Thanks to Emily Books, I was recently introduced to the radical feminist essayist Ellen Willis. Reading a collection of her essays, No More Nice Girls, has been only my second prolonged exposure to radical feminism.* That sounds like an unlikely statementfrom someone who has spent as much time collecting English lit. degrees as I have, but there is a world of difference between reading an academic paper that applies feminist theory to a text in order to illuminate certain aspects (rather like an archeologist might fire carbon ions at a fossil in order to ascertain its age), and reading dispatches from within a radical movement dedicated to dismantling our fundamental assumptions about human relationships, and refashioning them on more equitable terms. Willis's work is full of insights that feel desperately important to our culture, but I can't find their imprint anywhere in the world around me. My overwhelming feeling is 'What? You mean somebody already worked all this stuff out? Well then why the Hell are we in such a mess?'
That's why I called this post 'the Libraries of Atlantis' - because reading Willis feels like suddenly coming across a body of knowledge from a highly sophisticated, utterly alien culture that sunk into the sea years ago, and discovering two things:
- Intellectually, they were way ahead of us
- The crises that threatened them are almost exactly the same as the crises that threaten us (in Willis's case, the rise of the New Right, in Atlantis's case, well, rising sea levels, I suppose).
There's a great deal that I could quote from what I've read of No More Nice Girls (and I'm only halfway through reading it), but I'm just going to present two excerpts. The first is about abortion. Willis recognised at the beginning of the eighties that attacks on abortion would be at the heart of the right's cultural charm offensive, and she explained why access to safe, legal abortions for all women must be a central priority for anyone who believes that equal rights apply to all people, regardless of their genetic makeup. Here is what she writes:
I had a baby last year. My much-desired and relatively easy pregnancy was full of what antiabortionists like to call "inconveniences." I was always tired, short of breath; my digestion was never right; for three months I endured a state of hormonal siege; later I had pains in my fingers, swelling feet, numb spots on my legs, the dread hemorrhoids. I had to think about everything I ate. I developed borderline glucose intolerance. I gained 50 pounds and am still overweight; my shape has changed in other ways that may well be permanent. Psychologically, my pregnancy consumed me—though I'd happily bought the seat on the roller coaster, I was still terrified to be so out of control of my normally tractable body. It was all bearable, even interesting—even, at times, transcendent—because I wanted a baby. Birth was painful, exhausting, and wonderful If I hadn't wanted a baby it would only have been painful and exhausting—or worse. I can hardly imagine what it's like to have your body and mind taken over in this way when you not only don't look forward to the result, but positively dread it. The thought appalls me. So as I see it, the key question is "Can it be moral, under any circumstances, to make a woman bear a child against her will?"
[…] All antiabortion ideology rests on the premise—acknowledged or simply assumed—that women's unique capacity to bring life into the world carries with it a unique obligation; that women cannot be allowed to "play God" and launch only the lives they welcome. Yet the alternative to allowing women this power is to make them impotent. Criminalizing abortion doesn't just harm individual women with unwanted pregnancies, it affects all women's sense of themselves. Without control of our fertility we can never envision ourselves as free, for our biology makes us constantly vulnerable. Simply because we are female our physical integrity can be violated, our lives disrupted and transformed, at any time. Our ability to act in the world is hopelessly compromised by our sexual being.
-from 'Putting Women Back in the Abortion Debate', 1985
I'll finish with a quote that sums up what Willis does so well. It's an incredibly simple, irrefutable observation, with (literally) revolutionary implications:
A familialist society assigns legal responsibility for children to the biological parents; the society as a whole has only minimal obligations to its children, and people rarely make deep commitments to children outside their families. This system puts women at an inherent disadvantage: Since it's obvious who a child's mother is, her parental responsibility is automatic; the father's is not. And so the burden has always been on women to get men to do right by them
-from 'Looking for Mr. Good Dad', 1985
I'd never encountered the phrase 'familialist' before, but I love it - especially because it completely transforms the notion of 'personal responsibility'. The right has maintained a monopoly on 'personal responsibility' precisely because they deny the possibility that one's responsibilities might extend beyond one's immediate family. But once you ask 'why is this the case?' and 'should this be the case?' a whole world of possibilities opens up.
*The first was reading a single-volume collection of Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel's magnificent weekly newspaper comic