I have had the pleasure over the last two days of being in rooms where 99% present were women and were discussing matters of serious human concern.
The first day was with the New Script group (Belfast/Fermanagh) who are focused on a campaign around mental stress. It has been a long running campaign for improved mental health treatment in the North, in which l have played a minor part.
In its early days, about five or six years ago, the campaign was a typical “we want it and we want it now” approach. Street demonstrations in various places, outside the Health HQ in Belfast and inside it, were commonplace. Trips to Stormont to lobby politicians became the ritual highlight. Letter writing and email campaigns were de rigeur.
However, as time passed and it became clear that the system wasn’t listening, these women decided that new tactics were needed. And they were well up for the challenge.
The first step was to increase pressure on those in power by a tactical changing of how mental health treatment should be approached. No, they were not experts, but they did do their research.
It is the mental health system’s practice, driven by Big Pharma, to treat mental stress by way of “one-to-one” with a professional and the sufferer. The treatment is based around the framework of: “what is wrong with you?” and then a diagnosis, followed by pills of one kind or another. And this puts the cause firmly within the person’s body or more specifically, their “faulty” brain.
In turn, this approach absolves us of any questions of what else may have caused a sufferer’s distress. In fact, the real causes of a person’s distress are often ignored and therefore hidden. And the women were quick to spot the weaknesses in this treatment method, and its wider relationship to power.
The woman in New Script began to call for a new approach to mental distress treatment. This treatment uses the material-based premise of: what happened to you? This opens up the real causes of mental distress. It is trauma informed.
Questions around causes such as poverty, housing, the health service and other social justice issues, are firmly in focus now. Suddenly the activists in New Script see a whole other vista opening up right before their eyes. In fact, the horror of capitalism and its neo-liberal consequences is slowly but definitely coming into their understanding. For the average activist the “ah ha” moment has been reached, by the social justice route.
My second enlightenment came today (19th February 2025) when l was in a room with approximately 60 women from all over the North and South of Ireland, at the launching of their event called “Women of the Borderlands”. This was the culmination of a story “documenting programme”, where women from the border areas were asked to relate their experiences of living through the thirty-year war in the North. This was the first time that such research on this topic had been done with women only.
Here too, it was clear from the discussion and the Q & A, that the women are well able to articulate what happened to them and why. They told their sometimes-harrowing stories with great compassion. They were clear on the complicity of power from all sides in their years of suffering and, worst of all, their silencing.
It was interesting to note that the women identified the material issues in their lives that directly caused their problems. They highlighted poverty, poor housing, along with power, violence and class, while discussing their border life experiences up to the present day, not just the fact that they had lived through a war situation.
In the two examples above, women have become politically aware and empowered through their activism and learning. For me, what l have observed in both cases, is that there is, clearly, an untapped cohort of women, out there, being lost to the struggle, who have the ability to very positively enhance the veracity of the fight to achieve the destruction of capitalism.
How many more possibilities are there out there?
As Mao said: “Women hold up half of the sky”. Therefore, they have the ability and the right to be a central part of the struggle to ensure that a new, socialist world actually happens. If we continue to allow the silence of women in struggle, we are using only 50% of the energy available to destroy capitalism and build for the Socialist Republic.
