Feminists #
Feminism rose to address the marginalisation and suppression of women throughout history. Most histories have been written by men who have been androcentric, some anti-feminist, and some slightly weirdly misogynist. Most religions are unashamedly patriarchal.
Mary Wollstonecraft, #
In A Vindication of the Rights of Women,
Wollstonecraft was responding to the English conservative and opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that ‘a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.’
She wrote:
I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love … will soon become objects of contempt. … I wish to show that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.
Here are some of Wollstonecraft’s ideas for a social revolution published in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
• There shall be equality of partners in cohabiting relationships and equal division of legacies among family heirs. No special favors granted to firstborn sons.
• Every woman shall aspire to earn her own living (“the true definition of independence”) rather than employing sexual guile and physical appearance to attract a wealthy lover or spouse.
Few, if any, mother–daughter pairs compare to the glowing diptych presented by Wollstonecraft and her second daughter, Mary Godwin, better known by her husband Percy’s surname as Mary Shelley.
Wollstonecraft, who died in the late summer of 1797 at the age of thirty–eight, just eleven days after giving birth to Mary, offered her dazzled and often enraged contemporaries a vision of liberated womanhood that would help to make her the darling of twentieth–century feminists.
Louisa Lawson #
Patricia Grimshaw, The University of Melbourne
Louisa Lawson was an outstanding leader in the campaign for women’s right in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She shared prominence in New South Wales with Rose Scott as a promoter of the vote and other women’s issues though she did so in a more independent style. Born in 1848 in rural NSW, at eighteen years of age she married Peter (Niels) Larsen, later Lawson and farmed alongside him during her first years of married life.
She bore five children, including Henry Lawson, the well-known writer. She moved to Sydney in 1883 where she supported her family by undertaking washing and sewing, and taking in boarders. In 1887 she bought the Republican and with her son Henry edited and wrote most of the paper’s copy. In 1888 she established the Dawn, a journal devoted to women’s concerns that continued publication until 1905.
In May 1889 Louisa launched the campaign for female suffrage and announced the formation of the Dawn Club where women could meet to discuss reform questions and gain experience in public speaking. After the franchise was won Lawson continued to promote law reform and the extension of women’s work opportunities. She died in 1920, remembered more for her relationship to her famous son, than for her own leadership of the women’s cause (The Byron Bay Record, 4 September 1920, p. 4).
Germain Greer #
Rachel Buchanan, University of Melbourne writes:
The Greer who wrote The Female Eunuch was a phoenix, but that flaming bird could not exist without its counter, the stabilising, harmonising, quiet, steadfast turtledove. “Dr G” – the rockstar groupie, the cunt power shocker, the TV host – was the loudmouth partner of Dr Greer, the academic.
Loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
‘Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
This extract from Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle is the one that Greer cites in her discussion of The Ideal, the Love section of her most famous book. The early-years Greer Shakespeare records suggest that the Female Eunuch had two authors, and the turtledove matters at least as much as the phoenix.
Helen Garner claims that in The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer argues for the liberation of individual women had to begin with their sexual liberation (and satisfaction), urging women to understand their bodies, explore their sexual desires and control their reproductive lives.
Joan Didion #
Antonella Gambotto-Burke The Australian, April 2, 2021
Didion was widely recognised as the world’s pre-eminent literary, non-fiction stylist. Characterised by detachment, her remove came at the expense of heart; her fixation with style is a buffer to emotion as displays of feelings were distasteful. She mocks any need to surrender; what Grahame Greene called: “the splinter of ice in the heart of a writer”.
Instead she sought respite in alcohol. In Why I Write, Didion presents it as an act of aggressive hostility imposed on your audience.
“You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions – with the whole manner of imitating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating – but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully.”
In regards to her oeuvre, the issue of affective integrity is significantly more pertinent than that of aggression. As Als points out, Didion maintains that truth is provisional – that is, arranged to suit the circumstances and open to revision: a drinker’s motto.
Invariably, her subjects play handmaid to her style. the Presidential campaigns of 1988, she argued that the so-called “democratic process” had become unlinked from the people it was supposed to speak to and for.
Darryl Pinckney maintains
Joan Didion’s genius was at exploring the paradoxes and contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves.
Janet Malcolm #
Janet Malcolm is renowned for her artful explorations of the artifice of life writing. Her most famous book, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994), is as much an analysis of other biographies of Plath and Hughes as it is an examination of the entangled lives of the two poets.
Malcolm works to expose biography as a “flawed genre” that disguises the biographer’s desires behind a “pose of fair-mindedness” and that privileges the sensational over the commonplace in ways that give rise to inauthenticity and prurience.
In an earlier book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1989), Malcolm wrote:
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
Nevertheless, it’s the job.
Channelling the first line of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), she writes:
“The past is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally.”
Malcolm likens biographers to professional burglars:
The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity.
Readers, as well as biographers, are skewered for colluding in the exciting, forbidden undertaking of “tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole”.
The Saturday Paper on February 11, 2023 as “Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory”.
Susan Sontag #
1933 - 2004 Excerpts from : What Susan Sontag Wanted for Women by Merve Emre May 23, 2023 NYRB
The singular glamour of Susan Sontag has done her some injustice, particularly where matters of sex and gender are concerned. Suspicious of her celebrity, and convinced that her success had rendered her immune to the plights of ordinary women, her critics have characterized her relationship to the second sex as inconstant at best and faithless at worst.
” Women and men alike were ensnared by this desire to accumulate—but women were additionally oppressed by the institution of the nuclear family, a prison of sexual repression, a playing field of inconsistent moral laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt-producing factory, and a school of selfishness.”
The fact that the family was also the source of apparently unalienated values (“warmth, trust, dialogue, uncompetitiveness, loyalty, spontaneity, sexual pleasure, fun”) only increased its power.
On A Woman’s Beauty:
“Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement. Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.”
Women were not permitted to change, were not allowed to cast off their smooth innocence and docility in favor of wisdom, competence, strength, and ambition.
“To be sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly. Yet it was a power that had always been conceived in relation to men: “not the power to do but the power to attract.” In this sense, it was a power that negated itself. It could not be “chosen freely,” nor could it be “renounced without social censure.”
Women were not permitted to change, were not allowed to cast off their smooth innocence and docility in favor of wisdom, competence, strength, and ambition.
Beauty had been “abridged in order to prop up the mythology of the ‘feminine,’ ” then a more shocking and forgiving definition of beauty required unsexing it, violently. Beauty would no longer be subject to the approval of men; it would appropriate the masculine to do women’s bidding for them.
“A society in which women are subjectively and objectively the genuine equals of men . . . will necessarily be an androgynous society.”
She did not value separatism, the aggressive policing of the boundaries of who was or was not a woman. She valued the right to plural forms of being, the right to her many fractured selves. She envisioned an aesthetic and political integration that would, in the final analysis, result in the obliteration of “men” and “women” as categories of identity.
Helen Garner #
Garner came to fame through her fiction but forged a second career as one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of narrative non-fiction, and a highly controversial one, too.