Category Archives: Feminism

Books Feminism

Sheila Rowbotham at Bookmarks

June 10, 2010 – 10:37 pm

To Bookmarks this evening, to hear Sheila Rowbotham talk about her new book Dreamers of a New Day.

She’s a non-dogmatic but very easy to listen to speaker, and looking forward to reading the book, but at the talk what she had to say about feminism from the Seventies to the present drew most attention, and questions.

She said that in the Seventies feminists had thought things were moving very slowly in progressing their aims, but “we didn’t bargain on the fact that the whole system was going into a completely different phase.. we didn’t believe the whole welfare state would be so radically diminished…we saw things like women in parliament and equal pay as details – but these details proved to be extremely difficult.”

She made another powerful point: “In the Seventies we assumed that once you’d made a gain it would stay there; now we know you can go backwards.”

I asked her about her views on the focus in parts of contemporary feminism on sexualisation, and thought her response was very interesting.

She said that a key issue was that sexuality was being used to sell things, which was not new, but the commodity culture had managed to penetrate into many areas of personal life where it had previously scarcely been. That had affected how young women thought about their bodies – but that had also crossed the gender divide, also affecting men, although in different manifestations.

She suggested that it was the selling, the ultra-capitalism that needed to be tackled as the real issue. “I don’t know how that kind of system will change. It was the Marxist assumption that the working class would be the agent for change, but it didn’t have much to say about selling and environmental issues. The only alternative vision is from the environmental movement.”

Campaigners needed to work out how to express the need to change society without using moralistic disapproval. “It is not the case of convincing small groups – you need to work out how to convince the masses of people now watching the World Cup and buying lots of gadgets.”

But it wasn’t all heavy going – there were plenty of laughs, and I’m looking forward to meeting in the book the turn of the century Mrs Grundy “who argued for women’s right to Turkish baths”.

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Books Feminism Politics Women's history

Want to know why we should get out of Afghanistan?

May 23, 2010 – 10:42 pm

Article first published as Book Review: Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out by Malalai Joya on Blogcritics.

When I was running for the Green Party in the recent British general election, there was one issue on which I had no doubt how audiences at hustings and meetings would react positively – our call to withdraw British (and NATO) troops from Afghanistan. Surveys show around 70% of the public back that stance, and it was close to 100% of the audiences at hustings.

As I told them, I’d had in the past some doubts about our party’s policy of immediate withdrawal, having been worried about the human rights situation that we’d leave behind, particularly for women. But it was a Human Rights Watch report last year, which found 60-80% of the marriages of Afghan women and girls are forced, and learning that the brave women of Rawa are calling for withdrawal that led me to change my mind.

Having just read the autobiography of Malalai Joya, an outstanding Afghan woman MP, I’m now even more strongly of that view. (It was published in the US as A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise her Voice.)

She’s an extraordinarily brave, stalwart – and very, very young! — woman who has dedicated her life, and taken enormous risks, to speak out on human rights in her native land. And she says very clearly – and loudly and publicly in her own land, which led to her being expelled from parliament – that the people the U.S. and its allies are backing in Afghanistan are entirely the wrong people, the old warlords, many of them in her eyes (and those of others) war criminals. And she has no doubt that this foreign occupation can only prolong and amplify her nation’s problems.

Her story is an extraordinary one. Certainly, she was lucky in her parents, particularly her father, a democracy activist who moved his family around Iran and Pakistan as an exile in search for good schooling for them. (He, like the rest of her family, can’t be identified for their own safety – the name ”Joya” is one she adopted to protect them.) There must be many other potential Malalai Joyas in Afghanistan who will never get that essential foundation or confidence.

But there’s no doubt she was exceptional. Noticed as a fine teacher in the refugee camps, at the age of 21 she was sent to found an underground girls’ school in Herat by the Organisation For Promoting Women’s Capabilities. Only three years later, she was appointed to head its work in three provinces, just before 9/11. Under the new regime, despite its resistance, on her account she set up a clinic, orphanage and was able to distribute food supplies.

She must thus have been well known in the poor isolated province that was to send her, a 25-year-old unmarried woman, as a delegate to the 2003 Loya Jurga (national gathering) that was to approve a new constitution. Still standing for office, addressing a room full of women mostly older than herself, in her first “political speech” must have been quite an experience, and her delicate naivete is touching….

“I had a lot to say, and I wanted to cram those few minutes with everything I had ever done in my life, with everything I believed possible for the future, with everything I wanted for the women of Afghanistan. I stressed that I would never compromise with those criminals who had bloodied the history of our country, and that I would always stand up for democracy and human rights.

“As I spoke, I knew that my message must be getting through, because when the other women were speaking, members of the audience were chatting and making noise and not paying much attention. But as I began to speak everyone quietened down and listened. They even clapped a number of times during my speech…"

Yet, worryingly, as she made her way to the Loya Jirga, she gets strong warnings, not just from Afghans, but from UN officials, not to speak so bluntly there. She says: “Most of them seemed sincerely worried. I am not sure, but it is possible that some of them wanted to scare me into silence.”

read more »

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Feminism

Fundamentalist Christian influence – a real cause for election concern

May 2, 2010 – 8:33 am

The Observer today has an expose on Philippa Stroud, expected on Friday to be a Tory MP. She’s a fundamentalist Christian who has been praying to rid Britain of homosexuality – not in some sort of metaphorical sense, but directly and purposefully ecause she believes that’s what God wants and she wants to get him to do it. And she’s tried to do the same thing with individuals.

At a personal level, this kind of thing has a hideous effect on people – as the Observer quotes… “Angela Paterson, who was an administrator at the Bedford church, said: “With hindsight, the thing that freaks me out was everybody praying that a demon would be cast out of me because I was gay. Anything – drugs, alcohol or homosexuality, they thought you had a demon in you.”

It is something that I feel strongly about after an experience in Bankok. A Christian woman I knew had lots of personal issues, and also physical health issues. She arrived on my door one day in a terrible state, because she was ill (mostly related to diabetes), but mostly because the Christians with whom she lived had thrown her out because they were convinced the illness came from demonic possession. Not only had they thrown out an ill woman, they also dumped her possessions on the street, in case they were possessed…. She had been brainwashed into more than half believing they were right.

Of course all parties have prospective MPs with odd views, but Stroud apparently has great influence in the party – this a party that has Chris Grayling, who wants to allow prospective B&B guests to be thrown out on the street if they happen to be gay, and a leader who wants to reduce the abortion limit.

And this isn’t only limited to the Tories. Shockingly the allegedly “liberal” Liberal Democrats have had at least three MPs who have had interns from the heavily misnamed Care (Christian Action, Research and Education), which is anti-homosexual and anti-abortion rights – Paul Burstow, Tim Farron, and Steve Webb. (And there are also at least three Labour MPs.)

And there are also three Labour MPs, and SEVEN Tories.

Unfortunately none of these issues have been really aired in the election debates, but it does raise the question of whether the nasty, bigoted, “back to the 50s on ‘moral’ questions” party has really changed. Just look at where the money comes from.

Abortion Rights is already gearing up for a huge fight in the next parliament to defend access to abortion, and I fear similar struggles on other ‘moral’ issues.

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Feminism Politics

Powerful support for Green Party policy on sex work

February 21, 2010 – 5:22 pm

I was very pleased to chair on Friday what many afterwards said to me was a powerful session on the Green Party policy on sex work, which is, in short, in favour of the New Zealand, decriminalisation, model, which aims to protect the safety and wellbeing of sex workers by ensuring that they receive the coverage under employment law and under criminal law as anyone else, and that the stigma against them is minimised.

Catherine Stephens, of the International Union of Sex Workers, said that estimates suggested 80,000 people were working in the sex industry in the UK. Estimates for street sex work range from 3,000 to 22,000, and the Home Office says a maximum 4,000 women are trafficked. “So between 70-90% are non-trafficked off-street workers: an invisible majority who have no reason to the attention of the authorities or rescue organisations.”

Catherine said that streetworkers were generally accepted to be some of the most vulnerable people in the UK. “Street sex work shows a high prevalence of problematic drug and alcohol use, a correlation with a background in care, frequent low educational achievement, homelessness and a host of other problems.”

She added: “These women – referred to by a recent Home Secretary as a “blight” – are criminalised under the Street Offences Act of 1959. That’s now had a 50-year trial period and signally and completely failed to solve the problems associated with street sex work. However, recent legislation has intensified the existing approach, including defining “persistence” for soliciting: twice in three months. That gives this profoundly vulnerable group of women the opportunity to have contact with the police four times a year without fear of arrest.”

Yet even those women working indoors were, Catherine said, threatened by current legal conditions, which ensured that while prostitution itself was legal, many acts commonly associated with it were not. “Working indoors, the only way to be free of the risk of prosecution is to work for yourself in complete isolation. No current legislation actually targets coercion, violence, abuse or exploitation. Two people working together fulfils the legal definition of a brothel, so the law builds in isolation at the most fundamental level. … Would we be safer working together? Yes. Is that legal? No.”

“It is vulnerability which creates victims, not sex work itself, and the law makes us vulnerable.”

This was a powerful argument, but I think the most striking contribution was from Thierry Schaffauser, who has worked in the sex industry for sex years, in Paris and London, and is an activist with the IUSW, president of the GMB sex workers branch and I am International Relations for STRASS, the French sex workers union that includes more than 300 sex workers. (He also stood for Les Verts in local elections in Paris. (And he has also written on Comment is Free.)

He said: “I am happy to be invited to speak today because most of the time political parties don’t want to hear sex workers’ voices and even less if it’s a male sex worker although male and trans workers represent easily 30% of the sex industry in London.

“…When you are convinced to know better for others what is good for them, this means oppression. The only experts on sex work are sex workers themselves.

“The portrayal of sex workers as poor victims, sex objects, commodities, slaves, drugs addicts, victims of Stockholm syndrom and post traumatic disorders. All that, is not meant to help sex workers. But to deprive us our capacity to speak for ourselves and to allow false experts to present themselves as saviours and to confiscate our voice.

“…Anti-prostitution activists say that we are not workers. They say that we don’t sell our labour but our body. This is still the same strategy to deny our agency and intelligence. But this is also to prevent solidarity with other workers and exclude us from the labour movement. We can’t separate ourselves from our body. We all have to use our body in a way or another to work.

“…My body is more than just my sex. Being penetrated doesn’t mean that I give my body. The most important organ I use when I have sex is my brain. Being paid for sex doesn’t make me an object, at least not more than when I was working for minimum wage for a boss and that my legs and my back were hurting after 40 hours a week of work.

“What makes me an object is political discourses that silence me, criminalise my sexual partners against my will, refuse me equal rights as a worker and citizen, and refuse to acknowledge my self-determination and the words I use to describe myself.”

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Environmental politics Feminism

Things I failed to learn from my grandmother

February 14, 2010 – 9:07 am

Since I tried to make my first ever batch of preserves, at the age of 43, I’ve been musing on how much knowledge my grandmother had that she took to her grave, because I failed to learn it from it.

Sure, when I found myself with a very large pumpkin, home-grown, a feat achieved rather more by good luck than good management, I could look up a recipe for pumpkin chutney on the internet. I could look up the process for sterilising jars, then sterilising their contents, and off I went. But there are aspects of such things that are by far the best learnt from watching and working with an expert. (The onion definitely needs to be chopped small, I learnt, too late…)

And I’ve no doubt that my grandmother was an expert. She lived in a classic Australian house on a quarter-acre block, and the whole of the extensive back yard was devoted to fruits and vegetables. Well into her 70s, she tended that garden, producing an extensive range of produce that she stored and preserved in a wide variety of forms.

Not that I often ate it as a child, although there must have been great quantities of it. But I was taught to regard this lovely, homegrown, almost-zero-food-miles produce as embarassing, laughable even. “Proper” food came out of a supermarket freezer or from a can or bottle. Homegrown was a sign of embarrassing poverty and failure. (And it required skilled labour to process.)

Many other aspects of my grandmother’s life were also a cause for family embarrassment. She almost never threw anything away, and bought very little – the house was furnished with the furniture bought on marriage, and every potentially useful item – string, wrapping paper, bits of wire, were carefully arranged in drawers, available for use whenever required.

This all required thought, organisation, planning, system – things that I failed to learn from her.

Yet now, as I try to live an increasingly “green”, environmentally-friendly life, I’m forced to reinvent the knowledge that was second nature to my grandmother.

I’m trying to cut to almost zero my use of throwaway plastic containers, where it be Chinese takeaway or packaged berries, bottled soups or coffee cups. Yet I doubt my grandmother used in her life as any as I still use in a year, much as I try to cut down.

Whenever she left home, she took a packed lunch wrapped in paper, and a thermos of tea. There might have been a tin or two of soup in the cupboard for emergencies (when she was ill), but basically she cooked everything fresh, from scratch. And if berries weren’t in season on the bush outside, she went to her preserves.

I remember her telling me a story, very late in life, she was probably in her nineties by then, about a pair of scissors she was still using. As I recall the story her sister had been cutting some flowers, and had accidentally left these scissors in the newspaper in which the clippings were thrown on the compost heap. A couple of days later my grandma realised what had happened and rescued the now rusty implements. She soaked them in oil, then sandpapered off the rust, and here there were, perhaps eight decades later, still in effective use.

I was too young then, and perhaps too wrapped in consumer culture, to really grasp what I suspect she was trying to tell me, about more than a pair of scissors: get quality things, treat them with care, and make them last a lifetime.

And yet there’s also a darker, feminist moral in my grandmother’s life – she had made much of it, yet she lived as a virtual slave, her fine cooking, food-growing and preserving going to the service of a husband who treated her very poorly, who dropped his dirty clothes on the floor for her to pick up, and ordered a cooked breakfast every morning.

I certainly would never wish to be using the skills she had, should I be able to reconstruct them, for such a purpose, so as we do return, as we must, to these skills, this careful, preserving lifestyle, there’s something we’ve got to be very careful to do differently than did this early 20th-century generation: these must be skills for everyone to learn, everyone to exercise – men, women, and children too.

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Books Feminism Women's history

Learning from a feminist utopia

September 20, 2009 – 4:13 pm

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, created a new sub-genre, the feminist utopia. There’s something delightfully ironic about the creation, for there’s no doubt her world, an all-female one getting along very nicely thank you, would have horrified the original creator of the form, Sir Thomas More, and indeed it initially horrified her three main characters, men of her own time, who in best traditional style, set out to explore this unknown, mysterious land.

The narrator is Vandyke, clearly the most sensible and level-headed of the three; it’s a marker of the age of the text, and its liberal origins, that he’s trained in sociology. The character who is a symbol of the “typical” man of his age, and the one who fails utterly to cope with a society where women aren’t automatically his prey, is Terry, who supplies the aircraft and the funds for the expedition into this hidden land, sealed off by a volcanic eruption some two millennia previously.

The atypical man, the one who finds himself at home in Herland,
is Jeff, the expedition doctor and science lover, the sensitive, poetic type not entirely at home in his own society.

It’s a society that’s constantly striving to perfect itself: “Moadine told him. ‘We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty’.” The society is a democracy, if rather too fond of the decisions of the elders for modern tastes.

It’s developed what Vandyke finds is an entirely acceptable science, from astronomy to physiology, but where it has really excelled is agriculture, turning its limited environment into a veritable Garden of Eden (no accident that surely), in which every tree produces a crop and lives in managed harmony with is environment. In terms of another modern genre, they’ve terraformed it perfectly.

There’s only one thing it relies on from the time before the women were left – by combination of conflict and natural disaster – on their own to cope: a few huge old buildings, including the now largely redundant fortress.

As the author surely had no choice – and really as in science fiction today the science isn’t really the point – she skips over the essential development of virgin birth. It happens, and the women, understandably enough, come to revere it, putting motherhood at the centre of their society (although later, when they understand the limits of population growth controlling it by social pressure). But there’s little focus on heredity, and no desire for personal glory in it.

If there’s one main criticism of the nature of Herland today it is that as a society it is rather too perfect, impossibly so (even the men are forced to admire the practicality and suitability of the dress – although Perkins Gilmann’s concern with this, at the start of the 20th century, is understandable enough).

The 21st-century world is rather less sanguine about the perfectibility of human nature and indeed the possibility of perfection at all – Ursula Le Guin’s utopia/dystopia The Dispossessed in being a case in point.

Yet Perkins Gilmann can be excused in this: she wrote in a more innocent age – before the horrors of two world wars – and more importantly, she wrote at a time when women were barely allowed, and by most, thought possible of much practical constructive effort at all (although then as now, women on average worked harder and longer than their menfolk with the double burden of home and employment).

She was facing a huge mountain of public disbelief, and any flaw in the world of Herland would have been a fissure of opportunity for the enemies of feminism.

Although long neglected, Herland is indeed one of the founding texts of feminism, and anyone who’s interested in being a feminist should read it – but don’t worry, it is mercifully short and to the point, not at all flowerily “literary”. Its author is non-nonsense, getting on with the job, writing for purpose, not ego, just as her characters, and so often women generally, do.

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