British women activists, new book

This video from England says about itself:

Greenham peace camp: Bringing the fence down

3 September 2013

Despite the military presence, the women managed to cut through the perimeter fence at Greenham Common and enter the base in protest about the nuclear weapons stored there.

This is one in a series of films made in celebration of the peace camp at Greenham Common. Working with the filmmaker, Beeban Kidron, we invited women who stayed at the peace camp between 1981 and 1987 to send us their memories, pictures, letters and films.

We were inundated with material. We interviewed many of the women who contacted us, borrowed their photographs and their own home movies and rerecorded their forgotten songs. Those contributions are saved here at YourGreenham as a record of the strength, determination, wit and enduring wisdom of the hundreds and thousands of women who participated in the protest

By Ian Sinclair in Britain:

Inspiration from world-changing women

Monday 15th December 2014

Here We Stand: Women Changing the World, edited by Helena Earnshaw and Angharad Penrhyn Jones (Honno, £10.99)

“Rebellious women have not been much celebrated in our society,” the editors correctly argue in the introduction to this inspiring collection from Honno, a co-operative press set up to support Welsh women’s writing.

The interviews and short essays from 17 British women activists it contains go some way to countering our male-centred history and contemporary political culture.

The editors have taken care to choose a diverse set of largely little-known campaigners in terms of their social class, ethnicity, age, politics and issue of concern. It’s difficult to choose favourites from all the extraordinary testimonies, though Emma Must’s very personal account of her involvement in the pivotal anti-road protest at Twyford Down in the early 1990s is particularly affecting.

Elsewhere, Angharad Tomos’s contribution about her direct action in support of the Welsh language led me to reassess my own thoughts on the subject. Helen Steel’s interview is another highlight, her successful “McLibel” campaign against McDonald’s as remarkable as her being deceived into having a relationship with a police spy is angering.

Some common themes emerge, including Greenham Common’s widespread influence to the eye-opening experience of imprisonment for those jailed for their resistance.

An interview with Age of Stupid’s director Franny Armstrong fittingly closes this hugely important and motivating book. Armstrong shocks with her brutal honesty about the seriousness of climate change. “It’s too late for civilisation as we’ve known it to continue,” she explains and the moral and political ramifications of her argument that the people alive today “are the most powerful people who will ever live — because the generation before us didn’t know about climate change and those that follow will be powerless to stop it,” is disconcerting.

With corporate-generated climate change the biggest threat facing humanity, we need more people like the exceptional women found here.

As the freed slave Frederick Douglass said over 150 years ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” Activism, then, is the key to combatting climate change, just as it has been the fundamental driver of all progressive change throughout history.