What’s In a Name?

Quite a lot we think!

We as a group we are quite new. There are some women who had a lot of foresight and have been campaigning and working behind the scenes for years, others are ‘newly’ peaked.

This movement started as 1 member and a co-opted helper and has subsequently grown. Landing on the ‘right name’ was initially difficult, and the pseudonym of Joan Flower was landed on and then Joan’s cat’s name, Rutterkin. This is a reference to the Witches of Belvoir and Rutterkin was her familiar.

It wasn’t great, but a catchy name can be hard to come by. On the Million Women Rise march Joan spoke to Labour Women’s Declaration, and this was a pivotal moment. Joan realised it was important to link up with other organisations and after a bit of Googling realised other national organisations had based themselves on Women’s Declaration International and so after a few emails the Women’s Institute Declaration was born.

The eagle eyed may notice there is a bit of WIWD or WDWI or WID, this is due to the website being set up before the Twitter handle. There is a restriction on the amount of characters for user handles, Women’s Institute Declaration (@WomensIns_Dec) fitted and is snappier than the other names. Once our campaign became higher profile the Twitter handle was used by the media, so we adapted and are now the Women’s Institute Declaration.