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The new feminists: still fighting

Four decades on since woman began the campaign for equality, we asked seven modern-day activists to tell us why they believe the battle is still not won

 

Susie Orbach. Interviews by Shahesta Shaitly

The Observer, Sunday 15 August 2010

 

The feminist movement in the UK and the US did not start with bra burning – brilliant as that act now seems as a piece of political theatre. It started with small groups of women getting together to talk about "the problem that had no name".

Sitting in a circle, housewives, students, academics, artists, scientists and activists met in small groups to talk about their personal decisions, their sex lives, their love lives, their ambitions, their work, their children and their men, and discovered that the individual idioms of their lives which felt so personal and particular were, in profound and often startling ways, similarly structured and imagined.

They were self-limiting and cautious. They had imbibed injunctions not to want, not to desire, not to do unless that doing was within strictures of nurturing others and enabling them to fulfil their dreams. Whether it was typing a boyfriend's thesis or ironing his shirts, remembering whether flour was needed or the baby's nappy needed changing, women came upon their own internal patterns, which put them as midwives to the activities of others.

Four decades of activism have changed the face of what it means to be a woman in the west. Ambition is encouraged. In principle abortion is available. Sexual preference accepted. Women can borrow money in their own name. Collect child support as mothers. Daughters grow up believing the world is their oyster; that they can enter it as principals, not guests.

They don't anticipate that harassment may await them, equal pay may still be a dream, poverty a reality for many, that a hypersexualised culture will dog their attempts to feel comfortable in their bodies and childcare will flay them when they come to reproduce.

As their expectations clash with experience, they will be encouraged to see their difficulties as personal; the trumping of the feminist revolution by the "have-it-all woman" has privatised their experience, engendering a sense of individual failure if it doesn't – as it can't – all work out.

If they are lucky, they will turn to these eloquent women from Brazil, the US, Afghanistan, South Africa, India, Egypt and the UK and hear women who dare to articulate what others would rather not see. Sexual violence, physical abuse at home, infanticide of girl babies, abortion denied and sexuality controlled. They may begin to see links between their own privileged circumstances and the injustices which are perpetrated on women around the world as a form of control.

Hearing the struggles of women to challenge obedience, poverty, the denial of sexual rights and systematic rape and violence, they may understand the tools by which devastating relations between women and men, and women and women, are wrought.



Their window into seeing the entrenched nature of female infanticide – or as Asha Singh terms it, murder – of baby girls in India or of the so-called corrective rape of lesbian women in South Africa or the sexual violence that happens in Egypt may allow them to think about the social nature of the still unequal struggle for women's rights in the west.

Feminism has been a cultural force of epic proportions. As vision or as critique it has touched the lives of everyone. It has been the touchstone for modernity.

In the west, the women's movement has influenced all of our lives. It has transformed education, how we bring up our sons, acceptable sexual practice; it has enabled us to listen to children and be part of a trend in which personal experience as a testimony is appreciated for what it tells us about all of our lives.

Outside the west, as women have taken up education or earning money for themselves, social and sexual relations have been threatened. Sexual violence has increased, becoming an instrument of social control and terror. In the west, the right hails Sarah Palin as feminist heroine. The capacity of ideology to trim itself to the latest fashion can appear inexhaustible. But are we fooled? I think not. These magnificent interviews remind us of the need to ensure change for women (and men) around the world. And not only change, but the transformative nature of collective action.

 


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 820


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