A decade of austerity has undermined many of the economic, social and political gains achieved by women since the 1970s. Job losses, cuts to welfare and social care, and the rise in part time and precarious work, are just some of the factors intensifying the problems faced by women who have to work harder for […]

Sylvia Pankhurst (1882 –1960) was a formidable figure; an internationalist and anti-imperialist, an anti racist, and for a period a revolutionary communist. But it is as a tireless fighter for the emancipation of women that she is best remembered. At the centre of this work, she dedicated herself to the self-organisation and activity of working […]

By Mekdela Ejigu THE limited legal abortion and women’s reproductive rights available in the United States exist in a permanent state of siege enforced by the Republican party and religious conservatives across the country. During President Obama’s terms, Republican House and Senate members repeatedly attempted to block abortion clinics from operating in their districts with […]

COMPLAINTS of sexual harassment and discrimination by women officers and activists often go unresolved in the unions and the Labour Party. This is a shameful record and one that must be corrected immediately. The campaign group LabourToo, has submitted a dossier of complaints about such behaviour in the Labour Party. It consists of 43 anonymised […]

By a London teacher The recent decision by an East London primary school to ban pupils from wearing the hijab shows how Islamophobia subjects Muslim women to a double dose of racism and sexism. Although protests forced the school to reverse the ban, this is not an isolated attempt to single out Muslims for discrimination […]

By Ella Mertens WHETHER in Chile or Ireland, Germany or Poland – all over the world – women are protesting for their right to control their own bodies. A new generation is standing up to say that we can decide for ourselves whether or not to have a child in the event of pregnancy. Poland […]

By Jaqueline Singh WHILE within Fortress Europe right wing agitation and violence against refugees are on the increase, its external borders are increasingly impenetrable. People who flee from hunger, war, violence and exploitation are drowned in the Mediterranean or herded into massive camps on the borders of Greece or Turkey. War zones such as Afghanistan […]

By Hemamali Wijesinghe  Sri Lanka has had a developed culture and literacy for many centuries. As far back as 1931, when it was still a part of the British Raj, the right to vote was won by a campaign that mobilised women as well as men. In 1933, when the British government launched the Poppy […]

MINNIE Lansbury was born in 1889 in Stepney in the East End of London. Her parents, Annie and Isaac Glassman, were Jewish refugees from Poland, who had escaped the pogroms fomented by the Russian Tsarist police. Her tragically short life amongst the slums of the area where she was born was filled with struggle alongside […]

By a Unison schools convenor There are 1.3 million local government and school support workers – 78 per cent of them women. We are the housing officers, youth workers, social workers, teaching assistants, caterers and cleaners that keep hard-up families together and services running. Austerity budgets, year after year, have wiped out over 700,000 jobs […]

By Micaela Edelson The colonization of Indigenous women has persisted even in the ‘post-colonial’ era. Specifically, colonialism promoted a shift from an egalitarian society to a patriarchal societal structure which resulted in a legacy of violence against Indigenous women, and specific colonial sterilization policies not only affected women’s role in Indigenous society, it severely limited […]