Welcome to WHAT ABOUT WOMEN
Let me show you around...
I’m Milli Hill, bestselling author of four non-fiction books on women’s health, freelance journalist, and avid substacker. Some have called me ‘outspoken’. When it comes to women, I think this word is meant to have some kind of negative connotation, but personally, I take it as a great compliment!
Here on my substack I can say what I like, and that’s all thanks to you, my readers and subscribers. Substack is a new model of writing, in which the reader pays a small amount directly to the author. This means: no advertising, no editing, no censorship, no large publication dictating what is or is not of interest. If you want to read about it, you will find someone writing about it on substack, freely, and in their own unique and unfiltered style. Around each writer, a community also grows of others with shared interests. I love my own personal community here on substack and getting to know each of you in the comments section, the app, and my zoom writing group.
I’ve been writing since around 2010, when my children were babies and I needed a creative outlet amidst that particular brand of upheaval and chaos! I started out on Blogger, with a blog that some of you still remember, called The Mule. From there I progressed to freelancing in various UK papers - I was a columnist for Telegraph Women under the editorial leadership of Emma Barnett, and a columnist for Best magazine too. I’ve also written for Guardian, ipaper, Independent, Mail - especially Femail, and many other magazines and publications.
As well as writing, I also founded the Positive Birth Movement in 2012, and ran that organisation for nearly a decade. This passion for improving women’s experiences of childbirth led to the publication of my first book, The Positive Birth Book, in 2017, and it remains my ‘bestseller’, with over 100 thousand copies sold. I’ve also written Give Birth like a Feminist (Harper Collins, 2019) and My Period (Hachette, 2021). My fourth non-fiction, Ultra Processed Women, comes out with Harper Collins on 3rd July 2025, and my fifth, to be announced, will be published in 2026. To date, my books have been translated into seven languages.
The running theme throughout my work has been ‘what about women?’. I get frustrated when I see, again and again, women’s issues, women’s needs, women’s life stories, women’s health, women’s feelings…being sidelined or minimised or not even referred to at all. It was this that motivated me to campaign for better births, to write a book for young girls about the brilliance of their bodies, and now, to ask in my latest book how our current food systems impact on female people specifically. It was also this sidelining of women that first caught my attention in so-called ‘gender ideology’ - I was concerned about women being erased from language with terms like ‘birthing people’, and reduced to a selection of commodifiable body parts as ‘vulva owners’ or ‘egg producers’. Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment, we can see quite clearly how women’s needs are always second on the list after mens, as feminists are asked again and again about the feelings of trans identifying males who cannot now come into the ladies, compete in our sports, or sit on our women-only panels and shortlists. Challenging this ideology that erases and sidelines women got me ‘cancelled’ back in 2020, and I still sometimes write about that experience, and it’s occasional aftershocks.
What about women? In my place here on substack I will keep asking this question, centering women in the conversation, and calling out those who can’t see us or hear us. If you subscribe here, you will get all of my posts delivered to you in your substack app, or direct to your inbox (it’s up to you). My writing pattern tends to be:
A post on a variety of topics, every Tuesday / Wednesday
The Word is Woman, where I document examples of the erasure of women from language, every Friday.
The Nosebag, a round-up of everything I’ve been reading, writing and thinking about that week, every Sunday (paid only)
Paid subscribers get access to all of these posts, and to the full archive (most posts are paywalled after a few days, even if they were free access originally). Paid subscribers also get to join the community by commenting on posts, and start or join discussions in my personal space on the app (a bit like a whatsapp group!)
Paid subs also get invited to Writing for Change, my monthly group on zoom where we explore writing for social change. I really value my paid subscribers and try to offer them as much as possible. I could not keep writing here in this space without them. If you can’t afford to subscribe, please don’t think I don’t appreciate you too though! I really do. And you will still get access to some posts.
Here are a few examples of the sort of posts you can expect here on WHAT ABOUT WOMEN. For the full archive, go here.
The Word is Woman, where believe it or not, we have a lot of laughs, silly gifs and unsolicited references to popular culture, as we explore our ongoing erasure. Because you have to laugh.
Posts about why sex matters, like this one:
If you think Saoirse Ronan is right about women's safety, then you agree sex matters.
When I was 18 I used to drive my parent’s car to parties. Living rurally, these hour-long trips were my only chance of a social life at a time when, like all teenagers, I desperately craved one. I would have to drive myself back, alone, through winding country lanes, in the middle of the night.
Posts about the experience of being female, like this one:
The inner voice of women's self-loathing
On the red carpet at the Met Gala on Monday, Pamela Anderson looked the male gaze straight in the eye and said, “Deal with it”.
Posts about being female (in this case, menopause) AND the gender debate (in this case, pronouns):
How many fucks should we give?
I’m 49, and I hear a lot of negativity about this phase of a woman’s life. The hot sweats, the chin hairs, the invisibility, the 3am chats with the Reaper: there’s a lot not to like. But there’s one brilliant thing about it, that you just don’t hear enough of, and it’s this:
Posts about how we as women show up for stuff on the back foot and ready with our apology - even when we give birth:
A life less apologetic
The following is a speech I will be giving on Friday evening in Prague for the launch of the Czech translation of my book Give Birth like a Feminist. The title of the talk is:
This substack evolves as I evolve. It is me and it reflects my thoughts and my interests. But you can rest assured that, whatever the topic, it will always be underpinned by that vital but overlooked question: WHAT ABOUT WOMEN.
Thanks for joining me here, and I look forward to getting to know you. Milli x