Conservative Woman

About Conservative Woman

The Conservative Woman was a British social-conservative news and opinion website that published for 12 years, from its launch on International Women's Day 2014 to its closure in July 2026. Founded by Kathy Gyngell and Laura Perrins, it set out to provide a platform for conservative women's perspectives on politics, family and culture — and became one of the most combative voices on the British right, waging what its editor called a "12-year culture war" against feminism, the BBC, lockdown policies, net zero and mass immigration. Later rebranded as TCW Defending Freedom, it closed its doors on 18 July 2026, with Gyngell continuing the fight via a Substack newsletter. Its archived site remains at conservativewoman.co.uk.

Founding on International Women's Day 2014

The Conservative Woman published its first edition on 8 March 2014 — International Women's Day — opening, in editor Kathy Gyngell's later recollection, with a broadside against "ever-moaning feminists". The site was co-founded by Gyngell and Laura Perrins, two women who shared a conviction that mainstream feminism had become a destructive ideology and that conservative women's voices were shut out of the national conversation. Perrins, a former barrister turned stay-at-home mother and campaigner, brought energy and flair to the project; Gyngell, a former television producer and think-tank researcher, brought policy heft and editorial experience.

The timing was deliberate and provocative: launching a self-consciously anti-feminist women's website on the feminist movement's flagship day of celebration set the tone for everything that followed. The site positioned itself as the home of social conservatism with a female voice — defending marriage, motherhood and the family against what it saw as the corrosive effects of state-sponsored feminism, mass daycare and the sexual revolution's aftermath.

The founders: Gyngell and Perrins

Kathy Gyngell was the site's principal editor throughout its life, editing it voluntarily seven days a week for 12 years. A Cambridge and Oxford graduate, she had a career in television current affairs before leaving to become a full-time mother — an experience that radicalised her on family policy. She founded the Full Time Mothers Association, later renamed Mothers at Home Matter, to campaign for tax recognition of single-earner families and stay-at-home parents. She went on to become a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, chairing its Prisons and Addictions Forum and authoring the addictions sections of the Conservative Party's Social Justice Policy Group reviews Breakdown Britain (2006) and Breakthrough Britain (2007). She wrote for the Telegraph, Times and Daily Mail, and broadcast on the BBC, ITV, Sky and GB News.

Laura Perrins, the Irish co-founder, was born in Balbriggan, County Dublin, and qualified as a barrister at King's Inns in Dublin and, after a Cambridge LLM, for England and Wales in 2006. She gave up the Bar to raise her three children and became a prominent campaigner for the rights of stay-at-home parents, rising to national prominence in 2013 after confronting the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg on his LBC radio show on the subject. That same year she was included in the BBC's 100 Women list. She wrote for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, ConservativeHome and the Catholic Herald, and supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum. Perrins resigned as co-director of the site in 2025, leaving Gyngell as principal editor.

Editorial mission and stance

The Conservative Woman's founding gripe, as Gyngell described it in her farewell column, was "the feminist assault on the married family, the daycare push, and the trashing of children's needs and mothers' instincts". The site argued that feminism — embraced as much by "modern" Conservatives under David Cameron and Theresa May as by the left — had fragmented society, driven family breakdown and contributed to Britain's low birth rate. From that starting point its worldview expanded into a comprehensive social conservatism: scepticism of climate policy and net zero, opposition to transgender ideology and "radical feminism", hostility to open borders and mass immigration, and defence of free speech and national sovereignty.

The site was unsparing in its criticism not only of the left but of what it called "the polite right of the MSM" — mainstream conservative journalists and politicians it accused of lacking principle and courage. It attacked the BBC relentlessly, the Conservative Party's embrace of social liberalism, and, during the pandemic, the media's cheerleading for lockdowns. Its tone was polemical, moralistic and deliberately unfashionable: it wore its outsider status as a badge of honour.

Key campaigns and coverage

Over its 12 years, TCW campaigned on a shifting roster of culture-war fronts. In its early years the focus was family policy: the tax system's penalisation of single-earner households, the push to get mothers of young children into full-time work, and the expansion of state-funded childcare. It was an early and fierce critic of the transgender movement's influence on law and institutions, of net zero energy policy as "insanity" and "bad science", and of what it described as the Islamist threat enabled by multiculturalism.

During the Covid-19 pandemic the site became a prominent lockdown-sceptic voice. Perrins's March 2020 piece declaring she would rather "die as a freeborn citizen" than "cower like a dog in a kennel" by self-isolating became one of its most notorious articles. The site also campaigned against mass vaccination as the only sanctioned exit from lockdown, against the BBC's coverage of the pandemic, and later against abortion liberalisation and assisted dying. Its "week in review" columns by Gyngell served as a running commentary on the week's outrages, real and perceived.

News-Watch and the war on the BBC

A distinctive feature of The Conservative Woman was its close association with News-Watch, the independent organisation that monitors the BBC for political and economic bias. Gyngell had been associated with News-Watch since 1999, and the site gave prominent space to the journalism of David Keighley, whose close monitoring of the "biased and subversive state broadcaster" was, in Gyngell's farewell assessment, one of the things she was proudest of. TCW's pages carried detailed, programme-by-programme critiques of BBC coverage of Brexit, climate change, immigration and Covid.

The anti-BBC campaign was of a piece with the site's broader media criticism. TCW argued that the corporation was not merely left-leaning but actively subversive of British values and democracy, and it urged its readers to withhold the licence fee. Whether or not one accepted the charge, the sustained, forensic nature of the monitoring gave TCW a distinctive journalistic product that set it apart from pure opinion sites.

The business model: independent and donor-funded

The Conservative Woman prided itself on having no financial backing from wealthy donors, corporations or political parties — a fact it cited as the guarantee of its independence. The site was funded by reader donations and, in its later years, by subscriptions: it ran fundraising appeals, including a GoFundMe campaign, and eventually put much of its content behind a paywall, charging £10 a month or £100 a year. Gyngell edited the site voluntarily, seven days a week, for its entire 12-year run — an extraordinary personal commitment that she cited when explaining the closure.

The shoestring model was both a strength and a vulnerability. It gave TCW its authentic outsider voice and its freedom to say things mainstream outlets would not, but it also meant the entire enterprise rested on the shoulders of a tiny team and, ultimately, on one woman's unpaid labour. When Gyngell decided she could no longer continue, there was no institution to carry the site forward.

Rebrand to TCW Defending Freedom

In its later years the site was rebranded as TCW Defending Freedom, reflecting a broadening of its mission beyond women's issues to the defence of liberty in general — against lockdowns, net zero, censorship and what it saw as the authoritarian drift of the British state. The rebrand acknowledged that the site's readership and concerns had outgrown the original "Conservative Woman" framing, even as it retained the TCW initials and the conservativewoman.co.uk domain.

The rebrand did not arrest the underlying pressures. Perrins's resignation as co-director in 2025 removed one of the site's two founding pillars, and Gyngell was left carrying the editorial load alone. The site's content in its final year had the feel of a rearguard action — still combative, still prolific, but increasingly conscious of its own mortality.

Closure in July 2026

In early July 2026, Gyngell announced that TCW would close, with its last "edition" going out on Saturday 18 July. In her closing announcement she wrote that she had edited the site voluntarily seven days a week for 12 years and had "no alternative" but to bring it to an end. The announcement prompted an outpouring of messages from readers, many saying the site had been a lifeline and thanking her for taking on "the tyrants". Current donors were offered a limited-time code for free access to the TCW archive, which was placed behind a paywall.

Gyngell was careful to frame the ending as "not quite goodbye": she announced that the fight would continue on a new Substack, Right Times with Kathy Gyngell, where other TCW writers would also appear. The closure marked the end of one of the longest-running independent conservative websites in Britain — a 12-year run that had begun as a provocation on International Women's Day and ended as an institution of the online right.

Legacy

The Conservative Woman's legacy is that of a pioneer of Britain's independent conservative blogosphere. It demonstrated that a small, donor-funded website with a clear ideological identity could sustain itself for over a decade and build a devoted readership without institutional backing. It gave a platform to social-conservative arguments — on the family, on feminism, on the BBC — that were marginalised in the mainstream press, and it helped normalise lockdown scepticism and net-zero scepticism on the British right.

Its critics saw it as reactionary, conspiratorial and cruel; its supporters saw it as courageous, principled and prophetic. Both judgments contain some truth, and the site would have welcomed the argument. What is not in doubt is the scale of the achievement: twelve years of daily, unpaid, uncompromising journalism from two women who set out to say the unsayable — and who, for more than a decade, did exactly that.