Same · as · a · Wildcat

"The truth about stories is, that's all we are." -Thomas King

Not sure what King has to do with what I'm about to rant about, but hey.  I'm the Sequitur Queen.  Non.  I meant non.   I was just thinking that  I haven't done Feminism Friday in a while, so...

Today, I suggested that the answer to fury about the world was to go out drinking.  I think that if more of us angstified liberal types went out and picked fights with strangers in bars, the world would be a better place.  People should be scared of the Angry Drunken Feminists.

OK, so the plan has a few flaws.  Such as the strategy of picking fights when you are under five feet five.  But my point about being ok with your own anger...and not turning it inward where it will cause you stress headaches, high blood pressure, depression, and cancer....still stands.  If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.  So why do we still feel pressure to be Fun Feminists?  Like this.

"It doesn't mean that you hate men."   From the Feminist Majority's "This is what a feminist looks like" video.

...What?  WHAT?   Why are they essentially apologizing for being feminists, and wasting time on addressing stereotypes that over 100 years of feminism have proven are NEVER going to go away through sweet-talking, because the people who express them aren't rational?  They don't even believe that shit.  They just say it to divert the conversation from the real issue at hand.  It's a tactic, see?

Can you imagine, for example, a political organization for African-Americans making a video that said something like, "We're not angry black people!  We're FUN!  You too can be cool and down with the homies!"

...No, because they're not stupid.  They say things like, "Quit stereotyping us, jackass." 

Feminists need to be meaner, but more effectively, so.   People are going to call you a bitch if you're ever anything other than sugar-sweet and conciliatory anyway.   Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.  And kick some ass while you're at it.

As for any variation of the time-honored "feminists are unattractive" argument...that one's over two hundred years old, but whenever Rush Limbaugh says something, you know it has quintessential Mom's Basement Guy cachet...the appropriate response is, "Dude.  You're the kind of guy that made some feminists think that political lesbianism sounded like a viable idea."

Don't be afraid to be a bitch.  Bitches get stuff done.  BITCH IS SEXY. 

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."  --from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

This is what racism and sexism does:  Take a woman, intelligent, poetic, innovative, curious, fearless.   There are obstacles in her way; she overcomes them.  She goes to college, she does groundbreaking research, she is published.   Like a lot of bright, unique souls, she is cantankerous and opinionated and pisses people off.   She burns fiercely.  In a man this would be an advantage.  For a woman in the '30's and '40's, much less a black woman, it is the mark of Cain.   She writes about black people as she sees them.   She dares to write a novel about white people as she sees them, as if she has as much right to free reign of her imagination as anybody.  She dares do anything that suits her.  This is not to be borne.  

She fades away into obscurity.  She disappears, physically and metaphorically.   A woman whose rightful place is on lists of great writers of the twentieth century dies in a welfare home and is buried in an unmarked grave.   Her books fall out of print.  

It doesn't stop there; a person of the caliber of Alice Walker goes looking, starts writing about her.  Zora Neale Hurston's books come back into print.   A happy ending, of sorts.   If you aren't her.   She died fifteen years before her rediscovery, alone in a charity ward and silenced.   This didn't happen in the Dark Ages, or the eighteenth century.   It happened in 1960.

Contemplate this:   Who else don't we know about?   It has happened over and over again.   Women writers overcome all odds and then disappear again.   There were so many women writers in the late nineteenth century that men vocally feared that they were taking over.   But how many of them do we know?   Our lists of "great writers"  are heavily weighted towards men.   Is that coincidence?  Is it because of merit?  Do you really think so?

Virginia Woolf wrote about "Shakespeare's sister", an imaginary female genius who burned brightly but never wrote a word and who finally wound up buried at a crossroads, a suicide.   There have been plenty of those throughout history, I guarantee it.    The heartbreaking irony is that many women did write, got published, seemed to be breaking free, but still got buried in an unmarked grave.  The fact that some of them got  rediscovered doesn't mean they all have been.  Some are still lost.  Some will remain lost.  And you, any person who values the way that literature can open windows in the soul, should be angry, outraged at the way your world has been pared down and diminished.

 

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin

This story wouldn't strike most people as overtly feminist; however, it's a great parable about privilege, among other things.


http://feministsf.org/

Went to a panel on campus entitled "Hip Hop for Social Change". After someone in the audience mentioned that kids weren't learning anything about black history during Black History Month because of "No Child Left Behind"* (They are all too busy studying for the CRCT), one of the panelists got up and did a rap about black history. Apparently he has raps for everything "from ABC to trigonometry".

Dr. Aisha Durham, while talking about the objectification of black women in mainstream/commercialized rap and videos said, "We're still up there naked on the auction block." She was making a point about how images are being used to drive an engine based on exploitation; the excuse that the musicians give is "well, if I had librarians in long skirts in my videos, nobody would buy my records" (this is more or less a quote, but I don't remember from whom). The problem is that "I can't make money any other way" has been the justification for every destructive business practice that ever existed....Everything from sweat shops in the current world economy to nineteenth-century factories and the plantation system. "Oh, we just can't keep up with the demand for (cotton, sugar, cloth, machine parts, designer bags, music) unless we...." ....bring in boatloads of people and work them to death, hire eight year olds for twelve-hour shifts, get a girl to take her clothes off and shake her ass. At the end of the day, it's a lame-ass excuse. And the fact that the situation is such that a shitty exploitive job is the best option some people have doesn't let those who are creating and controlling the shitty exploitive jobs off the hook.

*My sister teaches mentally handicapped children in a public high school. Her students can't read or add, but she's supposed to somehow fit them into the same curriculum. She refers to it as "nochildleftbehindbullshit", all one word...

I'm going to post a link to a discussion of "the gaze" (as in, the male gaze) and what it reveals about power. It's a little abstruse. But what it boils down to is this: Who gets looked at by whom, how they are looked at, how much they are expected to be looked at, and how they are expected to respond, are all manifestations of power in our society. Because "looking" is the first step in access, and women, or anyone else our culture defines as "weak", "dependent", or "inferior", are supposed to be accessible at any time. There's something about cultural appropriation tangled up in there too, in a weird way, but let's stick to the gaze for now: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze.html

Also, you think that feminism is somehow quaintly outdated and that we're all free to do what we want? Check this out, and read between the lines: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-homemaking11oct11,0,1284632.story?page=1&track=mostviewed-storylevel

Don't get me wrong: I am the LAST person on earth to belittle the hard-ass work that being a stay at home parent really is, and I think the culture at large ought to value it more (and value men who do it, instead of looking at them sideways). But. This is not the way to do that.

The man whose wife is teaching those darling little homemaking classes banned ordination of women and fired a woman professor because he thinks that women shouldn't teach men theology. And these aren't just some fringe freaks; the Southern Baptist Convention...even with all the moderates leaving...is still the biggest Protestant denomination in the country. The young women who are studying homemaking but otherwise get a college education are the lucky ones. I know of families where the children are homeschooled...but the girls are only taught what they need to be wives and mothers, which isn't deemed to be much. This isn't a matter of "people can believe what they want". They CAN believe what they want...The trouble comes when they start brainwashing their wives and daughters with it. Do you really think that a choice made when your whole family and community and church is telling you "GOD wants you to live this way, and if you don't you'll go to HELL" is a choice freely made?

Those people have a lot to answer for.

...Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about women's education in the SEVENTEEN NINETIES. Why is this shit still going on? And why do we...why does ANYONE...put up with it?

For Feminism Friday, what thinkmonkey has to say about abortion, and also, thanks to mtn_hermit, what George Carlin says...

"This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism." --Gloria Steinem

"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute." -- Rebecca West

"It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union."

"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less." -- Susan B. Anthony

"The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source. " ~Lucretia Mott

"Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man." ~Margaret Mead

~

"I listen to feminists and all these radical gals - most of them are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men - that's their problem. " ~Jerry Falwell

"[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. " ~Pat Robertson

"Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society." -Rush Limbaugh

~

Sorry I didn't write anything original. I was busy practicing witchcraft, plotting to destroy capitalism, and flirting with girls.

...People in my theory class have pissed me off.

So, we were talking about a piece entitled "Some Reflections on Separatism and Power" by Marilyn Frye. I was saying that I had no use for separatism carried to the extreme, but that it was nonetheless very helpful to me to have it pointed out that women are (therefore I am) socialized to be available all the time.

"Like when a woman is sitting at a coffee shop or some other public place and men come up and start talking to them under the presumption that they have nothing better to do." I was just offering this as an example of how women are expected to be accessible all the time. Not something I thought was at all controversial. Hell, they talked about it on Designing Women.

You'd think I'd grown two heads or started speaking a foreign language. The two men in the class immediately leapt on this and started questioning me....are you SURE that's what happens? how do you know they don't just want to ask you out? etc.

I'm shocked and more than a little angry that I had to defend that observation in a feminist theory class. And no one backed me up, either.

*growl*

Here's a conference that will be happening at UGA in October. If you live out of town and want to come, I have a room with an air mattress and some additional floor space (speak up, though, 'cause I also told the Women's Studies PR person that I could host someone).

Women and Girls in Georgia Conference

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives." --Audre Lorde

"Nowadays, we're beginning to see how the connection between feminism and Witchcraft is not something that's new. It's something that's been there all along. In fact, it's something that's vital at the foundation of it." --Doreen Valiente

~

"Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or Negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.”

--Sojourner Truth

I have to say that I did not comprehend the full brilliance of this speech until recently, because I didn't properly understand the context. Her compatriots produced rivers of words to answer the objections of naysayers of the day, carefully constructed polite arguments in the best verbose 19th century style...which gave more weight to the opponents of universal suffrage and rights than they deserved. Sojourner Truth simply punches through them all in a direct manner that emphasizes just how ridiculous those objections really were.

Here's the thing: Radical feminism says that reform, working for legal and economic and social equality, is not enough. Patriarchy, a system of hierarchical dominance and control, is embedded in all of the institutions of culture and the whole thing is corrupt. You can't reform patriarchy, you have to tear the whole thing down and start over.

I actually tend to agree with this. The problem then becomes, who's going to bell the patriarchal cat?

Radical social change isn't pretty. People get hurt. How much of the cure would be worse than the disease? And yet, change is necessary. If you go too fast, things get very ugly. If you go too slowly...people lose track and start talking about "post-feminism" and stuff.

There are actually several varieties of radical feminism, just as there are many types of feminism in general, but I'll address the one people tend to think of most often when you say "radical feminist". There are people out there who believe that all of women's interactions with men are shadowed and corrupted by patriarchy, and that the only way to free yourself is to go off and form women-only enclaves. I have several problems with this, moral, philosophical, and pragmatic.

The primary one is, all of our interactions with each other are shadowed and corrupted by patriarchy. Avoiding men isn't going to help. It might help to illuminate some things (which is why I think that women-only or woman-centered spaces are very useful and tend to produce interesting ideas), but it is as best a temporary and limited solution. Patriarchy at its base is not merely about gender relations, but is about hierarchy, power and control, and every one of us is carrying it around in our heads. Women who do not sufficiently address this will merely play it out among themselves. I think that the history of women-only spaces and the dynamics that one often sees in them bears me out. Merely checking people's pants at the door doesn't work.

My moral objection is that I think that automatically excluding men from your perfect society or from your life is a bad ethical choice even if it did work.

Pragmatically...you've ruled out half the population already, and only a few women are ever going to be interested (as sleeping with men is also Not Allowed). What you have therefore is not a movement, but a clique (and one with a casting couch). You simply cannot implement sweeping social change with a tiny clique; it's not going to happen. To me, feminism must be about improving the lives of women in general, not just you and your friends.

And yet, as I say, woman-centered spaces are useful and important. I think they are a good idea....as a place to visit. I just want to go home afterwards.

I'll let someone else tell it, since she does it so well: http://starwatcher307.livejournal.com/206534.html

I've been thinking about going "independent" with a blog. But, you know me. I'm opinionated. Is there a way that I can control comments, etc. the same way I can control them on LiveJournal? What about TOS attacks?

I am going to be facilitating a feminist science fiction reading group at UGA, under the auspices of the Women's Studies department. Not only are they enthusiastic about this idea, I was told there might even be funding available for the project (!)

Anyway, now I need to come up with a reading list. Here are my ideas so far:

Joanna Russ How to Suppress Women's Writing,The Female Man

Ursula K. LeGuin "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas",The Left Hand of Darkness

Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale

Octavia Butler ....Must be on the list, yes, but which book?

Suzette Hadin Elgin Native Tongue

What else? Should I include a Jirel of Joiry story? How about Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing? Or one of MZB's books that focus on the Free Amazons? What about Elizabeth Bear's Carnival, which I haven't read yet?

There was a post to the Women's Studies department listserve asking for support for a rally to encourage the university to provide daycare on campus.

One person responded with, in part, "Salary compression needs urgent attention and affects all employees...Why not put your efforts into an issue that supports all UGA families- not just the ones with young children?"

Here is my response:

"Why don't you work on x issue, which is REALLY important?"

That's a classic deflection. It's been used against anyone trying to do anything since forever, especially feminists...I'm sure somebody asked Mary Wollstonecraft why she didn't focus her attention on natural rights for everyone, or something.
I am on staff, and I'm certainly concerned about salary compression. However, I also do not think that there's some kind of limited-resource game here that we need to play. A better working environment includes all kinds of things that I personally may never use....domestic partner benefits, for example. On the other hand, I might. You never know. In a similar vein, people who currently don't have young children may find that they need day care at some point in the future. And having *been* the single mother of a small child, when you need day care, it's an absolutely crucial need, not a luxury or a secondary consideration.

I think that acting as if there are only so many activisms to go around defeats us before we start. Yet as individuals we do only have so much time and energy. Ideally, if we each work on something that captures our own passion and attention, and *support* each other, then all the ground that needs to be covered will be.

Frankly, I'm a little appalled that someone on a Women's Studies list doesn't get why this is a feminist issue.

...Do I need to explain to y'all? Probably not. I will anyway.

1) Children are important. No children = No continuation of the species. Which means that whatever your favorite thing is, no more of that. No more rock and roll. No more peanut butter. No more hobbit slash. Got it?

2) The reality is that most of the people providing care for young children are women. That means that if you make it harder for people to look after their children, then you are making it harder for women to have careers and make it in the world in general.

3) When men are the ones looking after their children, they are going against the social dictum that it's Not Their Job. We want to encourage that sort of thing, because among other reasons, freedom from gender restrictions goes both ways.

There is no reality in which people are just going to stop raising kids. It has to be someone's job. It always will be. Whose job, is a matter for gender and class analysis. And as long as raising children is considered scut work done by people who don't really count, the situation is going to continue to be fucked up.

It is also going to continue to be a feminist issue of primary importance, because those people who "don't count", whatever their race or class, are usually women. And while men who go against the grain have their own problems, most of society's screwed-up attitudes about children and child care gets draped around women's necks.

As long as you ascribe to the belief that a woman caring for her child or someone else's is not doing important work worthy of respect, that she's just doing it because it's her meal ticket or because she couldn't make it doing anything else or she's self-indulgent or a "welfare queen" whatever your negative stereotype about mothers is, you are not a feminist. What you are is an anti-life misogynistic twit.

I don't have anything researched to write about at the moment, as I've been a bit busy. But I do have a comment to make about the goals and types of feminism.

There seem to be two sets of goals in feminism, which are (ideally) both directed towards the larger goal of creating equality. One looks at the very big picture, on a society-wide scale, and points at things like our notions of gender and gender roles, and the power attached to them, as the source of trouble. Many of the so-called "gender feminists" fall into this category, which is why people think that's the same thing as radical feminism (which I don't). Weirdly, the same people who reject traditional gender roles often seem to be gender essentialists (in that they think that men and women have core differences which are inherent).

The other approach tends to look at where most women actually are, and deal with their practical concerns. If for example, you simply reject the concerns of mothers (who still do most of the work of child-rearing) because in some ideal world they shouldn't be tied to that....then you are subsuming the concerns of real, breathing women right in front of you in favor of the concerns of mostly ideal, imaginary women (who conveniently aren't going to argue with you about it).

Women of color often feel that their point of view is so different from the rest of feminism that they have a different word for it, womanist. Most womanists tend towards the latter of the two approaches I have described. I don't think this is a coincidence.

I think that the lofty, big-picture approach is useful....but only when it's tied securely to a clear grasp of what most women's lives are actually like and a will to better their situation. Without that, it becomes at best a kind of blinder to one's own privilege, and at worst it becomes a superiority trip and an excuse not to do anything concrete. I think that it's also entirely possible to not be radical enough in one's perspective....to wind up being an apologist for the status quo. Real change comes from the liminal space in between, the Vesica Pisces between the actual and the ideal.

The benchmark is how you treat (other) women. You don't have to agree about everything....it's difference of opinion that makes horse races (and women's studies departments). But if you treat their choices with contempt...whether it be growing their hair long (or cutting it short), dressing as suits their own taste (whether modestly or sexily), or bearing and caring for children (or having none)....then you have already abandoned the essential core of what this is all supposed to be about. Justice, as I am fond of saying, happens between you and me. Freedom likewise.

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to–night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits." --Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

I should begin by pointing out that five hundred pounds a year in 1929 is equivalent to something like $12,000 a year in 2007. It's still a plausible amount of money to earn as a writer...and it's possible though not comfortable, to live on that amount, assuming you don't need pesky things like health insurance. It's poverty wages. But as Woolf intended, it's the bare threshold of independence.

Economic independence and freedom for women are inextricably tied, and like so many matters that principle was well understood by feminists of the past...and is still a problem for women today. It's more possible for women to get jobs and be independent, and so it often seems like the fight of second-wave feminism is won. However, women are still subject to largely invisible undermining of their position of independence....everything from social attitudes and pressure, to the extra burden of doing the bulk of unpaid scutwork in the home even when they work full time, to the fact that child care isn't valued properly, to the recent Supreme Court decision which effectively destroys the principle of equal pay. Women still earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Women writers often still face the essential problem pointed up by the title of Woolf's book: privacy, and even more important, the sense that one's own pursuits are important and worthy, and more important than the thousand little services to others that women are trained to perform. I've always been a wretched housekeeper, a good but haphazard cook, and distinctly lacking in the caretaking instinct most women are supposed to have. This is not, I've come to realize, from an innate lack of a desire for a clean environment or attention to the welfare of others, but from a rebellion so deep I don't even perceive it. It's not that I don't like a clean house. It's that I'm supposed to be the one who cleans it. And so forth. I feel the psychic encroachment of the world, the trammels it has always tried to place on me, sharply. They limit me, and my expression I suspect, in ways I can't even see.

And yet, as the lady says, if Aphra Behn could do it in the middle of the seventeenth century, so can I. Though she lived in poverty and was frequently in debt. If she was ever actually married to the elusive Mr. Behn, she never remarried. She had no children...if she bore any they didn't live, and if she had been responsible for the care of children she probably would never have written at all. We can't know if this was her choice or a sacrifice. We can't know what sacrifices she made, just in order to do what earned her male contemporaries riches and fame.

"The Play had no other Misfortune but that of coming out for a Womans: had it been owned by a Man, though the most Dull Unthinking Rascally Scribler in Town, it had been a most admirable Play. [I am] forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to owne it..." --Aphra Behn, preface to Sir Patient Fancy

Here's the thing about Aphra Behn: She has been described by more than one biographer or commenter as hard to pin down, elusive, a woman of endless masks. And yet, when you read her writing...for all the froth and foolery, the romantic tragicomedy conventions, and the sheer improbability of the plots...what leaps out at you is the stark unflinching way she portrays the reality of the relations between men and women, marriage, the sophistry and lies of courtship, double standards, and all. She portrays women as having desires and pursuing them, while eluding all attempts at control by the men around them. (Unlike Jane Austen's heroines, who do an awful lot of waiting, Aphra's go out and stir up some trouble on their own behalf.) She openly mocks the institution of marriage, while also mocking the results of libertinism for women: "what shall I get? A Cradle full of Noise and Mischief, with a Pack of Repentance at my Back?"

Behn's tart and unflinching observations of what went on around her...with a distinct lack of moralizing, but a cutting accuracy...are, I think what earned her the reputation of being "obscene" and "immodest". Her critics couldn't, after all, admit that the revulsion they felt at her work was because it contained too much truth.

Her writing played with truth and lies, artifice, adaptations of other people's work, fantastical fantasies, blatant pretense. The Emperor of the Moon, yet. Other works claimed to be true, or actually were true, fictionalized accounts of famous scandals. She reminds her readers of the layers of truth and artifice and her own motivations in prefaces and prologues, and in so many words, stating that she is writing to make her bread and that plays should entertain. And yet...The artifice is itself a dodge, of the opposite kind from "realism" which erases alternate points of view. At other times she claims to be writing for glory...indeed, sometimes in the next breath. Her characters are prone to asides, and her prefaces and prologues are often in an assumed persona. Behn is frankly making things up and often addresses the audience directly, showing her mask. Behind which is...another mask. It's the opposite of the confessional mode of art. Who is Aphra Behn, really? You don't know. That's her point. And by implication you, the generic "you" of society who is even now assumed to be white and male, don't know who any woman is. Can't know, because the harsh realities of society make dissimulation essential for survival. And...I say this as someone who disdains to dissemble...that is still true in many situations. When honesty hands others the means to control you, it's not a virtue...and when it offends those who have power, it is punished. Thus women are deceitful. Aphra Behn says none of this directly, of course. It's simply there. She doesn't point it out. You, the audience or reader, are free to see it. Or not.

First, this "Feminism Friday" notion is something I learned about from the Feminism 101 website.

Mary Wollstonecraft

She was born in 1759, and died in 1797 after giving birth to her daughter. That daughter, also called Mary, grew up to become Mary Shelley and write pioneering literature of a different sort.

Virginia Woolf said of Mary Wollstonecraft's books that they were "so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in them--their originality has become our commonplace." I've read people arguing that she "wasn't a feminist" because she didn't challenge the idea of male superiority (except obliquely) and because she never used the word (even though the critics acknowledge that that is because it hadn't been invented yet.) She also does not call for suffrage. However, since she does mention the idea of women participating in business and government, I don't think it's a great leap to assume she would have been in favor of it. She merely thought that in order to participate in society, women had to become educated and more independent first.

But when Mary Wollstonecraft mentions the doctrine of male superiority, it is merely to underscore her main point...which is that society, having reduced women to ignorant ciphers, had no idea what their true qualities were, and that the foolishness she saw in women all around her could be blamed firmly on their education and situation. She tartly takes men to task for insisting on keeping women uneducated and trivial, and then holding up ignorant and foolish behavior as proof of their inferiority:

"If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and grovelling vices. Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.

….How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes! "(Ch. 2)

Her tone is stringent, and her words are like a dash of cold water in a sleepy face. I think that Wollstonecraft, conscious of her readers, was too canny to load too much on them at once...Her remarks on the corrupting influence of power are radical, but she was surrounded by radicals who agreed with her on that point. She merely points out that the same power disparity that they saw as corrupt in society existed in every family, and the ways in which that too corrupted human relations. As the first person to analyse gender relations in terms of power, and to draw parallels between that and other power relationships in society, Wollstonecraft was decidedly in line with later feminist thought, whether she used the same vocabulary or not.

It is no longer the fashion to claim openly that women should be educated solely for the pleasure of men (she reams Rousseau mercilessly for this and other fatuous remarks). Yet as recently as the 1940's, my grandmother was asked why she was "spending all that money" to send my mother to college, as it was assumed she would only get married. In many places in the world, the education of young girls is not at all a given; and there are Christian Fundamentalists in this country right now who homeschool their daughters under the assumption that they will become wives and mothers only. Mary Wollstonecrafts's main fight is not yet won.

Her other remarks have currency as well. Take this one:

"Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."

If you don't think this is still true, take a look at a fashion magazine some time...with its bony fourteen year olds made up to look older than they are, and wearing $3000 dresses. Take a look at "women's magazines" in general. I have nothing against adornment as such...but the mere fact that it is still possible for a woman to get through life just by looking pretty and being attractive to men, speaks volumes. The fact that if she does so, she will be simultaneously held up as an example of a "feminine" or "beautiful" woman and denigrated as a "gold-digger", speaks more.

Or how about this?:

"It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection, which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection, have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought, in any sense of the words, its silken wings are instantly shrivelled up when any thing beside a return in kind is sought."

She doesn't dispute that women are (or should be) primarily concerned with family; but she does say that they ought to have independent pursuits as well. As we have learned, women having independent lives means that men can, should, and must step up to take on more responsibility for home. A survey of all the hand-wringing backlash articles about the so-called "opt-out revolution", how men feel about independent women, and how women can, can't, or constantly try to "balance work and family" shows that this too is current news. It's hard to negotiate those changes; Mary Wollstonecraft reminds us why it must be done.

And here's another we are still struggling with:

" A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, I will not stifle it though it may excite a horse-laugh.—I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to woman; is the cause why the understanding is neglected, whilst accomplishments are acquired with sedulous care: and the same cause accounts for their preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues."

What does she mean by "distinction of sex"? Does she mean gender roles? Probably. But the deconstruction of the notion of gender itself that is part of the feminist and society-wide conversation, is just a logical extension of what she says here in 1792. She perceives that it is the idea of "femininity" that holds people back, and that the distinction between male and female in society is really only important "where love animates the behaviour".

~

"Many millions have died and been forgotten in the hundred and thirty years [now two hundred and ten -E.] that have passed since she was buried; and yet as we....realise the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living." --Virginia Woolf

~(a footnote to a longer passage where she says that an education based purely and solely on precepts can't give tools for dealing with the real world):

"That children ought to be constantly guarded against the vices and follies of the world, appears, to me, a very mistaken opinion; for in the course of my experience, and my eyes have looked abroad, I never knew a youth educated in this manner, who had early imbibed these chilling suspicions, and repeated by rote the hesitating if of age, that did not prove a selfish character."

~
"Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness."