The Critics, Harold Harvey (1922). Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash
Welcome to the first full edition of The Frontline where we introduce our Women on the Frontline series, essays by women which span the generations. A young woman tells the story of her struggle to find help with disabling periods, followed by a veteran campaigner who recalls the exhilarating and disputative world of 1970s feminist publishing. And you can immerse yourself in that era by clicking on our ‘free gift’ link to the first edition of MSprint, from 1978.
Then meet our first Woman of the Week, a contemporary of suffragette Ethel Moorhead who was featured in our launch edition. The story of the long campaign for women’s suffrage has too often been sanitised, so we are starting the series with another woman who fought with such passion for the right to vote.
And we introduce Policy and Power, to help you find out what is going on in legislatures around the UK. Here we highlight a few current and upcoming items of potential interest our readers.
It is important to us that we engage with our readers and that you have an opportunity to connect with each other. At the end of this issue you will find a button taking you to our subscriber chat. We'll start a new thread here when each edition is published, for ideas and feedback. And you can find us in real time on X/Twitter, at @DalgetySusan and @LucyHunterB, and our shared account @EthelWrites.
We are elated by the initial response to The Frontline. Thanks to all our subscribers for joining us. With your support our fortnightly 21st century feminist publication, where women's voices have power, starts here.
Living with undiagnosed endometriosis: A young woman’s experience of how painful menstruation affects her life and how difficult it is to get health professionals to listen
By Ogino Ginko*
The timelessness of women’s bodies: Mycenaean figures of women (1400 - 1300 BC). Picture from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Collection, Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
I was ten when I got my first period. Looking back, I was strangely delighted because “I am a woman now!” Girls in my class would flaunt the fact that they had their period like a medal. Menstruation was a massive sign of maturity that I couldn’t wait to gain. The excitement was short-lived once I realised how much pain comes with it. This article highlights some of my experiences as a young woman advocating for an endometriosis diagnosis, and how my menstrual cycle negatively impacts my daily life.
The first couple of years were manageable but uncomfortable - heavy bleeding, dull aches and mood swings (much appreciated by my brother and dad!). As time passed, my cramps became unbearable. As the only woman in my household and having no family members with painful periods, I had no one to turn to. Each month was getting worse – something I am still experiencing. I tried everything, from uncovered hot water bottles which reddened my skin, to eight paracetamol and ibuprofen a day. Once it reached the point that nothing was providing relief, I realised it was time to go to a doctor about my symptoms.
Hostile response
I was treated as if I was being dramatic and spoken to in a tone that felt hostile. I was prescribed tranexamic and mefenamic acid for heaviness and to mitigate the pain. Even though I had quite light periods, they were no less sore (my most pressing issue). To add to my misery, the mefenamic acid made me extremely drowsy – something the doctor wrote off as “strange” and did nothing about.
Despite the medication, I continued to experience daily waves of faintness and nausea, even when I wasn’t bleeding. The prospect of throwing up made me so anxious that my cycle became a trigger for panic attacks. This was especially true during ovulation, a point in my cycle where I get a horrible stabbing pain, whichever side the egg is coming from. I had it in my head that everyone went through what I did - something a doctor explicitly said to me - and I was losing my will to fight. I would regularly explain all this, only to be met with a pitiful apology and no solution.
School was a terrible challenge. I vividly remember having my period for all of my National 5s. I was curled over in pain, with no choice but to take my exams, when all I wanted was my bed. It was no fun. There were many occasions where I had to step out of class because I felt like I might pass out from pain, and for a while the school was not a safe space for me.
Since coming to university in a different city, my health issues have been taken much more seriously, for a variety of reasons I would guess. For one, the older I get the harder it has been for professionals to use the excuse of, “you’re growing up, things will improve once you stop going through puberty.” Don’t get me wrong, I wished hard that this were true, but having lost all hope that it was just my age, the idea created a massive barrier to getting medical help. My needs were totally ignored by doctors who told me to, “wait to see what could happen.” The only options they provided me were the contraceptive pill or to suck it up.
Pill causes carnage
In the first month after I moved, I finally gave the pill a go in the hope of a fresh start. The first few months were carnage! My cycle went from as long as 65 days to as short as ten. I needed medication to stop a 15-day period that was destroying my quality of life. Thankfully, I got an emergency appointment extremely quickly, which would not have happened if I had still been with my old surgery. The change in care feels somewhat ironic given it now takes up to an hour of travel to get to my new doctor, in comparison to the 30 seconds when I lived opposite my GP back home.
My separate chronic issues - hypermobility and anxiety - were highly affected all this. The physio exercises prescribed to help my chronic joint pain were difficult as they involved a lot of swimming. And starting the contraceptive pill, with its terrible side effects, at the same time as starting my first year of university added a lot of mental strain to the stress of my health problems.
In November 2024, I was finally referred for an ultrasound and told that it would probably take about a month for an appointment. By the time it actually came round it was May 2025, by which time I thought I had been forgotten. I left the clinic after being told that my womb looked ‘normal’, but was also told by the doctor that, “I could be riddled with endometriosis, but she would never know.” I have come out of this whole process feeling quite defeated because it has brought me no closer to finding answers to my menstrual health problems.
No easy diagnosis
I have yet to hear of anyone with an issue with their periods getting a diagnosis and treatment easily, so surely more research and funding are necessary for women’s healthcare. I recently spotted a ridiculous academic article entitled: “Attractiveness of women with rectovaginal endometriosis: A case-controlled study.” It was later retracted by its authors, but the damage had been done. Priorities must be changed for there to be progress.
When I was first asked to write for The Frontline, I felt a sense of what I can only describe as impostor syndrome. For all I know, I have nothing medically wrong with me. But my teachers and friends keep reminding me that just because a lot of people go through hardships, my struggles aren’t “normal” and I should not be left to cope on my own without help.
I have spent a hell of a long time advocating to healthcare professionals that I have something wrong with me, and by writing this article, I am affirming that there is an issue, if only the professionals would listen.
Ogino Kinko* is my pen name. I am an 18-year-old studying at university. I am a musician and have recently raised £100 for women's health research by running a 5k.
Action on endometriosis
Endometriosis is estimated to affect around one in 10 women. Charities providing further information, and campaigning for better understanding, diagnosis and treatment, include Endometriosis UK and The Endometriosis Foundation.
The All Party Group on Endometriosis at Westminster is chaired by Kirsteen Sullivan MP. In Scotland, Rachael Hamilton MSP has been campaigning for better services for women and for the targets included in the women’s health plan 2021-24 to be met.
*Born in 1851, Ogino Ginko was the first registered female doctor to practise modern medicine in Japan. After contracting gonorrhoea from her first husband and and feeling humiliated by her treatment by male doctors, she decided to train as a medic. Read more about her amazing career here.
A feminist’s journey from the MSprint collective to the Supreme Court
By Marian Keogh
The first edition of MSprint, a feminist magazine published in 1978
It is 9.45 on Wednesday 16 April 2025 and I am sitting quietly in the United Kingdom Supreme Court in London. I have flown to London from Spain for 48 hours, this judgment is that important. It feels as if women’s rights have been under sustained attack and I have defended women my whole adult life.
For Women Scotland have taken the Scottish Government to court about what being a woman means in the Equality Act of 2010: does biological sex or gender identity underpin the law? Do women have the right to single-sex spaces?
Judge Hodge begins to speak…
I am 70 years old and wondering, ‘how on earth did I, we, get to this mad place?’ I do think that I have been a “feminist to my fingertips” since I was a teenager. It is now called second wave feminism but, for me, it was always women’s liberation. And I certainly thought most of those rights had been won and were secure.
MSprint collective
Rewind to the 1970s. To 1978 in particular, on a Saturday afternoon in Glasgow’s Women’s Centre at 57 Miller Street. A group of around six women are chatting about what we want to put in the next edition of MSprint “a Scottish feminist magazine”, the successor to the Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal.
MSprint was born out of a split in the collective of the Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal. Both then and now I am clear what made me a feminist. A woman’s right to choose, centred around legislation to decriminalise abortion.
I was very active in the Scottish Abortion Campaign, marching, organising, lobbying and writing about it in MSprint, which was set up so we could tell our own stories the way we wanted.
And I also knew that my mother, who had nine children and more pregnancies than that, had been denied opportunities that her brothers had. She was the dux of her primary school, but at 14 had to leave school since education was for boys, in her case, her two brothers. She disagreed with me completely on abortion, but she believed firmly in girls being educated and “getting on”.
We MSprint women knew each other because we were all feminists, and for us that meant fighting for women’s rights: equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free abortion and contraception on demand, free 24-hour nurseries, financial and legal independence, and the right to a self-defined sexuality, with an end to discrimination against lesbians.
Changing the world for women
We thought we were changing the world for women. We were sure we were on the right track. And we argued about everything - a lot. And we disagreed, all the time.
Like, what came first, socialism or feminism? Was capitalism really the real enemy? Were single issue campaigns a good use of time and what about the class struggle?Were lesbians the only true feminists? Could radical feminists campaign alongside socialist feminists? What role if, if any, could men have?
In 1978 I was 23. I was six months into my first “proper” job, a school librarian in Lanarkshire, surrounded by books all day - I loved it. And books and writing were so important for feminists. New ways of seeing the world, newly-published feminist writing. Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan. And fiction, anything published by Virago, The Women’s Press. Everything seemed so new and hopeful. Change was certain. And we were never going back.
And I loved being part of the MSprint collective. We chose topics, wrote about them and produced the magazine ourselves, then got it printed by a community printing press in Aberdeen. The sisters were definitely doing it for themselves.
FREE GIFT! Your very own piece of feminist history. Download the very first edition of MSprint here
I was 23 years old and busy changing the world. I was from a family of nine, with five brothers and three sisters, very well educated at a convent school, with a degree. And oh so confident and sure I was right.
I look back on that time as one of fizzing excitement, full of hope for change. One where we knew that we needed places women could go to get help, Rape Crisis Centres, refuges, women’s centres. Where you knew that women could be by themselves.
We were very hopeful for the future. We knew the law had to be changed in many areas and we knew we would have to fight for every improvement. We lobbied, wrote letters, went down to Westminster, spoke to journalists, went on marches and demonstrations and wrote for ourselves. I do think it is worth saying that in MSprint, and certainly me personally, we valued free speech.
A women’s right to choose
The feminists in the MSprint collective agreed that it was a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. But I had many friends who did not agree with me at all. Who thought abortion was murder. Who thought MSprint expressed extreme views on women’s rights.
I never thought they were not entitled to their opinion or that it made them the enemy. I just knew we had to keep fighting for Parliament to maintain the Abortion Act of 1967. Debate? Constantly and everywhere.
MSprint did not last long but I think back to those days very fondly. Not sure how I managed to work in a collective! But for a wee while it did work and it is part of Scotland’s women’s history.
Would we all agree now? I doubt it very much, but I truly hope we could argue as passionately as we did then and then agree to differ. And that feminism and women’s rights are still very important.
From 1978, aged 23 to 2025, aged 71 women’s rights are women’s rights and I am still a feminist defending them in any way I can. I - we - have come full circle.
Atta girl! Lila Clunas: The Original Woman Who Wouldn’t Wheesht
By Lily Craven, known to her many fans on Twitter/X as
In 1912, Lila tried to post herself to Winston Churchill, one of two MPs for Dundee at the time, but he refused delivery. Pic by: Anthony Tilke on Unsplash
The Woman of the Week is teacher and suffragette Lila Clunas (1876-1968) of Glasgow. Her specialities: making deputations, writing copious letters to the press about women’s suffrage and heckling MPs. Especially heckling. Strictly non-partisan, she was expelled from public meetings for heckling Churchill, Asquith and MacDonald.
Lila and her sisters joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906 in Dundee, and they were in the audience with their mother when Emmeline Pankhurst addressed the branch several months later. Inspired, Lila became a tireless worker for the cause: raising public awareness, sparking debate, and trying to bring about change.
In October 1907, she heckled Chancellor of the Exchequer HH Asquith at a meeting and was thrown out. In 1908, she heckled the MP for Dundee, Winston Churchill, at an election meeting in Dundee and was thrown out.
First arrest
Her first known arrest was in February 1909 - the Dundee Courier reported it under the shock headline ‘Dundee Lady Teacher Arrested’- after she and three other suffragettes tried to present a petition to HH Asquith, by then Prime Minister, as he walked along the pavement of Downing Street. When they approached to explain why women’s suffrage was worthy of consideration, he ducked into No. 10. The women left dejected but undefeated and returned to try again.
In a classic “recollections may vary” moment, the women’s accounts of what happened next contradicted those of the police. Lila was arrested for obstruction, despite protesting that she hadn’t so much as set foot on the pavement and that all four of them had been manhandled. Their evidence was brushed aside and they were given a choice: pay a fine of £3 each (£300 in today’s money) or spend three weeks in HMP Holloway. They chose Holloway.
Lila wrote to her family: “The great event is over, and I have been arrested.” After her release, she was still in a weak condition and at meetings would sit near the door, “to make a hasty retreat because the police were so rough.”
Meeting Winston Churchill
Even that didn’t stop her. Lila badgered Winston Churchill with letters pleading the case for women’s suffrage, with the result that she secured a thirty-minute meeting with him for herself and seven other suffragettes at the Queen’s Hotel in Dundee.
Impervious to their reasoning, Churchill told them they needed to demonstrate, “that they had on their side millions of women”, and that “the frenzy of a few was not a substitute for the earnest wishes of millions…these tactics of silly disorder and petty violence” would not make the government concede.
When the Liberal government called a general election in early 1910, Lila seized the chance to challenge her five parliamentary candidates about their stance on votes for women by sending them some simple questions: Will you pledge yourself to vote for a Bill giving the vote to women on the same terms as men? And will you mention your view on Women’s Suffrage in your election address?
For Churchill, there was a bonus question: “Will the Liberal government, if returned to power, enfranchise the women of the country on the same terms as men?”
Letter-writing campaign
She followed it up with a letter-writing campaign to the local press and tried to attend a meeting where the Labour Party candidate was due to speak, but as soon as she turned up with her admission ticket, the stewards threw her out - and they were far from gentle about it. A furious Lila wrote to the press again.
“For those women who have any lingering faith in the Labour Party, perhaps my experience…may be instructive.”
In late 1910, Lila sparked a lively debate for several weeks on the Letters page of the Dundee Courier when she wrote to protest about the treatment of suffragette prisoners: “One need not believe in militancy or even in women’s suffrage to disapprove of their treatment.”
Denied entry to a public speech by Winston Churchill in Dundee once again in 1912, Lila was determined to have her say and what she did next attracted national attention with widespread press coverage.
Personal letter to Churchill
Three years earlier, suffragettes Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McLelland made the front page of the Daily Mirror by having themselves delivered by the Post Office as human letters to No. 10 Downing Street. Delivery had been refused: “You are dead letters and must be returned”, but they’d made their point. Post Office HQ in London changed the rules to prevent any further eye-catching stunts of this kind, but forgot to let Scotland know.
Never one to ignore an open goal, Lila attached a card to her bodice addressed to Churchill, paid the Post Office her own postage of threepence and asked to be delivered by express messenger. The Post Office duly instructed a telegraph boy to deliver her to his residence. Churchill refused delivery so she went back to heckling.
The indefatigable Lila died in 1968 at the age of 92, but I think it’s fair to say she was the original Woman Who Wouldn’t Wheesht.
In her misspent youth, Lily Craven spent 28 years in prisons in England writing risk assessments, operational orders and contingency plans. Now retired, she spends her time finding ordinary women whose extraordinary achievements were buried in dusty footnotes in history books and writes about those instead.
Navigate the public policy maze with the editors as they keep a watching eye on the issues affecting women
Pic by: akinbostanci via iStock
We are all busy, so it is hard to keep up with what people in power are up to - particularly in relation to policies and services that affect women and girls. We can’t offer a full monitoring service but each edition we will highlight a few things to watch out for, and where you can find more information.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) consultation on its Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations. This follows the Supreme Court’s judgment of 16 April 2025 in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. Find the consultation here. Closes Monday 30 June.
Five questions lodged by Mercedes Villalba MSP, S6W-37868, S6W-37869, S6W-37870, S6W-37871 and S6W-37872, related to the Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. Due to be answered in writing by the Scottish Government on Tuesday 10 and Monday 16 June.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, or the ‘assisted dying’ bill as it is often described. On Friday 13 June, this private member’s bill, brought by Labour’s Kim Leadbetter MP, continues its ‘Report Stage’, where amendments are debated. The vote on whether or not it should proceed any further may also happen that day, or may be at a later date. You will find a useful briefing on the bill’s progress here. There is separate piece of legislation currently going through the Scottish Parliament. The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill has reached its second stage. Click here for a briefing.
Westminster, the ‘mother’ of parliaments. Pic by: sborisov via iStock
Each legislature across the UK has a helpful ‘what’s on’ section on its website.
Northern Irish Assembly (click on “View full agenda” for the detailed forward look)
Scottish Parliament (click on “Read today’s Business Bulletin”)
Senedd Cymru | Welsh Parliament (click on “View full calendar”)
