s happened since 1970s feminism is a huge number of women authors making sure other women aren’t forgotten. It’s been a revolution on the bookshelves,” says Cochrane. 

Leaning against one wall is a huge cork board (below) of pinned black and white pictures of stars from the heyday of old Hollywood: inspiration for a possible new novel. “The best times in my life, the most euphoric moments have been writing fiction…like you were flying, like you were in another world. And that makes up for the other times when you’re agonising because you can’t make this perfect thing in your head translate onto the page.” Cochrane’s rich and ready humour and gorgeous treacly voice remind me of Frances de la Tour and indeed it’s no surprise to find out that at the very beginning of her career, it was a toss-up between acting and writing; “writing a novel,” she says, “is the closest thing to acting because you’re thinking your way into a character.”

When we return to talking about Modern Women and I marvel at the research she’s done, she says gleefully, “When I’m in, I’m all in! It was a real joy to absorb myself with the worlds of other women, who in every case were phenomenally accomplished but also courageous, who got on with it and took a risk. I’d hope Modern Women is a positive contribution to the [feminist] movement, so people can read it and feel uplifted and inspired by all the work these incredible women have done.”

Research stacks for Modern Women: 52 Pioneers

Kira Cochrane's writing shed

Modern Women: 52 Pioneers

Modern Women: 52 Pioneers by Kira Cochrane was published on 2^nd March by Frances Lincoln

China Flash: Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in modern China

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing last month.

A Lean In Beijing meeting, image (c) Lean In Beijing

Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s book about how she battled corporate sexism to rise to the top at Facebook, has struck a chord with young, ambitious women in China. “I saw Sandberg’s TED talk in March 2013,” says one of Lean In Beijing’s founding members, Allison Ye. “I was shocked because I had never seen a successful Chinese female leader talk with such openness and honesty about how exactly she got there. It was refreshing. Her message was that we can be responsible for our situation and we can control our lives. It was very positive.”

The talk triggered the formation of Lean in Beijing, which sent a survey [PDF]to more than 500 women, asking about their aspirations, their careers and the challenges they experienced in their lives. It revealed that 90% of respondents had never seen a professional women’s network – and wanted one. “We had 60 to 70 women at our first meeting, and every one had a story to tell. Things they wouldn’t tell to their own friends and families, they would tell to strangers,” says Ye. The Lean In message of female solidarity, boosted by speaker events, high social media connectivity, consciousness raising 'circles' and the open discussion of everyday sexism has proven so popular and necessary that Lean In has spread to several Chinese cities far beyond Beijing. Even within the capital, Lean In members have founded their own offshoots like the Lean In Thinktank led by Yolanda Wang and Maggie Zhang and the six Lean In College mentoring schemes founded by Alicia Lui. The mentoring scheme involves bringing in younger professional women to be mentors to college age students, Lui tells me. “Mentoring is a really great way to work through relationship, career and family pressures. At our last event in May, 150 students showed up and we had 15 mentors, all from different industries and with different interests. After the event, lots more professional women wanted to be a part of the network as mentors.”

We are meeting up at a time when gender inequality is back with a vengeance in China, with ancient stereotypes about femininity, double standards about gender roles, endemic and normalised violence against women, media misrepresentation and longstanding pressures on women meeting new corporate injustices around equal pay, property ownership, female leadership and opportunity, as chronicled in Leta Hong Fincher’s brilliant and vital book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China.

Lean In Beijing’s discussions aren’t just about strategising within a corporate context, combating institutional sexism, why prominent Chinese women business leaders stand at less than 5% or why women are paid less than men for the same job. “It’s [also about] the pressure of getting married young, the pressure that’s coming from all directions,” says Ye, “not just the family but the media, the government, society. Every young woman in a family is pressured to get married really young. The message behind it is that a woman cannot be happy by herself, she needs to be someone’s wife, someone’s mother in order to be fulfilled in her purpose in life.” Yolanda Wang agrees: “For a man in China, at the age of 30 you’re meant to have a career, a car, a job. For a woman, the main responsibility is to find someone, to get married. And the pressure on her [to do that] starts at the age of 22 or 23.”

Recently, the journalist (and friend of Lean In Beijing) Roseann Lake co-organised the Leftover Monologues – women’s monologues from all over the world, prompted by a combination of the Chinese women’s movement, Leta Hong Fincher’s work on gender inequality and activist Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. It was the first time many of the Chinese contributors had presented their own stories. “It’s really hard for Chinese people to speak out. They’ll be judged by society as a bad girl, judged by family and friends,” says Maggie Zhang. The Lean In movement in China is radical in itself, for its fostering of open dialogue. The conversation goes far beyond tips on how to negotiate for higher salaries, be less self-critical, manage career progression, handle confrontation or consider a company job versus entrepreneurship - although Lean In Beijing members have discussed all these and more. “The idea is not necessarily limited to work or career, or even family,” says Lui, “it’s more about a close knit, confidential community of women who listen to you, empathise with you and help you.” “Women at big companies are afraid to speak out at meetings,” says Wang, adding, “In the US women sit and talk about their [professional and life] dreams. In China people ask you, ‘Do you have a boyfriend? What does he do?’ Nobody thinks a woman has a dream.” “We asked women how they saw their purpose in life,” says Ye, “and lots of women told us that that was the first time they’d ever asked that question of themselves.”

“Our parents tell us not to get a boyfriend when we’re at college, so we can concentrate completely on our studies,” says Maggie Zhang, “but then, when we turn 25, they pressure us to get a husband.” “I was told, ‘You should never try to be too smart or you won’t find a boyfriend’ by my mother’s friend,” says Lui, “and I was pressured to marry from the age of 26. The family is still considered the centre of everything. I’ve heard, ‘You can’t get a PhD because no-one wants to marry a PhD.’” 

"The other side of the ‘leftover women' story is that we’re moving forward as never before,” says Ye. “Women don’t need a partner to sustain their lifestyles. It’s inevitable that women in China will have more freedom and that this will force change. The post-90s generation is already changing things, they’re really independent. They see that it’s important to have your own thoughts.” Lui chips in, “On one hand China has been one country that’s done the best in equalising everyone to some extent. People’s lives are getting better. But there are problems with the way it’s being done and the consequences. The Chinese haven’t got used to money yet. They want to show off, to show people what they've got. CEOs of companies are in their 20s and 30s. They start a company, they make money. The Chinese mentality-change is one of the fastest in the world, because of the way modern China has started itself up.” “The economy is changing very fast. But society changes slowly,” says Wang. Ye says, “My parents went through the hunger, when they didn’t have enough to eat. That’s why what they want for me is the best: comfort, a husband. When my generation has its kids, it’ll be different.”

While women are regarded as valuable only within the domestic sphere, where their labour can be exploited for free, domestic duties are regarded as demeaning for men to do. “If a man is a stay at home dad, people think he doesn’t have what it takes to go out into the world and support the family. It’s about saving face,” says Zhang. “In Chinese TV shows the man is always rich, tall, successful and the woman is obedient and subservient.”

“There are a lot of social barriers,” Ye agrees when I balk at the idea of individual women changing themselves in order to somehow evade, circumvent, win out against or contend with endemically antiwomen structures, judgements, customs, stereotypes and activities. “We can’t change the outside of society very fast but within our generation and the next we can change the policy-makers of the future. There’s only so much one person can do, but if everyone plays their part you can change a lot.” However, the barriers to equality and liberation are high. “You are discriminated against as a single woman,” says Ye. “Single women are barred from adoption. Sometimes a woman will choose her family over her career. Or she’ll choose her career. But women aren’t allowed to be both.” Yolanda Wang’s company asked one of her female colleagues to sign a piece of paper promising that she wouldn’t get pregnant for two years. “We never hear about men’s work-life balance, only women’s. And you’re judged badly whatever you choose,” she says. Maggie Zhang adds, “We have to educate not only women but also men, who are under huge pressure to be successful.”

Alicia Lui believes that Sheryl Sandberg’s inspiring talk and book have “raised issues which enable us to have more open conversations about [sexism]. Lean In was a catalyst. It said to women, if you really feel you have a need for something you have to raise your hand and ask for it.”

Ye believes the movement is a chance for women to look at their lives afresh: “Before you change anyone’s life you have to change the way they see themselves. We have high rates of employment for women here, but sometimes women are happy with less demanding hours and less pay, because it means they still have time to do all their family duties. I believed all that too – until I was brave enough to say that that was not what I want. Once people see alternatives then they can begin to lean in and change their lives. We want to help women pursue their own definition of success, help them when they’re young and share stories of other women’s lives so they see themselves in these women.”

Lean In Beijing derives its momentum and power from its focus on co-operation between women. “Why do women judge each other?” says Allison Ye. “We don’t have that tradition of women helping women.” “We support each other to take the next step,” says Alicia Lui, “but starting something requires the other side to response. I argued with my mum [who put pressure on me to marry] and now she’s coming to understand my thinking. Each of us has a personal stake in Lean In Beijing because these issues affect us personally.”

Yolanda Wang says, “At my first Lean In Beijing meeting I realised I’m not on my own, I’m not crazy. Women are so honest, so encouraging, they push you to change things. For women it’s very hard to be their real self. Who they are now is who their family wants them to be, who society wants them to be. The cliché was that the only thing between girls was jealousy. But that’s not true. It’s so good to see girls who say to each other, ‘I like you because you’re awesome.’”

For a full list of my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here.

China Flash: Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing, where I am currently doing a stint as Deputy Editor.

Jenny Man Wu is a film-making powerhouse, describing her work as “soul led, not fantastical or abstract” and “inspired by a European arthouse sensibility in terms of the acceptance of the director as an auteur, rather than the Hollywood sensibility where a producer is the most important person and decides on the cast, the setting, the marketing and the distribution. It’s not important to me to make a million dollar movie. I want to continue to make low-budget movies where I have the right to do what I want, to show to and influence a certain small number of people. When I consider the price and sacrifice a director needs to pay to have a high budget cinema-style movie, I can say no to that. And if you’re making movies that you want to be screened in China you have to submit to censorship from the government.”

Over the course of four punchy short films, Man Wu has garnered international attention within just a few years of graduating from her studies in screenwriting and literature at Beijing Film Academy. Some Sort of Loneliness, A Choice (Maybe Not), Crime Scene and Last Words, all produced between 2012 and 2013, feature women in the throes of tragicomic contemporary despair. “It all starts with very little things, small daily situations,” says Man Wu. “Then I start to describe them, to look at them from a different angle.” In A Choice (Maybe Not), two young women are in a coffee shop, “and one of the girls is a little bit OCD about the choices she makes. She doesn’t want coffee. She doesn’t want lemonade. The beer is overpriced. The wine’s been open for two days. It's a comedy but it’s really about the pressure on women to choose. Women in the olden days almost never walked out of the house alone – and now we have all these choices, it seems. But there are so many choices it's hard to tell if you've made the right one or not. And sometimes when you're forced to make a big decision it's easy to put it down to fate, to the inevitable or the subconscious.”

Last Words, a monologue which Man Wu acted in herself, examines the notion of choice in a far darker way. “It’s a stream of consciousness, a woman talking about suicide and presenting her last words. She’s thinking about something [abusive] that happened in her childhood. The core of the film is not about how she develops her obsession with suicide but her recent experience of domestic violence, her struggle with her parents and the restraint she’s experienced from her father. It’s about how a female wants to have a different kind of life, about her struggle against patriarchy and disappointment and her desperation about her future. She feels that suicide is the only thing that she can do because she’s a perfectionist and an idealist – and these beliefs make her suffer all the more. At the end, she looks into the camera and asks, If I kill myself, does it mean I’ve surrendered to the world?”

Man Wu is committed to focusing on the issue of gender in China. “I have a political view about gender in general and that comes through in my work. Gender issues are political issues. I have a responsibility: I understand how it is overseas and how it is in Beijing and feel I must connect the two, to show that women could be living in so many different ways. We had a women’s revolution in China in the 1920s but all this did was release free female labour into the market.” In giving voice to the ambivalence, pain and wit of her women characters, Man Wu points out that she is going against society’s assumption that “women’s feelings and emotions are small and not political.”

When it comes to gender, Man Wu “can’t say it’s going backwards. It’s very complicated, how [society] sees single women. It’s related to capital and economics. It’s also that under the one child policy, girls do feel cherished within their family, they are insulated and protected from the frustrations of gender inequality at a personal level, so many don’t understand why they should fight for their rights. But it’s important to recognise that a lot of the problems in daily life are actually related to gender. For example I know of a young woman at school who wasn’t a virgin. But she was with a new boyfriend and to pretend to be a virgin, she put some [red] colour in herself – and the colour wouldn’t wash off the guy! And this was presented as a big joke by the guy’s friends. But there’s a double standard: girls really are expected to be virgins.”

Man Wu was selected to show at the 2013 Beijing Independent Film Festival, has just got back from the high profile Elles Tournent Film Festival in Brussels and is currently directing the Beijing Queer Film Festival, which will be running at various venues across town until December. However, both the Beijing Independent Film Festival and the Beijing Queer Film festival have both been shut down by the authorities on their launch dates in the past. One typically clever strategy for circumventing this possibility has been to screen films on special buses driving around the city; yet another example of the ingenuity which has developed in China as a response to the caprices and controls of those in power.

“I can’t leave Beijing,” vows Man Wu. “A lot of things are happening here. I see the changes and they’re not always good. It’s sad to see old buildings being demolished, places becoming more commercial. It’s always good and bad – but that’s what makes the world interesting. As Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”

To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here or explore some of the links below:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Beijing Night
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law
• Beijing storms, turtles and dogs
• Two Chinese characters
• Hair envy

China Flash: Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, China’s momentous social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women today

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing.

It took an earthquake to make Zhang Chao a writer. She is now an acclaimed journalist with nearly fifty thousand followers on Wechat and Weibo and is celebrating the release of her book Silent Golden Age, published by Xiron in October. Six years ago, she was staring tragedy in the face. “In May 2008, on the day of Sichuan Earthquake, my mom was having surgery. Thousands of people had died in this disaster and I was still waiting for my mom to wake up. That's when I decided to ignore my fears of failure and criticism and start living my life to the fullest.”

She always wanted to be a writer, but “having any kind of dream can be kind of terrifying.” Yet this terror is the source of her insight. In her sharp, punchy writing Zhang examines her own post-80s and 90s generation, which is “living out their golden age, but not having their voices heard by society. Young people, especially young women, are caught between their own dreams and society's expectations of them. I find it interesting how people choose, how people face heartaches and hardships, how people fight against and cater to society.”

Despite her success on social media and the highly Netty habits of today’s young Chinese readers, Zhang maintains that it is not important for 21st century writers to use social media and that is not writers’ own responsibility to increase their impact: “[Chinese social media networks] WeChat and Weibo and Facebook are merely platforms, and are not that different from traditional publishing. Things online can be very misleading, especially in this day and age, when information can travel so quickly. Even if a million people read your article it doesn't mean that it was good. For writers, what matters the most will always be the compassion and thought reflected in your work, everything else is a bonus. As a writer, you should focus on content - reach and social media is for the publisher.”

Describing her beloved Beijing as “the only city that can see all of my scars,” Zhang is inspired by China’s fast-transforming capital. “When I read E. B. White's Here is New York, all I could think of was my experience in Beijing. The first time I came to Beijing was 20 years ago. Back then, the city only had two subway lines. I moved here after graduate school, and since then I've lived in five different apartments, changed jobs twice and added about a thousand people to my phone contact list. The city saw me grow up, saw how I got lost and found my way back, how I fell and stood up again. Beijing knows the wounds and healing that came before.”

Zhang’s articles cover everything from food to football, social justice to sexual equality, love and sex to the arts and culture and everything in between. “What my more popular pieces have in common is that they focus on female independence and empowerment,” she says. “Most of my readers are young, intelligent, well-educated professionals. They are pushing a social movement here to encourage our generation of women to challenge tradition. I use my personal experience to prove that all limitations only exist in our head. We have the power to change culture and tradition.”

Despite her ambivalence about social media, Zhang’s influence is rooted in the impression that she is communicating directly and candidly with readers who are peers and contemporaries: “The stories I share, they've been happened to them before. I just help them say what they want to say, because I am one of them.”

Zhang has suffered from the misogynist backlash which seems to be an endemic and very telling feature of online life all over the world, especially when women writers address misogyny. “The most criticism I ever received was after publishing my thoughts on Eve Ensler's TED Talk ‘Embrace Your Inner Girl’. What I didn't expect was the mockery and verbal abuse from some male readers. They made me realize that in China, many men and women are far away from being equals, and female independence can be a very dangerous thing to these men, because they're not ready to share the power or to give up any control.”

Zhang’s ambition is to examine the “momentous” social changes China is undergoing and their effect on ordinary people. “Both the unrelenting spirit and weakness in humanity are being shown up more obviously than before. Materialism, idealism, collectivism and freedom are all big words which are [actually] deeply integrated in people's real lives. I want to write the untold stories, so my readers can remember what China was and understand what it will someday be. I’ll keep writing until the day I die, that's who I am.”

To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here or explore some of the links below:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Beijing Night
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law

Monday 25th November is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

Trigger warning. From Karen Ingala Smith and all text (c) her:

Monday 25th November it is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I’ll be highlighting the UK’s shocking record of women killed through male violence in 2013.

Starting at 6.00am, on the twitter account @countdeadwomen, I’ll be going through the UK’s diary of women killed by men. I’ll be starting with the 2nd January when Janelle Duncan Bailey was strangled by ex-boyfriend Jerome McDonald, moving on to 3rd January at 6.10, when Akua Agyuman died, two months after being stabbed in the chest and abdomen by her husband Minta Adiddo. Every 10 minutes, I’ll move through the year to commemorate all the women who I have found who were killed though men’s violence. So far I know of 112 women killed this year, so I’ll still be tweeting at midnight.

Thank you all for your support. We’ve reached 2,500 signatures now but I'm still the one doing the counting. As I've said all along, I'll keep doing it, until I'm convinced the government is doing enough!

Images of some of the women killed by male violence in the UK at a rate of 2 per week

The text on the campaign page lobbying the UK government to Stop Ignoring Dead Women [please click and sign in solidarity] reads as follows:

On New Year’s Day, 2012, 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar got a text from her boyfriend Myles Williams:

Okay wer all gud now and my new yrs ressy is that I aint going to hit u again and I won't hit u 4 this yr next yr the yr after that the next yr after that.

The next day he broke into her family’s home, stabbed her brother and sister as they tried to help, then he dragged Kirsty into the back of his mother's car and drove her away. She was found dead 2 miles away, dumped behind a wheelie bin. Kirsty had been stabbed 29 times.

Michael Atherton, 42, also sent a New Year text. Shortly before midnight, he sent a text to his partner, Susan McGoldrick, saying he was going out and would spend the night away because he didn’t like her sister Alison Turnbull, 44, with whom she was spending the evening. But Susan and Alison came home before he had left. Atherton, who held a gun licence despite a history of arrests for domestic violence dating back 10 years, shot Susan, Alison and Alison’s 24 year old daughter Tanya, before killing himself.

On New Year’s Day, Aaron Mann, 31 repeatedly hit Claire O’Connor, 38, with a blunt object before smothering her with a pillow. Her badly beaten body was found wrapped in her son’s sleeping bag and covered in a sheet in the boot of her car on January 2.

On 3rd of January John McGrory used a dog lead to strangle 39-year-old Marie McGrory. Garry Kane, 41, killed his 87-year-old grandmother Kathleen Milward, though 15 blunt force trauma injuries on her head and neck.

So, by the end of the third day of January 2012, seven women in the UK had been murdered by men, three were shot, one was strangled, one was stabbed, one was beaten then smothered and one was killed through fifteen blunt force trauma injuries. Perhaps because it was the beginning of the year, I just started counting, and once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. Since then, I’ve counted 199 women killed through suspected male violence. I urge you to read Karen Ingala Smith's site for more information.

At first I counted women killed through domestic violence. Then, on March 9th 2012, Ahmad Otak stabbed and killed Samantha Sykes, 18 and Kimberley Frank, 17. Otak wasn’t the boyfriend of either of them, but of Elisa Frank, Kimberley’s sister. After killing Kimberly and Samantha in from of Eliza, he abducted Eliza and drove to Dover in an attempt to escape to France. The murders of Samantha and Kimberley don’t fit the definition of domestic violence, but they’re absolutely about a man trying to exert power, control and coercion in his relationship. Their deaths made it clear to me that concentrating on what we see as domestic violence isn’t enough. It’s wider than that. The murders of Kimberley and Samantha by were no less about male violence against women that they would have been if he had been the boyfriend of one of them.

Then there’s Andrew Flood, a taxi-driver who strangled and robbed Margaret Biddolph, 78 and Annie Leyland, 88. When I learned he’d also robbed a third woman it was clear to me that there was a pattern to his actions. In fact, last year, five older women, aged between 75 and 88 were killed by much younger men, aged between 15 and 43 as they were robbed or mugged, including Irene Lawless, 68 who was raped, beaten and strangled by 26 year old Darren martin. The murders of Margaret, Annie andIrene were not any less about misogyny, than those of women killed by someone they were related to. So my list doesn’t just include women killed though domestic violence. We have to stop seeing the killings of women by men as isolated incidents. We have to put them together. We have to stop ignoring the connections and patterns.

The Home Office currently records and published data on homicide victims and the relationship of the victim to the principal suspect and sex of the victim. This does not do enough to tell us about fatal male violence against women:

1. It doesn’t tell us about the sex of the killer

2. It doesn’t connect the different forms of male violence against women

3. It dehumanises women.

The statistic ‘on average two women a week are killed through domestic violence in England and Wales’ is well known but we don't seem to feel horror in our response to this. The murders of some women barely cause a murmur; lots don’t make it into the national media. And so the connections, the horror, the patterns, the deaths continue in silence. Unnoticed. Ignored.

Ultimately, I want to see men stop killing women.

I have launched this campaign, Counting Dead Women because I want to see a fit-for-purpose record of fatal male violence against women. I want to see the connections between the different forms of fatal male violence against women. I want Domestic Homicide Review reports to be accessible from a single central source. I want to see a homicide review for every sexist murder. I want the government to fund an independently run Femicide Observatory , where relationships between victim and perpetrator and social, cultural and psychological issues are analysed. I want to believe that the government is doing everything it can to end male violence against women and girls. And I think the government should be recording and commemorating women killed through male violence – not me, a lone woman in a bedroom in east London

Let’s start counting dead women, not ignoring them. If you want us as a society, the press and the government to stop ignoring dead women, if you want us to find ways to stop women being killed, please join me, add your voice and sign this petition.

All text (c) Karen Ingala Smith

Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism, ed. Kira Cochrane

A landmark anthology of feminist writing covers forty years of zeal, wit and outrage.



The cover of Women of the Revolution.
Spot any pink? *satisfied grin*

 Can you hear that noise? It’s the sound of rebellion – one which reverberates ever louder with each successive page of this collection, which ought to be bought up, kissed, studied and prescribed by and to every woman, man, library, bookshop, cultural historian and gender studies university department in the world. Women of the Revolution is itself revolutionary in being a feminist book which does not feature any ‘ironic’ pink inking, dolls, body parts, models or other bullshit on its cover. Edited and selected by the Guardian’s women’s editor (and now staff writer) Kira Cochrane, it’s a compendium of some of the newspaper’s feminist writing from 1971 to April 2010.

Full disclosure A: one of my briefer columns (a tame one) is in it. Disclosure B: in the run up to the publication of the collection, Kira Cochrane and I have been speaking at some of the many events which are part of the current resurgence of feminist activism in this country. She has talked about the book and the inspirations and challenges of putting it together, so I’ve learned something about the thinking behind Women of the Revolution, which I am drawing on here. There were many articles to choose from in the 1970s, from interviews with Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller and Simone de Beauvoir to features on women workers uniting and striking, the dismissal of men’s violence against women and attitudes to rape. The tone of these pieces is so fresh, inquisitive, exploratory and new that one is filled afresh with the energy of these political pioneers, putting into words what so many millions of women have felt. Shocking, though, that Brownmiller's famous book about rape, Against Our Will, is still so very pertinent.

In the 80s, however, there is a noticeable change as the decade wears on. The fire and inspiring rage of features about the Yorkshire Ripper case, the genius of Maya Angelou, a day at Spare Rib and the brave women of the Greenham Common anti-nuclear demonstration becomes more circumspect, more nuanced and shadowy, more troubled. There are thrilling (to me as a critic and reader) and painful (to me as a woman) articles on that particular intersection of misogyny and racism, Judaism and Islam and their attitudes to women, the challenge of making a feminism that is truly global and the first appearance of writer Joan Smith, a heroine of mine, who confronts the normality and banality of misogyny: “Women-haters are not freaks or outcasts....but ordinary men,” runs the strapline.

Compared to the other decades in Women of the Revolution, the 80s are thin and wary. It is awfully tempting to put the blame, not on male perpetrators, whose hatred and violence have never really wavered, but on one Margaret Thatcher, a woman who used her great power to make sure no other woman got anywhere near the Cabinet. As Kira said at one talk, laughing ruefully, “Thatcher pretty much killed feminism. And then we were onto the nineties and this strange thing called post-feminism. Which is funny, because that phrase presupposes that there was a feminist era, which we have now moved beyond. If there was a feminist era I’d really like to hear about it.”

What we hear about in the Guardian during the 1990s may have been written in a general climate of gender-political complacency, but it is some of the most thrilling and confrontational writing in this collection, because it makes a global, precise, holistic and ultimately devastating critique of women’s position on a broad scale. It is tough, enthralling reading, tackling women who kill violent and abusive partners, systematic rape in war, women’s survival despite violence, Catholicism and misogyny (spotting a theme here, feminist religion watchers? It’s not going so well for the holy men, those pious-faced pricks), the perceived ‘whiteness’ of Anglo-American feminism and appearances from women writers who are still stars of the paper, like Maya Jaggi, bell hooks, Beatrix Campbell, Germaine Greer and Catherine Bennett. Star billing goes to Andrea Dworkin for her painfully funny open letter to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Just to get it straight – he did not have sex with that woman. She sucked him off and spat his jizz on her frock. Because that’s so much better.

Come the 2000s, according to Kira, and obvious from this collection, the intensification and sheer urgency of feminist feeling has been reflected in the number and range of features. Each piece crackles with anger, yes, but this section of Women of the Revolution shows a marked change in tone. Underneath the ire, the humour, the punchiness and brilliance of the writing is a haunted, prowling chagrin that while so much has changed, so much remains the same. The challenge of achieving equal pay, the endemic nature of male violence against women, the question of police attitudes, sexual harassment... these issues are revisited with ever greater brilliance and incisiveness, but deeper despair. How long must we say the same things, turning ourselves inside out as we writhe in frustration while the perpetrators continue abusing and the apologists, those civilised men and women, the writers, the judges, the officials, the businesspeople, the friends of friends, the politicians, the commentariat, the dinner party guests, carry on victim-blaming?

In addition to this, though, the 2000s section very clearly reflects certain new aspects of mainstream culture, of the general society in which we all live, and which shape both women and men. These new aspects may well be a reason for feminism’s revived zeal, along with the across-the-board outrage at the Con-Dem chaps’ cabinet of Eton-educated wankers, who between them have put together a budget which punishes women. The tackiness, objectification and outright misogyny of so-called raunch culture, attitudes to working mothers, the effects of the pornification of culture, the mainstreaming of the sex exploitation industry, the realities of sex work and the consequences of porn on young men’s and women’s intimate relationships are all examined.

Feminism is about to change the world again. It did it during the Suffragette era. It did it in the 1970s. It’s doing it now, at last. It doesn’t, I admit, feel like it when you’re in the middle of it. But Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism is proof of our triumphs and a testament to our achievements, as well as a sometimes heartbreaking record of what is done to us. Many of the issues written about with such concern and revelation in the early pages of the book are now theoretical ‘givens’ in the fight for justice, emancipation and equality. The extent and seriousness of domestic violence, relationship abusiveness, rape, harassment and discrimination are accepted if not resolved. Western women’s participation in the world and our fundamental human right to have a say in what happens to us are accepted, happily or grudgingly. We are able to blow the whistle on misogyny – we can even take the government to court. And yet still, despite that, we exist in the gaps between the lies and myths told about us, the violence done to us, the excuses of those who condone the perpetrators, the use of our labour and the never-ending sneer/jeer/leer/exploit/ignore creed of regular, normal, ‘civilised’ society.

Women of the Revolution is an inspiration to activism, a spur to creativity, a spark to fellow-feeling, a prompt to sisterly glee and a brazen, honest, wide-ranging collection. It is extremely readable and funny and very, to use a patronising word, accessible. As the closing feature, an interview with the brilliant Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, demonstrates, it is women’s famous strength and resilience, our ability to fight without violence, which will see us through the next forty years, whatever they bring. The last words salute her, as they salute every woman in these inspiring pages, and every avid reader, and every woman who has thought or felt that something wasn’t quite right, and did something about it: “A fighter to the last.”

Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism, edited by Kira Cochrane, is published by Guardian Books, £18.99