The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht

The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht: Voices from the front-line of Scotland's battle for women's rights

Editor	Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn
Language	English
Subject	Feminism
Publisher	Constable
Publication date	May 2024
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (hardcover)
ISBN	978-1-40872-070-7

The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht: Voices from the front-line of Scotland's battle for women's rights is a 2024 book of gender-critical essays, edited by Susan Dalgety, a columnist for The Scotsman, and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, author and former Scottish Government civil servant. The book was published on 30 May by Constable, an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group.

In a tweet about the book, J. K. Rowling explained to non-Scots that the meaning of the word 'wheesht' is to "'be quiet’ or ‘hush up’, but I suspect you could have worked that out from the context".

Summary

The publisher describes The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht as "the story of women who risked their job, reputation, even the bonds of family and friendship, to make their voices heard, and ended up – unexpectedly – contributing to the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first woman first minister."

The book consists of over 30 essays. Essayists include author J. K. Rowling, MP Joanna Cherry, MSP Ash Regan, and former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss. In the book, Rowling describes her belief in protecting women's sex-based rights. She says, in an abridged essay published in The Times, "I’d come to believe that the socio-political movement insisting ‘trans women are women’ was neither kind nor tolerant, but in fact profoundly misogynistic, regressive, dangerous in some of its objectives and nakedly authoritarian in its tactics".

Writing in The Sunday Times, the editors describe the core of the book in the words "I won’t be forced to say women’s bodies don’t matter — aren’t matter", which they attribute to the anonymous X account @Dis_Critic, the origin of the hashtag #WomenWontWheesht.

Reception

The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht debuted at number 3 on The Sunday Times list of bestselling general hardbacks.

Transgender journalist India Willoughby described the book as gender-critical and criticized the bookseller Waterstones for including it in a list of new books, given that Waterstones is "famously trans-supportive". In response, Waterstones said the list was a "broad overview reflective of new publishing across genres and subjects".

In The Times, Sarah Ditum begins her review with a quote from the book "Scotland is the land of the Enlightenment but also the witch craze", which she says explains why the country's establishment adopted trans activism. The book, she says, describes a feminist "fightback through the voices of the women who made it happen".

In the Morning Star, John McInnally describes the essays as being of "major historical, political and social significance", and that they expose what he calls "gender ideology" as being "regressive and reactionary". He further notes that "the voices in this book are of left-of-centre women" and that "each essay rings with that limpid articulacy of truth, defiance, and conviction that defines a movement built by these and many other women in defence of their hard-won sex-based rights".