International Women’s Day #IWD2026

This is from the header to the home page of the International Women’s Day homepage:

Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated. Together we can forge gender equality. Get ready for #IWD2026.

(Link to that website HERE. Lots of material, resources and suggestions on this site.)

Tomorrow is IWD, so I thought I’d post something relevant.

I was about to walk to the supermarket this morning and looked for something to listen to on the way that wasn’t about the war and mayhem in today’s world (thank you Nobel Peace Prize seeker DJT). I came across an episode of a podcast I subscribe to: Arts & Ideas (search for it on your usual podcast platform). It’s a spinoff of BBC Radio 4 material. In this episode the presenter Shahidha Bari looks at ‘how women express themselves in language, argument, poetry and art’ (from the episode descriptor).

Her guests are Sara Ahmed, an Australian writer and scholar (has interesting things to say about complaints and the language of complaining); Lauren Elkin, who needs no introduction – I’ve posted briefly HERE on her book Flâneuse; Karen McCarthy Woolf, whose latest poetry collection is called Unsafe; Mary Wellesley, a historian with a special interest in women in the medieval period; Ash Percival-Borley, a military historian and former soldier.

They all offer fascinating comments and insights in their discussion of women’s voices and language and how they resonate in a world that tends to dismiss, marginalise or trivialise them. I’d highly recommend a listen to this episode. I found it inspiring and informative. I must look out for an anthology of World War I poetry by women that was mentioned – I hadn’t realised that there was such a body of work (which kind of illustrates the ways in which women’s voices are often displaced by men’s in our culture.)

What else can I suggest from this blog that you might find of interest in connection with IWD? I’d begin with some of my most recent posts about a woman writer whose sequence of five linked novels is among the finest, most moving and engaging fiction I’ve read in a long time: Elizabeth Jane Howard’s the Cazalet Chronicles. She focuses on a group of women of varying degrees of independence and agency in the context of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family.

Some of my other favourite writers are women (just put their names in the search box to find my numerous posts about them):

Barbara Pym

Barbara Comyns

Elizabeth Taylor

Anita Brookner

Rose Tremain

Elizabeth Bowen

Virginia Woolf

Vita Sackville-West

There are many more I could have mentioned, but those are the ones who come to my mind most immediately.

This is my contribution to what the IWD website describes in one of its aims as setting out to elevate and celebrate women’s voices and achievements.