Pragna Patel
Pragna Patel is the Director of Southall Black Sisters a women's rights organisation in London, UK. She was a founding member, Chair and Director.
Patel is also a co-founder of Women Against Fundamentalism.
She trained as a lawyer and writes about race, gender and religion.[4]
She has an honorary Doctorate from Keele University for her outstanding contribution to women’s rights and a Bob Hepple Equality award alongside Mauro Cabral of GATE. The award is named for Bob Hepple, the former lawyer of Nelson Mandela.
She has said 'It is only through activism that that we can truly honour those who came before us to fight for the rights and freedoms that we currently enjoy and it is only through activism that can we encourage others to feel empowered and to form part of wider social movements that carry the promise of change.'
Communist women's gathering
According to Ros Sitwell, sisters from up to 10 groups, hailing from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, gathered at London’s Marx Memorial Library late June 2023, for a Communist Party of Britain-initiated women’s liberation symposium to discuss the current pressing threat to women’s rights and the possibility for co-ordinated working.
Flanked by the library’s display of red banners of the British Battalion volunteers in the Spanish civil war — one of which sported a caption that it had been proudly stitched by the women of Barcelona — Mary Davis of the Communist Party of Britain women’s advisory panel kicked off proceedings, explaining the spark for the event was the extraordinary response the CP had to its statement earlier this year on Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
The statement, issued by the party’s executive committee in March, raised concerns about provisions of the Bill that made it easier for people to self-identify their gender in Scotland and how that might interact with women’s rights under wider UK equality law, which is a reserved matter.
In something of a surprise, the CP statement received over four million views on Twitter and resulted in many of messages of support and queries about what can be done next to ensure women’s rights are upheld — and so the symposium was an attempt to address just that, to “create the beginnings of a discussion,” Davis said, among groups that had some of the same concerns.
A flavour of the strength that can be achieved through movement-building was given by guest speaker Mariam Dhawale, national general secretary of the All India Women's Democratic Association, a giant organisation working in 26 Indian states and with a membership of more than 10 million mostly poor rural and urban women.
She explained that for many years after Indian independence, while the women’s movement was large, the groups that developed were all at state level — until 1981, when delegates from 12 states held a unity conference in Chennai to create AIWDA, which in the four decades of its existence has grown and chalked up some impressive gains in a country where “from the moment of being born women have to struggle.”
Dhawale described how AIWDA had the capacity to mobilise hundreds of thousands of women on a particular issue, rallying on the streets and even surrounding government buildings if their demands are not met.
The event then opened up into a more informal, long-table format in which women could discuss any topics they wished in a dialogue around a table on the stage, followed by breakout workshops to explore feminist questions and report back.
Themes that emerged were encouraging women to speak; overcoming fear of “saying the wrong thing;” policing of women’s language and complexities of pronoun use; the need for spaces for women to come together for collective activities and to form friendships; the importance of local struggles; maintaining democracy within feminism; and the loss of consciousness of the power of collective action.
Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters spoke eloquently about the spread of identity politics, which “has captured both the right and the left.”
“The right has picked up identity politics to promote nationalist, anti-migrant policies — it is marching ahead with that and we as women ought to be very concerned,” she said, while “the left is seeing suppression of dissent from within and freedom of speech issues.
“We have to go back to class politics and move away from just sectional issues — not only are we not advancing on rights, we are going into retreat,” she cautioned, adding: “Human rights can be overturned overnight.”
Claire Heuchan of the women’s rights charity FiLiA paid tribute to the battles of the second wave feminists whose work she had been researching at Glasgow Women’s Library, saying we should be careful not to “create a narrative that younger women should not admire what older women achieved.”
Mary Davis highlighted a document called the Charter for Women, which had been adopted by the National Assembly of Women and a number of trade unions about 15 years ago. She suggested there could be a revived role for the charter and that the NAW “was keen to see it developed and adopted to create a focus for debate.”
“Underpinning a movement has to be a set of values, and the charter can be a starting point,” she said.
Enthused after an intense and politically thought-provoking day, sisters resolved to meet again to discuss these ideas further.[1]
Sisterhood, Socialism & Struggle
The Communist Party of Britain has organised a New Year feminist conference celebrating Sisterhood, Socialism & Struggle in the UK and across the world. This free weekend event on January 16-17 2021, will provide a virtual opportunity for women and men on the left to discuss and debate the importance of women’s liberation for the whole human race.
This event aims to put women’s liberation at the heart of class struggle and explore how we should respond to the intensification of women’s oppression under modern capitalism.
Based upon the three strands of the Charter for Women, which was adopted by the National Assembly of Women in 2020, sessions include Marxist-feminist analysis of women in society, at work, and in the international labour movement. Drawn from across the labour movement our speakers include Mary Davis on the roots of women’s oppression, Pragna Patel on domestic violence, migration and racism, Sarah Woolley on sexual harassment and Kellie O'Dowd on abortion rights.
Additional panels will highlight such questions as the feminisation of poverty, unfair job segregation and the erosion of women’s sex-based rights, calling for urgent change to secure equal pay and access to decent childcare.
Panels include "Women in society": with Mollie Brown, Laura Pidcock, Pragna Patel and Kellie O'Dowd.[2]
Additional panels will highlight such questions as the feminisation of poverty, unfair job segregation and the erosion of women’s sex-based rights, calling for urgent change to secure equal pay and access to decent childcare. .[3]
"Women, race, class and gender"
March 2019 Ros Sitwell reports from a meeting organised by the London Morning Star Supporters Group to mark International Women’s Day last week.
Kiri Tunks, Helen Steel, Christiane Ohsan, Pragna Patel and Mary Davis Photo: Karen Ingala Smith.