Celebrating women

To celebrate a week that includes both Mother’s Day and International Women’s Day we would like to share some wisdom from Mairi Kidd’s books, Warriors & Witches & Damn Rebel Bitches and Feisty & Fiery & Fierce.

First up is Maw Broon, Matriarch. In honour of all the Maws out there, working hard to support, provide for and create a home for the people they love dearest.

Live Your Life by Maw

Maw Broon’s might be an extreme example, but do you know that in co-habiting heterosexual relationships, studies show that women do around 40 per cent more housework than men and women are almost always the ‘default carers’ of children? In same-sex partnerships, too, studies suggest that there is not always balance.

Good relationships are based on teamwork. Make sure you take turns at the washing and the washing up. Get a shared calendar and take joint responsibility for taxing the car, arranging dentists’ appointments for little people or paying the cleaner. When a kid gets sick at school, take turns in being the one who stays off work.

Make sure you share the good times, too. Find time to sit down together to eat, head out on a date or snuggle up together and watch something you both fancy.

Read more about the Scottish women of history in Warriors & Witches & Damn Rebel Bitches.

Next we have Sarah Morgan-Jones, Entrepreneur. Hers is a story that reminds us to remember the women, past and present, in our own lives on International Women’s Day. Our grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters and ancestors. Discover their strength in their often untold stories – it’s helped bring us to where we are today. 

Live Your Life by Sarah

Today Sarah’s story is remembered only by her family; this, of course, is the case for most lives and almost always for women’s lives. Sarah bequeathed a more comfortable life to her children, and their children, than she had herself, and while her methods may seem a little dubious today, she operated within the legal framework of her time and her hard work should not be denied.

Remember the stories of your female forebears and share them with your sons and daughters, nephews and nieces. Whether your great-great-granny worked in a mill or wore fine clothes on her back, cleaned a great house or lived in one, was ‘respectable’ or uproarious, she was a survivor in a time when women had few rights and fewer protections, particularly against the greatest danger they faced in life, in the form of childbirth.

Sarah Morgan-Jones was my [Mairi Kidd’s] husband’s great-grandmother. In this spirit of remembering, she is featured in this book.

Read more about Sarah Morgan-Jones’s story and all the other badass women from Scotland, Ireland and Wales in Feisty & Fiery & Fierce.