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About my Substack
I’m Rachel Hewitt, an award-winning, best-selling feminist writer based in the UK.
I write about feminism, with a particular focus on psychological patriarchy: how individual men and patriarchal culture damage women’s minds, bodies and wellbeing, often via abuse and trauma, and how women and girls survive in the midst and aftermath of such horror. I write from the perspective of a victim-survivor, as well as a feminist writer and a historian-biographer of women’s lives.
My articles for paid subscribers, which form the ‘No Women Allowed’ project, investigate how men use institutions, laws, rules and regulations to curtail women’s freedoms - and how women fight back. Among other questions, I ask whether different types of feminist protest are effective in times of progress from in times of backlash. In periods of backlash – such as our own – is there anything that women can do to change men’s behaviour, or is it more effective for women to focus on forging our own spaces?
In my Substack posts for free subscribers, I write about how men’s abuse operates in less regulated environments, such as in the home, in intimate partner relationships and in public spaces such as streets and parks. I show how the psychological effects of patriarchy prevent women from caring for ourselves in a world in which we are encouraged to always put others first, and hamper our ability to see other women as allies, to organise with them, and to mount political resistance to patriarchal power. Abuse and trauma destroy our self-belief: literally, our belief that our own perceptions of reality are true. It is crucial for victims of abuse to have a witness standing beside them, testifying to the truth of what they’ve experienced and affirming their right to a liberated life. I hope my writing can act like such a witness, supporting women and girls after trauma by using words to give a clear shape to the reality and effects of such abuse. I hope that naming the agent (ie. men), as well as naming abusive men’s tactics, naming the effects of abuse on women, and describing how women can survive and even thrive after traumatic experiences, will help abused women and girls to have confidence in their own perceptions and reactions.
Without falling back on annoying and false platitudes such as ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’, my Substack posts pay homage to the creative, inspiring ways that women have found to live after experiencing patriarchal trauma. I write practical articles about practices that support women in countering the loss of self-belief that is caused by abuse. Sometimes I write about creativity and nourishing experiences of bringing something new into the world, whether through writing or DIY or gardening. Sometimes I write about beautiful things, and whether the perception of beauty has a calming effect on the symptoms of trauma. And often I write about movement, such as dance, and, in particular, running and outdoor adventures. In all my Substack posts, I explore what feminism looks like when we think of it as a practice, as well as a theory.
For my Substack community, I create at least 4 posts per month: 2 for paid subscribers (who gain exclusive access to the ‘No Women Allowed’ project, as well as to all my other posts, and to my archive) and 2 for free subscribers. Because I believe that my work is important and helpful for a large number of women, I am committed to keeping the posts about abuse and trauma free. At the same time, freelance writing is my full-time job and only professional income, and I believe that women’s work, training, qualifications and time should be valued. So, these latter posts will be free to read when they’re first published, and they’ll remain free for two weeks after publication, after which they will go behind a paywall with the rest of the archive.
If you do not have the means to pay for a subscription but would find it helpful to read the paywalled posts in the archive, then I offer free-of-charge ‘Sisterhood Subscriptions’, through which you can access all my articles. I don’t need to see any proof of income: please just message me here, with “Sisterhood Subscription” as the only words in your message.
If you do have the means, and would like to support my work (and also my ability to offer free Sisterhood Subscriptions to other readers), then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’re a man, and have benefitted from the financial and social power that patriarchy confers on men, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber with extra enthusiasm!
About me
I am the author of four books. Most recently, I published In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (2023), a feminist history and memoir of women’s outdoor sport, with a particular focus on trail-running and climbing. I have also recently published The Last Bastion: A History of Women in Sport, 1984-2024 (2025), which was a private commission to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the charity Women in Sport, and which will be publicly available soon. My other books are A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (2017): a history of revolutionary shifts in our attitudes towards emotions; and the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (2010), a history of the UK’s national mapping agency and the ways in which people have interacted with landscape. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, if you’d like to read more about me and my work, you can visit my author’s website.
