Desert Island Texts? PDF

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Women: A Cultural Review

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Desert Island Texts?

Sally Alexander , Gillian Beer , Penny Boumelha , Rachel Blau DuPlessis ,
Mary Evans , Gabriele Griffin , Judith Halberstam , Margaretta Jolly , Cora
Kaplan , Mandy Merck , Pragna Patel , Marjorie Perloff , Suzanne Raitt ,
Deryn Rees-Jones , Sheila Rowbotham , Dianne F. Sadoff , Lynne Segal ,
Susan Sellers , Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , Barbara Taylor , Helen Taylor &
Vesna Goldsworthy
Published online: 07 Apr 2010.
To cite this article: Sally Alexander , Gillian Beer , Penny Boumelha , Rachel Blau DuPlessis , Mary Evans ,
Gabriele Griffin , Judith Halberstam , Margaretta Jolly , Cora Kaplan , Mandy Merck , Pragna Patel , Marjorie
Perloff , Suzanne Raitt , Deryn Rees-Jones , Sheila Rowbotham , Dianne F. Sadoff , Lynne Segal , Susan
Sellers , Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , Barbara Taylor , Helen Taylor & Vesna Goldsworthy (2010) Desert Island
Texts?, Women: A Cultural Review, 21:1, 10-74, DOI: 10.1080/09574040903558420
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574040903558420
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Desert Island Texts?
T HE following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a

number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been
formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen text could be a
Downloaded by [Ramayana Lira] at 17:47 15 July 2015
theory, a novel, an artwork, a performance, a poem: one that had

stimulated, or even revolutionised, their ideas. As we hoped, this project
has created a selection of texts central to our many and different
experiences as feminists.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s

Own
To me the essay, or writing ‘otherhow’, has consistently offered a heady
genre for analytic and aesthetic pleasures and has encouraged (even
cleared) some speculative and politically urgent space between desire and
knowledge. The stakes in analytical arousal and engagement, not solely in
professionalism, are socially meaningful. As Tania Modleski once noted,
ideology is effective not only in conveying messages but in ‘bestowing
pleasure’; to resist hegemonic ideology, a ‘politically engaged criticism’
and a counter-hegemonic stance must therefore give pleasure. That’s
certainly one good reason for an essayistic practice. Thus Virginia
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) is my ‘answer’ to your question
of naming one formative and revolutionary feminist text. It’s not that I
don’t have some other candidates, but Woolf’s essay continues to be a
vital source of insight and pleasure. Furthermore, it continues to model
ethical theorising practices.
Woolf is a model for a feminism of critique*of negativity and
analysis, not of affirmation or affirmative thought. She deftly and (as if)
effortlessly offers sets of narratives and images, pulsing with originality
and thoroughly memorable as summaries or condensations of her ideas.
Here is a list: Shakespeare’s sister; ‘A room of one’s own and 500 pounds
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Women: a cultural review Vol. 21. No. 1.
ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09574040903558420
DESERT ISLAND TEXTS? ! 11
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a year’; ‘Chloe liked Olivia’; the visit to the British Museum library to
look up ‘women’; the wandering on the well-protected University Green
and ending up policed by the authorities; the relative financial poverty of
women’s colleges dramatised in two comparative menus; the ‘walking
down Whitehall’ (inheritor and critic) passage of a fervent dialectics; the
torquing of a sentimental image dubbed ‘the angel in the house’; the
androgyny idea imagined as a heterosexual couple in a taxi*and even
more . . . like the multivalent, subtle allusion to the ballad of the four
Marys. Woolf also makes witty digs at the pompous pro-censorship
positions within contemporary debates*as in her riff on the controversy
over Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness. Woolf thereby
dramatised and sometimes personalised (persona-ised) complex theoretical
and historical insights without over-simplifying them.
Yes, I know that couple-in-a-taxi has been justly criticised (too hetero,
and ignoring social class, besides*since someone undiscussed is, after all,
driving that cab), and yes, Chloe*or was it Olivia*does go home to
husband and children*but these critical insights still depend and draw on
Woolf’s own ways of imagining things, and do not do more than cast a
useful cross light on the structure as it stands. Still, Woolf presents feminist
thinking as something every woman could do if she were simply to pay
attention, follow through on her own insights, be a little more fearless, call
things as she saw them. It links anyone’s individual and specific
observations and mother wit to useful and inventive general understanding
and analyses of sex!gender materials. This tactic demystifies what thinking
and analysing are about; it makes thought not something ‘out there’*
inaccessible, overly pedantic, technocratic and professionalised, but makes
of thinking something ‘in here’*part of one’s life’s energy, part of the
process of understanding one’s own world and its structures.
Hence Woolf’s dramatising of critical thinking and its insights is
exemplary. The texture is interrupted, wandering, ‘random’, as a way of
showing thinking’s pensive and invested qualities (not the stark, poignant
alphabet of Mr Ramsay’s limited but adept logic in To the Lighthouse . . .).
Woolf gains the identification and commitment of her listeners and
readers by tracking the stages of her quest to find answers to the various
questions opened by the topic ‘women and fiction’. She also offers many
research projects, though in an apparently offhand fashion. In its
theoretical propositions, for example, about the recruitment of artists,
their possibilities for artistic production, about the meanings encoded in
their narratives, Woolf goes far into the invention of one kind of feminist
literary criticism.
Although her original audience consisted of university women, her
tactics radically democratise thought. Without watering insights down,
12 ! WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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she made her thinking and her findings clear, lucid, accessible, even
amusing while also making her allegories about the structures of exclusion
notably nuanced. One does not have to obfuscate to make intellectual
claims. Subtle insights are extremely well served by clarity. A theoretical
turn does not have to lose touch with the issues on the ground nor with
the mattedness of historical experience. Theory and practice might be
ethical twins*or at least close cousins. Not only do this tone, rhetoric,
and this brilliantly pulsed structure of insights and narratives mark
Woolf’s literary achievement; they also exemplify her ethical imperative
and represent her ethical achievement.
Given her own social inflections, her class background, her peculiar
privileges (and her complex pain), both the work’s insights, its structures
and its rhetorics construct a remarkable act of identification and empathy
both with her audience and with readers in the future. Woolf’s tone in
this essay is intimate, amused, confiding, witty, charged up, and some-
times masking anger (this*another critical insight*is, let us concede,
true enough, although it is also an all-too-knowing projection of what she
‘should have’ done or said). But in this work Woolf is never smug,
preening or superior. Instead, her tone is a model of female authority as
deployed in a feminist matrix. If gender hierarchies are to be rendered
obsolete so the socially productive agency of both genders can flourish,
we must think what we really want. What stances do we want to model?
What are our ethics of the enactment of thought. Are there enough
subjunctives and future perfects for the verbs we will need?
In any event, Woolf proposes that all the known sex!gender systems
have to change*all the structures of feeling that create and perpetuate
gender hierarchy; all legal, institutional, conventional and social barriers
to women have to be eroded and dissolved; all sense that females can only
be weakened and wobbling because of prejudice, and all interior and
exterior willingness to reinforce this*all these sedimentations of
consciousness must be smashed and the whole of social life reorganised.
These are noble, necessary, utopian goals. But mightn’t we have some
gasps of narrative pleasure, some intellectual joy, and a few utopian
giggles along the way? And why not? As we used to say*we want bread
AND roses, too.
This essay, so personable and so smart, is not an exercise in narcissism.
Despite the topic ‘women and fiction’, Woolf does not mention her own
books; the insights are as if in the future perfect. It is (touchingly for a
poet) the female poet to come, not the struggling novelist now, who is the
symbol of a new level of female achievement. This essay is not about ‘her’
as a woman writer; it is about ‘it’*the psycho-social and cultural and
historical structures of the sex!gender system (to use Gayle Rubin’s
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phrase). And Woolf also has an uncanny ability (palpable in her novels as
well) to suggest the unspoken, the porous moment, that which cannot yet
be pinned down, the evanescent insight. She leaves space for what she
does not know; she does not fill every available gap. Therefore, her
writing has a tensile shimmer*it is an arousal to further understanding
because it leaves space for the vibrations of your own responsive thought.
That kind of writing is remarkable. The word ‘suggestive’ barely covers
the situation. In this ability, she may be compared to Roland Barthes,
Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida. Or they to her.
Feminism in general and feminist criticism in particular could draw
even more on the power of its own and modernist epistemological and
rhetorical experiments, its challenges to cultural boundaries, its own
critical negativity. It could draw more concertedly on the proposals of
Theodor Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ for the ethics of perpetual

resistance to fixed formulations, for a sense of intellectual mobility, and
with perpetual consideration of the ways ‘thought’s utopian vision of
hitting the bullseye’ must be linked ‘with the consciousness of its own
fallibility and provisional character’. To open an analytic path to post-
patriarchal culture has been the goal of my own critical work and poetry,
and my work in the investigative claims of the essay. For all these reasons,
I perceive Woolf as a standard, a pioneer, a feminist thinker of the first
rank, a sister, as we used to say, in struggle.
Penny Boumelha on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Twenty years ago*after the birth of my daughter, my move from Oxford
to Australia, and the death of my mother*I found, among the small and
melancholy heap of written vestiges of my childhood that ended up in my
possession, a notebook that I had used when I was ten. One of its entries
was a list of the five best books I had ‘ever’ read. Number one on my list
was Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. I had no recollection of the first time of
reading*I expect I must have read it in one of those abridged Dent’s
Children’s Classics editions*but my adult self was obscurely gratified to
find that, even at that age, the novel had already taken a grip on my
imagination that it has rarely relinquished since.
Part of the novel’s strong imaginative appeal for me lies in the
relentless singleness of its voice and focus. There are no other
perspectives, no other voices, no other angles of vision, except those
relayed by the novel’s orphaned expatriate heroine, Lucy Snowe. It has
always seemed to me that Brontë makes a very sophisticated and complex
thematic use of the conventions of first-person narration, through Lucy’s
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triple status*as narrator, as observer, and as participant. In contrast to
some other wonderful narratives of nineteenth-century femininity*The
Mill on the Floss, for example*in which the life of the heroine is hemmed
in by the restrictions of family, locality and societal expectations, Brontë
gives us in Lucy Snowe a heroine almost alarmingly free from apparent
social determinations. She comes from nowhere in particular, is an
orphan, has no siblings, owns nothing. She travels alone to a foreign
country, educates herself and others, earns her own living, learns to
express herself in another language, moves freely around the town by
night, has male friends, performs on stage, finds love. Above all, she
survives: not by inheritance, not by marriage, but by her own resilience
and through a generous gift, freely given by the man she loves.
If this were all there is to the novel, it might sound like a kind of
Samuel Smiles fable of the self-made woman, the outstanding qualities of

the female individual guaranteeing transcendence of mere social circum-
stance. Brontë does not present Lucy’s freedom unequivocally as an
experience of personal liberty to be celebrated, however. The novel’s
most powerful image of freedom is in fact an image of exile. The comfort
of being a stranger brings with it the pain of discontinuity. The price
that Lucy Snowe pays for her personal liberty is radical isolation. It is not
that she has made a choice to reject family structures and pressures, for
example; she has no parents and no siblings, so there is no available choice
for her to make. One of the ways in which Brontë makes particularly
effective use of the technical aspects of first-person narration, for me, is
that Lucy’s status as an observer is so often shown to result from some
form of exclusion. She often watches, less because she happens to be there
than because she cannot be a participant: she watches family intimacies
because she is not part of a family; she watches the enjoyments of her rich
pupils because she is a paid employee; she watches her Catholic colleagues
because she is of a different faith.
Lucy more than once claims that the role of observer comes more
naturally to her than does action. It is not to be assumed, nevertheless,
that this is simply a spontaneous preference*that she is presented as just
the kind of person who is happier to be a spectator than to take action.
One of the most striking things about the book is the extraordinary
violence of the imagery that Lucy uses to report her inner life, her
internal conflicts: images of live burial, of wrestling and assault and
murder. In many instances, this internal turmoil represents Lucy
conquering and subduing ambitions and desires that she is convinced
will not be satisfied and should therefore be eliminated. Lucy regards self-
initiated action as a source of pain and danger, as generated by what she
calls mutiny and misery. The preference for impassivity, stoicism and
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spectatorship that she reports is a carefully constructed protection against
the emotional suffering that accompanies the desire for a wider life. She
chooses what she calls ‘the palsy of custom’ rather than ‘the passionate
pain of change’*chooses to have no expectations rather than to have
expectations that, she thinks, can only be disappointed.
I can readily see that this is an image of the female self and the role of
women that would not appeal to all, and I need to explain how such a
voice has been formative of my thinking on feminist issues. As it happens,
my own life has been full of transitions: from working-class London to
academic Oxford, from England to Morocco and then Australia and,
most recently, New Zealand. I regard myself as a serial migrant, and not
just in terms of countries. Education, in a sense, also led me on a journey
away from my family, away from the people I grew up with, and away
from the cultural habits and expectations that went with my background.
Villette has contributed to my sense that social transformation, whether
or not in relation to gender, involves loss and pain as well as liberation
and fulfilment. Although I have learnt a good deal from my reading in
political, cultural and literary theory, it remains stubbornly the case that
my thinking is fired more productively by narrative than by argument.
Brontë’s heroine, who constantly reinvents herself*through migration
and exile, through translation and acting*yet who presents herself by
means of such a strongly individualised voice has helped, as much as any
psychoanalytic work I have read, to shape my understanding of the
discontinuities and persistences that generate the continuous present of
the self.
And then, of course, it is such a fine novel. My critical writing has
largely focused on the relationship between social ideologies and narrative
forms, and I continue to be fascinated by the play of freedom and
convention in the invention of narratives. Villette exemplifies, for me, the
seduction and challenge of reading. In it, Brontë sets herself (and resolves)
formidable technical difficulties in giving the story of a woman with no
real story, told in the confessional mode of the first person by a narrator
who does not care to take her readers into her confidence, and yet
drawing the reader in to the events, the emotions and the ideas of the
novel. Lucy’s story and Lucy’s voice have a vividness that is not at all
diminished by the fact that they are at the same time used to challenge our
expectations about how women’s lives will be recounted; I can think of
no other novel that creates such a strong sense of an individualised voice
and simultaneously adheres so scrupulously to indeterminacy as its
narrative principle. It is a wonderfully complex and unsettling narrative
which allows its reader to experience all the pleasures of the text while
simultaneously throwing them into question.
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Mary Evans on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
Kingsley Amis once remarked that he would be loath to accept a supper
invitation from Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram, the couple united at
the conclusion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. It is unlikely that Amis’s
views will be regarded as authoritative by many readers of Women but
there is often a residual sense amongst Austen’s readers that Fanny Price is
the least attractive of any of Austen’s heroines, just as Mansfield Park is
the least engaging of her novels.
In this context, I wish to make the case for both the novel and the
heroine. I have admired both for over forty-five years, since I was first
dragged slowly and painfully through the novel at grammar school. In
those days, Fanny Price was read as a plucky defender of Christian
virtues, the ‘good’ girl who does little except wait for others to be ‘bad’.
The apparent passivity of Fanny Price remains for many the major
shortcoming of the novel.
Back in those long hot afternoons in the schoolroom I thought, in a
way as yet unformed either by feminism or by any experience of the
wider world outside that of suburban, middle class southern England, that
there was more to Fanny Price than was allowed. Indeed, there was a lot
more to be said for the novel as a whole than was generally supposed.
There was something going on in Mansfield Park other than a young girl
waiting for her virtue to be recognised.
Now I am more likely to overstate the case for Mansfield Park and
Fanny Price than to dismiss either of them. I now read Fanny as Austen’s
fervent account of female reason, of the ‘subaltern’ speaking, of autonomy
and independence defended, of real ‘ordinary’ courage in a largely
unsympathetic personal world, and as a person who has come to own a
coherent judgement about the world. In Mansfield Park there are various
examples of the ways in which Fanny speaks as a voice both for herself and
for others. For example, notwithstanding everything Edward Said has
written about Mansfield Park, it is Fanny who asks about the slave trade,
who has the moral sense to realise that the issue is important. It is Fanny
who stands up to Sir Thomas’s attempt to enslave Fanny herself and marry
her off to Henry Crawford. It is Fanny who seeks to improve the lives of
her brother and one of her sisters, and it is Fanny who does not choose to
think as her immediate social world wishes her to think.
In the tradition of women’s narrative Fanny could be seen as
occupying much the same place as Dorothea in Eliot’s Middlemarch,
the person whose ‘unhistoric acts’ produce some of the ‘growing good of
the world’. But I would suggest that Fanny has arrived at her ‘unhistoric’
place in a different way from Dorothea: namely, that alone in her cold
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attic Fanny has thought about what is going on around her. Unlike
Dorothea, born to privilege and the social space that allows her to follow
her inclinations, Fanny has had to create a social and moral world for
herself. This she has done partly through her understanding of Christian
religion but also through daily observation, through the refusal to judge,
and through the ability to recognise her own wishes. In this, Fanny is
both a creature of the Enlightenment (arguably, definitively so) and an
embodiment of that ‘reflexivity’ which is sometimes advanced as a
prerequisite for our own times.
The various ideas which emerge, for me, from Mansfield Park are
closely related to some of the vexed questions of twenty-first century
feminism. The first is that Mansfield Park provides us with a way of
thinking about the question of women and religion which does not
assume that religion is necessarily and always detrimental to women, or

that (following Dawkins) the most useful way of thinking about religion
is either for it or against it. On the contrary, it may provide a basis for a
sense of self that is not simply that of social convenience and convention.
I have no wish to defend the cruelties and absurdities of aspects of
religious practice or teaching but in Mansfield Park Austen uses religion to
discuss distinctions between social mores and moral values, an idea which
is at least worth considering, particularly in the light of those versions of
feminism that uncritically endorse western neo-liberalism. The second
contemporary issue where Mansfield Park offers us more than might be
immediately apparent is on the subject of fantasy, and the confusions and
delusions of desire*possibilities that are as relevant to women as to men.
Part of the rhetorical strength of feminism (over the last two centuries)
has been its account of women as the victims of oppression. Although
‘victimhood’ has been increasingly disallowed there remains a sense in
which the power of the social over women, just as much as men, is
problematic. Women are attracted by the wealth of the world, by social
success and all the good things that the western market economies have to
promise us in order for this form of society to survive. The part that women
play in the vortex of consumption and production is complex, but part of its
essential tragedy is that very often those most exploited in production are
the most vulnerable in consumption. Mansfield Park, written just before the
nineteenth-century explosion in domestic and personal consumption,
speaks to us of the collusions which we might make with this world.
That world is full of pretty and desirable things but of course, as Austen
points out, it is often difficult to obtain them without either the literal or the
metaphorical marriage to Mr Rushworth. But Austen does not make of this
argument the rigid anti-consumption argument of the twenty-first century.
Instead, she asks us about what we are prepared to pay to have these
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glittering prizes, and what we are prepared to ask others to endorse in order
that we might go on having them.
The years in which Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister of Great Britain
(1979!1990) were also the years in which feminism became more firmly
established in British infrastructure. If we read Great Britain as Mansfield
Park (it is, after all, still ruled by a firmly entrenched patriarchy), we can
perhaps see why a voice like that of Fanny Price is so attractive. This
voice does not endorse the status quo or collusions with wealth and
power but it speaks for those less able to speak for themselves. These
people remain, in twenty-first century Britain, more often than not,
women: battered, bruised by circumstance and often beguiled by male
rhetorical flourish.
It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that Amis wished to avoid Austen and
her characters. Patriarchy does not like being challenged and part of the
strength of Mansfield Park is that a text which seems so firmly settled in
the concerns of the English gentry in the early nineteenth century
contains so much which is subversive of that very order.
‘Mad for the message. Yes yes yes’: Helen Taylor on

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
I have always felt that grown-up feminists became politicised through
reading Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliant and sophisticated The Second Sex.
Alas, I tried it as a teenager and found it too dry and difficult. For me, the
transformative and radicalising text was one I came across while a 22-year-
old graduate student in the United States*one of the rare books I have
read through the night and wept over (I need my sleep and I rarely weep).
It seems an unlikely candidate*a populist polemic about middle-class
American housewives growing up in the 1950s*but it made sense of my
mother’s life, my own conflicted teenage years, and the confusions and
frustrations I had long felt, and shared with other women and men, about
definitions of gender and sexuality. When I recently dragged my old copy
out of the bookcase, I was both sad to see how tatty and yellowed this
Dell paperback had grown since 1970, but also startled to note how
vigorously I had thumbed it and scrawled over various passages in vivid
red ink.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in the US on 19
February 1963, poignantly eight days after the suicide of Sylvia Plath. In
A Jury of Her Peers, Elaine Showalter argues that ‘grief about Plath’s death
overshadowed [its] publication’ but that, when the poet and friend of
Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, finally read Friedan’s book, she was very
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excited, writing to Sexton that she had been ‘‘‘all but unable to put down
FEM MYSTIQUE. Am mad for the message. Yes yes yes’’’. I know just
how she felt.
The Feminine Mystique is a sustained, impassioned polemic against the
definition of women as homemakers and helpmeets rather than nation
builders and agenda-drivers. Described on its bright pink cover as ‘the
famous bestseller that ignited women’s liberation’, it was hailed by
futurist Alvin Toffler as having ‘pulled the trigger on history’. Friedan
describes the ennui and dissatisfaction of post-war American women
(albeit predominantly middle-class white educated women) who had
returned to traditional domestic roles following the more liberating war
years of female employment and flexible gender roles. ‘The problem that
has no name’ is her now-legendary phrase for the crisis of women doing
routine housework and childcare (shopping for groceries, making peanut

butter sandwiches, chauffeuring Cub Scouts, etc., etc.), who asked
themselves, ‘Is this all?’
The book goes on to challenge the rigid codification of gender roles
within marriage and society, examining the ‘dead history’ that the
nineteenth-century feminist movement had become to women born after
1920, the needs of capitalism for women to become willing, greedy
consumers within a newly affluent post-war culture, the damaging
contribution made by Freud and other theorists to confirming women’s
subordinate position, the socialisation of boys and girls into masculine
and feminine adulthood, and the part that academic disciplines and the
media play in definitions of masculinity and femininity. The chapters
point to an agenda which quickly became that of the American women’s
movement: apart from ‘The Problem that Has No Name’, which opens
the book, there are ‘The Happy Housewife Heroine’, ‘The Crisis in
Woman’s Identity’, ‘The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud’, ‘The
Sexual Sell’ and ‘A New Life Plan for Women’ (as well as the dubiously
emotive claim for American housewives in domestic space: ‘Progressive
Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp’).
The book ends with a series of bold questions: ‘Who knows what
women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? . . . Who
knows of the possibilities of love when men and women share not only
children, home, and garden, not only the fulfilment of their biological
roles, but the responsibilities and passions of the work that creates the
human future and the full human knowledge of who they are?’ Almost
half a century later, these questions remain urgent and unanswered.
My now-fragile paperback is inscribed very precisely, ‘Baton Rouge,
November 1970’, a significant month in my emotional*as well as
intellectual*life. In the second year of study for a Master’s degree in the
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United States, funded as a Teaching Assistant, I had just spent a delicious
summer in New York City and Los Angeles, earning good money as a
mini-skirted waitress and falling in love with an unemployed actor. I hung
out as his ‘old lady’, enjoying a rock-’n’-roll time with hippie couples: the
woman was meant to cook, clean and put out, while avoiding too much
display of intellectual prowess. One of these women asked if I knew
anything about ‘Women’s Lib’, and while confessing to complete
ignorance, I was intrigued. Returning reluctantly to my Louisiana
Master’s course, I was prompted by her question to buy the Friedan
book, and got down to reading it only two days before flying to New
York at Thanksgiving for more sweet lovin’.
I neglected everything else in order to devour at one sitting Friedan’s
coruscating attack on the definitions and roles of masculine and feminine,
and her explanation of the frustration, bitterness and depression of a

whole generation of intelligent women. While I was one of an elite group
of British grammar school girls to receive state funding for my British BA
degree, and to be selected for further study in the US, I was acutely
conscious of the tragic waste of my own mother’s potential, like others of
her generation forced to leave school very young, work most of her life in
low-grade ‘female’ jobs, marry a man traumatised by Second World War
Army service, and endure the drudgery of raising three children on little
money and minimal support from a very undomesticated husband. My
identification with an unhappy mother, and conflicted yearnings both to
immerse myself in academic research and also to live a full erotic and
emotional life, made increasing sense as I turned Friedan’s pages. I gasped
with recognition when Friedan stated, ‘In my generation, many of us
knew that we did not want to be like our mothers, even when we loved
them. We could not help but see their disappointment’. She also went on
to say that many such mothers, who loved their daughters, shared those
daughters’ desire that they should lead different lives, and have more. No
wonder mother!daughter relations were often so fraught. Her analysis of
the tension women feel between aspiring to be ‘good’ wives and mothers
and productive and resourceful workers*albeit focused on the profes-
sions (with all the elitist class and race assumptions and blind-spots for
which Friedan has been rightly criticised ever since)*is still startlingly
relevant. ‘The Feminine Mystique’ of her title, with its suggestion of
something reified and clouded by sentiment and hypocrisy (the famous
‘pedestal’ so reviled by nineteenth-century feminists), is exploded through
the book’s impassioned and well-documented prose.
Reader, I flew to New York, but everything had changed. I was so full
of Friedan’s ideas and words that I could hardly think or speak of
anything else. Clumsily beginning to find a feminist voice, I was a most
.......................................................................................................
undesirable companion for a red-blooded man, and my anger about the
unsatisfactory nature of sex roles, sexuality, the family, childcare, unequal
pay, contraception and abortion, turned me into a parody of a man-
hating, humourless feminist. As you might imagine, that relationship
ended abruptly, but there is a happy ending. I returned to Louisiana,
joined the National Organisation for Women (of which Friedan was the
first president), engaged in consciousness-raising and campaign groups of
which sympathetic men were early members, and discovered a world
of women and men who desperately wanted to experiment with
and transform gender relationships and roles. Betty Friedan’s accessible
and persuasive tract, which has sold over three million copies to date,
offered me insights and evidence that fast-tracked me into feminist
consciousness, politics and scholarship. And while many other feminist
writers have since complicated and enriched my understanding, none

other has kept me up all night with that exhilarated certainty that my
entire life*and that of my fellow women*was about to undergo a
glorious sea change.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the Weaving of Her Feminist Web

You have asked us to comment on a text that has been formative for our
thinking on feminist issues. Feminism was in the air among the smart
literary set when I was coming into my own in the 1950s in Calcutta. I
belong to the group which thinks that ‘text’ is a web or a weaving*
including the web of what one calls a life. Thus, this phenomenon,
marking ‘feminism’ in the stereotype of my life, is, to me, ‘textual’. One
could put it in a more (and less) understandable way by saying that
‘feminism’*probably the English word*was not for me a bookish affair,
although one was constantly naming books, especially The Second Sex.
I now realise that something not specifically called feminism was
woven into that web by my parents, who were proto-feminists, in so far
as, bearing some opprobrium from the larger family, they brought the
girls up exactly like the boy, emphasising intellectual achievements
rather than preparation for marriage. Our greatest source of pride was
that our mother, unlike the women of her class and generation, had
earned a Master’s degree in Bengali literature in 1937, when she was
twenty-four.
Father died when I was thirteen. He had been insistent in recognising
me and my sisters and mother, and perhaps women in general, as agents.
I was in practice a thoroughgoing woman-for-woman person by age
fifteen, when mother released me from the possibility of an arranged
.......................................................................................................
marriage. She showed me by her example how to be such a thing: through
her indefatigable work to establish a working women’s hostel in the
Calcutta of the fifties and sixties, as well as her hard work with other
women’s organisations, for travel and moral uplift, for the employment
of destitute widows, and what can only be called ‘undercover’ work
towards the establishment of the first institutional Ramakrishna Mission
nunnery, finding interim habitations for intellectual women who wanted
to leave patriarchal life, for whatever reason.
Once again, I wasn’t reading a book, but I was intertextually involved
in the making of a life: feminist intuitions implicit in the direct family,
and ‘feminist’ positioning explicit in the peer group.
The first influential text was probably Engels, Origin of the Family. A
close second was Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, but that was
simply because, as an assistant professor in her 20s, I was asked to

introduce her to a crowd of thousands at the University of Iowa, in the
mid-1960s. After that, it’s hard to say what influenced me*I was doing
feminism, producing feminist texts, before I could recognise an influence.
Cixous’s Laugh of the Medusa was nice, though, from the start, I was not a
single-issue feminist. Gayle Rubin’s ‘sex!gender system’ remains useful to
this day, for permutations and combinations.
This is not really an answer to your question. But I can do no better*
one of the nice things for me about feminism is that it doesn’t, like
Marxism, have a named book at the origin. And therefore I offer up this
non-answer: you decide if this tells you anything about the question.
Susan Sellers on Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’

I find it almost impossible, today, to describe the effect that discovering
Hélène Cixous’s essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ had on me. To do so, I
need to go back to the early 1980s, and a visit to Paris.* Like many of my
peers I was reading the plethora of women’s texts then being published by
feminist editors in Britain and America: critical works such as Germaine
Greer’s The Female Eunuch or Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, creative
rediscoveries such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel The Yellow
Wallpaper and the short stories in Hermione Lee’s The Secret Self, as
well as new voices from recently established feminist presses like Virago
* In fact, the essay had and The Women’s Press. This writing had a profound impact on me*but
already been published it did not prepare me for Hélène Cixous.
in English in the
I found her in the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, a library
innovative journal
Signs, but I was then situated opposite the Paris Panthéon. This vast national monu-
unaware of this. ment has the words AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE
.......................................................................................................
RECONNAISSANTE (To Great Men A Grateful Fatherland) carved
over the entrance. Born in 1864 Marguerite Durand was an early
women’s activist, and the library houses the considerable archive of
books, pamphlets, letters and photographs she left to the City of Paris
on her death in 1936. At the time of my visit, the collection also
contained more recent acquisitions, including subscriptions to women’s
and feminist journals. It was the extraordinary title of Cixous’s essay
that caught my eye.
The text is unlike anything I had previously encountered. It is not an
essay in the strict academic sense*but nor can it be called a piece of
creative writing. It is a powerful hybrid: informed by rich layers of
philosophical, psychoanalytic and literary allusion, while also speaking
personally about women’s lives. Its style ranges from critical commentary
to direct address, melding comedy and graphic imagery with passages of

intense lyrical power. It issued a clarion call to instigate change which I
found impossible to ignore.
‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ opens with an imperative: ‘[w]oman must
write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing,
from which they have been driven away as violently as from their
bodies’. In that single sentence, I was propelled into a new and dizzying
terrain. First, that compelling opening phrase: ‘[w]oman must write her
self’, with its amalgam of provocation and entreaty. The words seemed
given as a dare, whilst simultaneously extending an inclusive permis-
siveness. For, as the text goes on to signal, failure to answer the call has
consequences. If women do not write themselves into history and
culture, Cixous insists, then their marginalisation and exclusion will
continue. The past will repeat itself: ‘[i]t is by writing, from and toward
women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been
governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place
other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a
place other than silence’.
I was not accustomed to this use of ‘phallus’ and ‘symbolic’ (and there
would be other such instances of unfamiliarity in the essay), yet the
overarching meaning could not have been clearer. As I read on, several
shadowy thoughts focused themselves. The first was to see writing’s
connection to the women’s movement in an entirely new light. Unlike
the Anglo-American feminism I had known up until that point, ‘The
Laugh of the Medusa’ draws on a view of human identity that highlights
the crucial role language plays in shaping the psyche. While the works of
specific commentators are not referenced directly (though Freud is
named), it is through psychoanalysis’ understanding of the processes
whereby the individual is socialised that Cixous puts forward a view of
.......................................................................................................
what women’s writing can do: ‘[i]t is volcanic; as it is written it brings
about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine
investments’. Women’s writing will end the dialectic of ‘opposition
[and] hierarchizing exchange’ that has determined self/other relations up
to this point, and enable a radically different mode of being: ‘ensemble of
the one and the other, not fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion or
some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant
process of exchange’.
For Cixous, this insurgent women’s writing begins with the body.
Again (though I did not fully comprehend this at the time), ‘The Laugh of
the Medusa’ shares psychoanalysis’ conception of the body as a site of
early memory, ongoing sensory experience, drive energies and desires*
all of which precede and contain the potential to disrupt subject
formation. Cixous reasons: ‘[a] woman’s body, with its thousand and
one thresholds of ardor*once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it
articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every
direction*will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate
with more than one language’.
The body has been much debated in feminism and gender studies
since the essay first appeared in L’Arc in 1975. Yet for me, reading in
the early 1980s, Cixous’s words were electrifyingly novel: they were
intriguing, troubling, exciting. Anglo-American feminism in this period
tended to emphasise equality between the sexes, and this had the effect
of downplaying the body as a locus of empowerment. ‘The Laugh of
the Medusa’ not only put the body back into the equation, it insisted
on women’s possession and enjoyment of their specifically female
bodies. It saw in the proclamation of these differences possibilities for
transforming women’s position and the relationship between the sexes,
with a concomitant restructuring of the social, cultural and political
status quo.
While there is undeniably a palpable sense of ‘jouissance’ (sensual
pleasure) in the way women’s bodies are written about in the essay,
there is also a deliberate complicating of biological determinism. First,
Cixous is careful to avoid any fetishising notion of an ideal female body;
rather, the essay celebrates the plurality of women’s different bodies.
Secondly, the text offers several reminders that we all potentially
occupy a range of subject positions. Although Cixous would go on to
describe elsewhere the distinctions she sees between masculine and
feminine behaviours*with masculine delimiting the fearful, narcissistic,
destructive mechanisms that arise from endeavouring to constitute the
self in the place of mastery, and feminine encompassing risk, openness
.......................................................................................................
and respect for the other*these are present here in an exploration of
the individual’s inherent ‘[b]isexuality: that is, each one’s location in self
of the presence*variously manifest and insistent according to each
person, male or female*of both sexes, non-exclusion either of the
difference or of one sex, and, from this ‘‘self-permission’’, multiplication
of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body and
the other body’.
Many of the characteristic contours of what Cixous would later
develop as a concept of feminine writing can be found in ‘The Laugh
of the Medusa’, including the then-controversial idea that a feminine
writer might be a man. For Cixous, the admittance of otherness that is
central to femininity is not the exclusive province of women (though
she does suggest that women’s real or potential capacity to give birth
facilitates this), but a question of ethical choice. What creates a

feminine writer, she outlines, is their refusal to ‘fear any risk, any
desire, any space still unexplored in themselves, among themselves and
others or anywhere else. They do not fetishize, they do not deny, they
do not hate. They observe, they approach, they try to see the other
woman, the child, the lover*not to strengthen their own narcissism
or verify the solidity or weakness of the master, but to make love
better, to invent’.
Returning to ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ for the purposes of this
reflection has been a fascinating experience. I have not stopped reading
Cixous: indeed, in the intervening years since I visited the Bibliothèque
Marguerite Durand she has produced some seventy volumes, in the
course of which much that is sketched here is illustrated, expanded*
and sometimes revised or reconceived. Nevertheless, coming to it again
I realise how many points implicit in this early essay have informed
my own research, thinking and writing*beginning with that arresting
title. For myths, as Cixous demonstrates, frame our understanding*
and part of the project of the ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ is to expose
their falsity: ‘[y]ou only have to look at the Medusa straight on to
see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing’. This
refusal to appropriate or annihilate the other for the purposes of the
self*what Cixous calls here ‘Other love’ (the italics are hers)*
constitutes perhaps her most important contribution, one which
continues to challenge us today, whether in terms of the relations
between the sexes, a reader’s concordance with a text, the dealings
between cultures, or our current arrogance towards animals and
profligate squandering of the environment.
.......................................................................................................
Gillian Beer on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
Two big things happened to me in 1962: I got married and I read The
Golden Notebook. I can’t now quite remember which happened first but
they certainly flow together in my memory and even seem inseparable
now. Doris Lessing says in her 1971 Preface to the book that it ‘was not a
trumpet for Women’s Liberation’ and points out that ‘it described many
female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment’. But that was of
course one of the ways in which it liberated: as Lessing notes, it put into
print much that had never been heard outside private gossip between
women. What made it extraordinary was that it was not a book solely
about female experience; it was seamed through with the understanding
that politics is fundamental, that individuals whether male or female are
coursed through by the shared hopes and fears of their lived historical
moment. But also that they live that moment differently from each other.
The Golden Notebook is enormous, in length and in scope, covering
more than a decade and ranging across experience in South Africa and in
Britain with insights into the United States as well. Yet page by page it is
light to read, energised by dialogue, layered with mordant and witty
narrative asides, implicating the reader fully in the lives of the characters so
that we begin to be exasperated, stricken, delighted, appalled, almost on the
scale of the character’s own emotions. One thing it brought home to me is
that there is no necessary distance between passion and analysis. Both occur
together. I knew this inwardly but had never seen it acknowledged so
openly. That was a relief to a young woman discovering what it means to
be an intellectual and it authenticated much that I had only furtively felt.
The book is stupendously complex in design and also innovative in its
detail. I remember being profoundly impressed with the section in which
Anna decides to record fully all that happens on a single day and gradually
realises how writing it down is also shaping the day, giving her a dreaded
foresight into what its outcome will be. It is a day on which her period
arrives and I was puzzled, as I still am, by the vehemence with which
she feels distaste for her body and its flow of menstrual blood. Reading
the book again, this time I was appalled by the opening scene in which the
two women tease and humiliate with a Lawrentian condescension the
young man selling strawberries. So the book doesn’t invite the reader
simply to acquiesce in the experience and judgement of the women
characters. That’s part of its energy and freedom: we tussle with what’s
happening, shy away, re-immerse. The relationships described encompass
hostility, treachery, dissolution, as well as delight and compassion. The
book is never triumphalist. It shows what it costs to be free. It finds a
.......................................................................................................
language that can speak about love and politics and friendship and
resentment without sinking any one of them. Its power when it first
appeared can be gauged from this example: I lent one of my friends The
Golden Notebook. She was having a difficult time. Soon I had a phone call
from her then-husband, furious because, as he said, THAT BOOK had
ruined his marriage and it was my fault for lending it to her. She had
found her voice. She and I are still, glory be, friends.
This is a book that tells stories well. It encompasses different
generations, different genders (though Anna’s reactions to what she
thinks of as not ‘real men’*gay men*seem bizarre now) and different
social and ideological groups. The book imagines a future that didn’t
quite come about. Marxism here is central, with all its difficulties, and the
future can’t be imagined without it. Anna is for a long time on the brink
of leaving the party and at last does so. But the party remains powerful
here in a way that it no longer is in Britain. Similarly, the force of
psychoanalysis is no longer a controlling focus although it has probably
entered more fully into many people’s self-assessment than was the case
fifty years ago. So The Golden Notebook has become a rather different
book from what it was in 1962. In some ways it was so prescient that it
seems at times positively humdrum. It shaped paths for sensibility and for
feminism that have become taken for granted. But its dialogues, its ribald
satire, its truculence and panache, its scepticism and adherence, all hearten
and enlighten me now just as much as they did when it said so much that
had seemed unsayable in 1962.
Suzanne Raitt on Adrienne Rich’s ‘Transit’

In the summer of 1984 I climbed Mount Chocorua. I was twenty-three
years old, in graduate school, and about to start volunteering at a shelter
for battered women. During that summer, and the year that followed, I
started to see the world differently. I felt as if everything I was reading had
a sudden urgency that connected to all the urgencies of youth, and I
experienced a double awakening: to feminism and to poetry. I began to
ask questions about things I had taken for granted, like gender,
heterosexuality and whiteness. I started to realise that you could learn
from poetry in a way that was quite different from the way you could
learn from history books, sociology texts or even novels. Among the
many authors I read that year, Adrienne Rich was perhaps the most
important because many of her poems seemed to be about the ways in
which her world was in a state of continual transformation. In a copy
of her 1981 collection A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems,
.......................................................................................................
1978!1981, given to me on New Year’s Day 1985 by the person with
whom I climbed Mount Chocorua, I read this line, in the poem ‘Transit’:
‘Yet I remember us together / climbing Chocorua . . .’ Re-reading
‘Transit’ twenty-five years later, I still feel some of the same confusion,
hesitancy and euphoria I felt on the mountain and during the year that
followed. I still feel unsure about what feminism is or what it means,
what it has meant to me, and whether I have lived up to its promises.
‘Transit’ captures that feeling of uncertainty: the challenges, the comforts
and the doubts of a feminist consciousness.
The central image of ‘Transit’ is of two women encountering each
other on a mountain path. One is headed towards the mountain with her
skis over her shoulder. The other, the speaker of the poem, halts to let the
skier pass and then reflects on their encounter. Although the poem is
apparently about two different women*one middle-aged, athletic,

impatient, and the other a self-described ‘cripple’, more hesitant*there
is also a suggestion that the two women inhabit one another, or at the
very least, that they represent for each other an opening into a new
imaginative life. The most vividly pictorial stanza in the poem, the third
one, that begins ‘Yet I remember us together / climbing Chocorua,
summer nineteen-forty-five’, describes a shared panorama of apprehen-
sion and exhilaration as the trail suddenly opens onto a rock shelf: ‘when
the trail broke out onto the granite ledge / sloped over blue lakes, green
pines, giddy air / like dreams of flying’. The feeling of being suddenly
tipped into a new world, spread in beauty before the viewer suddenly
exposed, was my own experience that summer. ‘Transit’, in its equation
of emotion, physical and aesthetic pleasure, and intellectual astonishment,
effortlessly establishes the connection between knowing and experien-
cing, the ways in which, for feminists, they are so often the same thing.
As Rich herself said in 1964, ‘instead of poems about experiences I am
getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and
my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it’.
The central apparition of the poem*the skier who is ‘always
walking’ with her ‘cap of many colors’, a latter-day Joseph*is a vision
of unconscious ease and self-assurance. ‘[S]he passes me as I shall never
pass her / in this life’, says the speaker. When I first read this poem in my
twenties, this fifty-year-old skier seemed to inspire the speaker who stops,
watches, and marvels at her. The hesitancy of the speaker resonated with
my own uncertainties, and I assumed that she too was young, longing for
a future in which she might know who she was. The final image of the
poem*‘the point of passing, where the skier / and the cripple must
decide / to recognize each other?’*seemed metaphorical to me. The
speaker is ‘crippled’ by her own inexperience, while the older woman
.......................................................................................................
marches confidently into the snow shower. The skier represented a future
in which I had gained the authority and the stability I saw in some of the
women who trained me at the battered women’s shelter. I fantasised that I
would follow the skier, ‘moving without let or hindrance’ into the world
of adulthood.
Now, at nearly fifty myself, I read the poem somewhat differently,
my encounter with it mediated not only by my own ageing but also by
decades spent absorbing and disseminating ‘academic’ modes of writing.
Looking for criticism of ‘Transit’ to write this piece (not trusting my own
experience?), I found Claire Keyes’s subtle and incisive account in The
Aesthetics of Power. Keyes, knowing as I did not that Rich was herself fifty
the year she wrote ‘Transit’, and that she walks with a cane, believes
‘Transit’ describes Rich’s fantasy of meeting the able-bodied ‘self [Rich]
might have grown into’ (187), rather than a real encounter with a stranger.
I re-read the poem, wondering how legitimate it was to allow my new
knowledge of Rich’s disability, and of the fact that the writer and the
skier are the same age, to shape my response. At first the poem seemed no
longer to be about me. I wanted to believe that disability and mortality
belonged in someone else’s life, not in mine.
But our relations with our own fantasies are dynamic enough that
after a while I found a new way of entering the poem’s world. When I
climbed Chocorua in 1984 I felt that I was moving into a new, feminist
future. The poem spoke to those ambitions. But if the speaker is herself
already middle-aged, and knows she will never follow the skier up the
mountain, perhaps the poem is partly about disappointment and failure,
about not living up to aspirations or keeping feminist promises. The
speaker’s gaze follows the skier, but she stays in the valley, waiting and
watching. This is hardly an endorsement of feminist vigor; rather, more
profoundly and more humbly, it is the expression of an eager and anxious
suspense, a fear that we will fail in our efforts and that those who overtake
us will not even look back. Has the skier even noticed the speaker? At
first it seems that she has. We are told that she moves freely and
confidently ‘until the point of passing, where the skier / and the cripple
must decide / to recognize each other?’ But the question mark marks the
encounter as imagined, not remembered. At the end of the poem the
speaker is left waiting to be seen, alone at the foot of the mountain.
So now the poem seems to be about what I haven’t done*haven’t
been able to do*as well as what I have done: the multiple failings and
abandonments of an average life, as well as its minor achievements. Am I
the kind of feminist I hoped to be? I can’t say with certainty that I am. As
Rich says, ‘she, who I might once have been, haunts me / or is it I who do
the haunting / halting and watching.’ ‘Halting and watching’: perhaps the
.......................................................................................................
poem is also about the limits of a feminism that has become largely
academic, and about the slow constraints of ageing. But it also captures the
persistence of memory, hope and effort, and, who knows, perhaps that
final image*‘the skier and the cripple must decide / to recognize each
other?’*implies that the cripple might always have been a skier after all.
Once a Feminist: Lynne Segal on Grace Paley’s The Little

Disturbances of Man
Although we do it again and again, it is always challenging re-entering the
past to grasp anew texts that helped weave the feminist trappings some of
us have sported for around forty years now*their threads knotting,
unravelling, refurbished, as we try perhaps to keep pace with, or know we

are seen as lagging behind, successive academic styles or activist struggles.
No single text leaps out for me, returning to the 1970s, that decade when I
secured my feminist foothold*the stance that provided one way of
surveying the world ever since. Instead, I see an expanding torrent of
words, sounds, images, ones used eventually so successfully for taking in,
disseminating, solidifying, new worlds for women to enter. They were to
be spaces where women’s differing interests, fears and desires could figure
as significantly as those of men, with feminists forging a new vernacular
to delineate the questions perplexing so many of us entering adulthood in
the 1960s: ‘What is man that woman lies down to adore him?’
‘Man’, ‘woman’, were words we could still play around with then. We
used them, even though feminists already had some inkling of their
slippery meanings, which so often evaded us when we tried to pin them
down ourselves (leading to splits and squabbles), even as their old
designations enraged us, surveying how they had been fixed and assigned
to us by the world at large (creating most feminists’ lasting suspicion of
biological approaches to sexual difference). ‘What is man that woman lies
down to adore him?’ was a crucial question back then when I was a young
woman. Ironically, it was my own faithless lover of the time who gave me
the text it came from*Grace Paley’s first prose fiction, The Little
Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love (1973). More
interestingly, and just like the tales of her fellow American, Tillie Olsen,
these were stories that had been written in the 1940s and 1950s, and hence
by women significantly older than my post-war generation, now
demanding ‘women’s liberation’. They would be rediscovered and read
avidly by us twenty years later.
What was so exciting about Paley’s vivid, spiky prose was not just that
she wrote in a sparkling New York Jewish, or Yiddish, idiom, and always
.......................................................................................................
from a woman’s perspective, but simply that she was such a unique
lyricist of domestic life. Just as she intended, Paley’s prose filled the
women readers who quickly became her followers with energy and
delight. We identified with the feisty, loquacious single mothers who kept
reappearing in her tales. These mothers could handle the fretful moods
and misdemeanours of their young brood, the deficiencies, desertions and
reappearances of the men drifting into and out of their lives, with
continuous, wry humour, interrupted by only sporadic outbursts of
helpless rage, between surges of passion and desire: men and women at
love, was the suitably disordered subtitle of her tales.
Introducing a compendium of her published stories in 1994, Paley
commented on her own early writing, and that of Tillie Olsen and just a
few other women writers of the 1950s:
I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of

worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into
the second wave of the women’s movement . . . This great wave
would crest half a generation later, leaving men sputtering and
anxious, but somewhat improved for the crashing bath. Every woman
writing in these years has had to swim in that feminist wave. No
matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she
has been supported by it*the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness.
As so often, Paley gets it exactly right. Today, I see myself again in the
1970s, a single mother, in the midst of the boisterous bustle of a collective
household of women and children, laughing out loud at her stories. Her
humour was totemic of how many of us wished to be seen; her
descriptions of the tears and laughter of women’s domestic lives
encapsulating so much that we wanted the world to recognise about
the significance of women’s undervalued labours of love.
Her age, twenty years ahead of most second wave feminists, made Paley
all the more admirable. It is, of course, Simone de Beauvoir, fourteen years
Paley’s senior, who is rightly seen as second wave feminism’s leading
foremother, her texts and life making her, if only for a short while, the
exemplary figure. At least, she was the consummate mentor until many
began to question Beauvoir’s own ambivalence towards everything seen as
‘feminine’. In a lighter, more mischievous tone, Paley’s periodic writing,
alongside her continued activism, from the 1940s right through to her
recent death, sixty years later, kept her a beacon for feminist admirers. Her
followers never lost faith in her credentials. And certainly, Paley embraced
womanhood almost to a fault, at times, perhaps, overstating the contrasts
between those men of the world and her fictive housewives and mothers,
whose daily life she loved to embellish.
.......................................................................................................
Paley was an ardent feminist, but she was also, first and foremost, an
activist, pacifist, radical egalitarian and collectivist anarchist. Her
outlook harmonised perfectly with the dominant political spirit of
Anglo-American feminism in the 1970s, one, sadly, which hardly
resonates with the pervasively more pessimistic mood of contemporary
recessionary, wantonly militaristic times. The socialist utopian banner
has frayed. It is seen as naı̈ve, if not idiotic, for many entering adulthood
as the twentieth century drew to its ominous close, with global poverty
and ethnic tension escalating. This is all the more true for the women
now climbing ladders of corporate or bureaucratic power, even as class,
ethnic and geographical divisions become ever more deeply and
dangerously etched, positioning different groups of women, figuratively,
worlds apart.
For older feminists, having reached the age Paley was when we first
encountered her in our youth, revisiting her writing offers renewed
rewards. In recent years I have returned to that earliest text, to those
Little Disturbances . . . savouring, afterwards, much that I barely recalled
from before, both on the ambivalences of ageing and on the strong
stance that she, a quintessentially Jewish writer, promoted on the
Israeli!Palestinian conflict. From the beginning, Paley had offered her
readers intimations of ageing, in a far gentler and more respectful way
than the culture at large. Memorably now, in the opening narrative of
her first collection, ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’, written in 1955, an
ageing woman cheerfully recalls the joys of her youth: ‘I was popular in
certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more
stationary in the flesh’. Shifts of the flesh are dramatically delineated by
Rose: ‘I noticed it first on my mother’s face, the rotten handwriting of
time, scribbled up and down her cheeks, across her forehead back and
forth*a child could read*it said, old, old, old’. And yet, this is not a
tale of woe, for Rose, despite her weight and her wobbles, retains the
capacity to love again: the story ends with her returning to an old
lover*whom she had adored but forsaken half a century earlier, because
he was married*now that he has become a widower.
Shortly before her own tragically early death, in 1992, the British
novelist Angela Carter asked Paley why she had never written anything
about the menopause. Pondering her friend’s query in an article written a
few years later, Paley reflects that being more than twenty years older
than the movers and shakers of women’s liberation, the menopause and
the movement arrived together in her life, in the late 1960s and early
1970s. This meant that she moved on from the waning civil-rights and
anti-war work of previous decades, to savour the ‘wild, delighted’
activities of her many new friends in women’s liberation:
.......................................................................................................
The high anxious but hopeful energy of the time, the general political
atmosphere, and the particular female moment had a lot to do with
the fact that I can’t remember my menopause or, remembering it,
haven’t thought to write much about it . . . I’ve asked some of my age
mates, old friends, and they feel pretty much the same way. We were
busy. Life was simply heightened by opposition, and hope was
essential . . . If I were going through my menopause now, I think I
would remember it years later more harshly.
Paley always thanked the women’s movement for enabling her ‘to
cross the slippery streets of indifference, exclusion, and condescension’
more cheerfully, giving her an enduring sense of political purpose and
solidarity. That solidarity included her grief over the embattled lives of
Palestinians in Israel’s Occupied Territory. From her very earliest

writing, Paley worried about the consequences of the formation and
ever-expanding state of Israel, both on the Palestinians, whose land they
continuously confiscated, and on the hearts and minds of Israeli Jews.
Indeed, in that same first collection, she has one of her favourite
characters, Faith Rheingold (whose life most closely resembles Paley’s
own), suddenly start rowing with her former, and current, husband,
when all three are cheerfully gathered together in her home:
You know my opinions perfectly well . . . Don’t laugh . . . I believe in

the Diaspora, not only as a fact but as a tenet. I’m against Israel on
technical grounds . . . once [Jews are] huddled in one little corner of a
desert, they’re like anyone else . . . Jews have one hope only*to
remain a remnant in the basement of world affairs.
The Jewish diaspora, however, increasingly embraced Israel, while

Paley moved in the opposite direction, becoming one of the founders
of the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza in 1987. She spoke out on this issue until the very day
she died.
There is much more to say, but let me conclude with this thought.
Paley often acknowledged all she had gained from feminism, in her
lifelong passion for women’s independence and sexual freedom. But if her
life and politics, from middle age onwards, were rejuvenated from
encounters with second wave feminism, let me assure her spirit, wherever
it rests, that my life has been constantly refreshed, its political compass
steadied, by encounters with the writing of Grace Paley.
.......................................................................................................
Scenes of Feminist Reading: Dianne F. Sadoff on Gilbert and
Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic
SCENE 1: AUGUST 1979
Twenty years ago, a group of groundbreaking texts by feminist scholars

introduced feminist reading to the profession. Both Elaine Showalter’s A
Literature of their Own (1977) and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) sought to theorise proto-feminist
authorship, identify a female tradition and propose a new counter-canon.
Although both highly influential books affected my own reading,
Madwoman, in particular, authorised me to think about nineteenth-
century female and male authors as inscribing structures of feeling
drenched in anxieties about gender, sex, marriage and family. As a young

scholar struggling to shape and theorise Monsters of Affection: Dickens,
Brontë and Eliot on Fatherhood, I was mesmerised by Madwoman’s
revision of Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, by its mapping of an
‘anxiety of authorship’, in which the nineteenth-century woman writer
fears she cannot establish her literary authority and so become a
precursor*that the act of writing will destroy her. I was hypnotised
by its account of nineteenth-century women writers as ‘Gothic heroines’,
as Alison Milbank says in ‘Gothic Femininities’, attempting to ‘escape the
power of the male literary canon’ and to ‘establish their own place in the
pantheon’; by its account of Jane Eyre as seeking to break out of
patriarchal structures by struggling to be energised, monstrous, even
lunatic, like her dark double, Bertha Mason.
Slipping into a readerly trance, I discovered I had missed a crucial
committee meeting at Antioch College, where I was then teaching.
‘Victoria Redressed’, a conference held by the Dickens Project, University of

California, Santa Cruz, to commemorate Madwoman’s 20th anniversary
A record of the conference proceedings includes the following recollec-

tions and perspectives on feminism’s future . . .
At the feminist retirement home, the rhetoric of nineteenth-century

heroinism*of first and second wave, of multicultural feminisms*gets
memorialised. Here, the old girls reminisced about madwomen in attics*
which was their shorthand for the debates about the female literary canon
and a feminist critical tradition; for the propositions that the Victorian
.......................................................................................................
novel was, as they had said when young, feminist criticism’s site of
origination; for the call to rethink representations of separate spheres and
the shifting categories of analysis in feminist criticism that seemed to elide
the category of gender. But I collapse complexities.
One day the Dickens Project folks came to the Home for tea, and a
male delegate announced he’d heard that the ghosts of Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, of Emily and Hallam, tapped through the Home’s halls at
night. Alfred and Hallam were said to have muttered ‘but men suffer too’,
and Emily had asked, ‘but what about me? Hello, why always Jane?’
Dressed as Howdy Doody and the Bride of Frankenstein, Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar told him, as they used to say, ‘Right on. We
need the realist, humanist recovery project. What would the profession
do without female public intellectuals?’ Members of the attentive
audience nodded, thinking about the heady 1970s*which they were

finding harder to remember*about those days of bliss and confinement.
‘The common reader’, Howdy cautioned, ‘the common reader wants
accessible public prose.’
‘Let’s not just compete with scientists for funding’, the Bride chimed
in. ‘But’, she continued, ‘will we in the twenty-first century pursue a
common enterprise?’
‘My future wife doesn’t feel that way’, the ghost of Hallam retorted.
‘But I’m not a feminist!’ Emily screamed.
Later, of course, in Kenneth Branagh’s Hollywood dream of Mary
Shelley’s scientist-as-rock-star, the director as bare-chested and cape-
wearing papa, the penis would appear not only on the blank page but as
spectacular reproductive!technological machinery. In that cinematic
appropriation, the bride would burn, would hurl her fiery body off
battlements, much like the madwoman in the attic*but as Jane Eyre’s
dark double’s contemporary celebrity cousin.
‘Click’, the ghost of Tennyson intoned, invoking a rupture in what
the old girls used to call ‘historicism’.
‘But’, one attendee cautioned, ‘the female tradition can normalise
victimised femininity even as it spawns a backlash of anti-victimisation
feminism.’
‘Why’, another asked, ‘does the novel stand in for the Anglophone
tradition? Why does the queen’s aura and name preside over a century?
Why the four great women writers, in this sinister historical emplotment
that twentieth-century feminism reads as though back through its
mothers?’
‘Because’, someone insisted, ‘Victorian feminists concealed their
citation of Enlightenment foremothers.’
.......................................................................................................
‘That’s not what I meant at all’, she retorted. ‘All canons are
constituted on exclusion. Literary critical history conflates complex
chronologies; the narrative conventions of periodisation make Queen V a
model for the careers of women writers at our peril.’
‘Click.’ The ghost of Tennyson didn’t like to feel himself so excluded.
‘But why the author at all?’ the Bride of Frankenstein queried, looking
at her stitched face in the mirror, before she burned. ‘Why gender? the
author? literature? Why ‘Beyond The Madwoman in the Attic’?’
Three voices simultaneously chanted: ‘But why always Jane?’
‘Why the self?’ a fourth conference participant asked. ‘After all, it’s a
liberal, rights-based idea of the individual, and always gendered mascu-
line.’
A plenary speaker corrected: ‘After The Madwoman in the Attic, Jane
is recognisable as a figure from psychiatric and evangelical texts. Her

passion, her status as liar, suggest secret forms of the child’s internal life,
the historical move to child’s rights. Innocent, she’s not.’
Howdy broke in: ‘Beyond The Madwoman in the Attic, why, ‘Reader,
I married him’?’
‘But why always married?’
‘My future wife doesn’t feel that way’, the ghost of Hallam snapped.
Click.
Joining the Home’s women and visiting men, various figures alight in
the Town Hall. They identify themselves: political economist; legal
specialist; medical or art historian; researcher of eugenics and degeneracy
theory; kinship theorist of the pawn-broking avunculate.
‘But why?’ five voices chant. ‘Why must the literary graduate student
become a specialist in other discourses?’
‘Markets’, a fifth delegate explained patiently.
Babble reigned. A murmur emerged. The residents and their visitors
turned as a threesome of veiled figures emerged from the piazza. ‘Begone,
Chastity, Modesty and Purity’, a voice intoned. ‘Avaunt, Truth!’ A
chorus of trumpets sounded. My reader may hesitate, may disbelieve,
may reject the figure of Truth, with, as they said in the seventies, a capital
T, but at that moment, the ghost of Tennyson arose from the fountain.
Lured by the feminine always already inscribed in the heart of male
disciplinary study, triumphant will and frightful agony, he had become A
WOMAN! ‘To conquer or submit’, she pondered, swishing her paduasoy
frock around her ankles to show her legs. But she had always been known
for her well-turned legs.
The Bride, a figure for the possibility and problematic of feminist
collaboration, for shared enterprise, for sisterhood, looked in the mirror
and jumped.
.......................................................................................................
Click.
‘Is our allegiance to Victorianism under the sign of the Queen’s name’,
the speaker about Queen V pondered, ‘a nostalgia for empire?’
Click. The ghost of Tennyson vanished.
The Madwoman in the Attic remains highly influential, and its early
second wave reading of Jane Eyre endures as the ‘founding myth of the
suppressed female imagination’*as John Mullan notes in Anonymity. Yet
we now read Madwoman with the tools of feminist historiography. We
rewrite Madwoman’s allegory of female writers’ inscription of heroin-
ism’s confinement and escape, of the anxiety of authorship. In the 1980s,
Mary Poovey influentially argued that gender performed the mid-
Victorian work of class, that separate spheres contained women in an

ideologically constituted domesticity that could never be viewed as
natural. Patrocinio Schweickart proposed that we recover women’s
culture in a hypnotic identification with the ghosts that haunt the homes
of our foremothers; Valerie Smith, that the black woman’s figure is re-
embodied or fetishised, as spectre or trace, in the tradition of white
criticism. In the 1990s, Elizabeth Langland recuperated the nineteenth-
century domestic sphere as the domain of female managerial skill and
sociality; Ruth Perry maintained that the eighteenth-century kinship shift
from consanguineal family to conjugal affiliation initiated the ‘great
disinheritance’ of women’s legal, political and economic rights. No more
will madwomen be confined to the younger son’s great-estate attics.
Most recently, Amanda Vickery summarised the ongoing feminist
debate about the ideological effects of separate spheres. In ‘Golden Age to
Separate Spheres’, she notes that this framework ‘constitute[s] one of the
fundamental organising categories, if not the organising category of
modern British women’s history’, yet, research into local conditions of
the provincial middling sort as a class fraction fail to support this
framework. Vickery claims that Victorian women ‘emerge as no less
spirited, capable, and, most importantly, diverse a crew as in any other
century. Indeed, heroic narratives, such as Madwoman’s, assume that
domesticity was ‘actively imposed on women’, she says, who felt
entrapped and contained, and so demanded escape. Women’s opportu-
nities for participation in public life during the pre-Reform era, more-
over, broadened rather than constricted. Although the ‘unquestioned
belief that the transition to industrial modernity robbed women of
freedom, status and authentic function underlies most modern women’s
history’, Vickery claims, the complexities of women’s work have been
largely obscured by such myths.
.......................................................................................................
Myths of, say, the invention of the middle class, like those of
aristocratic decline and labouring evangelical zeal, demand revision. As
the old girls turn feminist criticism and historiography over to a younger
generation, happily, much work remains.
Gabriele Griffin on Remembering Alice Walker’s The Color

Purple
I bought Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, now a classic of black women’s
writing, in 1983, the year it was published in the UK by The Women’s
Press*a then cherished institution for publishing women’s writing*and
taught it for a number of years. In many ways, the early 1980s were an
exciting time: the canon wars, which were to transform so many higher
education curricula in the UK, and which heralded the establishment of
new disciplines such as Women’s and Gender Studies, were raging;
significant curriculum changes were being undertaken and as part of this
it became possible to set up ‘Women’s Writing’ courses in English*now
‘old hat’ and succeeded by more thematically framed modules, but then
all the rage, highly contested and very new. I was teaching Women’s
Writing at Loughborough University, and since Women’s Writing
courses were still very new, they provided significant opportunities to
introduce new material into the higher education literature curriculum.
The Color Purple proved influential in many ways, both for myself and
others: it was the first text I taught by a black woman, and it set me on a
teaching and research path that has persisted throughout my academic
career. I chose it partly in response to the fact that we had black women
students on our courses whose histories never seemed to be reflected in
our curricula, and this was one way to introduce those histories.
The Color Purple was significant in many ways. It was a text with clear
literary credentials: an epistolary novel (and thus formally interesting)
that had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. This was important because the
canon wars were strongly invested in questions of literary merit and how
this might be defined, and what*given that all curricula are selective*
‘deserved’ to be included in the curriculum on the basis of its merit. There
was also an important argument about the quality of work by people
whose voices had previously been marginalised within literary and other
canons. As a young teacher of literature, making curriculum choices that
ultimately had to be approved by senior colleagues, and as someone
holding up literary mirrors to women students (or so it seemed then*I
do not see it in the same way now), it was therefore important to be able
.......................................................................................................
to identify the literary quality of the work one chose to teach. Since this
was also the era of the introduction of literary theory into the curricula,
and the beginning of the rise of postmodern theories, stylistic issues in
writing were of critical importance*purely realist representations in the
style of nineteenth-century novels were regarded as rather dated; stylistic
experiment was the desideratum of the day. In this context a con-
temporary epistolary novel was a much easier ‘sell’ than a realist one,
since this form suggested literary merit.
The Color Purple, in some ways more importantly, also combined
many elements that were highly significant for Women’s Writing and
feminist criticism in the early 1980s: the use of a first-person narrator
(then frequently discussed as a typical ‘woman’s voice’ within literature),
the detailing in confessional mode of a history of personal trauma and
abuse by men, overcome through the love (emotional and sexual) of a

good woman, and the final triumphant emergence of the central character
redeemed from her victim status into one of independence and financial
autonomy*in other words, the representation of a personal journey
from object to subject status. This was very much how women’s writing
was discussed during the period, echoing the experiences that had driven
many women into the women’s liberation movement. Most importantly,
it featured black women as central characters, focusing on their ability to
endure and survive terrible traumas.
However, the novel was also the object of much criticism, from
lesbians for the way in which a lesbian relationship was instrumentalised
in order to ‘ready’ a woman to re-enter heteronormativity (a term not in
circulation then); from black men for portraying black men as sexual
abusers and oppressors within their own communities; from secular
women for the reification of ‘god’ (and thus patriarchy) as interlocutor
for an abused teenage girl; from others for its seemingly overly optimistic
ending (too much of a feel-good factor, stopping people from engaging
with the persistence of abuse and racism in contemporary culture). But,
for all these criticisms, The Color Purple was a roaring success, its
popularity sealed by the fact that it was made into a highly successful
Hollywood movie in 1985, cementing the careers of two famous black
American actors/television personalities: Whoopi Goldberg who played
Celie, the central character, and Oprah Winfrey, who played the defiant
character Sofia, refusing to be abused like Celie.
From my perspective, two issues became immediately obvious when
I started teaching The Color Purple: the text spoke to black women’s
situation in the USA, not necessarily in the UK where, at the time of its
publication, race riots had occurred and were occurring intermittently
.......................................................................................................
and repeatedly as a function of the sustained marginalisation of
ethnically diverse communities. Secondly, this text did not speak
particularly to women from the South Asian communities who were
also attending our Women’s Writing courses. In the early 1980s, though,
texts by South Asian women were not commonly taught and, indeed,
not readily available, and the texts by black women that were taught
(The Color Purple and Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have
considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf), as well as theory by black
women (bell hooks was the major author in the field then), were all US
authored.
I felt strongly that using these texts was a way of averting our eyes in the
UK from what was going on under our own noses, so to speak: the racial
conflicts and issues prevalent both within the women’s movement (see
Spare Rib and Feminist Review, 1982!1985, especially) and more widely in
British society at the time. In a sense it underwrote Paul Gilroy’s later
assertion of British pretence that ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’.
And so I began to set about trying to find literary texts by both Black
British, and South Asian British women writers that would speak to black
and South Asian women in Britain. This was not an easy endeavour. In the
early 1980s such writers were still very much marginalised within British
literary circles and publishing houses, and postcolonialism, the theoretical
framework that would help launch much of that work into prominence
during the 1990s, had not yet been invented as a concept. In fact, the first
novel by a black woman writer from Britain that I taught was Joan Riley’s
(1985) The Unbelonging. I remember going to hear Joan Riley read from it
in a now-defunct independent bookshop in Leicester, where questions of
intra-racial oppression, and of sexual abuse of black girls by their fathers (a
central issue in this novel), loomed large. Like Alice Walker and Ntozake
Shange in the US, she had been given much grief from members of her own
community in the UK about this.
The Color Purple, then, set me on a journey and a quest: to find texts
by black and Asian women writers speaking to women in the UK about
the situation in the UK. It was about acknowledging the rise of a
literature within the UK that was produced by, reflected, spoke to and
constructed the views of black and South Asian women. From where we
stand now, this may appear to be a somewhat naı̈ve view of the
relationship between author, text and reader, but in the early to mid-
1980s, the question of inclusion of different constituencies of*in this
instance*women in the curriculum through representing their views,
experiences and knowledge within those curricula was a major point
of discussion amongst feminists, and a demand from diverse groups of
women. Black and South Asian women’s writing became a core aspect of
.......................................................................................................
my teaching and my research and resulted, in 2003, in the first volume on
Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain, which I
published with Cambridge University Press. When I met the editor from
CUP for the first time, she said to me, ‘I thought you were black’. Well, I
am not, but I come from a family that was traumatically displaced during
the Second World War and among my immediate relations are mixed-
raced people who have been the objects of persistent racism in different
forms. It may be that this accounts for my interest in this work. But it is
also much more generally about the rights of women, and women’s rights
to be heard*a view I still strongly believe in.
Margaretta Jolly on Anne Severson’s Near the Big Chakra

It was a school night, and we went there on the train. The place was
upstairs, a bit shabby. Maybe it was just one big room above a pub. Still,
as a women’s disco*women only*it had got us curious. After all those
school parties, by which we meant competitive snogging with boys at
someone’s parents’ house, this was grown up, gained through a dark
portal. Later on I thought of it as a more exclusive door into somewhere
lush and light, which you had to shrink, like Alice in Wonderland, to fit
through. At this time, only sixteen, I wasn’t so sure, entering the crowded
room of women who all looked twice our age, dancing, chatting, to the
high sound of Gloria Gaynor.
The thing was projected on the wall behind. It took a while to work out
what it was, as it was so large. Raised seams of something purple, stripy,
glistening. ‘Oh my god! It’s a vagina!’ I watched it with my chin forward.
Actually, it was also labial lips, clitoris, hair. I wasn’t going to be put off,
though I heard my friend say something like ‘repulsive’. In fact I liked it, as
I liked the whole place. Click. A gigantic peach-coloured wall of flesh came
into view behind the busy heads of the dancers. And another, this time so
you could see a bit into the hole. Was that a string protruding?
These images did not haunt me, they did not transform me. Instead they
gave me an idea. There was another way of doing things, which, freed of
classroom heterosexuality, nobody at school or at home knew about. I
could go through that dark door, and who knows where I’d be? This idea
got me into trouble that summer when I told the dorm about being in the
Young Feminists, and fell in love with the contemptuous girl in the room
opposite, and then there was Greenham and Seneca, which gave me more
ideas, and women’s studies, and eventually the biggest idea of all, my long
step into lesbian life. Even when I turned out not to be a dyke exactly,
.......................................................................................................
I carried on dreaming of being in that wonderland, being what I’ve now
learned to call ‘near the big chakra’.
Near The Big Chakra can’t have been the first public view of
women’s sexual parts that I had seen: there was the torn crotch shot, in
a discarded magazine in the park when I was eleven, and, of course,
‘nudes’ in the high-brow exhibitions my parents had brought me up to
consume. In fact, I only thought of the film at the invitation to write
for this issue, and did not know what it was called until one of
Women’s editorial team, Barbara Rosenbaum, hazarded a guess. I am
fascinated to find out that it was made by an American film maker,
Anne Severson (now Alice Ann-Parker), in 1971, shot at the San
Francisco Art Institute where she was teaching at the time. I now know
from an interview with Severson that the film presents ‘in extreme
close-up, the vulvas of 37 women, ranging in age from three months to

57 years’. In a piece for Spare Rib in 1974, Severson added that ‘there
were two Black women, one half-Oriental girl [sic], two lesbians, one
prostitute, two virgins (I think), a lot of mothers, three mothers-to-be,
three grandmothers, four women menstruating, and one girl who
discovered a week later she had gonorrhoea, and one woman who
learned a month later that she had uterine cancer. All relevant, I believe,
because none of these characteristics is evident in the film*except the
women who are menstruating*you can see their Tampax strings’.
Intended as an educational as well as art film primarily by and for
women*indeed, Severson talked about its ‘cunts’ as part of her politics
of reclamation*she eventually screened it to all sorts of film societies,
women’s groups, art schools and film festivals, often deliberately testing
its effects on mixed and male as well as female audiences. (According to
B. Ruby Rich’s review, men vomited at one London screening in 1973,
though Severson suggests a more common reaction was to joke and
leer.) Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the revelation that Severson
had persuaded the Glide Methodist Church, which specialised in
community service related to sexuality and pregnancy, to produce it,
apparently ‘despite the director’s male colleagues finding the concept
unsavoury’.
That word ‘unsavoury’ now brings into view the blood, the smears,
and the child’s small parts. I hadn’t recalled any of this at all. The Big
Chakra in my memory was overlaid with Judy Chicago’s dinner plate
for Sappho, which turns the vulva into a gorgeous flower of green,
mauve and pink porcelain. What on earth was this ‘educational film’ of
everyday vaginas, going about their prosaic and sometimes morbid
businesses, doing on the wall of a disco? Why did the organisers of the
event see fit to screen this as a backdrop to dancing and drinking? The
.......................................................................................................
disjunction seems almost hilarious in retrospect but says everything
about the wonderfully odd, unthinkably idealistic meeting of lesbianism
and feminism at that time, unfolding ten years after, and thousands of
miles away from, the film’s production.
RADIATING LIFE FORCE
The impression made by this film, its impact*has been enormous . . . This
film is a new approach to our femininity*Agnes Varda, Image and
Sound
It is tempting to agree with Varda’s assessment. Surely there had been

hundreds*thousands*of years without anything like it, however far
Minoan statuettes might have stuck out their pottery bottoms. Second
wave feminism was astute to the ideology whereby, as John Berger

memorably put it in Ways of Seeing, a year after Severson’s film, ‘men
act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves
being looked at’. Laura Mulvey famously elaborated how bad the
phallic gaze was for women in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
in 1975. Woman was ‘subjected to her image as bearer of bleeding
wound: she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend
it’. How better to challenge this by showing the real blood meandering
out from between our legs? Shockingly demystifying, Severson’s film
literally reorients that gaze in a kind of gigantic speculum of the other
woman (Irigaray). Ms’s review beautifully captured the politics of the
film’s brilliant naturalism: ‘Neither clinical nor leering, its strange
neutrality makes it possible for the viewer to be simultaneously
fascinated, repulsed, awestruck at the diversity of women’s genitals,
and finally, at their universality.’ B. Ruby Rich in 1978 saw the film as
‘structuralist’ because of its ‘straightforward listing of parts, no
narrative, requisite attention to a predetermined and simplified struc-
ture, and fixed camera position’. Yet she acknowledged that its formal
composition was almost impossible to see, precisely because it was so
‘powerfully uncooptable’.
The title of the film is another clue to its redemptive aim: Chakra
is Sanskrit for the seven wheels of radiating life force in the body. The
‘big’ chakra (as it was known at the time) is located just beneath the
skin of the perineum (hence the vagina is ‘near’ to it). As a life force,
it is erotic and creative, in contrast to the intellectuality of the chakras
higher up in the body and the plainer force of the sacral chakra below
it. Severson explains amusingly that ‘in the early seventies we all
seemed to be stuck at this level of development. It . . . seemed to me
that the way out of this morass was to transform some of this energy
.......................................................................................................
into art . . . I also hoped to creatively release some of this energy for
myself and other women in order to move on up the cerebrospinal
ladder’.
Chakras are a profound metaphor for wholeness and for transforma-
tion. Even as I write, I’m touched by this. But I’m just as touched by
Severson’s intriguing synopsis of another of her films titled Introduction
to Humanities:
My first year Humanities class at the San Francisco Art Institute steps
before the camera and introduces itself one by one. This film is an
appropriate complement to Near The Big Chakra and should be shown
immediately after.
DESIRE AND DISGUST

Each and every one of our Big Chakras, then, may step forward. Or not?
Last week, by chance, I went out for dinner with the two friends with
whom I had attended the women’s disco twenty-eight years ago. I asked if
they had remembered the evening, and its unusual filmic decor. ‘Yes, I do.
I found it a bit . . . repellent’, said one. The other didn’t remember it
especially, though she did do those women’s discos. ‘I fancied a woman
there actually. She looked like a young Bob Dylan. But I wouldn’t say
that I was influenced.’ She paused before concluding, ‘Do you need to be
a feminist to be happy anyway?’
‘I’m not talking about being happy’, I said stiffly. ‘I’m talking about
being changed. Thinking differently.’ I felt that having raised the subject
had shed an air of repellence over our refined forty-something cuisine. I
minded that they seemed to think I was only talking about sex. By the
time I got home I was stirred up, by the loveliness of still knowing my
friends through all these years, and by the puzzle of the exchange.*
For even as the film tried to restore our bodies to ourselves, did it
inevitably divide? With a literal speculum you bow over yourself. By
contrast, a camera’s projection, even on a woman like yourself,
distances you. Is even Severson’s gentle screen another set of signifiers
that fail, like any language, to show it like it is, those close-ups
alienating in their very enlargement and projection? After all, perhaps
the point about women’s anatomy is that we don’t see, we feel? Then
there is the impulse to compare: oh look at that one . . . the ‘two
* I dedicate this article black women’ Severson pulls out in the description; ‘the half-Oriental
to my two friends and
thank them for our girl’; the vulva where the lips are completely different sizes. Diversity?
ongoing conversation. Universality?
.......................................................................................................
Though Near the Big Chakra is surely the opposite of titillating, the
trouble with the gaze is nowhere more evident than in the fact that in
Googling to find out more about the film, I discover it advertised on
several online porn sites. It is for this reason that the ultimate logic of the
passionate feminist campaign against pornography (already raging in
1981) culminates in Suzanne Kappeler’s suggestion that looking itself
should be stopped. And why, because of the multiple sacrifices this would
entail, Feminists Against Censorship got embroiled in a strenuous effort
to brew home-made (lesbian) pornography rather than the more difficult
task of tackling the commodification of sexuality.
If we accept the gaze as a fact of sexual life for women as well as men,
as Mulvey later did in Afterthoughts on her famous essay, still, no one
seems to be able to quantify how much images possess ‘impact’, despite
the numerous laboratory experiments on pornography. I guess I don’t

care so much about pornography as I did in my twenties*though writing
this article makes me feel I ought to. The problem for me now with the
film is not that it might play into a visual economy of patriarchal or even
lesbian desire, but its enduring ability to repel.
In their essay, ‘Socio-cultural Representations of the Vagina’,
Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson briskly put the political case as to
why, in listing seven key negative socio-cultural representations: ‘the
vagina as inferior to the penis; the vagina as absence; the vagina as
(passive) receptacle for the penis; the vagina as sexually inadequate; the
vagina as disgusting; the vagina as vulnerable and abused; and the
vagina as dangerous’. How can we care about, care for, a pudendum
whose Latin name means ‘to be ashamed’, though as ‘smelly cunt’
needs no translation? But Jonathan Dollimore suggests an even more
tragic explanation in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, in
arguing that ‘it is the fate of humankind to be constituted by a
fundamental ambivalence toward life itself, an alternation between
repulsion and transgressive attraction’. Disgust is thus the other side of
desire, but a side that is as profound as the conflict between instinct
and civilisation.
Dollimore was thinking about the association of gay sex with death,
not vaginas. In a different way, lesbian women can want to push away the
bodies of men, as, of course, can lots of heterosexual women. But why
should a woman’s genitals activate this conflict so particularly, even for
women themselves? The theory is that it is because it is precisely from
here that life emerges.
.......................................................................................................
THE LOST REAL
Although I believe that the second wave’s campaign against female shame
is still urgent, there may be something paradoxical about Severson’s
images that pride alone can’t do away with. Perhaps there is an emotional
reason for the shiver that so many women feel for the sight of another
woman’s genitals, irrespective of sexuality, which is surely a conflict
about their indifferent, yet so familiar, vitality. It seems significant that
Severson deliberately filmed each vulva in a slow, single continuous shot
to capture its subtle motion. She also encouraged women to move their
vaginal muscles, adjusting her zoom lens from time to time. What this
brought into being was the organism going about its life. How different
to the ‘short fast shots of beautiful cunts in glowing technicolour’ that a
male colleague of Severson’s did from Severson’s rough cut, thinking he

could improve on her editing. He also edited out all those other signs of
dubious life, the Tampax and yeast infections. The film is seventeen
minutes long. Apparently audiences think it is much longer.
Jay Prosser’s Light in the Dark Room suggests why the photographic
medium might enhance what disturbs. Prosser argues that though
photographs seem more than any other art to capture the presence of
what is really there, in fact their ‘reality effects’ are powerful because they
tell us about the things we long for but will never really grasp. Adapting
Lacan’s notion of the Real to capture the tease of this, this desired
presence is ‘that which escapes reality’, that which is unrepresentable, but
becomes apparent to us in ‘the return, the coming-back’ of trauma. This is
even truer ‘in an age that has repressed the referent’, that is, in the
sophisticated regime of simulacra that defines our image-saturated age. In
the middle of our confident gazing, we stop, pulled in by an unexpected
something about or in the photograph, making us wonder about what it
is we wanted it to save for us.
Severson’s film is a true coming out story, far more modern than
postmodern, and it avoids the mortification of a still photograph. But I
dwell on Prosser’s analysis because it helps explain its uncanny effects
better than debates about liberation and censorship can do. In suggesting
that photography itself is wounding, but wounding because of the
primitive and melancholic desire it evokes, Prosser asks us to think about
a form of fantasy. Peculiarly appropriate is Prosser’s application of this
theory to an enlarged close-up of a hormonally nurtured female-to-male
penis. With extraordinary sensitivity, he describes his changing feelings
from early days when he would project this on the wall in public talks as
glorious proof of the possibility of transsexuality, to his more recent view
that it proves precisely its impossibility.
.......................................................................................................
A nontranssexual woman, I know that my Real is also out of reach.
The vulva is a sexual muscle, vital and strong. It is also that part that needs
assuaging with creams, mopping, having operations on, that can hurt
inside in an indefinable way and, of course, harbour infections and dry
nodes of tampons and shadow children. It has to ‘go through’ the
menopause like it never would have four thousand years ago when the
chakras got invented and women didn’t live beyond middle age. This is
the menstrual, menopausal vagina that I suppose male-to-female transsex-
uals never long for. It is the memory of a basket of eggs that I now see
young women unconsciously carrying up in the crotch of their jeans. It is
the weird memory of one’s mother, and the indifferent movements of a
monthly cleaning that, like an animal, doesn’t care what you think. It is
the place that Anne Severson’s zoom lens caught up in a long moment of
light but whose life it wisely did not try to explain.

I bow to that place that I feel when I can’t see, that radiant place Near
The Big Chakra.
Barbara Taylor on Marian Engel’s Bear

Who’s afraid of women’s books?*Marian Engel, Interview, 1973
In 1976 Canada awarded its premier literary prize to a novel about a

sexual relationship between a woman and a bear. For a country routinely
described as boring, Canada displays a surprising penchant for such
flashes of sublime weirdness (witness film auteur David Cronenberg).
Marian Engel’s Bear stormed the bestseller lists in Canada and the USA
and went on to spawn a mini-industry of feminist criticism. In the UK,
the feminist press Pandora picked it up, but it gained little attention.
Maybe the book’s ‘peculiarly Canadian’ theme (as one reviewer delicately
put it) was a turn-off for Brits. Certainly my own enthusiasm for it made
friends smile*although those who read it on my urging admitted to
enjoying it.
At the time of Bear’s publication, I had been in London for five years,
having arrived from western Canada as a graduate student and stayed to
write a doctoral thesis. I was immersed in the women’s liberation
movement, crammed with its heresies and pieties*especially its pieties.
So in retrospect my delight in Engel’s novel slightly surprises me.
Whatever else it was, Bear was hardly feminist orthodoxy. Its dark wit, its
playful treatment of themes such as bestiality, male violence and female
masochism were not manifesto fodder. But I was reading psychoanalytic
theory at the time, and Bear must have chimed with the eye-opening
.......................................................................................................
propositions I was encountering there. I was also deeply unhappy, stuck
inside a dead relationship and teetering on the brink of an emotional
breakdown. So Engel’s novel presumably spoke to me on many levels,
some beyond my conscious hearing.
Lou, Bear’s human protagonist, is a librarian!archivist working at a
Historical Institute in an unnamed Canadian city. She is a ‘mole’, a
lonely, flabby thirty-something who spends her days burrowing amidst
dusty files in the Institute basement. Once a week she and the Institute’s
Director cheerlessly couple on her desk. Then, one summer, she is sent
off to catalogue a library bequeathed to the Institute by the descendant of
a colonial family. The family home housing the library is on a remote
island in the northern bush. Lou will be there on her own, with backup
only from Homer, a mainland storekeeper who boats in supplies now and
then. The prospect of this Crusoe existence intoxicates her*and then she
discovers the bear.
The bear is a pet of the deceased estate owner. Lou will feed him
during her stay, while his future is decided. He lives at the end of a chain
behind the house, and at first Lou is dismayed by his large smelly
presence. But he’s a gentle brute who*so long as she shits beside him
every day, so that he can smell her odour*will do her no harm. They
become buddies, swimming together and hanging out in the study where
Lou does her cataloguing. The physical companionship is welcome; Lou
enjoys rubbing his pelt, tickling him. Then one evening, stretched out in
front of the fireplace, she begins to masturbate. The bear decides to join
in, and starts to lick her:
The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself
like an eel found all her secret places. And like no human being she
had known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she
whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears.
The relationship becomes an idyll, with the woman joyously exigent (‘eat
me bear!’) and the bear wonderfully obliging (especially when she lathers
herself in honey). But there’s a pressure inside Lou for more. The bear
does not desire her, he is merely grooming her. ‘Claw out my heart, bear’,
she whispers, tempting him. ‘Tear my head off.’ She dreams about the
Devil, and aggressive sprites who want to ‘eat her breasts off’. On one
occasion she tries to mount the bear, to entice him to penetrate her, and
afterwards feels guilty and wretched. ‘She had gone too far. There was
something aggressive in her that always went too far.’
Then, one evening, as they are snuggling, the bear becomes aroused.
Lou, profoundly excited, crouches down before him*and the bear
reaches out a paw and rips her back open. The moment of violence is
.......................................................................................................
extraordinarily shocking. But the violence is not inside the bear*who
feels no rage, no malice, is only doing what bears sometimes do*but in
Lou, who has yearned for this physical explosion of destructive energy.
She becomes infected and feverish, and when she recovers finds herself
permanently scarred by her lover’s claw. And with this scarring she is
purged of the guilt that has haunted her. She feels clean, peaceful, ready
for anything. She returns to the city, while the bear goes to live with a
local native woman. Lou waves goodbye to him as they part, but he does
not watch her leave. ‘She didn’t expect him to.’
Retold as a bald narrative, the story sounds pretty bizarre*and it
certainly has its wacky moments. But it is also sexy, engaging and
disturbing. ‘People get funny up here when they’re too much alone’,
Homer the shopkeeper tells Lou, and the joys of solitude are a key theme.
Lou has a passion for solitude. In the city, this craving merely left her
lonely; but now, stuck on the island with her ursine beau, she has found
the perfect solitary scenario. ‘Not everyone is fit for silence’, she thinks,
but her bear emphatically is, affording her company and pleasure while
leaving her quietude unbroken. The bear licks and probes her, but he does
not intrude upon her. She can ‘paint any face’ on him that she likes, she
reflects, as his actual expressions mean nothing to her, as hers mean
nothing to him. With him, she is alone.
The female solitaire has a bad reputation. Strolling alone in paradise,
Eve succumbs to serpentine blandishments. Witches seek out solitary
places to consort with Satan. Women are too corruptible to be left on
their own. ‘When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil’, early modern
churchmen declared. In the eighteenth century the solitary female novel
reader was an object of deep suspicion. A woman alone in her boudoir
with one hand clutching a romantic novel while the other stroked her
genitals was a favourite pornographic image; small dogs occasionally
featured. The fantasies have changed over time but the fascination is
perennial. The western pornographic imagination remains enthralled by
what women get up to when they think that no one (or at least no one
human) is looking.
Bear is a richly comic commentary on this pornographic tradition, as
well as a contribution to it. Feminist critics have read it as a celebration of
liberated female sexuality*and there is plenty in the text to support this
view. A feminist friend writes, asking Lou what she’s up to, and Lou
replies with a postcard of a bear cub and the message ‘having a wonderful
time’. ‘I have an odd sense of being reborn’, Lou writes to the Institute
Director on arriving on the island, and by the time she departs she feels
beautified, energised, a new woman. When I first read the book these
elements struck me very much. I appreciated Lou’s animal lust, her bold
.......................................................................................................
flouting of prohibition. Now I am equally struck by her guilt and
confusion, and also by her fierce hostility to men, which runs like a
bilious stream throughout the novel. ‘What she had disliked in men was
not their eroticism’, Lou tells the reader, ‘but their assumption that
women had none.’ Which seems fair enough, except that it’s not the
whole story.
Men loom large in Bear, in every sense. Not living men*of whom the
few that appear in the book (the Institute Director; Homer the
shopkeeper, whom Lou fucks once, more out of politeness than desire)
are pretty poor specimens*but Real Men: the soldiers, adventurers and
Byronic poets whose stories Lou reads in the island library. These dashing
heroes are objects of desire, but also of envy. As her affair with the bear
unfolds, Lou feels herself to be ‘victorious’ over such men, her bestial
lovemaking ‘more than they could have imagined’. Byron had a pet bear
too, but did he screw him? She reads admiringly about Edward Trelawny,
Byron’s swashbuckling friend. ‘What a man! Big, abusive, a giant.’ She
considers calling the bear Trelawny, but the bear is too tame, cooperative,
woman-like (Lou is repeatedly amused by his resemblance to a lumpish
matron)*in short, too unmanly to be a Trelawny, until he becomes
sexually aroused, when he almost kills Lou. What does Lou want from
the beast male? In her notebooks from the period, Engel wrote about her
yearnings for ‘debasement’. She is fascinated by the Story of O, Anne
Desclos’s famous 1954 novel about female masochism. ‘How did O and I
get that way? How can I get rid of my albatross of guilt?’ Her answer is to
‘recognise that anger is sometimes legitimate and need not be punished’,
and so allow herself to ‘become a person’. The resolution is glib:
women’s-lib-by-numbers. But the rich brew of lust, love, rage, envy
conjured by Bear is too wild, too excessive, for any such simple message.
Bear ‘is an almost empty novel’, Engel once wrote of her book.
‘People bring their own content to it.’ Certainly the novel has been read
in many ways: as feminist!pastoral; as sexual gothic; as an early statement
of eco-feminism; as a critique of Canadian colonialism (there is much on
this last theme that I haven’t mentioned here). I choose now to read it as a
masturbation fantasy, which, like all masturbation fantasies, expresses
wishes and conflicts far below its surface content: in this case, the wishes
and conflicts aroused in women by male potency. Potent men*‘big hairy
bear-men’, as Engel described them in her notebooks*were a major
dilemma for Engel, for her femininity, for her feminism. Were she and I
alone in this? Possibly, but I doubt it. The desire to triumph over such
men, to render them abject (the bear wears a collar and chain just like ‘O’
in Desclos’s novel) may not be the most commendable feature of
feminism, but it is certainly part of our tradition. Engel’s artistry in
.......................................................................................................
Bear is to convey this desire*and the lusts and guilt and gender-bending
fantasies that accompany it*with exemplary openness and wit. The
erotic imagination has always been the wild card in the feminist pack. By
playing this card so fearlessly, Engel’s Bear showed me a new kind of
feminist honesty, which as a young woman I appreciated without quite
recognising it, and which today I still find admirable and*in the wake of
Engel’s death, at a younger age than I am now*surprisingly touching.
Sheila Rowbotham on Edith Thomas’s The Women

Incendiaries
I heard about the French historian Edith Thomas from my tutor at

university, Richard Cobb. Cobb, who, like Thomas, studied crowd
action from below in the French revolutions of the nineteenth century,
admired her greatly. Women historians were relatively rare during the
early 1960s, and I pricked up my ears. In the late 1960s, I would find
the English translation of her study of women in the Commune of 1871,
‘The Women Incendiaries’ (originally ‘Les Petroleuses’), and bought it for
thirty-three shillings and six pence.
Edith Thomas’s dramatic and moving history led me to ‘Les Femmes
de 1848’, published in 1948, as a tribute to the women of the French
Resistance. Her approach to the past was revelatory and proved vital
when I was beginning to conceive the contents of Women, Resistance and
Revolution (1972). Edith Thomas introduced me to women who have
continued to fascinate throughout my life.
Thomas makes the women come alive as individuals while showing
how they played a part in a collective insurgency. We meet Nathalie
Lemel, a bookbinder who started a food co-operative and was a member
of the First International; another member is the elegant Russian
Elizabeth Dmitrieff, a friend of Karl Marx. Then there was the
thoughtful, questioning Andre Leo, along with the defiant ‘Red Virgin’,
Louise Michel, both of whom inclined to anarchism. Thomas takes
us beyond those whose names are known, rescuing from the dusty
archives the prostitutes who flocked to the debating clubs, the ambulance
nurses who tended the wounded and the women who joined men on the
barricades, proudly wearing the long red scarves of the Commune.
Braid workers, seamstresses, boot-stitchers, laundresses, market ven-
dors step out of the pages and speak about the hopes and beliefs which
motivated them to take such extreme action. Thomas effects a double
reclamation of women rendered invisible by both class and gender
.......................................................................................................
prejudice. What is more, she announces this head on, declaring right at
the beginning of her book:
‘History’*which, in the sense that its movements affect women and

men, is one and universal*is almost exclusively the work of men.
Judging from the results, they have little to be proud of. Women, at all
events, hardly figure in it, except in minor roles or as victims.
These were electrifying words indeed and strangely prescient of the great
upsurge in women’s history which was soon to come as a result of the
women’s liberation movement.
Thomas contested both the reactionaries’ stereotypes of debauched
viragos and the saintly heroines of the left. Instead, drawing on her own
experience in the Resistance to the Vichy government and Nazi
occupation, she reveals women as active agents in a wider historical

movement. ‘The Women Incendiaries’ is at once impassioned and
scholarly; it inspired me when I first wrote about women and retains
its fascination still.
Birds of a Feather: Judith Halberstam on Chicken Run

‘The chickens are revolting!’*Mr Tweedy in Chicken Run
In one of my favourite feminist texts of all time, the epic animated

drama Chicken Run, the politically active and explicitly feminist bird,
Ginger, is opposed in her struggle to inspire the birds to rise up by
two other ‘feminist subjects’. One is the cynic, Bunty, a hard-nosed
fighter who rejects utopian dreams out of hand but the other is Babs,
voiced by Jane Horrocks, who sometimes gives voice to feminine
naı¨veté but at other moments points to the absurdity of the political
terrain as outlined by the activist Ginger. Ginger says, for example,
‘we either die free chickens, or we die trying’. Babs asks naively, ‘are
those the only choices?’ The reason Chicken Run speaks to me as
possibly the most important feminist text of the decade has to do with
this wide array of positions that the feminist birds take up while
trying, literally, to fly the coop and escape the exploitation of the
chicken farm. I am as drawn to Ginger’s utopianism as the next
freedom fighter, but I also appreciate Bunty’s cynical anti-utopianism
and Babs’s deployment of a kind of radical passivity. In the tension
between Ginger’s attempt to start a winged revolt, and Babs’s
questioning of the discursive field altogether, we enter into a complex
.......................................................................................................
and exciting political terrain that is even more dynamic for being a
scene of animation populated by claymation birds.
One clip from Chicken Run has become a classic representation of
the power and the danger of political organising. In the scene, ‘They’re
Organised’, Mr Tweedy suspects the chickens of hatching a plot to
escape while his wife accuses him of dreaming up the whole thing and
being even more stupid than the birds themselves. In turn, we watch as
Ginger rallies the troops with her particular brand of organic (chicken)
intellectualism, and she tells her birds to dream of something better:
a world without fences, without farmers and a place where the
chickens will feed and maintain themselves autonomously. Ginger’s
speech is immensely powerful and it sets her up as one of cinema’s
most inspired feminist icons. Later in the film, Ginger refuses to fall
into the conventional role of romantic lead and she will not let go of
her autonomy and political will, even in the presence of Mel Gibson’s
Rocky the Rooster. Unlike most romantic comedies, this one does not
require its heroine to sacrifice her sense of purpose in order to sooth
the ruffled feathers of her inferior male partner. Instead, Ginger rescues
Rocky: she sees through his claim to know how to fly and
circumvents him by designing and building an airplane powered by
the efforts of the chicken collective. Rocky is ultimately no more than
a footnote to the struggle and the chickens rise up without his
assistance.
Like many new animated films, Chicken Run draws some of its
dramatic intensity from the struggle between human and non-human
creatures. Most animated features are allegorical in form and adhere to a
fairly formulaic narrative scheme. But new Computer Generated Image
(CGI) animation tends to pit two groups against each other in settings
that closely resemble what used to be called ‘class struggle’; they propose
numerous scenarios of revolt and offer alternatives to the grim,
mechanical, industrial cycles of production and consumption. In ‘They’re
Organised’, Mr Tweedy’s intuitive sense that the chickens in his chicken
farm ‘are organised’ competes with Mrs Tweedy’s assertion that the only
thing stupider than chickens is Mr Tweedy himself. His paranoid
suspicions lose out to her exploitative zeal until the moment when the
two finally agree that ‘the chickens are revolting’. What are we to make of
this Marxist allegory in the form of a children’s film*this animal farm
narrative of resistance, revolt and utopia pitted against new waves of
industrialisation*featuring claymation birds in the role of the revolu-
tionary subject? How do neo-socialist narrative forms find their way into
children’s entertainment and what do adult viewers make of them? More
importantly, what does animation have to do with revolution? And
.......................................................................................................
finally, how do revolutionary themes in animated film connect to queer
notions of self?
The new genre of animated feature films, which use CGI technology
instead of standard linear animation techniques, surprisingly foreground
the themes of revolution and transformation. I call this genre ‘Pixarvolt’
in order to link the technology to the thematic focus, and argue that in
new animation films certain topics that would simply never appear in
Hollywood films for adults are central to the success and emotional
impact of the narrative. Furthermore, and perhaps even more surpris-
ingly, the Pixarvolt films make subtle as well as overt connections
between communitarian revolt and queer embodiment and thereby
articulate, in ways that theory and popular narrative have not, the
sometimes counter-intuitive links between queerness and socialist strug-
gle. And so, while queer politics are often caricatured by Marxists as
‘body politics’, or as simply superficial, these films recognise that
alternative forms of embodiment and desire are central to the struggle
against corporate domination. The queer is not represented as singularity
but as a part of an assemblage of resistant technologies that include
collectivity, imagination and a kind of Situationist commitment to
surprise and shock.
Let’s begin then by asking some questions about the process of
animation, its generic potential, the ways in which the ‘pixavolts’
imagine the human and the non-human and rethink embodiment and
social relations. Beginning with Toy Story in 1995, animation entered a
new era. As is well known, Toy Story, the first Pixar film, was the first
animation to be wholly generated by a computer and it changed
animation from a two-dimensional set of images to a three-dimensional
space within which point-of-view shots and perspective were rendered
with startling liveness. Telling an archetypal story about a world of toys
that awaken when the children are away, Toy Story managed to engage
child audiences with the fantasy of live toys and adults with the nostalgic
narrative of a cowboy whose primacy in the toy kingdom is being
challenged by a new model, futuristic, space doll. While kids delighted in
the spectacle of a toy box teeming with life*reminiscent obviously of
Nutcracker Suite*adults were treated to a smart drama about toys that
exploit their own toyness, and other toys that do not realise they are not
humans. The whole complex narrative about past and present, adult and
child, live and machinic, stands as a meta-commentary on the set of
narrative possibilities that this new wave of animation enables and
exploits. It also seemed to establish the parameters of the new genre of
CGI: Toy Story marks the genre as irrevocably male (the boy child and
his relation to the prosthetic and phallic capabilities of his male toys),
.......................................................................................................
centred upon the domestic (the playroom), and unchangeably oedipal
(there are always father!son dynamics as the motor). But the new wave
of animated features ushered in by Toy Story also shows itself in this
inaugural film to be deeply interested in social hierarchies (like parent!
child but also like owner!owned), quite curious about the relations
between an outside and an inside world (the real world and the world of
the bedroom), and powered by a very vigorous desire for revolution,
transformation and rebellion (toy vs child, toy vs toy, child vs adult,
child vs child). Finally, like many of the films that follow, Toy Story
betrays a high level of self-consciousness about its own relation to
innovation, transformation and tradition. Most of the CGI films that
follow Toy Story map their dramatic territory in remarkably similar
ways and most retain certain key features (say, the oedipality) while
trading the mise en scène*from bedroom to seabed or barnyard, from

toys to chickens or rats, fish or penguins, from the cycle of toy
production to the other industrial settings*and most remain entranced
by the plot of captivity followed by dramatic escape, culminating in a
utopian dream of freedom. While a cynical critic might simply find this
narrative cycle to be a blueprint for the normative rites of passage in the
human life cycle that maps a journey for the child viewer from
childhood captivity to adolescent escape and adult freedom, a more
radical reading actually allows the cycle to stand as a utopian narrative
for the real change that children may still be believe is possible and
desirable.
So, let’s return to Chicken Run and think about how it departs from
and elaborates upon the Toy Story premise. But also, how does this film
about ‘revolting chickens’ imagine a utopian alternative? The claymation
world of Chicken Run builds its premise around the utopian concept of
‘escape’, but here ‘escape’ is not the war camp model that people imagine.
It is indeed quoting The Great Escape, Colditz, Stalig 17 and other Second
World War films but war is not the mise en scène*rather the transition
from feudalism to industrial capitalism remarkably frames a life and death
story about flying the coop. Chicken Run is different from Toy Story in
that the chickens are obviously female and the oedipal falls away as a
point of reference in favour of a Gramscian structure of counter-
hegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals. In this film,
utopia is actually realised as a place without a farmer, with some form of
self-determination, and in relation to the control of one’s own labour.
And the queer element . . . well, again, they are mostly chickens and so, at
least in Chicken Run, utopia is a place populated by females in various
forms of relation.
.......................................................................................................
Sally Alexander on Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year
I used to say that Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year was the story of
my life, in my early twenties, as if I was just a creature of time and
circumstance. I read The Garrick Year sometime between October 1965,
when my first child was born, and the end of 1967, before my marriage
disintegrated. Like the heroine Emma Evans, I married a successful actor,
had a child, and followed his career*which in the novel led Emma to
Hereford for a summer season of plays. The plot revolves around a
thwarted love affair with her husband’s director (the most powerful figure
in any theatre, and in this case a man who remembers the Second World
War). Emma had two children. I remember clearly the first moment of
identification: a sentence that spoke of ‘intense joy and intense boredom’
with her child in the same breath. This sentence*a leitmotif of the
novel*was my first conscious encounter with the notion of maternal
ambivalence! The second moment of identification I’d forgotten until the
second read*although I laughed then, I remember (I think with shock) as
I did now, at the end of the affair. Fleeing the return of children and
husband, Emma’s lover backs his Jaguar out of the garage and rams Emma
up against the wall, crushing her thighs and knees. Emma’s husband pulls
the car off her, picks her up and calls the doctor who prescribes
tranquillisers and bed rest. Nervous breakdown hovers but Emma knows
herself to be tougher than that. A ‘survivor’, ‘unpiteable’, she ‘had grown
into the earth’, had become ‘terrestrial’, violated by ‘time and maternity’.
Emma recovers, and in the final scene she, with her husband, takes the
children to play on Abbydore Common outside Hereford. If there is a
viper in the bracken then only Emma notices and says nothing. Is there a
moral? Frustration and dissatisfaction, Emma finds, accompanies infide-
lity as it does marriage; choose marriage, and one’s own life is put on
hold. Domesticity cannot be escaped, indeed brings moments of ‘quiet
discontented pleasure’ or even bliss.
This time around, from page one, I was appalled by Drabble’s
heroine. I did not want to have been like her when I was young. Drabble
dislikes her too, I think. She makes her knowing and brittle: a ‘rarefied
connoisseur’ who undercuts every feeling, thought or move she makes
with ironic self-deprecation. She suffers from ‘human exhaustion’, her life
a ‘barren waste’, and aspires to ‘glossy photographs and the tv screen’
(except the job she gave up by trailing after her husband, David, is as the
first woman newscaster, which would have taken her away from ‘the
babies for only fifteen hours a week’*and had the ‘whole nation staring
at you’, as David put it). The novel opens with a glimpse of her husband’s
former lover in a television advert. Through Emma, Drabble gives short
.......................................................................................................
shrift to the world she lives in, of actors and acting. Theatre is dying,
snobbish and ‘unreal’ or ‘fake’*Emma enjoys facts*while the ‘celluloid
world’ breeds notoriety and corrodes personal memory. Emma describes
herself, often, as shallow, vain and ‘perpetually bored’ by actors, their
trivial, self-centred conversations, and provincial Hereford where the
only connection between people is ‘buying and selling’. She loves her
Islington terrace and London for its anonymity, variety and sophistica-
tion. Emma’s willed and reckless modernity is defined by childhood
memories: a determination to swim out of her depth, the discovery in her
school friend’s ordered household of a drawer full of junk, and the
horrified recognition, reading a Tennyson poem, that her feelings of pity
and love were the same as everyone else’s. Her love of danger, the
unexpected, a good row is a reaction to her ‘well-bred, quietly discursive,
mildly permissive father’, a Cambridge theology don. But when

clandestine desire awakes in her a hungry, sucking, bony creature of
need, she realises with horror that the ‘part of me that was not a function
and a smile and a mother had been curled up and rotten with grief and
patience and pain’. ‘To me’, Emma insists, ‘life is perpetually on the verge
of extinction’. Domestic catastrophe strikes often in this novel: ceilings
fall in (on the marital bed), gas leaks, stairwells break, there is an air crash,
one child almost drowns and the violence of marriages crops up in casual
conversation*rape, beatings, infidelity. But the one person who dies is
Julian, a young sensitive actor in her husband’s company, Emma’s alter
ego, who, tormented and indecisive, bullied and possibly homosexual,
throws himself into the River Wye.
The Garrick Year ends with an affirmation of marital love; three years
with David had changed Emma’s ‘capacity for serious emotion’, she
‘knew only one man, and that was David’; even actors are redeemed by
their ‘profound’ capacity for human interest and love. I was less coherent.
The end of my marriage remains a scene too destructive to recall except in
bare outline. Divorce led me to college, then university and all at the same
time as consciousness-raising, working for the women’s liberation move-
ment’s four demands (equal pay and job opportunity; education; twenty-
four-hour nurseries; free abortion and contraception on demand), the
London Women’s Liberation Workshop, the night-cleaners campaign,
and teaching in the Fawcett Library (as the Women’s Library was then
called). All this occurred in the wake of reforms that transfigured the lives
of young women and men in the late sixties in Britain, and make of this
novel a period piece: the expansion of higher education, legalisation of
homosexuality, abortion reform and divorce by consent. Women’s
emancipation as well as emotional violence underpins Garrick Year:
how are women to live, what do women want, who looks after the
.......................................................................................................
children? Women’s liberation in mid-1960s Britain grew*in part*out of
such banal personal confusion and crisis.*
The Golden Notebook and Me: A Reprise: Cora Kaplan on

Doris Lessing
I needed the big metal ladder to rescue The Golden Notebook from the top
shelf of my study bookcase. From the safe distance of my desk, its
hardback yellow cover still gave off a warning whiff*negative, slightly
bitter, dangerous*a condensation of the feeling tone of the novel, its
complicated attachment to and disenchantment with love and politics,
blended with memories of my own mixed moods in the years 1966!76. In
that early period of my long residence in England, which included the five
years of my brief first marriage, I had an intimate, love!hate relationship
with Lessing’s novel, keeping it close to hand, rereading it compulsively.
Once in my hands now, I see that it is badly warped and stained. The
book has felt so much mine, however neglected, that I am surprised to see
that this first American edition (Simon and Schuster, 1962) is inscribed by
Lessing to my then mother-in-law, actor Maureen Pryor*‘to Maureen,
with love from Doris, Xmas 1962’*and beneath, oddly, ‘Doris Lessing
[Author].’ The novel can’t have been lent to me before late 1966, but I
had certainly read and admired it when I caught a glimpse of Doris
Lessing [Author] surrounded by acolytes at a grim north London party,
full of drunk, angry, argumentative Jewish expatriates*many South
African*just after the Six Day War. Heavily pregnant, too American,
not Jewish enough, I felt like the wrong kind of expat, out of my cultural
and political comfort zone. I missed my chance with Lessing, too awed to
do more than mumble an introduction and gabble a compliment.
Born in 1919 in Persia, raised in Southern Rhodesia, Doris Lessing was
forty-three when The Golden Notebook was published, with ‘twelve
books*novels, stories, reportage, poems, and a play’*already to her
credit. Anna Wulf, the novel’s protagonist, is slightly younger, ‘born 10th
November, 1922, a daughter of Colonel Frank Freeman and May
Fortescue; lived 23 Baker Street; educated Girls’ High School, Hamp-
stead; spent six years Central Africa*1939!1945; married Max Wulf
1945; one daughter, born 1946; divorced Max Wulf 1947; joined
Communist Party 1950, left it 1954.’ In 1951 Anna had published
Frontiers of War, a novel selectively drawn from her experiences during
* See Nell Dunn,
the war in Central Africa with a group of left-wing young men and
Talking to Women,
London: Weidenfeld women, including three British airmen. Frontiers of War is ‘about’, as
and Nicolson, 1965. Anna says distastefully, ‘the colour problem’, and although it becomes a
.......................................................................................................
best-seller, allowing its author and her daughter to live on its royalties, she
is ashamed of it, believing it to be saturated with ‘a lying nostalgia’.
Indeed, Anna thinks that she is ‘incapable of writing the only kind of
novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral
passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at
life’. She has ‘decided never to write another novel’, seeing the ‘competent
and informative’ books she could write, and that were being written
by others in the post-war period, as the drying up of fiction’s true
mission: ‘the function of the novel’, she says, ‘seems to be changing; it has
become an outpost of journalism . . . read to find out what is going on’.
The ‘quality of philosophy’ is missing, and Anna, whose example of the
philosophical novelist is Thomas Mann, believes that the ‘novel
has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented
consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are become more and

more divided, and more subdivided in themselves’, that they unconsciously
reach out for the information about the world that the novel of reportage,
the novel as ethnographic investigation, can give them: ‘a blind grasping
out for their own wholeness’.
The Golden Notebook fiercely rejects the illusion that social (or
socialist) realism generously leavened with sentimental humanism could
cure the political and psychic crises of Western modernity. Anna sees her
own book as a ‘crime’ against truth telling in a continuum with the even
more aesthetically and morally bankrupt efforts of novelists loyal to the
Party line. Framed therefore as an anti-novel (rather like Mary Wollstone-
craft’s unfinished The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria), The Golden Notebook
aims to strip the fragmented social, political and literary body of its last
illusions. The impossibility of writing fiction is represented as both a
product of, and analogy for, the problems of decolonisation, of socialism,
of gender and sexuality that the book debates. Anna’s four notebooks
provide the novel’s structure: black*the ‘untold’ story of Anna’s ‘good’
war in Central Africa; red*Anna’s wearisome service with ‘The British
Communist Party’; yellow*an unfinished novel, The Shadow of the
Third’, about Ella, Anna’s alter ego; blue*psychoanalysis and its work in
everyday life*a diary of Anna’s analysis with Mrs Marks and its after-
effects, sometimes simply a chronology of world events juxtaposed with
psychic time: the time of memory, dream, reverie and madness. The
separate notebooks are testimony to the difficulty of making an organic
‘philosophical’ narrative out of these split stories and selves.
In Lessing’s novel the structural as well as contingent impediments
to global harmony, personal life and storytelling are problems facing
‘Free Women’*Lessing’s heading for those sections that take place in
the novel’s real time, as well as the phrase Anna (daughter of Frank
.......................................................................................................
‘Freeman’) and Molly Jacobs (Anna’s older actor friend) use, ironically, of
themselves. Soon after I became involved with the women’s movement in
the early 1970s, I realised just how ferocious and how convoluted a
conversation The Golden Notebook, through Anna, was having with
Virginia Woolf [author]*with Woolf’s novels, essays, diaries and
perhaps especially with a A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.
Two decades on, Anna and Molly are Woolf’s ‘Chloe and Olivia’ in
serious conversation; Anna, like ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, is created to offer
other possibilities for the woman writer, possibilities that come with a
strong health warning. Anna and Molly have acquired*not without
struggle but without massive opposition either*education, careers,
rooms of their own, lovers, children, a role in political life, but rarely
are these things achieved without cost. Woolf linked the future
development of the female-authored novel to the civil emancipation of

women, whose worldview she thought, would, with the franchise, move
beyond the domestic and personal: women would be ‘no longer angry’
and therefore better writers. Anna’s struggles show that domestic space
and the body still matter as the stuff of life and fiction, and that women
remain subaltern figures, and still angry: Ella cooking a meal for the lover
who stands her up; Anna reflecting on love and the female orgasm, and
the management of her period on a working day. Unlike Woolf, who was
scathing about psychoanalysis even while Hogarth Press published
Freud’s work, Anna accepts and profits from the self-knowledge that
‘Mrs Marks’, ‘Mother Sugar’, gives her, as I had, and would. At the end of
the novel, Anna goes mad for a time*and survives. Yet new freedoms,
Lessing cautions, do not guarantee a brave new world. If Molly and Anna
imagine themselves a step or two further than women of Woolf’s
generation, their children*Molly’s tormented son Tommy and Anna’s
daughter Janet*reject the politics and lifestyles of their mothers’ youth:
at the novel’s close the women also settle for less. Molly will marry a nice
liberal Jewish businessman, while Anna, opting for reform rather than
revolution, becomes a marriage counsellor and joins the Labour party.
My own relations with Lessing’s novel were peculiar*I responded to
it at first with a deeply atavistic rage, as if it were not a work of fiction but a
kind of maternal/political superego and I an argumentative adolescent.
Why had Anna conceded so much ground? Why was the novel so defeatist
about everything from politics to the future of fiction, to love and sex? As I
read, I ran another story*mine and my left-wing family’s*alongside
Anna’s. In the early to mid-1950s, I was five to ten years old, Anna in her
early thirties, my parents in their early forties. For my American family in
those years, communist sympathisers if no longer card-carrying members,
it was McCarthyism that was politically in our face, not, a bit strangely
.......................................................................................................
I now reflect, the upheavals in the Party. And 1962 was a hopeful political
moment in my political life: my college years, 1957!61, were taken up
with the Civil Rights movement, the making of the New Left, and segued
in the later 1960s into anti-war politics. The Golden Notebook’s account of
Anna’s deepening alienation with the British CP in the 1950s, as well as her
wartime African experience, jolted me out of an unconscious North-
American provincialism that marked my own and my parents political
history. The novel was as an eye-opener*there would be many more*en
route to becoming a more cosmopolitan, transatlantic subject. A willing
expatriate, I was nevertheless shocked by the violence entailed in
separating geographically, emotionally, politically from my family and
the world they and I grew up in.
By the time my rapport with it was exhausted The Golden Notebook
was more like a wayward, influential aunt than an overbearing mother. It

had, obliquely, done its good work*recruited me to a more femocentric
perspective, if not quite feminism itself*preparing me too, I guess, for
the failure of my marriage, for single parenting in a foreign country. Yet it
is where I resisted the text most that it had its best effect: the less I
sympathised with Anna’s political analysis, unhappy love affairs, cyni-
cism or compromises, indeed the more I hated the book’s controlling
tone*it is always Lessing speaking*the more it sharpened and clarified
the need and the difficulties of being a ‘free woman’ of my own
generation and formation, constraints understood but not accepted, with
political, personal and aesthetic hopes intact.
Axes: Marjorie Perloff on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel

In 1966 when Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, with its somewhat melodramatic
Introduction by Robert Lowell, was published by Harper and Row, I was
a first-year instructor at the Catholic University of America in
Washington, having received my PhD there the year before. It was a
hard time for professional women: my daughters were ten and seven
respectively and I, who had never really taught before (there were no
teaching assistantships in those days), had been assigned, as was then
typical, a four-course load: two sections of Freshman Comp, a Junior
Genre course that required me to teach Jacobean drama as well as
medieval romance*not quite my areas of expertise*and a Senior
Seminar in literary criticism.
One day in the Savile Bookshop in Georgetown, I happened to pick
up Ariel and read the lines:
.......................................................................................................
Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss,
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine . . .
A poet writing about potatoes hissing in the kitchen and a conversation

with a neighbour felt to be vicious! A related poem*‘Mary’s Song’*that
begins with the line, ‘The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat’. I was instantly
hooked. Plath was a year younger than I was when she committed suicide,
and, as I later learned from reading The Bell Jar (published posthumously
in 1971), her experience at Smith was not so different from mine at
Oberlin and Barnard. Like Plath, a few of my friends had won the
Mademoiselle (called Ladies’ Day in The Bell Jar) summer contest and
quickly learned how dreadful that ‘fashion’ experience could be. So
I read Plath’s deadpan account of Esther’s life in the New York magazine
world with a shock of recognition. These were the years when the top
colleges trained girls, as we were always called, to become the ‘right’
wives and mothers. I always loved playing with my children*I’m a
natural for dress-ups or ‘Monopoly’*but the hard part was the need to
be friendly with one’s neighbours*women with whom one usually had
nothing in common. I can still remember the conversations about
whether to trust one’s cleaning lady to polish the silver (she might, after
all, steal it!) and the endless competition as to whose toddler was the most
‘advanced’ in the toilet-training department.
So Plath’s very vivid, immediate, and gorgeously crafted poems about
her daily life*and then move towards death*had a very special appeal
to me. Here was a genuinely new way of approaching poetry, and I was
soon writing an essay about Plath’s work*her particular lyric mode of
Einfühlung*which was published in 1970 in the then new Journal of
Modern Literature as ‘Angst and Animism in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath’.
This essay, one of the first on Plath’s poetry, was followed by others on
The Bell Jar, the earlier work, and the posthumous arrangement of the
Ariel poems by Ted Hughes, whose own poetry I have always found
much less appealing and original than hers.
Within a decade or so, Plath had become a household word*think of
Woody Allen’s Annie Hall*and I found the hoopla a bit disconcerting.
Sylvia Plath was not, after all, W. B. Yeats or T. S. Eliot or Gertrude
Stein, and the biographical emphasis of most Plath discussion seemed to
trivialise the poetic accomplishment. As time went on, my own tastes in
poetry changed dramatically: confessionalism, even Plath’s brilliant
variant, no longer interested me and I read*and wrote*primarily about
developments in avant-garde poetry, from Futurism and Dada to Frank
O’Hara and John Ashbery, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein*and,
.......................................................................................................
more recently, younger poets like Caroline Bergvall or Yoko Tawada.
Then, too, Sylvia Plath, through no fault of her own, has had a
problematic influence. There have been many ‘domestic’ poets writing
Plathian poems about overheard phone conversations and non-function-
ing washing-machines, which are merely self-indulgent and boring. But I
still find Ariel exciting in its accuracy and passion: who else could take a
cut thumb or a vase of tulips received at the hospital and transform the
ordinary into the genuinely sinister? When, in reading ‘Cut’, I come to
the lines about the blood, spurting from the poet’s thumb, as an army:
A celebration, this is.

Out of a gap
A million soldiers run
Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on?
I still feel the poignancy of the absurd question, set off so neatly in its
own line. Ariel gave women (and men) permission to talk about things
that had been wholly taboo and yet (for the most part) maintain aesthetic
distance from what might have been such melodramatic material. Her
example brought contemporary poetry right to the centre of the larger
cultural discourse. One felt that poetry*a women’s poetry*mattered.
‘Words’ could be ‘Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings, / And the
echoes!’
Mandy Merck on Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex
The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first
feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the
sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no
longer matter culturally.
The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.
Pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for
the sake of the species. Moreover, childbirth hurts. And it isn’t good for
you.
In the forty years since these words were first published, the book in
which they appeared has undergone a strange history. Written by the
.......................................................................................................
then twenty-five-year-old Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex was
first published in the autumn of 1970, the same year as Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Like those other
founding texts of women’s liberation, it became a best-seller. But unlike
them it also became the object of attack and misrepresentation from both
conservatives and feminists before subsiding into neglect.
Shulamith Firestone wrote as a very radical feminist, arguing that
the division of human beings by reproductive function is the origin of
women’s subordination, but she was also a socialist, an ecologist and an
early advocate of children’s rights. In its opening fourteen-page chapter,
The Dialectic of Sex takes in Engels, Marx, Fourier, Owen, Bebel,
Newton, Beauvoir, Sartre, Hegel and Freud. If this sounds ambitious,
even for 1970, it is. Yet, unlike Sexual Politics, which was originally
written as Millett’s doctoral dissertation, Firestone’s book is not an

academic study. Instead, in a long feminist tradition ranging from the
writings of Mary Wollstonecraft to Valerie Solanas to Donna Haraway,
it is a manifesto*a fierce, funny and outrageous exhortation to political
change.
Firestone’s feminist contemporary Ann Snitow described her in a
1994 essay, ‘Returning to the Well’, as the ‘sort of person . . .
at the beginning of movements. Magnificent and stunned by

insight, they tell us we must change our lives; the way we live
is intolerable. Then they stagger off, leaving the less moonstruck
to try to live the insight out.
As Snitow observed, a book arguing against pregnancy and for the rearing
of children in communal collectives was bound to be demonised,
brandished by conservatives as proof that the early women’s movement
was crazy ‘(They refuse to be mothers! They want babies from test
tubes!)’, or*in the view of later feminists*male-identified ‘(They didn’t
like mothers! They wanted babies from test tubes!)’. And if these
positions weren’t liabilities enough, The Dialectic of Sex is by far the
most utopian of feminist manifestos, proclaiming ‘love alone’ as the basis
of human relations, which she believed would become ‘pansexual’. ‘We
are allergic to utopia just now’, Snitow wrote,
often seeing any sweeping refigurative thinking as falsely universalis-

ing, naı̈ve, out of touch with the hardness of power . . . Those who
came after have had to work at a slower pace, to take greater care. We
police ourselves and each other more, while Firestone was shamelessly
willing to generalize, speculate, make mistakes. To re-experience this
unapologetic voice now is a tonic.
.......................................................................................................
Firestone’s voice fell silent when she withdrew from active politics in
1970, just before her manifesto came out. When it was reissued in 1993,
feminist historian Alice Echols pronounced her withdrawal
[a] tragedy for the movement. There was nothing like

The Dialectic of Sex. Kate Millett’s pioneering Sexual
Politics was a sober tome. Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch was provocative but annoyingly coy. From its
opening line*‘Sex class is so deep as to be invisible’*
The Dialectic of Sex is a passionate, brilliant and
uncompromising book.
As Echols points out in her book on the Sixties, Shaky Ground, for many
‘woman-identified’ feminists Firestone was the ‘bad girl’ who ‘provoked
and revealed an enormous cultural anxiety about who would provide the
caretaking were women to stop being ‘women’. But for Echols, the appeal
of The Dialectic of Sex lay precisely in this refusal of femininity:
No one practiced this better than Firestone, whose ‘dream’

action for women’s liberation was a ‘smile boycott’, in
which ‘all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’
smiles, henceforth smiling only when something
pleased them.’
Predictably, Firestone’s reissued book did not please the Women’s

Studies culture of the 1990s, and it was again out of print again when a
young feminist named Jennifer Baumgardner republished it in a new
series of Feminist Classics in 2003. Getting this series off the ground took
Baumgardner years, during which Firestone re-emerged as the author of a
1998 collection of short stories, Airless Spaces, about people with mental
illnesses. In a terse explanation for the long years of silence, the cover
blurb reads, ‘Refusing a career as a professional feminist, Shulamith
Firestone found herself in an airless space’. Meanwhile, a graduate of
Firestone’s alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago, had discovered a
1967 documentary*Shulie*made about Firestone by four male Chicago
art students. At Firestone’s request, the film was never distributed, so
video artist Elisabeth Subrin shot a remark, also titled Shulie (1997). The
widespread notice achieved by this simulated documentary brought The
Dialectic of Sex back into public discussion.
In October 2010, the fortieth anniversary of Firestone’s manifesto will
be marked by a new collection of essays, Further Adventures of the
Dialectic of Sex (Palgrave Macmillan), co-edited by Stella Sandford and
myself. In it, nine different authors, ranging from reprotech ethnographer
.......................................................................................................
Sarah Franklin to queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman, reconsider Fire-
stone’s arguments about the potential benefits of cybernation, the historic
betrayal of feminism, the disastrous effect of the nuclear family on
women and children, and the dialectical relations between nature and
culture. We urge you to accompany us.
Deryn Rees-Jones on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf’s call, nearly a century ago, for material space and
economic independence in A Room of One’s Own was a vital touchstone
to me as a younger woman aspiring to become a writer. Perhaps what
fascinates me most about it now*almost certainly because I am at that
point when I can claim a relative financial independence, and do indeed

have a room in which to write*are the anxieties about genre, specifically
poetry, and their connection with women, biological mothering and
creativity, which emanate from it, as well as those which it provokes.
As Elizabeth Abel writes, reflecting on Woolf’s use of biological
metaphors of conception in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psycho-
analysis, ‘Texts are mothered, not authored, in Room, although Woolf
opposes textual maternity to biological maternity . . . Unlike the pen
that serves authorial self-expression, the mind-as-womb separates texts
from their creators . . . Successfully giving birth to a text is
synonymous, finally, with the androgyny Room openly propounds’.
For Woolf, there was not only a clear sense that textual maternity was
a substitute for biological maternity, but that great writing could not
be produced by women who chose to be, or became, mothers. Woolf’s
increasing awareness of the dangers of formulating an equation of
creativity with motherhood in the face of fascist ideology were of
course rightly felt and, as Abel has pointed out, rejected by the time
she was writing Three Guineas a decade later. But the depth of Woolf’s
anxieties about creativity and maternal fertility (if, simplistically, To the
Lighthouse can be read as an elegy to her mother, perhaps A Room can
also be read, defensively, as an elegy to lost motherhood) resound in
ways to which it seems important to return.
A Room’s use of the figure of Mary Carmichael*whose imaginary
novel Life’s Adventure Woolf contemplates, and who may in a hundred
years turn out, if she continues to innovate, to be a poet*also taps
deeply into the metaphors of biological propagation and the propaga-
tion of texts. Mary Carmichael, as Abel has pointed out, was the
pseudonym of birth control reformer and activist Marie Stopes.
Stopes’s novel Love’s Creation was published in 1928, ten years after
.......................................................................................................
her Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties,
and her birth control book Wise Parenthood. How aware was Woolf,
too, of the fact that Marie Stopes was also a poet, though almost
certainly not the kind of poet that Woolf, in her women’s poetry
series at Hogarth Press, would have wanted to publish? Aside from
Orlando, who begins life as a man only to evolve into a woman, all
the poets in Woolf’s fiction are men. It is surely no accident then that
the poet in the novel To the Lighthouse, which immediately precedes A
Room, is a Mr Carmichael; again no coincidence given the Scottish
setting of To the Lighthouse, that the Scottish Marie Stopes lived for
some time in a lighthouse. In Married Love Stopes writes that ‘the man
and the woman are each organs, parts, of the other. And in the
strictest scientific, as well as in a mystical, sense they together are a
single unit’; love’s creation is a ‘super-physical entity created by the

perfect union in love’. This ‘other’, for Stopes, is neither baby nor
poem, but it is striking that both Woolf and Stopes configure a third
space, which claims neither male nor female as its gender, but is a
creative union of the two. While the third space for Woolf is removed
in the form of the child/poem from the couple who create her, Woolf
almost certainly had Marie Stopes, sexual union and birth control, as
well as Coleridge on her mind, at a time when she was thinking
through what exactly it meant to write as a woman poet.
Thinking about A Room, re-teaching it, at the same time as I have
been thinking through and adapting my own feminist politics, and
learning too, to identify myself (at least some of the time) as a poet
and a mother, has made me question in turn the kinds of creative
space I might need in order for those two parts of me to fruitfully
cohabit. Reading A Room it is impossible not to return again to the
question of whether it is more difficult for a woman to ‘become’ a
poet than it is for a man, and to ask whether eighty years after its
publication women poets have yet ‘stepped into the body’ of Judith
Shakespeare and taken ownership of poetry. The deep anxieties about
genre that Woolf seemed able to play out with such surety in her own
work are foregrounded in A Room. The woman poet seems to become
the natural heir*in some kind of Darwinian evolution*to the
woman novelist whose broken sentences and sequences are projected
to become, in a hundred years, a new kind of literary modernity: the
poem written by a woman.
Jessica Benjamin’s discussion of intersubjectivity and woman’s
achievement of ‘a desire of one’s own’ in Shadow of the Other has a
ghostly Woolf resident in its formulation, and it is tempting to think
how intersubjectivity might be seen as a more refined and mobile
.......................................................................................................
version of Woolf’s desire for the androgynous mind that attempts to
escape gender binaries. Benjamin writes, ‘An intersubjective theory of
the self is one that poses the question of how and whether the self can
actually achieve a relationship to an outside other without, through
identification, assimilating or being assimilated by it. For Benjamin,
‘being a subject of desire requires ownership and not merely activity.
Ownership depends upon reclaiming the maternal form of activity, the
recognition and holding of emotional states, excitement in particular.’
While I think it is vital to be able to celebrate the women poets*
poets such as Anne Stevenson, Eavan Boland, Selima Hill, Medbh
McGuckian, Vicki Feaver, Jackie Kay, Carol Ann Duffy and, of the
younger generation, Alice Oswald, Vona Groarke, Kate Clanchy, Sinead
Morrissey, Kathleen Jamie, to name just a few*who successfully write
and publish poetry, and who are also biological mothers, it is important
not to forget that participating in poetic activity with all its positive
energies and privileges might also involve considerable negotiation of
difficulty on a practical as well as a psychic level. Woolf’s point in A
Room of course is that the material and the psychic are never divorced.
Both Woolf’s and Benjamin’s formulation also serve to highlight, directly
and indirectly, the ways in which depletions of the self in mothering can
bring about the demise of the textual mother. I am often personally
aware of the parallels between ‘maternal activity’ and writing (and,
indeed, of the vital importance of differentiating between one’s texts and
one’s children. One can, after all, put down the text one is working on,
rewrite it or erase it: not so one’s children . . .) In my own experience,
actual mothering, as well as identification with the maternal function, has
opened up a capacity and an awareness of self-ownership at the same time
as making me aware of the dangers of self-abnegation and the depletion of
energy that the sustained and often simultaneously creative*as well
mundane*interaction with one’s children involves. Is making room for
these kinds of parallel reclamations of maternal activity a more dangerous
accommodation for the woman poet? In our current culture I suspect it
still is. The creation of the woman poet requires, Woolf writes at the end
of A Room of One’s Own, an ‘effort on our part’. Reflecting on this in
2009 it seems vital not to acquiesce to a narrative that suggests that the
collective cultural effort of mothering her (irrespective of whether or not
she has children) is a task we should neglect, or even*in our
complacency*decline. Instead, it demands that we continue to scrutinise
the position of the woman poet, and to hope that Woolf’s somewhat
arbitrary projected marker of a century of women’s writing brings us to
the point in 2029 where anxieties need not be exhibited, and from where
new and dynamic narratives of the woman poet continue to unfold.
.......................................................................................................
My Lonely Planet: Vesna Goldsworthy on Rebecca West’s Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon
In the summer of 2009, I travelled through the Balkans lugging a copy of
Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in the torpid heat. At over
half a million words, this book*West’s paean to Yugoslavia, my
vanished homeland*is almost as long as the Old Testament. It is not
so much a guidebook*it is too wilfully unreliable*as an exhilarating
companion who transforms the way you see a place you think you know,
and changes your life in the process. It is always profound, often
provocative, and occasionally annoying, as any companion is bound to be
on a long journey.
Of all West’s books, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has been examined
most widely, not just as a literary work but as a political primer. Its fate
is closely related to Yugoslavia’s destiny. Published in 1941, when
Yugoslavia lay freshly dismembered and under Nazi occupation, in the
1990s its reputation sagged*from being recommended reading to being
warned against as ‘bad history’. Its advocacy of Yugoslavia’s survival was
now seen as pro-Serbian. US president Clinton was advised not to read it
lest it skewed his views on the region. That West’s book should be seen as
dangerous is a testimony to its power, but it is also a pity, as the issue of
partisanship has flattened out a complex narrative. In truth, Black Lamb
and Grey Falcon is a hybrid piece of life writing. Its extraordinary literary
form, so well suited to the nature both of the country and West as a
writer, make this book a modernist, and perhaps also postmodern,
masterpiece. Bad history it may or may not be, but it is great literature.
I grew up in Tito’s Yugoslavia where, because of West’s anti-
communism, the book remained unknown. I was in my twenties when
I discovered it. I am now forty-eight*the age West was when she
completed her, by her own admission, mad project of writing an
‘inventory of the country, down to its last button’. It had taken six
years. The whereabouts of her Yugoslav friends were now unknown
(many were incarcerated in concentration camps) and she sat in her
garden playing ‘O come, do not delay’ from The Marriage of Figaro against
the drone of bombers over London. She was convinced that no one
would want to read her book even once*let alone three times, as I have
now.
Weighing four pounds in paperback, West’s masterpiece was the
heaviest item in my suitcase, yet I am not alone in taking it with me amid
the discomforts of Balkan travel. The US journalist Robert Kaplan wrote:
‘I would rather have lost my passport and money than my heavily
thumbed and annotated copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’. Geoff
.......................................................................................................
Dyer described it as ‘a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never
requires updating’. Others have seen it as ‘the twentieth century’s greatest
travel book’, ‘one of the very greatest books of the last fifty years’, a
‘work of genius’.
But an ‘inventory of Yugoslavia’ alone would never deserve six
months of my life. One may be baffled by West’s power to grasp the
slippery essences of history, or wish to argue with her (scary prospect
though this is, for she was one of the fiercest polemicists of her times),
but, when travelling, one learns to relish moments that are ‘pure West’.
Such was the instant I stepped out of a propeller plane at the grandly
named St Paul the Apostle International Airport in the Macedonian town
of Ohrid, where my flight from Belgrade landed ten hours after the only
other arrival of the day. Airport staff outnumbered passengers. Notices in
Macedonian and Albanian urged travellers to declare their weapons and

insisted that officials did not accept bribes. The vast lake sparkled, and
Ohrid’s citadel shimmered like a mirage amid oleanders and wild figs on
the hill. Its freshly reconstructed ramparts were bedecked with the new
state’s flags depicting a yellow sun against a red background. The light
was so overwhelming that one felt an epiphany of some sort*some
matter of life and death*would present itself if one fully opened one’s
eyes. ‘Macedonia is the country I have always seen between sleeping and
waking’, West wrote in one of the many passages I know by heart.
Macedonia provoked one of the central meditations about the nature of
sacrifice which runs through her book. We offer ourselves up as victims
because it seems both good and easy*and religion teaches that we
should*but we shouldn’t, West urged: we should fight evil and defend
beauty wherever we can.
It is, probably, the best book about Yugoslavia ever written.
However, I often wish it were about somewhere else, for I believe that
it would be read more widely were it about France or Italy, rather than a
marginalised and ‘complicated’ place. I don’t agree with everything West
says*and even she knowingly contradicts herself*yet Black Lamb
remains superior to most ‘authoritative’ Balkan texts written by those
aspiring to academic and advisory posts. Complexity attracted West to
Yugoslavia and the task she set herself was to transcribe it. In the process,
she herself created a work of beauty that is worth defending.
It is a bold book by a writer at the height of her literary powers. It
offers a compendium of attempts, as Nazism’s shadow lengthened, to
think through the universal ‘big questions’: the nature of life, death and
love; the importance of the urge to create and*when need be*to die
protecting creation. Which other book does that without grandiloquence,
while tackling many ‘smaller’ points on its way: whether deciding why
.......................................................................................................
some cities work and others don’t; why women (mothers in particular)
are happier in some societies than in others if all societies claim to
worship womanhood and motherhood; or describing a hilarious lesson in
belly dancing she took from a Jewish refugee in a hotel in Sarajevo, ‘the
only time in [her] life that [she has] been reproached with undue
slenderness’?
Clearly, West was never a writer meant to wax lyrical about some
place like Provence. An ardent feminist, in 1913 she was twenty when she
wrote: ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism
is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express
sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’ Around
this time she denounced H. G. Wells as ‘the Old Maid among novelists’,
sneering at his work*‘the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long
absorbed in airships’*so amusingly and cruelly that he felt compelled to

meet her. She remained witty and vicious throughout her seventy years as
a writer.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is also, unusually for a work that deals
with politics and war, a book full of women. West sought interlocutors
like the classical scholar Anica Savic Rebac, only a few months younger
than herself. ‘If there were twenty people like this woman scattered
between here and China, civilisation will not perish’, West quoted a
friend as saying. I often wondered what this unusual thinker, who
translated Byron into Serbian when she was twelve, and Montenegrin
metaphysical poetry into English not much later, was like. I’d have given
anything to witness her encounter with West: a meeting of equals.
Married to Hasan Rebac, a Sorbonne-educated Herzegovinian Muslim,
Savic Rebac tried to kill herself on the day of his burial, before finally
shooting herself in 1953. ‘I am dying consciously and autonomously’, she
wrote, in emulation of the Stoics.
So many English women visiting the Balkans used their position of
privilege to meet the ‘great and the good’*and in patriarchal societies
those were men*seemingly happy to collude with what West describes
as ‘the pretence that women are worthless even though full advantage is
taken of their worth’. It is to West’s credit that she wasn’t dazzled by
displays of power, and that she sought out women like Anica instead.
Such meetings make her book an inspirational source for the history of
European feminism.
In short, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the strangest feminist
works I know. When West wrote it, she was as uncertain about feminism
as she was at twenty, while rendering it visible in every word of this
majestic book. ‘No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had
more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of
.......................................................................................................
the world more intelligently’, William Shawn of the New Yorker wrote
after West’s death in 1983. Whenever I am too scared to tackle a writing
task because ‘others could do it better’, or ‘it wouldn’t interest anyone’,
or when I censor myself, I wish I could be more like Rebecca West.
Pragna Patel on James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man
You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those
nets*Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist
James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not a book written
by a woman. It does not even deal with what could be called ‘feminist’
themes. But it was a profoundly life-changing book for me*it shaped my
resistance to the conservative and traditional values that scripted the
gender role I was expected to perform in my family and community, and
it has continued to shape my political outlook in the face of the rising
religious fundamentalism and racial and religious intolerance that now
threatens to engulf us worldwide. Having first discovered it when
studying for my A level English literature, I find it is a book that still
speaks to me today.
In 1977, I was sixteen years old*having lived in the UK since the age
of five*when I was taken to a village in India on the pretext of a holiday.
It was my first trip to India and I found myself desperately trying to make
sense of that vast and complex country of my origin, the birthplace of
Mahatma Ghandi, and the sheer scale of poverty the like of which I had
never encountered before. But before I could even begin to take stock, I
found myself being forced into meeting with a young man introduced to
me by my mother’s relatives for the purposes of marriage. I was utterly
shocked at the idea but, alone and trapped in an unfamiliar environment,
I found that events just overtook my protestations, sobbings and
pleadings. I returned to the UK from India, engaged, and feeling confused,
frightened and helpless. I was expected to write to and eventually sponsor
my future husband to the UK. There were no adults that I could talk to,
in or out of the home, no enlightened teachers or advice centres, no laws
or guidelines, and no wider societal awareness about forced marriages.
There were no role models in my family, I knew of no females who had
resisted the social pressure to marry and who had chosen instead to
continue with higher education. I was on my own, groping in the dark,
trying to decide whether to submit to or defy family and community
expectations of me.
.......................................................................................................
Every day was an emotional rollercoaster. Each morning I would
wake up determined to resist the idea of marriage to someone not of my
choosing, at a time not of my choosing. But each day, the pressure from
my family and relatives multiplied. Why did I think I was superior to
other women, or above the religious and cultural norms that guided the
rest of the women in my community? Why did I want to bring shame and
dishonour to the family name? Why did I not think of my mother, who
had worked so hard and selflessly to provide for the family, and who
desperately wanted her own pride and reputation restored in the face of
hostile in-laws? Why did I not think of the ruin that I would bring to my
three younger sisters and brother, whose own marriage prospects
depended on my marriage? Why did I think that I could overcome my
kismet (destiny)? Each night, I would go to bed, exhausted by the sheer
weight of social and emotional pressure which demanded that I submit to

the will of my family.
And then, just when I found myself acceding to the marriage out of
sheer exhaustion, I also found myself holding Portrait close to my chest,
sobbing my heart out, and repeating to myself again and again the words
of the constant refrain by Stephen Dedalus in the book: ‘I will not
submit’. I found inspiration and comfort in his determination to reject the
stifling constraints of family, nationality and religion in order to take
flight and find his own voice. Each day, I would wake up with renewed
courage, ready to do battle with my family, ready to dissent, struggle and
resist.
Eventually, after a year of civil disobedience on my part*I refused to
write to my fiancée or to even acknowledge our engagement*my family
caved in, exhausted by my sheer determination and will to resist and fight
back. I was free, and I lost no time in getting the grades that I needed to
get to university*I knew that education was the only way to open doors
to the world outside.
Portrait remains my touchstone text in so many ways*it reminds me
of the power of education, and it highlights exactly why it is that books
and knowledge pose such a threat to religion and especially to the
fundamentalists who are on the rise in all religions throughout the world.
In 1989, as a member of Southall Black Sisters and Women Against
Fundamentalism, I stood in solidarity with women from many religious
backgrounds and none, in protest against the Muslim fundamentalists
who called for the death of Salman Rushdie for writing a novel that
sought to question religious absolutism. I repeated the words ‘I will not
submit’, and I understood that Rushdie’s right to write was my right to
dissent. I recognised that these words were the only real weapons we have
.......................................................................................................
in our struggle against the patriarchal and illiberal identity politics, and
the power of religious absolutism that is on display everywhere.
Since 2001, in the post 9/11 world, we find ourselves struggling to
resist the unholy alliance forged ever stronger between the state and
religious leaders as they seek to corral us into specific, culturally
conservative, faith-based communities. Women, who come to SBS in
fear and desperation, find that their aspirations and desires for personal
security and liberty are being quashed by a growing insistence on faith-
based identities, on a ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ of identity, which serves
only to underpin the agenda of those who seek to control the minds and
bodies of vulnerable minority women. In such troubling and dangerous
times, I remind myself yet again of those powerful lines from Portrait, and
I strengthen my resolve to work with others to ‘fly by the nets’ of race,
caste, religion, nationality, class and patriarchy: nets that prevent women,
sexual minorities, writers, artists and any vulnerable and powerless sub-
group from soaring high and finding their own voice.
Portrait remains as relevant to me now as it was when I was sixteen
years old. I will be forever indebted to this book for changing the course
of my life and for helping me to shape the political outlook that I have
today. Every library, every school, every home should have a copy.

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This article was downloaded by: [Ramayana Lira]

On: 15 July 2015, At: 17:47

Women: A Cultural Review

Desert Island Texts?

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574040903558420

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Desert Island Texts?

T HE following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a

theory, a novel, an artwork, a performance, a poem: one that had

Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s

Theodor Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ for the ethics of perpetual

Penny Boumelha on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Samuel Smiles fable of the self-made woman, the outstanding qualities of

assume that religion is necessarily and always detrimental to women, or

‘Mad for the message. Yes yes yes’: Helen Taylor on

routine housework and childcare (shopping for groceries, making peanut

and her explanation of the frustration, bitterness and depression of a

writers have since complicated and enriched my understanding, none

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the Weaving of Her Feminist Web

simply because, as an assistant professor in her 20s, I was asked to

Susan Sellers on Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’

to direct address, melding comedy and graphic imagery with passages of

facilitates this), but a question of ethical choice. What creates a

Suzanne Raitt on Adrienne Rich’s ‘Transit’

apparently about two different women*one middle-aged, athletic,

Once a Feminist: Lynne Segal on Grace Paley’s The Little

unravelling, refurbished, as we try perhaps to keep pace with, or know we

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of

Palestinians in Israel’s Occupied Territory. From her very earliest

You know my opinions perfectly well . . . Don’t laugh . . . I believe in

The Jewish diaspora, however, increasingly embraced Israel, while

SCENE 1: AUGUST 1979

Twenty years ago, a group of groundbreaking texts by feminist scholars

drenched in anxieties about gender, sex, marriage and family. As a young

SCENE 2: AUGUST 1999

‘Victoria Redressed’, a conference held by the Dickens Project, University of

A record of the conference proceedings includes the following recollec-

At the feminist retirement home, the rhetoric of nineteenth-century

audience nodded, thinking about the heady 1970s*which they were

is recognisable as a figure from psychiatric and evangelical texts. Her

SCENE 3: AUGUST 2009

Victorian work of class, that separate spheres contained women in an

Gabriele Griffin on Remembering Alice Walker’s The Color

abuse by men, overcome through the love (emotional and sexual) of a

Margaretta Jolly on Anne Severson’s Near the Big Chakra

close-up, the vulvas of 37 women, ranging in age from three months to

RADIATING LIFE FORCE

It is tempting to agree with Varda’s assessment. Surely there had been

wave feminism was astute to the ideology whereby, as John Berger

DESIRE AND DISGUST

the numerous laboratory experiments on pornography. I guess I don’t

male colleague of Severson’s did from Severson’s rough cut, thinking he

light but whose life it wisely did not try to explain.

Barbara Taylor on Marian Engel’s Bear

In 1976 Canada awarded its premier literary prize to a novel about a

Sheila Rowbotham on Edith Thomas’s The Women

I heard about the French historian Edith Thomas from my tutor at

‘History’*which, in the sense that its movements affect women and

occupation, she reveals women as active agents in a wider historical

Birds of a Feather: Judith Halberstam on Chicken Run

In one of my favourite feminist texts of all time, the epic animated

trading the mise en scène*from bedroom to seabed or barnyard, from

mildly permissive father’, a Cambridge theology don. But when