Drama Queen, Moaning Minnie, Jailbait? What's in a label? Shockingly, but also intriguingly, a body part of the mountaineer Sandy Irvine has been found on Mount Everest. He disappeared in 1924, and the find consisted of a boot and a sock containing the remains of his foot. We only know his name because of the embroidered name label neatly sewn into his sock. Those of us of a certain age will have mixed memories of name labels. Schools frequently demanded that they be attached to all garments, including those compulsory and terrible navy-blue knickers required for girls’ PE lessons. Shoes also had to be identifiable, and regular inspections ensured compliance. Name labels were as much a part of school life as textbooks covered in wallpaper and tiny bottles of tepid milk at break time. And of course, they are still quite useful for schools and other institutions, although now they are more likely to be adhesive and come in a variety of colours with added images of footballs, unicorns...

SHUT UP! ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence’ As a starting point, and for a bit of a change, let’s begin on a pious note, with a biblical quotation. The ponderous words above are allegedly those of St Paul writing to his follower Timothy, a missionary. In fact, we may actually be looking at an early example of fake news as there is some debate about the authenticity of the epistle. But hey, when did a questionable piece of information ever stop anyone for relaying it (and in this case literally) as gospel truth? Ways of silencing women have persisted since the year dot. In Women and Power  Mary Beard describes what she calls the first example in Western literature of a man telling a woman to shut up. In The Odyssey , when Penelope enters a public area of the palace to make a complaint, her son, Telemachus, tells her to be silent, return to her own rooms and do women’s work, reminding her that public life is the exclusive re...

  August Reflections The Dog Days In late July and August, Sirius (known as the Dog Star), appears to rise at the same time as the sun. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the belief was that the combined heat of the two stars led to intolerable blazing hot weather, which in turn resulted in thunderstorms, fires, drought, high fever, and madness – a period known as the dog days. Today the phrase tends to evoke the hot, lazy days of summer, and until recently this time of year has been known as the ‘silly season’, described by the Cambridge Dictionary as a time:  ‘usually in the summer, when newspapers are full of stories that are not important because there is no important, especially political, news’.  The silly season, if it ever really existed, is now in the past, and today’s news bulletins are more likely to lead to despair. Wars are raging around the world with scant hopes for peaceful resolutions. The climate emergency is terrifying. In Britain, dreadful harms have been inf...

If you live to be eighty, you will have survived for about four thousand weeks. Which doesn’t really sound very much, although as Harold Wilson said, ‘A week is a long time in politics.’  It can also be a long time in women’s lives. The week of 19-26 July 2024 has included Joe Biden stepping down as a candidate for the US elections, a full week of business for the new British government, and several important and disturbing reports. As the week ended the Paris Olympics began, and another eventful week is now unfolding. If we unpick some events in a little more detail, we might conclude that it has been a bit of an emotional journey for women, offering hope, anger, joy, cynicism, excitement and despair, often all at the same time. Of course, many women may not have experienced any of those emotions – or even noticed some of these events. But the sensitive antennae of the members of Milton Keynes Fawcett Group have been twitching energetically recently – you can find more about this ...

  The struggle The few terse words above are from Susan B Antony (1820-1906), the American social reformer and women’s rights activist. She worked tirelessly, travelling miles, organising petitions, giving speeches, and promoting women’s suffrage. Her name may not be as familiar to us as those of the Pankhursts and Millicent Fawcett, but her words here are crisp and accurate. Women’s struggle for voting rights took years and years, with abuse, pain and hardship along the way. The fight for suffrage has been well documented, and it’s unusual to find anyone who has not heard about the suffragetttes. So one might think that a decision NOT to vote should be unthinkable. But millions of people who are eligible to vote in the GE on July 4th will not be putting pencil to ballot paper. People may decide not to vote because of apathy, disillusionment, anger or despair - all these may play a part, and there is much to be explored to understand the current sense of malaise that some people fe...

Justice Denied This month’s blog should probably be focusing on the General Election that has just been announced. After all, there are only a few weeks to go until July 4th. Not quite yet though. Soon we’ll be inundated with the vox-pops, the polls, the debates and the party-political broadcasts. But before the party campaigners with their rosettes, leaflets, banners, buses and megaphones get underway, there’s some unfinished business. Let’s take a look at some different campaigners, remarkable women and men who deserve our total admiration. We’ve seen a lot of these campaigners recently. As the dismal and squalid procession of scandals and cover-ups has grown larger, we’ve become aware of people who have devoted years of their lives to exposing terrible wrongs. People who have been denied justice, who have lost their livelihoods and whose families have been devastated. People who, in spite of experiencing terrible personal trauma, have found the courage and resilience to speak out a...

May 2nd will usher in a round of local elections across the country. Sooner or later there will also be a general election. If a candidate comes knocking at your door, or catches you in the street, do you have questions ready to ask them?  Will you be able to pin them down and get answers that make some kind of sense? Women from the Milton Keynes Fawcett Group have been thinking and talking about these issues and putting some ideas together. How can Milton Keynes become a better place for women to live and work? How can the wellbeing of the whole population be improved by making our city safer, healthier and fairer? And of course, these ideas and questions are not restricted to MK – they can broadly apply to any setting, large or small, village, town or city. Here are our thoughts. We’ll be putting them together in the form of a manifesto. It’s a work in progress and we are showing it here in a shorter format before the upcoming local elections. More detailed flyers and posters wil...

Skipping to the Loo! Joining the Queue Marylebone railway station is rather a nice place. Some splendid Victorian architecture, a florist, coffee bars and an airy, friendly atmosphere. A pleasant place to arrive, until you leave your busy train and need to access the ladies loo quickly. Looking around you might notice an odd little construction advertising the dubious joys of Bicester village and staffed by enthusiastic young people in fancy dress. Nestling behind it and near to the posh chocolate stall, you will spy the weary queue for the toilets. You know that queue. Your visits to cinemas, theatres, motorway services, festivals and other events have taught you all about recognising that queue and all its implications. But, hey, you’ve actually found the loos. And they are open.  And at least you are not visiting one of those places where you have to take potluck on the likelihood of finding anywhere at all. Sometimes you are fortunate and find a central, visible, well signposte...

  THINGS ARE DISMAL. IS POLLYANNA THE ANSWER? In the past, the emphasis in these blogs has often been about searching for glimmers of ‘hope’ rather than relying on relentless optimism. We’ve been a bit sniffy about bouncy positivity, the ‘Hello clouds, hello sky’ way of seeing the world. Little Miss Sunshine does not go down well with gritty realists and to call someone a ‘Pollyanna’ can be a bit of an insult. We are women who roll up our sleeves and confront. But frankly, at the moment, a bit of vacuous joyfulness might actually be quite nice. Because, well, everything is really pretty awful. It’s hard to escape from an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Whether you are trying to find a dentist, looking for a decent public toilet, or standing aghast at what’s happening on the world’s stage and wondering about any prospects for peace, justice and a decent environment, it’s the same feeling – that of your head banging fruitlessly against a wall. The original nightmare vision of th...

EQUALITY? FREEDOM? FAIRNESS? ELECTIONS IN 2024 So many elections! Two billion people are eligible to vote this year, and more than 60 countries will be holding elections. The freedom and fairness of these elections will vary. The results of some of them are in the bag already, before even a single vote is cast, and others will take place in dangerous and unpredictable circumstances. Two major elections have already taken place this year. In Bangladesh, following mass arrests of opposition activists, the unsurprising result was to keep the sitting premier for another year. Taiwan also voted to keep their president, but citizens did so in the full knowledge that this would incur the wrath of China which insisted that ‘the motherland will eventually be reunified’. Ukraine is due to hold a presidential election on March 31st this year, but their state of martial law may lead to a postponement. Other elections, from Mexico to Somaliland and from Tuvalu to Russia are all scheduled for this y...

Grit your teeth, find inspiration and get ready for 2024! Was there anything good about 2023? It’s 8.30am on Christmas Eve 2023, a blustery, grey and unseasonably mild morning. It’s very quiet, but Christmas lights have begun to glimmer in a few windows. Over in the park, two women walking their dogs wave at each other and then stop for a chat. A grandmother brings out a toddler to play on the swings and a cat sits hopefully on a doorstep, waiting to be admitted. The only disturbance comes from male blackbirds squabbling over food. There’s nothing unusual here, it’s a peaceful and familiar British suburban scene. But when the morning news comes on the radio, it’s almost unbearable. The world is covered by dark clouds, horrors upon horrors are reported from the Middle East, the ‘futile logic of war’ seems to have domination and our own relative safety can bring feelings of guilt for those of us whose lives are a comfortable exception. As 2023 ends, women and children in so many places a...

  Black History Month Special Edition Saluting Our Sisters Black History Month has been described as a time for ‘celebration, recognition and sombre reflection’. This year the theme is ‘Saluting our sisters’ and members of the Milton Keynes Fawcett Group have put together this special edition of our monthly blog to pay homage to some magnificent women. Each of us has written a short description of one woman of colour for whom we have personal admiration.  We could have chosen hundreds of women, but this is a blog after all, so we don’t have many words to play with. We’ve sneaked a few more names in at the end though and hope that you are inspired to find out more about these remarkable women. Pansy Jeffrey In 1981, Pansy Jeffrey, a Guyanese born British citizen co-founded The Pepper Pot Day Centre in London with her colleague Bridget Davies. She’d noticed that older members of the Windrush generation, having left home and family to work in the UK, were finding themselves isola...

  ‘WATCH THE WALL MY DARLING, WHILE THE GENTLEMEN GO BY’ These days we are used to hearing about the darker side of nursery rhymes. We know that ‘Ring a Ring o’Roses’ is all about the plague, and that ‘Little Miss Muffet’ probably refers to a certain Dr Muffet who crushed up spiders and used them as medicine for his patients (including his daughter). But it’s sometimes a bit unnerving to read a poem that probably seemed quite charming in its original context, but then takes on a darker meaning in the 21st Century. ‘Smugglers’ Song’ by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1930) is a rhythmic and mysterious poem, where a child is told by a parent to face the wall and to ask no questions if she hears horses' hooves at midnight: Five and twenty ponies, Trotting through the dark — Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk; Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie — Watch the wall, my darling,  While the Gentlemen go by Kipling’s smugglers are ‘gentlemen’, romantic figures bringing brandy...