Rebecca Morland

The Women of Wessex would like to know why young girls privacy and dignity is being sacrificed, in order to legitimise adult male fetish. Anyone any idea?

For the millionth time, British Jews are not the Israeli Government. And antisemitic hatred/attempted murder in the UK won't stop Netanyahu. @Baddiel wrote a brilliant book on this - easy to follow and understand. And here's the doc expanding on his book, link below.(Dir: my OH)

BREAKING: The Islamic Republic is preparing to hang eight women. Not a word from the international community or so-called human rights organizations.

“And next week on “Et Tu, Woman?”, we ask Alan for his take on menstrual cycles: inconvenient or simply showing off?”

Today, extra special thanks go to the fabulous @ForWomenScot for their indefatigable efforts in securing the #SupremeCourtRuling and all the amazing work they have done before and after. 🙏💕🧑‍⚖️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧🔥 Happy Anniversary!

🚨 LibDems want to retrospectively alter the Gender Recignition Act and the Equality Act 🚨 If this concerns you, and it should, ask their local election candidates about this policy. Or get in touch with the excellent @LibVoice4Women who advocate for upholding women's rights.

Today marks one year since the Supreme Court clarified beyond all doubt that in law, sex means biological sex. It’s time for the government to stop stalling and implement the law! #OneYearLater #SupremeCourt #WitChes #TikTokTimeIsUp

There is no Woman of the Day today. Instead, I’d like to point out that purdah doesn’t apply to us. For the next three weeks, I’m putting a sign in my front window making it clear I will not vote for any Council election candidate who won’t ensure compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling if elected. I’m sending postcards to @bridgetphillipsonmp, making it clear procrastination is not doing her any favours. I’ve used @SexMatters’ excellent template to email my MP — yes, the one who thinks women should just work a little harder at being kinder to the Most Oppressed — but I will write again about how unimpressed I am with delays and excuses. They are meant to be our elected representatives. They are meant to uphold the law. Time for them to locate their spines and stand up for women and children. I’m tired of waiting. Aren’t you? #NoMoreExcuses #SupremeCourtRuling #WomenWontWheesht sex-matters.org/take-action/wr…

I now know what peak rage feels like. The jaw dropping cynicism it takes to deliberately sit on the EHRC Guidance for 221 days, not to mention 363 days since the ruling, and then publish this garbage to hold things at bay until after the May Elections, takes absolving yourself of the responsibility to protect the rights of women and girls to stratespheric levels. This Government holds us in complete contempt. questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statem…

Where’s the outrage ?

If you have a couple of minutes to spare today, please do this one thing and write to your MP, asking why the government has still not acted to protect women and children. @SexMatters made it easy for us to do. #WhyAreWeWaiting #SupremeCourtRuling sex-matters.org/take-action/wr…

Woman of the Day teacher and suffragist Pippa Strachey (1872-1968) of London, the organisational genius behind the very first major suffrage protest, the Mud March, in 1907. That was 119 years ago, yet today, women are gathering in Westminster, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Manchester, Belfast, Plymouth, and Houghton-le-Spring, because once again, the government is ignoring women’s voices and prioritising the feelings of men — a very small subset of men, but men nonetheless - over the rights of women. The Mud March featured a brass band, carriages and motor cars carrying women’s suffrage flags and banners, and 7,000 women wearing matching rosettes, with around forty women’s groups from all over the country taking part. It required much soothing and smoothing by Pippa of "all sensibilities and political disagreements” beforehand to reconcile women’s groups with differing points of view but it was a triumph of diplomacy. Only the Pankhursts’ WSPU declined to attend in an official capacity but many of its leading members were there anyway: Christabel Pankhurst, Annie Kenney, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Today, there will be women’s groups and banners from all over the UK listening to notable speakers drawn from women’s organisations. No “soothing and smoothing of all sensibilities and political disagreements” is needed. We are united and we want one simple thing: for @bphillipsonmp to stop dithering and lay the EHRC guidance before Parliament. Her decision not to do so — and it is a decision — is causing harm to women (and men) and especially to children, because government departments, councils, retailers, employers and schools think they are excused from following the law. 119 years ago, Pippa, who had no experience of organising anything like this, made it a full team effort. The Artists’ Suffrage League produced posters and postcards. The marchers’ rosettes were made by the Actresses’ Franchise League. The London Society for Women’s Suffrage placed ads everywhere to publicise the event and encourage women from all walks of life to attend. Everyone played a part. It was a stroke of genius. Rachel Strachey, close ally of Millicent Fawcett and Pippa’s sister-in-law, wrote: “In that year, the vast majority of women still felt that there was something very dreadful in walking in procession through the streets. To do it was to be something of a martyr, and many of the demonstrators felt that they were risking their employments and endangering their reputations, besides facing a dreadful ordeal of ridicule and public shame.” Does that sound at all familiar? Thousands of women set off down Rotten Row with the brass band leading, Millicent Fawcett at the front, followed large contingents of women from all over the country, marching under banners that proclaimed their various professions and trades. The only thing that couldn’t be planned for was the weather. On the day, it rained incessantly: “mud, mud, mud" everywhere, according to Millicent Fawcett, which is why it was known as the Mud March. Today, it will rain incessantly in Cardiff, which is where I’ll be with my @WomenOfWessex sisters. It won’t put us off, any more than the mud did 119 years ago. We women are made of stern stuff. Back then, The Observer warned that the women’s movement should “educate its own sex rather than seeking to confound men". That’s straight out of NHS Fife and NHS Darlington’s playbook, don’t you think? The pro-suffrage Morning Post (now The Telegraph) deplored the "scoffs and jeers of enfranchised males who had posted themselves along the line of the route, and appeared to regard the occasion as suitable for the display of crude and vulgar jests". The Graphic (later the Daily Sketch), also pro-suffrage, carried a photo of a man dramatically holding up a pair of scissors "suggesting that demonstrating women should have their tongues cut out". Today, we face derision and similar threats from masked men. No, I’m not going to repeat them. You all know exactly how much male fury is unleashed whenever women dare to speak up in defence of their lawful rights. “Both sides”, my foot. Four days after the Mud March, NUWSS leaders met with the Parliamentary Committee for Women's Suffrage to discuss plans for a private member’s Bill proposing that women should have the vote subject to the same property qualification that applied to men. Relatively few women would have qualified and the sponsor was hopeful. The Bill was talked out. It took another eleven years before women over 30 were accorded the right to vote, and 21 years before all women were enfranchised on the same terms as men. The Supreme Court’s clarification of the Equality Act 2010 is almost 365 days old, yet public servants are still hounded for recognising biological sex, NHS staff are still denied access to single-sex changing rooms, women are still denied lawful single-sex services and placed at risk. Lesbians still face exclusion because they do not accept men as lesbians. Women in prison are still locked up with men. All of this is unlawful, Ms Phillipson. All of it. You could put a stop to it tomorrow. You would have the law and the courts on your side, so what’s holding you back? Women are rising. #OneYearLater #SupremeCourtRuling

There is no Woman of the Day today. Instead, I want to explain why I do what I do. No one really knows who first said, “History is written by the victors” but I’d bet you any odds it was a man. Think of your schooldays and count the number of times you learned about the roles played by women in shaping history, other than regnant Queens and perhaps Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale. Yet women lived, worked, networked, debated, campaigned, organised, invented things and built them too - but you’d never know this if your lessons, like mine, were confined to history books. For a practical example, just look around you. Fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, ironing board, home security system, call waiting system, car heater and windscreen wipers, even the very first computer algorithm: all invented by women. Are you surprised? Confined to the house, denied access to higher education, barred from engineering, denied entry to all branches of science and the professions for centuries, those bright analytical minds turned their attention to their immediate surroundings and saw what was needed to free them from domestic drudgery. In return, history ignored women’s achievements, glossed over them or consigned them to dusty footnotes. If all else failed, their work was credited to - or stolen by - men, the phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect, first identified by feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1870. In 1993, it was named for her by historian Margaret Rossiter who said, “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place’ in science was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.” Once you see it, you cannot unsee it - the Matilda Effect is everywhere - but now substitute ‘history’ for ‘science’. The proposition still stands. What I try to do is to pierce holes in that camouflage by writing about the almost-invisible women of history who overcame manmade barriers and changed the world. As a Second Wave feminist, I thought we’d won all the big battles, that it was just a matter of mopping up the resisters and dragging them into the 20th century. I did my bit to redress the balance in an overwhelmingly male environment, but how had I managed to miss the barefaced theft of our words, our spaces and services, our sports? How had we suddenly been reduced to a walking collection of body parts? It was a wake-up call. Once I saw, I couldn’t unsee the terrible damage being done to girls and young women who did not conform to the offensive sexist stereotypes being imposed on them by men who mimic women and their inane female cheerleaders. It made me fearful for non-conforming girls: tomboys. They need to see strong women as role models, women who don’t care about performing femininity, women who defy convention and do things their way. If you can see it, you can be it. So I went digging around in those dusty footnotes, found a little gold and started from there. I found thrilling tales of women who were inventive, resourceful and brave. Then I started sharing what I found more widely, tied to the calendar as Women of the Day. How do I find them? Often by pure chance. I go looking for one woman, spot a couple more names along the way - women whose stories really resonate with me - and file them away for the right time. Women’s history had been right under my nose the whole time. I just hadn’t realised that you needed to dig a little. The rather unexpected bonus was that in giving them a voice, I found mine. I am a conspicuously law-abiding woman, a former prison governor, and if you had told me when I retired that one day, I’d be standing outside a police station in protest at the hounding of gender critical women and singing “Go catch some rapists” to the tune of Guantanamera, I’d have advised you to seek immediate medical attention for the effects of the bump to your head. But here I am, telling women’s stories, and behind the scenes, pursuing a second career as a women’s rights activist. I won’t ever fall asleep at the wheel again. Tomorrow, I’m off to Cardiff with my Women of Wessex sisters, to protest about @bphillipsonmp’s inexplicable decision to delay laying the EHRC Code of Practice before Parliament — and make no mistake about it. It IS a decision; one that is causing real harm and damage to the rights of women and the protection of children. Some of you come for the occasional stories of women in history hiding in plain sight, but I hope you stay because you care about fairness and safety for women. For now, I leave you with this thought from the 1949 memoirs of Somerset suffragette Nelly Crocker (1872-1962): “Modern young women seem unaware of the price paid for their political and social emancipation, and modern historians have greatly ignored the struggle”.

Only SEVEN days until the first anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, and still the government has done NOTHING to enforce it.

Only nine days until the first anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, and still the government has done NOTHING to enforce it.

What sort of piss-brained CUNTBUCKET decided that the best way to improve the nation’s productivity was to make everyone do four times as many fucking tax returns?

Only 14 days until the first anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, and still the government has done NOTHING to enforce it.

A reminder that it has now been 209 days since the @EHRC sent @bphillipsonMP its draft guidance on single-sex spaces. But she has yet to table it in parliament.

Yep. Trans rights activists are 'too often overlooked' when they yell into megaphones outside Parliament about "punching terfs", or threaten us wearing balaclavas while trying to stop us entering women's rights events. They're 'overlooked' inside Parliament by every Labour MP...

Our AGM yesterday evening was well-attended and we had plenty to discuss. If you are familiar with Mumsnet, you’ll know the advice routinely offered to women with cheating partners: “Get your ducks in a row, see a solicitor, and leave the b———-“ 2025 could be described as the year when we got our ducks in a row. 2026 is the year we have seen a solicitor. We know our rights and we are not going to back down. This group is going from strength to strength. We hope to see you in Cardiff on 11 April.