She Takes Risks

In 1983, Mama Cash began her life supporting groups of women that were fighting for the right to make their own decisions about their lives and bodies, like movements fighting for legal and safe abortion. She especially supported groups at the margins of their societies, such as lesbians, girls, and sex workers.

She funded many lesbian and radical women’s publications in the Netherlands and contributed to building a solid infrastructure of Dutch feminist organisations. By the 1990s, Mama Cash was supporting many lesbian rights groups around the world.

Mama Cash Annual Report 1994 -1995: ‘By looking at society from a radical point of view, many lesbian groups influence other women’s groups.’

Early in her life, Mama Cash funded the first international meetings for sex worker activists. Since 2012 Mama Cash  is the proud host of the Red Umbrella Fund, the first ever global grantmaking collaborative guided by and for sex workers. The Fund is exclusively dedicated to the support of sex workers’ health, human and labour rights and self-determination.

Mama Cash supported the controversial Women on Waves boat. Crew provide sexual education in international waters and offer the abortion pill to pregnant women—drawing both political and media attention to a woman’s right to legal and safe abortion. Now Women on Web, a sister organisation founded by Women on Waves and also supported by Mama Cash, offers an online service to help women make safe choices about their bodies by ordering the abortion pill online.