Small Revolutions, Every Day: Feminist Life Advice for Very Hard Times

I’ve taken the decision to rename this Substack - to Small Revolutions, Every Day - to better reflect my intentions for it. Since I started it a couple of years ago, everything that I have written has been part of a largely unspoken project to explore how women and girls can survive, and even find ways to thrive, in a world full of men who hate women. From now on, I want to make what I’ve learned (and continue to learn) more useful to readers by framing my posts more explicitly as guidance, written from the viewpoint of myself as a victim-survivor of trauma and abuse, as well as a feminist writer and a historian-biographer of women’s lives. For paid subscribers, I will also begin to offer monthly Q&A sessions. If you support this work, and have the means, then please consider upgrading to a paid membership. For those who would benefit from a paid subscription but do not have the means, then I offer free Sisterhood Subscriptions. Please message me via Substack with the words ‘Sisterhood Subscription’ as the only words in your message, and I’ll provide you with one.

My Story

In January 2022, my husband took his own life, violently and without warning. In the aftermath of his death, I discovered he had been keeping secrets and living a double life, which demolished my perception of our relationship and made me realise how it had been, in many ways, abusive. This made the grieving process extremely complicated and I had to deal with the shocking loss, not just of him and of my day-to-day life as I knew it, but of the version of our fourteen years together that I had believed to be true. I also had to unpick the ways in which I had lost myself during our marriage, and how a difficult childhood had made me vulnerable to abuse later in life.

In the aftermath of my husband’s death, loss piled upon loss, as friends and family drifted away, my sanity, health and finances fell apart, and continuing my high-pressured academic job became untenable. In the Before Times, I had been a lecturer, teaching creative writing in a university, running a literary centre and a research network, and writing books, as well as running ultra-marathons, spending hours every day in the gym, renovating our house and garden, maintaining long-distance friendships, and juggling the needs of my three young children and my husband. After my husband died, I found myself more-or-less alone - many of my family members are dead, and I am estranged from my mother - and unable to get out of bed, let alone run fifty-mile races. For a long time, it felt as if I had lost everything, apart from my three amazing daughters and my little cat Jennie. I had to learn to rebuild my self, my life, my drive, my body and my belief system, almost from scratch.

In the early days, this took the form of summoning up enough energy to keep going; finding ways of enduring the physical pain of intense shock and grief; negotiating the territorial tensions that emerge between a person’s family members and friends in the wake of their death; and orienting myself around a few important tasks, such as caring for my children.

Over the longer term, rebuilding has involved realising the extent to which, in the Before Times, I had become alienated from my best interests and from what enables me to flourish. I have had to really get to know and trust myself for the very first time, and to reformulate ideas about what makes a good, meaningful and fulfilling life. In many ways, I feel that my experiences have stripped away widespread delusions I once entertained about men, relationships, and our patriarchal world, and enabled me to see things as they really are. Rebuilding involves attempting to integrate this clearer but harsher view of the world into a day-to-day life in which feminism is central to me, not just as an explanatory or analytical framework, but as a practice.

Now I want to share what I’ve learned, to support readers who might be going through very hard times themselves. Since early 2022, I have been lucky to have my extraordinary therapist swimming beside me, but I’ve also craved advice from other survivors, and reassurance from them that it’s possible to live fully, in the aftermath of such destruction. I’ve especially wished for advice from women who have similarly had to re-evaluate their view of the world after seeing more clearly the damage that men do to women and girls. In the wake of traumatic events, people often question ‘how do I survive this?’ and ‘how on earth do people get through this’, and I was moved by Gisèle Pelicot’s son’s cry of ‘How do we rebuild ourselves? What’s the method? How do we do it?’ So, in the hope of helping women who find themselves in godawful situations, I want to offer a survivor’s-eye view of some of the ways that I have found to keep going, day after day. This is not a Done Deal: I am nowhere near ‘fixed’, and rebuilding is very much a work in progress. But I hope that, by giving you honest accounts of my experiences, and of everything I have read, learned, analysed, tried, and practised, that there might be something that speaks to you and enhances your life too, even if it’s just in small everyday ways. I also take inspiration from the stories of countless women worldwide, past and present, who have found ways of enduring and even thriving after male-inflicted trauma, and I will continue to share those powerful examples with you too.

My rebuilding was made necessary by my specific experiences, but I am far from unique. We are living in a period of profound anti-woman backlash, in which millions of women worldwide are living lives of daily trauma, abuse, control, belittlement and suffocation of the self, perpetrated against them by men, in increasing numbers and with increasing intensity. Across the world’s female population, more than one in four (27%) women aged 15 to 49, who have ever been in a regular heterosexual relationship, have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner at least once. Much contemporary sexual abuse is influenced by men’s and boys’ consumption of porn, which is more easily available and more violent than at any time in history. Recent surveys show that over half of 18-24-year-old women in the UK, and 58% of US female college students, have been choked by men during sex, and a 2014 study showed that a third of surveyed straight male students at the University of North Dakota would force a woman to have sex if they knew that no consequences would result. In the USA and the European Union, it is estimated that at least 1 in 6 women are victims of attempted or completed rape, a proportion which rises to 1 in 4 women in Britain.

The harms that men inflict on women do not just affect our ability to move freely and safely in the public sphere or the home; they also disfigure our souls. Around the world, across all age groups and ethnicities, women and girls are at least twice as likely as men to experience traumatic events and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and their symptoms are observed to be more intense and long-lasting. Sexism and misogyny hamper all women’s and girls’ personalities in freely reaching their full potential. One outcome of increasing material inequalities between men and women is that, contrary to the well-worn myth that we are living through a ‘crisis in male mental health’, women are in fact twice as prone as men to poor mental health. Women are 40% more likely to suffer a mental disorder; we attempt suicide 1.5 times more than men (men ‘complete’ suicide more often because they select more violent methods, such as hanging, whereas women tend to opt for overdoses); and the most vulnerable demographic to mental ill health is women aged 16-24. Yet it is men’s unhappiness that receives the most attention: between 2023-2025, women’s mental health charities received only £161,795 of UK state funding compared to £1,003,488.71 given to male counterparts.

In order to change such a parlous state of affairs for women and girls, revolutionary material changes including a major redistribution of power need to occur in the world, and nothing I write here is a substitute for such political action. Indeed, when men grind down women’s resources and self-belief, day after day, by refusing to pull their weight, by belittling us, frightening us, controlling and isolating us, and by undermining our perceptions of reality, one of the effects is to weaken women’s ability to participate in collective, conviction-driven political protest. As this suggests, backlash does not just take place through the reversal of women’s legal rights: backlash is also a culture, in which men prize power over women, nurture an inflated sense of entitlement, and resent women when their entitled hopes do not come to fruition.

Men acting in such ways destroy certain character traits in women: self-confidence, lack of fear of authority, a thick skin, initiative, independence, leadership skills, freedom and ambition, sisterhood, and a deeply felt sense of what is good and bad for our wellbeing. These are the character traits which are not only essential for living a free and fulfilled life, but also for organising politically alongside other women, to fight for better conditions for women and girls. I strongly believe, therefore, that caring for our selves as individuals, and unlearning the ways we’ve been taught to suffocate our own desires and needs, is not a substitute for political action, but rather a preparation. Audre Lorde wrote that ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’

Writings about self-care and rebuilding after trauma typically come from qualified therapists, psychologists and life coaches, but I am writing from the perspective of a confessed ‘non-expert’: a survivor and a historian-biographer of women’s lives. Personally, I do the core work of processing the specifics of what has happened to me in sessions with my therapist, and what I write here is not intended to help readers to process the specifics of their trauma, nor as a substitute for expert therapeutic help. But there is a lot of time and life outside of the therapy room, when what faces us is not just processing the big things, but simply managing day-to-day life in a way that feels real and nourishing in the wake of trauma. What I write here is speaking to the ‘small, everyday revolutions’ that help women and girls to forge fulfilling lives. ‘Small revolutions, every day’ is the novelist Manju Kapur’s definition of feminism. Icelandic writer Kristin Helga Gunnarsdottir uses the same wording to explain how, ‘if one creates small revolutions every day, if one creates revolutions that very few even notice, then the world shifts, taking one along with it.’