Starting over.

[Thelnebriati]

I thought I'd start a thread to discuss rebuilding women's services from the ground up.

The very broad strokes are;
What services are needed?
How can they be funded?
Who will run them and how will they be trained and paid?
How can we learn from past endeavours, what worked and what didn't.
How can we collect and preserve the information, and pass it on.
How can we protect women's resources for future generations? Or do we have to accept they could be taken from us at any time, and treat it as an ongoing project?
Can we come up with new models?

On this thread, lets try to focus on the future, not worry about current losses.
Someone might like to start a thread to record services that have been lost. It might serve as a useful warning to others.

Yup.
I really wish I'd known all this when I was younger. I missed out on the opportunity to go to women's centres and meet with like minded women- I was just clueless! MN has been an education for me, along with a young woman I met who woke me up about the need for feminism.

I love some of these ideas.

It's possible one of the tiny silver linings of this whole Covid nightmare and women being forced out of the workplace in large numbers is we might have an opportunity to build even further on a woman focused movement. Strength and creativity often springs from adversity.

I used to live opposite a women's centre! In the 90s. It was so nice, as a teenaged lesbian in a new town, to meet women who were friendly and political.

Also used to use a women's centre - they were really strict, no male partners, no male children over I think 12. But also included TW.

Nottingham fell at least 15 years ago, didn't it? All our Nottingham lesbians friends abandoned ship.

@BuntingEllacott

The difficulty with commitment is the reality of women's lives, at base. The reason such a large scale operation hasn't been attempted, and the focus has remained on grass roots fire-fighting measures is because women are expected to clean up everyone else's shit, literally and metaphorically.

I'm articulate and analytical. I'm the kind of person people are happy to let lead them. But I've got kids with mental health problems, relatives with cancer, a minimum wage job, a whole raft of problems I'm not going to disclose here and there are only so many hours in the day. I am quite sure there are many, many other women exactly like me. Which is why the crowdfunders are made up of £10 donations from women who want to protect their rights but simply don't have the capacity to do more.

So true. The trouble is, by the time one realises the need for women-centred feminism, one no longer has the time for it! Assuming one is even in a position to hear about it, which so many women aren't.

Seeing what's happened to all these supposedly female or feminist organisations towing the TWAW line - I think the two worst that stick in my mind are

1. Fawcett Society saying a parliament of 50/50 men/transwomen would be fine, and

1. Feminist Library saying that we should not attempt to seek the cause of women's oppression and only feminists who agree with them may visit

...well, it makes me see any potential feminist or women's organisation as a Trojan Horse waiting to happen.

Single-issue campaigning is what has resonated best with me - it has made me consider the bigger picture in a way that a general "come to our women's group, hurrah for women, Beyonce and the suffragettes" message never has.

Women's refuges should be something everyone is on board with - so campaigning might get a boost from the popular press. I know we often apologise for linking to the right-wing papers (which are the only ones that cover this stuff), but did I see that the Sun has picked up the Monklands story?

This is the first time I've ever heard of women's centres, by the way! Sound very different to the university "eat cake and chat celebrity role models" society I never returned to...

If services directly affecting women were better funded, this would directly affect the numbers of children needing to enter the care system.

The number of reports I see where a birth mum has tried desparately to access services, to be told there's nothing there anymore or been signposted to a place 60 miles away that she cannot get to. The number of women sentenced to custodial sentences for crimes means that children enter the care system and rarely leave. (By the time she is released, she's an offender and this affects her employment, income, housing. If the children are in care, she's not eligible to get homed with them.

It makes sense for local and central government to fund these services better because it would save them huge amounts of money in the longer term. Added to that is the very human cost, impact on lives, impact on our society.