This is a thread on gendered differences in experiences of bereavement – and why it’s important that bereaved women have single-sex spaces. If you'd prefer to read this as an essay, there's a full version with refs (link in bio). This is for anyone who prefers to read on Twitter. Many grief support groups treat bereavement as if it’s gender neutral. The claim that ‘grief is a universal experience’ which goes ‘beyond gender’ is common. But there are gendered differences in grief, and failure to acknowledge them harms men and women - but particularly women.

Anyone who is bereaved lives in the shadow of a myth about what a ‘good grief’ looks like.

Look at almost any film or story about losing a spouse and there is a distinctive timeline, in which the same old landmarks crop up.


This trajectory follows the griever from the acute stage of pain, through a middle period in which their life expands in unexpected ways, to a resolution, which is usually encapsulated in the figure of a new partner (whom some widows refer to as a ‘chapter two’).

There’s so much pressure on women not to be ‘exclusionary’ but it’s always been men who have been the exclusionary ones.

Today I’m launching a new project, No Women Allowed, exploring how, globally, past & present, men have curtailed women’s freedoms, and women have fought back. Some examples: after WW2, men in the UK, US and Australia banned women from entering pubs and bars. In the 1970s-80s, women protested: chaining themselves to the bar, storming pubs, and taking proprietors to court. In the UK, the ban was overturned in 1982

I found it! The original phrase was "the bladder's leash". It was an idea expressed by Annabel Cooper, Robin Law, Jane Malthus & Pamela Wood (all from New Zealand) in a 1998 seminar paper 'Rooms of Their Own: public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860–1940'

https://twitter.com/drrachelhewitt/status/1866535150542082145

They published the paper in 2000 (you can read it here: ...), but they didn't use the exact phrase "the bladder's leash": instead, they wrote "We have entertained the notion of the bladder as a kind of leash restraining women’s forays away from home" doi.org/10.1080/7136

I’m seeing a lot of people on my timeline say that they won’t vote for Labour, because Labour “doesn’t know what a woman is”.

I am going to plead with you to suck up Labour’s imperfections and cowardice, and vote for them – because the alternative is terrifying. As a country, right now, we are in a dire state; and most of the horror is being visited on women.

The period of Tory rule – especially in the last 4 years – has been unspeakably awful for women and girls.

A cautionary 🧵 with an unhappy ending. I’ve just been scammed out of over £20K by a cowboy builder. Here is what happened to me, and some warnings – but ultimately it’s a pretty broken system that we have in this country, where this repeated pattern of behaviour is legal. In 2022, my husband died suddenly and traumatically. Thanks to a dear friend who had set up as a financial advisor a decade previously, we had life insurance, and I wanted to spend some of it on a treat for my daughters.

Today is the 2nd anniversary of my husband’s suicide. That day, plus the time before & after, are preserved in me as a core of pure horror. I find it very difficult to write about, partly because many aspects have to remain private, and also because I’ve come to distrust language There have been so many lies; as well as attempts to bully me, to force me to say or not say certain things, to twist words to attack me, to break down my boundaries, and so very many empty assurances.

I’ve tweeted a lot about the ‘happy’ stories that are contained in my book, In Her Nature: the women who blazed a trail in the great outdoors & how they show that women truly belong in sport & outdoorsiness today. Today I want to tweet about some of the darker aspects of the book My book, In Her Nature, came out of 2 trends I’d noticed: on the one hand, the rising visibility & achievements of incredible women in sport today. And on the other hand, what seemed to me like an increase in threats & hostility to women’s sport, especially from men.

I’m going to write more about traumatised grief but ugh, my inability to cope with sensory overload is debilitating. Multi-tasking used to be my superpower! But now I can’t cope with competing demands on my attention. Even simple distracting noises send me into spiralling anxiety I thought I was doing a bit better these days. But I’ve just been to a parents’ meeting at my kids’ school – there was a teacher presenting, babies in the audience wailing, parents whispering to them, children muttering to each other. I thought I was going to combust!

I chose the title ‘In Her Nature’ for my book because (a) it countered a claim made by the founder of the modern Olympic Games that sport isn’t ‘in women’s nature’, and (b) I wanted to write about women’s representations of the natural world, letting the reader ‘into her nature’. But I’ve realised that, if you search for tweets containing the phrase ‘in her nature’ (I don’t recommend it), you find absolutely dreadful misogyny: about women’s “innate” evilness, or angelic innocence, or horniness.

When I started In Her Nature, I kept being told that women didn’t have a long history of sport. I was told that we only started running, hiking & climbing in the 1970s.When I said I wanted to write about women 100 years earlier, even my agent & editor queried whether I’d find any I read academic scholars who claimed that ‘few women’ mountaineered (or hiked or climbed) in the past, and that ‘women’s historic role [in sport] was that of handkerchief-fluttering spectators.’ But I kept looking for sporty women in the past anyway.

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is (unsurprisingly) about grief and recovery. I sense that there’s an expectation among certain people in my life, for me to ‘return to normal’ at some point. Perhaps this comes from friends or family members who have been largely absent over the last year, and are waiting until things ‘settle’ until making contact.

I seem to be spending a lot of time at the moment dealing with firms and people who are reluctant to take responsibility for their mistakes, leaving me to face the considerable consequences. A particularly outrageous example is @KLM. Thread. My husband died in v traumatic circumstances in January, leaving me sole parent to my three fabulous young daughters. At spring half-term, I thought we could do with a holiday so I booked a few days at a campsite in France, flying there & back with @KLM. The flights weren’t cheap

Over and over again, sports clubs claim that their sport has historically been ‘male-only’, and hint at how progressive they are for having allowed women to join in the 1960s/70s/80s/90s/2000s/2010s. It makes me so angry! It’s just not true. In so many of these sports, women had a rich historical presence – before either being kicked out of clubs by men in the 1900s-1930s, or never allowed to join the clubs but pursuing the sport in different ways.

Around both my experiences of childbirth, I was acutely aware of a culture promoting "natural" birth. NCT leaders; baby yoga teachers; breast-feeding consultants all talked about vaginal births as if they were some morally superior ‘choice’. I was congratulated by midwives for having birthed twins vaginally, despite the fact it was never what I wanted, and has left me with lasting prolapses and continence issues.
I thought then, & think now, that glorifying vaginal birth is misogynistic anti-Enlightenment bullshit.

Right, I’ve been doing some reading (and writing) about young women’s experiences in public space, and it’s made me so angry and upset that I have to share a digest with you all. Globally, during adolescence, ‘girls’ worlds shrink, while boys’ expand’. One study finds that the map of 14-yo girls’ day-to-day movements is 2/5 the size of that of their 11-yo selves, and only 1/3 the size of 14-yo male peers’ movements.

I have to tell you about an idea I've read this week which has blown my mind. Traditionally in developmental psychology, the infant is thought to experience a profound, formative experience of loss, which takes place during weaning & represents the end of attachment to the mother It marks the beginning of the child’s socialisation as an autonomous individual. This is everywhere in psychoanalysis – it’s a foundational argument.

So here’s a (maddening) thing. I’m researching C19th women climbers in the Alps – and there were, like, HUNDREDS. There’s this widespread misconception that (as one male historian of sport puts it) ‘in sport, women’s historic role was that of handkerchief-fluttering spectators.’ Not remotely true. I’ve spent today looking at hundreds of photos of late-C19th women ice-skating, curling, hiking, climbing, playing tennis, and tobogganing in St Moritz. Here’s Effie Holland skeleton racing in St Moritz. And Janey Campbell posing on a sledge in 1892.

A while ago, I did a little experiment. I noticed that, as I walked through crowded city streets or tube stations, I was constantly darting around male pedestrians, nimbly side-stepping to avoid collisions. I decided, for a month, to try to counteract this learned behaviour. I pressed forward without dodging or skirting around men. But men weren’t used to moving out of a woman’s way, and I ended up having numerous collisions – more than 2 a day – which were met with abuse or complete amazement, more often than apology.