Feminism - A Very Short Introduction.pdf

‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism
is’, the writer Rebecca West remarked, sardonically, in 1913. ‘I only
know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments
that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’ The word was
a comparatively new one when she wrote; it had only appeared in
English – from the French – in the 1890s. Interestingly, the earliest
examples of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary carried
negative meanings. In 1895 the Athenaeum sneeringly referred to a
piece about a woman whose ‘coquetting with the doctrines of
feminism’ are traced with real humour. ‘In Germany feminism is
openly socialistic’, the Daily Chronicle shuddered in 1908, and went
on to dismiss out of hand ‘suffragists, suffragettes and all the other
phases in the crescendo of feminism’.
In those years, some writers used an alternative term –
‘womanism’ – with the same hostility. One long-forgotten writer
was roused to angry sneers in his memoirs when he recalled
meeting an intellectual woman living in Paris (she comes across,
despite his prejudices, as lively and interesting) whose writings
reflected ‘the strong-minded womanism of the nineteenth century’.
Curiously, one of the sharpest attacks on the word ‘feminism’ came
from Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One’s Own is such an
effective and engaging plea for women. In Three Guineas, written in
1938 in the shadow of fascism and of approaching war, and
probably nervous about any ‘-ism’, she rejects the word out of hand.
No one word can capture the force ‘which in the nineteenth century
opposed itself to the force of the fathers’, she insists, continuing:
Those nineteenth century women were in fact the advance guard of
your own movement. They were fighting the tyranny of the
patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state.
They were called, to their resentment, feminists, she claims (she is
historically inaccurate – the word was unknown in the previous
century), and she goes on to insist that we must
destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much
harm in its day. The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That
word, according to the dictionary, means ‘one who champions the
rights of women.’ Since the only right, the right to earn a living has
been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a
meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word.
But though Virginia Woolf’s ‘right to earn a living’ was, and
remains, central to feminism, getting on for a century after she
wrote it is clear that its attainment by no means solved all
women’s problems. Women’s work – despite the much-publicized
earnings of some high-fliers in the business world – remains lower
paid; or, in the case of housework, not paid at all. When Woolf
was writing in the 1920s, feminists had hardly begun to articulate,
let alone address, women’s special problems: issues to do with
childbirth and child-rearing, or the strain on women who had to
combine housework and/or childcare with work outside the
home.
Over the centuries, and in many different countries, women have
spoken out for their sex, and articulated, in different ways, their
complaints, their needs, and their hopes. As this is a Very Short
Introduction, I have concentrated on feminism in one country,
England, and have tried to explore its development through time.
While women in other countries have had different experiences and
definitions, in England, right up until the 1960s at least, the word
‘feminist’ was usually pejorative. Very few women, however deeply
engaged in fighting for women’s rights, would have described
themselves as ‘feminists’. When women began to organize again in
the 1960s and 1970s, the movement called itself Women’s
Liberation (borrowing the term from black, Third World, and
student movements). This was often shortened, sometimes
affectionately, sometimes in a derogatory way, to ‘women’s lib’. But
those years also saw the word ‘feminism’ being brought back into
general use, and its meaning was extended. Though there was still a
justified concern that civil and legal equality had not been fully
achieved, the new movement tended to concentrate on problems
specific to women in their reproductive and social roles. In those
years, too, feminists in Britain made an attempt, at least, to reach
out across national boundaries and discover what they had – or did
not have – in common with feminists abroad.
But how often, still, do we hear women anxiously asserting ‘I’m not
a feminist but . . . ’ as they go on to make claims that depend upon,
and would be impossible without, a feminist groundwork? The
American feminist Estelle Freedman argues that right from its
origins, the word has carried negative connotations; that
surprisingly few politically engaged women have styled themselves
feminists. In the 1990s some feminists in England and the United
States identified and warned against a ‘backlash’ against feminism
and its undoubted achievements. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley,
for example, called their third collection of essays Who’s Afraid of
Feminism?, with a cartoon of a big bad wolf on the original jacket
cover. They argued that ‘attacks on feminism frequently merge into
a wider misogyny’; ‘the feminist’ is now the name given to the
disliked or despised woman, much as ‘man-hater’ or ‘castrating
bitch’, ‘harridan’ or ‘witch’, were used before the 1960s. They added
that women also have to expose and eradicate the misogyny
inherent in feminism itself.
Just as troubling is the caution that the term ‘feminism’ seems to
arouse in many younger women, a surprising number of whom
seem to shy away from the concept. One English tabloid recently
published a double-page spread entitled ‘Is Feminism Dead?’,
which managed, neatly enough, to sit on the fence; equal space was
devoted to arguments yes and no, to those who felt the term was
still urgently relevant, and to those who were sure it was dated, even
embarrassing, and should be retired. The piece was illustrated with
a photograph of ‘militant women’s libbers’ picketing a Miss World
demonstration. (In fact, everyone in the photo was laughing.)
Faintly embarrassed, I recognized my much younger self, with long
hair and long skirts, clutching a distinctly uninspired placard
announcing that ‘women are people too’. I had almost forgotten
that the Miss World contests still existed (in those bad old days it
was on prime-time television), until in 2002 the event received
unexpected publicity, first when Nigerian militants demonstrated
violently against its ‘parade of nudity’, which they thought would
encourage promiscuity and Aids, then when several contestants
refused to participate because a young Nigerian woman, sentenced
to death under Islamic sharia law for having become pregnant
outside marriage, was reprieved – but only until she had weaned her
baby. The beauty queens’ gesture was both courageous and effective,
though interestingly, one insisted, with a hint of anxiety, that she
took up her stand, certainly not because she was a feminist, or even
because she was a woman, but because she was a human being.
When I recently asked some women in their early 20s – some of
whom were university-educated, others working, and all, clearly,
beneficiaries of earlier battles for women’s rights – whether they
considered themselves feminists, or indeed had any interest in
feminism, most of them replied, flatly, no. The very term itself, one
woman claimed, sounds stuffy and out of date. Feminism, she felt,
has become, on the one hand, a playground for extremists – she
termed them ‘fundamentalists’ – who had nothing useful to say to
women like herself. On the other hand, she argued, feminism has
become ‘institutionalized’, and she compared it to communism: it
demands commitment, not simply to ideas, but to a generalized
ideology. Moreover, she added, it is nowadays just another academic
subject. You can get a degree in ‘gender studies’ and that, she felt, is
the real kiss of death: proof, if any were needed, that feminism is no
longer urgently relevant. Perhaps these younger women will feel
differently in ten years or so, when they find themselves juggling
family, housework, and a job; perhaps they will find that they need
to re-invent feminism to suit their own experience. But in a way, I
hope they will not need to.