Maintaining the Rage

By Renate Klein. This article was adapted from the speech Renate gave at #FiLiA2021 during the Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation Panel.

Renate Klein

When we had the idea for an anthology with old women’s writings, Susan and I hoped very much that this volume to celebrate our publishing company Spinifex Press’ 30th birthday would be our present to young women.

The result, Not Dead Yet. Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation, exceeded our expectations.

Many of the 56 women over 70 writing in this book, want the exhilaration, stresses, anger and joy they experienced through their 40 or more years of feminist activism passed on to younger women.

The passing on of feminist knowledge in our fast-read, fast-experienced and fast-forget-everything time is truly of the utmost importance.

While the word ‘feminism’ these days is used more often than 10 years ago, unfortunately it is often a ‘feminism light’ or indeed a ‘faux-feminism’, that the media serves up for us. Still thin as stick insects, still tottering along in high heels and still dressed to fawn over men, these ‘choice’ feminists lecture us on ‘our bodies, our rights’ to be ‘sex workers’, ‘surrogates’, as well as CEOs and world explorers.

What’s missing is knowledge about our feminist herstory and our role models: old women – in person or by their writing – that enable young women to make sense of their past and present - and provide glimpses into their future.

From the late 70s to the end-90s some lucky women learnt such inspiring radical knowledge in Women’s and Lesbian Studies before they were queered and postmodernised out of existence – or turned into depoliticised Gender/Sexuality/Trans studies where few if any of the texts are by radical feminists that connect the Women’s Liberation Movement with the present. This is a very serious problem – although the books still exist and some of their authors are alive and well and discussion of their writing can be found in countless radical feminist groups on Facebook or the Internet in general. Forming a book club is one small solution.

But in order to find these books, you need a starting point: a friend that points you in the right direction, your feminist mother or grandmother if you are lucky to have such women in your life, and perhaps even a dinosaur professor in some university who has somehow managed to survive the many variations of ‘woke’.

And this is where Not Dead Yet enters the picture. 36 of the 56 contributions in the book are an incredibly rich source of knowledge about feminist actions, organisations founded, important books written and discussed, public protests, feminist campaigns, and feminist solidarity events to show that ‘sisterhood’ was – and is – indeed alive and well (even if, as we are all mere mortals, disagreements and quarrels will always exist).

There are threads through many of these stories: working hard towards the abolition of prostitution and surrogacy which are forms of violence against women, working hard – and I think it gets harder and harder – towards the abolition of pornography as young girls are bombarded with such vile porn that they believe choking and slapping is what is ‘normal’ in heterosex – and the boys try to enact how they see men treat women in their porn diet – ubiquitous and easy to obtain on the Internet.

The other 20 contributions in Not Dead Yet range from a hilarious account of a challenging coastal walk in the North of England where the ‘old woman’ was belittled by the leader, only to show him up as a silly twat as of course she would, to reflections on art in a feminist’s life, to turning one’s hand to restoring vitality to soil that was denuded. Creativity, wit and irony is not missing from the women’s tales and some are profoundly moving such as an 81-year-old former ‘rabble-rousing’ radical lesbian feminist’s ‘body scan’ of her many crevices and creases which she finishes with “I gently rub lotion over it with love” (Sandra Butler, p. 42).

Another strong message in Not Dead Yet is the powerful use of anger that, living in a technopatriarchy, women need to survive. Anger is neither hate nor violence. Anger is expressing our grievances when we hear yet again how a man killed his female partner, sexually abused children, forced women who are not part of the dominant group – white and western middle-class – to live below the poverty line, face homelessness and have their disabilities untreated. And often, on top of all that structural inequality, misogyny and plain old sexism manage to survive and even thrive as in the new transgender scam where 2 and 2 equals 5, full-bodied men with penises say they are lesbians and demand access to female spaces including our beds. And children’s bodies are mutilated with powerful dangerous drugs that have long-lasting consequences.

We all – young and old – need to maintain our rage to stand firm and insist on the right of women and girls not to be erased. We must not be compliant and meek. We have a right to exist. And more: to enjoy our lives, excel at what we want to do and enjoy happiness.

There is no safe space for any woman unless the world is a safe space for ALL women – wherever in the world we live. The writers in Not Dead Yet make a small contribution towards this future.

Dr Renate Klein is a longstanding feminist health activist and author/editor of 20 books.