In solidarity and sisterhood
International Women’s Day is a great moment to celebrate the brilliant women who are shaping our world. It’s a wonderful opportunity to give thanks to the women who’ve impacted our own lives directly. But for me, first and foremost, it’s a day for sisterhood, a chance to express our solidarity with all women.
And we can’t do that by celebration alone. We also need to acknowledge where the sisterhood is needed more, where women being failed by our systems and our society. So while there is so much to celebrate on a day like today, I also want to use it to talk about a group of women who are at best invisible and at worst vilified: mothers raising children in poverty.
It’s a year now since I stepped down from running the charity I set up, Little Village. During the 5 years I was there, we supported 12,000 children across London, providing them with everything they needed, from cots to socks.
The mothers who walked through our doors were at rock bottom. Many had experienced homelessness and poor mental health. Violence, and specifically gender-based violence, loomed large. It was notable how many absent partners, violent dads, abusive family members lurked in the shadows of these women’s lives. This so often is treated as incidental to their stories, going unrecognised, uncounted and untreated. Yet Agenda has linked these more frequent experiences of sexual violence quite clearly to data showing that women face significantly higher levels of mental ill-health.
At Little Village, we saw how these issues were compounded by the unequal gender impacts of a decade of austerity. Funding for domestic violence work has been cut; more than three quarters of local authorities have cut funding for refuges; furthermore women, as the majority of single parents, have been hit hardest by the benefits caps and cuts to social care services.
“There really is a remarkable gender dimension to many of the [social security] reforms. If you got a group of misogynists together in a room and said ‘how can we make a system that works for men and not women?’ they wouldn’t have come up with too many other ideas than what’s in place” — Prof Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
The women we met were painfully aware of society’s judgement of poor women. Their awareness of the media was heartbreakingly clear: as women in poverty they told us they were defined as ‘scum’, ‘slags, ‘on the take’, ‘drug addicts’, ‘bad mums’. These attitudes are baked into many other systems too: for example in the criminal justice system, women who have been involved in street sex work and heavy shoplifting have much harsher sentences than men who commit equivalent crimes.
I continue to rage about what had brought the women we met at Little Village to this point of crisis, and how stacked the world seemed against them despite their determination to give their kids the best start in life. Their experiences were shaped deeply by the toxic social attitudes they encountered, and the way in which services were designed to put children ahead of women, despite everything we know about the importance of maternal wellbeing to their children’s futures.
So today I stand in sisterhood with all the brilliant mums I met in my time at Little Village, and I invite you to think of them too, and celebrate them with the labels they chose for themselves: survivors, strong, adventurers, resilient, fearless, brave, caring and quick-thinking. They had these capacities in buckets, in the face of challenges that would surely put any one of us at risk of crumbling.
