These days, quoting historical figures is a bit like getting someone’s chewy stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Fortune favours the obscure or the obscene, whereas the historical quote is flattened by the democratic impulse of the www. But if asked my preference for anyone’s used chewing gum, it would have to be Virginia Woolf’s. In A Room Of One’s Own, Woolf said, ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Slightly tangential to the context Woolf was using, it’s this line that often comes to mind when i think of my relationship to feminism, which was bequeathed to me by my mother. If you think of old chewy through a lens of food pairing, all quotes should be served with something complementary. And so i also think of Goethe’s critique of the conflict between success and forms of social control in The Sorrows of Young Werner (1774)
There is much to be said for the advantages of rules and regulations, much the same thing as can be said in praise of middle-class society – he who sticks to them will never produce anything that is bad or in poor taste, just as he who lets himself be moulded by law, order and prosperity will never become an intolerable neighbour or a striking scoundrel. On the other hand… rules and regulations ruin our true appreciation of nature and our powers to express it.
Anita Brookner takes this passage from Goethe for the epigraph of her fifth novel, Family and Friends, agreeing with Hermoine Lee’s reading that the novel is premised on the suggestion that middle class family life creates sanity but prevents creativity. Between Woolf, Goethe and Brookner, the issue for me is in reconciling a feminism that only makes sense insofar as it comes from my mother – with a context in which self-realisation is contingent on rejecting familial influence. It seems to me that what is established is a paradoxical opposition between a feminist familial inheritance which needs to be partially rejected for self-realisation to occur and self-realisation as a woman necessarily being feminist insofar as we live in a patriarchal society. I define feminism as a movement for equality and so i think anyone can be a feminist.
i) my mother’s feminism
My mother was born in 1938, the year WW2 began, which was unfortunate because she predated the baby boomers and so didn’t ride the wave of change which the boomers brought about. She came of age in the 50s, which was a pretty grim time for women. Shortly after my mother was born, my grandmother handed her on to my grandmother’s sister to look after – a woman my mother wrongly began to call mummy. My mother went to 11 schools in 13 years, her family went bankrupt on the land and she left school to help support them financially, she was raped, she married young, she got divorced. Later my mother got a job in an insurance firm, where she was paid half what the men were paid for the same work and at the same time she went to night school. She loved working and studying. My mother married my father in 1968 and had my sister in 1970 and me in 1974. My father didn’t support my mother working and so she spent 25 years as a suburban housewife although later she went on to get a Masters in Women’s Studies. My father had a successful career and some of the benefits were that my mother got to travel, eventually move into the inner city and also to contribute to building a country property and business.
My mother is the most well-read person i know, specially in history. From when i was little, my mother read as much as she could, which is not so fun for a kid. My Mum says i would say ‘I’m hungry’ just to get her attention when she was reading. When i was 5, i gave my mother an encyclopedia for her birthday. Instead of chatting to the other mums waiting for their kids to come out of school, my mother would read Proust in the car. She wouldn’t let us watch The Brady Bunch but made us watch The Science Show. When we drove up to Sydney one Christmas, we were allowed to take it in turns to play tapes. My sister played Prince, i played Wham!, my mum played Freud’s lectures and my dad played whatever my mother wanted, so we had a double dose of Freud. My mother started subscribing to the Times Literary Supplement when i was about 9, and one of my favourite childhood memories is lying in bed with her, drinking coffee and reading academic reviews. Something about the coffee and the big words, while in the safety of my mother’s bed, made the world seem very exciting. I remember her reading The Second Sex and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Gloria Steinem. Feminism also meant an interest in women’s health so we had Our Bodies, Ourselves and we went through a big Leslie Kenton phase in the 80s which meant my mum sprouted her own sprouts, made her own yoghurt and, on the odd occasion we had cake, it would be made with wholemeal flour.
This was the cover i grew up with
My Mum didn’t like or want to be a housewife and so she was quite depressed, what with giving most of her life to Safeways, cooking unwanted meals (curried vegetable crepes – eiwww) and following a boring routine which she found to be antithetical to who she was. She didn’t like many people and she found the world to be very unjust. Feminism explained alot to her. She thought women’s work in the house should be paid (it should). She was angry about the social, sexual, legal, material double standard ruling men’s and women’s lives and behaviour, where it seemed like men could get away with doing what they wanted and women were devalued and forced into dependent relationships in which they raised the children, had no money in their own right and no sexual freedom. My mother was not opposed to sharing these views with the whole family, and so we all became feminists, including my father, who eventually fought to have more women on the corporate boards on which he served. Sometimes i wish my mum would have done what she needed to do for herself, instead of becoming so political and intellectual. But she stayed for us, so she wouldn’t break up the home and i am incredibly grateful for that. And so feminism came to stay as well.
ii) getting my own feminism, in weird ways
Political debate was a natural part of my family life, and we didn’t do much socialising. In high school, I read the Communist Manifesto (it’s short) and Steve Biko ‘I write what i like’ and Judith Krantz’s ‘I’ll take Manhattan’ oops. I wanted to be a revolutionary and an anti-apartheid activist, so it was a bit of a surprise when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and i realised that he might not need me. After this wake-up call, I decided to focus my energies on equality between the sexes. I read The Women’s Room and Sexual Politics. Then Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth came out and i used to read that on the exercise bike at night – my third session of exercise for the day – in front of Madonna’s Express Yourself concert tour. This was in year 11 and 12. I was learning that feminism was so unpopular that it was best to look completely glamorous and skinny if one wanted to get one’s message across successfully.