In 2014 feminists spoke up. This year we’re taking to the streets | Ellie Mae O’Hagan
There can be little doubt that 2014 was a watershed year for feminism. The niggling sense that women had been short-changed became a conversation, which grew into a roar. As Rebecca Solnit put it on this very site, feminism in 2014 was “loud, discordant, and maybe transformative, because important things were said – not necessarily new, but said more emphatically, by more of us, and heard as never before”.
Well I’d like to offer a hopeful prediction: if 2014 was the year women made their voices heard, 2015 will be the year women take to the streets. It’s the next natural step for this new wave of feminism and it can’t come soon enough. In fact, over the last few weeks, I’ve seen the green shoots of feminism’s next phase emerging, because I’ve taken up invitations to attend the meetings of a new feminist direct action group called Sisters Uncut.
The name “Sisters Uncut” is a deliberate nod to UK Uncut, the anti-cuts direct action network founded in 2010. A few of the founding members of Sisters Uncut cut their teeth organising protests with UK Uncut, and they believe UK Uncut’s organising model – where the foundation of one UK Uncut group in London inspired dozens of autonomous UK Uncut groups to set up around the country – is the perfect way of setting up networked direct action feminist groups across Britain.
Sisters Uncut focuses specifically on protecting domestic violence services, and a lot of its members work for domestic violence charities and prevention services. To that end it has very specific, thorough and achievable demands for the government. As well as the obvious demand for domestic violence services to be protected from cuts, the group also calls for specialist domestic violence services for LGBT women, BME women and so on; guaranteed access to legal aid for women experiencing domestic violence; access to safe and secure social housing for women fleeing domestic violence; the end of panic rooms being classified as a spare room under the bedroom tax, and for the safety of victims not to be subject to immigration status.
Sisters Uncut holds public, women-only (which includes trans and intersex women) meetings once a week, and in doing so has managed to create a feminist activist community. The atmosphere of the meetings is so galvanising, supportive and radical that they’re almost addictive. While meetings are mainly focused upon organising protests against cuts to domestic violence, feminist politics is debated (and by no means agreed upon) by attendees in a spirit of kindness and respect.
Watching the meetings unfold is like witnessing a tangible feminist movement come into being, especially with regards to the effect Sisters Uncut has had upon survivors of domestic violence. As one member put it: “It’s very liberating to acknowledge there are survivors among us, and that we’re allowed to exist as survivors: to have voice. The group has allowed survivors and women who haven’t been victims of that particular crime to stand up together, publicly and noisily.” Sisters Uncut has shown its members that women-only feminist organising groups are both powerful and empowering, and as a result the meetings themselves feel like a political act.
Of course, women-only organising spaces are not new. Sisters Uncut has been founded in the shadow of pioneering groups of previous generations, such as the suffragettes and the women of Greenham Common. More recent feminist groups, like the UK Feminista and East London Feminists, have emerged as fourth-wave feminism has gained momentum. But Sisters Uncut is possibly the first contemporary feminist group to focus upon direct action, and to deliberately choose an organising structure that can be easily replicated around the country. The founders seem to want to coax nascent feminists away from the internet and into rooms together, so they can eventually take to the streets.
Sisters Uncut is holding its first women-only protest against cuts to domestic violence services on Valentine’s Day in central London, and members are currently in the process of building a website of resources so that women around the country can set up Sisters Uncut groups of their own. I asked a Sisters Uncut founder, Frida, what had inspired the women to form the group: “We were horrified that domestic violence services were being decimated by austerity, and felt it was a result of the fact that women are generally treated as second-class citizens whose needs are relegated. So we decided the only thing to do was to organise ourselves and go out onto the streets and make ourselves heard.” A simple message, then: women are important, our lives matter – and feminism just got interesting.