Today we decided to open our eyes a little wider. Sure, women have done well in the United States but what about in the rest of the world? Have the rights of women in Africa mirrored the American liberation? We turned to the Oxford African American Studies Center to learn more and found a great article by Gwendolyn Mikell. Check it out below. If you haven’t read the other articles this month, Feminism and Art, On Female Body Experience and Feminism be sure to go back and read them!

Female activism and feminist movements in Africa.

In contrast to much of the twentieth century, today we can talk about African feminism because African women themselves do so, and because they have quite clear ideas about what they mean when they use the term. Albertina Sisulu, the respected senior woman in the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, and the wife of Walter Sisulu, symbolized this new wave of female activism when she joined the women’s walkout at the ANC Party Conference in Durban in 1992.

The walkout demanded that the ANC commit itself to 33 percent female representation in Parliament and other government positions in the new South Africa to come. This form of feminism in South Africa is but one of many feminisms in Africa. Feminism varies both among the various nations as well as among different cultural subgroups on the continent. Nevertheless, African women’s recognition of something they call “feminism” marks a new political sophistication borne of their deep engagement with the difficulties and challenges now facing their societies. The emergence of African feminism signals women’s desire to play a role in determining the direction of development.

Thus, African feminism is Janus-faced: it looks forward to women’s new goals, as well as backward to statuses and roles that women leaders have played in the past. African women are voicing their opinions about the failed elections, military coups, political upheavals, refugee movements, economic recessions, structural adjustment, and other crises that severely affected their lives since the 1980s. They are affirming their own identities while transforming societal notions of gender and familial roles.

African feminism is highly political, and it is a response to African social and political developments rather than an outgrowth of Western feminism. African women know that women and children have borne the brunt of the recent crises, as measured in high child mortality rates, lowered female literacy rates, the continuing confinement of women to agricultural work, and their exclusion from modern, technical, and scientific fields. Many African women (and some African men as well) are committed to correcting these disparities and forging new relationships between state and society, even though Western powers and global institutions still exercise tremendous influence over the economic and political conditions of African states.

Since the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China (September 1995), Western governments and development agencies have urged respect for women’s human rights and initiatives for “women’s empowerment” in African state policies. This Western pressure has provided some support for women’s activism. On the other hand, many African politicians viewed Western efforts with suspicion, and have questioned the autonomy and legitimacy of women’s actions. This controversy has not deterred African women activists. They know this may be their best opportunity to create a place for themselves in national life. Therefore, they are determined that “we will not miss the boat this time around.”

Distinctive Features of African Feminism

African feminism differs from Western feminism because it has developed in a different cultural context. Today, African women are seeking to redefine their roles in ways that allow them a new, culturally attuned activism. This is not a totally novel challenge, since there is evidence of gender hierarchy, female subordination, and women’s struggles to reshape their statuses and roles within traditional African cultures in earlier historical periods. Gender asymmetry and inequality, particularly the distinction between public (political) and private (household) spheres, certainly existed in indigenous African social life. Gender inequality solidified during and following the phases of Islamic expansion and as European conquerors attempted to subdue or ignore female leaders. However, in Africa, female subordination takes intricate forms grounded in traditional African cultures, particularly because it is partially shaped by the “corporate” and “dual-sex” patterns that Africans have maintained through their history. Since culture is not static, new forms of asymmetry and inequality have arisen. Politicians and laypersons alike sometimes present this inequality as customary, but this is a distortion of African history. Women’s contemporary activism and their attempts to fashion an African feminist approach to public and private life have emerged in response to these inequities.

The forms of African feminism emerging in various parts of the continent do not grow out of individualism within the context of industrial societies, as did Western feminism. In the West, economic and social trends historically pushed women into more active roles in the economy, and Western feminism has focused on women’s struggle for control over reproduction and sexuality. However, African women have had a different experience. African feminist debates do not focus on theoretical questions, the female body, or sexual identity. Rather, like many of its Third World counterparts, African feminism is distinctly heterosexual, supportive of motherhood, and focused on issues of “bread, butter, culture, and power.” The average fertility rate in Africa has stayed around six children per woman, and this reality shapes African women’s lives. The practical orientation of African feminism grows out of a cultural heritage of female integration within corporate, agrarian, and family-based societies, and a more recent history of political domination and economic exploitation by the West.
In contrast to Western feminism, which emphasizes individual female autonomy, African feminism emphasizes authentic public participation and decision making by women. The issue of African clitoridectomy is one that African women say they themselves should be and are working to resolve—not Western women. African women are now exploring ways to incorporate their own views of women’s development into African development policies and the activities of nongovernmental organizations. Since the 1990s women leaders both inside and outside of government have criticized the effects of national policies on women. Political leaders and the military victimized some women for their criticism of social policies: women’s demonstrations were disrupted, they were jailed, their markets were burned, and they were forced out of public positions. Nevertheless, African women’s experiences of the hardship of economic restructuring and the growing democratization of their societies have pushed them toward greater boldness in voicing their grievances and focusing attention on women’s status within their societies.

Cultural Roots of African Feminism

Africans, perhaps more than the peoples of other regions, tend to fuse nature and culture in their traditional conceptions of women’s roles. Ali Mazrui has said that African women have controlled earth, fire, and water—three of the four elements in traditional culture. They have thus held responsibility for preparing food, acquiring fuel for cooking, and tilling the soil, in addition to other productive and reproductive tasks. Although Western observers stereotypically equate women’s roles with “nature” and the domestic sphere of family, reproduction, household, and marriage (the private realm), and associate men’s roles with “culture” and human complexity in political and economic roles (the public realm), this dichotomy does not hold true in Africa. Most African women combine roles as mothers and as economic contributors. The African feminists of today are—equally—mothers of several children, community participants, and public persons. African women have always sought to take on politically and economically responsible roles.

Thus, African feminism builds upon a solid tradition of female inclusion in a wide variety of social roles in African cultures. The prevalent Western myth of an African “matriarchy” has no validity here, since women typically do not seek to dominate. Although African women are frequently assertive and strong, the norms of their own societies have usually shaped their roles. These norms situate gender relations within the context of social groupings, such as extended families and secret societies, or encourage what is called dual-sex organization, in which women form their own associations separate from male associations to accomplish their tasks. In some areas, such as West Africa, women’s ability to form dual-sex groups in their own interest is highly developed, creating a facade of egalitarianism, while the tradition of separate women’s groups is weaker in East and southern Africa. Dual-sex organization was also more firmly rooted in matrilineal areas of West and Central Africa, where descent was traced through women, than in patrilineal areas of East, West, and southern Africa, where men form the core of the family.

Although men generally dominated traditional African societies, women led wars of resistance against foreign powers. The Berber prophetess Kachina held back the Arab invasion in the eighth century; and the female prophetess Nehanda of Zimbabwe led her people in resistance to the imperialism of Cecil Rhodes during the late nineteenth century. Queen Mother Yaa Asantewa fought against British colonial conquest in the Asante kingdom (present-day Ghana). Women who were organized as sisters, wives, market women, and artisans could alter decisions they considered harmful to other women. The early twentieth-century example of the Aba Riots, or Women’s War, among the Igbo of Nigeria demonstrated women’s ability to use their associations to protest colonial or community decisions that clashed with women’s interests. However, as centralization and statehood emerged, rulers attempted to limit women and control the political process. This type of state bias against women increased during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when colonial regimes attempted to conquer and reshape African societies.

Women have enjoyed representation in social groupings, for example through dual-sex organization, throughout most of African cultural history. This has been advantageous for African women, since they have been able to assume positions allotted to their kin groups within the community. Women could rise to positions of political, religious, or economic prominence if they belonged to prestigious families. Perhaps more consistently than in any other region of the world, there have been high-status female leaders all across Africa, from ancient Egypt to South Africa, including queens, queen mothers, chiefs, and priestesses. In matrilineal societies, the queen mothers, women chiefs, and priestesses were not feminists, but simply leaders and decision makers. Nevertheless, their leadership did inspire some female activism. Likewise, the dual-sex model is widely scattered across the continent, and often power is balanced between male and female leaders. The dual-sex model assumes its ultimate form in the dual-monarchy of king and queen mother, which exists in many Akan societies, as well as in Swaziland. Women helped to shape the political traditions, charters, and constitutions of traditional African societies that were enshrined in proverbs, oral traditions, and myths of state.

Islamization, colonial conquest, Christianization, economic crisis, and other changes over time have resulted in renegotiation of the traditional social contract. Often this has given rise to gender-biased relations and an attempt to exclude women from political life. Queen Njinga of Angola opposed Portuguese conquest by mobilizing those who supported her right to rule against those who opposed the notion of female leadership. However, in nearly every part of the continent, even in Islamic areas, the preexisting base of female involvement and activism escaped complete destruction, and often unique forms of female resistance emerged. In many countries, African women found ways of linking new practices with older principles of women’s participation and activism.

Contemporary African Feminism

The crises in African economic and political life have caused serious hardship for women since the 1980s, but this has also generated a new burst of African feminism. Previously, African states were hesitant to discuss women’s issues and grievances publicly. However, they were not hesitant to accuse women of subversion or a lack of patriotism when their organizations demonstrated against state policies or when they lobbied international organizations to improve conditions for women. Often, African leaders targeted women when they acted collectively to protest wage cuts or artificially high food prices. Sometimes, governments victimized female merchants and entrepreneurs by charging that these women were hoarding commodities or illegally producing products, and states defamed female aristocrats who offered political opposition.

It is not surprising that the economic arena has generated many defiant responses from African women and feminist organizations. Women are responsible for much of the farm work in Africa, but Colonial Rule and the market economy have often isolated women from sources of finance and sometimes damaged their traditional rights to own land. A result has been the concentration of resources in male hands. Women have noted that increasingly, under the pressures of the market economy, their families and lineages have fragmented. Men have divorced or delayed marriages, and men have migrated across borders seeking work in response to resource scarcity at home. During the 1980s and 1990s the International Monetary Fund and World Bank pressured African countries to implement structural adjustment programs that required cuts in health care, social services, and education. These programs harmed women and children disproportionately. But now, African women are refusing to suffer “down on the farm.” Much of women’s feminist activism in the 2000s is designed to focus state and public attention on the welfare of women and children, and to create new economic policies that are beneficial to the entire populace.

Likewise, although African women played important roles in nationalist politics or liberation struggles that brought their countries to independence, very few were chosen as government ministers or diplomats, and most were excluded from leadership positions in political parties. Nevertheless, women in such countries as Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya used their astute knowledge to build women’s political organizations that could apply pressure on political parties and begin to hold state politicians accountable to the community. The experiences of women in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa provide us with examples of effective feminist action in the current period of democratization and the struggle against military rule.

African women today have taken a leadership role in setting new economic and political agendas. One of the legacies of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women is that African women are determined to shape the policies of their countries. They have pushed for additional support for girls’ education, including training for careers in industrial fields, the sciences, agriculture, or the professions, and for greater gender sensitivity in government and private-sector hiring policies.

Increasingly, African women have led national dialogues about women’s human rights. In West and East Africa, and also in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa, women are stepping up their campaign against sexism and exploitation. African feminists have opposed such practices as early marriage, female genital mutilation, women’s exposure to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) through unsafe sex practices, and various forms of medical neglect. In northern Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, as well as in South Africa and Kenya, Muslim women have argued that they can be good Muslim wives and mothers even as they pursue professional training, a role in community and regional dialogues, or public office.
African feminists today have fostered a greater awareness of the connections between gender and the political economy of the state by openly discussing the links between the public and private experiences of African women. They have challenged the reluctance to talk about gender conflicts, and they have prompted women to collectively address political actions that affect their lives. African feminists have generated a new model of what feminism is about and new feminist views of civil society, the family, and the state. They have stepped forward to defend their views in international gatherings of policy makers and feminists in the conviction that their approaches will yield more positive results for African local, regional, and national development than will feminist approaches that are imported from Western societies.

Women’s History Month has become a great excuse for me to delve through the Oxford Online Resources. Today’s excerpt is from Grove Art Online, which provides web access to the entire text of The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner and The Oxford Companion to Western Art, ed. Hugh Brigstocke. The excerpt below, by Lisa Tickner, is about the convergence of art and feminism. Be sure to check out our other posts in this series, On Female Body Experience and Feminism.

Feminist art is work that is rooted in the analyses and commitments of contemporary feminism and that contributes to a critique of the political, economic and ideological power relations of contemporary society. It is not a stylistic category nor simply any art produced by women.

1. The ‘woman question’ and women artists in the 19th century.

‘Feminism’ (Lat. femina: ‘woman’) referred originally to the qualities of women. It did not come into use as a term denoting ‘advocacy of the claims and rights of women’ (OED) until 1895, after a century of debate on ‘the woman question’ or ‘women’s rights’. It cannot be coincidence that a flurry of books devoted to women artists, the first exhibitions that grouped them together as women and the first opportunities for their serious education and employment all accompanied the rise and influence of the Victorian women’s movement. Both as professionals and as amateurs, women became artists in large numbers for the first time in the 19th century: what Virginia Woolf called the ‘battle of the Royal Academy’ was one among many: the battle of Westminster, the battle of Whitehall, the battle of Harley Street. Art was open to women in a way that the institutionalized professions of politics, religion, law and (until the 1870s) medicine were not. The idea of the woman artist, if increasingly familiar, was, however, still deeply uncomfortable. The serious pursuit of art was understood to be incompatible with the demands of femininity, just as the attributes of femininity were incompatible with the production of good art.

A keen awareness of these contradictions made many women artists feminists, and feminists were interested in the woman artist, not only because she was a type of the skilled and independent woman but because women’s supposed lack of cultural creativity was often given as a reason for denying them the vote. In 1897 the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage published a list of suffrage supporters that included the names of 76 women painters, among them Lady Butler, Henrietta Rae, Annie Louisa Swynnerton and Lucy Madox Rossetti. From 1907, after the foundation of the Artists’ Suffrage League (followed in 1909 by the Suffrage Atelier), women lent their artistic skills to the propaganda of an elaborate political campaign… Until then women, in flight from the newly insistent and inferior category of the female artist, tended to concede the conventional wisdom that ‘art has no sex’.

2. The Women’s Liberation Movement and art institutions.

Feminism’s ‘second wave’ emerged in the USA at the end of the 1960s… The emphasis on equal opportunity led women artists to organize against institutional discrimination. The emphasis on a self-defined sexuality encouraged feminists to challenge the images of femininity then current in advertising, pornography and the mass media; it also led to exploration of alternative representations of and for women, and ultimately into an analysis of how representation itself produces social definitions of femininity and determines the way experiences are perceived.

In 1969 women from the Art Workers’ Coalition in New York formed Women Artists in Revolution or WAR. This was followed by a second breakaway group in 1970, the Ad Hoc Committee (of women artists), which was organized to fight institutional discrimination, beginning with the picketing of the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the Whitney Annual of 1969 less than 6% of the work had been by women; the exhibition of 1970 included 22% of work by women. Further demonstrations took place at the County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (1970), the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1971), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1972). In 1971 WAR and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (W.S.A.B.A.L.) observed in a letter to the Human Rights Commission that women constituted 52.5% of the American population, 60–75% of the art students, but only 5% of the artist population in galleries and 3% of that in museums. The early editions of H. W. Janson’s standard text-book A History of Art (1962 and 1977) ignored women, and Arnold Hauser’s multi-volume Social History of Art (1951) included only one in a list of 450 names.
Women were also poorly represented in contemporary reviews. This led feminist artists to organize independent exhibitions and women’s cooperatives and galleries such as the feminist A.I.R. (founded in 1972 and housing the Women’s Art Registry) and SoHo 20 (opened in 1973)…

Artists in New York emphasized equal representation and economic parity, but during the 1970s there was also an active women’s art movement in California, which placed greater emphasis on what it perceived as specifically female content (related to women’s bodies and female experiences) and feminine sensibility…

In London the first Women’s Liberation Art Group exhibition was held at the Woodstock Gallery in 1971; the first to make a public impact, however—and bring upon Monica Sjoo the threat of obscenity and blasphemy charges for her painting God Giving Birth—was the Womanpower exhibition held at Swiss Cottage Library in April 1973.… The Women’s Art History Collective, which began meeting in 1972, joined women artists’ groups to picket the Hayward Gallery Condition of Sculpture exhibition in 1975, after the model of the Whitney demonstrations, demanding 50% representation in state-housed and subsidized exhibitions and on Arts Council selection panels; in 1978 the Hayward Annual was selected, controversially, by an all-woman panel and reviewed in the press, as ‘The Girls’ Own Annual’ and ‘Ladies’ Night at the Hayward’, in terms that reiterated the 19th-century category of ‘feminine’ creativity. Thereafter it was tacitly recognized that women should be represented on major grant-awarding bodies and selection committees, although a level of institutional discrimination remained.

…Much feminist work was exhibited in libraries, women’s centers or other non-gallery spaces, sometimes from necessity but often as a matter of principle. For some, ‘art’ was primarily a form of expression and communication between women rather than something to put in a gallery. The Feministo Postal Event (1975), which developed from an exchange of objects through the post between a network of women, both professional and amateur artists, was characteristic of collaborative work only later exhibited as Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife (1976–7). Jo Spence’s ‘photo-therapy’ was based on a refusal to acknowledge traditional distinctions between photography, communication, therapy and ‘art’. For others, the point was to reach an audience in the overlap between avant-garde interests and those of the women’s movement, to address feminist and art-world constituencies at the same time. May Stevens suggested that where their political intent is unrealized, feminist works in museums and galleries ‘hang like unopened letters, unanswered invitations’ (Robinson, p. 181).

3. Feminism and representation, the 1970s.

At the same time that feminist artists struggled for equal rights in existing institutions and set up alternatives of their own, they worked at developing a political culture that would intervene in the ‘interlocking network of images, values, identities which saturate our daily living’ (Parker and Pollock, 1987, p. 79). This has involved transformations or role reversals at the level of content (e.g. Sylvia Sleigh’s male nudes and other images by women of men); cultural ‘heroinism’, exemplified by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (installation, 1974–9); and great goddess and matriarchal imagery (Mary Beth Edelson, Monica Sjoo). The Red Poster Workshop produced overtly propagandist graphics, while the social position of working-class women was treated in works by Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly and Margaret Harrison from the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union and the Hackney Flashers. The subject of women’s health was tackled by Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson, and particularly explicitly in Jo Spence’s photographs. Women’s relation to the unconscious and the unspoken was treated by Susan Hiller. An emphasis on such uniquely female experiences as menstruation and motherhood and on domesticity was made in work by Judy Chicago, Vivienne Binns and Kate Walker. Artists such as Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke and Suzanne Santoro celebrated the female body in its difference, often using parodied glamour imagery, or what the American critic Barbara Rose termed ‘vaginal iconology’… Among artists, as in the Women’s Movement itself, there existed a plurality of feminist positions and strategies. Feminist art drew on the possibilities of conceptual, environmental, scripto-visual, film, video and performance work, or on more traditional techniques of painting and sculpture. In certain circumstances it may not be the intention of the producer but the eye of the beholder and the context in which the work appears that secures its political reading: Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings were, to her dismay, perceived as celebratory sexual images by feminists; in the context of the Women’s Images of Men exhibition, Elisabeth Frink’s bronze heads lost their generalized humanism and became pointedly masculine. ‘Feminism’ is not necessarily a consciously determined ingredient of the work but a product of the relation between the work and the representations of a dominant culture, a particular audience, and the uses to which it is put. It has also been argued that there is no feminist art but only art that can be read as feminist….

4. (?)Post-feminism, the 1980s and the 1990s.

The three exhibitions at the ICA in 1980 represented a turning-point in the institutional visibility of feminist art in Britain. The influence of theories of ideology and the subject (in particular the impact of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis) encouraged a shift away from ‘cultural feminism’ towards a recognition of the processes of sexual differentiation and of the hopelessness of excavating a free or original femininity beneath the layers of patriarchal ‘oppression’. The vexed question of whether men could make feminist work was answered in the 1980s by an increase in the number of men making work about masculinity (e.g. Victor Burgin and Sunil Gupta). A younger generation of women came to take the insights of feminism for granted, dealing with gender and identity through parody and masquerade: Laurie Anderson used a voice coder to heighten her sexual ambiguity; Cindy Sherman presented herself as the object of the look while refusing, in a mobility of self-constructed identities, to be discovered in it; Barbara Kruger’s montages offered women the pleasure of answering back. Despite a use of neutral pronouns, the posited spectator is invariably male (We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture).

Feminism is no longer (necessarily) marginal. Jenny Holzer and Rebecca Horn (in 1989 and 1993 respectively) have had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum; Jenny Holzer was selected for the American Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale (1990); Rachel Whiteread became the first woman to win the Turner Prize (1993) at the Tate Gallery. At the same time, and perhaps significantly, the visceral strand in 1970s feminist art has re-emerged in work by such artists as Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finlay, Sue Williams and Kiki Smith, and in publications including Angry Women (1991) and Bad Girls (1993). The foreword in Bad Girls claims to chart a reaction against the puritanism and ‘hard-edged didactic work’ of the 1980s in favor of a return to ‘the surrealist traditions of Louise Bourgeois and Meret Oppenheim’ and ‘the aggressive camp of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party’. It is now almost impossible to generalize about feminist art…

… There is no perfect marriage between feminism (as a political ideology) and art (as a cultural activity). Feminism promises at the same time to enrich the products of art, to expose the pretensions and vested interests in art and to break open the category of art altogether.

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays describe diverse aspects of women’s lived body experience in modern Western societies. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students and women of all ages. The following excerpt is an interlude in the essay “€House and Home.”€ This personal anecdote, writes Young, “tells the story of one bad housekeeper: my mother. The purpose of this gesture is to commemorate, but also to describe in concrete terms how disciplinary standards of orderly housework and PTA motherhood continue to oppress women, especially single mothers.”

We present this essay not just to point out the obvious, that good mothers do not fit one mold, but to celebrate Women’s History Month. We salute the mothers of the past, present and future, their homes, their jobs and their decisions.

Interlude: My Mother’€s Story

The dream of a house in the suburbs became my mother’s nightmare.

My daddy left our Flushing apartment each morning in one of his three slightly different gray flannel suits and took the subway to mid-town Manhattan. An aspiring novelist turned insurance underwriter, he was moving slowly but steadily up the corporate ladder. I imagined his office as Dagwood’€s, and his boss as Mr. Dithers.

My sister and I tripped out to school each morning, in the horrid saddle shoes our mommy made us wear, and she stayed home with the little baby boy. A perfect picture of fifties family bliss, with one flaw: my mother didn’t clean the house.

Our two-bedroom apartment was always dirty, cluttered, things all over the floors and piled on surfaces, clothes strewn around the bedroom, dust in the corners, in the rugs, on the bookcases; the kitchen stove wore cooked-on food. I never invited my friends into my house. If they came to the door and peered in I told them we were getting ready to move. Mostly my friends did not care, since we played in the alleys and hallways, and not in each other’€s houses.

My mother spent her days at home reading books, taking a correspondence course in Russian, filling papers with codes and calculations. She seemed to me an inscrutable intellectual. But she also played with us-authors, rummy, twenty questions, with gusto-and sang and sang, teaching us hymns and old army songs. Sometimes on a Saturday she hauled out the oils and sat her little girls down to model, and then let us make our own oil paintings. From my mommy I learned to value books and song and art and games and to think that housework is not important. It was 1958. My mother had to stay home with her children even though she had worked happily In a Manhattan magazine office before we were born, even though she spoke three languages and had a master’€s degree. I was mortified then by her weirdness, sitting in her chair reading and writing, instead of cooking, cleaning, ironing, and mending like a real mom. Later, after she died in 1978, I read her refusal to do housework as passive resistance.

Like most of the Joneses (well, more likely the Cohens) on our block, my mommy and daddy dreamed of owning a house in the suburbs. They dragged us three kids all over the state of New Jersey looking at model homes in new developments. Back in Flushing, they poured over houseplan sketches, looked at paint samples, calculated mortgage costs. Finally we settled on one of the many mid-Jersey developments built on filled-in wetlands (called swamps at that time). From the four models available, my parents chose the midpriced split-level. My sister and I chose the blue for our room and my three-year-old brother pointed to the green patch on the sample chart. Many Sundays we drove the more than hour-long trip to watch the progress of the house: foundation, frame, walls, grass.

Finally we moved. This was happiness. We were the Cleavers. We bought a ping-pong table for the game room. My sister and I went careening on the streets on our bikes. Then my daddy died-€quickly, quietly, of a brain tumor.

My mother was devastated. She relied on us for what comfort there could be in this wasteland of strangers in four types of model homes. At first the neighbors were solicitous, bringing over covered dishes, then they withdrew. The folks at church were more helpful, offering rides to the insurance office or church. My mommy drank, but never on Sunday morning. My sister and I went to school sad, my brother stayed home with our mother, who had less motive than ever to clean the house. We were not poor once the insurance and social security money came, just messy.

But one spring day a uniformed man came into my class and called my name. He escorted me to a police car where my brother and sister were already waiting. Without explanation, they drove us to a teenreform home. No word from or about our mommy, where she was, why we were being taken away. Slowly I learned or inferred that she had been thrown in jail for child neglect. Daughters do not always defend their mothers accused of crimes. Being one to please authorities, and at eleven wanting to be knowing and adult, I believe that I told stories to confirm their self-righteousness, of how I did most of the cooking and how my mother did not keep house.

A woman alone with her children in this development of perfectly new squeaky clean suburban houses. She is traumatized by grief, and the neighbors look from behind their shutters, people talk about the disheveled way she arrives at church, her eyes red from crying. Do they help this family, needy not for food or clothes, but for support in a very hard time? A woman alone with her children is no longer a whole family, deserving like others of respectful distance. From my mother’s point of view there was no difference between child-welfare agents and police. A woman alone with her children is liable to punishment, including the worst of all for her: having her children taken from her.

Neglect. The primary evidence of neglect was drinking and a messy house. We ate well enough, had clean enough clothes, and a mother’€s steady love, given the way she gave it: playing ping pong, telling Bible stories, playing twenty questions. We were a family in need of support, but we children were not neglected.

After two months we were reunited, moved back to our gray splitlevel. My sister and I rode our bikes on the street again, played kickball and croquet with the neighbor kids. My mother was determined to prove she could manage a household by suburban standards, so she did what she thought she had to-called an agency for live-in maids.

One day a thin fourteen-year-old black girl arrived at the door, fresh from North Carolina. We gave her my brother’€s room and he moved in with my mommy. I felt a strange affinity with this shy and frightened person, who sobbed so quietly in her room. She was not prepared for the work of housekeeping. She and I worked together to prepare the packaged macaroni and cheese. We sorted laundry, silently sitting across from each other, for she did not know whose things were whose. We hardly talked; she told me the barest facts about her life. I see her standing on the landing in a cotton summer dress, a Cinderella figure holding a broom and wistfully sweeping. She quit within two weeks, and the house was not any cleaner.

So we glided through the summer, playing punch ball and tag with the kids in the terrace. My mother went to the city frequently to look for work. In August she took us out to buy three pairs of new shoes, for my brother would start kindergarten. School began, my mother was off to work, my twelve-year-old life seemed rosy enough.

Until one day in early fall I came home from school to find a police sign nailed to my door. A fire. A smoldering ember in my mother’s slipper chair had ignited and sent out flames, the neighbors had summoned the fire department. I used their phone to call a family friend to come and get us kids-€”I wasn’€t going to any reform school again. There was not much damage to the house, they had caught the fire early, but when breaking in to douse it they had seen the papers strewn about and dust on the floor and beer cans. My mother was arrested again.

We lived with those family friends for a year. Every three months a box of clothes arrived for us from the Department of Social Services-€”I loved the discovery of what they thought we ought to be wearing. After they let my mommy out of jail and rehab we visited her every couple of months in an impersonal office for an hour or so. She hugged us and cried, and told us of her job in the city and the new cleaning lady, Odessa.

As I plummeted into adolescence and my brother entered his seventh year, there was a crisis in our foster home: our foster father died suddenly of pneumonia. Headed now only by a woman, our foster family instantly became a bad environment for us; they shipped us back to my mother without warning. Her family reunited again, my mother wasted no time packing up and moving us all back to the safe indifference of New York City.

Waves of grief rolled up from my gut when, ten years after my mother died, I saw the movie Housekeeping.

I was raised on “Free To Be You And Me,” and my favorite story in it was of Atalanta, a young princess who lived “happily ever after” in a very modern way (check it out for yourself). The story, off an album from the 70’s, narrated by Alan Alda, inspired the little feminist in me.

Why I am blogging about fairytales? Because March is Women’s History Month and to celebrate we will be presenting a post each Thursday related to this year’s theme, “Generations of Women Moving History Forward.” While the stars of “Free To Be You and Me,” like Marlo Thomas and Roberta Flack inspired me, generations of women laid down the path that I now follow. To kick off the celebrations we have excerpted the introduction from Feminism: A Very Short Introduction by Margaret Walters. We hope that Walters’s introduction will impress upon you the changing role of Feminism throughout history. Be sure to check back next week!

‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is’, the writer Rebecca West remarked, sardonically, in 1913. ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’ The word was a comparatively new one when she wrote; it had only
appeared in English – from the French – in the 1890s. Interestingly, the earliest examples of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary carried negative meanings. In 1895 the Athenaeum sneeringly referred to a piece about a woman whose ‘coquetting with the doctrines of feminism’ are traced with real humor. ‘In Germany feminism is openly socialistic’, the Daily Chronicle shuddered in 1908, and went on to dismiss out of hand ‘suffragists, suffragettes and all the other phases in the crescendo of feminism’.

In those years, some writers used an alternative term – ‘womanism’ – with the same hostility. One long-forgotten writer was roused to angry sneers in his memoirs when he recalled meeting an intellectual woman living in Paris (she comes across, despite his prejudices, as lively and interesting) whose writings reflected ‘the strong-minded womanism of the nineteenth century’.

Curiously, one of the sharpest attacks on the word ‘feminism’ came from Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One’s Own is such an effective and engaging plea for women. In Three Guineas, written in 1938 in the shadow of fascism and of approaching war, and probably nervous about any ‘-ism’, she rejects the word out of hand. No one word can capture the force ‘which in the nineteenth century opposed itself to the force of the fathers’, she insists, continuing:

Those nineteenth century women were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state.

They were called, to their resentment, feminists, she claims (she is historically inaccurate – the word was unknown in the previous century), and she goes on to insist that we must

destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day. The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means ‘one who champions the rights of women.’ Since the only right, the right to earn a living has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word.

But though Virginia Woolf ’s ‘right to earn a living’ was, and remains, central to feminism, getting on for a century after she wrote it is clear that its attainment by no means solved all women’s problems. Women’s work – despite the much-publicized earnings of some high-fliers in the business world – remains lower paid; or, in the case of housework, not paid at all. When Woolf was writing in the 1920s, feminists had hardly begun to articulate, let alone address, women’s special problems: issues to do with childbirth and child-rearing, or the strain on women who had to combine housework and/or childcare with work outside the home.

…. When women began to organize again in the 1960s and 1970s, the movement called itself Women’s Liberation (borrowing the term from black, Third World, and student movements). This was often shortened, sometimes affectionately, sometimes in a derogatory way, to ‘women’s lib’. But those years also saw the word ‘feminism’ being brought back into general use, and its meaning was extended. Though there was still a justified concern that civil and legal equality had not been fully achieved, the new movement tended to concentrate on problems specific to women in their reproductive and social roles. In those years, too, feminists in Britain made an attempt, at least, to reach out across national boundaries and discover what they had – or did not have – in common with feminists abroad.

But how often, still, do we hear women anxiously asserting ‘I’m not a feminist but . . . ’ as they go on to make claims that depend upon, and would be impossible without, a feminist groundwork? The American feminist Estelle Freedman argues that right from its origins, the word has carried negative connotations; that surprisingly few politically engaged women have styled themselves feminists. In the 1990s some feminists in England and the United States identified and warned against a ‘backlash’ against feminism and its undoubted achievements. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, for example, called their third collection of essays Who’s Afraid of Feminism?, with a cartoon of a big bad wolf on the original jacket cover. They argued that ‘attacks on feminism frequently merge into a wider misogyny’; ‘the feminist’ is now the name given to the disliked or despised woman, much as ‘man-hater’ or ‘castrating bitch’, ‘harridan’ or ‘witch’, were used before the 1960s. They added that women also have to expose and eradicate the misogyny inherent in feminism itself.

Just as troubling is the caution that the term ‘feminism’ seems to arouse in many younger women, a surprising number of whom seem to shy away from the concept. One English tabloid recently published a double-page spread entitled ‘Is Feminism Dead?’, which managed, neatly enough, to sit on the fence; equal space was devoted to arguments yes and no, to those who felt the term was still urgently relevant, and to those who were sure it was dated, even embarrassing, and should be retired. The piece was illustrated with a photograph of ‘militant women’s libbers’ picketing a Miss World demonstration. (In fact, everyone in the photo was laughing.) Faintly embarrassed, I recognized my much younger self, with long hair and long skirts, clutching a distinctly uninspired placard announcing that ‘women are people too’. I had almost forgotten that the Miss World contests still existed (in those bad old days it was on prime-time television), until in 2002 the event received unexpected publicity, first when Nigerian militants demonstrated violently against its ‘parade of nudity’, which they thought would encourage promiscuity and Aids, then when several contestants refused to participate because a young Nigerian woman, sentenced to death under Islamic sharia law for having become pregnant outside marriage, was reprieved – but only until she had weaned her baby. The beauty queens’ gesture was both courageous and effective, though interestingly, one insisted, with a hint of anxiety, that she took up her stand, certainly not because she was a feminist, or even because she was a woman, but because she was a human being.

When I recently asked some women in their early 20s – some of whom were university educated, others working, and all, clearly, beneficiaries of earlier battles for women’s rights – whether they considered themselves feminists, or indeed had any interest in feminism, most of them replied, flatly, no. The very term itself, one woman claimed, sounds stuffy and out of date. Feminism, she felt, has become, on the one hand, a playground for extremists – she termed them ‘fundamentalists’ – who had nothing useful to say to women like herself. On the other hand, she argued, feminism has become ‘institutionalized’, and she compared it to communism: it demands commitment, not simply to ideas, but to a generalized ideology. Moreover, she added, it is nowadays just another academic subject. You can get a degree in ‘gender studies’ and that, she felt, is the real kiss of death: proof, if any were needed, that feminism is no longer urgently relevant. Perhaps these younger women will feel differently in ten years or so, when they find themselves juggling family, housework, and a job; perhaps they will find that they need to re-invent feminism to suit their own experience. But in a way, I hope they will not need to.