Today’s hugely important guest post is from one of the loveliest bloggers around – Kylie Hodges, who you can find over at Not Even A Bag of Sugar.
The Partnership for Maternal, Child and Newborn Health is a division of the World Health Organisation and they have asked me to shout far and wide about the Newborn 2013 conference. Continue reading
It is International Women’s Day on Friday.
Last year, I marked it on my blog with a post about Save the Children’s campaign to give women around the world access to reproductive health care.
This year, my thoughts have stayed a little closer to home, and I’ve decided to acknowledge some of the many incredible women who have had a direct impact on my life.
I started the post thinking I would just mention one or two, but as I started writing I found myself overwhelmed – in a good way – and I couldn’t even begin to narrow it down like that.
Women get a lot of stick sometimes, for their cattiness or for being seen as too competitive. True enough, there are some rotten ones out there… but there are also some incredible communities of women who support and nurture each other, and they are far more worthy of our attention. I count myself very lucky that in my life so far the good eggs have outweighed the stinkers by far.
I will confess, I used to be a bit squeamish about calling myself a feminist. I thought it meant that I had to stop shaving my legs and wearing a bra, neither of which I’m prepared to do. But as I’ve grown older and, y’know, grown up a bit, I’ve realised that’s really not the case. Feminism, and women’s rights, are about issues far more fundamental than my personal grooming habits.
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Kate Adamson lives in Fife with her husband and loves pottering about in Edinburgh. She likes physics, knitting, empty museums, cake and weird facts. She blogs at blurofwoodsmoke.wordpress.com and tweets as @KateLAdamson
It’s 1994 and I’m sitting in my sixth year studies physics class. Actually, I’m perching on a high stool and jiggling my foot, a habit I wouldn’t grow out of till I quit caffeine five years later.
Outside the classroom, a male classmate (who I have either a live or a dormant crush on, I can’t remember) is talking to a girl in the year below.
“So, are there any girls in your class?” she asks.
“Kate’s in this class,” he replies.
Her tone is sarcastic “No, I said girls.”
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My Facebook feed has been chock-a-block recently with folk getting excited about the Auld Reekie Roller Girls – Edinburgh’s flat track roller derby team. I am thrilled to have a guest post about ARRG from Mairi Campbell-Jack, a poet who lives in Edinburgh with her daughter and tweets as @lumpinthethroat. I’m also super chuffed to have been given permission by the excellent Edinburgh photographer Dan Phillips to use the accompanying shots. You can find Dan on Twitter as @dan_photo, but more importantly you can check out his website here and Flickr stream here.
While on SlutWalk Edinburgh a few months ago I got a chance to start talking to another radical lefty Mum (where else does one meet her peers?) and we both started discussing our daughters and their understanding of femininity. This was something on my mind following a conversation I’d had with my daughter at a bus stop a few weeks ago.
Daughter: Mummy, why are you not beautiful today?
Me: What makes you think I’m not beautiful?
Daughter: Yesterday you wore a skirt.
As I discussed on a previous post on Barbie, I am reasonably relaxed now about letting my daughter choose her own toys and clothes, but her preoccupation with whether clothing make someone “beautiful” does tend to worry. Fellow radical lefty Mum pointed me in the direction of Roller Derby, as a great example of alternative feminities. I happened to know someone on the Edinburgh writing circuit who played and so I booked tickets to the Auld Reekie Roller Girls festival match.
I must say I was a bit sceptical as I am one of those people who have grown-up utterly hating sport. I hate everything about it, from how incredibly boring it is to the constant unremitting whine that comes from the television whenever it is on. The last time I was taken to see live sport it was an ice-hockey game, and I have no shame to say I found it so tedious that I read through the last third.
I watched Roller Derby and came away a complete convert. It’s violent (secretly I’m disappointed there wasn’t a fight), fast, fun and the women in it are really enjoying playing the sport but also using it as a way to play with their own image and express their sexuality. I wouldn’t really describe it as feminine. Feminine as a word in our culture often carries with it overtones of passivity, and Roller Derby is much more grown up than that, while maintaining a sense of playfulness I have never witnessed in other sports. While one of the often valid criticisms of many sub-cultures is the sameness of dress and make-up choice of those within it, some of whom often claim to appear to be seeking individuality, I don’t feel that can be fairly levelled at Roller Derby.
If you look at the team dress and make-up, which appears to stem directly from the Riot Grrrl tradition, then the conclusion you would come to would be that it is a very homogenous alternative – but you know, being a team they do have to wear a uniform. However, if you bother to turn around and look at the crowd you will see a very different story. The crowd is predominantly female, but there are also a lot of men in there. There are people with strange hair, tattoos and piercings. At the same time there were people of every age range, children as young as six months, families, groups of friends, people who even looked like social workers or the sort of people who buy vegan shoes and some who looked decidedly mainstream – honestly, it was like some of them weren’t even trying to be cool.
How did it affect my daughter? Well her behaviour that day wasn’t her best, she didn’t like the noise, was bored and desperate to get my attention as we had been apart for a week. She did say she wanted to go again. I went straight out and bought the t-shirt and put it on as soon as I got home.
Dorkymum | Stories from Tasmania 