Off to Threadneedle Street
A campaigner who forced the Bank of England to have female representation on banknotes has pledged to donate her first Jane Austen tenner to a women’s shelter as the new plastic currency enters circulation.
Caroline Criado-Perez threatened to take the Bank to court for discrimination when the former governor Mervyn King announced that it was phasing out paper fivers featuring the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, the only woman other than the Queen to feature on legal tender at that time.
They were replaced last year by the new £5 featuring Winston Churchill.
But on the new £10 note the bank backed down and on Thursday more than 1bn new tenners featuring Austen begin entering circulation. It ends a four-month period in which there has been no usable note featuring a woman other than the Queen.
Twitter today:
https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/status/910457977328537600
https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/status/910482470503686145
Needless to say, Criado-Perez received huge amounts of abuse over suggesting a woman’s picture being on tenners for a while.
She has also been instrumental in getting a statue of Millicent Fawcett – Women’s Suffrage campaigner – in London https://twitter.com/channel4news/status/910583609735745537
Wow. This is real? I want one.
Hell yes it’s real.
I got several from an ATM this morning.
Almost as if they’re actual currency!
I’ll see if I can get one today.
Last year I got a copy of Caroline Criado-Perez’s book from a free library (these are cute little box things that people put outside their houses and fill with books. You can take any book you want or put other books in). I emailed Criado-Perez to say how inspirational I found the book and mentioned that I was going to put it back into the free library for someone else to read. She asked for my address and sent me a signed copy.
In times like these, with very few causes for celebration, it’s so good to see her smiling and victorious, with Poppy looking as adorable as ever. I was afraid that that was never going to happen again when I was watching her twitter handle fill up with the ugliest hate-tweets imaginable – including the obligatory rape and death threats – quicker than the Twitter feed could display them. I’d click “refresh”, and by the time the tweets were finished loading, there would be 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at a time (well, actually 24:7, but I’m talking about the coordinated ones) day after day for months. All that effort just to prove that misogyny was a non-issue…
To make things worse it didn’t take long before she also came under attack from the usual suspects on the (supposedly) pro-“feminist” side, including many of the same people who would later throw Ophelia under the bus (more often than not associated with the Block Bot). I was by then very aware of the cyberbullying coming from the right after it had destroyed movement atheism and skepticism, but the attacks on CCP and roughly half of the feminists I was following by the other half may have been the first hint I got that “we” may in fact not all be “in this together”. Before then I thought that “TERFs” and “SWERFs” were haters who did things like equate the very existence of trans people with rape (I had seen some of that, and I fully supported the trans activists who called it out), but I was pretty sure that CCP didn’t fall into that category. The rest, as they say, is history.
@Myrhinne
That was nice of her.
That reminds me: I got copies of your books om a free library (these are cute little box things that people put outside their houses and fill with books. You can take any book you want or put other books in)……
Above post was meant to include “Ophelia” at the start. Buggered up that joke then.
@Bjarte Foshaug
Yeah. And in just about every interview she did the first question was something like “but surely you knew you’d be attacked by idiots?” It’s hard to imagine a less helpful question.
I didn’t see that but it doesn’t surprise me. I was…let’s say blockbot adjacent… for a while. I knew some of those people and I approved of some of the stuff they were trying to say. It was the business over Ophelia and ftb that caused me to sever ties with them. I hadn’t realised quite how sensitive their hair triggers were when it came to discussing trans issues. They were dragging up out of context quotes and waving pitchforks. Fuck that shit. Losing friends was a small price to pay.
Definitely not. Another on the long list of women who have been tormented for reminding everyone that women are people.
@latsot
Yeah, same here. I was never a moderator or anything, but I was definitely a supporter. As I remember it (and do correct me if I’m wrong), the blockbot started out as a free service to women like Ophelia who were targeted by misogynist trolls like the Slime Pit crowd. Then the people behind it started expanding into other social justice issues, including trans issues. And from there the hunt for alleged “TERFs” or “SWERFs” gradually came to eclipse everything else. It was weird to watch as my Twitter feed gradually went from mostly featuring tweets critical of MRAs and other misogynists to almost exclusively featuring tweets demonizing feminists. This was shortly before I deleted my Twitter account in disgust.
Like, I suspect, so many other readers of B&W I started out in the skeptic/atheist camp* and was only later sucked into the social justice wars (in the aftermath of the “elevatorgate”/”Dear Muslima” shitsorm). At the time I was totally clueless about all the factions and divisions among people who identified as feminists or social justice activists of some flavor and naively assumed that we were all on the same side against the MRAs, the slimepitters etc. So I started indiscriminately following every twitter feminist who seemed to have anything interesting to say. I also followed a few *trans activists and learned that there were people called “TERFs” who were at least as bad as the MRAs sending rape threats to Rebecca Watson. It wasn’t until later that I realized they were talking about some of the other feminists I was following, who, as far as I could tell, were only guilty of questioning the innateness/legitimacy of gender roles and the idea of “male” vs. “female” ways of thinking or feeling.
One of the weirdest twitter exchanges I ever had was with a trans activist who apparently saw the need to question me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger and gay rights activist. I was basically told that even though this woman never actually said anything transphobic, it was non-the less “implied in very subtle ways” (if I get the wording right) that were only visible to trans people and that I as a cis person was therefore unqualified to question. As far as a could tell “their” TERF detection method boiled down to telepathy and spectral evidence.
* I haven’t given up on scientific and critical thinking, but those were never about belonging to particular groups or movements anyway.
Bjarte
It happened in about two days. People I’d come to rely upon as caring about people suddenly didn’t care about around 50% of people or what they had to say. I didn’t want to cut ties with friends, but I had to.
Also Bjarte
Sidenote: I never signed up to the blockbot myself, because I always wanted to keep the ability to decide whom to block rather than turning it over to someone else. Nowadays I’m finding myself blocked by people I hadn’t heard of until that second – a tweet quoted somewhere that I look up to see if there are interesting replies. Precautionary blocking of total strangers – I’ve never seen the point of it.
And that’s where we’ve been stuck now for years. There are people who consider themselves to be on the left who tweet nothing but abuse of feminists – not just demonizing them but abusing and wishing violence and death on and telling shameless lies about. It’s a disgusting spectacle yet it doesn’t get criticized…except by people called “TERFs.” It’s astonishing.
Ophelia
I know. I should have been more specific on that point.
Apparently “equality” means that people with physical traits more representative of fathers than mothers (the people formerly known as “men”) should all have the same right to treat people with physical traits more representative of mothers (the people formerly known as “women”) like shit, regardless of race, class, “gender”, or sexual orientation.