Here are some dates for your diary of woman-centric events going on around the UK and Republic of Ireland this week.

Belfast:

3 – 7 March: Ulster Hall Lecture and Workshop Series.

A series of lunch time events at 1pm, fronted by academics and well-known women’s sector figures, organised by Reclaim the Agenda. Bring your lunch box along.

3 March: Mary Anne-McCracken: Pioneer feminist and revolutionary. Lecture by Dr John Gray. 4 March: The forgotten women in Belfast City Cemetery. Lecture by Tom Hartley. 5 March: Where is feminism today? Workshop with Kellie O’Dowd. 6 March: Belfast women and the Great War. Workshop with Dr Margaret Ward and Lynda Walker. 7 March: Feminist fairytales. Workshop with Belfast Feminist Network.

Email  or call 028 9023 0212 for further details.

4 March: Shrieking Sisters, in The Linen Hall Library at 2pm.

To mark International Women’s Day 2014, The Linen Hall Library is staging an interactive schools performance Of Shrieking Sisters, a play based on the real-life attempt by a group of suffragettes to blow up Lisburn Cathedral in 1914. Written by Maggie Cronin and Carol Moore and performed by Maggie Cronin, Carol Moore and Laura Hughes, it will examine what made a respectable middle class supporter of women’s rights resort to active militancy.

Admission is free. Afterwards, tours of the building and its collections will also be available to anyone who is interested.

To book places, please contact Deborah Douglas on 028 9032 1707 or email.

5 March: Launch of the 24-Hour Domestic and Sexual Violence Helpline at the Stormont Hotel from 11.30am.

Join Women’s Aid at the Stormont Hotel from 11.30am to celebrate the launch of this new helpline. Lunch will be provided. Please register if you wish to attend.

7 March:  Fem the Vote Workshop Black Box, Belfast, at 12 noon.

Why aren’t more young women voting? This women-only workshop in the Black Box from NUS-USI will delve right into the issue, exploring female voter registration and what topics matter to NI women. To register click here.

8 March: Rally for International Women’s Day 2014 at 12 noon, at the Art College, Belfast.

After assembling at the Art College, we will march our way to the City Hall for 1pm, where there will be a welcome from the Lord Mayor, songs, speeches and a buffet. Everyone welcome.

Bradford:

7 – 9 March: Equal Fest #4 at The 1 in 12 Club, Bradford AND Wharf Chambers, Leeds

EQUAL fest is a DIY benefit festival for women’s rights groups and the bands are playing for free or traveling expenses. EQUAL fest supports and wishes to encourage woman’s involvement in DIY punk / hardcore and political music scene and would like to inspire more females to get involved. That’s why all the bands that are playing have at least one non male gender member.

EQUAL fest supports gender, racial, social, generational, cultural etc. equality and opposes any forms of oppression, inequality and discrimination.

This event is happening at the 1 in 12 club in Bradford, a members owned and run social centre based on anarchist principals, self-management, co-operation and mutual aid and in Wharf Chambers in Leeds, worker co-op run bar, cafe, venue and community space.

For the full line up, click here.

Bristol:

7 March: Women and the politics of work at Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol, from 6.30pm.

To mark Women’s History Month, Bristol University are bringing together women who took action in the workplace: Sally Groves, who played a key role in the Trico Equal Pay Strike in 1976; Miriam Glucksmann, a sociologist who wrote Women On The Line after a year working in a motor parts factory; and Mila Navarra from the campaign organisation Justice For Domestic Workers.

Admission free.

8 March: Changing the World for Women and Girls at M Shed, Princes Wharf, Wapping Road, Bristol, from 7.30pm-10.30pm.

Join M Shed for an evening of debate, film, music and Fairtrade refreshments to celebrate International Women’s Day 2014. Organised by the Bristol Fairtrade Network.

Highlights include: Margarita Espinoza from Soppexcca Co-operative; music from The Cat’s Pyjamas and Makala Cheung; film screening ‘In the House, In Bed and On the Streets’, direct from the Feminist Film Festival in London; panel debate ‘How do we end violence against women?’

Tickets £8/£6.

8 March:  International Women’s Day – Fem FM Revisited at the M Shed, Princes Wharf, Wapping Road, Bristol, from 3pm-5pm.

In 1992, over 200 women made history in Bristol by setting up the UK’s first women’s radio station – Fem FM. Bristol Record Office has digitised the original broadcast tapes, now available for research as part of the Fem FM archive of recordings, photographs and other material.

To mark the launch of the archive a panel discussion about women’s achievements in radio over the past two decades will ask ‘Is the climate better for women broadcasters in 2014?’

9 March: Translation / Transmission: Calypso Rose – The Lioness of the Jungle + Intro at The Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Harbourside, Bristol, from 1pm.

March is Women’s History Month and the Translation/Transmission season at the Watershed will celebrate the diverse ways women activists have communicated their struggle and resistance through film.

An exuberant and inspiring ambassador for the Caribbean, Calypso Rose is the uncontested and much decorated diva of Calypso music. With more than 800 recorded songs, she continues to be a pioneer and champion of women’s rights, as she travels the world making music. French-Cameroonian filmmaker Pascale Obolo spends four years with Calypso Rose on a very personal journey. Travelling to Paris, New York, Trinidad and Tobago and to her ancestral home in Africa, we learn more about Calypso Rose in each place, and the many faces and facets of her life. The daughter of an illiterate Trinidadian fisherman, she was one of ten children, and was sent to live with relatives in Tobago at the age of 9. At 15 she wrote her first song and launched a career that took her to the top of the male-dominated calypso world. This creative film is not only about memory and the exchange and discovery of world cultures, but also about the journey of a remarkable woman, an Afro-Caribbean soul and an exemplary artist.

With an introduction and singing performance from Nia Bumkubwa.

Ticket prices: £5.50 full /£4.00 concessions.

Cambridge:

5 March: Book launch: ‘The Meaning of Success: Insights from Women at Cambridge’, at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge CB3 9DP from 5.30pm-7pm.

Hosted by Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

‘The Meaning of Success’ profiles 26 women at Cambridge – from world-leading academics, to key administrative staff – and features contributions from another 100.

It seeks to understand how women in academia value success, and concludes that the University of Cambridge – and the higher education sector more generally – would benefit from a wider, more inclusive definition of success; one that benefited women as much as it did men.

To book your place, click here.

Cardiff:

8 March: Stop Violence Against Women at City Hall Lawn, Cardiff, from 4pm – 7pm.

Cardiff Feminist Network presents International Women’s Day 2014: Stop Violence Against Women

Speakers including: Rhian Davies, Cardiff Women’s Aid; Susan Pashkoff, economist and anti-cuts campaigner; Sara Mayo, CFN campaigner (personal capacity) and many more…

Plus poetry by Mab Jones, music and creative writing readings, including “Mis(s) Seen” by Cardiff poets Merched Mentrus’.

Coventry: 

7 March: celebrate International Women’s Day at FWT – a Centre for Women: a Health and Wellbeing coffee morning  at 70-72 Elmsdale Avenue, Foleshill, Coventry CV6 6ES from 10.30 am – 12 noon.

Diverse events are held every Friday of the month.

FWT (Foleshill Women’s Training) an award-winning, women only centre, that has been operating since 1989 and is dedicated to helping all women in Coventry and the surrounding areas through its social, health and economic programmes.

Durham:

8 March: Conference: Literary Dolls: The Female Textual Body from the 19th Century to Now,at theUniversity of Durham

The artistic presentation of women’s bodies has been widely understood as a celebration of the beauty of the female form, but many of these depictions serve to fetishise their physical form, to dismember them and to control women in general, both within the arts and in the wider world. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to appraise the depiction of women’s physical form in the arts and how far artistic presentation has informed other disciplines from the 19th century to now.

We seek to assess how far the arts have changed in line with apparent developments in the treatment of women over the comparable historical gulf. We are also keen to consider the social impact the arts have had, and continue to have, on the treatment of women. Papers will discuss textual presentation of women’s bodies including includes literary depictions, but also those in film, television, digital media, the visual arts and the applied social sciences.

Keynote speakers: Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Jane Smiley; Professor Jo Phoenix, University of Durham and Dr Kate MacDonald, University of Ghent.

For information email this address.  In association with the University of Durham’s Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities.

Edinburgh:

5 March: Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre fundraiser and International Women’s Day celebration at The Outhouse, 12a Broughton Street Lane, Edinburgh, from 8pm.

Join Edinburgh Feminist Network for an (early) celebration of International Women’s Day and to raise funds for Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. People are welcome to bring ‘pot luck’ food to share but drinks must be purchased in the bar.

There will be music, a cake sale, clothing sale, a raffle and other delights…

75 per cent of EWRASAC’s frontline support and counselling services are currently at serious risk due to the end of funding streams at 31 May 2014. They offer free and confidential emotional and practical support, information and advocacy to women, girls aged 12 and over, and all members of the transgender community, who have experienced sexual violence from male or female abusers at any time in their lives. This includes rape, sexual assault, childhood sexual abuse and ritual abuse.

Kingston-upon-Thames:

8 March: International Women’s Day Women workers fight back against MITIE abuse from 2pm.

On International Women’s Day, women from the IWGB trade union are organising an event at Kingston University. Women from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts are supporting them. We would like you to come along with us and bring people.

The IWGB is the union that organises cleaners and other outsourced workers at University of London, and has been leading the inspiring ’3 Cosas’ campaign in recent months.

IWGB women are going down to Kingston because Kingston University has honoured Ruby McGregor-Smith, the CEO of MITIE. McGregor-Smith has been given awards for “diversity in business”, but the reality is that MITIE are accused of being an anti-union company, that severely exploit workers.

The company also runs six prisons, including two youth offender institutions. They are “partners” with the Prison Service and the UK Border Agency.

NCAFC Women are going to Kingston to tell the world that MITIE and its CEO represent oppression, and that Kingston University’s homage to her represents an insult to MITIE workers. The real inspiration is women workers fighting for their rights. They stand in the tradition of the struggling women workers who began International Women’s Day more than a century ago.

Hosted by Kingston Uni UCU, they will be sharing food and drink hearing from MITIE workers; watching a documentary about their situation and their struggle against it; discussing ideas for campaigning about it; listening to South American folk music and dance; and reading a mural of writings produced by the IWGB English class for International Women’s Day.

Leeds:

7 – 9 March: Equal Fest #4 at The 1 in 12 Club, Bradford AND Wharf Chambers, Leeds

EQUAL fest is a DIY benefit festival for women’s rights groups and the bands are playing for free or traveling expenses. EQUAL fest supports and wishes to encourage woman’s involvement in DIY punk / hardcore and political music scene and would like to inspire more females to get involved. That’s why all the bands that are playing have at least one non male gender member.

EQUAL fest supports gender, racial, social, generational, cultural etc. equality and opposes any forms of oppression, inequality and discrimination.

This event is happening at the 1 in 12 club in Bradford, a members owned and run social centre based on anarchist principals, self-management, co-operation and mutual aid and in Wharf Chambers in Leeds, worker co-op run bar, cafe, venue and community space.

For the full line up, click here.

London:

4 March: ‘Conversation’ about Money and Equality at New Theatre, East Building, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A, from 6pm-7.30pm.

With the arrival of The Women’s Library at LSE, the Gender Institute will be running a series of ‘Conversations’ for which audience participation is invited.

Money and material resources are unequally distributed throughout the world. This conversation discusses the part that gender plays in this universal pattern and the ways in which gendered financial inequality can be challenged.

Diane Elson is professor of sociology at the University of Essex. Ruth Lister is emeritus professor of social policy at Loughborough University and a member of the House of Lords.

This event is free and open to all, with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.

8 March: Protest Amnesty International at Amnesty International, Peter Benenson House, 1 Easton Street, London WC1X, from 6pm.

Amnesty International UK are proposing to adopt a policy position which advocates for the decriminalisation of punters and pimps across the world. Further to this, a pimp who held a leadership role in the organisation is claiming that he was the instigator and driver of the policy. Amnesty is currently consulting with members and other groups about the proposed policy. If you would like to take part in the consultation by opposing Amnesty’s support of pimps and punters rights, please come along and show your opposition on March 8th.

The 8 March is International Women’s Day and Million Women Rise (MWR) in the UK. We are organising this protest to take place after the Million Women Rise march (and immediately before the after party) at the London Amnesty head office, which is only a 20-minute walk from the MWR after party, so women can protest and then head to the after party afterwards.

Hosted by Abolish Prostitution Now and Radfem UK; endorsed by: SPACE International, Survivors for Solutions, Edmonton Small Press Association, Julie Bindel, Spinifex Press, Organizing for Women’s Liberation, Feminist Current, Sisterhood Is Global Institute, Prostitution Research and Education, Manchester Feminist Network, Ruhama, Coalition Against Trafficking Women International, NoRMAs, Pink Cross Foundation Australia, Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry, Esohe Aghatise, Associazione Iroko Onlus, Turin, Italy

Until 22 March: The Mistress Contract by Abi Morgan at Jerwood Theatre downstairs, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W

She and He are the pseudonyms of a real-life couple who live in separate houses in the same city on the west coast of America. She is 88. He is 93.

For 30 years he has provided her with a home and an income, while she provides ‘mistress services’ – ‘All sexual acts as requested, with suspension of historical, emotional, psychological disclaimers.’

They first met at university and then lost touch. When they met again twenty years later, they began an affair when She – a highly educated, intelligent woman with a history of involvement in the feminist movement – asked her wealthy lover to sign the remarkable document that outlines their unconventional lifestyle: The Mistress Contract.

Was her suggestion a betrayal of all that she and the women of her generation had fought for? Or was it brave, honest, and radical?

Then — on a small recorder that fit in her purse — this extraordinary couple began to tape their conversations about their relationship, conversations that took place while travelling, over dinner at home and in restaurants, on the phone, even in bed.

Based on reams of tape recordings made over their 30 year relationship, The Mistress Contract is a remarkable document of this unconventional couple, and the contract that kept them bound together to this day.

Tickets £32, £22, £16, £12.

Until 23 March: Hannah Höch exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1.

Hannah Höch was an artistic and cultural pioneer. A member of Berlin’s Dada movement in the 1920s, she was a driving force in the development of 20th century collage. Splicing together images taken from fashion magazines and illustrated journals, she created a humorous and moving commentary on society during a time of tremendous social change. Höch was admired by contemporaries such as George Grosz, Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters, yet was often overlooked by traditional art history. As the first major exhibition of her work in Britain, the show puts this inspiring figure in the spotlight.

A determined believer in artistic freedom, Höch questioned conventional concepts of relationships, beauty and the making of art. Höch’s collages explore the concept of the ‘New Woman’ in Germany following World War I and capture the style of the 1920s avant-garde theatre. The important series ‘From an Ethnographic Museum’ combines images of female bodies with traditional masks and objects, questioning traditional gender and racial stereotypes.

Astute and funny, this exhibition reveals how Höch established collage as a key medium for satire while being a master of its poetic beauty.

Tickets £9.95/£7.95.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne:

5 March: Celebrating INternational WOmen’s Day a showcase of research on women and inequality at Lipman Building, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, from 12.45pm–4.30pm.

Featuring presentations by: Dr Pamela Davies:“Bearing the Brunt of Harm and Criminal Victimisation: Women, vulnerability and resilience” Centre for Offenders and Offending;  Dr Carol Stephenson:“The eye of the beholder: Women’s use of photography in the fight for Cape Breton Coal Mining” Centre for Civil Society and Citizenship; Dr Kirsten Haack: “Breaking the glass ceiling but not glass walls? Women in executive roles in politics and international relations” Centre on International Public Policy and Management; Dr Katy Jenkins:“Making the extraordinary everyday: Women anti-mining activists’ narratives of staying put and carrying on in Peru and Ecuador” Centre for International Development.

This event is free.

Sunderland:

5 March: ‘Stop the Council Cuts’ March and Mass Lobby at Park Lane, Vine Place End, Sunderland, from 1pm.

Sunderland City Council is planning on implementing around £110 million of cuts over the next 3 years. This will mean the loss of jobs and public services in Sunderland.

The Council will meet at 2pm on 5 March to vote on the budget for 2014/15; join the Sunderland People’s Assembly and march to the council chambers and lobby the council to oppose these cuts.

Dublin:

5 March: The Spring Pub Quiz! at Doyles, 9 College Street, Dublin, from 7.30pm.

Dublin Nights for Choice welcome you to the first of many events in 2014. They invite you to one of their always successful, always enjoyable, always boozy weeknight table quizzes. This time around they are incredibly lucky to have comedian Alison Spittle as quizmaster. YAY!

As usual, it’s a fiver a head with teams preferably comprising of 4 members (although 3 or 5 is ok too), and also as usual, if you’re on your own come on down and we’ll hook you up with a team. Raffle prizes, booze, sound and sexy people, and all funds raised go straight to the good folk at ASN, helping women on the ground. So please get your name down, get sharing, and may the best team win!