I came pretty late to feminism. Starting Uni in 2000 as a mature student this was what I knew about it: -
Germaine Greer started it
In the Sixties feminists burned their bras
Feminist were pretty hairy generally, but it wasn't a condition of entry
Feminists were all frighteningly clever, but irrelevant
Feminism had nothing to do with The Suffragists
It started in the '60's but ended sometime when I was knee-deep in nappies and baby-sick
All of which is not to say that I didn't think that the world was a pretty unfair place if you were female. Or that I didn't burn in indignation over things like gendered salary structures. Or that I didn't throw my toys out of the cot once in South Africa when told I couldn't buy a set of friggen saucepans on HP without my husbands signature. Or that I wasn't aware of injustices.
I just didn't know that any of that had anything to do with feminism.
Even had I been I still don't think I would have been particularly interested: I am not a joiner-of-things and I imagined that to be a Feminist I'd have to register somewhere or clock-in or at least go to meetings with lots of strident strangers who would all despise me because I wasn't comfortable in exclusively female surroundings.
So when I first met Margaret Cavendish I was gobsmacked.
I think we are so used to hearing people gush about everyone from Oprah Winfrey to their Avon lady changing their lives that we are continually surprised when we come across someone who genuinely does. So the first time I heard a voice speaking the very things that I have inside my head I was more than just surprised: I was transformed. Especially as the voice which uttered these words has been silent for over 400 years. I had a fleeting fear that my head would start rotating clockwise at 360 degrees or that I would pee on the carpet as was Linda Blair's wont when finding she was no longer alone inside her own head. I even began to feel sorry I hadn't believed a friend who had once gravely confided in me that she had always known she was the re-incarnation of Barbara Castlemaine so that, when she met her husband who was, in fact, the reincarnation of Charles the Philanderer, she knew immediately that the fates had conspired to bring about their union.
Once I had started to recover from my initial gobsmackedness (that one gets patented alongside "blogdem") I became aware of feeling first, puzzled and then a little later of the initial stirrings of overpowering indignation. Where the hell had this lady been all my life?
While I may only have decided to get my formal qualifications in Literature and Drama at the dawn of the new millennium both were subjects in which I had been immersed all my life. At the age of 8 I could, (and unfortunately did) quote great swathes of Tennyson, Ben Jonson, Kipling and Omar Khyam. I had stood in at rehearsals or "heard" lines from works as varied as Dostoevsky, Miller, Noel Coward and She Stoops to bloody Conquer so often that, by the age of 13 I could, at a pinch, have understudied for a multitude of parts at a moments notice. When I was 15 I won my first nationwide Adult Literature Award.
I knew my stuff as well as any other person, goddammit. But nowhere, ever, had I heard the name of Margaret Cavendish. In fact, I dully began to realise, nowhere, ever, had I heard the voices of any women - apart from the religious -until Austen and The Brontes. I had swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the received wisdom that there were none to be heard.
I had been so used, all my life, to being out of step with the rest of the world; to knowing that, whatever I felt about a subject, the minute I opened my mouth and uttered what I assumed to be the general consensus a hush would fall and people would start to shuffle their feet uncomfortably. I had been told so repetitively by a constant stream of starched nuns until the age of 18 that I was "a strange girl", by a procession of men that I was "weird" and by my husband that I was a conversely a half-wit and up myself, a loony and a bitch, that I had become used to invalidating any opinion I had as soon as others showed they were not on the same page.
Yet, unbelievably, here was this woman who, in her time, was more popular than Shakespeare ever was in his, who had been the only woman ever to be accepted into the male cloisters of both Oxford and The National Society in the Seventeenth century, who had been philosopher, playwright, author, scientist: - and we shared the same views on so much.
Being considered eccentric was something she played to the hilt: the story of her shamefully adopting men's clothing on occasion I discovered to have been prompted by the same urges that had caused me at 18, to start smoking a pipe. She was nick-named Mad Madge by others and my husband had labelled me a crazy woman and threatened to commit me to a loony bin. She adored dressing up for her own amusement and so did I. But, much more that any of these superficial and random similiarities (she was, after all, a Duchess and married to the richest and most influential man in the kingdom while I, at the time, was a single mum on Oz-study who took her kids out to dine at the local soup kitchen once a week), was that all the thoughts I had ever had about men she had had too.
I did what I always did at such times and burst in on my friend Wendy, smoking furiously, walking up and down her backyard and eulogizing about all this sudden fellowship to a dead woman. I was overcome!! Every married woman I had ever known was blissfully happy in her lot, adored her spouse and was adored in return. Other women respected men and were not consumed by these traitorous little niggling that perhaps, after all, they were not quite the perfect sex.
I had never dared to tell anyone, even my mother, that instead of awe and wonder, I regarded some of them as pompous prats and sniggerred at them in the privacy of my own room. Yet Margaret, up to her plucked eyebrows in the constraints of patriarchal strictures and codes of conduct, laughed openly and exposed her feelings on the public stage through her plays - and was the first woman ever to do so in England.
When I eventually wound down I saw Wendy sitting on the back step hugging her legs and eyeing
me curiously. Without a word she went inside, poured two glasses of wine and made two cups of coffee. Plonking herself down on the steps again she sipped her wine and stared at me.
"Hmm. So every married woman is blissfully happy with her lot, huh?" she asked me with a cocked eyebrow. "Other women consider the entire male gender to be superior?" She patted the ground in front of her and said:
"Come, kiddo. I'm going to educate you."
That was an illuminating afternoon - the first of many in the unlikely setting of a suburban back yard. In time I began to lose my fear of other women and my feelings of aloneness and alienation. Somehow the knowledge that nothing I thought was shocking, or unique or even new, and that Margaret had been there before me, gave me courage to start voicing my thoughts and sharing them with women other than Wendy. And rather than sniggerring alone in my room we giggled and shrieked and slapped our thighs and belly-laughed about the oddities of male/female relationships until the tears ran down our aching cheeks.
I made up my mind to write my thesis about Margaret Cavendish and the research I began then led me from Mary Astell to Aphra Behn and right up through Mary Wollstonecraft, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf and into the waiting arms of Dale Spender and all the funny, passionate, intelligent contemporary women who lay claim to the title "feminist" today.
It saddens me that the mediocre and second-class minds of those who, sated often in nothing more than bias, ignorance and personal agendas, consistently marginalise these feisty, loving and brave women have the same kind of power that they did in Margaret's day. For four hundred years the woman who first publicly voiced what we would call feminist ideas, has been purposely pushed to the back of mouldy archives and libraries and that witty, innovative voice silenced. The same is already happening to women who followed in her footsteps in the twentieth century and today the mouths of such ardent feminists as Hazel Hankins Hallinan, Constance Rover and Mary Stott are already filling with dust as everything they stood for becomes denigrated and turns to dross. It is stated even in history books that the Feminist movement began in the '60's.
So, after all that, do I now consider myself a feminist? Well, to tell the truth I don't know. Its a label that has been posted on me by many others. But when I think of the lives of our foremothers and all they went through, I honestly don't think I have the bravery, the wit or the strength of purpose to follow in their footsteps. However I will continue not only to remember them but to give them their due. And as for Margaret - I will continue to fight for her to be able to take her rightful place in the canon of English Literature.
So, I might not yet be a true feminist, but I thank all these women continually that, through them, I am at last proud to stand up and be counted as a woman.
Germaine Greer started it
In the Sixties feminists burned their bras
Feminist were pretty hairy generally, but it wasn't a condition of entry
Feminists were all frighteningly clever, but irrelevant
Feminism had nothing to do with The Suffragists
It started in the '60's but ended sometime when I was knee-deep in nappies and baby-sick
All of which is not to say that I didn't think that the world was a pretty unfair place if you were female. Or that I didn't burn in indignation over things like gendered salary structures. Or that I didn't throw my toys out of the cot once in South Africa when told I couldn't buy a set of friggen saucepans on HP without my husbands signature. Or that I wasn't aware of injustices.
I just didn't know that any of that had anything to do with feminism.
Even had I been I still don't think I would have been particularly interested: I am not a joiner-of-things and I imagined that to be a Feminist I'd have to register somewhere or clock-in or at least go to meetings with lots of strident strangers who would all despise me because I wasn't comfortable in exclusively female surroundings.
So when I first met Margaret Cavendish I was gobsmacked.
I think we are so used to hearing people gush about everyone from Oprah Winfrey to their Avon lady changing their lives that we are continually surprised when we come across someone who genuinely does. So the first time I heard a voice speaking the very things that I have inside my head I was more than just surprised: I was transformed. Especially as the voice which uttered these words has been silent for over 400 years. I had a fleeting fear that my head would start rotating clockwise at 360 degrees or that I would pee on the carpet as was Linda Blair's wont when finding she was no longer alone inside her own head. I even began to feel sorry I hadn't believed a friend who had once gravely confided in me that she had always known she was the re-incarnation of Barbara Castlemaine so that, when she met her husband who was, in fact, the reincarnation of Charles the Philanderer, she knew immediately that the fates had conspired to bring about their union.
Once I had started to recover from my initial gobsmackedness (that one gets patented alongside "blogdem") I became aware of feeling first, puzzled and then a little later of the initial stirrings of overpowering indignation. Where the hell had this lady been all my life?
While I may only have decided to get my formal qualifications in Literature and Drama at the dawn of the new millennium both were subjects in which I had been immersed all my life. At the age of 8 I could, (and unfortunately did) quote great swathes of Tennyson, Ben Jonson, Kipling and Omar Khyam. I had stood in at rehearsals or "heard" lines from works as varied as Dostoevsky, Miller, Noel Coward and She Stoops to bloody Conquer so often that, by the age of 13 I could, at a pinch, have understudied for a multitude of parts at a moments notice. When I was 15 I won my first nationwide Adult Literature Award.
I knew my stuff as well as any other person, goddammit. But nowhere, ever, had I heard the name of Margaret Cavendish. In fact, I dully began to realise, nowhere, ever, had I heard the voices of any women - apart from the religious -until Austen and The Brontes. I had swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the received wisdom that there were none to be heard.
I had been so used, all my life, to being out of step with the rest of the world; to knowing that, whatever I felt about a subject, the minute I opened my mouth and uttered what I assumed to be the general consensus a hush would fall and people would start to shuffle their feet uncomfortably. I had been told so repetitively by a constant stream of starched nuns until the age of 18 that I was "a strange girl", by a procession of men that I was "weird" and by my husband that I was a conversely a half-wit and up myself, a loony and a bitch, that I had become used to invalidating any opinion I had as soon as others showed they were not on the same page.
Yet, unbelievably, here was this woman who, in her time, was more popular than Shakespeare ever was in his, who had been the only woman ever to be accepted into the male cloisters of both Oxford and The National Society in the Seventeenth century, who had been philosopher, playwright, author, scientist: - and we shared the same views on so much.
Being considered eccentric was something she played to the hilt: the story of her shamefully adopting men's clothing on occasion I discovered to have been prompted by the same urges that had caused me at 18, to start smoking a pipe. She was nick-named Mad Madge by others and my husband had labelled me a crazy woman and threatened to commit me to a loony bin. She adored dressing up for her own amusement and so did I. But, much more that any of these superficial and random similiarities (she was, after all, a Duchess and married to the richest and most influential man in the kingdom while I, at the time, was a single mum on Oz-study who took her kids out to dine at the local soup kitchen once a week), was that all the thoughts I had ever had about men she had had too.
I did what I always did at such times and burst in on my friend Wendy, smoking furiously, walking up and down her backyard and eulogizing about all this sudden fellowship to a dead woman. I was overcome!! Every married woman I had ever known was blissfully happy in her lot, adored her spouse and was adored in return. Other women respected men and were not consumed by these traitorous little niggling that perhaps, after all, they were not quite the perfect sex.
I had never dared to tell anyone, even my mother, that instead of awe and wonder, I regarded some of them as pompous prats and sniggerred at them in the privacy of my own room. Yet Margaret, up to her plucked eyebrows in the constraints of patriarchal strictures and codes of conduct, laughed openly and exposed her feelings on the public stage through her plays - and was the first woman ever to do so in England.
When I eventually wound down I saw Wendy sitting on the back step hugging her legs and eyeing
me curiously. Without a word she went inside, poured two glasses of wine and made two cups of coffee. Plonking herself down on the steps again she sipped her wine and stared at me.
"Hmm. So every married woman is blissfully happy with her lot, huh?" she asked me with a cocked eyebrow. "Other women consider the entire male gender to be superior?" She patted the ground in front of her and said:
"Come, kiddo. I'm going to educate you."
That was an illuminating afternoon - the first of many in the unlikely setting of a suburban back yard. In time I began to lose my fear of other women and my feelings of aloneness and alienation. Somehow the knowledge that nothing I thought was shocking, or unique or even new, and that Margaret had been there before me, gave me courage to start voicing my thoughts and sharing them with women other than Wendy. And rather than sniggerring alone in my room we giggled and shrieked and slapped our thighs and belly-laughed about the oddities of male/female relationships until the tears ran down our aching cheeks.
I made up my mind to write my thesis about Margaret Cavendish and the research I began then led me from Mary Astell to Aphra Behn and right up through Mary Wollstonecraft, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf and into the waiting arms of Dale Spender and all the funny, passionate, intelligent contemporary women who lay claim to the title "feminist" today.
It saddens me that the mediocre and second-class minds of those who, sated often in nothing more than bias, ignorance and personal agendas, consistently marginalise these feisty, loving and brave women have the same kind of power that they did in Margaret's day. For four hundred years the woman who first publicly voiced what we would call feminist ideas, has been purposely pushed to the back of mouldy archives and libraries and that witty, innovative voice silenced. The same is already happening to women who followed in her footsteps in the twentieth century and today the mouths of such ardent feminists as Hazel Hankins Hallinan, Constance Rover and Mary Stott are already filling with dust as everything they stood for becomes denigrated and turns to dross. It is stated even in history books that the Feminist movement began in the '60's.
So, after all that, do I now consider myself a feminist? Well, to tell the truth I don't know. Its a label that has been posted on me by many others. But when I think of the lives of our foremothers and all they went through, I honestly don't think I have the bravery, the wit or the strength of purpose to follow in their footsteps. However I will continue not only to remember them but to give them their due. And as for Margaret - I will continue to fight for her to be able to take her rightful place in the canon of English Literature.
So, I might not yet be a true feminist, but I thank all these women continually that, through them, I am at last proud to stand up and be counted as a woman.
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