Philobiblon

Article first published on Blogcritics

If you ask people to imagine “an artist”, what you’ll probably get is an image of a Renaissance man in a linen smock, or a slightly modernised equivalent. What you’re unlikely to get is an Indian peasant woman in traditional dress perched on a rough country ladder, painting the side of her house.

But browse through the pages of Nurturing Walls: Animal Art by Meena Women and the image in your head might well be changed.

Two short essays in the text explain and explore the women’s work, setting out how Mandana painting, as their work is term, is done by women from the Meena tribe in Rajasthan. It explains that the large tribe is concentrated as farmers in the Aravalli Hills, although they have a history as a warrior clan, which when overrun in the 11th century took to the hills as guerrillas, a role they maintained into the 20th century, leading to them being named by the British under the “Habitual Criminals Act” of 1930 as robbers and criminals whose movements needed to be curtailed.

Yet there’s nothing of this surely turbulent history in the images of this tradition, although perhaps a hint in the fact that it’s a temporary art, meant to be painted over again and again, as the chalk on mud fades. (Then again perhaps that’s simply a reflection of art has it has surely been through most of human history – a pleasurable creation to be immediately enjoyed, before we distorted it with the destructive effects of the market. And it gives a hint of how much of human artistic history we’ll never be able to recover through archaeology, except through the most unusual accidents of preservation.)

The style certainly broadly fits within that tradition somewhat patronisingly called “naive”, in that there’s no focus on realism, or the rules of perspective or many rules at all really (except one that’s probably largely practical – the great majority of the images are white chalk on brown walls).

And the skill of the artists, as you’d expect, varies – but the best of it here is truly stunning – captivating in its depiction of a playful love between animal mother and child, innervating in its lithe energy.
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The London Library copy of Before I Go…Reflections on my life and times, by the late Guardian women’s editor Mary Stott, was last borrowed in 1998, and only a couple of times before that.

It’s a pity for her 1985 memoirs have much to offer the reader of today, and have many reminders that many of the issues with which we’re wrestling politically – from voting systems to maternity leave – have been the subject of furious debate for decades.

Born in 1917, she’s something of a bridge between the First Wave feminists and the Second Wave, which she viewed from a place of mature professional power and influence (one of the few women in that position at that time) with some understandable bemusement. By modern standards she’s unsound on the subject of “Ms”, she hated it, and rather unsound on homosexual rights, but given the world she grew up in, she’s humane, commonsensical and remarkably clear-sighted, while being self-effacing and alost frustratingly humble.

She’s much to say on feminism that still has powerful resonance today, for example:

“The spate of books on women’s subjects in the last few years has been extraordinary. Too many, in my view, have been inaccessible to me, who left my grammar school at 17, and to the girls who leave their comprehensives at 16 – not to mention many others in between. I think it is time to concentrate more attention on the writing, on the simple, comprehensible exposition of ideas rather than on the bibliography.”

She’s also interesting as a defector from Labour to be a founding member of the SDP in 1981, and a member of its executive in 1982, a self-identified political neophyte:

“…it takes a very strong and politically idealistic spirit to survive bickering over procedural hassles. Procedure has to be sorted out, but perhaps the political novices, ‘the nice people’, the ‘wets’ have a role in indicating, now and then, when we can summon courage to tackle the technicians, that ‘ends’ are really what matter and what keep enthusiasm alive, and, even, that means can corrupt ends. Sometimes I fear that the more ‘political’ one becomes, the more one is likely to lose sight of the goal that made one join a party in the first place.”

Today, as the conservative government talks much of Big Society, while also slashing funding for the institutions that might support it, she reports on the president of the National Council of Women, Helen Waldsax, asking “that the government should ‘acknowledge in some constructive form the public service given by so many voluntary organisations to this country’ and warned that unless this was done, many organisations would have to function at half strength, or even disappear, which would mean the loss of ‘the source of supply of many specialist skills’. She added, ‘a very important democratic principle is at stake here’. But there has been no sign that Prime Minister Thatcher, who so heartily approves, she says the voluntary principle, has taken any notice.”

But perhaps the most pervasive sense one gets from this book is the modestly and self-deprecation of a woman who was obviously powerful and exceptional. It’s a reminder of how women were taught to be – and must never allowed to be again.

Article first published on Blogcritics.

Nina Power, if placed in a classification of feminists, would clearly fall within the socialist/Marxist camp, seeing the oppression of women arising chiefly from the economic base. But this is a sophisticated, nuanced form of this analysis, that is sensitive to the developments of the superstructure, as well as the base, of the past couple of decades.

Her One-Dimensional Woman is only about 50 actual pages of text, almost more pamphlet than book, but there’s a lot packed in, not all of it making an obviously coherent whole.

The title comes from Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man, who is “fully immersed in the promissary world of liberal democracy and consumerism, and yet ‘the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls”. For women today, Power says, “what looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles”.

She begins with a brief exploration of the Sarah Palin phenomenon, which is something of an outlier, if a topical one. The conclusion: “She turns maternity into a war-weapon, inexperience into a populist virtue and feminism into something that even the Christian Right could approve of.” Power makes the point that if we allow the term “feminist” to be captured by such women, progressive women concerned about basic rights from access to abortion onwards will have to disown it – it is worth defending.

In a similar vein is the chapter on the attempt to justify the Iraq war, and particularly the Afghan war, by the claim that its purpose (so historically nonsensical) is to free the local women. The answer to this is easier, really, just listen to the local women, who are very clearly saying “get out”.

Then Power gets into the meat of her argument, that the workforce has indeed been feminised: “work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women’s jobs tended to be in the past… Alternatively, we could turn this around and talk about the labourization of women – the way in which females are cast as worker first and only secondarily as mother or wife, or any other identity position not linked wiith economic productivity.”

Much of this has affected both sexes. So Power says: “The demand to be a ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking’, ‘selling yourself,’ in effect, to become a kind of walking CV is felt keenly.” But for women this plays on older stereotypes to particularly focus on their looks, their clothes, their body, which bleeds into woman as consumer, and the claim that any consumer purchase – from lipstick to chocolate, is feminist indulgence, because you’re worth it.

On this, Power gets particularly strong: “Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamante phone cover.” (Here she’s being, I think on balance unfairly, strongly critical of Jessica Valenti.)

But perhaps the most original part of this text is the exploration of pornography, on which Power argues for historical perspectives. As she briefly alludes to, it is well worth remembering that pronographic images were used as a form of political communication during and around both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, but “the ahistoricism of the anti-pornography movement takes as its presupposition the idea that men will always nurture a violent desire towards women and that porn is merely a reflection of this”.

Power argues, however, that before WWII, porn lacked the mechanistic, highly specialised characteristics of today, in older forms, particularly French films, “sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville”. The performers, she says, genuinely appear to be having fun, and the “plot” not infrequently runs around men’s difficulty in “performing”. Very different she says, from sex that is clearly work in contemporary porn.

So there’s a lot here, but ultimately what it fails to do is really provide a road-map, a way forward. Power has entirely justifiable criticism of what is being presented to us today as “feminism”. But she doesn’t really tell us what her own looks like.

What’s the origin of the fundamental misogyny in Western thought? If we’re ever going to get rid of it – to, in the large-scale terms I’ve started to think recently – get rid of the gender binary, the insistence that everything be split in two opposing categories to which the negative is assigned the female – one of the things we certainly need to do is work out where it came from.

That’s the subject of Vigdis Songe-Moller’s Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought, translated from the Norwegian by Peter Cripps. That a publisher should have chosen to translate such a text suggests something pretty special, and while it ventures into aspects of philosophy to which I have limited exposure, I rather think that it is.

Songe-Moller is conerned primarily with how Greek citizens (which means of course men), and particularly classical Athenian citizens, thought about women, and about reproduction, and relations between the sexes. Her basic conclusion is that they “seem invariably to have drawn sustenance from the dream of women’s superfluity”. (p.4)

In Greek and particularly Athenian myths, she finds again and again asexual, vegetative reproduction preferred to sexual – and suggests that this is related to the fact that only this way can a “perfect” reproduction of the male – a copy – be related. Despite Greeks liking to think of women as simply a vessel for the male seed (she quotes from Aeschylus’s tragedy, Eumenides: “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth/Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”), the fact that a child was not a copy of its father was undeniable.

So Athenians (men) thought of themselves as the descendants of Erichthonius, who is born when the Olympian blacksmith, Hephaestus, fails in a bid to rape Athena, but instead spills his seed on the earth, the soil of Athens, from which the child springs. He has a father, but no mother.

There’s also sociology: “Since it is the woman who gives birth to the child, it seems reasonable to regard her as the physical link between one generation and the next. For the Athenian oikos, however, she was an unstable link, insofar as a new woman had to be fetched into a man’s family for each new generation. ..Thus the secure link in the family was the man, the master of the house, the paterfamilias. It was he who symbolized the family’s unit and continuity, that is who enabled the family to remain the same through time.” (P. 16)

But it is Greek philosophy that is at the heart of the author’s argument, and particularly the pre-Socratic Parmenides, who establishes an ideal: “The ideal is eternity and immutability… a form of divine reality in which mortal phenomena such as life and death play no part. Parmenides can be characterized as Plato’s spiritual father; and the extent of his influence on European philosophy right up to the present day can hardly be overestimated. Philosophers of the Platonic tradition – from Parmenides and Plato through to Kant and Hegel – have for example found it natural to think in terms of heirarchies. Immutability is suprerior to change; eternity is set above time; immortality above decay and death.” (p.21)

More, Parmenides tries to define what is existence, or Being – something that exists. And central to his definition is certainly, lack of plurality or mutability. Not-Being, the alternative, is an essential part of change – e.g. a shoot becoming a leaf, but No-Being can’t be allowed anywhere near the pure Being. In her introduction, Songe-Moller explains how as a pregnant post-doc, she realised that “the Parmenidian idea of all things existing ultimately as one and self-identical is… far from self-evident.”

Songe-Moller goes then back to the 1960s and 70s Paris School around Jean-Pierre Vernant, which she says argued that there was a close link between the geometrical way of thinking of the ancient Greeks, with the circle as the central motif, and the archaic and classical city state. Each citizen was theoretically equidistant from the centre of power. Extending on from this, she says that Parmenides establishes this balance and equality through exclusion – the exclusion of women and slaves. “The unity and balance of Parmenides sphere of Being depend on the exclusion of Not-Being, and … this strategy can be regarded as analogous to democracy’s dependence on those groups that were excluded from it.” (p. 51)
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