On the slippery ladder to success, many Black and Asian women throughout England may be crashing their heads against a glass ceiling that is much thicker than what their white British female counterparts confront. But in London, a 140-year-old organization has launched a campaign for justice for these sometimes “invisible” women through the “Seeing Double” project.
The organization, known as the Fawcett Society is a leading equalities nonprofit that campaigns for the rights of women. Originally created by British suffragist, Millicent Fawcett, in 1866, in London, to gain women the right to vote, the Fawcett Society has gone on to extend their founder’s legacy by focusing on contemporary social and economic issues for women in Britain. Poverty, employment, domestic violence, women in the penal system, and political representation in public life are some of their primary focuses. Distilled, they cover three major themes: money, justice, and power.
“Seeing Double” crosses all three areas of Fawcett’s “core areas,” creating an opportunity for closer inspection for how race and gender are experienced in the lives of Black and ethnic minority women in the UK in hopes of achieving equality, says race and gender policy officer Zohra Moosa.
Previous to this new project, the society published a report on how the Black and minority ethnic women were faring in the UK within social and political arenas. Their initial study informed their decision to create a three-year program dedicated to examining the special barriers that Black and ethnic minority women face as a result of “double” discrimination. “In doing that piece of work [“Black and Minority Ethnic Women in the UK”] we realized how different the experiences were and why our existing work didn’t have the capacity to look at it in detail,” Moosa said.
“Some of the facts that we found were that women are severely underrepresented in public life, for instance—there are only two female ethnic minority MPs [British Members of Parliament] in the whole Parliament.”
Imagine life in the United States Congress without America’s groundbreaking female politicians such as Shirley Chisolm, Barbara Jordan, Maxine Waters, Carole Moseley Braun, or Cynthia McKinney.
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