Feminism

Serenading Adela: A Street Opera is a major new community theatre event now in rehearsal.

It celebrates a colourful protest on January 7, 1918, when, on a hot summer night during World War I, supporters of British-born suffragette and anti-war militant Adela Pankhurst gathered outside the bluestone walls of the Women’s Prison at Pentridge in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg.

In the weeks since evidence of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long pattern of sexual abuse surfaced, millions of women, trans and gender nonconforming people, even men around the world, have exposed the scale of sexual violence in our society, using the #MeToo hashtag to tell their stories.

#MeToo set off a profound moment of collective bravery, which would have been impossible without the broad sense of solidarity and support for those coming forward.

Los Angeles streets were swarmed by the thousands of protesters on November 12 as Hollywood was taken by storm by a march inspired by the #MeToo Twitter campaign.

In support of victims of sexual assault and harassment, thousands of demonstrators marched, pausing in front of CNN’s headquarters.

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) has reported a huge disparity in the superannuation that women retire on compared with men.

Last year, the mean superannuation balance for women across all age groups – from workers just starting out to retirees – was $68,000, compared with $112,000 for men.

Women who retired in 2016 had an average super balance of $157,000, while men had an average balance of $271,000.

Feminist NGO Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia (RDVSA) is urgently seeking funds to keep the phones switched on at the NSW Rape Crisis Centre (RCC).

The NSW RCC is the last remaining public 24 hour, 7 days a week sexual assault counselling service in the state.

One of the most important aspects of Venezuela’s pro-poor Bolivarian Revolution has been its promotion of women's empowerment through community organisation.

To get a sense of how this grassroots process of community organising is developing and the role women are playing in the process, we visited the Ataroa and Lomas de Leon communes as part of the Venezuela Analysis international solidarity delegation in late August.

Those smirking denigrators of the “nanny-state” who gripe about “occupational health and safety gone mad” would do well to read Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls. It details a time when a nasty industrial poison, unregulated by business-friendly governments, destroyed countless US women’s lives.