feminism - zelda style!

Zelda and friends at Greenham Common

I had always thought of myself as a feminist and equal to any man. I was out there with the boys, beating them at their own game. Not for me those Party women's groups making things for the Bazaars throughout the year. I went out to work, an independent woman, and I prided myself on taking the decisions in the family. At work, too, I was nicknamed "Queen Bee". Only later did I question that view of myself and become uncomfortably aware that I carried more than half the world on my shoulders. What a fool for not recognising my oppression. Then came the Women's Liberation Movement and my awakening, my recognition of my weaknesses as well as my strengths, that enabled me to look honestly at myself and my position in society. It was a painful process. Consciousness-raising groups gave real meaning to the slogan "the personal is the political". We learned that what we had thought was our problem alone was in fact shared by many other women. Through the sharing of experiences we uncovered and discussed the impact of male power or patriarchy. It became a two-way process of women putting their personal feelings into a political perspective and of Party political women getting more in touch with their personal feelings. And for me it meant having to acknowledge my own mistaken attitudes and practices. I also had to look more closely at the Party and recognise its mistaken attitudes and practices. Feminism was difficult for women of my age to embrace because it invalidated so much we had valued in our lives before.
[Note from Sue: I feel sad that any woman felt their values invalidated by feminism. I know what Zelda means, but in my view, if the movement made her feel that way, there was as much wrong with the values of the movement as with her own.]
Within the Party, discussion had centred around the belief that all would be well for women once we gained socialism. "We should be fighting shoulder to shoulder with our male comrades to defeat capitalism", they claimed, "there's no need to organise in separate groups". We should subsume our struggle for liberation from our oppressioon within the greater struggle to free the working class from their oppression, it was said, ignoring the fact that so many liberation struggles have exposed this argument as false. Women would be urged to support the freedom struggle and encouraged to play a full part in the frontline battle alongside the men and seemingly fully equal to the men. "Look at us," the men in command would say to the world, "we have given the women equal status" and then when the battle was over, the sacrifices made, the women would be pushed back into the home, into servicing the male head of the family, into a second-class citizenship yet again.
The slogan for me was "Women's right to Choose". It should apply not only to the question of abortion, but to every sphere of life. I want control over my own body, my own mind and my own life, and for that I need the fullest information to enable me to make the right choices about my life. [I feel desperately sad reading this, given the complete lack of control Zelda had over her body, mind and life in her last few years!] I want equality of opportunity. I want co-operation, not competition.
Those early days of the women's movement were filled with exciting discussions. I felt I was living on the edge of new discoveries all the time. i was caught up in all the passionate arguments on sexuality and the ectivity around the demands for abortion on demand and free 24 hour nurseries. I was reading Betty Friedan's "The Feminist Mystique", Shulamith Firestone's "Dialectics of Sex", Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Dale Spender on man-made language. Women's books became very important to me. I read them voraciously. Alice Walker and Maya Angelou broadened my vision; Susie Orbach's "Fat is a feminist issue" gave another dimension to the struggle, as did Barbara McDonald's "Look me in the eye", about lesbians' invisibility even within the women's movement. I was searching, searching, searching all the time, looking into myself and sharing the experiences of other women through the groups. But it wasn't all discussions - theory and practice were joined. Women's Centres and women's safe houses were opened, empowerment projects sprang up, anti-discrimination legislation, easier divorce and abortion were all fought for, and educational changes were wrought. To this day I am still re-examining the world in the light of both feminism and Freud.
I meet so many older women nowadays having relationship problems with their daughters. It is worrying too that each generation of women seems to make the same mistakes as their mothers did and have to re-examine their views on relationships, marriage and child-bearing. Dale Spender was so right when she said "women's ideas about the relationship of women and men are either co-opted or lost by men and have to be recreated every fifty years or so".
Arguably the feminist revolution is the only successful revolution in the 20th century. But now women are arguing amongst themselves as to whether feminism is dead. We may not have achieved all we hoped, but it is recognised that feminist ideas have radically changed society in many ways. Feminism is not dead, it may be just lying dormant for a while in the minds of millions of women. I like Rebecca West's answer in 1913 when she was asked what feminism means: " 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 sentimens that differentiate me from a doormat."