Jan Nielsen

If you have bags of time and are relatively new to Netflix you could gorge on the blockbuster series. Most are made and set in the USA. A bunch of them focus on difficult, screwed-up white men though their imperfections contrast with some amazing female characters.

In a world in which far right authoritarian governments are on the rise from Brazil to India, the use of violence in general and sexual violence in particular are weapons of choice. It is not surprising that this was a central focus of many of the International Women’s day protests which took place this year across the global south from Chile to Pakistan.

As the election began the press was full of stories about the number of MPs, particularly women, stepping down because of the “horrific abuse” they have received. MPs such as Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan dominated these reports, despite the fact that Diane Abbott MP was the recipient of half of all offensive tweets to female MPs in the six weeks preceding the official start of the election.

It is interesting that, after many years of media obsession with serial killers, a new book, opera and TV documentary share an emphasis on the social conditions and attitudes that made some women more vulnerable to assault and allowed the killers to get away with it for so long.

Hallie Rubenhold’s book The Five uncovers the impoverished lives of the victims of the infamous Victorian killer, Jack the Ripper. She highlights the material circumstances which drove them into prostitution to keep themselves and their families alive.

The #MeToo campaign has rightly shone a glaring light on the misogyny and discrimination that women experience. Less publicised has been the striking increase in inequality that women are experiencing as a result of austerity, cuts to services and changes to the benefits system.

Recent government statistics show that women will shoulder a startling 85 percent of the burden of the government’s cuts to social security and tax changes by 2020. They also show that women’s incomes are being hit twice as hard as men’s as a result of changes to the tax and benefit system.

There are hard facts that have to be appreciated to understand the real lives of too many children in Britain today. Our children are the unhappiest children in Europe, mental distress among the young is a pandemic, foodbanks and child poverty are rampant and child on child violence and deaths blight cities like London.

Nobody knows the reality behind these facts better than Camilla Batmanghelidjh the founder of Kids Company. From its inception in 1996 its aim was to provide support to deprived inner city children.

Louise Bryant was an American radical journalist who travelled to revolutionary Russia with John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World. Bryant wrote her own account of the events she witnessed and people she met, titled Six Red Months in Russia.

During the centenary celebrations historians and commentators have made much of the effect the First World War had on the lives of women. However, most of the coverage has focused on the impact on the lives of middle class women. The recent release of the film version of Testament of Youth illustrates this clearly. Vera Brittain represents the women who volunteered in their thousands to contribute to the war effort.

Beyond the Fragments has been republished virtually unchanged 34 years after its original publication in 1979. Sheila Rowbotham, in her new introduction, explains why: "When an American friend recently gave my section of Beyond the Fragments to young women occupying Wall Street, they found it hard to understand".

It is therefore useful for us to remind ourselves of the context of the original publication.