As rivers run dry, the desperate search for water has led to a rise in domestic abuse, conflict and illness
All photos by Cyril Zannettacci/Agence Vu for Action Against Hunger
Continue reading...Category Archives: Women
They stayed to fight the Taliban. Now the protesters are being hunted down
Women’s rights activists fear for their lives as Afghanistan’s new rulers infiltrate, detain, beat and torture groups of protesters
A month ago, Reshmin was busy organising protests against Taliban rule in online groups of hundreds of fellow women’s rights activists. Now the 26-year-old economics graduate must operate clandestinely, dressing in disguise and only demonstrating with a select few.
“If things continue like this, there will be no future for women in Afghanistan. It’s better if the future never arrives,” says Reshmin, who spoke to the Guardian using only her first name, which means “silk” in Farsi, out of security concerns. “Each time we go out, we say farewell because we might not make it back alive.”
Continue reading...‘We run from men only to meet crocodiles’: Kenya’s drought is deadly for women
As poverty and lost livelihoods fuel threats in the home, those who have found refuge still risk their lives walking miles in search of water
The setting sun brings a warm glow to the huts in the village of Umoja in Samburu county, Kenya. Christine Sitiyan sits outside her home with her beadwork, carefully running the thin thread through tiny bead holes, hoping she can finish the colourful belt she is making before darkness sets in. The traditional belt can fetch 3,000 Kenyan shillings (£20), enough to cover her needs for a month.
This tranquil scene is very different from her troubled past. Like many girls in her community, Sitiyan never finished school but was married off as a young teenager. Seven years later, with two children, she left her husband, unable to endure the beatings from a man she says could no longer fend for the family in an increasingly harsh environment.
Continue reading...‘The bikini line is still a no-no’: why does dance have a problem with body hair?
Chests must be de-fuzzed, armpits shaved, legs waxed. But as dance becomes more diverse, should it stop policing what grows naturally? Top performers speak out about their body hair
The ideal dancer’s body is unrealistic in many ways: bendier than a Barbie, incredibly lean but super-strong, with very particular proportions (in ballet, small head, long legs, short torso, high insteps). And also, it’s hairless. As with swimmers, athletes, gymnasts and others who wear leotards for a living, constant depilation is part of the job.
That goes for men as well as women. “I choose to shave because it gives me a sense of readiness,” says dancer and choreographer Eliot Smith. “I believe it gives me better outlines of the body against the stage lights.” On ballet message boards, it’s not uncommon to find parents of teenage boys asking what to do about hairy legs showing under white tights (wear two pairs of tights, or paint over hairs with pancake are two suggestions, if shaving isn’t an option).
But is there an alternative? When pole dancer Leila Davis was pictured in an Adidas campaign in March showing off armpit fuzz, as well as toned abs, there were plenty of online haters, predictably, but lots of lovers, too. And there are a few – although not many – contemporary dancers who are happy to let their body hair be seen on stage.
“I want it to be normalised,” says Jessie Roberts-Smith, a performer with Scottish Dance Theatre. And independent choreographer Ellie Sikorski sees it as part of a bigger picture. “It’s not the first fight I would pick about the homogeneity of bodies on stage,” she says. “But there’s something archaic in dance – where your body is policed in certain ways. You’re taught not to have agency over your body and body hair is a tiny detail of that.”
Continue reading...‘My Elizabeth Barrett Browning film needs a woman’s touch – but where are all the female directors?’
Screenwriter of biopic about the radical poet says the industry must do more to get women behind the camera lens
A new film about a 19th-century poet and early feminist is crying out to be filmed through a woman’s lens, but it is likely to be directed by a man because there is such a shortage of female directors, according to one of Britain’s leading screenwriters.
Paula Milne has written a feature film inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who campaigned against social injustice, including slavery and child labour, while living in fear of her own father. Milne believes that such a story, with its many contemporary parallels, should be filmed by a woman, because of the natural empathy that women have for one another, but that is unlikely to happen.
Continue reading...Stella Creasy on her lonely maternity cover battle: ‘Women should be able to have kids and do politics’
The Labour politician is used to fighting battles – but can she win her latest: convincing her colleagues to back proper maternity cover for fellow members?
Stella Creasy is dodging people on the pavement as we talk. She apologises for the background noise but it’s hard finding time for a conversation when you have a newborn son, a toddler daughter, and no proper maternity leave from a full-time job as Labour MP for Walthamstow; this walk to an appointment is the only window she has. Last month, she spoke in a Commons debate on childcare, baby Pip in a sling, sounding astonishingly composed for someone who had given birth four weeks earlier. I ask how she’s feeling and she laughs briefly and says: “Tired as hell, mad as anything.”
And then it all comes tumbling out: the night before that debate, she’d been in hospital with an infection she thinks was brought on by doing too much. The day after her caesarean, she was dialling into meetings with the defence secretary from hospital – she has had about 200 cases in her London constituency of people seeking help getting family members out of Afghanistan – and has barely stopped since. “There wasn’t any alternative,” she says. “These are people ringing up my staff threatening to kill themselves because they’re so worried about family members. You can hear the terror in their voices.” Meanwhile, she’s grappling with “the mum guilt” for not taking more time off, while struggling to be patient with people in parliament who ask how she is, only to back away when answered honestly. Having lost a battle with the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) this summer over the maternity leave cover she wanted, Creasy refuses to draw a polite veil over the consequences. And if that means breaking the working mother taboo against admitting that everything is not in fact fine, then so be it.
Continue reading...‘It is bullying, pure and simple’: being a woman in Japanese politics
Harassment is common for women who run for office and female MPs comprise just 9.9% of lower house
Mari Yasuda has come to dread checking her social media accounts. While a TV programme has tipped the candidate as “one to watch” in Japan’s general election this month, her anonymous correspondents make no secret of their belief that, as a woman, she should not be standing for parliament at all.
“They accuse me of sleeping with powerful men to get ahead or make abusive comments in calls to our office,” says Yasuda, who is contesting a seat in Hyogo prefecture for the opposition Constitutional Democratic party of Japan. “I receive emails from men remarking on my appearance or asking me for a date.”
Continue reading...Why pregnant women need clearer messaging on Covid vaccine safety
Analysis: early uncertainty around vaccination advice for expectant mothers has left them confused and hesitant
- Pregnant women are being turned away from Covid vaccine clinics, experts warn
- Coronavirus – latest updates
In the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, there was uncertainty around almost everything, from who was more adversely affected by Covid-19 to who should get vaccinated first – or at all.
But as awareness about the illness and vaccine safety has grown, one group in particular remains confused and torn about the risk of immunisation: expectant mothers.
Continue reading...‘Gunmen killed a midwife who refused to leave a woman in labour’
Zahra Mirzaei pioneered ‘groundbreaking’ maternity services in Kabul, but has been forced to flee. She says she won’t stop fighting for dignified care for Afghanistan’s women and girls
When Afghanistan’s first midwife-led birth centre opened in the impoverished district of Dasht-e-Barchi in western Kabul this year it was a symbol of hope and defiance.
It began receiving expectant mothers in June, just over a year after a devastating attack by gunmen on the maternity wing at the local hospital left 24 people dead, including 16 mothers, a midwife and two young children.
Continue reading...The Nigerian fish market where gods and commerce meet
The all-women market appoints a ‘mother of wealth’ to pray for their good fortune – and in this recession-hit country the role is more important than ever
Folasade Ojikutu wears a traditional white lace dress for her work at the lagoon dock behind Oluwo market in Epe. The small town is home to one of the largest and most popular fish markets in Lagos – and almost all 300 traders are women. Many are from families who have sold fish here for generations, and Ojikutu, 47, is their “Iya Alaje”, meaning the mother or carrier of wealth.
As she strides past a small waterfront shrine, dozens of women fishing waist-deep in the water chant and hail her, calling out “Aje”- in part a reference to the Yoruba goddess of wealth. Every day, hundreds of people travel, sometimes for hours, to buy fish at Epe market, as it is commonly known, where the spiritual and commercial merge. And the mainly women traders look to Ojikutu– who acts as an intercessor, praying for good fortune, alongside managing affairs at the market.
Continue reading...‘We planted a seed’: the Afghan artists who painted for freedom
The Taliban has whitewashed Kabul’s political murals – and those who created them have fled into exile
Negina Azimi felt shock and fear like never before when she heard that Taliban fighters had entered Kabul on 15 August. As an outspoken female artist in Afghanistan, she knew they would come for her.
“We heard reports that the Taliban might raid houses. I was scared because I live in a very central neighbourhood and every room in my house is adorned with the kind of art the Taliban won’t approve of,” she says, referring to paintings that feature messages about women’s empowerment and are critical of the Taliban’s atrocities.
Negina Azimi, who is now in a refugee camp in Albania with others of the ArtLords collective. They are now planning an exhibition
Continue reading...More than 30,000 Polish women sought illegal or foreign abortions since law change last year
Tens of thousands have travelled to other European countries including England for legal terminations since near-total ban, campaigners say
At least 34,000 women in Poland are known to have sought abortions illegally or abroad since the country introduced a near total ban on terminations a year ago.
According to Abortion Without Borders (AWB), an organisation that helps women access safe abortion services, more than 1,000 Polish women have sought second-trimester abortions in foreign clinics since the country passed draconian new laws.
Continue reading...How online meetings are levelling the office playing field
Far from suffering ‘Zoom fatigue’, many women have found the move to online meetings empowering
Before the pandemic Francesca used to miss a lot of meetings because she had to drop off her kids at school before commuting into the office. If she did make them, she rarely spoke up.
While many workers are suffering from Zoom fatigue, for workers like Francesca online meetings have presented an opportunity – and one that she fears may soon be taken away.
Continue reading...Comedian Bridget Christie: ‘I see my flasher’s penis all the time. But I can make horrible things amusing’
The comic has come blazing out of lockdown fearless and on full throttle, buying a motorbike for her 50th birthday and turning the menopause – along with an incident in a park – into comedy gold
‘I must tell you how old I’m going to be when I die,” says Bridget Christie, whipping out her phone to show me a small cartoon gravestone bearing the date of her demise. Fittingly, we’re sitting in a churchyard near her home in London, not far from some actual gravestones. According to the app, Christie, who recently turned 50, has 34 years left. As one of the many people who lost loved ones to Covid-19, death has been on her mind during the pandemic, and her thoughts on ageing have been exacerbated by the arrival of the menopause. In lockdown, preoccupied by the passage of time, she decided to look at the moon every night: “I thought about how many moons I’ve got left to see. I was like, ‘We’re not here for very long – what are you going to leave behind?’”
Her thoughts coalesced into her BBC Radio 4 series Mortal, which tackled birth, life, death and the afterlife. Working with BBC Radio Theatre, where she’d previously recorded standup, she decided to try something different. Whispered monologues, surreal characters (Zeus, the Grim Reaper and dead Bridget among them) and real telephone conversations are stitched together into something quite intimate. Although she got their permission, she didn’t tell her dad, sister Eileen and friend Ashley exactly when she’d be recording their phone calls, lending a naturalness to the chats.
Continue reading...‘I feel hurt that my life has ended up here’: The women who are involuntary celibates
What is it like to go without a partner when you long for one – and when even a fleeting sexual connection feels impossible?
When a woman named Alana coined the term “incel” in the late 90s, she couldn’t have predicted the outcome. What started as a harmless website to connect lonely, “involuntary celibate” men and women has morphed into an underground online movement associated with male violence and extreme misogyny.
In 2014, Elliot Rodger stabbed and shot dead six people in California, blaming the “girls” who had spurned him and condemned him to “an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires”. There have since been numerous attacks by people who identify with incel culture, including Jack Davison, who killed five people in Plymouth this summer, before turning the gun on himself. In the darkest corners of the internet, incel groups have become a breeding ground for toxic male entitlement, putting them on hate crime watchlists across the UK.
Continue reading...Female directors wait longer than men for their big break, report reveals
A huge equality gap in top jobs and pay has been highlighted between women TV documentary-makers and male colleagues
Television documentary teams in Britain today are full of ambitious and capable women but most of them have to wait much longer than their male colleagues to become directors and earn a bigger wage.
The findings of the campaigning group We Are Doc Women (WADW), released this weekend, have revealed that gender equality is still a goal, not a reality, in factual programme-making.
Continue reading...Viva la vulva: why we need to talk about women’s genitalia
Ignorance about the basic biology of vulvas is still shockingly high – yet there are huge health benefits, physical and emotional, to be won with better understanding
If you have a vulva between your legs, could you identify the seven separate structures in a mirror? If your partner has a vulva, can you identify theirs?
For over half the population, the vulva is a significant part of their body; an exit and an entrance, a site of pleasure and, often, pain, that speaks to core human function and need. In 2021, it can feel as if we’re on the cliff-edge of emancipation from the history of oppression and ick surrounding female genitalia. The booming sex toy market, a growing awareness of hormonal cycles and the messy reality of periods, a sharper focus on female pleasure and evolving conversations about menopause all point to real progress. Yet there remains a well of misunderstanding in society about what’s down there (clitoris, labia majora, labia minora, urethral opening, vaginal opening, perineum and anus, by the way), with tangible consequences.
Continue reading...Blind date: ‘A man on the next table was watching a horror film’
Marta, 30, project manager, meets Andrew, 33, broadcast journalist
Marta on Andrew
What were you hoping for?
Romance, naturally. Failing that, someone I could have an interesting conversation with.
‘He lives freely, I live in fear’: the plight of India’s abandoned wives
Activists highlight the poverty, stigma and abuse faced by women deserted by spouses living abroad
Kamala Reddy*, 33, a software engineer from Andhra Pradesh, married Vijay Kumar* in a traditional Hindu wedding in 2012. Kumar, who was working in the UK, was chosen by Reddy’s family. “But he didn’t take me to the UK after our marriage. He made excuses such as problems with the visa and so on,” says Reddy.
In 2016, Reddy became pregnant. Under pressure from the family, Kumar brought her to England. On arrival, she was shocked to discover Kumar’s secret. He had a British partner, two children and a stepchild. Neither Kumar’s nor Reddy’s families knew about the other family. Kumar threatened to leave Reddy if she told anyone.
Continue reading...Nobel prize will have no gender or ethnicity quotas, academy head says
Only 59 Nobel prizes – or 6.2% of the total – have gone to women since their inception in 1901
Swedish scientist and head of the academy that awards Nobel prizes has ruled out the notion of gender or ethnicity quotas in the selection of laureates for the prestigious award.
Göran Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, accepted that there are “so few women” in the running but conceded the prize would ultimately go to those who are “found the most worthy”.
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