Celebrating women all year round

This blog is taken from something I wrote for my local Women’s Institute – Lee Green WI – as part of our 10th birthday. I was asked to recall a special WI memory from the last decade, and there were plenty of fun and memorable things to choose from, but there was one event the stood out in my mind – attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace to mark 100 years of the WI.

Obviously that’s a pretty unique occasion and not one you forget in a hurry, but the thing that made it most memorable wasn’t the event itself. I’m sharing here just a part of what I said because I feel it speaks volumes about the relevance of the WI today as a movement, and also about how fabulous women are and how we should celebrate ourselves not just on International Women’s Day, or even on Mother’s Day or our birthdays, but all year round.

‘Walking through those familiar palace gates, and under the stone archway where on TV we have seen so many dazzling horse-drawn coaches enter was a once in a lifetime opportunity. The queue to get in was massive and I’m ashamed to say that we sneaked in behind a group from Wales by pretending to be with their party!  Once inside the palace, the hallways and rooms we walked through were of course vast and splendid and led us onto the lawns, where hundreds of our fellow WI members were gathered from all over the country- I’ve never seen so many fascinators in one place! We were selected to be presented to Princess Alexandra and managed to do a decent curtsey with very little practise!

But wonderful and exciting as all of that was, it’s not the prime reason this day sticks in my memory. I remember it most of all because of the wonderful women that I met there and the stories they told. There was Mary who’s president of her tiny WI in Wales, a group that was started by her great aunt, of which her mother was also president, and which she’s desperately trying to keep going in honour of her relatives, despite falling numbers because she knows how important it is for the elderly women who currently attend. Without it they’d have very little social contact.

Then there was Gillian, who told us about her terrible first marriage, where she suffered emotional bullying at the hands of her husband, lost self-esteem and the ability to see how she could go on. She told us it was the support of the friends she met through the WI that helped her to see she deserved and could have a happier life, and that gave her the courage to leave that toxic relationship, and rebuild her life. She’s now happily remarried.

It was hearing those stories, and more, that changed my view of what the WI is. Not just cakes and Jerusalem, not resolutions and campaigns, but women being great friends to other women; women feeling and showing loyalty to others; women using their strength and encouraging courage in other women. To me THAT is the importance of the WI, and the memories of those women will stay with me always.‘

What I’ve learned…

We’re all dealing with something, and no one person’s grief is worse than any others. Thank you to my friend Lindsay Nicholson for writing about this topic which we find difficult to talk about, but which touches everyone’s life in one way or another.