Wild Hope

Retracing my mother’s footsteps in search of women’s freedom

1974. A 22-year-old Jacqui French stands for a photograph in Omaha, Nebraska, thousands of miles from home.

In 2022, the US Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, restricting access to abortion across America. The decision mirrored a global trend towards a devastating unravelling of women’s freedoms; a reversal of hard-won progress, and a battle that continues to be fought on both sides of the Atlantic.

Following in the footsteps of her mother fifty years before her, Marisa Bate is galvanised to journey across America, meeting the women on the ground, and telling the stories behind the headlines. Examining half a century of feminist struggle in the UK and the US, she also finds herself tracing the roots of her own family, seamlessly interweaving the personal with the political.

Lyrical, poignant, and bursting with defiant hope, And Still We March is an urgent and perceptive dissection of female autonomy, motherhood, and a woman’s right to choose.

A ‘beguiling feminist memoir’ Lindsey Hilsum