Blue plaques are found right across Greater London, showing us where important people in history have lived and worked. Over 900 official plaques have been erected across London since the scheme began in 1866. But, currently just 14 per cent of blue plaques across the city celebrate women. The first plaque to a woman was…
A Century of Female Suffrage Today marks 100 years since the Representation of the People Act 1918, which was the first step towards giving all women the right to vote. While it is important to recognise that the Act gave only certain privileged women the right to vote, it is a milestone we are proud to…
We all know who The Girl is. She holds The Hero’s hand as he runs through the Pyramids, chasing robots. Or she nags him, or foils him, plays the uptight straight man to his charming loser. She’s idealised, degraded, dismissed, objectified and almost always dehumanised. How do we process these insidious portrayals, and how do…
In January this year Emma Watson launched her feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf, inspired by her own exploration of brilliant literature about women and equality. As she wrote at the time, ‘there is so much amazing stuff out there! Funny, inspiring, sad, thought-provoking, empowering! I’ve been discovering so much that, at times, I’ve felt…
Here at Virago we’re always asking questions. This month we were lucky enough to be joined by two brilliant feminist thinkers, who agreed to answer some for us. Here’s what happened when two generations of feminism questioned one another – the meeting of two of the minds behind Fifty Shades of Feminism and I Call Myself…
Everyone’s talking about Fifty Shades again this week.* We can only assume they’re celebrating our recent paperback release of Fifty Shades of Feminism, the seminal, eye-opening, downright essential collection of short takes on feminism today! Is being a woman all about submitting to desire? There are many more shades than that . . . and here are fifty…
As a little gift from Virago to you this yuletide, we wanted to send you all cards . . . not your traditional Christmas card, we’ll admit, but some of our favourite feminist quotations to keep you inspired. They all feature in I Call Myself a Feminist, the essay collection which we published in November,…
We want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who sent us their favourite feminist quotes back in June. We loved them all, and a few even managed to make their way into the final manuscript of I Call Myself a Feminist. To find out which ones made the cut, you’ll just have to read…
