Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT
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Life as a ‘Lady Insurrectionist’
LYNNE WALSH reports from the recent ‘Chartism Day’ conference at Reading University, where sisters of the 19th century Chartist struggle emerged from the pages of history
A Chartist mosaic in Rogerstone, Newport
[Robin Drayton/Creative Commons] 
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Castro became one of the first leaders to denounce Israeli genocide against Palestinians at the UN, comparing zionist persecution to Nazi crimes while Cuba trained PLO cadres and awarded Arafat state honours, writes PABLO MERIGUET
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
THE role of women in the Chartist movement has often been neglected, even though they ruffled the Establishment’s feathers in their work as Hen Chartists and Lady Insurrectionists.
This year’s Chartism Day conference, at the University of Reading, succeeded in shining a spotlight on key figures including Helen MacFarlane, Frances Wright, Susanna Fearnley, Mary Grassby, Elizabeth Hanson, Mary Ann Walker and Sarah Theobald.
The event, staged by the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH), platformed 16 speakers, although only two were women. The voices of long-dead female Chartists filled the room, thanks mainly to Dr Judy Cox, whose work has uncovered the tub-thumping speeches and excoriating quotes from the Hen Chartists, as they were dubbed by the press.
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