There is no single feminism.
Women have always struggled throughout history and across the world
for freedom and against patriarchal domination.
So I’m going to tell you about some of my favourite texts
from just one feminist movement,
the Women’s Liberation Movement that began in the United States
starting in the late 1960s and lasted through the 1970s and 1980s.
It was an incredibly vibrant and powerful movement,
which produced not only important lasting changes
for American women,
but also some breathtakingly powerful pieces of writing.
First up is The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone.
It was published in 1970 when Firestone was just 25 years old.
It’s a wildly ambitious book that
tries to do for the analysis of patriarchy
what Marx and Engels did for the analysis of class domination.
In the book, Firestone argues that the origins of women’s oppression
lie in the biological division of reproductive labour,
which, in her view, ensures
the psychic and material domination of women by men.
The book includes a number of radical utopian proposals.
It’s a provocative, rich and challenging book,
with which you are certainly not required to agree,
but which deeply bears reading and thinking about.
My next book is Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, published in 1976.
Like Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex,
Of Woman Born focusses on the theme of biological reproduction
as a source of women’s oppression,
but otherwise couldn’t be more different from Firestone’s book.
Adrienne Rich argues that we should distinguish between motherhood
as a cultural institution that entraps women
in their own bodies and in the domestic sphere
and the potential of motherhood
to be something that sets women, men and children truly free.
The book is an extraordinary and lyrical meditation
on mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, bodies, medicine,
psychology, history, politics, and
Adrienne Rich’s own experience of being a mother to three boys.
It’s always a book that my students of all genders really love
to read and discuss...
and they very often end up giving the book
as a gift to their own mothers.
My third book is Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class,
which was published in 1981
Angela Davis is one of the most significant
political visionaries of our time.
She is a longtime member of the Communist Party,
she was a member of the Black Panthers
who stood trial for arming black activists,
she has a PhD in Philosophy and is a professor
at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
and she continues to this day
to be a tireless activist who campaigns, among other things,
for the abolition of prisons and the end of sexual violence.
Women, Race and Class is perhaps the most important of
all Angela Davis’ books.
As the title suggests, it offers an analysis
of how three structures of oppression
- patriarchy, racial domination and class domination -
interact to mutually sustain each other and
to devastate the lives of the worst off women and men.
In other words, Women, Race and Class is a foundational text
of what we now call intersectional feminism.
Overall, Women, Race and Class is a great feminist text,
and a reminder that the history of feminism is full
of productive disagreement.
My fourth book is the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas,
self-published in 1967 and sold on the street by its author.
One year later, Valerie Solanas made headlines for
shooting the artist Andy Warhol
and she was jailed for three years.
The SCUM Manifesto is very difficult to describe.
It’s a wild and provocative and bizarre feminist manifesto,
in turns disturbing and exhilarating and deeply funny.
It argues that men are in fact the weak,
submissive, boring and passive ones
and that it is women who are secretly
creative, brilliant, strong, cool and inventive.
The sources of everything that's interesting in culture.
Solanas also argues that
truly independent woman don't need sex,
and that it's educated, middle-class women
who are co-conspirators in patriarchy.
And finally, she also argues that the male sex should be abolished.
Needless to say, it’s a problematic text in all sorts of ways,
but also a potent reminder of the place of the outrageous
and the carnivalesque within feminism
and it's really well worth the read.
My final book is an anthology called Sisterhood is Global.
It was edited by the American feminist Robin Morgan
and published in 1984.
The US Women’s Liberation Movement,
like the British Women’s Liberation Movement,
took place in a global context.
And so this edited volume offers a sort of encyclopaedic overview
of the condition of women,
and their ongoing political struggles for equality
in 70 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
While the essays reveal an incredible diversity of background conditions
against which feminist struggles occur
conditions of history, religion, culture, economics, and so on
certain themes echo throughout the book,
most notably that women’s emancipation must go hand-in-hand
with an end to colonial and racial domination,
capitalist exploitation, and environmental degradation.
It’s an amazing thing to leaf through or study systematically,
and also a really important reminder that feminism
is not something owned by any one group of women.