Women for Scottish Independence.... controversial?

I got up this mornin', and I made myself a page.  Yeah, I got up this mornin, and I made myself a page.  Didn't see the trollin' comin', comin' straight for me....




Er... ahem.  Anyway..
Today I founded the Women for Scottish Independence page on Facebook, then I spent a little while plugging it to a handful of groups and pages.  Immediately the likes started rolling in, which is very gratifying, but I also started to see something I'd not really been expecting, and that was a fair amount of vitriol at the very idea of there being such a page.
The first accusation I came across was that it was sexist.  Sexist?  Really? The point of the page is to encourage  discussion about an issue which deeply affects the Referendum campaign, and that is the lack of specifically female support.  There are more women than men in Scotland folks, we really do need to look at this issue, I'm afraid, and we need to engage women in it both in discovering what the problem is and in finding the solution.  Are Fathers 4 Justice sexist by the same token?
The second accusation was a bit of a stunner.  There is shouldn't be such a group, apparently, it's segregationist.       Currently facebook hasn't put a 'ban by gender' option on the plate so even though the vast majority of likes the page received today were from women, a few men did have the tenacity to sneak through under my nose.  The cheek of it... they'll be hearing us talk about our secret women's issues and Mark Zuckerberg wont let me stop them!  Of course, the whole premise of the accusation is a total nonsense, our page is hardly segregated from the rest of the world and isn't about to become segregated.  What it does do is provide a forum for people to discuss the issues of Independence that affect women and it aims to do so without any party-political bias so that it can be as open as it needs to be.  There are some issues, even now in the 21st century I'm afraid, that affect women more deeply than men, so women are going to be in the majority of people active on the page.

The third accusation was pretty bizarre.  Apparently we don't need such a page at all, and we shouldn't be bothering.  Honestly? When women form 7% more of the population than men and still only 45 of our 129 MSP's are women, women make up only 24% of our local councillors and get only a third of public appointments, we don't need to bother with a page aimed at increasing female participation in Scottish politics?  Is this what we call equality?  Are we wrong to try and figure out how to change this? When I tried to question this gently, I was told rather summarily that women don't need help to participate, they should simply speak up for themselves and if they won't that is their own fault.  I guess that also means we don't need to address the alarming decline in voter turnout either?  It's fine to let the ruling classes get on with alienating people from politics with the kind of behaviour we've seen from the Coalition government in Westminster and to never try to reach out to all of those disaffected voters who just won't speak up is it?  It's got nothing to do with the prevailing feeling of not being listened to that so many people report has it?  

OK, so the last one really got me a bit upset.  Of course that's not the way forward.  We need to look at the issues that women don't feel are being addressed, and we need to do it out of the glare of the mainstream political forum of party politics so that they don't feel intimidated.  I'm not inferring that women are timid here, just in case you wondered, I just think that it is a huge disincentive to speak out for most people regardless of gender, and this is the best approach to take.

One last little point, the majority of hostility the page received today was from women and not men.  The vast majority of feedback we have had has been hearteningly positive, and I want to thank everyone for their support. For the Yes vote to carry the day in Autumn 2014, we need to work to bring all of the disaffected on board with us, we need to build consensus politics with the strength of voice and diversity that will trump the playground politics that currently undermines our democracy.  With the page we're reaching out to the biggest disaffected group in Scotland, and I am not going to apologise for doing that.  

PS.  Maybe some people will be a little upset with the tone of this article, I will apologise for that as I am not out to make people angry.  I simply needed to address the above issues for the sake of my own sanity before bed tonight, otherwise that blues song is going to keep going round and round and round in my head to the wee small hours of the morning!