7 minute read
Megan Clement
Where is home for a feminist? ‘I carry “home” on my back,’ wrote poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), a protective response to the many layers of discrimination she experienced as a queer Chicana woman. ‘Home’, for Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, writing in the 1970s, was a place of confinement, where women’s movements ‘strongly resembled those of domestic poultry’. The home has rarely been a safe place for women (never mind feminists), who have for millennia dared to ask for better accommodation. But in the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, academic Hannah Dawson, who teaches the history of political thought at King’s College London, has built a vast home for six centuries’ worth of feminist writers – the ‘city of ladies’ that medieval author Christine de Pizan envisions in the anthology’s first extract. It is a glorious history of women’s struggle for liberation from 1405 to 2020, featuring rebellious feminists of all stripes, from the French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges to Kenyan Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai to the Russian punk rockers Pussy Riot.
In her introduction, Dawson writes that ‘the story of the four waves of feminism is deeply flawed’. Her judicious editing shows, for example, that Black women by no means waited for the third and fourth waves to point out the blind spots of white feminism. Alongside the white, wealthy women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who blithely state that their gender are ‘slaves’, there is the testimony of formerly enslaved women who ask, as Sojourner Truth famously did in 1851, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, or to acerbically dismantle the hypocrisies of the nascent white Southern women’s movement, as Anna Julia Cooper does in A Voice from the South 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?’
Advertisement
Still, the trajectory these selections trace amply demonstrates 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 ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ is never more evident than when it follows 200 pages of feminists asking in various ways for education and the vote so that women could stop being quite so disappointing and frivolous.
When Susan Sontag notes in her 1959 diary, ‘the coming of the orgasm has changed my life’, we are greeted with the first indication in more than 500 years of feminist thinking that women might actually enjoy sex. In 1977, The Combahee River Collective Statement propels us forward once more with its rigorous definition of intersectionality: ‘We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race.’ And the excerpt from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), in which she lovingly details the simultaneous bodily transitions that take place as part of her pregnancy and her partner’s gender-affirming surgery – ‘two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness’ – shows that feminism and gender are tents as big as we need them to be. But there is a flaw undermining it all. We aren’t told who any of these writers are, save for their names and the places and years of their birth and death, nor what else they wrote outside the paragraphs selected for inclusion. ‘It is usual in anthologies to provide biographies of the authors, but in the end I decided not to do this,’ Dawson writes. ‘I want to cut them free of the peculiar rope that ties a woman’s words to her circumstances.’ The effect of this decision is not to liberate these writers from the yoke of biographical interpretation but rather to bamboozle the reader, sending them straight to Google to find out what, say, Trama di Terre is (a migrant women’s organisation in Bologna), whether the Eleanor Marx in question is related to that Marx (yes), or even whether the passage they are reading is fiction or non-fiction. It may be true that, as Dawson claims, ‘a woman writing struggles not to be reduced to her life’, but it is also true, to quote Sara Ahmed, whose Living a Feminist Life (2017) is excerpted here, that ‘citation is feminist memory’. Stripping these works of their context, as Dawson
From Sojourner Truth to Pussy Riot
Megan Clement
The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing
edited by Hannah Dawson
Penguin Classics $55 hb, 704 pp
Sojourner Truth, 1864 (Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Sojourner Truth Collection
does, demurring even from providing an index, feels like feminist amnesia.
When presented with a nearly 700-page anthology of feminist writing that spans centuries, it is perhaps churlish to ask for more. But though this tome is heavy on writers making the observation that sexism exists, and should not continue to do so, it is often light on specifics. We learn little, for example, about the mechanics of street harassment, revenge porn, stalking, coercive control, economic abuse: just some of the individual beams that lock together to constitute that vast scaffolding of violent misogyny that holds up our society. I would have traded the single paragraph from Jane Eyre we are offered early on for an in-depth treatment of any one of them.
There is not much on equal pay outside the abstract. Abortion is mentioned mostly in passing, despite the fight for reproductive rights being far from over. There is little substantial on sex work or pornography – two of the most prominent issues that continue to divide feminists. #MeToo, surely the most significant public reckoning with feminism of the twenty-first century, does not feature beyond the introduction. Other omissions are to be welcomed. There is no ‘gender critical’ writing in The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. In her introduction, Dawson rightly says that the tendency among a certain strain of feminist to imply or even explicitly state that trans women are not women is ‘a breach of sisterhood and a failure of feminist thinking’.
Just as I might have started this review with the story of the man who approached me outside a shop and whose pick-up line was to ask me what I was reading (he seemed crestfallen to find out that it was a feminist anthology), Dawson opens her introductory essay with the tale of a masked man on a motorbike who confronts her on a dark street – each intrusion, in its way, ‘one more jolt in everyday gendered reality’. But there is more to my gendered reality, at least, than intrusive or even abusive men. At its best, feminism is greater than Dawson’s definition: ‘the insight that sexism exists, and the struggle against that oppression’.
Feminism is world-building. It is the business of imagining, and then pursuing, utopia. This is what makes Marxists like Shulamith Firestone and Alexandra Kollontai so good at it. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 vision of Ladyland – a place where gender roles are reversed, refugees are welcomed, and men’s attempts at armed invasion are repelled using solar and wind power – also sounds quite promising in our present moment. There are necessarily ‘killjoys’ in feminism, as Ahmed sets out, but there is also the normal kind of joy: the joy of liberation, the joy of ‘lifting as we climb’, as Angela Davis reminds us we must. ‘Feminism is for everybody,’ bell hooks wrote in 2000, and there is something for every feminist and would-be feminist in this remarkable chronicle of a diverse movement’s messy, slow, often contradictory but always exhilarating progress towards a better reality – a safer home. g
Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in gender, human rights, international development, and social policy. She also writes about Paris, where she has lived since 2015. Her reporting has appeared in the Guardian, Bloomberg, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Al Jazeera among other outlets.
READ GLOBAL
SHOP LOCAL New books from Text Publishing
A wise, witty and wine-filled adventure set on the ancient walking paths from France to Rome,Two Steps Onward is about helping the people you love, figuring out what you really want in life and seizing your chance—before it’s too late.
A sweeping historical saga, perfect for book clubs. Spanning four decades, from 1920 to the late 1950s,The Tulip Tree follows one family’s story across eastern Europe in one of the most tumultuous periods in the continent’s history. ‘Unforgettable.’ Karen Joy Fowler
Renowned Australian philosopher Peter Singer gives new significance to Apuleius’s The Golden Ass—a hilarious, bawdy tale from Ancient Rome and one of the earliest novels.
From the bestselling author of The Trauma Cleaner comes a book about ghosts and gods and flying saucers and certainty in the absence of knowledge. ‘Fascinating.’Guardian
