Rachel Hewitt

Paul Laity · After Martha For the hospital, and for the NHS, it was a closed case, another preventable death: medicine is imperfect, such things...

‘All doctors get things wrong. What matters hugely to families in our position is that they have the courage and humility to admit to these mistakes. If they do, it transforms the way you feel about a clinician.’

@paullaity.bsky.social on his daughter Martha’s death: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

How I turned Ikea Billy bookcases into a gorgeous Georgian-style built-in library I haven’t done a DIY post in a while, mainly because I haven’t done any DIY in a while, but I’ve spent this last week building myself a library out of Ikea Billy bookcases, and I thought I’d share the...

open.substack.com/pub/rachelhe...

Thank you for all your lovely, supportive comments! If you’d like to read about how I built the library from @ikeaunitedkingdom.bsky.social Billy bookcases, I wrote a “how to” on my newsletter. Link in bio

Gorgeous!

Apparently the Zinsser B.I.N. Shellac primer is the way to go. It’s horrible stuff - gives me an instant headache - but I’ve read lots of blogs saying that it works

I’m going to paint one bookcase at a time. The books are roughly in alphabetical order and I don’t fancy taking them all off at once

So gorgeous! 😍😍😍

the basic bookcases are ikea Billy bookcases, which I've turned into a built-in library with trim, coving, skirting etc

No, I mean paint it. The carcass is comprised of IKEA bookcases. So I’m going to PAINT them with primer and PAINT.

Apparently this is what it will look like once I’ve painted it

This week I built a library. Now I just have to paint it 😱

Banning Women

Very interesting, inspiring & enraging episode of Subject to Power with @rachelhewitt.bsky.social - all the episodes I've listened to have been fascinating, on a wide range of feminist subjects open.spotify.com/episode/7z5o...

Copy of Rachel Hewitt’s book In Her Nature on bookstore shelf

Was delighted to spot @rachelhewitt.bsky.social’s book at a bookstore in Geneva today!

ICYMI: for the weekend crew

There are still spaces on my WRITING RETREATS in November and January! These are for anyone writing about outdoor adventure: running, hiking, climbing, swimming, or embezzling £60K from your former employer and having to go for a very long walk. More info & book at www.rachelhewitt.org/retreats

I've become fascinated in the origins of modern peer-to-peer support groups for grief. And I’ve discovered that we have second wave feminists to thank for many of them!

@rachelhewitt.bsky.social Saw this and thought of you.

In a long read piece for my newsletter, I describe the extraordinary June Hemer and her work with NAW in the 70s and 80s, as well as turning the spotlight onto the nature of grief support in the present day.

I’d love it if you read my work and help bring Hemer back into view.

Link in bio!

But she, and the origin of such groups in second-wave feminism, have been written out of history, and occluded by the fame of a few individual expert psychotherapists and counsellors.

June Hemer was a figure who changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of widows in the UK, and helped to establish the model of peer-to-peer grief support groups, which is still alive and well today in communities such as @widowedandyoung.org.uk .

Even better, by engaging in political activism, groups such as NAW encouraged women ‘to utilize their anger as a revolutionary political force’ and it was hoped that tackling the causes of some of their distress would, to some extent, provide a cure.

As one group member said, ‘I need no longer consider myself a candidate for the “funny farm”, since so many of the women arrayed in that small sitting room, despite their surface differences, seemed to share what for so long I had believed to be my own idiosyncratic suffering.’

The benefits of grassroots peer support groups did not just lie in the way they ameliorated women’s loneliness, but how they showed that much female sadness stemmed from patriarchal inequality and abuse rather than women’s individual flaws.

In championing the support that women offer one another, Hemer echoed certain feminist positions, such as that of Sheila Jeffreys, who said that the therapist-client relationship was ‘precisely the sort of authoritarian and hierarchical set-up which, as women, we are trying to get away from’.

She emphasised that ‘only a widow can understand how another widow feels’. In believing that widows had the capacity to help one another and fight for their rights, Hemer differed from CRUSE, which brought trained therapists and counsellors into meetings.

In 1971, she established the National Association of Widows (NAW) as a ‘widows’ liberation movement’, to fight such systemic discrimination and to give widows some much-needed emotional and practical support and a social circle of other widows.

Hemer was widowed in her mid-40s, with a school-age child, and she swiftly realised that there were serious and harmful inequities in the tax and benefits system, by which widows’ lives were made even harder.

In particular, the idea that the best support for widows comes from other widows drove the work of a remarkable woman who has almost entirely been forgotten today, called June Hemer.

I've become fascinated in the origins of modern peer-to-peer support groups for grief. And I’ve discovered that we have second wave feminists to thank for many of them!

Ditto