The MsUnderstood Programme aims to improve local and national responses to young people’s experiences of gender inequality. Check out our website.
The MsUnderstood Programme aims to improve local and national responses to young people’s experiences of gender inequality. Check out our website.
I’m tired of waking up to claims that young people can’t be bothered to vote and therefore the lack of policies in our interest is our fault. Our collective weariness with an environment that does not seek to include us is often wrongly conflated with the idea that we are politically apathetic. Everyday party rhetoric, in language and content, prioritises the interests of older, middle-class white men and routinely ignores young people. But shouldn’t party politics be adapting to us; the people who will be shaping this country’s future, instead of those who will come to depend on us or already do?
Tamara-Jade Kaz in “Young Women in the UK Defy Stereotypes of Political Apathy Through Social Media”
(via theyworkforustoo)
Susan B. Anthony, Bob Moses, Wajeha al-Hawaidar; to name but a few of the men and women who have dedicated their lives to achieving universal suffrage, so that we all may vote. This is not a battle which started and finished with the Suffragettes, or with the black civil-rights campaign, but one that continues today. Women in Saudi Arabia are still awaiting the day in 2015, when, at last, they will be able use their vote for the very first time in their country’s history.
I am 17 and a half years old, and last October marked the second time that I used my right to vote. Jersey, a tiny nine-by-five island, 14 miles off the coast of France; high in off-shore banking accounts, milk and low on…taxes, but more importantly (and perhaps less contentiously) on voting age. In 2008, the States of Jersey, following in the footsteps of Brazil and Nicaragua, decided to extend the right to vote to young people aged 16 and 17. My right to vote is not something that I tend to take lightly. I fully appreciate its levity, and the brazen context in which it was forged. I feel the courage of the Suffragettes drive me as I mark the cross on my ballot paper, bold and unashamed - I would like to disclose that Emmeline Pankhurst did not coerce me into voting for anything or anyone in particular…it was a metaphor.