By Emily Horner @EmilyAMHorner
Vicky Foster
International Woman's Day was Sunday March 8, 2020- which has been celebrated annually on this date since 1911.
Leeds Literature Festival celebrated the day on their third evening at Chapel FM Arts Centre in Seacroft, East Leeds, on Friday March 6, 2020.
Three performances were broadcasted to a live studio audience- ending with the main act of Vicky Foster performing her poems.
Vicky Foster is a writer, performer, and poet from Hull. Her work has been broadcasted on Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio 5 and Radio 6, and has been selected twice for Radio 4's Pick of the Week.
Foster read extracts of her autobiographical poems from her radio play Bathwater, which she produced in 2019 for Radio 4.
Her poems took the audience on a nostalgic trail of her experiences, which many, if not all, women can relate to.
Something that many women can relate to, however is struggling with their body image.
Her first poem was set in the Northern seaside town Bridlington, of a 14-year-old Vicky feeling like she couldn't take her layers of clothes off so she could swim in the sea.
She said: "Body image affects women massively, with social media, filters and Love Island- that kind of superficial culture.
"But young women are getting smarter at identifying it."
She also performed a poem as a tribute to the generations of her female family members:
"I've written more about my Nana, but they are all strong women.
"When I was growing up I never appreciated my Mum and what I had, and I realised that at the time I was writing."
Other strong women had inspired her poem about women learning to box.
Foster told her audience about her visit to a domestic abuse shelter in Hull, and her performance at the Voices of Forgotten Northern Women in 2019.
It was a show of poetry performances and stand up comedy to celebrate women from Northern History who had slipped through the cracks of time and forgotten about- from early suffragettes to musicians.
Foster had also demonstrated her own strength through her poem about men from her past giving her unsolicited advice, telling her what to do and how 'to improve'. Her poem was a message to them that she did not need 'saving'.
"I started writing when I was six, but stopped when I was 19 and had my son, and I had chronic fatigue in 2010- I could barely leave the sofa.
"A therapist recommended journaling to process the trauma that I had. By keeping a diary, poems and stories started to come out."
Foster said that what the women from the shelter, the Voices of Forgotten Northern Women and her female family members all had in common was their strength in sharing their experiences. And the sharing of her own, through her poetry at Chapel FM, had distilled a sense of strength and confidence through to her audience too.
"(International Woman's Day is) still really important- it highlights the inequalities between men and women, and there is still a naive view that men and women are equal (now)."