#Women’s Liberation

[erebusvincent]

[liberate-women-now]

I work in tech (a male dominated field) and have no fucking clue as to why it is paid so well when compared to some other fields… you know, other than the reason being it’s a male dominated field lol.

Teachers are underpaid and overworked, especially primary school teachers, and it’s outrageous they make about the same as I do with my entry level position.

[munegirl]

I hope in 2024 lots of women leave their shitty husbands

[haggishlyhagging]

This introduction can serve as a working sheet for a beginning consciousness raising group.

The typical consciousness-raising group is composed of six to twelve women who meet on an average of once a week. Groups larger than ten or twelve are less conducive to lengthy personal discussion and analysis. The consciousness-raising process is one in which personal experiences, when shared, are recognized as a result not of an individual's idiosyncratic history and behavior, but of the system of sex-role stereotyping. That is, they are political, not personal, questions.

Generally consciousness-raising groups spend from three to six months talking about personal experiences and then analyzing those experiences in feminist terms. Thereafter they often begin working on specific projects including such activities as reading, analyzing and writing literature; abortion law repeal projects; setting up child care centers; organizing speak-outs (rape, motherhood, abortion, etc.) ; challenging sex discrimination in employment, education, etc.

The following is a list of topic areas generally discussed. Although listed by week, they are not in any particular order, nor is it necessary to rigidly adhere to a one-week/one-topic schedule. The questions are examples of the kinds of areas that can be explored.

Week 1 GENERAL: What are some of the things that got you interested in the women's movement?

Week 2 FAMILY: Discuss your parents and their relationship to you as a girl (daughter). Were you treated differently from brothers or friends who were boys?

Week 3 FAMILY: Discuss your relationships with women in your family.

Week 4 CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE: Problems of growing up as a girl. Did you have heroines or heros? Who were they? What were your favorite games? How did you feel about your body changing at puberty?

Week 5 MEN: Discuss your relationships with men-friends, lovers, bosses—as they evolved. Are there any recurring patterns?

Week 6 MARITAL STATUS: How do (or did) you feel about being single? Married? Divorced? What have been the pressures—family, social— on you?

Week 7 MOTHERHOOD: Did you consider having children a matter of choice? Discuss the social and personal pressures you may have felt to become a mother. What have been your experiences and thoughts regarding such issues as child care, contraception and abortion?

Week 8 SEX: Have you ever felt that men have pressured you into having sexual relationships? Have you ever lied about orgasm?

Week 9 SEX: Sex objects-When do you feel like one? Do you want to be beautiful? Do you ever feel invisible?

Week 10 WOMEN: Discuss your relationships with other women. For example, have you ever felt competitive with other women for men? Have you ever felt attracted to another woman?

Week 11 BEHAVIOR: What is a "nice girl"? Discuss the times you have been called selfish. Have you ever felt that you were expected to smile even when you didn't feel like it?

Week 12 AGE: How do you feel about getting old? Your mother getting old? What aspects of aging do you look forward to? Fear? Do you think it is a different problem for men and women?

Week 13 AMBITIONS: What would you most like to do in life? How does being a woman affect that?

Week 14 MOVEMENT ACTIVITY: What are some of the things you would like to see the women's movement accomplish?

-‘Consciousness Raising’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[womenaremypriority]

Limiting women’s reproductive rights has always went both ways. Some women are forced to stay pregnant/denied abortions, told that their god-given duty was to give birth, or denied alternatives to staying bare feet and pregnant their whole life, while other women were forcibly sterilized, had their children taken from them, or were forced to have abortions. True reproductive freedom (a major aspect of women’s liberation) will only work if it goes both ways and focused on all aspects.

[troythecatfish]

[carpathxanridge]

OFFICIALLY LAUNCHING: THE RADICAL RADIO SERVER

radical radio is a server for women’s liberationist/radical feminist and radically-aligned women to share our love of music and discuss our favorite female artists! whether you are an avid listener and music lover, or a female musician yourself, you’re welcome to join us! (there is only a light verification process once you join to keep the server female-exclusive—having a feminist blog is the easiest way to get verified.)

💜📻🎸🎶 here’s the link to join! 🎶🎸📻💜

my desire to create this server was inspired by the integral part music has played in the feminist movement. the women’s music movement and the festival culture built around it helped sustain and offer vibrance to the feminist movement and was truly revolutionary. it’s my wish to one day see a similar artistic output for the modern radical feminist movement. that’s of course a big wish—starting this server for me is a small action toward that! hopefully this server can grow into a little network of radical feminist musicians and music enthusiasts.

i believe that music can be an incredible tool for consciousness raising. it was about a year ago that i realized how male-identified and subconsciously misogynistic my own listening activity and beliefs about what defines a “serious” or “challenging” musical project were. since then, i’ve shifted my listening habits to be far more female-focused, and observed the change in mentality i was able to create in myself by burning down the effigy of the Male Musical Genius that had held so much gravity in my mind, and replacing that with admiration and study of unique and diverse female talent.

hopefully this server can be a place for other radical feminist women to undertake a similar shift in mindset if they haven’t already, and to simply connect to each other through this shared interest. i hope we can hang out, jam out, share music recommendations, and listen together!

this server is also run in association with the blog @radical-radio, a submissions blog for your favorite female artists that features a new artist each week. make sure to check it out as well!

[digitalconcept-fl]

Hello, I’ve made some more mock pins and buttons. Anyone is free to use them, so long as they are not involved in any hate speech.

I chose the theme of cats, due the historic symbolism between cats and women, as well as social prejudice cats experience due to that connection. Cats have long since been persecuted along side women, but they cannot round us all up, they cannot kick us and expect us not to land on our feet. We will fight with claws and fangs to no longer be under the foot of the social construct that tells us from childhood that we should live a life of shame and that our lives are not valuable. We have proven we can be leaders, writers, scientists, construction workers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, planners, artists, philosophers, DESPITE the patriarchal systems ACTIVELY FIGHTING us every second of every day.

We must believe in ourselves as all the women who fought for us before in history. We have to, because regardless of country of origin, age, race, income class, profession, education, martial status, ALL WOMEN suffer under the patriarchal rule.

[erebusvincent]

[floatingbook]

No one can save you but yourself.

[cow-dyke]

Really random post but if you are “pro-life” or anti-abortion, get the fuck off my page.

You are 100%, without a doubt, not welcome here.

[haggishlyhagging]

When I started looking at feminist efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, I knew that women had been involved in work against prostitution because there has been some feminist historical work on the Contagious Diseases Acts. What astonished me about these feminists was that the language they were using was so fiercely feminist. They described men's use of women in prostitution as an abuse of women, as dividing what they called the class of women, and putting aside one half of that class simply for men to use for their own purposes. I was surprised by the strength of the language that was used and the way in which these writers were very directly pointing out men's abuse of women in prostitution, and targeting men directly in everything they said.

I went on to discover something I had no knowledge of and about which there was virtually no information in secondary sources: there was a fifty-year campaign by those women against the sexual abuse of children. This started out of the struggle against prostitution, and it centered at first on raising the age of consent for girls so that young girls could not be used in prostitution. There wasn't a law against men using women in prostitution, but age of consent laws would have removed young girls from men's reach. That campaign culminated in the raising of the age of consent for sexual intercourse in Britain to 16 in 1885, and for indecent assault to 16 in 1922. It took fifty years.

Feminists were not simply trying to raise the age of consent. They were fighting incest, pointing out that incest was a crime of the patriarchal family, of men against women, and that sexual abuse of children was a crime carried out by men of all classes. They were fighting for women jurors, magistrates, women police to look after victims, fighting for all kinds of reforms that I thought had been invented by this wave of feminism. They were involved in setting up shelters for women escaping prostitution, something that is happening again in this wave of feminism.

I was enormously impressed by these feminists. In fact, I sat in the Fawcett Library in London getting terribly excited and wanting to tell everybody what I was finding out. Feminist theorists like Elisabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Frances Swiney were writing at this time about sexuality. We haven't had access to their work because it hasn't been taken seriously. Where they are written about at all in history books, they are simply called prudes and puritans and their ideas are seen as retrogressive. What these women were arguing was that the sexual subordination of women—men's appropriation of women's bodies for their use—lay at the foundation of the oppression of women.

Interestingly, these two women, Swiney and Elmy, made clear their opposition to the practice of sexual intercourse. This practice has become so sacred that it is almost impossible to imagine any serious challenge being made to it. What we have seen in the last hundred years is the total and compulsory enforcement of that sexual practice upon women so that women are allowed absolutely no outlet or escape from it.

But at the end of the nineteenth century there were feminists who were prepared to challenge intercourse. They were prepared to say, for instance, that it was dangerous for women's health; that it led to unwanted pregnancies or forced women to use forms of technology, contraception, that reduced them simply to objects for men's use; that it humiliated women and made them into things. Feminists pointed out that sexual diseases transmitted through sexual intercourse were dangerous to women's lives. They felt sexual intercourse to be a humiliating practice because it showed men's dominance more obviously than anything else. They believed that this practice should take place only for the purposes of reproduction, maybe every three or four years. I know these are ideas which if you voiced them today would make people think that you had taken leave of your senses. But these were ideas that were absolutely mainstream; they were being put forward by respectably married women, one married to a general.

These women were campaigning fundamentally for a woman's right to control her own body and to control access to her own body. The integrity of a woman's own body was the basic plank of their campaign.

-Sheila Jeffreys, “Sexology and Antifeminism” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

[clittromney]

I’ve finally started reading my mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that my aunt gave to her for her 16th birthday in 1967. I’m only two chapters in but I’m in love. This is the kind of feminism we need to bring back to the mainstream. Feminism that centres the female body and challenges sexist female socialization. “Women Unite”.

“To [mom’s name] the book no liberated woman should be without! With love from [aunt’s name] 28/3/77”

I’ve only read the preface, “Our Changing Sense of Self”, and “The Anatomy and Physiology of Sexuality and Reproduction” so far. I’m really looking forward to the next chapters.

So many aspects of radical feminism discussed in this book that feel lost in modern feminism and should really be common, mainstream opinions by now.

This book is great so far and I’m so glad I picked it up off of my mom’s bookshelf. I feel like I’m carrying the torch by reading it.

[pillsquad]

[dworkinsdaughter]

Wanted to show you all my feminist dress I made