At 9:28 AM +0000 1/8/03, Chris Emery wrote:
>What do folk think about why did women allow themselves to be
>suppressed? And why did/do they allow societies to continuously oppress
>them? Is there a flaw in feminist resistance and attack? Is there a
>feminist apathy in the face of male oppression?
Interesting question, Chris... and a possible answer is so complex,
how does one begin?
As a woman who calls myself feminist, I want to defend and articulate
specific biases against women, without falling into that simplistic
trap of saying it is the _only_ thing which happens, or that it is a
simple question of Victim/Oppressor. I think that's true of all of
the women writing here; we're not stupid enough not to be aware, for
instance, that a lot of these biases are insitutionalised and
perpetuated by women (female genital mutilation is the classic
example). So anything which considers these issues has to consider
both interior, psychic conditioning as well as social pressures. I
think this is especially pertinent to thinking about poetry, which
has always been a specifically male reserve and where a female
presence seems to create, in some quarters, incredible resentment,
and where female self-censorship is a real issue. More, I don't
think it's an accident that it's an argument that seems to be
happening on several fronts at the moment. As the general political
atmosphere has moved further right in the past few years, so it seems
that a number of men feel it's ok now to put women back in their
place. There's, for example, a far right militia gang in Victoria
which harrasses women who dare to leave their husbands: they put on
black masks and picket their houses, putting up graffiti which says
things like WHORE: and they feel quite justified in doing this. Or
Patrick McCauley, my old mate, in Quadrant, complaining that
Australian poetry has been "feminised" and that this has caused a
"crisis of integrity". (I have been thinking, btw and maybe I ought
to answer that letter, it is very vicious).
There have always been punishments, ranging from the hideous (being
bricked up alive in a wall or burned) to simple exclusion from
society, for women who flout decent feminine behaviour, and women
have always been legislated with fewer rights and values than men.
Only a minority of women have ever had the strength to resist that:
Aphra Benn, say, is a very solitary figure. Even on one of the
earliest pieces of writing, the Code of Hummarabi, it's clear that
women are chattels: the punishment for killing a woman is less than
for killing a cow. Sometimes the resistance is recorded: so Livy
mentions the Vestal Virgin Postumia, who was tried for being too
witty and lively for a woman. And so on and so forth: throughout the
West there are stories of women which illustrate these kinds of
conflicts. Yes, the Celtic women fought with the men; but in this
it's significant that the Romans _won_, not the Celts, and what we
inherited was a Roman tradition.
Anyway, to keep this with poetry: I think of Anna Wickham, who was
put in a mental asylum by her husband when she showed him her book of
poems. Or the fact that aristocratic women of the 17C considered it
worse than whoredom to have writing published. Blah blah. I find it
interesting in Nietzsche that while he despised "feminine" behaviour
and has some passages of out-and-out misogyny, he is quite aware that
this is conditioning imposed by men: at some point (I think in The
Gay Science) he talks about how men have created this caricature of
womanhood.
I can't pretend this is anything than schematic: but these centuries
of conditioning have an effect which a couple of decades of supposed
equality is not enough to erase. (Aime Cesaire talks about something
similar in terms of the self image of the African after being
colonised in his poem Return to the Native Land). So the issue of
complicity is a real one. I was raised by a woman who told me that
one should never challenge the authority of a man; that in order to
get what one wanted, one used manipulation (not that she called it
that). This is the classic tactic of the powerless; it's also in its
own way quite successful, although I think the effects of this are
almost wholly negative, since it is basically a counsel of despair, a
kind of awful realpolitik which falsifies any possibility of honest
relationship between men and women. I found it a horrific idea, and
still do: I have a violent allergic reaction to those ideas of being
"feminine" because of that conditioning. But this is how these
complicities are transmitted.
In terms of female apathy: the simple example I can think of is a
woman who lives with a continuously violent man and who continually
returns to that violence. This is not an uncommon situation. I
interviewed such a woman once: her son and she had been acquitted
from bashing this man to death with a hammer when he was asleep.
They had both been subjected to decades of horrific violence and
humiliation from this man, which had hospitalised both of them. But
the question: why didn't she just leave him? fails to take into
account the despair and terror that both of them suffered. This
woman _had nowhere else to go_: her situation had isloated her, and
she didn't, for example, have a job which gave her a measure of
economic independence. It wasn't apathy, it was a brutalised numbing
of the imagination. This is an extreme example, but it does
illustrate that a prison of this sort is both psychic and economic,
and also rather difficult to untangle.
At 1:14 PM -0800 1/8/03, Mark Weiss wrote:
>It should be noted that the very few preindustrial female voices of protest
>were those of extremely privileged women.
It also might be the case that privileged women had some sort of
protection due to their status - unprivileged women didn't. There
are mediaeval court cases which illustrate this - one of a woman who
was raped by a number of men, and dared not report it until she was
backed up by several witnesses in case she was the one punished as a
whore. I think in France, women couldn't even testify in court, as
their word was considered unreliable. To be a widowed woman or
single and poor was a disaster, since there was literally no place in
society for such women: there are documents about these women, who
were homeless and unpropertied - they couldn't even buy themselves
into a convent - and they formed the core of what became the Beguines.
This is already too long: and also barely enough. I think it's a
real question, but to really talk about it requires something of book
length!
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
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