About Us
The FemSpeak.Net Story

  

FemSpeak arose out of many sessions of 'girl-talk' in suburban kitchens and laundries, neighbourhood barbies, PTA meetings, kaffee-klatsches,gyms, tennis and netball courts, as well as the odd play-group, dyke bar and office staff-room.

When the dreaded F-Word - Feminism - came up, it's often met with claims of boring, 'too serious' too cliquey, and basically not much fun, with little relevance to many women's lives. On the subject of women's magazines, websites etc, similar claims were made ranging from too frivolous, to too boring. Despite the large numbers of women's websites, e-zines etc, for the young & hot to the post-menopausal invisibles, we thought there was still room for another, one that put the F-Words - Fun & Friendship - into Feminism.

Another common theme of our 'girl-talk' sessions was that feminism had become too distant from women's daily lives, full of academic theory and vague "issues" fragmented into cliques of 'in-crowds' constantly thrashing each other, reminding some of us of our school days. You know - like where the girls all separate into lots of closed little social circles, and nearly all of us felt excluded from the "popular girls" set?

Why FemSpeak. Net?

As we are not a commercial business, or a registered organisation etc - we were not able to use the .Com ending. Being about 'networking' - (and not particularly well "organised") - we thought .Net domain was the most appropriate.

Why RadfemSpeak. Net?

Those who originated the site and put it together, identified more closely with the radical brand of feminism, in terms of radical - meaning getting to the root of it all, and also radical in terms of 'liberation' and 'freedom' from oppression, for all women, arising from a belief that underlying almost everything oppressive in our lives is a deep mysogyny and hatred of women.

As may be expected, most of our first 2,578 preferences for a 'first name' feminist domain had already been registered by others. Since the idea for FemSpeak arose out of our 'Girl Talk', we wanted something along the theme of women just hanging out together.

Using 'Femspeak' alone in internet search engines, brought up an enormous number of anti-feminist articles - claiming feminism as akin to nazi propaganda for over-zealous application of political correctness to language, and using the term 'FemSpeak' as akin to George Orwell's use of the term of 'NewSpeak' in 1984.

The situation is even worse with 'Radfemspeak'.

So, we also really liked the idea of reclaiming the name, and making it our own meaning.

At FemSpeak, enjoying just hanging out with our women friends, (and friends of women) we have revisited the old theme of The Personal is the Political - as in:

Womens' Life Matters & Womens' Lives Matter.

We hope you enjoy hanging out here too

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