Bronwen Davies

to infinity........... and a bit further

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@Neutrogena @iamKishan19 Second the neutrogena ultra sheer range but I go for the SPF100

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK @benhackshealth @UK_Daniel_Card I have teenagers - they love a trip together the ‘big’ Tesco. Very weird.

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK Fake news lol

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK I’d been estranged for my dad for a number of years and found that I’d already done a lot of grieving, but it absolutely comes in waves. I find it catches me when I least expect it and time lessons it, but it doesn’t go away.

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK But it happens every year when we get a ‘heatwave’ - do people throw them out for winter? I don’t understand where the annual demand for fans comes from every year?

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@NJSimmondsbooks Absolutely not

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK Good luck - hope you make some progress

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

So #questiontime removed the two Westminster representatives for parties who won a majority int heir native nations elections today. Nice to see how Wales and Scotland matter in the national political debate

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK After an awful year last year I started with a personal trainer this January for the same reasons - game changer. My favourite time of the week. Still along way to go but feel like I’m taking charge of my health and wellbeing

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK @SeanWrightSec That’s it exactly - it’s not that they don’t know how to behave, but choose to set it aside

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK @SeanWrightSec Yes to this, but the same people work in the private sector and behave very differently (in my experience at least) - baffling!

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK I’m sorry for your loss.

I was estranged from my dad for a long time and when he passed away still had a lot of complicated feelings - others don’t need to fully understand but sometimes having empathy and just saying nothing is the kindest thing to do.

[Lily Craven @TheAttagirls]

There is no Woman of the Day today. Instead, I want to explain why I do what I do. No one really knows who first said, “History is written by the victors” but I’d bet you any odds it was a man.

Think of your schooldays and count the number of times you learned about the roles played by women in shaping history, other than regnant Queens and perhaps Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale. Yet women lived, worked, networked, debated, campaigned, organised, invented things and built them too - but you’d never know this if your lessons, like mine, were confined to history books.

For a practical example, just look around you. Fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, ironing board, home security system, call waiting system, car heater and windscreen wipers, even the very first computer algorithm: all invented by women.

Are you surprised? Confined to the house, denied access to higher education, barred from engineering, denied entry to all branches of science and the professions for centuries, those bright analytical minds turned their attention to their immediate surroundings and saw what was needed to free them from domestic drudgery.

In return, history ignored women’s achievements, glossed over them or consigned them to dusty footnotes. If all else failed, their work was credited to - or stolen by - men, the phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect, first identified by feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1870.

In 1993, it was named for her by historian Margaret Rossiter who said, “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place’ in science was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.”

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it - the Matilda Effect is everywhere - but now substitute ‘history’ for ‘science’. The proposition still stands. What I try to do is to pierce holes in that camouflage by writing about the almost-invisible women of history who overcame manmade barriers and changed the world.

As a Second Wave feminist, I thought we’d won all the big battles, that it was just a matter of mopping up the resisters and dragging them into the 20th century. I did my bit to redress the balance in an overwhelmingly male environment, but how had I managed to miss the barefaced theft of our words, our spaces and services, our sports? How had we suddenly been reduced to a walking collection of body parts?

It was a wake-up call.

Once I saw, I couldn’t unsee the terrible damage being done to girls and young women who did not conform to the offensive sexist stereotypes being imposed on them by men who mimic women and their inane female cheerleaders. It made me fearful for non-conforming girls: tomboys. They need to see strong women as role models, women who don’t care about performing femininity, women who defy convention and do things their way. If you can see it, you can be it.

So I went digging around in those dusty footnotes, found a little gold and started from there. I found thrilling tales of women who were inventive, resourceful and brave. Then I started sharing what I found more widely, tied to the calendar as Women of the Day.

How do I find them? Often by pure chance. I go looking for one woman, spot a couple more names along the way - women whose stories really resonate with me - and file them away for the right time. Women’s history had been right under my nose the whole time. I just hadn’t realised that you needed to dig a little. The rather unexpected bonus was that in giving them a voice, I found mine.

I am a conspicuously law-abiding woman, a former prison governor, and if you had told me when I retired that one day, I’d be standing outside a police station in protest at the hounding of gender critical women and singing “Go catch some rapists” to the tune of Guantanamera, I’d have advised you to seek immediate medical attention for the effects of the bump to your head.

But here I am, telling women’s stories, and behind the scenes, pursuing a second career as a women’s rights activist. I won’t ever fall asleep at the wheel again.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Cardiff with my Women of Wessex sisters, to protest about @bphillipsonmp’s inexplicable decision to delay laying the EHRC Code of Practice before Parliament — and make no mistake about it. It IS a decision; one that is causing real harm and damage to the rights of women and the protection of children.

Some of you come for the occasional stories of women in history hiding in plain sight, but I hope you stay because you care about fairness and safety for women. For now, I leave you with this thought from the 1949 memoirs of Somerset suffragette Nelly Crocker (1872-1962):

“Modern young women seem unaware of the price paid for their political and social emancipation, and modern historians have greatly ignored the struggle”.

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK Maybe just contact the concerns team before you submit a subject access for your data - you’re clearly entitled to it and it’s a quick fix. They may just tell the dept to release it ? Might just be quicker - depends on how helpful your trust is?

[Home of the Brave @OfTheBraveUSA]

Vance: "When people like Kamala Harris send our sons and daughters, our young people, to fight in stupid wars, it is the young generation that carries the burden of that. We're gonna stop sending our young people to far away lands. We are not the policemen of the world."

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@NJSimmondsbooks Get her a copy of Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez just to ensure her rage is fully formed! The whole system is rigged !

[United Nations @UN]

Globally, women hold just 64% of the legal rights enjoyed by men.

“When we are not equal under the law, we are not equal,” said @antonioguterres on Sunday’s #InternationalWomensDay.

“It is time to make justice a reality for women & girls, everywhere.”

https://t.co/y8v4oAdmjA

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

This

[💗 @ma1ybe]

Two thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women. Not because women live longer, but because estrogen protects the brain. When it’s suddenly stripped away, the brain literally shrinks. Brain fog in your 40s isn’t “just stress.” It’s a red flag. But instead of addressing hormones, women are gaslight with antidepressants or told to meditate. Fast forward 20 years and she’s in a nursing home and can’t remember her own kids. This isn’t “normal aging.” It’s medical negligence. And despite most Alzheimer’s patients being women, much of the research is still done on male mice instead of female mice. That’s not science, that’s neglect.”

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@jan_murray Private healthcare saved me - I definitely still wouldn’t have a job and I don’t know how much of my sanity I’d have left if I hadn’t paid for my surgery after years of inaction on the part of the NHS. I’m glad you finally getting the response you deserve from your dr

[Bronwen Davies @beddiebyes]

@LisaForteUK It’s the small things ❤️