Emails 1 - 3

EMAIL ONE, KIRSTY TO JOANNA

Hi Joanna,

Do you want to think about doing an "aunt - neice" piece e.g. You could raise questions from texts and I could respond to them - or vice versa!

I have a few credentials. I was one of the people who started the Women's Liberation in Preston. It started when I saw a piece on one of the Sunday papers about the fledgling Women's Liberation Movement. In the small print I saw there was a group in Bolton and persuaded a friend of mine to go along with me to the meeting. Half a dozen utterly terrifying women who had already read their Germaine Greer, their Shulamith Firestone etc. etc. simply said "Don't bother coming down to Bolton - go and set up your own group." - So we did!

We used to have regular meetings and debated the four (I think!) demands of the Women's Liberation Movement (You can go and research what these were - I confess with shame I've forgotten them!). We had a long and extended debate on wages for housework - I was against (even though, as you know, housework is not my forte). One of the women was older than me and had four children and was in favour. I was young, hard-headed and studying (unbelievably for the time) business studies. I could see that, never mind the theory, economically it was a non-starter. I ran rings round her in debate but felt very sorry afterwards because she was clearly very hurt.

After a few months a couple of working class women turned up who looked and sounded visibly different to our middle class academically oriented group. They told us about being beaten up by their husbands, on whom they depended for money and a roof over their head and asked us, "What are you going to do about it?" We had no answers. They (answers) started to come a few years later when Erin Pizzey started her refuge for battered women.

When I came to London I joined the Essex Road Women's Group. This was a very loose grouping of women who marched, demonstrated, had consciousness-raising meetings, meetings where they examined their vaginas with a speculum, reading groups - I attended one on 19th and early 20th century radical movements run by Sheila Rowbotham. Some of the books I read then I still value now, particularly William Morris's News from Nowhere.

At some point around I think 1975-6 The Radical Women's Movement became influential. We had to decide whether to become lesbians or not. People often think that decisions about sexual orientation are easy to make but I didn't then and don't think it now. The Masters and Johnson studies of people in the US who had experienced both homosexual and heterosexual affairs bears this out. In 1977 I went off to live with Chris in South London and the Women's Movement faded from my life.

Did these experiences of the 1970s shape my life? Yes - in the sense that they pushed me into a far more radical theoretical position than I occupied before. My face never fitted in middle-class, provincial, "proper" Sunderland. As a child and in the 1960s I thought that this was my fault. After the 1970s I thought it was my parents' fault and as a consequence spent quite a few years enjoying insulting smug middle class people with my radical opinions. Now I am no longer much bothered about assigning blame.

The Women's Movement was in many ways lots of fun. The ideas were serious but women enjoyed being with other women and, for me personally, I only started really to like men once I learned to like women.

Over to you!

Love

Kirsty

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EMAIL TWO, JOANNA TO KIRSTY

Hello Kirsty!

Thanks for your email. It´s fascinating to hear about all your experiences! One of the first questions that pops into my head is if you think that the position of women has "improved" at all since your experiences in the 70s? Also, have any "new" obstacles for women come to the surface?

I´m ashamed to say I´m not as well-read on my feminist texts as I should be! I read the Second Sex a couple of years ago but I don´t remember all her arguments - might have a look on the internet and brush up on that! Perhaps I could just tell you my initial ideas and then refine it afterwards. If you have any questions for me ask them and I´ll have a crack, and if I don´t have a clue what to say, I´ll ask you for more help!

The main thing I remember was the first chapter, where Beauvoir used examples from nature to try to show that it wasn´t necessarily natural for women to want to be mothers and enjoy motherhood full stop and for men to be the ?hunters? and go out and work. That reminds me of Butler´s arguments that not only are men and women gendered, but biology is gendered, and the dichotomy of sexes, male and female, are inventions of society. I thought her arguments were really convincing, the problem is, when I try and recount them to others, no one is convinced! It could just be my bad debating skills, but it could also be that gender constructions are so hegemonic that its almost impossible to deconstruct them. Most of my female friends say they are all for ?equality?, but that it is to be expected that there´s so few women in high powered positions, since it´s ?natural? that women, not men, bring up the kids and everything that goes with it. I think nowadays most people shun feminism, since gender equality seems to have been declared before the event, so they think that there´s no reason for it. Therefore, people who want more rights for women actually want women to have more rights than men, in their eyes. I don´t know how general attitudes towards the Women´s liberation movements that you were involved with were in the 70s? Did people think you were "mad man-hating lesbians?"

I hear what you are saying about the different "needs" of working class women and middle class academics. I kind of had a similar feeling with the Saharawis - their problems as women were drastically different from mine and how could I presume to be able to "help" - But actually, in the end I concluded that in many ways the problems are quite similar for women everywhere.

I think the so-called "third world feminists" like Chandra Mohanty say that we shouldn´t universalise women´s problems, because they are different everywhere depending on the context. But I think that parallels can be drawn quite easily. For instance, in the Sahara you may be put in prison if you get pregnant out of wedlock, whereas here you might get labelled a slut if you don´t know who the father is. Obviously the punishment is very different but I think they both boil down to a fear of female sexuality!

I thought it was also interesting to see how Saharawi women dealt with the gender roles that were assigned to them in a different way to how women have here. They are expected to take care of the housework and do all the childcare work. So women claimed that since they were able to manage the household, they were also better qualified than men to manage the entire camps, which they do! Also, most of the women who have been locked up in Moroccan prisons refer frequently to their position as mothers in their testimonies and draw strength from it. They try to "socialise" motherhood. I think "women´s work", mothering, housework, caring, is much more highly valued there than it is here.

I think the strategy in the West was to move people away from the idea that such tasks were just for women. That highlights a problem for the Saharawi women - if you try and convince society that women are capable of powerful leadership roles precisely because of their domestic role, then women don´t have the time to carry out their new role in the public sphere because there´s too much housework to do! I think the solution is a bit of both - we should stop gendering work, but those jobs that were (and are) traditionally associated with women should be better valued (but perhaps not in economic terms - I think you´re right, that´s not going to work!). So, my jumbled up point is that maybe 3rd world feminists are right in that women´s problems differ greatly according to context. But that doesn´t mean that there aren´t very significant parallels. Maybe if we focused on the similarities rather than the differences we could learn from each other.

Well, those are my tangled up initial ideas! I´ll have a look up the four demands of the Women´s Liberation movement on the net, and see if I have any more mixed-up thoughts!

Love Joanna
xxx

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EMAIL THREE, KIRSTY TO JOANNA

Hi Joanna,

I think the women at the conference would be interested to hear about your experiences with the Saharawi and Moroccan women. One of the many issues that was not really discussed in the 1970s was culture and ethnicity. Richard Sennett's book The Fall of Public Man written in the mid 1970s starts to address this but the arguments have become much more complex since then.

Has the position of women "improved" - this of course raises the old chestnut about "progress" - a huge debate. In the 1970s I took the view that there was no such thing as progress in a debate with my fellow business studies students. They all disagreed with me but could not articulate what "progress" was! They all thought progress was about taking over daddy's factory and making lots of dosh as extremely thick captains of industry.

Now, as with so many other things, I am not so sure. There have been huge changes and some are for the better. The fashionable way to analyse change in the 1970s was via various species of Marxism. However, one of the interesting things about the analysis was that - although dialectics was a fashionable word - people's opinions were resolutely fixed. If you started an argument with someone from the IMG for example, you knew exactly where the argument would go and exactly what slogans would be produced!

I now think that dialectics is the way the forward - not to progress - but to a continual series of critiques of apparently ingrained, established and often sexist positions. Negative dialectics - most thoroughly but very impenetrably discussed by Adorno in a book of that name - Heidegger in Being and Time and other works (all nearly as impenetrable as Adorno) and Freud in an extremely difficult but very short essay (only around 6 pages) on "Negation" are to my mind the key writers. Negative dialectics is a method of raising questions about what happens when you say "no", and/or encounter difference. If you link Negative dialectics to postmodernist ideas of ever shifting series of meanings and also to Freud's notion of a dynamic ever shifting unconscious, then you begin to have the tools for thinking about women today.

If you apply this perspective to the issue of housework for 1970s middle class would-be liberated women and housework for women Saharawi and Moroccan culture, then I think you can begin to draw parallels. Rather than trying to compare like with like (impossible here) or like with unlike (ultimately self-defeating) I suggest that you could develop an argument about how the raising of difference in culture e.g. men's tasks v. women's tasks has the same underlying largely unconscious structure.

You can then throw in Butler's essentially Foucauldian view to support this, i.e. Foucault's analysis of unconscious power relationships in society.This is a long-winded reply to your question, "Are gender constructions so hegemonic that it's almost impossible to deconstruct them?" I think you/me, both of us could answer "we could try!"Do you think we should turn this into a blog and ask Naomi if she wants to run alongside the conference - it seems to have the makings of something along these lines! If so, I shall leave it to you to set it up!

Love

Kirsty