Women holding a vigil for a woman who got murdered by a police officer got attacked by police officers. Fun times in the UK.

https://twitter.com/liamyoung/status/1370819072368246786

CW// sexual harassment, sexual abuse

The Sarah Everard case really has me down. My whole twitter timeline is full of women sharing their stories about street harassment. And ofc I’m thinking of my own stories too. I feel like we do this every year and the only result is that we feel bad remembering shitty things. It’s not like there’s a single reply from a man being like “wow now I get it!” This sucks.

Absolutely.

Lol same. I went to yt right after and damn, they’re still going strong! The tango cover of Bad Guy is quite nice.

I get irrationally mad at all the anti-Women’s Day tweets on my timeline tbh. No shit we don’t just need “a day”, but the day is also not just for getting flowers and dumb emails. There’s yearly women’s demonstrations around the world on March 8, maybe we should spend more time talking about those instead of just bitching about how it’s a useless day.

Maybe you could dress up to do a nice Skype session with friends. Put on Postmodern Jukebox or some classical music, crack open a nice wine 😄

I moved out at 18 for uni - moved country actually, and then moved again for my Master’s and then my PhD. Then the pandemic hit a few months into my PhD and tbh the thought of staying in a city where I barely know anyone, doing home office the whole time because we’re heavily discouraged to come in, while freaking out about the border between me and my family potentially/partially closing, was dreadful to me. So I’m at my parents’ right now and while we get on each others nerves, it’s actually really nice altogether. I missed them! Plus I can hang out with my siblings, who live only 20 minutes away by bus. Missed them too. I’ll move back to my uni city in autumn, but for now and especially during the pandemic, I’m happy to be where I am. Being expected to make it alone is a very Anglo thing to me lol. (Though ofc it’s different if the family is bigoted etc.)

Maybe you’re better off telling them that women still had to do most of the cooking and cleaning in the USSR, let’s return the womenz to the kitchen, go communism, amirite fellas 😂

Oh hm, well even the Smithsonian and QZ agree, maybe they’ll believe it from there. Or try giving them Ghodsee’s op-ed from the NYT. But tbh if they’re really into feminism, I’d start them with the Feminism for the 99% manifesto, which pushes anti-capitalist feminism without being all scary and “super Marxist”.

I read Rowbotham’s Resistance, Women, and Revolution a few years ago and can’t vouch for it completely, but her chapter on women pre and post Russian revolution rang very true to me when I look at my female relatives and gender norms in our family (we’re all Soviet/post-Soviet). This chapter is available online here, though I don’t remember if it’s in any way abridged.

I assume Kristin Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism goes into it at least a bit too, as she’s a professor of Russian and Eastern European studies, but I haven’t read it yet, so can’t promise anything.

While it’s highly specific, I would recommend checking out Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War, which is an oral history of Soviet women fighting on the Eastern Front. It implicitly shows the mentality of Soviet women, as well as how they were treated by their comrades, the higher-ups, and the population when they returned during peace.

My own very brief observations: no housewives here, most women worked full-time. It’s just that then they went home to a “second shift” - to cook and clean and take care of the children.

What did your friends not believe?