"Men need to be held accountable for violence against women"

Jalna Hanmer at FiLiA, 2021

Jalna is a former professor of Women's Studies, who was responsible for bringing women's studies as a discipline in academia to the UK before, of course, it all went horribly Judith Butleresque wrong and we saw it replaced with ‘gender studies’ or ‘queer studies’.

She was a founder of the National Women's Aid Federation in 1974, and a key organiser of the hugely influential conference on all forms of male violence towards women and girls held in Brighton in 1996, which was a driver of the globalisation of the global women's movement against male violence.

Jalna is now 91 years old but has not quite retired. She once told me she would stop doing feminist activism when they carry her out in a box. Jalna lives with her family just outside Barcelona in Spain, and in February I visited her at home. Jalna is a very dear old friend who helped change the course of my life.