Posts: 959 published (quite a few still sitting in draft!)
Comments: Way too many to count, since we started, but adding up the monthly byte-counts I've been doing recently gives 2737 comments from November 2008 to February 2009.
Page-loads: 161,692 (an average of 442 a day over the whole year - our average for March so far is 804 a day)
Our biggest days to date have been (in order of page-loads) Monday 9th March, Friday 6th March (both as a result of the Pay Equity Faxathon I assume), Monday 9th February (due to Jacinda Ardern's guest post), Sunday 9th November (the day after the election, when we were one of the few left-of-centre blogs writing much) and Tuesday 19th August (for reasons I cannot fathom).
We hope that in our first year we've achieved our mission of promoting the blog voices of women in Aotearoa New Zealand, particulary the feminist ones, not least through our hosting of the 9th Down Under Feminist Carnival. And we have been active participants in Blogland ourselves, not least joining many many other bloggers and websites in the Internet Blackout opposing s92A of the Copyright Act.
Typing is not the only form of activism, so we've done some real life things too which have interacted with the world outside our computers, with your invaluable support as our readers, commenters and linkers:
- The Pay Equity Faxathon, on March 6th 2009, and support for the pay equity petition initiated by Labour's women's affThis listairs spokesperson Sue Moroney; work that is continuing through the Pay Equity Hub.
- Deborah's work on putting together a team submission on the discussion document "Improvements to Sexual Violence Legislation in New Zealand".
- I met up with some readers and took part in a Reclaim the Night event in Auckland in November
- Our survey of candidates in the 2008 general election, which attracted responses from every party in Parliament at the time, and some more besides
- The Suffrage Eve Debate, on September 18th 2008, featuring candidates from four parties (National, Act, Labour and the Alliance) putting their case for whether centre-left or centre-right is best for women.
- Taking on ALAC over their Lisa advert, which perpetuated rape myths and was generally pretty unhelpful. This included speaking about the issue at a Thursdays in Black forum at UOA in July.
- Holding a fundraising morning tea for Preventing Violence in the Home in June.
- Maia took part in a picket supporting cleaners striking at Spotless in Wellington back in April 2008.
Any ideas for what we should do in our second year are most welcome in comments :-)
Thanks for clicking; we look forward to a future full of writing, reading, doing stuff, and eating cupcakes.
4 comments:
I think we've done well!
Re that submission: I've always been more of a thinker and writer than a do-er, and I've been engaged in very little activism myself, 'though in some part that has been because of where I was living at various times. One march against the Sprinkboks touring NZ back in 1986 (I think(, a bit of work with Women against Pornography, and nothing much else. I wanted to go and protest on / about section 59 (i.e. supporting the repeal of section 59, of course!), but my boss at the time made it very clear that we ought not to be seen there (public service rulz). So THM gave me the impetus to actually do something i.e. work on that submission. I'm very grateful to the THM community for facilititing it, and supporting it, and getting involved.
(Yet another note to self: must follow-up on what has happened.)
Congratulations! I might not comment much but this is one of my favourite blogs.
Also, belatedly, thanks for the link to my blog.
Congrats! I'm glad to see THM doing so well. Always a good thought-provoking read.
Deborah, there are all sorts of shades to activism and your writing is totally part of that rainbow. I hope that doesn't sound patronising; I just feel very strongly that a good movement or cause or campaign is one that has many ways of involvement, to respect that different people prefer different methods of showing their support. I used to be quite sneering about my friends in the Labour party and their party activism, but in the last government their chipping away from inside the party delivered some gains that my ranting on the street in the '90s was all about. We all play our part, and who can really unpick it all to determine whose contribution did more, when they are all so intrinsically part of the pattern of the whole?
My word I am getting purply in my prose tonight.
Thanks Sharon and SMSD, it's lovely to have your feedback.
Oh and SMSD, I haven't forgotten that you still have the porta-cot!
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