Sarah Graham

Along with 500 other feminists, I spent last weekend at the University of Birmingham, for UK Feminista’s Summer School. It was such an intense weekend that it’s hard to know where to start. After arriving at my brother’s house in Birmingham on Friday afternoon, the entire rest of the evening was spent discussing feminism, politics and gender with Eden and Ruth, over feminist curry and the strangest coloured wine I’ve ever seen. There’s clearly no better way to get in the mood for a weekend of feminism!

Saturday began, after a brief introduction, with a talk on the past, present and future of feminist activism, during which Rosalind Miles highlighted for me how appallingly lacking my knowledge of women’s history is! Must buy some more books. She also provided the perfect response to the question “Why are you a feminist?” – “Why aren’t you?”

Probably the highlight of Saturday, for me, was the following talk: “Every Movement Needs a Front Line”: the role of non-violent direct action in feminism, featuring Alison Dear, coordinator of OBJECT’s Feminist Fridays; Finn Mackay, who is just as passionate and inspiring as everyone says she is, and spoke brilliantly on her experiences of women-only activism.; Tamsin Omond, Climate Rush; and Aisha Mirza, UK Uncut. I came away feeling really inspired to live my feminism in every day life, through deeds not words, to get involved with more direct action, and to find creative ways of starting my own. Deeds not words, the slogan of the suffragettes, is one of the aspects of feminism I find hardest to enact – I’m a writer, I’m comfortable with words, but deeds are a little more scary and certainly not very much within my comfort zone! Watching Alison’s fantastic video of OBJECT’s feminist Friday action in Tesco, I really regretted always having been too scared and too shy to get involved with them.

The rest of Saturday consisted of How to use the media in campaigns, with Laurie Penny and Women and the Revolution: what the Arab Spring holds for women, with Hannah Pool and Nesrine Malik. The day was wrapped up with an aerial photo of us all stood in the courtyard, spelling out the words FEMINISM IS BACK. I’m going to blog about the after-party, which was hosted by Birmingham Fems, separately because I’ve got a lot to say about it!

Sunday started far too early for those of us who’d been dancing to Blondie till almost 1am, but was well worth dragging myself out of bed at 7.30am for and was, for me, the most exciting of the two days. It kicked off with Under Attack: defending women’s reproductive rights. A woman’s right to choose is one of the few issues that feminists seem to be almost entirely, 100% united on, as evidenced by the unanimous gasps of horror as Darinka Aleksic, Abortion Rights UK, and Dr Evan Harris discussed attempts by Nadine Dorries et al to restrict women’s access to abortions – including the Government’s alarming move towards handing reproductive health advisory services over to religious, anti-choice organisations. Equally, it was terrifying to learn of the arrival of American Christian anti-choice groups in the UK, importing their more militant, more extreme (and better funded) tactics, including harassment of vulnerable women outside abortion clinics. I could write about the importance of reproductive rights all day, but this post’s long enough already and I’ve only just got started on day 2! I’ll inevitably come back to it in future posts, but in the meantime you all really ought to visit Abortion Rights’ website and email your MP to tell them to support abortion providers’ right to provide counselling, rather than handing it over to manipulative, misleading, anti-choice, faith organisations.

Next up was Mobilising Men: engaging men in feminist activism, run by Matt McCormack Evans, founder of the Anti Porn Men Project. This session was three times over-subscribed and I know was met with mixed reviews. I’m going to blog about this separately too because I’ve got far too much to say on the topic.

After lunch and a great chat with the lovely Matt, I went to Not For Sale: resisting the sex industry, with Anna Van Heeswijk, OBJECT, and Heather Harvey, Eaves. It was lovely to have enough time before the start to catch up with Heather and be introduced to Anna. I’ve long been convinced that both OBJECT and Eaves’ positions on the sex industry are absolutely spot-on and both women spoke brilliantly on the subject, despite some fairly confrontational questions during the Q&A session. The rhetoric of “choice” is one rolled out frequently, not only by men but by fellow feminists, yet my time at Eaves has confirmed to me what an exploitative industry we’re really talking about and how dangerous it is that strip clubs, pornography and prostitution have become so normalised – even glamorised - over recent years. Demand Change, Eaves and OBJECT’s human rights approach to prostitution tackles demand, while offering support to women working in the industry. Again, I could go on about this for hours…

The final two sessions of the day, for me, were All In It Together? How the cuts are hitting women hardest, with Cath Elliott; Anna Bird, Fawcett Society; Sandhya Sharma, Southall Black Sisters, who was another amazingly passionate speaker; and Aisha Mirza, UK Uncut, and The Global Struggle: international feminist resistance.

One thing which struck me as slightly incongruous was the number of occasions, throughout the weekend, when debates sprung up about whether we ought to rename “feminism”. It’s a relatively common debate, I suppose, but not one I expected to waste so much time over at a feminist conference. As a movement, feminism is far from perfect and, as a term, it is loaded with connotations, but it is also loaded with the history of those amazing women who came before us. I am now more convinced than ever that shying away from the word, rather than reclaiming it, does the cause absolutely no favours. As someone pointed out, the Daily Mail and friends will hate us whatever we call ourselves.

Aside from providing an entire weekend in a safe, misogyny-free space with hundreds of passionate feminists, Summer School was a really fun, informative way of empowering activists of all ages and genders with the facts, ideas and inspiration to get involved for themselves. Not only do I feel more fired up, but I also feel better informed to defend my rights and the rights of women worse off than myself. It was fantastic to meet so many of the feminists who really inspire me (Cath Elliott, Kat Banyard, Anna van Heeswijk, Matt McCormack Evans, to name a few), to see Heather again, and to ‘tweet up’ with a number of my favourite twitter feminists (@MadamJMo, @smeaters, and more) – not to mention quite surreal to have random people tell me “I know you from the internet!” Twitter is a strange but wonderful community and, I firmly believe, a really important part of contemporary feminist activism. I think we all came away with plenty to think about – the only question is, what next?