Because this was a big year for me.
Huge.
At the start of 2013 I had a five week old baby.
This is what my day looked like, in terms of breastfeeding alone:
That was an easy day. Often, I had to go over onto the other side of the page.
It has been probably the hardest year of my life with a lot of change going on.
I’m a huge fan of Leonie’s planners, and I filled mine in for 2013 as I was determined to have a full, fun year and achieve a lot despite – and because of – having a new baby in my life.
I’ve never done a post like this before. But sometimes it’s really nice to look back and be proud of what you did.
This post is more for me more than anyone else, when I feel that I’ve achieved nothing and progress is glacially slow, I can remind myself that it’s okay and that I done good.
To be honest, even managing to finish this post was extremely difficult.
And when you’ve taken an hour to two hours every night putting a baby to sleep for the last 365 days and are working the ‘4 hour work week’ not because you’re relaxing in a hammock but because you only get about 4 uninterrupted hours a week to work on your own stuff, sometimes you need to feel good about what you’ve managed to do. OKAY?!!!
So, anyway… this is what I achieved in 2013, in no particular order.
(p.s. If you don’t like long posts listing the positive achievements in someone’s life then look away now. I know I’m incredibly lucky, and I’m grateful for it every day. And obviously, some of this is about my parenting stuff and implies absolutely no judgement on anyone who does things differently. And I don’t talk about the hard bits because I choose to focus my mind on the good stuff. So there.).
I got up every day after a night of no sleep and managed to build back a semblance of a life.
I did it day by day. And the next day. And the next.
With heavy use of reward stickers and the Story of Mum Gold Star Reward Chart.
(I haven’t had an uninterrupted night’s sleep since he was born.
In November 2012.
Just saying.)
…and made friends with some local mums.
The course was free, with free food(!) and they gave us stickers for turning up. Yeah!
Doretta teaches at my local Virgin Active gym. I’d done some pilates with her when I was pregnant and enjoyed being called a ‘pregnant goddess’.
I needed to do something to help me physically regain my strength after the ravages of childbirth and all that. Her classes are fab, and I’ve done it most Saturdays all year. It’s a one and a half hour class, so there’s really time to get into it. And the mental/relaxation aspect of yoga has been really great too, especially in the early days when I’d had no sleep and was so exhausted, to lie on the floor and rest for five minutes was absolute heaven.
She played this one day, and I bought the CD. It’s part of my soundtrack to the year.
It was painful. Very painful at first. And early on, it was almost constant. We had cluster feedings, which meant that between about 5pm and 1am it was pretty much constant feeding. And during the rest of the day I might get about an hour in between feeds, which themselves lasted for 30-60 minutes.
I went to the NCT breastfeeding cafe and said “is this normal?”. They said yes. Blogs like Kellymom helped.
I started off making logs of the timings, and after about a month I just gave up and went with the flow.
It got easier, much easier.
I’m glad I was able to do it.
This book is AWESOME, by the way:
It’s been a huge success.
Andrea Olson’s book is amazing. I highly recommend it if you’re intrigued by this whole thing.
It was mostly done whilst breastfeeding my baby, which as I already said, took many hours each day.
Reclaiming The F Word: Feminism Today
Turns out that the yoga teacher does meditations in her home, which is just down the road from me. I managed to do a few sessions, and enjoyed it.
From the Thames Barrier to Hampton Court, in stages of about 6 miles a time, over the course of the year.
At the start, with Sam aged about 3.5 months
At the end of the London Section, at Hampton Court
Not enough though… need to work on this next year!
…and attended the evening do with Sam – only for hour before he needed to go to bed, but nevertheless! We made it!
I did B School, Nap It Out and Autoresponder Madness. I also renewed my membership with Leonie Dawson’s Amazing Biz and Life Academy.
This is me doing Nap it Out, during which I completed my hiking guides (which were about 40,000 words in total and 200 pages…!)
This was basically my memory book of Sam’s first year.
This was so much fun.
To make my home more ‘me’
Tate Britain, and Tate Modern, to see Klee.
Had intended to go more often, but failed. Need to work on this next year!
In May, from my friend Stephanos
Total convert. It’s awesome.
& sent out a weekly email.
Amazing friends I’d met through doing one of Marianne Cantwell‘s courses.
Photo by Jessy Paston
This relates to my London Hiker website.
I did posts for Baby routes, Tiny Buddha, the PlanetD, and London Bloggers.
There’s one in the gym, and he now goes for an hour about three times a week, so I can work.
Went to Worcester and Clearwell Castle for a wedding weekend
Huge.
Too big to sum up here.
This is my new BIG PROJECT!!
I’m so excited about this and am working with 60+ women on developing this fantastic gift for a new mama.
From 48 to 234.
Highly recommend the Manduca.
Forget the Baby Bjorn.
He knows ‘milk’ and ‘more’. We are teaching him ‘potty’ and ‘finished’.
…with a few friends
I wanted to really REALLY enjoy this first year of life with my baby.
Yes, it’s been probably the hardest year of my life. But I think I managed it.
Now I have a toddler.
It’s scary.
Check out Leonie’s planners here if you like setting yearly goals and LOVE writing lists of things to do! I highly recommended them. And they’re an absolute bargain.
(p.s. Links to the planners in this post are affiliate links. It doesn’t cost you extra, but if you buy, I get 50%.)
]]>I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth!
I’ve been a busy bee!
This (above) is the temporary ‘holding’ logo for my new project!
It’s called the New Mama Welcome Pack.
Let me explain…
A few months after I had my baby I found myself walking past the hospital where I gave birth.
I wandered in, and took a tour of all the locations I’d come to know over my pregnancy, soaking in the memories and the enormity of what had happened.
As I got to the maternity ward a woman in a hospital gown who had obviously just given birth a few hours before came hobbling out.
I felt so much empathy and compassion towards her and I knew I wanted to make something to help women through their first 3 months of motherhood.
The New Mama Welcome Pack is a multimedia digital product containing beautiful, inspiring, useful and heart-felt contributions from many fabulous bloggers, writers, artists, and entrepreneur mothers, which will be delivered to the inbox of the new mama over the course of three months.
Unlike most gifts after a birth, this will be totally focused on HER rather than the baby.
Each contribution will feel like a gift from her personal ‘support team’ of contributing mamas, offering love, inspiration, wisdom, support, encouragement and reassurance.
This would be an ideal gift for a first time mother; one that keeps on giving over a 3 month period.
10% of profits will be given to a maternity charity, working to make birth safe for all.
I’m going to be working on this over the next few months.
As long as Sam doesn’t eat all of my project plan:
If you’d like to know more, please pop your name into the sign up form below and I’ll update you as it progresses!
My friend came in half way through to use the loos and started to chat with me.
I took the nappy off, said “hang on a minute I’m just going to do something a bit unusual”. I then went into the nearby toilet cubicle, held the baby over the loo and hey presto he did a wee. And then he did a ginormous poo.
He was about 4.5 months old at that point. However, we’d started using the potty when he was about 8 weeks old (you should have seen my mum’s face when she saw him use it for the first time, now *that* was a picture).
Anyway, my friend was astounded and almost ran out of the toilets shouting about the poo.
So we had to admit it and explain it to our friends. Yes, we are doing ‘EC’.
What the hell is EC?
Essentially it’s about helping the baby to go to the toilet (potty) from birth (or whenever you start it) rather than waiting until traditional potty training. The idea is that babies are born with the instinct not to soil themselves (that’s why they’ll often wee on the changing table when they have the nappy off), and that you can eventually learn their signals to understand when they need to go and then help them. It’s actually how they manage potty training in many cultures around the world.
I hesitated about posting about this because it’s kinda personal, and once you’ve stated you’re doing something like this it feels like a) there is suddenly pressure on you to do it ‘perfectly’ 100% of the time b) you have to carry on doing it and not change your mind c) people might judge you and think you are weird d) people might think I am judging them for not doing it (no no no never!).
There have been a few sensationalist and misrepresentative articles about this recently labelling it as an ‘extreme Hipster Parenting fad’, ‘eco one-upmanship’, ‘a means for middle-class professionals to mitigate some of their first-world guilt by embracing cultural traditions from around the world’ and claiming that people who do it have ‘inherent smugness and moral superiority’ and that’s just from this one piece.
Um, okay. So no judgement there then.
…but I’m sharing about it because although it’s about poo and wee and nappies and shit like that (see what I did there?) it’s actually really cool and interesting and amazing and probably more people should know about it and well, to be honest it works for us now and if it doesn’t work later on and we stop for whatever reason that’s fine too, I don’t regret doing it (as I explain below, you don’t have to be purist about it).
Obviously this is not for everyone and everyone does things differently and manages the best they can and that’s totally cool too. (And for any feminists reading this yes there are certainly interesting things to be said about privilege and parenting styles: Raising my Boychick is useful and thought provoking on the topic.)
I think this might be a bit like baby led weaning; seen as unusual and ‘hipster’ at first but later more and more people catch on to it.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote to my friend afterwards as she wanted to know more.
***
Dear X
Hiya!
Sorry for the delay in sending you info about baby poo stuff. I could honestly talk about this for ages but it’s not something you tend to raise as it’s kinda unusual…!
Ok so what it is, is a practice called ‘elimination communication’ (or EC).
This is the best summary I have found:
The video sums it up really well (she’s selling her book of course but she’s fantastic and very clear…)
You do NOT have to have your baby naked all the time! I don’t! Do not be put off by the ‘nappy free’ language, you can do it with nappies on or part time.
That website sells a PDF book, video series & forum which is AMAZING and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking of getting into it.* I basically learned how to do it just from her book and website.
Although it’s best to start as soon as possible, most people are too overwhelmed with everything else to start straight away.
We started to use the potty after about two months I think (roughly). You can get special small potties for this which you can hold between your legs and put the baby over the top. We have recently changed to a standard potty.
What we were able to do *before* that was, from the beginning, every time we heard him start a poo (trust me, you can tell!) we held in him the squat/EC pose with nappy on and used our ‘cue’ which is to say stuff like ‘oh you’re doing a poo? any more poo-poo? any more poo?’ etc until he’d finished (usually he’d cry or wriggle when he’d done).
We noticed he’d often wee during a nappy change which reinforced the idea that they instinctively want to do it ‘in the open air’ and not soil themselves (which makes sense). After time, babies lose this instinct because by only being allowed to do it in their nappy, they are effectively trained to eliminate in their nappy. Then, usually, you have to train them back…
Here are my top benefits of it:
The squat pose used in EC helps him do what he needs to do, rather than just leaving him lying flat on his back pooing. Even if you know about this one thing you can hold them in the ‘position’ with the nappy on to help them do their business.
He does most poos in the potty now. Wees are so frequent it’s harder to get all those, but I’m not bothered about doing it 100%, more about him knowing what to do on the potty (which he does).
He hardly ever has nappy rash.
Less dealing with pooey nappies and bum (in a nappy, the poo goes all over the place; if he does it in the potty it’s a much smaller clean up).
He knows that weeing and pooing in a potty is normal and does not only associate those things with having a nappy on.
It’s nice to let him wriggle around naked for a bit after a potty time, getting some fresh air, and knowing that he’s not going to suddenly wee everywhere because he just did a wee in the potty.
It sounds weird but you feel good that you’re helping him to do something he needs help to do. Just like you do with feeding. It is another way to listen and communicate with your baby and deal with their needs.
However, we tend to base our practice on timing and guessing rather than clear signals from him. So, in the morning when he wakes up, we do a potty and he almost always poos and wees. We do it during every nappy change too (as you saw the other day). We offer a ‘potty opportunity’ before we go out of the house and when coming back into the house. This is a cool benefit too as it means less chance of a nappy change needed whilst out and about if he does a wee beforehand. This simple thing alone is worth knowing about! I mean, if you can offer your baby a wee opportunity before leaving the house to save having to change a nappy whilst out isn’t this worth knowing about?
We also do things like: before we go swimming offer him the chance to do a wee in the toilet at the swimming baths (which he often does).
Before doing baby massage class I’d take him for a wee so he’d be comfortable during the massage.
We use cloth nappies at home and disposables at night and out and about. Because we do EC, we have less pooey nappies to wash at home which makes using washable nappies more bearable.
If I’m at home I will periodically offer him a ‘potty opportunity’ when I think he probably wants/needs to go.
It is actually really amazing and cool when your very young baby knows what to do when you put him over the potty…
But if it isn’t working, honestly it’s no big deal at all.
There is a helpful EC UK Facebook group that’s a private group (search for EC UK on facebook) and sometimes there are London meetings!
I’d be happy to explain more if needed.
Hope this helps!
Now you know more about baby poo than you ever thought you would!
***
Here is a genuine email I sent to Andrea Olson who wrote EC Simplified because I was so impressed with her book:
***
Dear Andrea
I have been meaning to email for a while to tell you how helpful and brilliant I think you and your book* are!
I bought your book whilst I was pregnant last year as I was interested in starting EC with my first baby. I can’t remember how I stumbled on your website but I definitely remember seeing your introduction video on YouTube and thinking how clearly you explained it and non-scary you made it seem. It didn’t take me long to want to buy your book after checking out your site.
First of all, the book is absolutely brilliant. It is really comprehensive, professional, well laid out, very clear, full of information, fun to read and easy to use. I remember reading it and thinking “even if I don’t end up doing EC, I don’t regret buying this as it’s so informative anyway”. None of the regular parenting books tell you this stuff but it feels like everyone should know this! Even if you’re not doing EC, simple things like understanding why the baby might be crying (for elimination reasons) and using the EC hold to make it easier for them to do a poo rather than leaving them lying down struggling (who wants to poo lying down?!), honestly I’m amazed why this isn’t more widely known.
The pictures and videos are extremely helpful. The gallery of positions is invaluable and SO comprehensive! You went into so much detail and every step is laid out.
When our baby was born we didn’t start EC straight away and kept him in nappies all the time but I used the principles in the book to learn and help my baby and to get him used to the cues we would use. One night soon after he was born I heard a noise from him; I held him in the EC hold I learned from the book and videos and he did his first meconium poo. Since then whenever we heard a poo happen we held him in position (with his nappy on) and said our cue word for poo.
On changing his nappy we noticed that he would regularly wee during the nappy change which convinced me you are right about babies natural instincts not to soil themselves.
We started to try using the potty at about 8 weeks old offering it during a nappy change, on waking, and before going to bed and before leaving the house to go anywhere (e.g. in pram or sling) and on coming back to the house. It has been amazing. It worked almost instantly. He is now 11 weeks old and is doing most of his poo and wees in the potty. He waits until I get the nappy off and sit him on the potty to do a wee! I can hardly believe it sometimes.
What is incredible to me is that I am doing most of this based on timing, instinct and offering regular opportunities to him like you described in the book, rather than following his signals as they aren’t very clear yet – and he seems to *know* that when he is on the potty he can poo. I swear he *knows* what to do and *tries* to do a poo when offered – it isn’t just coincidence! My mum visited me when he was 8 weeks old and was totally stunned by it. It was fantastic.
We are continuing to use nappies and I really appreciate your approach that this is okay – I think you present a great relaxed and laid back attitude about it and you’re not ‘purist’ about it at all. I love that you emphasise that you can do this part time as well. We are now transitioning to cloth nappies because he hardly ever has a pooey nappy nowadays.
(I also think the way you are running your website as a business is really great to observe too.)
You are welcome to quote any of the above as an endorsement.
THANK YOU for such a great and helpful product!
Best wishes
Catherine
***
Here are some resources I found useful:
EC Simplified by Andrea Olson (*Yes this is an affiliate link meaning if you buy I will get a percentage of the sales. But as you can see I am *genuinely* embarassingly gushing about this product!)
http://www.bornready.co.uk/ and http://www.nappyfreebaby.co.uk/ – UK sites about this issue with free info!
Brilliant cartoon and really good blog post by Kate Evans: “Parents who practice elimination communication are overachievers.” Discuss. This is great as it discusses some of the possible negatives of doing it in a purist way.
Lulastic and the Hippyshake various posts about doing EC from a Londoner
***
WELL, THERE IT IS. YOU READ IT. YOU CAN’T UNREAD IT.
]]>I have been reading a lot of Lucy Cousins children’s books recently. She uses thick black lines a lot in her work, and the effect is really dramatic.
Connie (the creator of Fearless painting) also does this in her work.
Also, this time I had musical accompaniment to my painting!
At my Yoga class on Saturday, our teacher Doretta played some kirtan music by Krishna Das, specifically the song below.
I remembered that Connie is a fan of kirtan.
So I thought it would be nice to paint ‘fearless’ whilst listening to this.
]]>The recent announcement about Spare Rib being re-published made me remember this.
Sorry for the bad photos but I think it’s pretty interesting. Arguments about feminism in the media; the responsibility of magazines like Spare Rib to represent the movement and not discriminate; how collectives are run; censorship; political splits; conflicts; class issues; what terminology/language to use; all these debates are not new (as Reni pointed out in this article).
Letters page:
I love the jauntiness of this font, considering how awful the whole fall out must have been for everyone involved. Woo! Controversy!
I couldn’t photo them all properly as I was in a rush but this gives a flavour of what people were saying:
]]>My article on contemporary feminism in June/July’s [2010] issue of Red Pepper has now been published online. It’s unashamedly optimistic; deliberately so, like our book, as a counterpoint to all the media messages we’ve had over the past few years telling us that feminism is dead or ignoring feminist activism.
Since I wrote the article for Red Pepper, it seems that the media is finally recognising that there is a feminist movement in this country, and there’s been a rush of celebratory articles. Hurrah! It feels like we finally broke through with that message.
And it’s been an important message, because whatever problems there might be within feminism or differences of opinion between feminists, making more people aware of the existence of the movement is a valid task, I feel. Whilst many regular readers of The F Word will be aware of the range of feminist activism and opinions, a lot of people still aren’t.
Women’s oppression remains a major feature of British society, even if it sometimes looks rather different than it did during that last big wave of feminism in the 1970s. But the good news, argues Catherine Redfern, is that feminism is alive and kicking too
You’d be forgiven for thinking that feminism today is in a terrible state. We all know the score by now, surely: rape conviction rates are at record lows; girls’ and boys’ career choices are still split along gender lines; women are being paid less than men; there’s concern about the ‘sexualisation’ of girls; politicians are threatening to roll back the clock on abortion rights; climate change is threatening women – the poorest of the poor – worldwide. And that’s just picking a few things off the top of my head.
In the face of all this, what have women been doing about it? Nothing apparently, according to the mainstream narrative of feminism over the past few years. Shrugging our shoulders, insisting we’re empowered and painting our nails while Rome burns.
Young women particularly have borne the brunt of this criticism, routinely told they’re apathetic or anti-feminist. At a recent feminist conference in Australia, 23-year-old organiser Rosa Campbell complained to a reporter: ‘We’re told all the time we have raunchy pornographic sex, binge-drink, pole-dance and are not active feminists. We’ve taken all the choices the seventies feminists won and used them for our own oppression. We’re ungrateful and rude.’
This has been the dominant narrative in the UK too. Feminism ‘has sunk into mindless hedonism’ according to one recent Telegraph article, laced with disapproving overtones about young women’s depravity, and illustrated with the mandatory photo of a group of young women partying in the street. Curiously, young women’s apparent rejection of feminism is presented as proof of their superficiality, while at the same time real feminists are dismissed and ridiculed.
The truth is rather different.
You might spot my sarcastic comments about people assuming that all feminism is about nowadays is debating whether Katie Price is a feminist icon. Shortly after completing this article, I was interviewed by Stylist Magazine for their feminism issue, with three other feminists. Whilst the interview overall worked out ok, guess what the first question they asked us was? “Some people suggest that Katie Price is a feminist icon. Discuss” Oh, the irony!
Laurie Penny wrote a response to my Red Pepper piece, which was also published in the magazine. You can read it here.
The new edition of Reclaiming The F Word with an updated Preface will be available in June 2013.
]]>And then this happens in my kitchen:
FUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
Note to self: have more things in the house with these colours. I obviously like them.
]]>As part of the survey of UK feminists undertaken for our book, we asked the 1265 respondents ‘please list the three feminist issues that most interest or concern you.’ Survey respondents could write these in free text. We undertook an analysis of the responses, categorising and coding them, and the results are published in the Appendix of our book.
However, there is another interesting way to analyse the results which is to use word cloud tools to look at the language used.
The word cloud below shows the 150 most frequently mentioned words given in answer to this question by the people who responded online – 988 respondents (for our book, we analysed both online and paper responses, of course).
Of course, this is only representative of the 988 survey respondents and no-one else. And the words are out of context – we can’t see from this, for example, how the word ‘equal’ was used (was it mostly used in conjunction with ‘pay’?), or what approach the people who mentioned ‘prostitution’ or ‘pornography’ have towards those issues.
But isn’t it interesting? What do you think? Does anything surprise you, or do you think this is pretty reflective of the scope of feminism in the UK?
One thing that strikes me is the words ‘objectification’, ‘sexualisation’, even ‘pornification’ – possibly due to the success of Object in publicising this issue.
I also find it interesting how the word ‘media’ is relatively large, comparable to words like ‘equal’ and ‘pay’. I think this could demonstrate how cultural issues and representation are important in feminism alongside structural issues like politics, economic issues and violence.
If I amend it to show the top 50 words, it looks like this:
I’ll try to post up some more word clouds – there’s a lot that can be done from the survey results.
The new edition of Reclaiming The F Word with an updated Preface will be available in June 2013.
]]>On Thursday 3rd June we celebrated the launch of my book with Kristin Aune, Reclaiming The F Word! We’re proud to be part of a series of UK feminist books published recently, hopefully contributing to the debate along with Kat Banyard’s The Equality Illusion, Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls, Ellie Levenson’s The Noughtie Girls’ Guide to Feminism and Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman.
If we’ve achieved nothing else, I hope that now people will no longer say that feminism is dead – if that happens, my work here will have been done!
The launch was an amazing evening and it was so lovely to be surrounded by friends and supporters, and a ton of amazing women, many of whom I hadn’t met in real life before. We also had a zine stall, which I was ridiculously excited about, organised by the excellent Marching Stars Distro – check it out!
(And, y’know, I’m sorry if this post is self-indulgent, but how often do you get to celebrate your book being published eh?)
Here’s myself (on the left) and Kristin (on the right) with Rose Holyoak, who assisted with the major survey, the results of which forms the appendix of the book. (In case you’re wondering, I’m wearing tons of badges from various feminist events I’ve attended over the years).
I actually got to sign books. Unbelievable!
Here’s a small excerpt from our speech:
We intended our book to be partly a celebration of feminists today, to shine a spotlight on the feminist community that’s somewhat hidden from the mainstream. For that reason, we’ve included the voices of ordinary feminists themselves, activists, bloggers, campaigners and zinesters (many of you here tonight). To us, their words – your words – are just as important and valuable as successful feminist writers in the mainstream or famous feminists and they deserve recognition and praise.
For that reason, as you’ll have seen already, we’re very excited to have a zine stall here, kindly arranged by the Marching Stars Zine Distro. We hope this gives yet another small insight into the vibrancy and diversity of today’s grassroots feminists.
We wrote this book because we wanted people to know about this. Even in these days of the internet, books remain hugely influential, and we know from our survey how important books are to people discovering feminism for themselves. It isn’t easy to get a popular feminist book published, and this book percolated around both of our heads for 7 or 8 years before it saw the light of day.
Writing a book is a solitary experience, and we mostly remember the endless procrastination with coffee mugs, books and papers scattered across the room – and a fair amount of Googling. But it has also been a very rewarding collaborative experience working together.
I [Catherine] would like to say that Kristin’s dedication and hard work have been an inspiration. Many a time my research consisted of emptying out my stack of zines all over the carpet and scouring them for useful quotes – meanwhile Kristin was slaving away in the British Library! I very much appreciate the way we were able to compromise together, and I’d particularly like to thank Kristin for not killing me when I adamantly over-estimated the word limit by 10,000 words…
Writing this book we’ve had a sense of being part of the wider feminist community – of our survey participants, people we interviewed, The F Word readers and contributors, people who read drafts of the book and academics and journalists who supported us. Thank you to all of them.
…We’d like to finish with a toast to all the hard working, brave feminists out there who’ve inspired us and continue to change the world. To the feminists!
Some more reports of the launch here:
Uplift
Rarely Wears Lipstick
We Mixed Our Drinks
All photos from my own Flickr account
—-
The new edition of Reclaiming The F Word with an updated Preface will be available in June 2013.
]]>There’s an interview with me (Catherine) up at Grassroots Feminism. I was interviewed by Red Chidgey, who asked me about setting up The F Word, our book, how co-writing works practically, and forms of activism. Read the full thing here.
I also thought that you might be interested in some extra questions from the interview that didn’t make it into the web version (exclusive questions, if you like!). Aren’t you lucky, eh! Anyone else remember soc.feminism?
The F Word started off as just you writing the articles. When did it develop into getting others involved?
I started posting about it on various news groups at the time and other websites, and I joined some yahoo lists connected to the American websites I was reading- there was one called Third Wave that I joined that was really good. People must have picked it up from there. There was one woman who contributed something for the first time and it was so exciting. “Oh god! Someone else is involved!” It was great. It was probably three or four months after [n.b. July 2001, the fifth month of publishing]. Gradually I got more people involved. …at the time there were news groups, there were no blogs or anything. One called soc.feminism. It must have been a UK one. So I posted on it saying, “Does anyone know any feminist magazines, websites, events, anything”. And I got a load of emails back from men going “Don’t you know that feminism is dead. Men are the underclass now.” And just ranting about that. But there was this one person who replied; who I think was the person who contributed the first article. …Then I found out about the riot grrrl scene and zines as well, so I started to make flyers and pass them out to people. That whole community was so welcoming and brilliant and people from there contributed and it just kind of escalated.
How much time were you spending on the F-Word?
It’s really hard to quantify. In my previous job I used to live close to where I work so it would take me about half hour [to commute], which meant I had more time at home. So I would get home… I don’t know. It just felt like I had a lot more to get out. I’d be writing things and I’d be on the bus thinking about things to write about. So it’s really hard to measure because you’re always thinking about what to write throughout the day and that’s part of the time as well. Just a few hours at weekends, and during evenings as well. It is a lot of time. Especially dealing with all the emails, as that’s part of it. I know Jess [McCabe] has lots.
You were editor for 6 years. What made you decide it was time to leave?
I wasn’t updating it as much as I used to because I was quite busy and just felt a bit tired. Also I was thinking, “What am I going to do with this? I can’t do this forever, just by myself. I need to hand it on”. It’s either hand it on to someone else or stop it. And Jess had been contributing for ages and she was really really great and she had the same viewpoint as I did about what the site should be. I thought she would be brilliant to carry it on, and thankfully she said yes. Phew! (laughs). I think she is amazing. I also think it’s good to show that it’s bigger than just one person, so it’s not just all about me, just because I set I up and was running it. It can carry on without me, and that’s really great as well.
Did you ever feel singled out as a visible feminist by the media? How was the response to that?
I think that people were generally positive. But I felt it was really strange because I hadn’t really done anything apart from run a website. I felt like people who actually organize campaigns and work in rape crisis centres and things like that; they should be the ones really who… the most amazing ones. I was more providing a platform for those people to say what they thought. So I always felt a little bit weird, but it was also nice as well, on the other hand, to be recognised. There wasn’t much negative feedback [to being named in the Guardian 50 women to watch out for list]. …There’s reasonable criticism of the F-Word, which is fine. But because people have heard your name in the media, they assume things about you that aren’t true. They assume I must be a lipstick feminist who hates second wave feminists who wants to come up with a high heel style feminism or something. …a lot of people assume that they know what the Editor’s opinion is on certain issues, just because the F-Word has published something, not [written] by the Editor, but by someone else.
How do you understand the term the ‘third wave’?
My understanding… my interpretation of third wave feminism is that there’s a resurgence of feminism today. That’s basically it, how I interpret it. I know there’s different interpretations and politics. I think there is a resurgence of feminist activity and think it’s ok to call that a third wave. It feels like there’s a bit of a dip between the second wave and now, from what I’ve read… Going with my interpretation, rather than someone else’s… because [some] younger people think that they’re a second wave feminist, and that’s fine, whatever they want, it’s a different interpretation.
Were you one of the founders of the London 3rd Wave?
After The F-Word had been around for a while, Kristin [Aune] and I arranged a meeting with a few feminist people we know in London as we weren’t aware of any London feminist groups. Especially ones for younger women as well. So we had a meeting … And we decided to set up a group. We called it ‘Third Wave’ because it was positive, saying feminism is here, we’re embracing it again. And there were no other feminist groups in London, across London wide feminist groups that we were aware of. I’m sure there must have been, which is weird, but…
Things weren’t really promoted so much. I think we’re a lot more networked now.
You didn’t have much internet information at the beginning. The 3rd Wave group was really nice because you had a lot of people who had very different opinions on things, but it was always very open minded, discussing things… radical feminists became best friends with sex work feminists and it was just really nice. We didn’t really get much activism done, which is why other groups were set up probably, who did things like put on marches. But a lot of people met each other who became involved in The F-Word and went on to do other things. One went on to set up $pread Magazine in New York.
What feminist media have inspired you?
The feminist ones: Bust and Bitch magazines. And Ms Magazine as well. This website called Third Wave in America. It hasn’t been active for years, but that was a major one. It was really exciting. And books by feminists like Naomi Wolf. And zines as well.
How important to you is it that The F-Word is uncommercial?
It’s really important actually. We had this consultation about advertising on the website. In the end we have a small thing which links to Amazon which gives us a little bit of money which we can use to partially fund the site and give some money to charity as well. But I would have hated to have had adverts over it, like some websites do. I just don’t like it. I don’t like it. I like the fact that there is no adverts on it. It’s good.
Are the running costs of the website just the hosting itself?
Yeh. And the other thing to do with that is paying people to write. No ones’s ever been paid, it’s all voluntary. And there’s no plans to change that. And that’s really important as well. Yeh, it’s the server costs… the cost of the URL, hosting and then if we wanted to redesign it, which Jess is looking into, then that would cost quite a bit of money as well. We’ve basically just paid for it ourselves. [note: actually there are other costs too like transport costs for the collective to meet with each other which I forgot to mention]
Does that ever bother you?
It did worry me. I thought “What am I going to do? I can’t keep paying for this for the rest of my life”. It doesn’t really bother me that much at the moment because I can afford it, so I’m happy to do it. But I can’t keep paying it for the rest of my life! (laughs). That would be quite a lot of money. I don’t know what we’re going to do about that, but I think people might donate who care about it… But then, you don’t want to make people think they have to give money to it in order to join in. That would be really bad.
What’s your hope for the redesign?
I think Jess is driving that. I haven’t really had time to get involved in that very much. To keep the accessibility and simplicity of it, and not get it all cluttered and stupid images of high heels (laughs). Don’t make it pink. Just to freshen it a bit, make sure it’s accessible. Make some of the commenting a bit easier and to make some of the administration a bit easier, because some of it is quite time consuming at the moment. Maybe making it a bit less static on the front page.
Read the other questions over at Grassroots Feminism.
The new edition of Reclaiming The F Word with an updated Preface will be available in June 2013.
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