With LGBT History Month over and International Women’s Day not far off we switched gears on Women’s Outlook today and went 100% with a feminist agenda.
First up I was delighted to welcome back Sian Webb from Bristol Womens’ Voice. Sian and her team are organizing a festival day at M Shed on March 12th to celebrate International Women’s Day. They have rather more resources than I did for the LGBT History Festival, and have a really spectacular event planned. It is only one day, but they have three streams of programme and some really cool stuff. Further information is available here.
For the next hour I was joined by Jess Read of the Women’s Equality Party. I must confess that I’d been a bit nervous of these folks in the past because they seemed to have a bit of an air of White Feminism about them. However, Jess was very firm on the need for intersectionality, including acceptance of trans women. The discussion ranged over a wide variety of issues including how WEP would manage its non-partisan stance. It was really refreshing to have a politician in the studio who a) said that she didn’t want to be a politician, and b) said that her party’s aim was to put itself out of business.
You can find the Bristol branch of the Women’s Equality Party on Facebook. There is also a Bath branch which is somewhat nearer to me. You can find your local branch here, and I do believe that’s Ceri in the picture at the head of that page so I’m guessing it is a Bath branch photo.
In the final half hour I was joined by my friends Jo Hall and Roz Clarke to talk about the fabulous Fight Like A Girl anthology. The link to book for the launch event is here. It will be awesome, especially Fran Terminiello’s demonstration of the use of sharp, pointy things. Hopefully the panel I am chairing will be good too.
We may have mentioned a whole bunch of amazing women writers in the process, including Juliet McKenna, Kameron Hurley, Tansy Rayner Roberts, NK Jemisin, Glenda Larke, Mary Gentle, Gaie Sebold, Foz Meadows, Danie Ware and many more.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here, and the second hour here.
Jo will be back in the studio tomorrow morning to talk to Paulette about World Book Day on the Education Show.
The playlist for the show was as follows:
- Sisters are doing it for Themselves – Eurythmics
- Why? – Tracy Chapman
- Independent Woman – Destiny’s Child
- Let’s Talk About Sex – Salt n Pepa
- Unstoppable – Liane La Havas
- Stone Cold Dead in the Market – Maya Angelou
- Horse and I – Bat for Lashes
- Ghetto Woman – Janelle Monáe
Jess chose the third and fourth tracks. She’s a big Beyoncé fan. We managed to avoid coming to blows over whether Bey is more or less awesome than Janelle Monáe