International Women’s Day
Herein lies an interlude from our normal transmissions about singles and albums and tours to talk about WOMEN on this day dubbed International Women’s Day. Sadly it is not a very happy International Women’s Day for many international women today as misogyny, oppression and abuse in the workplace, home place and wider society is still a struggle faced by literally millions of women around the world. Closing the gender pay gap, creating gender equality and balanced opportunity and representation in business and politics are things that still need to happen and if this day is used for something, perhaps it should be for thinking about those things along with how you personally can affect change in your daily life, how you think of and treat women and if there’s anything more you feel you could or should be doing. Being a feminist is more than just saying you are a feminist. Subconscious or subtle prejudices and bias are insidious forms of misogyny that all women face at some point in their lives, often imposed on women by men who would claim to be feminists.
On a personal-to-the-label level we would like to shout out to all of the women on our roster, past, present and future. Thank you for making music. Thank you for working with us!
Thank you to all the women dancing, writing, making films, making art – inspiring, empowering and representing.
In this world it is privilege to be able to create and so many women aren’t able to. Some women focused charities you can research and support:
https://www.refuge.org.uk/
http://www.rosauk.org/
http://www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/
https://www.youngwomenstrust.org/
https://www.womenforwomen.org.uk/
www.mybodybackproject.com
https://sexwise.fpa.org.uk/
http://www.saverauk.co.uk/
http://rightsofwomen.org.uk/
https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk
https://uknswp.org/
The picture on the homepage is of Virginia Woolf, a very inspiring woman. She published the short essay A Room of One’s Own in 1929, following from classic modernist masterpieces Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse, feminist whirlwind Orlando and preceding The Waves. Here is a beautiful and still very relevant excerpt from her essay. Pick it up if you get the chance.
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.