Books
Suffragette city. Feminism is not about table dancing or ironic posturing. Michele Roberts on why the fight must go on
Published 29 April 2002
No Turning Back: the history of feminism and the future of women
Estelle B Freedman Profile Books, 445pp, £20
ISBN 1861973454
The Fawcett Library, that archival treasure trove of suffragette and suffragist history, recently moved to Aldgate in the East End of London. After being renamed, by popular acclaim, as the Women's Library, it reopened its doors in a beautifully renovated former wash-house. Its celebratory inaugural exhibition, accompanied by a chic and witty catalogue aimed at a new generation of activists and interested readers, included not only wonderful militant banners from a hundred years ago, but also wonderful militant magazines and pamphlets from the more recent wave of feminism that gathered momentum in the 1960s and 1970s.
It gave me quite a shock, on the opening evening, to wander round and recognise so much of the material on show. There was Red Rag, the socialist-feminist journal that no libertarian worth her salt could do without, or could do without arguing about. There was the very first issue of Spare Rib, with a lovely, ardent woman on the cover: "Days women rocked the world". It was extremely dis-concerting to see our passionate articles and polemics, printed on underground or alternative presses - writings that to us were alive and necessary, but also disposable - elegantly displayed in glass cases like art objects, let alone to witness various luminaries of new Labour cooing over this cool new enterprise as if they had personally manned or womanned the barricades all those years ago.
Could such a fiery and revolutionary movement be contained like that, so tastefully designed and displayed? Heartening growls and grumbles from old feminists on the margins of the crowds, during the new Labour speeches, proved that rebellion is not dead. And once the posher guests had swept on to the next do, leaving some space in their wake, you could begin to see what riches the Women's Library, under its new director Antonia Byatt (daughter of A S Byatt), is trying to make accessible to the widest possible range of users. The library is in no way a coffin. Feminism, if she was ever a sleeping beauty, has revived and sat up again. She is alive and kicking - though in some places, like the good fairy-tale heroine, she necessarily goes about in disguise.
I felt a similar sense of disquiet on opening Estelle Freedman's magisterial book. Why on earth should the huge variety and complexity of feminist struggles, political and intellectual, be summed up in just one text? Could the global histories of feminisms be crammed into fewer than 500 pages? The answer is yes, if you are as much a mistress of precis as Freedman is; and yes, if like her you teach women's studies to undergraduates and want to provide them with a single, more or less adequate, introductory textbook. Here it is: one size fits all.
I'm referring here to the corset on the cover of No Turning Back. Presumably this image was intended to suggest that patriarchy, with all its constriction and confinement, has been rumbled. It has been ruptured and burst out of. But, alas, we all know that the glossies hail the rebirth of the corset - or its red satin sister, the basque - every other year or so, and we all know people who still think corsets much sexier than Wonderbras. That which is pronounced dead usually has a strange and stubborn habit of returning, yes, like the Undead, like vampires, ghosts, childhood memories, poetry, the novel and the unconscious. Feminism and corsets: they're both still around and they coexist.
In any bar, according to certain newspapers, you can meet young women who will argue that lap-dancing evening classes (learning how to take your corset off) are spicily empowering. You can read columns by their ardently non-lesbian older sisters who boast of enjoying getting lap-dancers to dance for them: that way they can watch the corsets come off and have a wee frisson, but without having to cope with their own homosexual desire. Exploitation and repression is the name of that game. And, still on the subject of lingerie, all those black leather corsets in Black Lace novellas are being worn as objects of masochistic desire, because the gorgeous pouting bookettes are marketed as masturbation aids for today's young businesswomen with no time for real love affairs, those guilty rich girls who secretly, apparently, want to be punished for having some power.
So, Estelle, your cover does your argument no good. And while we're at it: what a shame there are no illustrations. In a book aimed at the young mass market, this seems an oversight. After all, feminism, in its recent incarnation, did not begin in the universities and the libraries. Thriving crucially on cheaply produced visual images such as posters, it spawned art, theatre and cinema. It began on the streets and inside anywhere women lived. It was inspired by black women's struggle for civil rights in the US, began over here with strikes by Ford women workers over equal pay, was fuelled by underground rock and drugs culture of the 1960s, and by the advent of the Pill.
In the early days, study, reading and discussion groups sprang up alongside active campaigns. The Workers' Educational Association and other radical adult education institutes ran classes for the people by the people. Gradually, women's studies increasingly moved over into the universities, giving the sense that women's liberation was only for the educated middle class. Women's liberation in Britain could not be separated from capitalist culture. If it challenged capitalism, it was also produced by it. With the Thatcherite triumph of capitalism came the media's acceptance of a bearable kind of feminism: the right of white women to make lots of money just like white bourgeois men. It makes me shudder with horror when I meet youngish people who think that's all feminism ever was.
Freedman's book is helpful because it tries to outline the varieties of women's struggles for justice, against oppression, all round the world; to suggest the bravery, risks, dissonances and contradictions involved; and to be honest about the ways in which certain over-articulate white women have had to learn to shut up and listen to their sisters elsewhere with different priorities. She knows the American star system has produced "leaders" who may be far removed from the women on the ground trying to make things better.
The situation has been different in Britain, with our stronger tradition of socialism and group co-operation. Our excellent historians and cultural critics such as Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal have done finer, more subtle work than Freedman. But perhaps her book will serve as a way into theirs. She has trawled conscientiously through all the revolutionary as well as reformist versions of feminism, and provides useful critiques of hierarchy and privilege, showing how liberation struggles connect gender to issues of race, class, ecology and the global market. Copious notes and bibliographical information are given, but the index, oddly, does not refer to computers or cyber-feminism. No Turning Back operates as a kind of sampler, or menu, pointing you towards the feast in other books, other libraries. It is a helpful introduction, but I would argue against some of its oversimplification.
Michele Roberts's most recent book is Playing Sardines (Virago, £6.99)
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