Women Journalists From England

"Stock is no right-wing bigot but a mild-mannered, dry-humoured, left-wing lesbian. An acclaimed philosopher who received an OBE last year, she teaches trans students, respecting their pronouns, and has written repeatedly in support of their human rights. It is bleakly ironic that she is accused of "endangering" others just for holding heretical views, when police have warned her to stay off campus and take security measures for her personal safety."

"When Andrea, a Metropolitan Police constable, was summoned into a room by her inspector he stood up, she assumed, to greet her politely. Instead he lunged, grabbing her breasts and forcing his hands into her underwear. She froze, then aimed a kick at his groin and fled. Andrea hadn't intended to report him — "you shut up and put up with it. If you speak out, you’re finished" — but she confided in a colleague who did. Compelled to pursue a complaint, a 30-month ordeal began which ended in her dismissal for discreditable conduct in 2020. The inspector kept his job."

"Almost daily in the Met, Andrea witnessed what in any other workplace would bring a visit from HR or even instant dismissal. She was paired with an officer who liked to park near secondary schools to ogle teenage girls’ breasts; colleagues constantly watched porn on their phones; a PC, convicted of gross indecency for masturbating on a train, kept his job; men would return from domestic violence scenes saying the victim was mad and deserved a slap. If Andrea failed to laugh at such banter, colleagues would ask: "Are you on your period?" If she left her notebook lying around she'd find a penis drawn inside. Older women were "Dorises" or "white goods" (ie domestic appliances). When a young tourist disappeared, men gathered around the computer to gawp at her photograph, one saying: "She’s locked in my sex dungeon at home." When the station carpet was treated for a flea infestation they joked: "It’s for Andrea’s crabs.""

"Clearly the GRR has far-reaching implications for women. But what happens when they point this out? First, the bombastic know-alls who've ignored every female writer, lawyer and policymaker for five years pull out their manly opinions. Like Alastair Campbell, who chided Laura Kuenssberg for an interview with Sir Keir Starmer in which she dwelt on the GRR, which affects half the population — but not the important half. Or Lord Falconer, who pompously wafts away concerns, tweeting that "the vast majority" of new male GRC holders "are likely to be genuine". So what's a few women facing sexual assault or indecent exposure, an intimidated lesbian or two, or a class of girls unhappily undressing with a teenage boy? These “It might never happen, love" guys don't think women deserve legislation that protects us in principle. We're expected to pray that careless laws, framed for others' benefit, don't hurt us in practice. And if they do, it’s just an "isolated incident". Suck it up. And the next one. There’s no pattern. Let’s ignore the inconvenient truth that males commit 98 per cent of sex crime and 90 per cent of violence, whatever their gender identity."

"Mark it in your diary: the bicentenary of the Gaols Act 1823. The work of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, this landmark law mandated sex-segregated prisons with female inmates guarded by female wardens. When women were incarcerated among men, Fry observed, they were exploited, terrified and raped. She established a principle which became enshrined in international law, from UN protocols to the Geneva conventions. How, then, was history rewound, 200 years of evidence memory-holed, so that this week the double rapist Adam Graham was remanded in Cornton Vale women’s prison? How could a "robust" risk assessment by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) conclude he was safe?"

"Even so, would a state-run plan to bump off the old ever be acceptable? Since assisted dying was legalised in the Netherlands in 2002, the parameters have extended far beyond allowing a merciful release from terminal suffering — which most of us support — to include even young people with depression."

"In Canada assisted dying is available to almost anyone able to give informed consent if they first undergo counselling. Critics say euthanasia has been offered to the poor, disabled or just unhappy, including maimed military veterans."

"Yet this dystopian film has one uplifting lesson. The administrators of Plan 75 are young people: they process applicants, listen to their fears and life stories on helplines and finally hand out the death drugs with a benign indifference. They don’t hate the elderly, they just don't see them as truly human. Only when they happen to meet and forge the special bond between old and young do they see the horror of their work."

"The tribunal is a timely reminder to the left that democratic norms are precious. If you try to crush every political opponent or believe intimidation is fine when it happens to the "bad guys"; if you declare that law-breakers you agree with should go unpunished, while those you disagree with don't deserve legal representation, you are no better than Trump or Orban. Stating that a lesbian does not have a penis is an inalienable right."

"I will use female pronouns for some trans women. My rules are personal. I will call no male who commits a sexual or violent offence "she". But those who respect women, like Debbie Hayton, or those I meet in real life, I will respect. This will win me abuse on both sides: Stonewall would say the choice should not be mine; gender-critical ultras will cry traitor. But I reject all compelled speech. Using pronouns doesn't mean I no longer believe sex is real. I use them, in their original sense, as a courtesy. You can hold concerns about youth transition without screaming at a bereaved mother that her child was a boy."

"True, different views on the surge in female-to-male transition were reported brilliantly last week by the Timess Janice Turner, one of the strikingly few women willing, in the face of concerted abuse, publicly to examine complex social and medical changes the authorities seem disinclined to explore. That such women are frequently and correctly described as "brave", for all the world as if they were war correspondents, only underlines the extent to which conventionally abhorrent exhibitions of bullying and hate-speech have been allowed to flourish here – with some of our most trusted adults leading by example."

"The lasting legacy of the financial crisis on Britain’s electoral landscape was not to shift our political centre of gravity to the left, but to shake the faith of voters in the capacity of mainstream politics to provide solutions. "You’re all the same" is a common refrain heard on the doorstep. It was this cynicism that created fertile territory for the SNP and Ukip: both Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage have successfully positioned themselves against a remote Westminster elite."

"[W]atching Barack Obama charm his way into our hearts here in Britain has reminded me of how brilliant he is at – well, just talking to people. Whether addressing a nation on TV, getting a grilling from journalists or rolling up his sleeves and taking a Q&A in a roomful of young people, he knows how to connect in a way no other present-day politician can. Over the past days, we’ve seen him articulate the positive case for Britain remaining in the EU better than any UK politician has done. He’s answered tricky questions in a way that comes across as authentic and honest, even daring to say: "I don’t know" to some of them. He’s challenged people who have said things he disagrees with in a way that somehow makes you like him more. When one young woman in the "town hall" yesterday morning apologised for being emotional, he said crying was fine and joked he feared she was going to come up on stage and do a dance with him."

"If we were to carry on rolling back state-funded care in Britain, it would inevitably be women who’d feel obliged to give up work to care for older relatives, storing up financial problems for their own old age. Some ageing people without family members willing to care for them would simply fall through the cracks. Even those whose families could do this might find themselves physically taken care of but with their emotional health suffering as relationships break down under the strain. Duty might kick in, but we would be kidding ourselves if we thought we could reverse-engineer the evolutionary urge to make huge sacrifices for our children. That’s not to say that it’s not lovely when some opt for a more multi-generational family life. But it should be an active choice. Structuring the state in a way that forces people to embrace a Mediterranean approach is wrong. We can’t answer the question of how big we want the state to be without asking how much our families should feel obliged to do for us – and how much we care about the potential price in terms of growing social and gender inequality."

"Which brings me to the vegan burger. Take a step back and it seems bonkers that our political leaders hold firm on outlawing weed but seem loth to invoke the nanny state where it’s most needed: in avoiding catastrophic climate change. We won't succeed in this unless we persuade people to fly less and eat less meat and dairy. That’s a gargantuan task, made harder by the demotivating knowledge that your own efforts are only likely to matter if others match them. Yet the most politicians do is half-heartedly conjure up a few green taxes in the hope they’ll nudge people in the sort of right direction. But they’re not effective enough, and also hit the poorest most. Time for the nanny state to get more radical. We should start by banning altogether things that have literally no function, such as bottled water in a country where it’s actually safer to drink tap water. And take a leaf out of wartime Britain – climate change is no less existential a threat – and ration activities such as flying and eating meat. If you’re not that bothered about a rare steak, you can sell your coupons to someone who can’t live without a good ribeye and feel smug as you tuck into your environmentally friendly, fake-meat alternatives."

"I hoped that if anything I ever did went viral, it would be because I’d uttered some profound insight too good not to share. Last week put paid to that dream. A BBC Breakfast video clip of myself and Sherelle Jacobs, assistant comment editor at the Telegraph, from Thursday had garnered more than 4m online views by Saturday afternoon. As much as I’d like to think it was due to my incisive Brexit analysis, I have to concede it was as a result of me being well and truly upstaged. ... Our clip had inspired a series of jokey tweets on Sherelle’s startled facial expression as I imparted my pearls of wisdom. ... Sherelle has reacted to her fame with the grace of a professional. And she got a lot of love (“You ROCK!!!” one admirer tweeted). My takeaway? Those media courses that say it’s 95% how you present, 5% what you say are wrong. My partner in crime ensured 0% of what I said got heard."

"It was an effective, if painful, reminder of how racism manifests itself: not just in words such as "Paki" but in the self-appointed white gatekeepers who see it as their business to police celebrations of the contributions made, sometimes in the face of appalling racism, by people of colour. I've lost count of the number of times I've been called a racist simply for acknowledging the ethnicity of the medical professionals who gave their lives to keep us safe. So it’s worth reiterating why the skin colour of our fallen NHS heroes matters. It’s not just that outright racism and rising levels of Islamophobia affect the wellbeing of NHS workers willingly risking their lives to keep us all safe, it is that, as the General Medical Council has acknowledged, BAME medics face structural racism. And the government's anti-immigration rhetoric continues to legitimise discrimination at the frontline."

"Its simplicity may be alluring, but it is wrong and alienating to see all white people as potential Derek Chauvins, just as it is wrong and alienating in the context of #MeToo to see all men as potential Harvey Weinsteins. Blaming people may feel good but it won't lead to structural change. There has to be a middle ground: of asking people to take responsibility and to step up as allies without alienating them by telling them how terrible they are first. It's not fair or just that those who face racism and other forms of structural discrimination have to put so much thought into how they make the case for eliminating it. But we do need to develop better and non-combative approaches to helping people understand the nature of racism and how it manifests itself in society today."

"Gender-non-conforming behaviour is something to be celebrated, rather than the basis for teaching children that they may have been born in the wrong body, as some schools now do. There are many reasons why children and young people may experience gender dysphoria: it may be a sign that a child will go on to have a fixed trans identity in adulthood, but can also be associated with discomfort about puberty, grappling with same-sex attraction and childhood trauma. There is a coincidence with autism. Yet the NHS has ignored this in embracing gender ideology's unevidenced affirmative model and has put growing numbers of young people on the path of irreversible medical treatment that can make them infertile and has potentially significant risks for their brain and physical development, without adequately exploring the reasons for their gender dysphoria."

"[[Nicola Sturgeon|[Nicola] Sturgeon]] remains blinkered: she has ignored female victims of male violence, treated the concerns of the UN special rapporteur dismissively and failed to listen to young people who received appalling care from NHS Scotland and now regret their transition. Her implausible mantra remains that no man will abuse the system, women's rights are not affected and evidence reviewed by an English paediatrician has no relevance to Scottish children. Scottish Labour could still try to amend the bill to make clear that a GRC does not change someone’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. But the most likely outcome is that Sturgeon, a self-professed feminist and nationalist, will leave the door wide open for a Conservative government in Westminster to step in to protect Scottish women, by updating the Equality Act to clarify its sex-based protections for women apply only to those who are biologically female."

"[On the probation service in England and Wales] Just like in every other part of the criminal justice system, there is a fatal minimisation of the risk that violent men pose to women and children. Monitoring resembles box-ticking rather than a dynamic assessment of risk. Is this offender complying with his licence conditions (and even on this basic test there have been serious failures)? Is he in a new relationship? Might he come into contact with children? It takes a sophisticated professional to see through the manipulation of a narcissistic male abuser in order to accurately assess those risks."

"The downside for gender ideology campaigners is that their position has been subject to far more forensic examination in the courts than they previously experienced in parliament or civil society. In court, Mermaids' chair made the extraordinary claim that it doesn’t "give advice on medical stuff" despite evidence that it has lobbied the NHS to lower the age limit for medical transition and helped draft NHS service specifications. Another witness for Mermaids claimed that anyone can identify as a lesbian, whether or not they are female. In other court cases, Stonewall witnesses have effectively argued that it is transphobic to distinguish between gender identity and sex."

"I've had attempts to try and get me kicked off charitable boards. I've been doxxed [having personal information published] online by people who disagree with me on this issue. I've had my home address published online. It's just an example of how toxic and polarised this debate is."

"Women account for three-quarters of criminal convictions for watching live TV services or BBC iPlayer without a licence, and a huge chunk of all criminal convictions against women, one-third, are for non-payment of the licence. Are women really 50% more likely to engage in evasion than men, or are they getting disproportionately lumbered with convictions?"

"The one thing we do have system-wide information on, though, is the huge gender-based disparities in the conviction rate. Under pressure, the BBC last year commissioned an investigation into why the burden falls so heavily on women: it is because women are more likely to head single-parent households; more likely to be home when an inspector visits; more likely to answer the door to an inspector; and more likely to be living in poverty or in low-paid work and struggling with bills."

"There was something unsettling about the serried ranks of New Labour women elected on 1 May last year [1997]. All those structured smiles and cheerful jackets gathered round our leader made me feel like a bad-tempered Daily Mail reader or one of those glorious man-hating feminists of myth who live in Hackney and refuse to shave their legs. What I hadn’t realised was that this unmonstrous regiment of women came much closer to representing the end of something – feminism as a natural ally of radical politics – than to representing a key moment in the long march through the institutions. Nor had I imagined that so many of them would become part of that blancmange known as one-nation politics. There are many reasons why they have proved such a disappointment. Personal ambition is one. Most new MPs live in fear of marginalisation, of being banished to the Siberia of consistently applied principle, of having to face up to the fact that they will never be a bag-carrier for an Under-Secretary of State. Sisterly solidarity, too, plays a part. Top Labour women are ferociously loyal to each other, but their loyalty has so far furthered no cause greater than the right of cabinet ministers to send their children to selective schools or to have their minds changed over tobacco sponsorship of Formula One."

"There’s no doubt that a Corbyn win would pose an enormous challenge for the centre-right of the party, but the many MPs who oppose him can surely sit on their hands or plot, or both, for only so long. The task is even greater for the member for Islington North, borne in on a wave of popular feeling. If his leadership were to succeed, it would need to be exceptionally generous, imaginative and inclusive. It would have to forge fresh alliances, take surprising positions and make unexpected compromises. Hardie the seer, the agitator, inspires those of us who believe Labour needs to present a bolder alternative to the Conservatives. Hardie the diffident party leader reminds us that we still have a lot to learn about how to shape “divine discontent” into a credible and popular programme."

"But Hardie’s political trajectory also serves as an important warning to any contemporary radical leader in parliament, the one bit of the job many claim Corbyn cannot do. A strong believer in representative democracy, Hardie nonetheless loathed the deal-making and elitism of parliament itself and was widely acknowledged as a poor leader of the party in the Commons for the very short period he undertook the job from 1906 to 1907."

"When it comes to the politics of agitation, Jeremy Corbyn is Hardie’s clear heir. Were Hardie alive in the 21st century he would surely have opposed the Iraq war, visited the Occupy encampments, supported those activists fighting against the "social cleansing" of London and denounced austerity. A charismatic public speaker who frequently addressed huge crowds, he would have recognised the enthusiasm and fervour of the mass audiences that Corbyn has attracted across the country, which so many thought dead in the age of Twitter and Facebook."

"If a week is a long time in politics, a century can seem surprisingly short. With uncanny timing, the centenary of the death of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader and arguably its most towering figure, falls at the end of this month, on the very weekend that Labour delegates will gather in Brighton for this year’s annual conference, the first under the party’s new leader."

"A quarter of a century on, the Grunwick dispute remains one of the most significant in modern industrial history. In a sense, the strike was typical of a pattern of similar disputes before and since: a factory with a few hundred workers, a slowly building sense of injustice and a long standoff between employer and worker. But even then, Grunwick seemed a different kind of battle. This was a historic meeting between a traditional trade unionism, still relatively sure of its power, and a growing band of black and Asian workers who were beginning to find an industrial and political voice. Arthur Scargill bought down his Yorkshire miners in a bus - there was even fighting talk of shutting the pits. Grunwick workers travelled to more than 2,000 workplaces over 40 weeks to enlist support. The strike seemed to draw in every progressive movement of the day. "Black and white unite and fight" demanded the banners in Chapter road. Socialist feminists did their picket duty and wrote sternly of the military tactics of their trade union brothers. Jayaben Desai, in her sari and white cardigan, handbag crooked over her arm, was a feminist heroine of the age. Yet perhaps the most lasting consequence of Grunwick and other mass disputes during the 1970s were some of the anti-union laws of the 1980s, particularly those outlawing mass pickets. Today, it is possible to see more clearly the fraud that lay at the heart of the argument advanced by what was then called the "new right", particularly over Grunwick. A few hundred Asian men and women asking for the right to join a union and negotiate from within it was hardly the best example of an overweening and arrogant union movement it claimed was running the country. By any reckoning, Grunwick was a just cause, whose supporters included moderates such as Shirley Williams. In 1977, an independent court of inquiry chaired by Lord Scarman criticised mass picketing but upheld the workers' claim to union recognition. But it was a lost cause: George Ward, the Grunwick owner, refused to give in. This, despite a last-ditch hunger strike by Mrs Desai and four colleagues on the steps of the TUC. The strike fizzled out in early 1978. No walkout since, bar the miners' strike of 1984-5, has quite achieved Grunwick's fame or progressive significance. In the early 1980s, I went to a small factory near Birmingham to cover a similar dispute, led by a group of Asian workers protesting about pay and conditions and the right to union recognition. This time, the streets were empty. As union power declined, so did media coverage - if there's no punch-up, so what?"

"I did not start out in state schools. Like so many children of Labour politicians in the 60s, my brothers and I began our education in the private sector. My parents, Tony and Caroline Benn, decided to move us all to state schools around 1963 on the grounds that it was hypocritical to back comprehensives for everyone else and then educate your own children privately. In some people's eyes, this made us four children a collective sacrifice, a living social experiment. We felt only lucky. Our nearest comprehensive was Holland Park, which cynics so enjoyed deriding as a showcase comprehensive and therefore a place of privilege. (If I had a pound for the number of times people have said to me, "Holland Park? Oh that wasn't a real comprehensive!" I could have paid for a year of private schooling, easy.) Holland Park was one of the first purpose-built comprehensives in the country but it was also, by the time I got there in the late 60s, a large rumbustious institution, which drew in a small, albeit highly publicised, section of the middle class who lived around the school. Some of these, like my mother, Caroline, became passionately committed to both the school itself - she was governor of Holland Park for 35 years - and the wider comprehensive cause. My brother Hilary remembers the strangeness of arriving at Holland Park for the first time after attending Westminster preparatory school, where he and my eldest brother Stephen had been usefully designated as Benn I and Benn II. He can still remember how huge the school buildings looked to him and the strange sound of so many boys - and girls - laughing and running and talking in the vast playgrounds."

"[B]ack in 2006, I pitched a piece about the phenomena of so-called grooming gangs operating in former mill towns in the north of England. As we now know, a sizable majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim origin, because that was the demographic of young men in those towns. I took the story to the Sunday Times, where it was published in September 2007, four years before The Times ran its first piece (in January 2011) by Andrew Norfolk, who was credited with breaking the story. Norfolk had been given five months to research the phenomenon and it turned into the massive story I had suggested, way back in 2006; Viner, though, had seemed more concerned with being labelled "Islamophobic"."

"Viner's pursuit of the Tortoise deal has been absurd and deranged [...] It represents a failure of duty of care to her staff, and crass mismanagement. To value the Observer brand at £1 is craven. And [[w:James Harding (journalist)|[James] Harding's]] Tortoise deal doesn't stack up."

"Viner likes to deny it but there are antisemites on the daily's staff and she has not had the courage to face them down. For years now I have made a point of sending her a back channel email each time the Guardian has published another outrage. It will be a joy to know that I'm not a part of that anymore."

"When she was appointed the first female [Guardian] Editor in Chief, in 2015, my feminist crowd were pleased, because she had long prioritised women's issues, and in particular the campaign against male violence."

"I once asked if a friend, a teacher from Huddersfield, could cook for him so that she could put it on her CV – "cooked for Alan Rickman" (it made sense at the time). He not only said yes, but acted as her sous-chef and rustled up a top politician and a Hollywood actor as fellow guests. When asked recently about his proudest Royal Court moment, his answer was not about him: he said it was when he took Rachel Corrie’s parents outside the front of the theatre to show them their late daughter’s name in neon lights."

"Being open can bring you great scoops, too. My favourite example of this was during the 2009 London protests against the G20 meeting, when our reporter, Paul Lewis, was investigating what happened to a newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who had collapsed and died while walking through the protests. The pathologist reported that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack. We were searching for eyewitnesses. We put callouts on Twitter and on the Guardian site, and within hours Paul was contacted by a Guardian reader in the US. This man was an investment fund manager who had been in London on business; he'd slipped out of his meetings to have a look at the protests, and film them on his smartphone. On reading our callout at his home in New York, he looked back at his footage, and discovered very clear images showing Ian Tomlinson being shoved to the ground by a policeman. As you can imagine, it was a big scoop. Although the police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, he was later dismissed for gross misconduct. The pathologist has been struck off. In August the police settled a civil action by the Tomlinson family by issuing a formal apology and agreeing to pay compensation. None of this would have happened if the Guardian hadn't been open to the web, with international reach."

"[On preparing the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie with Alan Rickman] But the quantity of the material left us with a series of questions. How much of Rachel’s life before she went to Gaza should we include? And should we quote other people? The trend in political theatre, from David Hare’s The Permanent Way to Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantánamo, is journalistic: the use of testimony, of interviews and on-the-record material rather than invention. But for us there could be no re-interviewing to fill in the gaps. We had a finite amount of words to work with, as Rachel was dead. I was very keen to use some of the emails that Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig, sent to their daughter while she was in Gaza. They are full of the kind of worries any parent might have if their child was in a dangerous situation, but because Rachel never came home, they have a devastating poignancy. ... And what about the voices of Rachel’s friends? I interviewed many fellow ISM activists, most of whom have been deported from Israel since her death. We watched tapes of two of the moving memorial services: one in Gaza, which was shot at by the Israeli army, another in Olympia. We viewed documentaries on the subject, most notably Sandra Jordan’s powerful The Killing Zone, and considered using video grabs. But in the end the power of Rachel’s writing meant that, apart from a few short passages quoting her parents and an eye witness report of her death, her words were strong enough to stand alone."

"Youth crime is an obsession for today's politicians, but in a small town in the 1980s there didn't seem to be much about. I came across drugs only when I met some wild boys from the exotic metropolis that is Thirsk. The violent crime I heard about, meanwhile, was largely distant and always terrifying: at primary school I was petrified of the Yorkshire Ripper until he was caught in 1981; later I was deeply troubled by the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh in 1986. The crimes the young people I knew were committing were the taping of the Top 20 from the radio (which was made especially glamorous because of the urban myth that someone from Leeds had gone to jail for it), underage drinking and smoking dope. No one I knew was arrested. However, my diary held a pleasing reminder that even a goody-two-shoes high-achiever like me got into trouble with the law. Our school, a Yorkshire state school, had made it to the London finals of a debating competition, previously the preserve of top public schools. The team was Simon, my political enemy (he was Tory, I was Labour; today he is a New Labour councillor), and me. We won, and to celebrate Simon and I and our supporters took over a flat in Fleet Street to which someone had the key, drank until the sun came up and were visited by the police at 5am, just as a fellow pupil was demonstrating how to wear an elephant-trunk thong he had bought earlier. Who could complain about the youth of today?"

"The second low point, I remember very clearly, was on February 9. I was way behind schedule, so took a day's holiday from work with the aim of reading three novels - one each in the morning, afternoon and evening. The first book was Anne Tyler's fabulous The Amateur Marriage, which was about mistakes and regret and which I found deeply affecting. I cried in my local cafe. The second book was Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen, a superb but cruel book about terrible things. I sobbed the entire time I was reading it. This was in a different cafe. That evening, at home, I read Stella Duffy's devastating novel about terminal cancer and death, and how it is worse to die than be left behind, and, well, I could hardly walk. The trouble with really good novels is that they make you engage, make you experience the emotions of the characters as if they were your own. It was a terrible day, and yet these remained three favourites for me throughout the judging process."

"The classic example of such a coloniser was Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, as described in Leila Ahmed's seminal Women and Gender in Islam. Cromer was convinced of the inferiority of Islamic religion and society, and had many critical things to say on the "mind of the Oriental". But his condemnation was most thunderous on the subject of how Islam treated women. It was Islam's degradation of women, its insistence on veiling and seclusion, which was the "fatal obstacle" to the Egyptian's "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation," he said. The Egyptians should be "persuaded or forced" to become "civilised" by disposing of the veil. And what did this forward-thinking, feminist-sounding veil-burner do when he got home to Britain? He founded and presided over the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, which tried, by any means possible, to stop women getting the vote. Colonial patriarchs like Cromer believed that middle-class Victorian mores represented the pinnacle of civilisation, and set about implementing this model wherever they went - with women in their rightful, subservient place, of course. They wanted merely to replace eastern misogyny with western misogyny."

"Say no to the mutilation of your flesh with knives, vacuum suction and poison, and that means you are irresponsible."

"I must respect myself; after all, I wash my hair with Fructis. Similar justifications lie behind the rise in cosmetic surgery (up 50% in the past five years in Britain): that it makes women feel better about themselves, complete, free from their flaws. While women flock to surgeons to have gruesome operations with often calamitous consequences, while cosy Boots the chemist offers injections of poison to paralyse expression muscles in the face, the surgery spin meisters sell it as a quasi-feminist act to take control of your body."

"The scandal of the medicalisation of birth is not new; from the 1960s, activists such as Ina May Gaskin and Sheila Kitzinger have fought against the interventionist tide that sees birth as an illness, rather than part of a woman's "wellness cycle". But it is a scandal that has reached extraordinary proportions: in 30 years, the Caesarean rate in Britain has more than trebled; one baby in five is now delivered this way. (The US figure varies from 50% for healthy, middle-class women in their 30s and 40s in private hospitals, to between 1% and 15% for those in public hospitals.) Of course, Britain is different from America in that the market does not rule healthcare - US hospitals get a $1,000 bonus for every epidural requested. But the story is absolutely relevant here, with doctors under increasing pressure to avoid litigation, a severe shortage of midwives, the increasing popularity of elective Caesareans for women who are constantly told that vaginal childbirth is traumatic and terrible, and the threats of private interests entering the health service."

"[[Germaine Greer|[Germaine] Greer]]'s new book is an exciting reminder of how discrimination against women stops them, physically, from being 'the whole woman'. 'Your cellulite is you,' she says. It might sound obvious; but what a thrill to talk about owning our bodies, about being who we are. This is where the equality-seekers get it wrong, and liberationists like Greer get it right. Because how we feel about our bodies has an impact on whether we get paid the same. Of course we'll never get equal status if we're spending all our time and energy worrying about our thighs. Of course we'll never get equal pay if we ask for it wearing a baby-doll slip. What has equality legislation done for women anyway? The Equal Pay Act came into force 29 years ago and yet a woman still earns 79p for every £1 a man earns doing the same job. Women may be entering the workforce in record numbers, but with little pay and no security. Saying we should concentrate only on equal pay doesn't even get you equal pay."

"Our model is the amazing Jill Tweedie, a former columnist on the Guardian. Her close friend Polly Toynbee told me that after a diagnosis of motor neurone disease – the condition that drove Diane Pretty to battle for the right to die – Jill calmly acquired the medication needed for a sure and safe despatch. She booked herself into a hospice for what she told her family was a short respite and took her tablets whilst she was still capable of self administration, but in a setting where it would be professionals who would find her body rather than those close to her."

"Her weekly column became an icon of all that was hairy and terrifying to men who found the women's movement a threat to their security. She was parodied, ridiculed and attacked. Mostly, though, she became a focal voice of women all over Britain who wrote to her in their thousands and took courage from her to look at the truth about their lives. ... Her radicalism never wavered but her honesty demanded that she explore the ambivalences feminists like her were scarcely able to confess to themselves, let alone to the world. The result was "Letters From A Faint-hearted Feminist", a new series of columns in which issues of central feminist ideology were put through the same critical wringer as the unthinking patriarchal orthodoxies that had been in her earlier columns. Could not you wear high heels with a boiler suit? Were beautiful clothes a gorgeous prison, or a legitimate choice for independent women? Was monogamy inevitably a road to servitude? The cleverness of those columns was Jill's ability to admit to ambivalence, to weakness and to changing her mind without compromising her beliefs in equality, independence and the destructiveness of stereotypes. In their way, they were a bridge between the revolutionary battlefields of the 70s and the next generation who rightly took their freedoms for granted and saw no reason whatever to agonise about boiler suits or PhDs."

"From the word go, Tweedie, 'the doyenne of feminist journalists bringing the hottest of bulletins from the front line of the sex war' (ibid) [See note below] was both partisan and subjective/ Although reserved about detaikls of her life, especially the tragedy of her children, she mined other experiences. Her style, too, was the radical opposite of the remote discoursew which passed for objective journalism. She wrote as she spoke and the words jumped off the page, full of colloquialisms and inner dialogue."

"She [Tweedie] opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ... I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another. She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ..."