Feminism
‘Ain’t I a woman?’
by a Black Woman of the South (1892): ‘Is not woman’s cause broader, and deeper, and grander, than a bluestocking debate or an aristocratic pink tea?’ From Sojourner Truth to Pussy Riot Still, the trajectory these selections trace amply demonstrates Megan Clement how the keystone texts of each ‘wave’ pushed the discussion of women’s rights into a new era (though it’s more than a little galling to wonder how many more might need to hit the shore before we reach something like equality). The sophistication of Simone de Beauvoir’s observation in The Second Sex (1949) that The Penguin Book of ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ is never more Feminist Writing evident than when it follows 200 pages of feminists asking in edited by Hannah Dawson various ways for education and the vote so that women could stop being quite so disappointing and frivolous. Penguin Classics When Susan Sontag notes in her 1959 diary, ‘the coming $55 hb, 704 pp of the orgasm has changed my life’, we are greeted with the here is home for a feminist? ‘I carry “home” on my first indication in more than 500 years of feminist thinking back,’ wrote poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa in that women might actually enjoy sex. In 1977, The Combahee Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), a protective re- River Collective Statement propels us forward once more with its sponse to the many layers of discrimination she experienced as rigorous definition of intersectionality: ‘We believe that sexual a queer Chicana woman. ‘Home’, for Palestinian poet Fadwa politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives Tuqan, writing in the 1970s, was a place of confinement, where as are the politics of class and race.’ And the excerpt from Magwomen’s movements ‘strongly resembled those of domestic gie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), in which she lovingly details poultry’. The home has rarely been a safe place for women (never the simultaneous bodily transitions that take place as part of mind feminists), who have for milher pregnancy and her partner’s genlennia dared to ask for better accomder-affirming surgery – ‘two human modation. But in the Penguin Book of animals undergoing transformations Feminist Writing, academic Hannah beside each other, bearing each other Dawson, who teaches the history of loose witness’ – shows that feminism political thought at King’s College and gender are tents as big as we need London, has built a vast home for them to be. six centuries’ worth of feminist writBut there is a flaw undermining ers – the ‘city of ladies’ that medieit all. We aren’t told who any of these val author Christine de Pizan enviwriters are, save for their names and sions in the anthology’s first extract. the places and years of their birth and It is a glorious history of women’s death, nor what else they wrote outside struggle for liberation from 1405 to the paragraphs selected for inclusion. 2020, featuring rebellious feminists ‘It is usual in anthologies to provide of all stripes, from the French revolubiographies of the authors, but in the tionary Olympe de Gouges to Kenyan end I decided not to do this,’ Dawson Nobel Prize-winning environmentalwrites. ‘I want to cut them free of the ist Wangari Maathai to the Russian peculiar rope that ties a woman’s words punk rockers Pussy Riot. to her circumstances.’ The effect of In her introduction, Dawson this decision is not to liberate these writes that ‘the story of the four waves writers from the yoke of biographical of feminism is deeply flawed’. Her interpretation but rather to bamboozle judicious editing shows, for example, the reader, sending them straight to that Black women by no means waited Google to find out what, say, Trama for the third and fourth waves to point di Terre is (a migrant women’s orout the blind spots of white feminism. ganisation in Bologna), whether the Alongside the white, wealthy women Eleanor Marx in question is related Sojourner Truth, 1864 (Library of Congress Manuscript of the eighteenth and nineteenth to that Marx (yes), or even whether Division, Sojourner Truth Collection centuries who blithely state that the passage they are reading is fiction their gender are ‘slaves’, there is the or non-fiction. It may be true that, as testimony of formerly enslaved women who ask, as Sojourner Dawson claims, ‘a woman writing struggles not to be reduced to Truth famously did in 1851, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, or to acerbically her life’, but it is also true, to quote Sara Ahmed, whose Living dismantle the hypocrisies of the nascent white Southern women’s a Feminist Life (2017) is excerpted here, that ‘citation is feminist movement, as Anna Julia Cooper does in A Voice from the South memory’. Stripping these works of their context, as Dawson
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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021
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