… feeling uncertain is sometimes the most fruitful way of being.
Helena Kennedy, in Third Way Jan./Feb. 2013
(And yes, I’m a bit behind in my reading of this magazine.)
Most crucial in private
Interesting thoughts on feminism in public and in private:
As a feminist, I’ve always felt that feminism is most crucial in private. In public, there are always people (men and women) to reason and defend the place of women. The discourse is clear, potent and largely active. We’re moving forwards, change is occurring. I do feel that.
The private sphere is where I most need feminism’s ideas. It’s here that we ask ourselves deep and secret questions. Interrogate our hopes, ambitions and desires, find out who we’re trying to please, hold up the current shape of ourselves against the images that formed us.
Josie Rourke, ‘The Right to Be Uncertain’, in Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach (eds), Fifty Shades of Feminism
Fifty Shades yet again
On my continuing journey through Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach, I have just come across a new highlight. It’s Susie Orbach’s contribution, entitled ‘A Love Letter to Feminism’. Like some of the other authors, she thinks back to the 1970s and how women were ‘daring to think and enact new ways of learning and living’.
I was particularly interested in her reflections on the fears these women had to face. ‘We began to appreciate how much patriarchy was a structure undermining us’, she says, ‘within and between women, as much as a political force outside us’. And again: ‘Internal psychological chains kept us in check and away from being as full as we could be.’
Orbach notes that she could have lived like so many women before her. But she counts herself lucky that she didn’t. Feminism, she says, gave her a proper life:
Without feminism, life’s challenges could and would have stained my individual experiences – as [they] for so many of my mother’s generation – turning them sour and bitter, rather than into places of learning. Without feminism I couldn’t have understood my personal dilemmas. Nor would I have had the capacity to reflect.
I was also moved by her comments on friendships that made it possible for her and other women to ‘think and enact new ways’:
exhilarating friendships took centre stage. They were a hammock underpinning our personal and collective struggles. We helped each other find and tell our stories as we were reshaping ourselves. Inside friendship we found ways to tackle our hesitancies, our fears, our insecurities, our shame and self-doubt.
To choose freely
What all women deserve is to be able to choose freely the lives they want to lead, free of oppression and exploitation, filled with opportunity to be who they want to be. It is all about human rights.
Having shared the key aims of feminism and explored feminist-critical interpretation of the Bible for a number of years, I am continuing to enjoy Fifty Shades of Feminism. As already said, the contributions are short, but what makes them interesting for me is at least partly the fact that they have been written by such a diverse group of women.
The quote above is from a contribution by Helena Kennedy, who, as a barrister, Labour member of the House of Lords and an expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues, also has interesting things to say about how the law, having traditionally been made by men, has dealt with the world from a male perspective.
A deeply contested demand
One of the fascinating aspects of Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach, are the reflections on what has been achieved over the last few decades.
Liz Kelly, for instance, in a contribution entitled, ‘Changing it Up: Sexual Violence Three Decades On’, talks about ‘the deeply contested seventh demand’ of the British Women’s Liberation Movement regarding violence against women. The demand was:
Freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of male violence. An end to the laws, assumptions and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression towards women.
That this should have been ‘deeply contested’ almost seems bizarre today. And indeed Kelly goes on to say:
In thinking about this piece, I tried to remember just why this statement was considered so divisive in the late 1970s: few would contest its content today …
One would hope so and yet the idea of male dominance sadly seems difficult to eradicate in some parts of society.
What I oppose and what I reject
… what I oppose and what I reject: discrimination and oppression, homophobia and patriarchy, injustice and violence, force and empire.
Thus John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now.
Yes, I can go with that.
Karl Möller 