This photograph was taken on Saturday 7th of March 2020. Pictured is (L-R) Peggy Luhrs, Bryn B, Venice Allan, DJ Lippy, Georgia Constantinou and Kara Dansky. We had just walked with Million Women Rise through the streets of London to raise awareness of violence against women and girls and connect with fellow activists. Little did we know but in16 days lockdown would be announced, changing our lives forever.
Looking back through my photographs I am reminded of how much has changed in that time. How much history is lost.
We had met that day because Venice and I had worked together to organise an event to be held the next day, International Women’s Day at Speakers Corner Hyde Park. I’d actually met Kara the day before to record an episode of my Podcast, Suffragette City Radio. As neither of us lived in London this had involved an awkward trek through the expansive Friends Meeting House, the HQ of quakers in the UK to record possibly the most echoey podcast ever. Kara was nothing but gracious. She was on the board of directors of WoLF then, at a time where American women’s rights campaigners were still finding their feet.
She has flown all the way over from the states to speak at Women’s Say, an event which would later metastasise into #LetWomenSpeak as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull continued to arrange the open mic free speech events over lockdown. It was an idea that had started about a month ago in Venices kitchen as we chatted over wine and fags. Speakers Corner was chosen not only as the historic home of free speech in the UK but because it was the location of an event that was to be the spark that ignited the women’s movement, the start of our push back against trans rights activism. In September 2017 Maria Maclachlan was punched in the face at Speakers Corner by Tara Wolf, a trans-identified male who had come to the park to disrupt a talk given by Venice Allan about transgenderism and its impact on women’s rights.
Also photographed is Peggy Luhrs, a woman’s rights campaigner from Vermont, who unfortunately is no longer with us. I had the pleasure to get to know her a little better during the lockdown, on a series of Zoom calls which inadvertently helped to solidify an international network of women’s rights campaigners. She was an OG second wave lesbian feminist who had watched first hand the rise and fall of that feminist movement; along with the rise of it’s bastard twin transgenderism. I am so glad I had the opportunity to connect with her in the last years of her life.
We are living history now. Are we on the right side of history? How will we be remembered? I guess that’s not for us to say but if we don’t record our history now we won’t have any voice in the future, others will speak for us.
I am actually watching history be re-written right now. To see who is erased, whose work is forgotten. New women join the movement every day and I welcome them in but I worry we are forgetting who sat at the heart. Women. Ordinary women. Grassroots women’s rights campaigners.
This blog will be a repository of that history. It will be a reminder of all the work of women that has helped to build this movement. A recognition of the collective labour of hundreds and thousands of unsung heroines.
I will also upload content from blogs that I have written over the years so that all my work is kept in one place.
I’m also going to be writing longer pieces where I try to articulate my thoughts on all of the issues that arise when you live in a world where telling the truth is becoming a revolutionary Act.
So to start as I mean to go on, here is a collection of photographs of the women who spoke at Women’s Say, International Women’s Day 2020. Photos curtesy of Tones of Monochrome.
What I found so fascinating as I looked through these photographs was the sheer number of women who I didn’t know at the time, who have now become friends. Women who have gone from strength to strength and who continue to fight for women’s rights in any way they can. It makes me wonder what the next 4 years have in store as the movement continues to grow and develop.
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What a lovely post and blog concept - to document the history. Thanks for this lovely trip down memory lane!
I subscribe to a lot of Substacks and they’re all great for teaching me new things and keeping me up to date. But none have been committed to documenting at this grass roots level what has been happening. So this post feels very much an archive ‘by us for us’ which I value and appreciate. Thanks Lippy. Subscribed.