By Jenny Turner
The Guardian UK 33, no. 24
December 15, 2011
Young
women, the state and public order in Britain, as seen in clippings from
the newspapers, August 2011: Natasha Reid, 24, pleaded guilty to
stealing a television from a Comet in North London during the riots of
August 7. Her mother said she was “baffled” by her own behaviour—she had
a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along
with her sister and a friend, to “entering” Argos in Croydon: “The
tragedy is that you are all of previous good character,” the judge said,
as he sentenced them to six months each. Chelsea Ives, the 18-year-old
“shamed former Olympic youth ambassador” shopped by her mother, pleaded
guilty to criminal damage and burglary on the Sunday, and to violent
disorder (a Somerfield in Hackney) the following evening. “The public
seem to automatically place me in an unnamed category for thick,
low-life individuals, which is not me at all,” Chelsea wrote “from
behind bars” in a letter intended for the novelist Gillian Slovo, but
which the Evening Standard used as an occasion to run her
big-hair camera-phone-in-the-mirror Facebook picture yet again. She
began a two-year jail sentence this month.
Here, in a nutshell,
is the problem with feminism. Young women “of good character” losing
their heads and wishing they hadn’t. You feel so sorry for them, but
can’t you sense what they tasted in the air as they were doing it:
freedom, fury, the power—for once—of being young and strong and agile
and a homegirl, the flat-out joy of getting your hands on some free
stuff. “This is the best day ever,” Chelsea said, while looting the
T-Mobile store. “Trainers, clothes, mobiles, iPods, Macs—possession of
these things is tantamount to human rights,” a writer called Charmaine
Elliot posted on Blackfeminists.blog, remembering her own youth in
London.
“I took a trip to Selfridges one afternoon to visit a
friend and was struck by advertising slogans that said, à la Barbara
Kruger, I shop, therefore I am. And I couldn’t help but wonder that as I
couldn’t actually shop, ergo what?”
At the UK Feminista
summer school in Birmingham meanwhile, Emily Birkenshaw, 24, a teaching
assistant from York, was learning how to “go floppy” when arrested.
“You’re heavier then, so you can’t be carried,” she told the Observer. “It just felt really empowering.” UK Feminista was launched last year by 29-year-old Kat Banyard, whose first book, The Equality Illusion,
came out at much the same time. “The event is set to harness the recent
upsurge in interest in this previously unfashionable social movement,” a
press release for the summer school said. In June UK Feminista had joined forces with Object
(the stress goes on the second syllable, “I ob-ject”), another newish
bright-young-feminists organisation, to campaign against the recent
opening of a Playboy nightclub in London. “Eff off Heff, stop degrading
women!” protesters chanted. “No more sexist men, Playboy empire has to
end!”
Look at them on YouTube, having their genteel shout and
waving their Ban the Bunny placards: “Ob-ject, women not sex objects.”
“That’s not what empowerment looks like/This is what empowerment looks
like!” Idealistic, well organised, compassionate and let-them-eat-cakey,
these young women have no place on their neat clipboards for
disturbance, unintended consequences, humour or even humility when faced
with the pressures and precariousness of most people’s lives.
More from YouTube, late September.Object
and UK Feminista have been busy, dressing up in white overalls with red
ink on their faces, waving cleavers outside the XBiz pornography trade
show in Bloomsbury: “Just a bunch of pimps and butchers/ Who trade in
women’s lives!” A small bearded man shouts at them bitterly, an XBiz ID
card round his neck, a bottle of Stella in his hand. “You’re a bunch of
whores!” he snarls. “I’m gonna fuck you all up the arse!”
“Pornography
today is increasingly violent, body-punishing, degrading and
woman-hating,” it says on Object’s press release, which is both true and
completely beside the point. It’s a free-market economy out there, so
of course there’s going to be violent pornography as long as there are
people fucked up enough to want it. And of course there are people
prepared to make it for them. The American writer Laura Kipnis warns
against getting “teary-eyed about exploited pornography workers” when
you “haven’t thought much about international garment workers, or
poultry workers—to name just two.” Which is funny, because the girls
from UK Feminista were wearing the hats you wear to gut chickens and
pull their claws off. It’s even funnier if you remember that two of
porn’s most successful crossover stars both front animal-rights projects
that attack the poultry industry in particular: the Playboy model and
actress Pamela Anderson (Baywatch, Borat) and the hardcore queen Jenna Jameson, for Peta’s Kentucky Fried Cruelty and McCruelty (I’m hatin’ it) campaigns.
Chicken
pieces, iPods, A-level burb girls with jobs in Selfridges, unable to
buy any of the stuff they sell: how often if ever are such things
addressed by Object and UK Feminista? How important is being female to a
young woman’s everyday life and future prospects, compared to being
born in the 1990s, or being Somalian, or good-looking, or receiving EMA,
or going to Oxbridge, or not getting a single GCSE? “To put it
schematically: ‘women’ is historically, discursively constructed, and
always relative to other categories which themselves change.”
Thus the British poet-philosopher Denise Riley in Am I That Name? (1988),
her short, playful, brilliant study of the many ways in which fixed
identities never work. “That ‘women’ is indeterminate and impossible . .
. is what makes feminism,” Riley concluded, so long as feminists are
willing “to develop a speed, foxiness, versatility.” Can the members of
Object and UK Feminista welcome such transformations, or is this what
they are afraid of: that if they let themselves really look at the world
around them, feminism as they think they know and need it might
completely disappear?
“Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling
over feminism . . . perhaps we should say no more about it”: Simone de
Beauvoir, at the very beginning of The Second Sex (1949). “The
subject is irritating, especially to women.” Long before they were
shouting “Ban the Bunny” and dressing up as butchers, feminists were
annoying people, not just misogynists and sexists, but the very people
you’d think would like them best. It was true in suffragette days, as it
was during Women’s Liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, and it’s very
much a problem for what boosters have been calling “the third wave”
since the early 1990s. We know the angry squiggles that signify this
irritation—the hairy-legged Millie Tant man-hater, Mrs. Banks in the
Disney Mary Poppins, a suffragette too busy to care for her children.
And it’s obvious how useful such stereotypes have been in neutralising
the threat felt in the wider culture. But these caricatures obscure a
real problem: a confusion between self and other, identity and
difference, that you might charitably view as an unfortunate side-effect
of being of and for and by women, all at once; or, less charitably, as
narcissistic self-absorption.
It’s true that women, as a gender,
have been systemically disadvantaged through history, but they aren’t
the only ones: economic exploitation is also systemic and coercive, and
so is race. And feminists need to engage with all of this, with class
and race, land enclosure and industrialisation, colonialism and the
slave trade, if only out of solidarity with the less privileged sisters.
And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven’t: Elizabeth Cady
Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty Friedan made the
epoch-defining suggestion that middle-class American women should dump
the housework on “full-time help.” There are so many examples of this
sort that it would be funny if it weren’t such a waste.
Not that
the white middle-class brigade like being on the same side as one
another. There’s always a tension between all of us being sisterly, all
equal under the sight of the patriarchal male oppressor, and the fact
that we aren’t really sisters, or equal, or even friends. We despise one
another for being posh and privileged, we loathe one another for being
stupid oiks. We hate the tall poppies for being show-offs, we can’t bear
the crabs in the bucket that pinch us back. All this produces the
ineffable whiff so often sensed in feminist emanations, those anxious,
jargon-filled, overpolite topnotes with their undertow of envy and
rancour, that perpetual sharp-elbowed jostle for the moral high ground.
Looked
at one way—in the manner of Joan Didion, for example, in her harsh,
oddly clouded but startlingly acute essay of 1972 on the Women’s
Movement—the idea of feminism is obviously Marxist, being about the
“invention,” as Didion put it, “of women as a ‘class’,” a total
transformation of all relationships, led by the group most exploited by
relations in their current form. So why did the libbers so seldom say
so? Well, some came to the movement as Marxists, and did. Sheila
Rowbotham wrote that “the so-called women’s question is a whole-people
question” in Women’s Liberation and the New Politics (1969);
then in 1976 Barbara Ehrenreich stressed that “there is no way to
understand sexism as it acts on our lives without putting it in the
historical context of capitalism.” Others shoved the categories in great
handfuls through the blender: “sex-class” must “in a temporary
dictatorship” seize “control of reproduction” according to Shulamith
Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970).
More
prevalent, however, was what Didion called a “studied resistance to the
possibility of political ideas”—who, in any case, ever heard of a
radical-feminist movement taking its understanding of historical change
from a man? The entire Marxist tradition was repressed, leaving a weird
sinkhole that quickly filled up with the most dreadful rubbish: wise
wounds, herstory, nature goddesses, raped and defiled; sisters under the
skin, flayed and joined, like the Human Centipede, in a single biomass;
the fractal spread of male sexual violence, men fuck women replicated
at every level of interaction, as through a stick of rock.
And so
Women’s Liberation started trying to build a man-free, women-only
tradition of its own. Thus consciousness-raising, or what was sometimes
called the “rap group,” groups of women sitting around, analysing the
frustrations of their lives according to their new feminist principles,
gradually systematising their discoveries. And thus that brilliant
slogan, from the New York Radical Women in 1969, that the personal is
political, an insight so caustic it burned through generations of
mystical nonsense—a woman’s place is in the home, she was obviously
asking for it dressed like that. But it also corroded lots of useful
boundaries and distinctions, between public life and personal burble,
real questions and pop-quiz trivia, political demands and problems and
individual whims. “Psychic hardpan” was Didion’s name for this. A
movement that started out wanting complete transformation of all
relations was floundering, up against the banality of what so many women
actually seemed to want.
Across the world, according to UK
Feminista, women perform 66 percent of the work and earn 10 percent of
the income. In the UK two-thirds of low-paid workers are women, and
women working full-time earn 16 percent less than men. All of this is no
doubt true, but such statistics hide as much as they show. One example.
In a piece in Prospect in 2006, the British economist Alison
Wolf showed that the 16 percent pay-gap masks a much harsher divide,
between the younger professional women—around 13 percent of the
workforce—who have “careers” and earn just as much as men, and the other
87 percent who just have “jobs,” organised often around the needs of
their families, and earn an awful lot less. Feminism overwhelmingly was
and is a movement of that 13 percent—mostly white, mostly middle-class,
speaking from, of, to themselves within a reflecting bubble.
In Feminism Seduced,
the American sociologist Hester Eisenstein, a self-confessed
“professional feminist,” writes that she is “unhappily” aware that
feminist politics have become “all too compatible” with the globalised
free market and the neoliberal thinking that promotes it. Feminists
write books, teach classes, shout slogans, work for NGOs that tell all
manner of “glossy tales” about how unambiguously “empowering” and
“progressive” it is for women to become involved in mainstream economic
life. She finds a real stinker in the UN Population Fund’s 2006 report,
which blandly triangulates “the global care chain,” which, it says,
offers migrant workers “considerable benefits, albeit with some serious
drawbacks;” on the upside, “gifts,” extra cash to send back home, the
chance to travel, and for Muslim domestics in the Emirates the
opportunity, maybe, to do the Hajj.
The reality is very different
for poor women in poor countries—that is, for most of the women in the
world. What options really await them when they get a job? According to
research cited by Eisenstein, there are basically four alternatives:
factory work in export-zone sweatshops, migration, sex work or
microcredit. In the old days, the libbers in their rap groups talked
about Jane O’Reilly’s notion of the ‘click! of recognition’: the sudden
realisation that some nagging problem too dull, too everyday, too basic
even to mention was in fact urgent and shared and politically central.
Reading Eisenstein’s book, the click! comes as a slap.
How has
Western feminism drifted so far out of touch? By narrowing its focus,
Eisenstein thinks, to culture and consciousness and personal testimony,
neglecting what she calls “the political economy of feminism,” and in
particular the economic peculiarities that caused Women’s Liberation to
happen where and when it did. Never mind the Pill, the miniskirt, the
“problem with no name,” Eisenstein says: all that is a sideshow. The
rise of Western feminism came about because there was a widespread
shift, around 1970, of middle-class women from the home to the
workplace: partly, no doubt, because they sought fulfilment and
financial independence, but mostly because wages overall were in
decline. Women entered the workforce bigtime, in other words, just as
the “long boom” of the postwar years was ending, and since most women
get lower-paid jobs anyway—part-time and casual, unskilled,
mommy-track—most of them went ‘straight up the down escalator’, the
phrase coined by the economic historian Teresa Amott. This is the way it
has been for most women ever since.
Feminism, according to the
sociologist Angela McRobbie, has been “disarticulated” and “undone,”
bits pulled out, reworked and retwisted, and other bits dumped. At the
moment, the popular elements include “empowerment,” “choice,” “freedom,”
and, above all, “economic capacity”—the basic no-frills neoliberal
package. It’s fine for any ‘pleasingly lively, capable and becoming
young woman’ to aspire to this. It doesn’t matter if she’s black or
white or mixed race or Asian, gay or straight or basically anything, so
long as she is hard-working, upbeat, dedicated to self-fashioning, and
happy to be photographed clutching her A-level certificate in the Daily
Mail. This young woman has been sold a deal, a “settlement.” So long as
she works hard and doesn’t throw bricks or ask awkward questions, she
can have as many qualifications and abortions and pairs of shoes as she
likes.
“Why a book?” Louis Menand asked recently in the New Yorker, in an article about how the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique—about
rich, educated suburban housewives suffering from “the problem with no
name”—became “the catalyst for a social change.” “But why a book? Why
not a court case, or a boycott, as in the case of the civil rights
movement—something that challenged existing law?” Perhaps, he
speculates, it was “because the book was a medium that women had
relatively unobstructed access to as authors and as readers.” Never mind
Emma Goldman and her dancing: for revolution to reach middle-class
women in the early 1960s, it had to be something you could get on with
in the home between the vacuuming and the cocktails. This “books as
bombs” hypothesis only works for middle-class women, of course.
Working-class women would not be lounging around of an afternoon, but
out working, maybe cleaning or doing childcare for a richer woman who
was busy reading or finding herself or getting herself a little job.
“People
like to be able to point to a book as the cause for a new frame of
mind,” Menand argues, “possibly for the same reason that people prefer
anecdotes to statistical evidence. A book personalises an issue. It has
an Erin Brockovich effect.” People don’t want especially true or new or
risky ways of thinking about feminism, they just want one of
Eisenstein’s “glossy tales” with a part for Julia Roberts. If feminism
wants to make sense to the people of the reflecting bubble, it has to
present itself as a traditionally feminine narrative genre, as sleek
high-end infotainment, with showbiz gossip, glamour, stars.
It’s
possible to disagree with this completely while also seeing that Menand
is sort of right. Feminist ideas circulated in the 1960s and 1970s
through books, magazine interviews and the new form of television chat
shows. A montage in Women, a documentary series by Vanessa Engle
broadcast by the BBC last year, showed the big bang underway. The former
child actor Robin Morgan (Sisterhood Is Powerful, 1970), wry and ready for her interview in enormous tinted shades; Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will,
1975), calmly browbeating a smarmy male editor during the Ladies’ Home
Journal sit-in of 1970. And Germaine Greer, of course, a feather-cut
hipster dryad: “It’s a cinch to have an orgasm. I can give an orgasm to
my cat!” And ever since, this book-as-bomb model has come to stand for
the progress of feminism in general: Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, 1990), Susan Faludi (Backlash, 1991), Ariel Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs, 2005)—big-selling first books by American upper-journalists, young and clever and energetic, bright-eyed and bushy-haired.
Unexpectedly,
though, Engle’s film also captured the shadow, a living ghost, of
something else. In one especially mustardy-looking fragment, a young
woman and a toddler in a crochet tabard are seen falling out with each
other in a dingy kitchen, over the foaming horror of the twin-tub
washing machine. It doesn’t say so, but this moment comes from a BBC
film called People for Tomorrow, made by Selma James in 1971
and now available on open access on the BBC website. The film follows
everyday women in Peckham, Belsize Park, Bristol, reflecting on what
might change in their lives and how to go about making this happen, in a
movement that is plain and concrete, but builds into an elegant
dialectic. “It’s very bad for children to just see the woman doing all
this mopping-up process all the time,” the mother is saying in this
fragment. “I’ve been fighting it all my life, my conditioning from my
mother, and here I am . . . doing the very same thing to my two
daughters.”
James’s Wages for Housework movement is
now remembered, if at all, as a frippery, a jokey badge pinned to a
Wolfie Smith lapel. But actually it was an intellectually ambitious
attempt to synthesise Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism, and not
with the usual sellotaped hyphenations. Domestic work, while not
recognised as work because not paid for, is as necessary to the economy
as the waged sort. The workforce needs to be fed, clothed, cleaned for,
comforted, as does its progeny, the workforce of the future. “We place
foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure,” James
wrote with her co-author, the Italian socialist-feminist writer
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972).
“We assume that all women are housewives and even those who work
outside the home continue to be housewives. That is, on a world level,
it is precisely what is particular to domestic work . . . that
determines a woman’s place wherever she is and to whichever class she
belongs.”
For many years, the only widely available piece of James’s writing has been this Power of Women booklet,
generally a good sign when you saw it on a new friend’s bookshelf,
small and shocking pink. The film, though, is a better introduction, and
begins with James herself, earphones on and thumping away at her
typewriter: “Like millions of women everywhere, I am a typist. I’m a
housewife, a mother, and I’ve been a factory worker. For twenty-five
years I’ve been involved in revolutionary politics.” She was born in New
York in 1930 and came to Britain in the 1950s as the wife of C.L.R.
James, whom she had met when she was a teenage activist. Her writings, a
selection of which will be published next year, present her politics as
emerging directly from her daily experience. On how C.L.R. helped her
to get started:
“The way to do it,” he said, “is to take a
shoebox and make a slit at the top; then whenever you have an idea jot
it down and slip the piece of paper into the shoebox. After a while, you
open the box, put all these sentences in order and you have a draft” . .
. I knew that if I stayed home from work to put the draft together, I
would end up cleaning the cooker or doing some other major piece of
housework, so I arranged to spend the day at a friend’s house . . . I
had no distractions or excuses. I opened the shoebox, and by six or
seven that evening, just as he’d said, I had the draft of a pamphlet.
The point of Wages for Housework was
not to reduce politics to dirty dishes, but the opposite: dirty dishes
became one index of a job, a role, a domestic ballet that included
“managing the tensions of and servicing in every other way those—women
and men—who do waged work, school work, housework and those made
distraught by unemployment;” absorbing “expressions of anger that are
not allowed elsewhere;” doing the volunteer stuff no one else has time
to bother with, “from church societies to library support groups, from
food co-ops to disaster appeals” and all this going on constantly,
ceaselessly, even more in peasant economies than in richer ones. “The
major part of unseen and uncounted housework,” she added, “is done in
the non-industrial world.” James also tried to uphold a clarity and
honesty about race and class differences among her comrades, without
brooding or sentimentality or presumptuousness or
more-oppressed-than-thou guilt-tripping:
What we’ve been trying
to do . . . is to develop a unified view of the world, that is, a
holistic view of all the divisions among us and how they connect, in
order to build the movement to undermine these divisions . . . We are
divided in many, many ways. Naming and examining those divisions, we can
come to a unified conception of the real relations among us, both
subtle and stark.
James has never been a popular figure in the
Western women’s movement, and is snubbed in most mainstream accounts.
There are accusations of fanaticism, cultishness, sectarian behaviour.
“Like Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Jill Tweedie wrote in a 1976 piece reprinted
in a collection of Guardian journalism, “Selma James and her
sister enthusiasts . . . harangue conferences, shout from soapboxes,
gesticulate on television, burn with a strange fever.” Even Barbara
Ehrenreich gets a little snitty: “Battles broke out between lovers and
spouses over sticky countertops, piled-up laundry and whose turn it was
to do the dishes,” as though there can be no way of thinking about
domestic labour except treating it like a sitcom, with all the sharpest
lines reserved for you.
In People for Tomorrow there is a
conversation, towards the end, between James and a young man, sweet
face and ginger sideburns, out shopping with his permed-and-set young
wife. “How much time do you spend with your children?” Selma asks, off
camera.
“Oh, very little, just one day a week, which is Sunday.”
“Don’t you think you’re missing something?”
The man agrees that he’s missing the children, but “can anyone suggest a better way?”
“Well, that’s what Women’s Liberation is trying to figure out,” Selma says.
“Do
you think it’s worthwhile?” she asks the wife, and the wife says “No,”
and giggles. “We asked her what she thought she might lose,” Selma says,
and the wife says that she just can’t see a man with the children all
day. “I don’t think anybody should be with the children all day long,”
Selma says. “But why shouldn’t he be with the children some of the day
and you some of the day too, and perhaps even together? And perhaps even
in a neighbourhood, all the parents in the neighbourhood helping with
the children?”
“That’s probably a good idea,” the husband says.
“But you’d have to alter the whole structure of work, for instance,
wouldn’t you, to break days up into half-days, as far as work goes?”
“That’s what we want to do,” Selma says. “That’s one of the ideas we want to explore.”
Forty
years on, and the changes are in some ways astonishing: where I live in
South-East London—just up the road from where James filmed one of the
rap groups—it’s quite common to see men caring for children, waged, in
schools and nurseries, and, unwaged, in the home.
Part-time work
is common, as is flexi-time, homeworking, freelancing, multi-tasking.
Equality is regulated by statute. There’s a state-funded nursery and a
Sure Start children’s centre in the primary school across the road;
there are two libraries in easy walking distance, four playgrounds, two
parks; and many other things that, when you look at them from a
distance, make Camberwell look like the New Jerusalem, except that when
you come up close, you see how crummy they are, and compromised, and
half-baked.
Perhaps another reason James gets missed out so often
is because for more than half a century, she has kept her attention
patiently focused on such perpetually disappointing realities. Why keep
having your nose rubbed in all this when you could be reading about
something more amusing instead? And yet, if you stick with it, you’ll
start to see why people like her care so much about public services,
crappy and underfunded though they are, and likely to get so much worse.
They give you a break, a safety net, a respite; and then, granted that
extra brainspace, you can use it to get more. And then, you can work out
how to get more. And more, and more, and more, and more and more.
“Women
only,” it says on the Yahoo page for the London Feminist Network,
another circle on the young-British-feminist Venn diagram. “For all
feminist women” willing to support the organisation in its aims: “to
increase women’s resistance to male violence against women in all its
forms, e.g., r*pe, sexual assault, domestic violence, p*rnography,
pr*stitution, women’s poverty, war & militarism etc.” The vowels
were left out, presumably, in order to stop the page being picked up in
searches for rape, pornography, prostitution—three of the most popular
internet searches. Right from the start, then, the LFN cannot directly
name three of its main critical categories—an act of violence, a mode of
representation, a nasty job. All linked, in all sorts of ways, but
linked just as much to all sorts of other things as well. Rpe,
Prnography, Prstitution. Blanked out, beyond the pale, undiscussable.
The
Rpe-Prn-Prst triangle first came to prominence with the New York
radical feminists of the 1970s—pornography was the theory and rape the
practice, as Robin Morgan said. In her memoir of the period, Susan
Brownmiller writes that it was ‘a miserable coincidence of historic
timing’ that ‘an above-ground billion-dollar industry of hard and
softcore porn began to flourish . . . simultaneously with the rise of
Women’s Liberation,” but there was nothing coincidental about it: they
were both aspects of sexual liberalisation in a market economy. And
something similar is happening at the moment, with panics about
“sexualisation,” “pornification,” and the “commercialisation of
childhood.” Of course businesses will try selling sexy stuff to
children, if they think adult markets are saturated. Of course
pornographers want to break into the mainstream. And of course the
mainstream welcomes such initiatives, because sex is always sexy, and
everybody’s always desperate for something new. And it only gets more
sexy when you claim to be against it, which means you get to talk about
it at length with the added pleasures of disapproval and
self-righteousness. Something of this is surely going on even in Ariel
Levy’s elegant critique of ‘raunch culture’, Female Chauvinist Pigs, and in Natasha Walter’s less judgmental Living Dolls (2010).
Anti-porn porn, basically, with an interesting relationship to
prole-baiting—the word “vulgar” needn’t refer only to a person’s state
of undress.
From Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) to the ghastly New Statesman
article of 2000, in which she wrote about her own drug-rape in a Paris
hotel room, the exemplar of this stuff was Andrea Dworkin, who wrote
again and again about sexual victimisation, her own and that of other
women, in fiction and non-fiction, in journalism and memoir. I used to
find it surprising that such a figure got written about so often, and
with such affection, in the broadsheet newspapers, until I realised:
brilliant copy. “Obsessive feminine masochism infused with the ecstasy
of public self-exposure,” in the words of the excellent Laura Kipnis. “A
perfect storm of high-profile narcissism, wrapped in an invitation for
social rebuke.”
What Dworkin’s writing manifestly wasn’t, however, was any sort of thought-through anti-rape campaigning. In the memoir Heartbreak (2002), the last book Dworkin published before her death in 2005, she wrote: “I’ve spent the larger part of my adult life listening to stories of rape . . . I couldn’t move, I could barely breathe—I was afraid of hurting her, the one woman, by a gesture that seemed dismissive or by a look on my face that might be mistaken for incredulity.”
Suppose
you are that “one woman.” Would you turn for help to an egomaniacal
victim-magnet barely able to stop herself dashing off to write about her
pain at your story? Wouldn’t you prefer the company of somebody quiet,
damped-down, unflappable, with that trained social-workerly restraint
that can seem so bland and frustrating, but which comes into its own the
minute someone is actually hurt. “How did I become who I am?” Dworkin’s
memoir continues. “I was torn to pieces by segregation and Vietnam.
Apartheid broke my heart. Apartheid in Saudi Arabia still breaks my
heart . . . I can’t be bought or intimidated because I’m already cut
down the middle.” Andrea Dworkin, a cosmos, multitudinous and
all-suffering in her gigantic dungarees.
Members of the London
Feminist Network featured centrally in the third “Activists” film in
Vanessa Engle’s series Women. “I suppose it all comes down to male
violence against women,” one says. “Sexual violence,” says another. “Sex
trafficking and female genital mutilation.”
“Sexual violence,
in particular domestic violence.” “Porn is like a huge issue for me.”
“It becomes impossible to leave your door without being mortally
offended,” says the beaming and vibrant Finn Mackay, a star activist in
her early thirties. “That is a sick, sick society.”
Mackay says
she first wanted to be a feminist when she was six or seven and heard
about Greenham Common. She left home as a teenager to join another
women’s peace camp, then moved on to build the LFN, Object and the
reborn Reclaim the Night. She’s now writing a PhD about her feminist
activities, goes to a feminist meeting most nights and gets at least a
hundred feminist-activist emails a day. “I have the feminist rage . . .
it’s a bit like taking the blue pill in The Matrix . . . you
understand, you look differently at the workings of society.’ It’s a
language of religion, almost, complete with conversion and regeneration
and separation from the surrounding world.
Denise Riley, as before:
Can
anyone fully inhabit a gender without a degree of horror? How could
someone “be a woman” through and through, make a final home in that
classification without suffering claustrophobia? To lead a life soaked
in the passionate consciousness of one’s gender at every single moment,
to will to be a sex with a vengeance—these are impossibilities, and far
from the aims of feminism.
Further problems with gender
self-saturation were luridly on display in an essay called “American
Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide” by Susan Faludi, published in Harper’s
last year. “American feminism . . . hasn’t figured out how to pass
power down from woman to woman, to bequeath authority to its progeny,”
she argued, and her essay collects a hilarious list of indictments
gathered from “activist gatherings and scholarly conclaves”: “Mean Spirits: The Politics of Contempt between Feminist Generations;” “Are Younger Women Trying to Trash Feminism?”, “The Mother-Daughter Wars;” “Am I My Mother’s Feminist?,” “The movement,”
she claims, “never seems able to establish an enduring birthright, a
secure line of descent—to reproduce itself . . . What gets passed on is
the predisposition to dispossess, a legacy of no legacy.” If Faludi
followed Eisenstein’s political-economy advice, I think she’d find that
half these mumsy metaphors cancelled the other half out.
And yet, this “legacy of no legacy” became a story-arc in Vanessa Engle’s three films. The first film, the delightful Libbers,
cut between archive and contemporary footage, the stars of then as they
are now, hitting old age: Kate Millett, bent double in her Crocs, still
smoking with gusto; Germaine Greer, clucking at her peafowl; Marilyn
French, shortly before her death at seventy-nine, tiny, anguished, very
ill. The figure, though, who spoke most clearly for history was Susan
Brownmiller, watering the houseplants in her New York apartment,
toprocking at her street-dancing class in her mid-seventies: “There’s so
much more that needs to be changed, and the new generation is going to
have to learn that you can only do it really by having a movement. But
they’re also going to learn, and it’s a sad lesson, that you can’t
jump-start a movement—suddenly there’s a critical mass of people wanting
to do something with other people, and you can’t fake that.”
The
second film profiled a bunch of apparently uninteresting middle-class
mothers, bickering about whether in their household the work gets done
by the woman or the man. “In what way are you different from a housewife
in the 1950s?” the voice off-camera asks. The last film was about the
LFN and its sister organisations, and the feminist revival that’s said
to be going on right now. Presumably, evidence of such a movement might
include recent books such as Reclaiming the F-Word by Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, which is the book of the F-Word website, and Kat Banyard’s The Equality Illusion. “A new heyday for British feminism,” Kira Cochrane claimed in the Guardian,
a “sudden burst of British feminist publishing after an extensive
drought,” but surely that’s pushing it. So a handful of writers try
their luck at the books-as-bombs business model, as others copy The Da Vinci Code.
And as for feminist blogging, isn’t it just one of those back-bedroom
hobbies, like home-made porn and crafting, that suddenly becomes visible
because the technology allows it? (Zadie Smith on “the great tide of
pornography” in 2001: “It’s not all bad news. We’re talking women whose
sexual desires are no longer sublimated into the making of quilts.”)
Both Redfern/Aune and Banyard try hard to reach younger readers in need
of a basic introduction, and seem to have decided that doing so
necessitates missing out all the interesting stuff, politics and
economics and feuds and splits. I suspect this view may be mistaken.
“Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers,” Nina Power writes towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Woman. She then hands over to Toni Morrison speaking to Time magazine
in 1989. On single-parent households: “Two parents can’t raise a child
any more than one. You need a whole community . . . The little nuclear
family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white
people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it I don’t know.” On
“unwed teenage pregnancies”: “Nature wants it done then, when the body
can handle it, not after forty, when the income can . . . The question
is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.”
On how to break the “cycle of poverty,” given that “you can’t just hand
out money”: “Why not? Everybody [else] gets everything handed to them . .
. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper
classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That’s the shared
bounty of class.”
What about education? If all these girls spend their teenage years having babies, they won’t be able to become teachers and brain surgeons, not to mention missing out on cheap beer, storecards, halls of residence. To which Morrison, with splendour, rejoins: “They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them in my arms and say: ‘Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me—I will take care of your baby.’ That’s the attitude you have to have about human life.”
Power, who teaches philosophy at Roehampton University,
comes to feminism from an unusual angle. As a scholar of Marxism and
Continental philosophy she’s well read in the radical-modernist
traditions— thus One Dimensional Woman, from the Marcuse book
about how postwar “liberal democracy and consumerism” dulled and
flattened Western “man.” She’s also one of Britain’s foremost web
diarists, with a superb blog at Infinite Thought since 2004. And she’s a
relative youngster, which means that for her, all that 1960s-1980s
stuff is not a story about herself. For her, the past of feminism is
approached as history, with irony and detachment.
Two points
about Power’s method, with regard to Toni Morrison and other exemplars
from the past. Like her fellow Zer0 author Owen Hatherley, Power has a
curatorial, almost antiquarian attitude to the relics of vintage
radicalism she admires. She writes of ‘the sheer crystalline simplicity
of Morrison’s insights into the relationship between class, race and
gender’. How hospitable, how generous of Power to invite along a
stranger, then sit back and let her take over. How strange and brave of
her also to place such a long and striking quote from such an
unfashionable writer so teeteringly close to standing as her own first
book’s final word. And when you think about it, how explosive of her:
“When you want to be a brain surgeon, call me.” All our assumptions are
flattened by this laconic little statement.
And this, surely, is
only the start. It’s obvious—now Power-Morrison has said it—that any
politics worth having has to start with the nuclear family: its
impossibility, its wastefulness, its historical contingency. Children
are the messages a family, a society, a culture, a civilisation, sends
into the future, and yet every day there comes more evidence that
child-rearing as currently practised among the people with all the
choices doesn’t seem to be working out. They overeat, our little
messages, they starve themselves, they adore themselves when they’re not
indulging in self-harm. They don’t want to study medicine or train as
teachers when they can just be “in the media.” And this obviousness
starts little fires sparking backwards across the decades. There’s Selma
James and the strange marginalisation of her ideas, not to mention the
way the whole family-in-a-house imago goes unchallenged, even by
feminists, lesbian and gay couples, and single-parent campaigners, let
alone in government, advertising, the popular media etc.
This has
not always been the case. A critique of the tight-knit nuclear family
as a breeding-ground of consumerism, neurosis, misery in general, was
central to feminism in the 1970s. This is Adrienne Rich on ‘the
institution of motherhood’ in Of Woman Born (1976): “It creates
the dangerous schism between ‘public’ and ‘private’ life; it calcifies
human choices and potentialities. It has alienated women from our bodies
by incarcerating us in them.” “There is much to suggest,” she wrote,
“that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea
of dependence on a woman for life itself, the son’s constant effort to
assimilate, compensate for, or deny the fact.”
Rich’s book was
extremely influential in its time, and such arguments resulted in the
growth of the nurseries and of shared parenting of 1970s North London,
where attention was given to “children’s health requirements, play
space, schooling, mothers’ housing needs, anything else we could think
of,” according to Lynne Segal. And yet, a few decades later, all this
seems buried, Planet of the Apes style, under heaps of chicklit and Supernanny and I Don’t Know How She Does It,
and the collected purées of Annabel Karmel. How has what went before
been so thoroughly forgotten? The Power-Morrison double act does exactly
what such interventions are meant to, flashing up at a moment of
danger, laying bare the evidence of a crime.
Power makes no
effort to explain how this happened. Instead of choking up on guilt,
anger, scholastic hairballs, she just waves ‘the sheer crystalline
simplicity of Morrison’s insights’ in front of her: water under the
bridge, guys, no need to go on about it, so long as we all do our very
best, from this moment on.
Except that suddenly, last spring or thereabouts, the emphasis of Power’s blog changed.
Overnight,
almost, it turned itself over to the anti-cuts movement, with flyers,
listings, e-petitions, links. And Power herself seemed to lose interest
in vintage feminism, writing instead about kettling and hyperkettling
and the brain injuries sustained—after last year’s anti-tuition-fees
demo in London—by the philosophy student Alfie Meadows. “Lecturers,
Defend Your Students!” she bolshily entitled her contribution to a
collection called Springtime: The New Student Rebellions. It
must be relevant that the first university department to close as a
result of government cuts was philosophy at Middlesex, where both Power
and Meadows studied.
And as if on cue, James and her comrades
were out in force this June at the first London SlutWalk, given that
name after a police officer in Toronto suggested that if girls didn’t
want to be raped of an evening, they “should avoid dressing like sluts.”
So obviously lots of people— not just women—wanted to dress up as sluts
to point out the absurdity of this position; and lots of people, like
me, wanted to march in solidarity, wearing our usual boring clothes. A
little girl marched in a fairy costume. A transgender couple marched in
matching wigs, hiking sandals, gigantic inflatable penises. WHAT WERE
WOMEN WEARING IN LIBYA, CONGO, DARFUR WHEN THEY WERE RAPED? read one
placard; WE ARE ALL CHAMBERMAIDS, said another, with a little picture of
Dominique Strauss-Kahn; Selma James had a home-made sign with PENSIONER
SLUT on it, and a little heart.
A couple more items from the
scrapbook. International Women’s Day this March was marked by the
broadcaster Mariella Frostrup with a piece in the Observer about her new
charity, the ingeniously acronymical Gender Rights and Equality Action
Trust, aka Great. The Great website has a big picture of Mariella, wan
and elegant in a row of smiling African women refugees: “From Mozambique
to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso,
feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women.” In May they had a
big charity auction in a “new ultra-luxury hotel” with “the most
exclusive guest list” and “an unforgettable performance from Mark
Knopfler.” No wonder those refugee ladies are grinning from ear to ear.
Also on International Women’s Day, Power wrote in the Guardian about “Rage of the Girl Rioters,” the title of a Daily Mail piece
about the anti-tuition-fees day of action last November. She saw
the Mail’s treatment as ‘the latest in a long line of attacks on women
who campaign directly against the state’, such as suffragettes and rent
strikers and bra-burners, miners’ wives and 1990s ladettes. “What looks
to be a moral criticism,” she writes, “frequently masks a deeper
political and economic fear—what shall we do when young women are
academically successful, economically independent, socially confident
and not afraid to enjoy themselves? Could there be anything more
terrifying?”
Rage of the Girl Rioters! I thought as I was reading. This I have to see! So I looked at the Mail’s website, and found some interestingly dialectical comments under the piece. “I don’t appreciate my daughter’s picture being [in this section] . . . She was actually coming out from a crowd rush after nearly fainting!” writes a lady from West London. “In your typically misogynistic attempt at smearing these protesters,” says a young man from Kuala Lumpur, “I have to hand it to you. This must be one of the coolest collections of photos I’ve seen from the day.” Not so long ago, it was impossible to imagine young women, young people, or anyone really, protesting in numbers about anything; now, they’re on the streets and furious all the time. The Daily Mail, concluding its analysis: “Thus, for the first time in a protest filled with confrontation and hatred, young girls took centre stage. Now everything is up in the air and changing all the time.”
Among the recent books consulted in the writing of this piece: The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Men & Women Today by Kat Banyard (Faber, 2010)
Dead End Feminism by Elizabeth Badinter (Polity, 2006)
Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labour and Ideas to Exploit the World by Hester Eisenstein (Paradigm, 2009)
Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings, 1952-2011 by Selma James (PM Press, 2012)
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy (Free Press, 2005)
How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (Ebury, 2011)
Meat Market: Female Flesh under Capitalism by Laurie Penny(Zero, 2011)
One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power (Zero, 2009)
Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement by Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune (Zed, 2010)
Dreamers of a New Day by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2010)
Letters 34, no. 1
January 5, 2012
I
think that Jenny Turner and I want the same thing: a revolutionary
feminism committed to overcoming the family, transforming economic life
and providing people with better choices than the ones currently offered
them (LRB, December 15, 2011). It is rare to see someone want these
things in writing, in public, in a mainstream publication. So why was
her essay so hard for me to like? Mostly, it is that Turner wants to use
historical analysis to figure out what the future will be like, and her
history is garbled and wrong.
For example, she points out that
Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed suffrage for freedmen in the years
following the Civil War. Stanton, along with many other first-wave
American feminists, was an abolitionist first. Abolitionism taught them
organisation, political tactics and rhetorical fire, and they spent
decades giving speeches, circulating pamphlets, and being called ‘nigger
lovers’ as they walked down the street. It was only after the Civil
War, with abolition completely achieved, that Stanton and other
feminists lodged their opposition to the 14th and 15th Amendments. The
reason is they expected a little reciprocity from the cause to which
they had devoted so many years, and got none; those Amendments let
male-only suffrage go unchallenged. It is perfectly legitimate to
criticise Stanton’s decision to oppose these amendments, but it is
contemptuous to imply that it was made on the basis of nothing more than
self-absorption.
“Who . . . ever heard of a radical-feminist
movement taking its understanding of historical change from a man?”
Turner asks. Well, everybody, actually. Shulamith Firestone wrote that
Freud ‘grasped the crucial problem of modern life’. There was also Marx,
who radical feminists discussed (and still discuss) all the time. She
claims that consciousness-raising was invented by lesbian separatists,
women who wanted to ‘build a man-free, women-only tradition’ of their
own. This is completely backwards. Radical feminists of all kinds
invented consciousness-raising because they felt domestic life had
isolated women from one another, and that it might be useful to have a
little space to work out ideas together. The lesbian separatism came
later.
These details matter, especially in an essay that gives
the impression of a strange contempt for feminism in general. Whenever
Turner finds an event, or a protest, or an idea that she likes, it is
usually some exceptional individual woman who is behind it. Whenever she
disapproves of something, then “feminism,” or “Women’s Liberation,” or
“libbers,” or the “radical-feminist movement” is to blame. I sympathise
with almost everything that Turner wants for feminism’s future, and I
agree with her that certain strains of feminist thought have been
misguided and counterproductive. But she also seems to want to do
without any kind of movement at all, or at least to forget about any
movement that preceded her writing her essay.
Richard Beck
Brooklyn, New York
Jenny
Turner is disappointed in Western feminism for too often wanting to
have its cake (by adopting a critical stance towards whatever seems to
hinder women from having the lives they want, or ought to want) and eat
it (by declining to challenge the economic and familial structures
within which these hindrances come about). But Turner’s own attempt at a
radical challenge to the world as it is does not inspire confidence.
She quotes with approval Toni Morrison’s claim that the nuclear family
“just doesn’t work”—it causes narcissism, consumerism, overeating,
undereating and self-harm, according to Turner—and applauds Morrison’s
vision of a world in which a teenage single mother who aspires to train
as a brain surgeon can readily do so, thanks to fellow community
members’ willingness to take care of her baby for free. Turner assures
us that the rightness of this line of thought is ‘obvious’ once you come
to think about it; presumably this is why she presents no evidence to
support the correctness of the diagnosis, much less the viability of the
solution.
Michael Nabavian
London N5
In her piece on
feminism, Jenny Turner incidentally misrepresents the motives behind the
closure of Middlesex University’s Centre for Research in Modern
European Philosophy, now transferred to Kingston University (LRB, 15
December 2011). Government cuts did not lie behind the decision. Rather,
philosophy did not fit with Middlesex’s international strategy and the
university knew that by closing the centre, it could keep the money
awarded for its strong research performance in 2008 and use it for
something else. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will
continue to give Middlesex something in the region of £175,000 per year
until the results of the next national assessment of university research
are known—sometime around 2015-16—even though most of the staff who
generated that income are now at Kingston. Middlesex closed its highest
rated research unit in order to take a profit on it.
Andrew McGettigan
London N1
Letters 34, no. 2
January 26, 2012
Jenny
Turner’s “scrapbook” on feminism begins and ends with girl rioters’
“flat-out joy” and what might be called shopping situationism (LRB,
December 15, 2011). The young women who joined last summer’s riots are,
she tells us, “the problem with feminism.” But what is this problem?
Young women “losing their heads” or feminists who didn’t?
Yes,
the riots were a problem: the medium—collective larceny and incendiary
violence— obscured the inaugural message, that a black man, Mark Duggan,
had been shot to death by the Metropolitan Police. The riots exposed a
crisis of politics: a cruel gap between the cause and consequences of
Duggan’s death. That crisis is those girls’ tragedy; it is our tragedy.
Why doesn’t Turner address this? What has feminism done to deserve her
rant?
One soul is exempt from Jenny Turner’s splatter critique:
Selma James. Those of us who belong to the Women’s Liberation generation
remember well James’s Wages for Housework campaign. Jenny Turner is
right about one thing: James was never popular. Her virtuoso
sectarianism was not attractive, and her leftist populism named an
important issue (unpaid domestic labour) without challenging the power
structure that produced it.
The Women’s Liberation movement didn’t adopt Wages for Housework because
it didn’t challenge the patriarchal political economy, or the domestic
division of labour, or men. Far from being an “intellectually ambitious
attempt to synthesise Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism,” its theory
was crude and its practice toxic.
However, a host of women
certainly did undertake ‘intellectually ambitious’ work. Juliet
Mitchell’s essay, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, published in 1966
in New Left Review, a pioneering analysis of the lacunae in Marxism
(relations of social reproduction and the sexual division of labour),
was a founding text of British feminism. Women’s Liberation was animated
by a torrent of intellectual endeavour and awareness-raising (derided
by Turner as sitting around but really another term for thinking). This
didn’t impinge much on Wages for Housework, or on Turner either. She
finds alluring a slogan most of us thought was bonkers.
Turner
burdens feminism with both too little and too much power when she asks
how it has ‘drifted so far out of touch’. After the 1970s Women’s
Liberation lived on not as a thing, a place, an address – it had no
institutional moorings – but as contingent politics: as ideas, as
coalitions, as challenges in the professions, political parties and the
academy, in women’s services, and in popular culture; it created new
political terrain. All this is ignored by Turner, who relies on an
American leftist critique that feminism has narrowed its focus from a
politics of redistribution to recognition (identity) politics:
recognition can be accommodated, redistribution cannot. It claims that
feminism thrives in neo-liberalism. It does not thrive. Remarkably,
however, it survives. There’s a difference.
The conditions for it
to flourish were eroded by the rise and rise of what Stuart Hall calls
Thatcherism’s ‘regressive modernisation’, the assault on state
welfarism, the neoliberal sway of the global economy, and an ideological
offensive in which it is right on to be right off.
Feminist
activism in these islands exemplifies not the collapse of either
recognition or redistribution but—in the most dispiriting conditions –
their necessary synergy. Feminism is still breathing here, there and
everywhere. It audits the cost/ value of the domestic division of labour
as a form of redistribution from women to men, and its acute
manifestation, for example, in the coalition’s budget strategy. The
Women’s Budget Group last year amplified Yvette Cooper’s calculations on
the coalition’s deficit reduction strategy: 72 percent of the cost of
the budget was borne by women. This evidence ignited a legal challenge
by the Fawcett Society on the grounds that the budget strategy
transgressed statutory equality duties.
Turner is distracted,
however, by ‘a harsher divide’ between the privileged 13 percent of
women who earn “just as much as men” and the rest. “Feminism
overwhelmingly was and is a movement of that 13 percent”—the prissy,
“let-them-eat-cakey” monstrous middle-class regiment of women. Class
discombobulates Turner. Would anyone in their right mind malign Angela
Davis or Stuart Hall because they’re black and middle-class? Middle and
working cultures have always been mobile, moving in and out of each
other. Politics is where we can in engage in “becoming” rather than
“being,” not as identity politics but as a way—and this is the point,
after all—to overcome the subjective and social injuries of
subordination.
Strange, says Turner, how often feminism hasn’t
engaged with race and class. Strange, I say, that she hasn’t registered
the intensity of these engagements. Cue her allusion to the white
American abolitionist and suffrage campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Turner says she ‘opposed votes’ for black freedmen. No, not quite: she
insisted on votes for black men, and women black and white, at the same
time. It split the suffrage movement. The great Sojourner Truth, born
into slavery, had sympathy for this argument. She told the American
Equal Rights Convention in 1867 that ‘man is so selfish that he has got
women’s rights and his own too . . . he keeps them all to himself.’
Multiple oppressions and modalities of power have always –
inevitably—circulated in feminist politics.
This brings us to
Turner’s larger problem: politics itself. She gets all roused up over
the wrong question. Why did a book catalyse feminism, she asks. Being a
book, it “only works for middle-class women.” So, working-class women
don’t read? Actually, Women’s Liberation bounced out of activism not
texts: the detonator was black and white women’s humiliation within the
liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s: the Freedom Rides, the
Civil Rights and anti-war movements. The American Women’s Liberation
movement was born out of resistance to racism, war and male chauvinism,
in that order. These histories are withheld from Jenny Turner’s
undignified tantrum. We learn that she is angry—but she is angry with
the wrong people.
Beatrix Campbell
London NW1
