The Holding Space by Julia Macintosh

Like most people, you are not able to face more than one fear during your lifetime. You also spend your life fleeing from your first fear towards your first hope. Be careful that you do not, through your own wiliness, end up always in the same position in which you began. (Jane Bowles)

I was invited by Alex to share my personal account of mental illness, and was reminded of this by Joel White’s moving reflections about his experience of breakdown and its transformative impact on his life. Well here’s the thing: I’ve already recounted the ins and outs of my own experience of breakdown, on my personal blog. My posts there record the evolution of my reflections over the past few years, as I headed into crisis and emerged from it into recovery and renewal, into the present. So I’m not going to dig too deeply into that – though please bear with me here, because I’m going to try to use it as a springboard to something else. Read more…

How Feminism Found Me by Laura Mulcahy

Recently I was approached with the question ‘How and why did you become a feminist?’…

I have to be honest throughout most of my life I thought that feminism had died a death since its second wave and that (at least in the UK) men and women were seen and treated as equals. I thought there was no need to wave placards and get angry any more as we were in a really good position as opposed to others around the world. This is why I wasn’t a feminist. Oh how wrong was I!
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A Century after the Suffragettes

Being aware that it was a century ago that the suffragette movement stood to be counted in the United Kingdom, I felt it was important to try and commemorate this. In many ways the work they started, most famously personified by Emmeline Pankhurst, is still on it’s ascendency. What gender differences exist still within and outwith the home, workplace and institution ?  Here is a quote from Elizabeth Fulhame (fl. 1780 to 1794).  She was a chemist working on significant problems and the formulation of a science developing out of less rigorous traditions… Read more…