Feminist Review: Issue 37 (Feminist Review Journal)

CONTENTS

Black Women, Sexism and Racism: Black or Antiracist Feminism?

Gemma Tang Nain

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Nursing Histories: Reviving Life in Abandoned Selves

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The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh

37

Born-Again Moon: Fundamentalism in Christianity and the Feminist Spirituality Movement

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Washing Our Linen: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism

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Marian McMahon Naila Kabeer

Janet E.McCrickard Clara Connolly Review Essays

on Letter to Christendom Hannana Siddiqui

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on Generations of Memories Julia Bard

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on Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dossiers 1–6 Pragna Patel

93

Reviews on Women of the Arab World and In Search of Shadows Lilian Landor

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on the LIP pamphlets Joan Neary

102

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on ‘We Were Making History’, Women and the Telangana Uprising Shelia Rowbotham

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Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance

107

Poem

111

Response: More Cagney and Lacey

117

Letters

121

Melba Wilson

Jackie Kay Lorraine Gamman

Noticeboard Cover photograph: Joanne O’Brien, WAF Picket of the Irish Embassy May 1990

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ISBN 0-415-06536-4 Master e-book ISBN

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BLACK WOMEN, SEXISM AND RACISM: Black or Antiracist Feminism? Gemma Tang Nain

Introduction As a black woman and a feminist from the Caribbean—Trinidad and Tobago to be exact—I am concerned about the apparent polarization of feminism into ‘black’ and ‘white’ in both Britain and the USA, given that, as an ideology and a political practice concerned with the oppression of women, feminism still has to struggle to achieve and maintain legitimacy. It has been argued that racism in these societies, including its existence within the women’s movement itself, is responsible for this polarization. We in the Caribbean are no strangers to racism, having experienced some of its most extreme manifestations during slavery and for some time after its abolition. However, given the numerical advantage of persons of African descent in the region, it has been possible since the end of colonial rule, and particularly since the 1970s, to weaken the force of racism. White men (both local and foreign) may still control the economies of the region but black men have achieved political power and do exercise considerable control over the public sector. To the extent, then, that power changed hands, it went from white men to black men; women did not feature in the equation. Caribbean women, therefore, have not found it necessary to differentiate feminism into ‘black’ and ‘white’, and the five-year old Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) does in fact attest to this. The women’s movement in the region thus comprises women of different ‘races’ and backgrounds, with divisions, where these exist, emanating from ideological differences rather than racial antagonisms. I can well appreciate that racism must be a potent force for black people in both Britain and the USA where, numerically speaking, they constitute a minority. I can empathize, too, with the plight of black women in these societies, caught as they are between racism on the one hand and sexism on the other. What I cannot understand is the tendency, on the part of black women, to allow the force of racism to overshadow that of sexism, which in turn has implications for strategizing. It leads to ambivalence towards, if not total rejection of, feminism on the part of some black women. In the case of Britain, for example, the relevance of feminism to black women became a contentious issue within the Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD). While it was acknowledged that some of the issues being addressed were of relevance to black

Feminist Review No 37, Spring 1991

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women, given that we ‘do have to deal with things like rape and domestic violence, and Black men are as sexist as the next man’ (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 1985:174), the point was also made that ‘if you’re a Black woman, you’ve got to begin with racism. It’s not a choice, it’s a necessity’ (Bryan et al., 1985:174). In reference to the USA, Joseph noted that both the black movement and the women’s movement are crucial to the black woman’s life, ‘for to choose one and omit the other is detrimental to her well-being’ (Joseph and Lewis, 1981:38). Having said that, however, Joseph concluded that ‘given the nature of racism in this country, it should be obvious that the Black Liberation struggle claims first priority’ (Joseph and Lewis, 1981:39, my emphasis). It would seem, then, that the relationship to feminism of black women in Britain and the USA is aptly summed up by Lauretta Ngcobo when, in reference to black women in Britain, she noted that: It is…true that few of us are feminists in the sense understood by white middle-class women. Ours is an ambivalent position where we may be strongly critical of our men’s assertive sexism…yet we are protective of them, not wanting them attacked…or even grouped with other men for their sexism. (1988:31). From the writings of several black women (see for example Amos and Parmar, 1984; Bryan et al., 1985; hooks, 1982; Joseph and Lewis, 1981; Ngcobo, 1988) it is evident that this ambivalence derives from: an assessment of feminism as a white ideology and practice which is antimen; a sense that it is incompatible with the black struggle against racism and that attention to it will detract from and divide that struggle; a belief that it does not address issues of relevance to black women; disenchantment over the experience of racism (and/or indifference to it) by black women who were involved in the movement. But more fundamental, perhaps, has been the claim of black feminists that: 1 some of the concepts of mainstream feminism do not take into account the experiences of black women. They are thus race-blind and as such lack applicability and relevance to black women (Amos and Parmar, 1984; Carby, 1982; Joseph and Lewis, 1981); 2 some of the practices of mainstream feminism demonstrate insensitivity to the experiences of black women and the entire black population (Amos and Parmar, 1984; Bryan et al., 1985). The concepts of reproduction, patriarchy and the family were singled out as problematic in their application to black women, as were activities surrounding the issues of abortion and male violence, including rape. Part of the problem, however, lies in confusing different levels of analysis (Chhachhi, 1986). For example, the concepts of reproduction and patriarchy are at different levels of abstraction from that of the family, given that the latter, unlike the former, can be viewed as ‘a concrete social phenomenon…’ (Chhachhi, 1986:3). The next section of this article will examine the relevance to black women’s lives of the concepts of reproduction and patriarchy, against the background of the black feminist critique. This will be followed by a discussion of the controversy over political practice, and it is in this section that the feminist critique of the family will be discussed. The final section will look at the viability of black feminism, to be followed by the conclusion.

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Controversy over conceptual issues Black women and reproduction In keeping with the theorizing of Edholm, Harris and Young (1977), reproduction will be used in this article to refer to reproduction of the labour force, both maintenance and allocation/ nonallocation of persons to it over time, and to human or biological reproduction. The first published challenge to mainstream feminism in Britain came from Hazel Carby (1982) in an article titled ‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’. In that article Carby noted that the concept of reproduction becomes problematic when applied to black women, since, in addition to reproducing black labour, they are also involved in reproducing white labour through the provision of domestic service in white households. She did not state to what extent black women in Britain are involved in domestic service in white households. The first point to be made, then, is that Carby does in fact acknowledge reproduction’s relevance to black women, i.e., they are involved in reproducing labour. The problem for her seems to be that one cannot use the concept of reproduction in the same way for both black and white women. But I would seriously question the validity of this claim without reference to a specific socio-economic context. If one is referring to the USA or the Caribbean at a certain historical period—during slavery and for a substantial part of the post-emancipation period—or to contemporary South Africa with its apartheid system, then undoubtedly race assumes an overriding significance in those contexts. However, in most other situations, it is arguable that class, rather than race, constitutes the significant factor. In the case of Britain, for example, it is well documented that white working-class women have for centuries provided domestic service for middle- and upper-class households, and for some this included the function of wet nurse to the children of these classes (Oakley, 1976). According to the 1841 Census for England and Wales, some 712,000 women were employed as domestic servants. But as other jobs became available to working-class women, they began to vacate domestic employment, and the ensuing ‘servant shortage made the domestic role of middle-class and working-class women more and more alike’ (Oakley, 1976:52). The fact that the servant shortage affected middle-class women and not middle-class men is what is of importance in any discussion of reproductive tasks. For, as MacEwen Scott (1986:164) observed, whatever assistance is received is based on substitution and does not ‘alter the fact that legally and ideologically the ultimate responsibility for the home [lies] in the hands of the wife or mother’. But an additional point needs to be made. While middle- and upper-class women generally may be able to avoid some reproductive tasks, their escape is far from total. In the main, they may be able to avoid that aspect of reproduction described as domestic labour, which involves housework and childcare or, to put it differently, they have managed to avoid the maintenance functions required for reproducing the current and future labour force (as well as the non-members of that labour force). However, they still need to be involved in biological or human reproduction, and in terms of labour force allocation/nonallocation, they are likely to be crucially involved.1 For example, the socialization of male and female children of the upper classes is likely to be quite different where the male child is being geared for a future role of owner/controller of the means of production while the female child is being geared for a

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housewife role. Here the upper-class woman will be responsible for the type of socialization these children receive, even if the day-to-day details of this process are not carried out by her. With regard to black women in Britain, two examples will be highlighted of reproduction’s relevance to them. The reference made by Bryan et al. (1985) to the problems faced by members of the Brixton Black Women’s Group (BBWG) in their roles as activists, mothers, cooks and cleaners, as well as their involvement in social production, demonstrated its relevance to these women. Further, Fuller’s study of 1975 to 1977 of pupils of a London comprehensive school clearly revealed the disproportionate involvement of black girls rather than boys in domestic labour. ‘In common with many of the Asian and white girls interviewed, the black girls expressed considerable resentment that their brothers were not expected to undertake domestic tasks (either at all or to the same extent).’ (Fuller, 1982:94) This finding demonstrated that it was the future women who were being groomed to undertake the reproductive responsibilities. It can be concluded, then, that outside of certain specific contexts it is class differences among women which enable some of us, both white and black, to relieve ourselves from performance of some aspects of the reproductive role, either temporarily or permanently. Such relief, however, does not allow us to abdicate responsibility for the role. Hence the crux of the matter is that reproduction has been and remains the responsibility of the woman in most, if not all, contemporary societies, even though we may experience it differently depending on our class, race and country of residence. Black women and the working of patriarchy Paralleling its controversy within mainstream feminism, it is the concept of patriarchy which has provoked the greatest antagonism from black feminists. They have argued that, however understood, patriarchy cannot be used in an unqualified way within the context of a racist society. For Amos and Parmar (1984:9), ‘it is a denial of racism and its relationship to patriarchy to posit patriarchal relations as if they were non-contradictory.’ Gloria Joseph goes even further. She states that, with respect to the USA, the term patriarchy can only be applicable to white male dominance since ‘all white women have ultimate power over Black men’ on account of the racist nature of the executive, legislative and judicial systems (Joseph, 1981: 100, my emphasis). But before beginning the discussion about patriarchy’s relevance, I wish to clarify the distinction between patriarchy and sexism. For, while some writers use these terms interchangeably, they are not being used here in that way. In this article, Heidi Hartmann’s definition of patriarchy is being employed. This refers to a set of hierarchical social relations between men which allows for control of women’s labour power (Hartmann, 1981). In other words, patriarchy is operationalized through the gendered division of labour in social production, in both its vertical and horizontal manifestations. Sexism, on the other hand, refers to an ideology which assumes women’s inferiority, and which legitimizes discrimination against them on the basis of their sex and feminine gender. Let us, therefore, first address the issue of sexism. While black women in Britain and the United States acknowledge the sexism of both white and black men, Gloria Joseph (1981) makes the interesting point that black men in the

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United States ‘learned’ (by implication from white men) to dominate black women, a statement which implies that these men, prior to their arrival in the United States as slaves, did not do so. A related point has been made by some black women in Britain who stated that: ‘We don’t alienate [black] men because they put down black women, because we recognise that the source of that is white imperialist culture’ (Bryan et al., 1985:173). But such claims are fundamentally refuted by Lauretta Ngcobo when she says: ‘In considering the relations between the sexes in the Black community, it would be self-delusion to pretend that our problems are entirely due to slavery and racism’ (1988:28). For her, many of the attitudes of black men to black women were formed in Africa, in spite of the fact that some women did enjoy positions of power in precolonial times, and it was these attitudes that were taken to the Caribbean and elsewhere, albeit having been diluted by slavery. This attitude is clearly borne out by Stokely Carmichael’s famous phrase that the only position for women in the black movement is prone (Haralambos, 1980), and by the following comment attributed to Amiri Baraka, another prominent proponent of black resistance in the United States. Paraphrasing Jim Brown he noted that ‘there are black men and white men, then there are women [and the] battle is really between white men and black men’ (cited in hooks, 1982:97). Some people have argued, however, that the sexism of black men in both Britain and the USA is different from the sexism of white men in those societies. ‘The oppressive white man and the oppressed Black man [sic] may both exhibit sexist behaviour, but the former does so from a position of power, the latter from a position of powerlessness.’ (Ngcobo, 1988:31) While this may be true, I would challenge the usefulness of such a distinction. One can in fact take a similar position regarding the racism of white women and the racism of white men, and Sandra Harding (1981) alludes to this, but do these distinctions change the nature of institutionalized sexism and racism? Does the fact that there are unequal power relationships among members of the dominant sex/gender, and among members of the dominant race, really make a difference to the victims of sexist and racist oppression respectively? I think not, and there are times when shared racism among white people can override sexism and when shared sexism among men can override racism.2 Having addressed the issue of sexism, let us now turn our attention to patriarchy. If one is to determine whether the lives of black women are affected by patriarchy in societies which are considered racist, and whether black men participate in it, one will have to show that the labour power of black women is controlled in such a way so as to limit their access to income through a gendered divison of labour in employment, and to show that the labour power of black men is not controlled in the same way. In order to address these issues, the USA will be used as an example of such a society. The use of the USA is related to access to information and is not intended to suggest that conclusions can be extrapolated to Britain or any other country, nor is such extrapolation necessary. It is simply intended to demonstrate the relevance (or otherwise) of patriarchy to the lives of black women within the context of a society that is assumed to be racist. While recognizing the inherent inadequacies in the use of statistics, I will attempt to demonstrate the existence of patriarchy through use of income levels, employment distribution, years of schooling completed, and income relative to educational qualifications. (It is factual to state that statistics do not provide a total picture of reality. For instance, statistics of income levels do not indicate how many hours of work correspond to a particular income. Also, while statistics on employment distribution clearly show the gendered division

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of labour along occupational lines, they do not adequately reveal what kinds of jobs are done, for example, by black women vis-à-vis white women in clerical and service work. Bruegel (1989) highlights some of these difficulties in respect of black and white women in the British labour market.) Even before the reforms to the United States system became operationalized following the emergence of the black power movement in the 1960s, black men were earning more than black women (Lewis, 1977).3 Figures for 1963 reveal that the year-round median earnings for full-time black male workers were $4,019, compared to $2,280 for full-time black female workers. In fact, the earnings of black men also surpassed that of white women whose comparable earnings for 1963 were $3,687. By 1974, the earnings of black male workers had reached $8,705, compared with $6,371 for black women and $7,021 for white women. For white male workers their earnings moved from $6,245 in 1963 to $12,434 in 1974. (Lewis, 1977) What is revealed by these figures, then, is that although white men are by far the highest earners, black men do constitute the second-highest earning group. In fact, while the income gap between black and white women closed during the period 1963–74, the gap between women (black and white) and black men widened. These findings are even more startling when it is recognized that black women had completed more years of schooling than black men, and white women more years than white men, during that period. Figures for 1966 indicate that the median years of school completed by black women were 10.1, compared with 9.4 for black men. For white women the figure was 12.2 compared with 12.0 for white men. (Murray, 1970) These figures reveal that black men, even with the least schooling of the four groups, managed to achieve the second-highest earnings. In terms of employment distribution, data for 1974 showed the greatest concentration of black women in service work (26 per cent), closely followed by clerical work (25 per cent). For white women the figures were 36 per cent in clerical work followed by 17 per cent in service work. On the other hand, the greatest concentration of black men was in transport (26 per cent), followed by craft and kindred work (16 per cent), while for white men the comparable figures were 18 per cent in transport, and 21 per cent in craft and kindred work. The data given here for black women and men is inclusive of other non-white groups, although ‘blacks’ accounted for almost 90 per cent of this non-white population. (Lewis, 1977) Clearly, then, there was greater homogeneity in employment along sex lines rather than along race lines. These findings also lend support to the observation of Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis that ‘within western societies, gender divisions are more important for women than ethnic divisions in terms of labour market subordination. In employment terms, migrant or ethnic women are usually closer to the female population as a whole than to ethnic men in the type of wage-labour performed.’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983:69) Finally, an interesting picture is provided by a breakdown of earnings according to educational levels for the year 1979. For persons with qualifications under a high-school diploma, white males earned $9,525, black males $6,823, white females $3,961 and black females $3,618. For persons with a Bachelor’s degree, white males earned $19,783, black males $14,131, white females $9,134 and black females $10,692. (King, 1988:49) At the latter level of education, the income of black females actually surpassed that of white females, though all women lag behind black men who in turn lag behind white men. It is noted by Deborah King (1988), in reference to comments made by P.M. Palmer, that white women are

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better off than black women due to their access to the higher earnings of white men. While this is no doubt true, it simply reinforces white female dependency and subordination, and leaves patriarchy intact. In fact, the existence of patriarchy ensures that white women have an interest in the retention of racism and the higher incomes it offers to white men. It seems obvious, then, that while racism is a significant factor in the differences between white and black men’s earnings, it is sexism and the operationalization of patriarchy which crucially affect the earnings of all women in the USA. Further, the above information does demonstrate the participation of black men in these patriarchal relations. In fact, although Hartmann’s (1981) definition implies that these relations which restrict women’s access to productive resources would have only intra-group applicability, i.e., that women within a particular group would be subordinate, economically, to the men of that group, the evidence for the USA contradicts this implication since white women, as well as black women, earn less than black men. Therefore, while it is true that racism in the USA ensures that the hierarchy within patriarchy is steeper than it would normally be (between classes for instance), it does not negate patriarchy’s existence.4 This evidence also refutes Joseph’s (1981) claim that all white women have power over black men. For, while it can be conceded that economic power is not the only source of power, it is in fact an important source. Controversy over political practice As with the concepts discussed above, black feminists have criticized mainstream feminism for aspects of its political practice. In this section, I will discuss the critique of the family, the demand for abortion and the issue of male violence. The feminist critique of the family Given that a number of feminist concepts point to the family as a crucial site of women’s oppression, it was logical for it to be targeted for criticism. But this feminist critique, like the Marxist critique before it, has met with little popularity, and at times open hostility and counter-attack (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982). But before moving into a discussion of this counter-attack, exactly what is meant by ‘the family’ should be clarified. Part of the ambiguity results from a failure to distinguish between ‘an aggregation of kinsfolk or a household of co-residents’ (Barrett, 1980:201). Thus, for Barrett, it is more useful to speak of the household rather than the family, and of a familial ideology. Barrett does, however, make use of the combination term ‘family-household’, and this is the usage which will be followed here to refer to both kinsfolk and co-residents, since the two need not be mutually exclusive, and often are not. A key source of counter-attack to the feminist critique of the family has come from black feminists who have vocalized their defence of the black family-houshold as an arena of solidarity and resistance against racism in both Britain and the USA (see for example Amos and Parmar, 1984; Carby, 1982). This view of the black family-household is supported by other writers (Flax, 1982; Lees, 1986), who also point to a similar function on the part of the white working-class family in these societies, against the vicissitudes of capitalism. However, one should not allow this reality—the family-household as a source of resistance to other forms of oppression—to disguise or distort the oppressive elements to women within

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that very institution. And the black feminists cited above do acknowledge the possibility of such family-based oppression. In adding their support to the view of the family-household as oppressive to women, Arthur Brittan and Mary Maynard point to the mothering, domestic, sexual and emotional services performed by women within the family-household: ‘We regard such activities as oppressive…because they are expected of women, but not of males’ (Brittan and Maynard, 1984:145). And while women may not perform these tasks to the same degree, given variations in family-household organization in contemporary Britain and the USA, it is arguable that they do perform more of them than men do. But an even more telling point is the ideological expectation that these activities will be performed by women, which means that ‘no woman, adolescent, unmarried, lesbian or whatever her status can escape the oppression built into her real or imputed family position’ (Brittan and Maynard, 1984:146). Additionally, there is the issue of violence against women in the family-household, and this will be discussed under a subsequent heading. Thus it is obvious that the family-household embodies the contradictions of oppression which are characteristic of the wider society. A further point which needs to be made is that even the white, middle-class, nuclear family which has been the prime focus of the feminist attack, is not without its merits. As Coote and Campbell (cited in Rowland, 1984:16) note: ‘Of course, it would be easier to develop a clear political analysis of family life if it were altogether a bad thing…but…there are ways in which the family can be a source of care, affection, strength and security.’ And this is particularly so given the ideological justification of the family as ‘the “haven in a heartless world” of capitalism’ (Barrett, 1980:212). It is apparent, therefore, that a certain degree of ambivalence has characterized feminism’s critique of the family, an ambivalence which has not been acknowledged by black feminists, and hence feminism’s consensus on this issue tends to be exaggerated (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982). Further, it is, perhaps, the ambivalent nature of the feminist critique, and its general unpopularity, which at least partly explains why revisionist/pro-family feminists, as well as antifeminists, have launched their counter-attack in this area, in an attempt to discredit feminism. (See Eisenstein, 1984, and Stacey, 1986, for a discussion of revisionist/pro-family feminism.) Elshtain and Friedan, both writing in the early 1980s in defence of the family and in celebration of motherhood, are viewed as the key architects of this revisionist/pro-family backlash within feminism (Eisenstein, 1984; Stacey, 1986). It is regrettable that the black feminists, in their counter-attack, did not address this alternative trend, either to support it or to distance themselves from it. It can be suggested, then, that feminism’s critique of the family has been, and remains, a contentious issue, antagonizing and alienating women of different races, classes and political persuasions. Undoubtedly, it is necessary for feminism to develop a knowledge base about different family-household forms (Barrett and McIntosh, 1985), in order to analyse the power relationships within them which in turn can inform appropriate action. The demand for abortion The issue of abortion represents another area of controversy between feminist action and black women in Britain and the USA. The claim of black feminists that the issue must be that of a woman’s right to choose rather than simply limited to abortion per se is indeed valid. In fact, the struggle must be for women to control their sexuality and fertility through

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access to safe contraception and abortion, and to decide if and when they want children. But did the broadening of the demand necessarily have to involve an attack on the original demand for abortion? Let us examine this matter further in the context of Britain. It has been argued by black feminists that doctors were all too willing to administer abortion to black women, at times against their will and even to sterilize them without their knowledge. Given this reality, then, abortion was dismissed in almost flippant fashion in the 1970s by members of the BBWG. They stated that ‘abortion wasn’t something we had any problems getting as black women—it was the very reverse for us!’ (Bryan et al., 1985:149) But by the early 1980s, under the threat of the Corrie Abortion Amendment Bill, both the BBWG and OWAAD were articulating their support for the right to abortion, since its removal as a legal right would mean a return to the ‘back street’ abortionist and, perhaps, a greater risk of being given the dangerous drug, depo provera. This serves to highlight the fragile nature of any rights won by women, and the need for co-operation among feminists even where disagreement may occur. In fact, the 1980s has witnessed the emergence of strong anti-abortionist lobbies in both Britain and the USA, and hence the right to state-funded abortion is now under attack for all women, both black and white. This antiabortionist position has gained ground even among socalled progressive elements in the USA, ‘to the point…of denying the right to abortion to women who are the victims of rape or incest’ (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982:14). With reference to the antiabortionist groups in the USA, Women’s International Network News (WIN News) notes that these groups ‘have resorted to an incredible range of tactics, from blatant propaganda and harassment to personal intimidation and legal action’ (WIN News 14, 1, 1988:35). It is important to note, too, that antiabortionists are not limited to individuals and voluntary groups, as the state is also involved. In July 1989, the Supreme Court in the USA just fell short of reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling which had granted women the right to decide whether to have an abortion. The 1989 ruling, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, now permits individual states to make the decision for the woman (WIN News, 16, 1, 1990). In Britain, successive attempts to reduce the time limit within which abortions can be performed have failed, but as the antiabortionist lobby grows, with active support and assistance from US groups, the need to be vigilant cannot be overemphasized (WIN News 15, 4, 1989). Male violence against women Although one may assume that women of different races and classes can unite over the issue of male violence, here again conflict has emerged. Under this heading I will discuss two manifestations of male violence: domestic violence and rape. Domestic violence Women suffer from an inordinate amount of violence within their homes, usually perpetrated against them by their husbands or other males with whom they are sexually involved. But it is a crime which is grossly under-acknowledged and under-reported, and even where it is reported it tends to be dismissed or not taken seriously by the police. Feminism has drawn

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attention to this issue, and has achieved some success in having it put on the agenda as a problem which needs to be addressed. But for black women in Britain and the USA (who suffer this fate at the hands of their black men), their situation is compounded by two additional factors: the fact that the ‘white’ police service is likely to be even less sympathetic, if not downright hostile (Mama, 1989, provides some examples of white police hostility towards black women in Britain who reported such crimes); and their own ambivalence towards reporting their men to agencies which have shown themselves to be racist. Some have gone further and have argued: ‘What’s the point of taking on male violence if you haven’t dealt with State violence?’ (Bryan et al., 1985:175) Thus black women are truly caught in a ‘no-win’ situation, and at times are further abused by black men, secure in the knowledge that they would not be turned over to the police. However, within recent times, black women in Britain have been refusing to remain silent victims of this abuse, and have been seeking shelter within women’s refuges which have been in operation in Britain since the middle-to-late 1970s. (See Mama, 1989, for a full discussion of this issue). Rape Another crime which affects women and which continues to take place at a staggering rate is that of rape. It is a crime which, given the mere possibility of its occurrence, has served to severely limit the mobility of all women. Feminism has been active in focusing attention on this manifestation of violence against women, and some feminists have organized ‘reclaim the night’ marches. Centres for rape victims are also in operation. There have, however, been problems with ‘reclaim the night’ marches in Britain, for example, when some white feminists marched in areas of black concentration. This had the effect of suggesting a link between black people and violence and was justly criticized. However, it ought to be mentioned that while women’s mobility is affected by the fear of rape and other attacks on the streets, this has not attracted anything near the level of concern and outrage which the fear of racial attacks has produced. This crime of rape, as well, has produced ambivalence among black women in Britain and the USA with black feminists contending that rape cannot be addressed without at the same time mentioning the lynching of black men. (Amos and Parmar, 1984; Davis, 1981). It has been pointed out that in the USA, for example, several black men in the post-emancipation period were lynched for raping, or suspicion of raping, white women. This so overshadowed the rape of black women, however, that when Brownmiller asked a black male librarian for information about rape, she was told that for ‘black people, rape has meant the lynching of the black man’ (cited in Wallace, 1979:119). It is important to recognize, therefore, that while there was a link between the raping of women and the lynching of black men at certain historical periods and in specific socio-economic environments, what is involved are two separate and distinct social problems. In fact, if the mass media is to be believed, it would seem that the crime of lynching is now a relic of the past or, at any rate, is now quite rare. On the other hand, the raping of women in contemporary Britain and the USA continues unabated, thus constituting justifiable grounds for treating the two issues separately. With regard to the rape of black women, in both Britain and the USA, once again, as in the case of domestic violence, they face additional difficulties. If a black woman is raped by a

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white man, no one is likely to take her seriously, and even if he is arrested he is unlikely to be convicted. (Information from the USA confirms that few white men have been convicted of rape. Davis, 1981) If she is raped by a black man, she faces the dilemma of reporting it and being ignored or further abused by the police, in addition to having feelings of disloyalty to black people (Omolade, 1985), or of suffering in silence. Either way, she is the loser. What is not easily understandable is why black women should feel a sense of disloyalty to, or betrayal of, the black population in reporting acts of violence against them by black men, while the black men seem not to harbour any such sentiments by abusing them in the first place. This undoubtedly amounts to an asymmetry of loyalty. Further, given the frequent references in black writings to the ‘black community’, should this ‘community’ not have acted to protect its women from, and to condemn its men for such acts of abuse in the light of the racism of the state and its agencies? Or is the reference to a black community simply a façade, intended to disguise deep internal divisions and a lack of consensus? These issues should provide fertile ground for investigation by black feminists. Having discussed the areas of controversy (conceptual and practical) between mainstream feminism and black women in Britain and the USA, we must now turn our attention to the viability of black feminism in addressing the issue of women’s oppression. The viability of black feminism What does the ‘black’ in black feminism stand for? Despite differences within radical feminism and socialist feminism, it has been suggested that one can attribute to these groupings certain core tenets. Radical feminism, for instance, asserts the primacy of sexual exploitation over all other forms of oppression while socialist feminists assert that an integrated understanding of sexual oppression and class exploitation is necessary. Therefore, the describing adjectives of radical’ and ‘socialist’ are associated with specific political/ideological meanings. With regard to black feminism, while it is postulated that it is oppression based on race, sex and class which must be addressed, it has to be acknowledged that some ambiguity is associated with the adjective ‘black’. Is it intended to be political, racial, or both? There is thus an on-going debate as to who is black (Murphy and Livingstone, 1985), which in turn has implications for the boundaries of black feminism. Let us first examine the situation in Britain. If ‘black’ in Britain is not about skin colour, as has been argued by Bryan et al. (1985) and Sivanandan (1985), then on what basis are persons included or excluded? If it is a political term, as suggested by Bryan et al., to refer to people who have suffered colonial and imperialist domination, then can Irish women, who are considered ‘white’, be included? If not, why not? Amina Mama’s attempts at clarifying the issue are far from satisfactory, since she takes the position that the term should not be extended to encompass all those who have suffered from imperialism: ‘In Britain it is clear that Black refers to Africans (continental and of the diaspora), and Asians (primarily of Indian subcontinent descent). All have a shared history of oppression by British colonialism and racism.’ (Mama, 1984:23). But a similar argument about colonial domination and racism can be put forward in the case of the Irish at the hands of the British. According to Husband (1982) and Miles (1982) the Irish, in an earlier period of British history, had also been racialized, although skin colour did not

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constitute the difference. It was felt that their ‘Celtic Blood’ was different from that of the British (Husband, 1982). Mama’s definition of black also confirms the view of Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1983) that Greek Cypriots and Jews are not black. In order to limit the term ‘black’ to Africans and Asians, one would have to confirm its reference to skin colour. This is, perhaps, quite legitimate in the British context, given that the survey referred to by Daniel (1968) showed that Africans (primarily from the Caribbean at that time) and Asians (primarily from the Indian subcontinent) were subjected to more severe racial discrimination than other immigrants who were considered ‘white’ (e.g. Hungarians). But, then, one would have to be honest and state that it does in fact refer to skin colour as well as being political. However, this raises another issue—whether Asians (from India, Pakistan, etc.) will accept the label of black if skin colour is what is intended, since they have angrily objected to being called black in Trinidad and Tobago, insisting that they are brown. And while it can be argued that their experience of racism in Britain may have served to foster an acceptance of blackness, none the less it means that their relationship to the term is qualitatively different from that of persons of African descent. For example, while it is true that colour variations were acknowledged by Afro-Caribbeans before their arrival in Britain, blackness as part of their identity was never fully disallowed. In the USA the term ‘black’ has been less ambiguous, referring primarily to people of African descent. Among some non-white women the term ‘women of colour’ has been used, at times to refer to all who are not white, including those of African descent (Murphy and Livingstone, 1985), and at times to refer to non-whites other than Africans, thus reserving the term ‘black’ only for those of African descent (Mama, 1984). It seems apparent, then, that since the term ‘black’ is so closely linked historically to people from Africa and of African descent, encompassing both a racial and political definition, it becomes problematic to attempt to transform this into a purely political term to refer to other non-white peoples. It is an issue, therefore, which should be addressed by black feminists. Is black feminism an alternative movement? The ambiguity surrounding the question of who is ‘black’ is replicated in black feminism’s location and constituency. Can black feminism be viewed as part of feminism and hence the women’s movement in the West, as part of the black movement (encompassing both black women and black men in the struggle against racism), or as part of both movements? Relatedly, is it functioning on behalf of all women, only non-white women or, more narrowly still, only black women? If we assume, for a moment, that it is part of feminism, here again a comparison with the other strands within feminism is useful. Radical feminism asserts that it is for all women, regardless of class, race, sexual orientation, or whatever other differences may exist among women. Socialist feminism also claims that it is for all women, but recognizes class as a major factor dividing women. Logically, then, black feminism, too, should be for all women, while recognizing race and class as significant dividers among women. But the reality has been that while radical and socialist feminism have been seen as open to all women, though in fact they have been dominated by white, middle-class women, black feminism has been perceived as restricted to black women.

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In order to try to unravel some of these inconsistencies, we will look at the situation of black feminism in Britain. Let us address, first, the focus of black feminism, i.e., try to ascertain the constituency on whose behalf it functions. Most, if not all, black feminist writings have stressed the need to address sex, class and race oppression, which theoretically means that black feminism as an ideology and a movement is open to all women who support such claims. However, some of the writings within black feminism have also encouraged the perception that it is only applicable to black women. Claudette Williams, for example, points to black feminism as ‘an important and valid dimension of the struggle of black people for their total liberation’ (Williams, forthcoming). A similar position is alluded to by the BBWG although some ambiguity is apparent. The group states that it adheres to socialist feminism, while also adhering to black feminism. Further, the latter at times seems to refer to part of a total struggle for liberation of all oppressed people, while at other times it seems to refer specifically to part of the black struggle (see Speak Out No. 4). And this brings us back to the ambiguity associated with the word ‘black’. For, if only certain women are black, as suggested by Mama (1984), then how can black feminism be applicable to women who are not black? It is probably this lack of clarity which motivated Anthias and Yuval-Davis to question, within the context of Britain, the polarization of feminism into mainstream (white) and black. ‘The notion of “black women” as delineating the boundaries of the alternative feminist movement to white feminism leaves non-British nonblack women…unaccounted for politically’ (Anthias and leads Davis, 1983:63). This reference to an alternative movement thus leads to a discussion of black feminism’s location. Although Williams (forthcoming) indicates that the black women’s movement did not emerge as an alternative to the (mainstream) women’s movement in Britain, and Mama (1984) questions the reference to it as such by Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1983), the writings of Amos and Parmar (1984) do in fact lay claim to the status of black feminism as an alternative movement. They specifically make mention of what ‘true’ feminism ought to be, and of black feminism ‘as a distinct body of theory and practice’ (Amos and Parmar, 1984:18). On the other hand, the BBWG acknowledges that it holds a socialist-feminist viewpoint, while advocating black feminism (Speak Out No. 4). Thus, there seems to be some ambivalence as to precisely where black feminism stands in relation to mainstream feminism in Britain. With regard to its relationship to the black movement, Williams’s comment that it is part of the black struggle seems to indicate a positive relationship. As mentioned earlier, in the USA the term ‘women of colour’ is sometimes used to refer to all non-white women or, at times, to refer only to those who are not of African descent. Hence when the term ‘black’ is used, it usually refers specifically to women of African descent, and this is borne out by writings of black women in the USA (Davis, 1981; hooks, 1982; Joseph, 1981). However, regarding the location of black feminism in the USA, here, too, some ambiguity exists. In terms of its constituency, it is possible to suggest, again from writings of black women (for example, hooks, 1982), that it, caters only for black women. When it is acknowledged, then, that the black population in the USA, as in Britain, constitutes a minority (although in the former they are a larger minority than the latter), it can be contended that without co-operation with mainstream feminism, the viability of black feminism in both Britain and the USA is rather limited. It is understandable that black feminism may have been important and in fact necessary to black women in both Britain and the USA at a particular historical juncture. It was, perhaps,

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a strategic political choice, given the alienation felt by black women in both the maledominated black movement and the white-dominated women’s movement. It must also be acknowledged that black feminism did play a vital role in exposing racism within the women’s movement, and in having oppression based on race accepted as a valid and legitimate issue for the feminist agenda. But it would seem that black feminists in both countries now need to decide whether they want to retain this narrow focus, i.e., catering specifically for black women, or whether they want to broaden their constituency. If the latter choice is made, it may entail a change of name, given the ambiguity surrounding the term ‘black’. A possibility could be Antiracist/Socialist feminism (despite it being such a mouthful), to reflect its concern with sex, race and class oppression, and to allow all women who adhere to this viewpoint—black, other non-white, and white—to be involved. This is perhaps the kind of alternative being alluded to by hooks (1982). For, although hooks is a black woman and a feminist, and believes that feminism should deal with sex, class and race oppression, in her writings there is some ambiguity as to whether one can classify her as a black feminist in the sense of advocating a feminism specifically for black women. In fact, while she acknowledges the support and solidarity enjoyed by black women in black women’s groups, she is critical of a separate black feminism: ‘Rather than black women attacking the white female attempt to present them as an Other,…they acted as if they were an Other’ (hooks, 1982:151). Conclusion In this article I have examined the claims of black feminists, regarding the inapplicability to black women of some key feminist concepts, and the adverse consequences for black women of some aspects of feminist political practice. Although black feminists have identified the concepts of reproduction, patriarchy and the family as problematic, I contend that reproduction and patriarchy constitute different levels of analysis from that of the family. Therefore, while reproduction and patriarchy have been discussed under the rubric of conceptual issues, the feminist critique of the family, the demand for abortion, and male violence against women are treated as areas of political practice. Through an examination of the concepts of reproduction and patriarchy within the context of Britain and the USA, I conclude that these concepts do have relevance for black women in these societies. Regarding feminist action connected with the family-household, abortion and male violence against women, I acknowledge that some of the claims of black feminists are valid, although areas of common concern and interest to both black and white women are clearly evident. In my assessment of black feminism’s viability, I have drawn attention to the ambiguity surrounding the term ‘black’, as well as to black feminism’s location (in which movement or struggle is it located), and to its constituency (on whose behalf is it functioning). The conclusion I have reached is that black women represent its constituency, although I have not made a conclusive decision on its location. I have conceded that black feminism may have been necessary at a particular historical moment, given black women’s experience of multiple oppression, but ask whether it should now seek to expand its constituency. I have suggested that this may involve a change of name, perhaps to Antiracist/Socialist feminism, to reflect

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concern with the triple oppression of sex, race and class, and to allow all those who adhere to this viewpoint to participate. As argued in this article, then, feminism is an ideology and practice which acknowledges the oppression of women and which seeks to transform this situation. It does not follow from this that it is anti-men, as perceived by some black women, though aspects of early second-wave feminism may have been anti-men, for example SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). However, one should not generalize from that faction to feminism as a whole. Within the Western world feminism consists of various strands—liberal, radical, socialist and black feminism—and while liberal feminism is not necessarily interested in transformatory change, it is the view of this writer that the different strands do have their place within contemporary feminism in Britain and the USA, and that ideology should inform political organization and practice. The assertion that political organization and practice should flow from ideology is made to encourage a shift away from the polarization in Britain and the USA between black feminism and the other feminisms which are considered ‘white’. The experience of feminism in Britain, where the mainstream ‘white’ movement collapsed due to conflict between radical and socialist feminists, and the subsequent demise of the black women’s movement, should have served to highlight the fragility of race as a unifying factor for organization and practice within feminism. And this point is made all the more cogent when it is acknowledged that those women considered ‘black’ in Britain are as divided among themselves as they are from ‘white’ British women (James, 1986, makes mention of the antagonisms between AfroCaribbeans and Asians in Britain and urges that it should not be ignored). Parmar, in a somewhat reflective mood following her scathing attack on ‘white’ feminism (along with Amos in 1984), wrote in a 1988 article that ‘Racial identity alone cannot be a basis for collective organising as the black communities are as beset with divisions around culture, sexuality and class as any other community’ (Parmar, 1989:59). If black feminism is converted, then, into Antiracist/Socialist feminism, it will thus constitute an ideological position to which women, of whatever race, can subscribe. But precisely because this aspect of feminism is likely to be dominated by black women and hence by issues connected with racism, it is important for feminism to retain its other dimensions. Socialist feminism will ensure that class exploitation is not marginalized but since it, too, runs the risk of being dominated by class issues, radical feminism needs to be retained in order to stress the issue of sexual oppression. Liberal feminism will continue to work for reforms within the present system and that, too, is desirable. These four emphases within a broad-based feminism should co-operate with each other and take part in collaborative action wherever possible. It is, of course, not at all certain that women in general, and black women in particular, will accept this four-pronged approach of feminism. Several black writers (Amos and Parmar, 1984; Davis, 1981; as well as Bhavnani and Coulson, 1986) have contended that racism should be elevated to the same level of primacy as sexism within feminism. Assuming, then, that this is undertaken, and disregarding for a moment that it will shift the focus of the feminist project, what role will be left for the black/antiracist movement to play and, perhaps more importantly, what role is envisaged for black (including, here, other non-white) men? Will black men join with women, black and white, in such an antiracist feminism which will entail struggling against both racism and sexism? Since this eventuality seems unlikely, it is, perhaps, more realistic to have a component of feminism concentrate on issues of racism, in

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keeping with my suggestion. We should all be wary of ‘proxy fights for freedom’ (Stimpson, 1971:474). By way of a final comment, it should be noted that some congruence exists between the view of Iris Young (1981) and the views of black feminists. Young insists that the struggle against patriarchy and capitalism is a struggle against one system, that of capitalist patriarchy. Black feminists, too, insist that it is one struggle against racism, sexism, and capitalism. King (1988), for example, asserts that one-dimensional struggles, emphasizing sex, class or race oppression, respectively, ignore the reality of black women’s lives. What Young and the black feminists seem to be suggesting, then, is one mass movement against the various sources of oppression, given that these sources are an integral part of one system. While this sounds reasonable and, perhaps, represents an ideal solution, the implications of such a mass movement for organization, focus and political practice would seem to make this ideal unrealistic, at least at the present time. Therefore while, at the level of theorizing, work should continue regarding the interrelatedness of these various forms of oppression, at the practical level it would seem more feasible for the movements—feminism, black/antiracist, and socialist—to retain their autonomy, while ensuring mutual collaboration and cooperation. Some women may decide to remain within the black/antiracist movement, or the socialist movement, where it is hoped that feminist issues will form part of the agenda. This is quite legitimate, perhaps even desirable, for as noted by Lees (1986), paraphrasing Audre Lorde, each woman must decide for herself whether it is oppression based on race, class or gender that is the most crucial for her. The twenty-year history of second-wave feminism has been marked by fragmentation and internal contradictions, serving to highlight the differences between women. But, as stated by Bulbeck (1988:146): ‘Accepting then our differences, must these become divisions?’ I sincerely hope not, and I trust that we women, from our various viewpoints and within various movements, will seek to support each other as we struggle to achieve our liberation. Notes Gemma Tang Nain currently works as a regional programme officer with the Caribbean Network for Integrated Rural Development (CNIRD). She has lectured in politics and sociology and worked on research projects for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and for the Inter-American Institute of Co-operation in Agriculture (IICA). She is an active member of a local feminist group, Women Working for Social Progress (Workingwomen) and of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA). This article, though somewhat modified, forms part of a wider study by Tang Nain on black women and feminism. 1 It is only in the last few years that reproductive technology has made it possible for some women to avoid biological reproduction, if they so wish, and still reproduce themselves. 2 An example of sexism overriding racism is provided by the granting of the franchise to black male ex-slaves at the end of the Civil War in the USA and its denial to all women. Davis’s (1981) interpretation of this decision as simply the desire of the Republicans to acquire two million black votes appears overly simplistic. Surely the vote to women would have ensured them of much more. For hooks, on the other hand, the extension of the franchise to black men and not to women

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demonstrated that both black and white men were able to ally themselves to each other ‘on the basis of shared sexism’ (hooks, 1982:90). 3 With respect to the reforms, mention is made of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which had repercussions in various American institutions. ‘Education, direct political participation, and jobs began to become more accessible to “upwardly mobile” blacks’ (Lewis, 1977: 349). 4 Unemployment has not been dealt with since I was addressing the specific issue of the operation of patriarchy through the gendered division of labour in employment. In any event, while it is common knowledge that black men suffer higher rates of unemployment than white men in both Britain and the USA, it is also true that unemployment rates for all women tend to be underestimated.

References AMOS, Valerie and PARMAR, Pratibha (1984) ‘Challenging Imperialist Feminism’ Feminist Review No. 17 , ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives.’ ANTHIAS, Floya and YUVAL-DAVIS, Nira (1983) ‘Contextualizing Feminism—Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions’ Feminist Review No. 15 . BARRETT, Michèle (1980) Women’s Oppression Today London: Verso. BARRETT, Michele and McINTOSH, Mary (1982) The Anti-social Family London: Verso. BARRETT, Michele and McINTOSH, Mary (1985) ‘Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminist Theory’ Feminist Review No. 20 . BHAVNANI, Kum-Kum and COULSON, Margaret (1986) ‘Transforming Socialist-feminism: The Challenge of Racism’ Feminist Review No. 23 . BRITTAN, Arthur and MAYNARD, Mary (1984) Sexism, Racism and Oppression Oxford: Blackwell. BRIXTON BLACK WOMEN’S GROUP (1984) ‘Black Women Organising’ Feminist Review No. 17 , ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives’. BRUEGEL, Irene (1989) ‘Sex and Race in the Labour Market’ Feminist Review No. 32 . BRYAN, Beverly ; DADZIE, Stella and SCAFE, Suzanne (1985) The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain London: Virago Press. BULBECK, C. (1988) One World Women’s Movement London: Pluto Press. CARBY, Hazel (1982) ‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’ in CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982). CASHMORE, E. and TROYNA, B. (1982) editors, Black Youth in Crisis Herts: Allen & Unwin. CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982) The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain London: Hutchinson. CHHACHHI, Amrita (1986) ‘Concepts in Feminist Theory—Consensus and Controversy’, Paper presented at the Inaugural Seminar: Gender in Caribbean Development, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. CROMPTON, R. and MANN, M. (1986) editors, Gender and Stratification Cambrdge: Polity Press. DANIEL, W.W. (1968) Racial Discrimination in England Middlesex: Penguin Books. DAVIS, Angela (1981) Women, Race and Class London: The Women’s Press. EDHOLM, F ; HARRIS, O. and YOUNG, K. (1977) ‘Conceptualising Women’ Critique of Anthropology , Vol. 3, Nos. 9/10 . EISENSTEIN, Zillah (1984) Feminism and Sexual Equality New York: Monthly Review Press. EISENSTEIN, H. and JARDINE, A. (1985) editors, The Future of Difference New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ELSHTAIN, J.B. (1982) editor, The Family in Political Thought Sussex: Harvester Press .

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FLAX, Jane (1982) ‘The Family in Contemporary Feminist Thought : A Critical Review’ in ELSHTAIN ( 1982 ). FOWAAD (1979a) Newsletter of the Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent, July 1979 . —— (1979b) September 1979 . —— (1980a) February 1980 . —— (1980b) July 1980 . FULLER, Mary (1982) ‘Young, Female and Black’ in CASHMORE and TROYNA ( 1982 ). GORNICK, V and MORAN, B.K. (1971) editors, Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness New York: Basic Books. HARALAMBOS, Michael (with Robin HEALD ) (1980) Sociology: Themes and Perspec tives Slough: University Tutorial Press. HARDING, Sandra (1981) ‘What is the Real Material Base of Patriarchy and Capital?’ in SARGENT ( 1981 ). HARTMANN, Heidi (1981) ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’ in SARGENT ( 1981 ). HOOKS, bell (1982) Ain’t I Woman! Black Women and Feminism London: Pluto Press. HUSBAND, Charles (1982) editor, ‘Race’ in Britain: Continuity and Change London: Hutchinson. JAMES, W. (1986) ‘A Long Way From Home: On Black Identity in Britain’ Immigrants and Minorities Vol. 5, No. 3 . JOSEPH, Gloria (1981) ‘The Incompatible Ménage à Trois: Marxism, Feminism and Racism’ in SARGENT ( 1981 ). JOSEPH, Gloria I. and LEWIS, Jill (1981) Common Differences : Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. KING, Deborah, K. (1988) ‘Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The context of a Black Feminist Ideology’ SIGNS Vol. 14, No. 1 . LEES, Sue (1986) ‘Sex, Race and Culture: Feminism and the Limits of Cultural Pluralism’ Feminist Review No. 22 . LEWIS, Diane K. (1977) ‘A Response to Inequality: Black Women, Racism, and Sexism’ SIGNS Vol. 3, No. 2. MacEWEN SCOTT, Alison (1986) ‘Industrialization, Gender Segregation and Stratification Theory’ in CROMPTON and MANN ( 1986 ). MAMA, Amina (1984) ‘Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Feminist Review No. 17 , ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives’. MAMA, Amina (1989) ‘Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses’ Feminist Review No. 32 . MILES, Robert (1982) Racism and Migrant Labour London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. MITCHELL, J. and OAKLEY, A. (1986) editors, What is Feminism? Oxford: Blackwell. MURPHY, Lindsay and LIVINGSTONE, Jonathan (1985) ‘Racism and the Limits of Radical Feminism’ Race and Class Vol. 26, No. 4 . MURRAY, Pauli (1970) ‘The Liberation of Black Women’ in THOMPSON ( 1970 ). NGCOBO, Lauretta (1988) editor, Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women in Britain London: Virago Press. OAKLEY, Ann (1976) Woman’s Work: The Housewife, Past and Present New York: Vintage Books. OMOLADE, Barbara (1985) ‘Black Women and Feminism’ in EISENSTEIN and JARDINE ( 1985 ). PARMAR, Pratibha (1989) ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’ Feminist Review No. 31 . ROWLAND, Robyn (1984) editor, Women who do and Women who don’t join the women’s movement London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. SARGENT, Linda (1981) editor, Women and Revolution London: Pluto Press.

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SIVANANDAN, A. (1981) ‘From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain’ Race and Class Vol. 23, Nos. 2/3 . SIVANANDAN, A. (1985) ‘RAT and the Degradation of Black Struggle’ Race and Class Vol. 26, No. 4 . SPEAK OUT (undated) Newsletter of the Brixton Black Women’s Group, Issues 2, 3 and 4 . STACEY, Judith (1986) ‘Are Feminists Afraid to Leave Home? The Challenge of Conservative Profamily Feminism?’ in MITCHELL and OAKLEY ( 1986 ). STIMPSON, Catherine (1971) ‘“Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Thy Neighbour’s Servants”:Women’s Liberation and Black Civil Rights’ in GORNICK and MORAN ( 1971 ). THOMPSON, Mary Lou (1970) editor, Voices of the New Feminism Boston: Beacon Press. WALLACE, Michele (1979) Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman London: Calder . WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL NETWORKNEWS ( 1988 ) Vol. 14, No. 1 . —— (1989) Vol. 15, No. 4. —— (1990) Vol. 16, No. 1 . WILLIAMS, Claudette (forthcoming) ‘We Are a Natural Part of Many Different Struggles: Black Women Organising’. YOUNG, Iris (1981) ‘Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory’ in SARGENT ( 1981 ).

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NURSING HISTORIES:

Reviving Life in Abandoned Selves

Marian McMahon

They were moving on toward a resolution of something that had

Feminist Review No 37, Spring 1991

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been started for them centuries before What did you know about this past except that it didn’t have anything to do with this your most important day

They spent hours getting ready everything had to be co-ordinated, even your underpants were white and of course new a gift carefully wrapped untouched for the first time in that life position You smiled a lot and

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seemed to walk more confidently after it was over But maybe she thought this was due to the time spent waiting silently still while others went before you And she keeps trying to get it right It looks perfect and everyone follows you with their eyes with their hearts for this most public private moment

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But her suspicions come back now and I know them and they are coming more often with a ferocity that she can no longer control or ignore In 1989 I completed a film entitled Nursing History.1 The process I went through in making the film established an analytic direction for me that brought together aspects of the self that both my own history and contemporary social theory had taught were best to remain forgotten. The film began with two very general related concerns. First there was a desire to more fully grasp how we might be situated as subjects within the social formation in a manner that did not rely on distinctions between me and you, us and them, insidious distinctions that seem to be making their way into critical theoretical frameworks. Second there was a pressing need to create an expressive form that was process-oriented, nonauthoritarian and did not invoke closure based on a single truth ostensibly produced by the content.2

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Central to the development of the film was the context in which it was created. It was made as part of my Masters thesis at the University of Toronto, within the context of formal education, a context that produces and sustains the prospect that analyses will evoke closure by producing final truths that purge the need for further investigation. Formal education espouses specific forms of rational thinking and pragmatic concepts and linear models of knowledge, and very specific, life-long-learned, notions about what counts as knowledge and the world—a world that exists independent of the knower. Working within this context, I was constantly made aware of the demands for air-tight knowledge and yet I was working to bring to the foreground the production of knowledge rather than knowledge itself. Prior to working with the images and home movies which make up the film, I had been using aspects of feminist, postmodern and psychoanalytic theories to explore how, as Philip Corrigan puts it, school teaches subjects and creates subjectivities. (Corrigan, 1986). As I read my way through the theoretical positions put forward through these disciplines, I became increasingly troubled by a fissure growing between what I felt was informing my experiences of being in the world as a particular subject and the theoretical formulations that claimed to account for my experiences. It had been the deep furrow between what I knew and what I felt that had brought me to study theories of the subject in the first place. But for all that, the split was being reproduced again. Having the theories that ‘explained’ subjectivity and regulation offered hope, but being unable to apply them in my own life to eliminate subordination led me to a silent space where I experienced in my aloneness that selfsame regulation. I was originally too embarrassed to admit that the theories were not making my life fall in order, feeling like a failure, not smart enough, not a good enough feminist—unable in the end, as I’d been told all along, to GET IT RIGHT. Time and time again I fell or was pushed into this sickeningly familiar parenchymatous space—speechless. Time and time again I found myself crawling out, faithfully, to make solemn promises: I will stop feeling I will speak correctly I will write coherently I WILL THINK STRAIGHT In realizing that the authority of the theory I was reading excluded me, I gradually came to realize that it couldn’t heal what needed to be healed. I also began to recognize that this exclusion produced a strong desire to be included, to belong. It was to this desire I started making concessions. In class, both as a student and while teaching, at conferences, at meetings and in papers, I attempted to fit in, to speak in a manner that would, I had been led to believe, guarantee my visibility. In employing this mode of speaking, I could not equally express what needed to be spoken. Ostensibly by my course of study, I had turned my back on what life was serving me next, and yet…maybe I had an appetite for objectivity after all. Perhaps I longed for the conditional security of the status quo and unbiased truth, that version of being and the world brought into form through the combined totalizing and individualizing techniques fixed firmly in political structures. (Foucault, 1982)

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How can we learn from history? Not from the formal chronicle of events, but from the subjective feelings and thoughts with which we experience the events of our everyday lives. How do we learn from the history that we live? (Lyman, 1981:55). I worked as a registered nurse from 1974 to 1984. In 1982, after finishing an undergraduate degree, I quit nursing for—and I was certain of this—the last time. I was now thoroughly equipped with many and various sophisticated theories about women and work: why we are called to the helping professions and how this work naturally suits us. According to the rules of knowledge, these theories should have been the sufficient, if not necessary, condition of my exodus from the occupational realm of nursing. They weren’t. Aspects of the theory I had read at school had provided me with the analytical tools to conceptualize my experiences in a way that helped explain why I felt the way I did in circumstances of regulation and subordination. What these concepts did not do was enable me to stop responding to those circumstances with the subordinate behaviour that must have been brought into existence at the primal scene of oppression. Following the completion of a four-year degree in cinema studies, I went right back to nursing. One year later, I tried again to leave, this time with apparently more success because I haven’t been back. I say ‘apparently’ because, although I have left the field, the urge to care for others as my major pre/occupation has never left. What I have realized is that the experience of regulation has a specificity with dimensions that are both public and private. Rememorizing that specificity is a vital political act that should not be dismissed as individualism and irrelevant to political struggle.3 am claiming that the political is personal. The subject of revolution is ourselves—is our lives. (Lorde, 1984:67). I began to take a stand against subservience to the authority of theory and examine what lay behind the illusionary comfort of objectivity through the process of making Nursing History. My voice changed the moment I started to situate historically the feeling of not being who I was told I should be and to analyse my efforts to be who I was not. Revoicing started when I started to counteract truths that had attempted to claim me and to come to terms with why the authority of those claims had such a hold on my sense of self and self-worth. You walk toward a future that your past has thoroughly predicted and yet you feel you are entering a new world and somehow you manage to make it work. (Text from Nursing History) In Nursing History I began to explore why I couldn’t stop caring—this compulsion to anticipate and meet the unspoken needs of anyone around me. This exploration started with an attempt to establish the relationship between women’s work as mothers and women’s work as nurses, and moved from there to examine how what appeared to be a personal decision to work in the ‘helping’ professions was a decision embedded in circumstances not completely of my making. A partial record of those circumstances existed in the home movies that, for the most part, my father had taken, over a fifteen-year period. These images stand as a public record of our collective family history. In reviewing this public record of interpreted events, I found myself living within memories of events that could not be seen, recalling other versions of events that had been recorded. I began to wonder what else was

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being recorded, whose histories were these images claiming and for whom were these stories being told? In the development of any new kind of knowledge, as Jane Flax (1990) points out, one of the greatest difficulties is to make the familiar strange, as something that needs explanations. In looking at these home movies, searching for clues that would deepen my understanding of how my gendered sense of self and self-worth was linked to this activity called nursing, what stood out as strange—and strange that it never stood out before—was the fact that forty of the sixty total minutes of super-8 film were of weddings. Family photographs and super-8 film are meant to be painlessly and effortlessly understood. But these personal images from the past were all embedded firmly in the social as signs telling me who I am supposed to be, what I am supposed to be doing. As in many families, my father was the official historian of our family, of our lives. In this position he was not simply recording the past but, more importantly, he was creating it. By rearranging these home movies I was trying to interrupt the flow of official history. I manipulated the images themselves, juxtaposed disparate images and interrupted the chronological record of history. At times I was willingly swept away in the tide of family sayings and stories (knowledge acquired by rote learning, unthinking memory) because I wanted my inner history to coincide with this outer one. If I remembered ‘properly’ then perhaps I could make this reunion happen. In resistance to the many demands to look properly, I watched the films with friends who were able to pose questions that challenged the ostensible normalcy of the sequence of events that had been recorded. Also, I brought theory into this newly emerging textual space to help reconstruct the incidents of my life, to help me say different things about myself. The meaning of images can be challenged even though preferred meanings are located both in the time and place of their taking and in repeated family viewings combined with ritualized and recited interpretations of that historical moment. What also worked for me in challenging this interpretation was directing my gaze not at people in the pictures (this pulled me back into knowing these characters and fixing my subject position vis-à-vis the way I had been permitted to know them) but at objects. So, for example, my mother’s apron became a treasure chest of memories about her domestic labour and our class background. By focusing on my mother’s apron, I was able to recall my first encounter with the shame of poverty. My care-giving identity was evident early on and as a school-age child I was frequently asked to babysit for my teachers. On one such evening I was helping my grade-six teacher’s wife prepare dinner before she and her husband and two friends went out for the evening. She was peeling potatoes. Eager to help, I got a tea towel and tucked it into the top of my pants and approached the sink where she was working. My mother only had one apron, a gift that she used only on special occasions, like when we had visitors. Otherwise, for everyday use in taking care of her seven children and husband, she tied a tea towel around her waist, tucked into the top of her skirt. My teacher’s wife didn’t understand why I had a towel on until I explained, in innocence, that the towel was my apron and that I was doing like my mother did. She laughed and left the kitchen returning with her husband and two guests. She recounted my story pointing to the towel around my waist. They laughed together, hard put to believe the story, but the proof was there, standing silently in front of them. I relived this moment in the present as I recalled its happening. The disgrace, which I know by heart, burst forth suddenly like a haemorrhage: face flushed, short of breath, pulse weak

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and irregular, skin cold and moist, I could hear my heart pound. This lesson, one of many to come, was a lesson in humiliation where what counted was learning so very well the skills of deception, hiding who you are, protecting your family, carefully observing and building the disguises necessary to pass, to fit in so no one would know. By doing what I normally did at home I had exposed my family to ridicule, lowered their worth in the eyes of others because I had yet to learn that it was a shame, instead of a crime, to be poor. In many of the photos and super-8 footage that represent my mother in her domestic space, she is wearing her apron. That this was her one and only apron or that she appears with it over a ten-year period of family footage never struck me as odd. Previous viewings of these images had been spent getting caught up with rehearsing family history through reminiscences about the represented event or by focusing on my mother’s activities within the image. In most cases, she was bringing food to the table for a holiday celebration. When I shifted my attention away from these conventional events and people onto a specific object within the image, like the apron, I was able to unlock one set of historical meanings that I had been locked into. As the emotions of the past jumped off the screen into my consciousness, many things came into focus. Of crucial importance was the awareness of that fine balance in autobiographical work between uncovering the past in as many layers as possible and using retroactive reflection, facilitated through and by preconceived analytic categories and theoretical frameworks, as an organizing tool. Also included in the home movies was a thirtysecond clip of my nursing graduation ceremony. What was even more striking as I looked for strikingness was the similarity between the bridal gown and the nursing graduation outfit: the complete whiteness of both, the decorative head-dress, the fact that both outfits are shaped in regard to their function in their respective public ceremonies—in other words, neither are worn again in public. The women-in-white became the structuring image for the film, a sign of women’s anticipated servile nature and purity and silence. By rearranging my father’s images of our family’s history, I disrupted the conventional narrative unity of events—a narrative scripted in a social world invested in the maintenance of ‘the happy family’. Simultaneously, another meaning and order of events began to emerge for me so that, through the process of examining this particular and imaged history, knowledge was created that made possible the revisioning of a past that had destructively claimed me. In looking over and over again at this family footage, the details of age-old patterns of denial and splitting began to surface. I recognized the nurse (myself then?) who said, ‘I am you’. At the same time, the well-read student and the lecturer (myself now?) refused to give way to ‘the nurse’. I came to realize that the discrepancy between who I saw myself as now and who this picture claimed was me was a discrepancy grounded in denial. This blocked me from grasping my historical presence in the context of my present knowledge. What was the nature of the division between that girl in the picture (the nurse who I definitely did not want to become then or now) and the me who I presently saw myself as? I knew my historical presence was crucial to my efforts to re-appropriate my past and to reorder what it meant to know. Yet I could not establish that presence. It wasn’t simply that I could no longer recognize a self in the representation put forward through the image of the nurse. Rather, a deep, raw conflict—an always already there familiar conflict—was pushing its way into strangeness. There was the subject position of the nurse and therein one sense of self that I could identify with as imaged in the home movies. In opposition, there was another

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sense of self, one who had been well-educated, one who revolted against the image of that caring self. Aside from the emotional turmoil that this split and juxtaposition of identities created, there was also the intellectual disappointment. In looking back at the past and reconstructing it in the light of a theoretically sophisticated framework, I had hoped, as promised, that all feelings (conscious and not) associated with this past would fall into place and vanish. If I understood the ways in which women were directed to service the needs of others, then why couldn’t I stop this pre/occupation with caring and move on to something else? Seduced by the rules of logic and specific formations of rational thought, I had expected that the trauma of oppression would simply go away now that I had a theory to explain it. Well, it didn’t. The secret memories I had about how I learned not to speak, to be passive, to service others, threatened to overwhelm the present. The emotions of the past were still intact, emotions of intense pain that didn’t seem to be directly linked to the time or place of any picture’s taking. But I knew somehow these feelings were rooted in the images of our family, of my childhood. And, in the absence of pain, there was fear, fear of being swallowed up by the pictures, by the well-rehearsed historical interpretation that was meant to constitute my presence. If only I could be satisfied nursing. Looking at the past packaged and pressed between the pages of a picture album, and frozen within the frames of home movies, I tried to remember things differently. I tried to recall events that were beyond the frame, deeper than the two dimensions of the image. And that is when the tension between longing to know another story and the pressure to identify with those pictures of a history that was meant to constitute my presence, to conform and dutifully repeat the collective family story, became apparent to me as a tension born out of a lifelong effort of denial. The tension acted as an emotional barrier preventing me from crossing over to discover something that I was not prepared to know. What I was not prepared to know made me vulnerable to conformity. As this tension painfully surfaced, I began longing for the imaginary plenitude that those pictures claimed to represent and promised to deliver—if only I look properly, if only I fit in, if only I could GET IT RIGHT. Because when you GET IT RIGHT, when you fit in, when you conform, you do not stand out, you can almost be invisible and when you are invisible, you are safe. The fissure between inner reality and outer history came into view as a surface reflection of a much deeper split. In forgetting to remember events that weren’t part of the family narrative, weren’t visible in those photo albums, weren’t captured on the super-8 images, I was able to protect myself from the pain of knowing that my childhood was lived through the terror of having been physically abused every single day by my father. Strange—I always thought I just deserved it. Gloria Joseph asks, ‘Where does the pain go when it goes away?’ (Quoted by Lorde, 1984: 145). As this past came to light, I gradually understood that for me caring was not simply an activity bound to an occupation called nursing. Rather, caring was an identity through which I came to ensure my safety as a child in a violent household. I learned to care, not because as a female I was established by nature as intuitively kind and helpful, but because my survival depended upon it. As a child I grew to believe that by taking special care of my father’s needs, with special attention to the unspoken ones, that I could ensure my safety. Much of my

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And they all watch for the same thing—not knowing what lies beyond this image, underneath its two dimensions, and beyond its static frame. Lies that have made them know what they see is real—you can see it for yourself can’t you—lies that make them realize it is real. We rely on these images not to confirm our suspicions but to lay them to rest firmly, flatly once and for all. (Text from Nursing History)

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inner life as a child was spent trying to mind-read, trying to anticipate my father’s next move and compensate for it through excessive consideration of what I had decided he needed. If I could imagine what he needed and give it to him, then perhaps he would be in better spirits, then perhaps he would stop yelling and hitting and hitting and hitting. In later years, this caring identity was mobilized and transformed into a set of activities contained within the image of the nurse. Here I got paid for doing what I had taught myself to do—make other people’s spoken and unspoken needs direct my actions and thus form the basis of my sense of what was real in the world at large. In breaking through the barriers of this unspeakable past, I was also able to see that although I had quit nursing, I couldn’t quit caring in this all-consuming sense because I could not see that my identity was dependent upon it nor realize the history that sustained that identity. The sense of self and self-worth that was operating in the moment of care-giving was of one who had learned that her safety and survival were conditional upon self-erasure by repeatedly losing herself in the task of identifying and servicing others’ perceived needs. As I slowly brought this history to light through memory work and the process of producing Nursing History, nursing for me surfaced as an occupation that capitalized upon a historically continuous response of submission and resistance that I made as a particular woman to particular forms of regulation characterized by physical violence. I stopped nursing but never stopped caring because caring was an activity and an identity that protected me from an unspeakable past of physical violence. Caring bound me to a chronic state of misrecognition, repetition and subjugation—an unconscious state in which the compulsion to maintain a subordinate posture in the world protected me from something that had already happened. This past denied kept me tied to a system of regulation that, in its original form, no longer existed but manifested itself in contemporary formations. My ‘choice’ to become a nurse, to perform what had been socially constructed as women’s work, intersected with a personal history where I learned to care for the safety of my life. We hardly ever consent 100 per cent to our own invisibility, to our own subordination… yet somehow until we break the silence and send out an active NO we are not able to organise that resistance, or take it seriously. (Marino, 1988:25). When circumstances in the here-and-now plug into hidden histories of powerlessness and subordination, and when feelings associated with these histories are awakened, they act to set constraints on what is presently possible. Without reclaiming our pasts, we are vulnerable to situations that summon forth secret and painful histories of subjugation with accompanying feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness and anger—states that reflect the response to the abuse of power we were once subjected to and are now made subjects of. The dimensions of circumstances which establish emotional over-functioning, the housekeeping of the heart, as one of the few legitimate fields of female authority and accomplishment need to be more fully contextualized. And to do this we need our histories with urgent and serious attention paid to the emotional conditions that produced them. The sorrows of the past appear too painful and too dangerous to the fragile rationality of the present. Yet for many of us the past can be much too dangerous to forget (Lyman, 1981). The subjective sphere, as Louisa Passerini points out is not second-rate reality (quoted in Thompson, 1982:54). It is the means through which we make sense of ourselves to ourselves

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and to the world. The story I have told is not a heroic tale of a self that was once marred by some personal defect. I view the telling of our personal stories of subordination as an essential political act because without our stories recovered the past haunts the present and hopelessly claims the future. The possibility of living here and now is lost to the compulsive need to deny through repetition the past as we live it. We have all differently learned that keeping our individual and collective mouths shut will guarantee safety. What is absolutely crucial is to recognize, to look back at, the scene where we first learned that to be quiet meant to be safe. And, along with this remembering, and the pain of realizing the injustices we have differently lived through, it is essential to recuperate the different ways in which we have differently struggled against the silence. Now that I have revealed this history, this subject to you, I do not experience a ‘truer’ self. My identity is not linear or continuous, I am neither more whole nor fully assembled. The account I have produced is selective. It is a synthesis of a history that has set the limits on what is possible for me to know. And this history, which is not static, and which I create in the telling, in forgetting and in remembering, is a history that constitutes me as its subject in formation. I have taken fragments of myself and compared them to a different arrangement of fragments of my past. This work represents my attempt to make different senses of my present and to create possibilities for a different future as well. I am no longer committed to that version of history, the one that tells me I am what I should be, passive, conciliatory, submissive. I am now looking for an interpretation of history that confirms who I am and at the same time helps to bring to light how I tried so hard to be what I am not. And this looking that I have offered here, it exists somewhere between my writing and your reading as knowledge produced in exchange. With histories re-covered, always partially, always continually, I can question stories made by those who are socially entitled to create official versions of history—versions that erase, generalize or wrench us from the contexts that shape us and that we constantly struggle to reshape. At the same time I can search for connexions that are common to our experiences as women, including identifying and exploring the enduring effect of institutional structures and practices. These continually and constantly refreshed forms of regulation are experienced through both the most intimate and the most public spheres of our daily lives. Through an examination of how we identify ourselves to ourselves and to others I believe we can challenge the politics of individualism and begin to create an inclusive politics. Belinda Budge, Philip Corrigan, Ferne Cristall, Stephanie Ede, Helena Feinstadt, Phil Hoffman, Madiha Khayatt, Jill McGreal, Maureen McMahon, Milagros Paredes, Kathy Rockhill, Norm Steinhart. That I have been able to come to terms with these memories has been made possible through the work of people whose life-giving efforts are not visible here. Without their support, without each of them saying in a unique way, ‘You matter. I believe what you are saying. I will listen,’ this story would not have been written. I could not have created the safety necessary for the process of this writing without first having spoken what I was coming to name, without first having heard myself speak, and crucially, without recognizing that I was being heard instead of beaten. I acknowledge my own participation in being able to perceive what was being offered. But these people provided for me a safe space, permitted me to

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believe myself, to know what I know and to put it out into the world, first tentatively in speaking where words fall off lips and disappear into thin air, and then finally firmly on this page with more permanence, as a perspective that is necessary to political and personal struggle, triumph and resistance. Notes Marian McMahon is a film-maker and part-time Ph.D. student at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education in Toronto. She is currently co-organizing a conference on Women and Autobiography in the Academy (Spring 1992) and working on a film entitled Racing Home. Thank you to Heather Berkeley who generously applied her exceptional editorial skills to the final drafts of this writing. I would also like to thank Susannah Radstone, Mica Nava and the readers from Feminist Review for the thoughtful and full-of-care reading I think the piece received. Given the nature of what I am writing about this is hard to come by—for the most part readers get overwhelmed by the content and are unable to integrate their emotional response with a critique of the piece. 1 Nursing History (10min/16mm col) uses super-8 home movies transferred to video and blown up to 16mm. In the process of making the video transfer, home-movie images are manipulated and transformed. They are juxtaposed against new footage in an effort to elaborate the fixed nature of subject positions within traditional representations and interpretations of family life in home movies and to suggest the possibility of creating other less fixed positions. The viewer is invited to contemplate the social production of images generally and specifically within the conventions that govern the making of home movies. Further invitation is extended to contemplate how memory works and how history is made. The narrative unity of the family history is brought to light as a fabrication supporting particular versions of the world and of the subject positions it in turn helps to create off screen and on. In non-sync sound, the narrator in voice-over uses the first person pronoun ‘I’ to connote subjectivity, the third person ‘she’ to connote objectivity and the third person (acting ambiguously as singular and plural) ‘you’ to describe a disassociated self who seems to belong both nowhere and everywhere. In doing so I was able to inscribe a sense of self into the film somewhere in between these four positions of ‘me’, calling attention to the way, both on screen and off, our sense of unity as individuals is constantly at risk and thus questioning the notion of the unified subject. When referring to Marian as represented in the home movies I (as narrator) switched ad lib from ‘she’ to ‘you’ to ‘I’ My intention here was to at once establish an identity based on the linguistic accountability of these pronouns and at the same time, through switching, immediately call into question the identity that each pronoun assumed. I was attempting to recreate social conditions where we are continuously produced unevenly as a process, where there is no progressively developed self, no coherence to one’s self. Home movies seem to offer the greatest possibility for hopes of the unified subject, i.e., a self who progresses evenly across time and sequentially through developmental stages of ‘life’. These films stand as a demonstration of the ostensible truth of a history that the subject represented has lived. Summoned to return from a distant place is a memory that reminds us of a time when we looked like that, did those things and importantly felt that way and no other. We see ourselves as subjects of these films because these memories are activated to produce an attitudinal position of the viewing subject that springs from the attitudinal position of that same subject in the films. Further, in using the codes of realism home movies promise to provide knowledge based on reality, not the appearance of knowledge based on realism. After all, it’s hard to disbelieve what you see is real and are directed to remember having lived.

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2 The process of rememorizing began in 1985 under the supervision of Kathleen Rockhill in my first graduate course of a Masters programme completed in 1987 with a thesis. This published text is an adaptation of that thesis (McMahon, 1987) and a version of a paper presented in Sheffield, England, at a conference of the British Association of Cultural Studies called, ‘Knowing our Place: Culture and Belonging’ (April, 1990). During this graduate seminar I began working with history and memory, through moving and still images, both family photographs and super-8 movies and images that I created. Revisioning and revisiting the political and emotional environments of my past has been made real through the use of images. They are a way of making sense of the world and provide a basis for life: then, now and for all that follows. That the significance of images was recognized by Kathleen Rockhill and, also in my course of study, by Philip Corrigan, enabled me to create a more deeply textured version of history and subjectivity. In contrast, I have run into resistance to the use of images and autobiography within formal education, including academic conferences. The most common argument is that works produced through these means are subjective and hence the traditional standards used to evaluate academic production, standards which assume the possibility, indeed the desirability of objectivity, cannot be used to evaluate autobiographical and imaged work. For a critique of academic standards and the implications for feminist scholarship and pedagogy see K.Rockhill, 1987. 3 Hidden and denied histories most often and most clearly contain painful stories about the imposition of consensus. In the centre of these stories are important clues about how control is extended to the sphere of subjectivity to produce self-regulated subjects. The denial both privately and publicly of these histories limits sustained struggles for justice. As Alice Miller (1981:112) points out, political action can be fed by the unconscious anger of children who have been so misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped and drilled, be partially discharged in fighting our institutions, then be shifted to a new object. In repressing personal history, what is made possible is the projection of our own stories on to others and the subsequent conceptualization of regulation as something that only happens to those others. The splitting off of the self from others by embracing the division between me and you, us and them, intersects with a socially constructed, treacherous division that, among other forms of governance, relies on a limited set of characteristics of difference that simultaneously serves to keep us separated from ourselves and from others.

References BARTHES, Roland (1977) Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. BURGIN, Victor et al. (1986) Formations of Fantasy London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. CORRIGAN, P.R.D. (1986) ‘Informing Schooling’ in LIVINGSTONE ( 1986 ). CLEMENT, Catherine (1987) The Weary Sons of Freud (translated from French by Nicole Ball) London: Verso. CLOWARD, Richard A. and FOX PIVEN, Frances (1979) ‘Hidden Protest: The Channeling of Female Innovation and Resistance’ Signs No. 4, Spring . FINCH, Janet and GROVE, Dulcie (1983) editors A Labour of Love; Woman Work and Caring London: Routledge. FLAX, Jane (1987) ‘Re-Membering the Selves: Is the Repressed Gendered?’ Michigan Quarterly Review No. 26, Winter . (1990) Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, & Postmodernism in the Contemporary West Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. FOUCAULT, Michel ( 1982 ) ‘The Subject and Power’ Critical Inquiry No. 8, Fall . GEDDICKS, Al ( 1986 ) ‘The Dialectics of the Irrational’ The Insurgent Sociologist No. 23, Winter .

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GEIGER, Susan N.G. (1986) ‘Women’s Life Histories: Method and Content’ Signs No. 2, Spring . HOFFMAN, Philip (1978) On the Pond (9 mins/16mm). (1988) passing through/torn formations (43 mins/16mm). (1990) Kichener-Berlin (34 mins/16mm). JACOBUS, Mary , (1987) ‘Freud’s Mnemonic Women, Screen Memories and Feminist Nostalgia’ Michigan Quarterly Review No. 1, Fall . LE DOEUFF, Michele (1977) ‘Women and Philosophy’ Radical Philosophy No. 17, Spring . LIVINGSTONE, David W. and Contributors (1986) Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power South Hadley, Massachusetts; Bergin & Garvey. LORDE, Audre (1984) Sister Outsider Trumansburg: Crossing Press. LYMAN, P. (1981) ‘The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressentiment and Political Speech’ Socialist Review No. 3, May/June 1981 . MARINO, Dian (1988) ‘Landscape for an Easily Influenced Mind: Critical Reflections on My Experiences as an Artist and Educator’, paper presented at Adult Education and the Arts Conference, Oxford, England, July . McMAHON, Marian (1987) ‘Telling Tales Out of School: the ABCs of Repression in Education’, unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Toronto. MILLER, Alice (1981) The Drama of the Gifted Child (translated from German by Ruth Ward) New York: Basic Books. MORAGA, Cherie (1983) Loving in the War Years Boston: South End Press. MORANTE, Elsa (1984) Aracoeli New York: Random House. MORRISON, Toni (1987) Beloved New York: Alfred A.Knopf. PASSERINI, Louisa (1982) ‘Work, Ideology and Working-Class Attitudes to Fascism,’ in THOMPSON ( 1982 ). RICH, Adrienne (1986) Blood, Bread and Poetry New York: Norton. (1980) On Lies, Secrets and Silence London: Virago. ROCKHILL, Kathleen (1987) ‘The Chaos of Subjectivity in the Ordered Halls of Academe’ Canadian Woman’s Studies No. 4, Winter . SALDIVAR, Ramon (1985) ‘Ideologies of the Self: Chicano Autobiography’ Diacritics No. 3, Fall . STEEDMAN, Carolyn (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman: a Story of Two Lives London: Virago. THOMPSON, Paul (1982) editor, Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe London: Pluto Press. ULMER, Gregory (1985) Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. WALKERDINE, Valerie (1986) ‘Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy’ in BURGIN et al. ( 1986 ).

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THE QUEST FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh Naila Kabeer

Introduction In 1971, twenty-four years after its inception as homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was torn apart by a bloody civil war. It ended with the emergence of Bangladesh, a new state committed to the principle of secularism. In 1976, secularism was deleted from Bangladesh’s Constitution and a process of statesponsored Islamization was begun. However, the process has been hesitant, cautious and uneven. It was not until 1988 that Islam was rewritten into the Constitution as the state religion. Despite pressure from the country’s fundamentalists, Bangladesh remains a People’s Republic rather than an Islamic one. Women have obviously benefited from this apparent lack of confidence which characterizes official attempts to promote Islamization. There has been no attempt, equivalent to that in Pakistan and Iran, to enforce Islamic norms of behaviour and dress for women as a means of demonstrating state commitment to Islam. They have also benefited from the presence of different and contradictory ideologies, both within state discourse as well as in the wider polity, which have helped to impede any systematic curtailment of women’s rights in the name of Islam. In this article, I argue that the problematic relationship between state and religion in Bangladesh stems from a central ambivalence within the Bengali Muslim collectivity. In its claims to independent nationhood, it has had to reconcile itself to the fact that, while Islamic beliefs and Bengali culture are the very essence of its separate identity, its historical experience has prevented the two from being successfully moulded together. The article touches briefly on the historical roots of this political dilemma. It then goes on to examine the issue of national identity in relation to the political projects of contemporary regimes and to analyse the conflicts and interactions between official constructions of nationhood and the place accorded to women in state discourse.

Feminist Review No 37, Spring 1991

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The Islamic tradition in Bengal Bengal has always existed as a distinct cultural formation within the Indian subcontinent. It was believed to have been first settled by migrants from South-east Asia who brought with them their own beliefs and way of life (Maloney et al., 1981; Muhith, 1978). Subsequent waves of formal religions were imposed on this pre-existing ‘little tradition’ and were themselves permeated and transformed by it. Incorporated into the Brahminical system as a ritually inferior caste, the indigenous Bengali people have enthusiastically embraced every major anti-Brahminical devotional movement that emerged in the region—Buddhism, Vaishnavism and finally Islam (Addi and Azad, 1975). Islam’s egalitarian principles made for massive conversions among the low-caste population of Bengal, but it did not live up to their expectations. A caste-like division emerged within the Muslim community between the ashraf, those of noble or foreign extraction, and the ajlaf, indigenous converts of lowly origins. Bengali Muslims found themselves integrated into the Islamic umma (community) without transcending their former subordinate status (Thapar, 1968). They sought solace in the preachings of the Sufis, holy men and mystics of Persian origin, whose respect for Islamic principles of equality made them more effective leaders with the artisans and cultivators of rural Bengal than the distant urban-based ulema (Islamic clergy). The Islam of the villages of Bengal bore the imprint of this history. It was a fusion of Hindu and Muslim traditions shared by cultivators and artisans who had lived and worked together for centuries. Within this syncretic system, it was impossible to disentangle the origins of various beliefs and customs about the land and seasons, pollution and purity, birth, death and marriage, ghosts, demons and holy men, which were held by Hindu and Muslim peasant alike and were essentially Bengali beliefs (Blanchet, 1984; Fruzetti, 1980). In marked contrast was the faith practised by the urban-based, foreign-born Islamic élite who strongly resisted assimilation into indigenous Bengali culture and sought to distance themselves equally from Hindus and low-born Muslim converts by stressing their foreign extraction, adhering to orthodox Islamic practices and speaking only Persian, Arabic and, later, Urdu. The élite became the most vociferous supporters of the demand for a separate Muslim homeland, representing Bengal in the Muslim League and subsequently in the political leadership of the new state. Although it claimed to speak for all Bengali Muslims, it spoke in languages which were not understood by the majority of their ‘imagined’ constituency, it looked to West Asia for its cultural references and regarded local custom and beliefs as irremediably Hinduized. National integration and cultural difference: the Pakistan era Pakistan was carved out of the areas of Muslim majority in India: Sind, Baluchistan, North West Frontier Province and West Punjab to the far north-east and East Bengal to the east. This anomalous state, divided by geography, culture and language, was dominated from its inception by a primarily Punjabi military-bureaucratic oligarchy whose policies towards the east wing reduced it to the status of a colony and sowed the seeds of the country’s subsequent disintegration. While these policies took the form of both economic and political discrimination (Callard, 1957; Nations, 1975), it was probably the state’s activities on the

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cultural front that finally brought home to Bengalis the full extent of their alienation from their rulers. The assault mounted by the Pakistani state on Bengali culture had strong undertones of racial arrogance by the Punjabis towards the smaller and darker Bengalis, additionally nourished by the suspicion that, though nominally Muslim, their ‘relatively recent’ conversion from low-caste Hindu status made them unreliable co-religionists (Ali, 1983). The cultural and linguistic affinity between the Hindus and Muslims of Bengal was also profoundly threatening to a state which had only Islam to hold together its fragmented and divided people. Reluctant to rely on religious allegiance alone, successive regimes in Pakistan embarked on a strategy of forcible cultural assimilation towards the Bengalis. The process began soon after Partition and was targeted on the Bengali language, the primary vehicle for the specific identity and separate culture of the Bengali people. Urdu, with its echoes of the sacred language, had come to symbolize the movement for Pakistan and, in 1948, it was declared the official language of the new state. The Bengali resistance was led by those who did not share the Pakistani antagonism to Hindu culture, but chose rather to emphasize the common bhadrolok (‘respectable classes’) values and aspirations which informed the middle-class way of life for Bengalis on both sides of the political divide. The language movement resulted in the death of six student protestors and the overwhelming defeat of the Muslim League in the 1954 provincial elections. The victors were the United Front, led by the Bengali nationalist Muslim Awami League founded in 1949. The new party subsequently dropped the ‘Muslim’ epithet and henceforth became the voice of the disenfranchised middle classes of East Bengal. The 1956 Constitution, which declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic, also gave Bengali equal status with Urdu as state language. However, the struggle over language was ultimately a struggle over power and the essential problems remained unsolved. Cultural issues came to the forefront again under Ayub’s regime. A Bureau for National Reconstruction was set up to purge the Bengali language of Sanskrit/Hindu elements and purify it with Arabic, Persian and Urdu. The songs of Tagore were banned from the state-controlled radio and television. Restrictions were imposed on the dissemination of Bengali literature, and grants offered to artistes and literati who were prepared to work for ‘national integration’. A policy of assimilation-through-miscegenation made its first appearance in the system of financial incentives for inter-wing marriages (Khan, 1985). The Bengali resistance to this attempt by the regime to appropriate the mantle of Islamic authenticity for its own cultural traditions served to crystallize what was exclusive to the community: its common history and distinct way of life, reaffirmed continuously through shared cultural references, rituals and modes of communication. Although initially the province of the middle classes, Bengali nationalism had, by 1971, become a mass movement under the leadership of the Awami League. Bengali women and the Pakistani state Despite the significance attached to Islam in official discourse, the leadership in Pakistan regarded itself as modernist, prepared to make pragmatic use of religion, but prepared also to reform its more anachronistic features. The state made no attempt to reshape the behaviour of Bengali women in accordance with orthodox notions of Islam. Official attempts at purging

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Bengali culture of its ‘Hindu’ elements were fuelled by a fear of cultural difference and national disintegration rather than by a drive towards Islamization per se. If Bengali women experienced official disapproval, they did so as part of the generalized attack on their culture rather than as its specific targets. Nevertheless, the dress and deportment of Bengali women took on increasing symbolic value in the struggle over cultural identity. On one level, it led to the politicization of normally uncontroversial aspects of everyday middle-class life. The right to sing the songs of Tagore and to wear bindis,1 the practice of the Bengali middle classes of training their daughters in the arts—singing, dancing and drama—and allowing them to perform in public: ‘all these activities which seem so commonplace now, in the 50s and 60s were acts of dissent given the Pakistan government’s branding of these as Hindu aberrations’ (Ahmed, 1985:47). Bengali women celebrated their cultural difference within the conventional political sphere as well. Over the years, 21 February, the Day of the Language Martyrs, had come to symbolize an annual reaffirmation of Bengali identity. Women, wearing white saris (the colour of mourning among both Hindus and Muslims in Bengal), joined in processions to lay wreaths at the monument to the martyrs. As the nationalist movement gathered force in the months preceding the declaration of Bangladesh’s independence, massive demonstrations were held in Dhaka in which large contingents of women, dressed in traditional festive yellow and red saris, wearing bindis on their foreheads and singing Bengali nationalist songs, including the banned songs of Tagore, spearheaded what was effectively a cultural resistance to the Pakistani regime (Ahmed, 1985). The affronted sensibilities of the Muslim fraternity were avenged in the bloodbath that was unleashed on Bangladesh in March 1971. In the subsequent months of occupation, Bangladeshi civilians were picked up for interrogation by Pakistani soldiers with the question that haunted them with increasing intensity: Are you a Muslim or a Bengali? Perhaps the most tragic victims of Pakistani hatred and suspicion were the estimated 30,000 Bengali women who were raped by Pakistani soldiers, purportedly in their mission to ‘improve the genes of the Bengali people’ (Ali, 1983:91) and thus populate Bangladesh with ‘pure’ Muslims. The policy of assimilation-through-miscegenation revealed the terrible deluded logic of racial supremacism. The politics of the post-liberation state Bangladesh emerged from the nightmare of 1971 as an independent state. It has been ruled ever since by an unstable alliance between an underdeveloped national bourgeoisie and the military and civil bureaucracy. The post-liberation years in Bangladesh have been marked by coups, counter-coups, growing impoverishment and an increasing dependence on external assistance. During this time, the state has completed a full ideological circle which has taken it from a position of official secularism to one of giving constitutional recognition to Islam, only a step short of the Islamic Republic status of pre-liberation days. The Awami League, under the leadership of Sheikh Mujib, was given a massive electoral mandate and formed the first post-independence government. It sought to promote a moderate form of socialism for the economy. Internationally, it opted for nonaligned status, negotiating aid and assistance from diverse sources, including India and the socialist countries. However, neither moves were popular with the United States whose decision to

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withold food shipments to show its disapproval of Bangladesh’s trade with Cuba was one of the factors behind the devastating famine of 1974 (Sobhan, 1982). Mujib was assassinated in August 1975 and, after a brief succession of coups, Zia-ur Rahman came into power, setting the country firmly on its present pro-Islamic and pro-US course. Zia’s political survival depended on distancing himself ideologically from the Awami League as far as possible in order to generate his own civilian base. He projected himself as a modernist, espousing a progressive version of Islam and committed to the enhancement and prosperity of private capital. The rapid de-nationalization of the economy under Zia created a newly rich class of entrepreneurs and traders whose interests were tied to those of the government in power and who became its allies. However, electoral victory represented the acid test in his bid for domestic and international legitimacy; it was the most effective demonstration that the Awami League was not the sole party with a popular base. Zia used the breathing space afforded by martial law to found his own party—the Bangladesh National Party (BNP)—using the various forms of patronage available to a government in power. In the end, Zia’s quest for civilian legitimacy proved to be his downfall. The military resented sharing power and resources with his newly established allies in the BNP and increasingly distanced themselves from him. He was assassinated in 1981 and succeeded by General Ershad. Ershad has imitated many of Zia’s tactics—to the extent of founding his own political party and seeking electoral legitimation—but has not repeated his mistakes. The presence of the military is now more extensive and more overt: in industry, in commerce, in the diplomatic service and within central and local government. Ershad, in other words, is not going to risk being alienated from his military power base. In the midst of the political turbulence of the post-liberation years, the contradictory claims of the Din-ul-Islam and Bangla Samaj—the sacred and the cultural community—have not been resolved. However, different forces shape the ideological construction of national identity in the post-liberation era; it is now spearheaded by the search for legitimation by different regimes rather than by popular resistance to a repressive unity. In this continuing process, women have entered the public arena in new, explicit ways, often directly linked to the political projects of the post-liberation regimes. The Awami League, state secularism and women’s rights The liberation struggle was fought on the grounds of ‘culture-as-nationalism’. Women participated in the movement for Bangladesh, but raised no challenge to their position within the cultural community. Most middle-class women appeared willing to rely on the good intentions of the nationalist government to represent their interests and remedy social injustices. Its paternalism unchallenged, the good intentions of the post-liberation government towards ‘the womenfolk’ were narrowly circumscribed. The 1972 Constitution recognized for the first time the equality of the sexes in all spheres, but went on to reserve for members of one sex any class of employment or office on the grounds that ‘it is considered by its nature to be unsuited to members of the opposite sex’ (Clause 3, Article 29). Fifteen parliamentary seats were reserved for women, but they were to be filled through nomination by the ruling party rather than through the electoral process. While the importance of education for women

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was recognized, it was seen strictly in terms of their domestic role: according to the First Five Year Plan, ‘The level of schooling of women determines the efficiency of household management. Educated women pay better attention to nutrition, health and childcare than the uneducated.’ Mujib’s regime was mainly preoccupied with coping with the ravages of war, famine and deteriorating law and order. It had little scope to deal specifically with the situation of women, except in connexion with the rehabilitation of women who had been raped, widowed or otherwise affected by the war. Despite a variety of measures towards this end, it is likely that Mujib will be best remembered for declaring women who had been raped birangona (war heroines). The term was an attempt to disguise the sexual violence of the crime so as to make social ostracism of its victims less severe. However, it merely highlighted the social hypocrisy and unease surrounding the issue of female sexuality in Bangladesh and many of the women were rejected by their families. A 5 per cent quota of government employment reserved for rape victims was, needless to say, never filled, since it merely served to mark them out (Huda, 1987). In the broader policy arena, there were few initiatives for women. They were still perceived in development planning efforts primarily in relation to fertility control and their critical role in realizing population objectives; the only reference to women’s income-generating activities in the country’s First Five Year Plan is in connexion with such objectives. Nevertheless, at the ideological level, it can be argued that the Awami League’s commitment to secularism helped to create a more favourable context for the pursuit of women’s rights than had hitherto been possible. Secularism in this context implied equal status for all religions. While the ‘personal’ spheres of marriage, divorce, inheritance and guardianship remained, as before, under the separate jurisdictions of different religious communities, the Constitution now banned communalism, religious discrimination, state bias in favour of any religion and political parties based solely on religion. Along with a secular constitution, the naming of Bangladesh as a People’s Republic rather than an Islamic one, the choice of a national anthem, composed by Tagore, a Bengali Hindu, and a national flag devoid of Islamic symbolism, were other signifiers of the secular leanings of the new government.2 The Awami League’s espousal of secularism was, of course, derived from its analysis of the divisive role played by religion in the nation’s history rather than from any particular commitment to gender equality. But, I would argue, secular states allow more negotiable frameworks for the politics of gender than imaginable in states where legitimacy is ultimately derived from religious texts which codify the principle of gender inequality. The Awami League’s secularism effectively favoured the ‘customary, communal, pliable’ version of Islam which made up the folk traditions of Bengali Muslims over the ‘divine, centralist and establishment-based’ version favoured by the fundamentalist constituency within the country (Jahangir, 1986:79). It removed the power of interpreting religious codes of conduct from the Muslim clerical establishment and permitted less rigid and immutable models for women’s behaviour to emerge, models which were easier to modify through contest and struggle. Women and developmentalism in the Bangladesh state By the time Mujib was assassinated, changing currents in the international donor community were converging to form new strands of aid policy. The influence of the international women’s

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movement was making itself felt in the politics of foreign aid. It challenged the assumptions and priorities that had so far dominated development aid, and demanded that women’s interests be specifically taken into account rather than left to a dubious trickle-down process or be interpreted entirely in terms of their reproductive roles. The effects of these new trends were visible in the policies of aid donors to Bangladesh who began to earmark separate budgets for women’s programmes and for research on women’s issues. These developments had their positive effects in the Bangladesh context by introducing a new and potentially progressive vocabulary—the vocabulary of women’s emancipation—into official discourse on women, by giving women’s productive contributions a greater visibility and by increasing the number of development projects directed to women. The coup that brought Zia-ur Rahman to power coincided with the United Nations International Women’s Year (1975) and the declaration of the United Nations Decade for Women. Zia took up the cause of Women in Development (WID) with great public zeal. The Second Five Year Plan (1980–5) was the first in two decades of development planning in the country to give explicit consideration to strategies for integrating women into the development process. A fully fledged Ministry of Women’s Affairs was set up, the number of parliamentary seats reserved for women were doubled to thirty and 10 per cent of public sector jobs were to be reserved for women. Resources were channeled to rural women through various development initiatives. These efforts to improve the condition of women did not spring from entirely disinterested motives. On the contrary, Zia was able to make considerable political capital out of his championship of Women and Development policies. Having come to power by military means, he was faced with the problem of generating a political base for himself. He was not the first political leader to use state patronage to persuade rural interest groups to support regimes in power. But the opportunities for patronage inherent in the distribution of foreign development assistance, together with the additional funding now available for women’s projects, offered new and different channels of patronage to offer to the rural power brokers. Ershad has continued the policy of public commitment to WID policy. In addition to the conventional range of development activities for women, he has also pushed through certain legal initiatives. Family courts have been set up since 1985 with exclusive jurisdiction to deal with cases relating to parental and conjugal rights, thereby expediting their speedy disposal. A number of ordinances have also been enacted which make crimes against women (abduction, trafficking, rape, acid-throwing and dowry-murder) subject to capital punishment. To sum up, there is no doubt that both Zia and Ershad attached considerable significance to the place of WID in state policy. It is evident in the efforts made to advance women’s welfare as well as in their frequent declarations on the subject, themselves couched in the idiom of WID, for example: In Bangladesh we recognise that women’s participation is of central, not marginal, importance in the total process of development…one cannot think of any development strategy for a society that does not explicitly take into account the roles and status of half of its human resources. (President Zia, 1977)

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Bangladesh has made a special attempt to educate the female half of the population, to make them self-reliant and give them a chance to participate in the building of society. (President Ershad, 1987) The limits to developmentalism: social welfare and the moral order A more detailed examination of the state’s WID policy is necessary before the gap between stated intent and actual implementation becomes apparent. While the public declarations are indeed impressive, they obscure the very specific, and ultimately limiting, ways in which women have been incorporated into state policy. They divert attention, for example, from the gross inadequacy of public sector funding for women’s programmes: around 0.20 per cent under the last five-year plan. Official efforts remain trapped within the paternalistic assumptions and class bias of the Bangladesh state and certain persistent themes connect present state policy with the past. One unifying theme which links the policies of different regimes derives from their common concern with political stability and the social order. The continuing priority given to population control, for instance, has been described by some writers as a form of ‘crisismanagement’ by an alliance of national élites and international donors who regard population growth as the key threat to the existing political order (Akhtar, 1986). Others have described development projects for women as an essential element of the state’s attempts to contain potential political unrest, by helping to meet, if only temporarily, the immediate needs of a growing section of the poor (Feldman and McCathy, 1984). However, bolstering the political order is only one aspect of the state’s defence of the status quo. Another aspect relates to the way in which its policies anticipate, embody and reproduce a particular, class-based paradigm of gender relations. The gender subtext of state policy is evident in the way in which women are positioned within it. While men enter in a variety of occupational, political and civil roles, women are brought in primarily as wives and mothers and are persistently bracketed with children in both administrative structures and development plans. Family-planning programmes are the only category of targeted development programmes which manage to reach more than 10 per cent of women, while income-generating projects offered to women appear more geared to satisfying middle-class notions of female propriety than to meeting poor women’s needs for financial security. Tacit normative pressure gives way to overt moral coercion when the state turns its attention to the rehabilitation of women who have somehow slipped from their place in the social—and moral—order. Women singled out for special attention in rehabilitation efforts by the state have shifted periodically in response to changing public concerns: ‘destitute’ women (i.e., widowed or abandoned) in the pre-independence period; ‘war-affected’ women (widows and rape victims) in the aftermath of liberation. More recently, media outcry over the traffic in women has highlighted ‘socially handicapped’ women (prostitutes) as the latest target for official rehabilitation. All these categories have one important feature in common: they are women who have been displaced through various processes from the protective custody of ‘private patriarchy’. They present, in other words, the disturbing spectacle of women on their own, a deviation from the ‘normal’ order. Rehabilitation programmes in effect place such women in the protective custody of the state until they have been taught how to conform more closely to the social norms of poor-but-virtuous womanhood. The rhetoric of ‘integration’

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and ‘participation in development’ that characterizes state WID policy is abandoned here in favour of the language of ‘moral upliftment’ and ‘normalization’. The hallmarks of rehabilitation strategy are training in a range of ‘appropriate’ female skills (not remarkably different from those offered in WID projects), religious education and strict discipline. Women cared for by the Rehabilitation Foundation, for instance, are forbidden to visit friends or family without prior authorization, locked into their hostels by five o’clock in the evening and sent to bed by seven. Not surprisingly, ‘psychological resistance…to rehabilitation programmes’ was cited as one of the major problems encountered by staff at such centres (Jahan, 1979:364). The most striking aspect of the state’s rehabilitation efforts is, however, its single-minded preoccupation with female virtue. Women prisoners, for instance, are presented with hair oil, a comb and a copy of the Koran to ensure their decent appearance (unkempt hair is equated with easy virtue) and moral education (Guhathakurtha, 1985). The nature of the state’s concern with prostitution was graphically summarized by the title of a seminar organized after the media outcry over prostitution in 1986 by the Directorate of Women’s Affairs —‘Correction and Social Reclamation of Women from Moral Danger’ (cited in Azim and Huq, 1987)—as well as in the state’s highly publicized, but largely unsuccessful attempts to rehabilitate prostitutes through marriage to local tradesmen. A recent proposal by the Directorate3 for a new training and rehabilitation complex for prostitutes offers the familiar package of compulsory religious education, physical exercise, the usual forms of training as well as prisonlike discipline. In addition, a social worker/counsellor is proposed who will provide every ‘inmate’ with ‘repeated counselling as and when necessary for their moral rectification’. The proposal recommends that women who successfully complete the rehabilitation programme be issued with a trade course certificate by the government in official recognition of their status as ‘useful normal social being(s)’ and assisted in finding earning opportunities through which they could come across ‘other members of the normal society and hopefully…turn into…normal social being(s)’. The drift to the Islamic state In its preoccupation with female purity, present state policy reproduces many of the attitudes of past regimes: paternalistic as long as the boundaries of social respectability are maintained, repressive when they are transgressed. However, the moral role of the state is being given a new edge by the attempts of recent regimes to revive the place of Islam in defining national identity. The search for a popular mandate by rulers who captured state power by military means has brought to the surface once again the old tensions between Bengali and Islamic definitions of national identity, fought out this time between liberal and traditionalist forces within the national community. The electoral victory needed to boost Zia’s standing in the national and international arena required an ideology to counter the official secularism of the Awami League and to undermine its still-considerable support. Islam offered an obvious and powerful alternative to win over right-wing Islamic elements who had been discredited by their pro-Pakistan policies in 1971, but who had regrouped since the Awami League lost its hold on state power. The process of dismantling state secularism was started by Zia in 1977 when he inserted the declaration ‘Bismillah-ar-Rahman-ar Rahim, (‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficient, the

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Merciful’) at the beginning of the Constitution; deleted the principle of secularism and replaced it by ‘absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah’. Zia also proposed the designation of ‘Bangladeshi’, instead of the previous one of ‘Bengali’, to describe citizens of Bangladesh (reported in Bichitra, 27 April 1981). The redefined term played down the cultural aspects of the national identity, with its unavoidable connotations of a common heritage with Hindu West Bengal, and imposed instead a territorial definition which clearly demarcated the two communities. The ban placed on religious parties by the Awami League was lifted and many ex-Muslim Leaguers now aligned themselves with Zia’s Bangladesh National Party. Attempts to close the gap between state and religion have been continued by Ershad. His strategy however is to play the religious card, in the hope of vesting his party with some ideological legitimacy, without having to share power with the fundamentalist parties. This has not proved to be an easy task and accounts for his irresolute path to Islamization. On several occasions since his assumption of power, Ershad has declared his intentions of turning Bangladesh into an Islamic state but did little to implement this commitment. This changed when, in November 1987, a massive wave of oppositional activity, in response to Ershad’s attempt to place military representatives in local government, nearly brought the government down. Ershad agreed to hold elections, but rejected the opposition’s demands for a provisional caretaker government. The elections were held in March 1988 and, while Ershad’s party swept the polls, it was a meaningless victory. The main opposition parties boycotted the elections and it was estimated that less than 3 per cent of the electorate turned out (Daily Telegraph, 5 March 1988) in what was dubbed ‘the voterless election’. Ershad’s first act in the new Parliament was to push through the Eighth Amendment in which Article 2A declares: The state religion of the Republic is Islam, but other religions may be practised in peace and harmony in the Republic’. Justifying the Amendment, he declared that while the distinct identity of the Bengali people lay in their culture, language and geographical entity, independent sovereignty and other spheres of nationalism could only be defined through Islam (Daily Ittefaq, 21 June 1988). However, the move was widely seen as a cynical political act, an attempt to contain the secular opposition and to make inroads into the fundamentalist constituency. A large number of rallies and demonstrations were held in protest against what was seen as a violation of the liberal nationalism which brought Bangladesh into existence—‘the spirit of ‘71’. They were supported not only by the mainstream opposition parties and trade unions, but also by a wide spectrum of women’s organizations, student groups, the Supreme Court Bar Association, the Combined Professionals’ Action Committee, the Federation of Bangladesh University Teachers and various prominent intellectuals and ex-freedom-fighters. The Islamic community: international support and the internal constituency The restoration of Islam to a central place in state ideology has been analysed so far as the strategy of military rulers in search of an ideology, but there were other considerations which assisted the process. Official Islamization was also an attempt to create and capitalize on forces which would help to contain the secular and liberal opposition within the country. During Mujib’s ban on religious politics, the main fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, had continued its activities unofficially through various social and community organizations

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such as the Masjid Mission and the Bangladesh Islamic Centre. Initially through clandestine and subsequently through open recruitment, it has enjoyed a major increase in its membership. It operates through a combination of well-organized proselytizing and social welfare work (mobile clinics, medical services, education and charity). It has been particularly successful in recruiting a youthful cadre through the operations of its Youth and Student Shibirs (Encampments) and, significantly, it is for the first time successfully recruiting among women through a separate women’s front. A growth in nonpolitical grassroots religious consciousness is also discernible. It is exemplified by the Tabliq-Jamaat, one of the largest but least known religious movements in the Muslim world today, whose annual assembly in Tongi (Bangladesh) draws together over a million people from all over the world. The Tabliq- Jamaat has no organizational structure or political aspirations, but assists the fundamentalist cause by creating an environment of revivalist Islam (Mohsin, 1983). Various reasons have been advanced for this growth in Islamic consciousness. To some extent, it represents a rise in anti-Indian sentiment in reaction to Indian intransigence on the Farakka Barrage, its naval presence in the Bay of Bengal and other acts of hostility which have periodically disrupted the relationship between the two countries. Another reason offered is the import of conservative values by Bangladeshi migrants returning from the Middle East (Ahmed, 1985). Another undoubtedly important reason can be termed the Saudi factor. The West is, after all, not the only source of funds for Bangladesh. The OPEC countries, most importantly Saudi Arabia, have entered the ranks of major aid donors since the oil boom of the early 1970s. While it is not clear to what extent moves to reassert Islamic values were in deference to Saudi sensibilities, it should be noted that Saudi Arabia refused to recognize the new state of Bangladesh until the assassination of Mujib and Zia’s accession to power. The change of regime expedited the flow of aid from the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia as the most important source. The main vehicles identified by the Saudis to disseminate Islamic values have been the Islamic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the Madrassa (religious education) system and the fundamentalist parties, all of which are believed to receive a great deal of official and unofficial aid from Saudi Arabia. The outcome of Saudi munificence has been the creation of alternative networks of patronage (scholarships, vocational training, student accommodation, employment and medical aid) which materially bolster the appeal of the Islamic constituency. Various research organizations have also been set up to propagate Islamic values and build up a cadre of Islamic intellectuals to service the expansion in religious centres and the educational system. They seek to challenge head on the ideology and rhetoric of developmentalism, clearly labelled ‘Western’, often selling their publications at unprofitably low prices to counter ‘the fact that tons and tons of books on other ideologies in the best print and finest paper…are being distributed free in this country’ (cited in Mohsin, 1983). Predictably, the rising Islamic intelligentsia pays special attention to the conspicuous place accorded to women in the state’s developmentalist discourse, denouncing ‘the so-called progressive intellectuals’ who ‘in symphony with their Western masters’ attempt to argue for equality between the sexes (Islam, 1980:250). The Islamic Economics Research Bureau recently published a collection of papers presented at a seminar on Islamic Economics. Three papers deal specifically with women, all of them focusing on the issue of employment. One

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common feature of these articles is their attempt to subvert WID arguments to provide support for their own very different positions. Thus, in common with many feminists within and outside Bangladesh, one article contests the ‘Western’ idea that housewives do not work, but draws from this the conclusion that women do not require employment opportunities: It is necessary here to consider the validity of the western concept regarding women employment. It is very unfair to think that those who work in [the] home are unemployed…Apart from many other works, rearing and educating a child is a whole time job…How can it be said that staying at home is a loss of productive manpower. Development is likely to increase, other factors remaining the same, if a healthy and psychologically satisfied generation can grow up in the care of mother. (Hannan, 1980:240) The author concludes from this that: proper course in Bangladesh or for that matter in any Muslim country would be not to bring out women from homes as competitors of men in the employment market (241). All three contributions employ an eclectic mixture of ideas taken from the WID literature documenting the adverse effects of modernization for women and from the Koranic injunctions about separate spheres for women and men. However, despite the expressions of concern for women’s welfare and repeated assertions that ‘home is the ideal workshop for women’ (Islam, 1980:252) it is clear that the authors share an overriding preoccupation with the moral order and a terror of the sexual chaos which results from ‘demands for Western-type of freedom in all respects’: Men and Women sit in the same working place face to face. Whatever liberal arguments are put forward in favour of this arrangement, in reality the close proximity of the opposite sexes arouses lust and love for each other which on many occasions lead to immoral and scandalous affairs between them. What [is] happening to their children left at home? Are they getting enough love and proper rearing? The answer is ‘No’…Under these circumstances our future citizens would be weak, coward[ly] and immoral. It requires no detailed discussion nowadays to see how wide [are] the disasters of co-education and free mixing. (Hossain, 1980:270) A lurid picture is painted of the disasters of ‘free mixing’ of the sexes in the West: moral degradation, suicides and crimes (Hossain, 1980), weakening of family ties, rise in unstable marriages and divorces, spread of venereal disease, child neglect, increased rape (Hannan, 1980), excessive and unbridled freedom in sex, indulgence and narcotics, illicit affairs, a flood of pornography, loss of religious faith, negative feelings like envy, hate, selfishness and other vicious mental thoughts (Islam, 1980). The lessons are clear: tampering with the ‘natural’ principle of separate spheres for the sexes leads to a total breakdown of the moral order.

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Contradictions in state policy Clearly, state attempts to win the support of the Islamic constituency have different gender implications from those associated with promoting Women and Development policy. In contrast to goals of women’s emancipation and economic participation, the Islamic lobby in Bangladesh seeks to confine women to a domestic role and to impose controls on their public mobility. Zia’s strategy, and that of Ershad after him, has been a blatant balancing act between the conflicting gender ideologies implicit in different aid packages and a refusal to acknowledge their inherent contradictions. Women have not benefited, for instance, from the money being poured into the religious education system by the government and the Madrassa Board since they are generally excluded from these institutions. Such discriminatory provision of education clearly contravenes the commitment to sexual equality still contained within the Constitution as well as the declared intention of the state to increase educational opportunities for women (Khan, 1988). Measures curtailing women’s visibility in the public domain also contradict the state’s declared policy of encouraging women’s employment in the public sector and women’s participation in competitive sports. Thus the earlier policy of recruiting women into the metropolitan police has been gradually modified so that women are now restricted to roadside traffic booths or checkpoints: obviously maintaining a female police force which operated on the streets ‘did not quite tally with the values being cultivated by an aspiring Islamic state’ (Guhathakurtha, 1985:86). These shifts and contradictions within state policy are possible because the state regards the issue of women’s rights—and of Islam itself—in essentially instrumentalist terms. It is significant that the most organized political force on the religious right—the Jamaat-e-Islam—has remained in the opposition, unimpressed, it would appear, by the government’s Islamic posturing. Some degree of coherence in overall government policy is made possible by the fact that both the Saudis and the US have the long-term interests of private capital at heart; Saudi Arabia is regarded by the US as one of its most reliable allies in the fight against international communism. Consequently, while Saudi influence is apparent in some public-sector policy and within the community, it has generally refrained from interfering with the workings of the private sector. The struggle for women’s rights The cynicism of state policy is most evident in the sphere of gender because the position of women is a key factor distinguishing different ideological packages. In its pursuit of political legitimacy and international aid, it professes to believe in both the emancipation of women as well as in its negation. At the same time, it is precisely the existence of these contradictory interests and pressures on the state that has permitted some genuine advances to be made in women’s struggles. The WID influence has helped to challenge the monopoly of archaic ideological preconceptions about women at all levels of Bangladesh society. It has also opened up new possibilities for organization and struggle around women’s interests. This has mainly taken place in the political and developmental sphere; autonomous women’s organizations are, as yet, very few. Since liberation, political activities around women’s rights have emerged as a distinct area of mobilization. The women’s wings of the two main parties—the BNP and the Awami

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League—are primarily active around welfare issues, but also support equal rights for women. In view, however, of their limited definition of women’s roles, their demand generally translates into putting pressure on the state to reform family and personal-status law. Women’s rights are given a broader interpretation by the left-wing parties. The most active of these is Mahila Parishad which is linked to the Communist Party and has over 30,000 members. Mahila Parishad has been active on a wide range of issues: it has fought for the rights of women workers both in factories and in middle-class occupations like banking, kept up the pressure on the government to implement the 10 per cent quota for women in employment and (in contrast to the BNP and Awami League) opposed reserved parliamentary seats for women as an antidemocratic ploy to strengthen the party in power. More recently, it spearheaded a campaign against dowry and against violence against women and opened up shelters for women who had been victims of violence. Some of the laws passed by the government on these issues were a consequence of Mahila Parishad’s campaigns. Despite its undeniable strengths, Mahila Parishad’s institutional links with the Communist Party have prevented it from giving an independent significance to women’s oppression. The struggle for women’s rights tends to be subsumed within the ‘wider’ struggle for socialism and democracy; the politics of gender in personal relations and everyday life, and the ideological bases of women’s subordination, receive scant attention from its members. This was evident, for instance, in the national campaign against male violence which reached its peak in the summer of 1985. While Mahila Parishad took a leading role in denouncing male violence, it joined forces with the left opposition in linking it with the breakdown of law and order under Ershad’s regime and focusing its efforts on bringing down the government. Protests by other women’s groups that women were being portrayed in Mahila Parishad’s campaign as passive victims and that the issue of domestic violence (reported in the press far more frequently than recognized in the law and order explanation) was being side-stepped, were generally dismissed by Mahila Parishad as divisive, irrelevant and likely to alienate male support. The other main location of struggles for women’s rights is in grassroots development organizations which flourish outside the confines of official efforts. A significant number of these nongovernmental organizations place women’s oppression centrally in their programmes for change. Rather than reproduce the welfarism that characterizes most development initiatives, NGOs such as Proshika, Nijera Kori and Saptagram have shifted their primary objectives from meeting the immediate needs of poor and landless women and men to that of their longer-term empowerment. These NGOs work with a collective rather than individual concept of empowerment. Landless women and men are organized into groups, often on the basis of welfare or economic activities: health delivery, credit, cultivation of collectively leased land and so on. Through a process of ‘conscientization’, they are encouraged to analyse the roots of their oppression and to break the ‘culture of silence’ which is part of the condition of poverty (Freire, 1972). The training sessions include analysis of feminist issues—such as male violence, dowry, polygamy, verbal repudiation—as well as the more usual class-based ones of wages, land rights, corruption and clientelism. These strategies represent an important break with past efforts to change women’s lives. They are directed primarily at rural women who generally fall outside the orbit of conventional political organizations. They also give greater primacy to the power of ideology

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in maintaining gender subordination. By acknowledging that the struggle against oppression also requires the transformation of individual consciousness, the progressive NGOs have extended the arena of the women’s movement beyond the parameters of conventional left politics. Aside from political and development organizations, there are also a large number of independent women’s organizations such as professional organizations (e.g., the Federation of University Women, the Federation of Business and Professional Women), the Bangladesh Women’s Rights Movement (mainly working around legal discrimination), Naripokkho (an autonomous feminist group) and various women’s research groups such as Women for Women and Nari Shongoti. It is unlikely that women could have been active in such numbers and on such a range of issues if the state had been a more monolithic presence and displayed a firmer commitment to its Islamic programme. Significantly, the first demonstrations and rallies in opposition to the government’s Eighth Amendment were called by women’s groups: as a leading newspaper commented, ‘This time the women have taken the lead’ (Holiday, 19 April 1988). The same article commented that women’s opposition to the Amendment drew its moral roots from the humanistic values which had inspired the liberation struggle. In the words of a resolution adopted at the end of one of the rallies called by the women’s groups: ‘the war was fought to ensure the continuity of the culture and tradition of the Bengali people. The war was supposed to guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of thought, women’s rights’ (Holiday, 29April 1988). As one of the women’s groups that initiated the protests against the Amendment, Naripokkho declared its opposition to any attempt to mix religion and politics on the grounds that it strengthened the fundamentalist hand and vested every man with the moral authority to police women’s behaviour. The organization has now issued a writ against Ershad on the grounds that his Amendment contravenes the equal rights guaranteed to women and to religious minorities by the Bangladesh Constitution, by the Charter of the United Nations and by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its example has been followed by other women’s groups and by legal and professional organizations who are contesting the Amendment on similar grounds. Conclusion: women, Islam and the ad hoc state This paper set out to analyse the place of religion and culture in defining the identity of the Bengali Muslim collectivity. The syncretic form of Islam that flourished among the Bengali Muslims, and the common cultural legacy they shared with Bengali Hindus have often made them suspect in the eyes of the ‘true’ believers. A brutal war of liberation was fought in 1971 to defend what Bengali Muslims believed to be their own distinct national identity: a fusion of Bengali culture and humanist Islam. Bangladesh’s history since independence has been one of political instability, as different factions of the ruling class struggle to control state power. In their quest for an internal constituency and external legitimacy, successive military regimes have sought to reconcile apparently contradictory political programmes. The contradictions are most apparent in the sphere of women’s rights, since state policy has, on the one hand, championed WID values and the emancipation of women, and on the other, set in motion a ‘creeping’ Islamization

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process, which strengthens the hand of those who would snatch back the gains that women have made. Women have been able to capitalize on the ad hoc politics of an insecure state. The contradictions and tensions that characterize state policy have opened different possibilities for women’s struggles. Women have also benefited from the resistance of liberal and secular forces to the state’s attempts to restore Islam as a basic principle of Bangladeshi nationhood. Such resistance has helped to moderate the extent to which official Islamization can be translated into a direct attack on women’s rights. The women’s movement will continue to find allies outside its own ranks as long as political Islamization is seen as a negation of the spirit of 1971. In the words of one writer on the place of Islam in Bangladesh: Since Bangladesh came into being certain issues have been reopened, which one thought were buried in the ashes of the war of liberation. We had established our identity as Bengalis, as a nation that embraces various religious communities…. We have learnt the hard way the difference between religion and nationhood. Let us not unlearn it. (Anisuzzaman 1983:152). Notes Naila Kabeer does research and training in gender and development issues at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. She is a member of the Feminist Review Collective and of Naripokkho, a women’s organization in Bangladesh. This article has been excerpted from my contribution to Women, Islam and the State: A Comparative Perspective, a collection of articles edited by Deniz Kandiyoti and published by Macmillan Press. I am grateful to Macmillan Press for permission to reproduce this excerpt. An earlier version of the paper appeared as an IDS Discussion Paper, No. 268, in 1989. I would also like to thank Deniz Kaniyoti for her editorial advice and to Rokeya Rahman Kabeer, Ruby Ghuznavi and Shireen Huq for their valuable comments on the paper. 1 The vermilion spot traditionally worn by Hindu women as a symbol of their marital state, but now widely adopted by both Muslim and Hindu Bengalis as a cosmetic feature. 2 The Awami League’s gestures towards secularism stand in marked contrast to Bhutto’s stance in Pakistan during the same period. Despite his left-wing populism, Bhutto’s version of socialism carried the prefix of ‘Islamic’. He retained the status of Islamic Republic for Pakistan and declared Islam the state religion. A list of the symbols incorporated by Bhutto in his 1973 Constitution, which went beyond those in the Constitutions of 1956 and 1962, are cited in Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed Women of Pakistan Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (London: Zed Press, 1987) 3 This information is from a project proforma issued by the Ministry of Social Welfare and Women’s Affairs proposing a new Training and Rehabilitation Complex for Socially Handicapped Women.

References ADDI, Premen and AZAD, Ibne (1975) ‘Politics and Society in Bengal’ in BLACKBUKN ( 1975 ). AHMED, Rafiuddin (1983) editor, Islam in Bangladesh Society, Culture and Politics Dhaka: Bangladesh Itihas Samiti.

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——(1985) editor, Bangladesh: Society, Religion and Politics Chittagong: South Asia Studies Group, University of Chittagong. AHMED, Rehnuma (1985) ‘Women’s Movement in Bangladesh and the Left’s Understanding of the Women Question’ Journal of Social Studies No. 30, pp. 27–56 . AKHTAR, Farida (1986) Depopulating Bangladesh Dhaka: UBINIG. ALI, Tariq (1983) Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State Middlesex: Penguin Books. ANISUZZAMAN, A.T.M. (1983) ‘Comments on Ghulam Murshid’s paper’ in RAFIUDDIN ( 1983 ). AZIM, Firdaus and HUQ, Shireen (1987) ‘The Shabmeher Story Reconsidered’, paper presented at the workshop on Media and Women’s Oppression in Bangladesh, Dhaka 29/30 January, 1987 . BLACKBURN, Robin (1975) editor Explosion in a Subcontinent London: Penguin Books. BLANCHET, Therese (1984) Meanings and Rituals of Birth in Rural Bangladesh Dhaka: University Press Ltd. CALLARD, Keith (1957) Pakistan: A Political Study London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. FELDMAN, Shelley and McCARTHY, Florence E. (1984) Rural Women and Develop ment in Bangladesh Selected Issues Oslo: NORAD/Ministry of Development Cooperation. FREIRE, Paulo (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed Middlesex: Penguin Books. FRUZETTI, Lina M. (1980) ‘Ritual Status of Muslim Women in Rural India’ in SMITH ( 1980 ). GUHATHAKURTHA, Meghna (1985) ‘Gender Violence in Bangladesh: The Role of the State’ Journal of Social Studies No. 30, pp. 77–90 . HANNAN, Shah Abdul (1980) ‘Women Employment: Its Need and Appropriate Avenues’ in Thoughts on Islamic Economics Proceedings from a seminar on Islamic Economics held by the Islamic Economics Research Bureau, Dhaka. HOSSAIN, Muhammad Musharraf (1980) ‘The Employment for Women’ in ISLAMIC ECONOMICS (1980 ). HUDA, Sigma (1987) ‘Women and Law: Policy and Implementation’, paper presented at a seminar on Women and Law organized by Women for Women, 13–15 September, 1987 . ISLAM, Zohurul (1980) ‘Women’s Employment: Problems and Prospects’ in ISLAMIC ECONOMICS (1980 ). ISLAMIC ECONOMICS (1980) Thoughts on Islamic Economics , proceedings from a seminar on Islamic Economics held by the Islamic Economics Research Bureau, Dhaka. JAHAN, Roushan (1979) ‘Situation of Women Deviating from Established Social Norms’ in WOMEN FOR WOMEN RESEARCH AND STUDY GROUP ( 1979 ). JAHAN, Rounaq (1980) Bangladesh Politics: Problems and Issues Dhaka: Dhaka University Press. JAHANGIR, B.K. (1986) Problematics of Nationalism in Bangladesh Dhaka: Centre for Social Studies. KHAN, Salma (1988) The Fifty Percent Women in Development and Policy in Bangladesh Dhaka: University Press Ltd. KHAN, Zillur Rahman (1985) ‘Islam and Bengali Nationalism’ in Rafiuddin AHMED ( 1985 ). MALONEY, Clarence , AZIZ, K.M.Ashraful and SARKER, Profulla C. (1981) Beliefs and Fertility in Bangladesh Dhaka: ICDDRB. MANIRUZZAMAN, Talukder (1983) ‘Bangladesh Politics: Secular and Islamic Trends’ in Rafiuddin AHMED ( 1983 ). MOHSIN, K.M. (1983) ‘Trends of Islam in Bangladesh’ in Rafiuddin AHMED ( 1983 ). MOKKAMEL, Tanvir (1987) Samrajyabader Pancham Bahini Dhaka: Jatiya Shahitya Prakashini. MUHITH, A.M.A. (1978) Bangladesh: Emergence of a Nation Dhaka: Bangladesh Books International Ltd. NATIONS, Richard (1975) ‘The Economic Structure of Pakistan and Bangladesh’ in BLACKBURN (1975 ). O’DONNELL, Peter Charles (1987) Bangladesh: Biography of a Muslim Nation Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

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SMITH, Jane J. (1980) editor, Women in Contemporary Muslim Societies London: Associated University Press. SOBHAN, Rahman (1982) The Crisis of External Dependence. The Political Economy of Foreign Aid to Bangladesh London: Zed Press. THAPAR, Romila (1968) A History of India Volume 1 London: Penguin Books. WOMEN FOR WOMEN RESEARCH AND STUDY GROUP (1979) editors, Situation of Women in Bangladesh Dhaka: Women for Women Research and Study Group.

BORN-AGAIN MOON: Fundamentalism in Christianity and the Feminist Spirituality Movement Janet E.McCrickard

‘But you’re an intelligent woman,’ a male friend said to me one day. ‘How on earth did you fall for it?’ ‘It’, in this case, was fundamentalism, otherwise known as born-again Christianity, or the charismatic movement, the modern revivalist form of evangelical Christianity.1 might have replied that intelligence is no protection against that sense of insecurity which all too often besets the university fresher, especially one like myself, newly liberated from a girls’ convent school, completely naive, and uncomfortable unless told exactly what to do by somebody else. In the eyes of the fundamentalists (as personified by the ‘God Squad’, i.e., proselytizing members of the Christian Union) I was a fruit ripe for the plucking, and in psychological terms I was, in short, plucked. Although it was not long before I began to realize the true nature of the bargain which I had made, it was not until seventeen years later that I finally learned to live without fundamentalism or, to be more precise, unlearned fundamentalist ways of thinking. In the interim, I spent twelve years as an active participant in the feminist spirituality movement or ‘Goddess revival’. In the more obvious of its manifestations, the Goddess revival could hardly be more different from evangelical Christianity. Indeed, they explicitly claim to be polar opposites. While one is patriarchal, authoritarian, puritanical, dogmatic, right-wing and Christian, the other is matriarchal, antihierarchical, hedonist (especially in its sexual attitudes), nondogmatic (at least in theory), left-wing and openly and defiantly occult. Yet they have certain things in common by virtue of being revivalist or restorationist in character. Both attempt to restore or recreate a system and values which existed in an earlier, pristine, wiser and happier era. Both are attractive in their offer of inner healing, a cure for anxiety and insecurity, a perfect way of making life beautiful, harmonious and deeply purposeful. Both hold out the promise of belonging to an élite spiritual group with an exclusive hotline to Ultimate Divinity. For myself, the lure of fundamentalist Christianity and feminist spirituality alike lay in their élite and exclusive nature—the idea of belonging to a group which had all the answers, in which I would feel right all the time, and never wrong, and in which ecstasy was always just around the corner, proved quite irresistible. But discussing the issue with other women, some ex-evangelicals, it became clear to me that women are often attracted to charismatic Christianity and the Goddess movement by their claims of spiritual empowerment. While the

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KORE: the maiden (or youthful) aspect of the Goddess

born-again Christian is empowered by the spirit of Christ or the Holy Ghost, which comes to indwell her (thus restoring a harmony with the Almighty Father which had been lost through Adam and Eve’s rebellion) the spiritual feminist is empowered by lunar energies, a psychic force which comes from realization of the Goddess-nature within each woman (this restores harmony with the Great Cosmic Moon-Mother which was lost when men rebelled against the primitive matriarchate). Assertions that ‘power’ (spiritual, social or otherwise) can be obtained in such-and-such a way are only attractive, however, to those who feel (or who can be persuaded to feel) in some sense powerless, that there is some disharmony, something wrong with the individual or cosmic machinery, that can easily be put right if only one knows the correct techniques. There is considerable similarity between the powers (or charisms) claimed by the Spirit-filled Christian woman and her Moon-attuned spiritual-feminist counterpart. Both kinds fall under the heading of the occult, psychic or paranormal. They include healing, prophecy, types of clairvoyance, channelling or mediumship, and intuition or ‘discernment’ which allows one, for example, to detect the spiritual presence of evil, or the truth or falsehood of an idea.2 Charismatics are certainly aware of the occult connexion, for they constantly and strenuously make a distinction between Christian powers—legitimate, true and derived from God—and those of non-Christians, which may appear to be the same but are really only Satanic counterfeits. Before one can obtain spiritual power there must be a renewal of the mind, a stage of initiation, realization or rebirth. In the fundamentalist case this is a process of submission and self-emptying. First one must (according to the traditional evangelical formula) ‘Invite Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Saviour’. Later, when one is fully yielded

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(this very particularly means accepting without any mental reservation the full authority and inerrancy of the Bible) one is available for possession by the Holy Spirit. The metaphors here are undisguisedly sexual, to the point of being pornographic—before Holy Spirit possession the candidate must yield, must open herself, must submit, must be broken. A popular charismatic hymn invites’ ‘Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me…bend me, break me, mould me, fill me’. In that case, I must have been suffering from the spiritual equivalent of vaginismus, for I failed to achieve that mental passivity and acquiescence that was required of me by the masculine God. While a belief that one is personally helpless is essential for the would-be fundamentalist, the process following on conversion is designed to emphasize and expand that sense of powerlessness unto the complete emptying of all self-esteem. This is the state fundamentalists call brokenness, and it means the most complete and conscious rejection of one’s very right to intellectual autonomy. This total subjection to the authority of God as revealed in the inerrant Scripture means that the individual conscience must be discredited, human goodness defamed, and the ‘outer’, ‘fallen’ world of nature, culture and nonbiblical ideas treated as Satan-contaminated. It was during a charismatic service (in an Anglican church) that I was brought up with a jolt against the real consequences of ‘yielding’. The sermonizing vicar had just given out the text for the day, a passage describing an Israelite massacre of Canaanites—men, women and children. He went on to act this out from the pulpit, miming the joyful way Joshua and his soldiers had slashed babies with their swords—joyful, because they were doing the divine will, just as God had instructed them. The congregation laughed aloud at the vicar’s antics. I sat grimly. I could not laugh. His message was that, from a purely human point of view, this massacre might seem cruel or immoral, but from a truly Christian point of view, it was actually supremely moral and illustrated the gulf between our fallen minds and God’s infinite purity and justice. And this was the test. We could measure our yieldedness by our willingness to accept as good those decrees and acts of God which the fallen, sinful, autonomous mind proudly judged to be cruel or immoral. My personal repeated attempts and utter failure to cut through the nerves of reason and conscience, in order to be ‘at peace with God’ and escape hell-fire, were so painful that I left the fold after about a year—and almost immediately became involved in feminist spirituality, which seemed to me to offer the freedom and autonomy which fundamentalism denies. The renewal of the mind in Goddess revivalism aims to restore thinking and more particularly feeling to its ‘natural’, harmonious state, in effect the same kind of intuitive, magical and semiconscious awareness as that supposedly enjoyed by palaeolithic woman. The Goddess movement looks back to an era far more remote than that of the biblical world, to a paradise existence in which women were supreme, the hypothetical ‘matriarchate’. Full meaning and value for women, politics and society is located in this vanished world of the palaeolithic era, this Golden Age, the first and best human social arrangement, or so it is claimed. The matriarchate is supposed to have been a worldwide phenomenon, primarily based on the correct intuitions of politically-OK wise-women, who led the prehistoric clans for long, blissful, nontechnological millennia. The supreme deity was the ‘Great Moon-Mother’; so-called lunar or feminine values were paramount (Sjöö and Mor, 1987). Golden Age religion, however, needs the doctrine of a Fall, to explain how we came to blow this perfect world. The spiritual-feminist version says that the egalitarian, peaceful,

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CERES: Goddess of harvests, from a statue in Venice

vegetarian, Moon-goddess-worshipping, feminist clans were overcome by patriarchal hordes of Aryan warriors rushing down from the north, all-complete with sun-gods, rape, technology, meat-cookery, the class system and above all, reason. This rewriting of history as a dualistic battle between good (us) and evil (them) is a common feature of fundamentalisms of all kinds. The spiritual-feminist version divides the cosmos, mind and experience in a way which operates as fundamental dogma, even though the movement as a whole claims to be nondogmatic. The division goes something like this:

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No doubt the reader can extend the list herself without actually knowing anything about the Goddess movement.3 According to this cosmology, the cause of the world’s ills is something called the solar principle, the male spiritual force. The rational faculty, or masculine way of thinking, is Sunconsciousness, the influence of the solar principle on the human mind, and it doesn’t take a degree in theology to see that, for many spiritualist feminists, the Sun plays a role very much like that of Satan in Christian cosmology. The mind-renewal of the spiritual feminist is therefore not a process of reconciliation between the poles of the spiritual world, but one of purification, of casting out the impure and disruptive solar, masculine element, to extinguish the Sun so that the truly feminine Moon and Stars may be seen. (This is particularly true of certain lesbian-separatist sections of the Goddess movement.) By attuning to the Moon, by identification with it, by acceptance of what are considered ‘lunar values’ and by realization of the divine, ‘the feminine’, within herself, a woman may release the full flood of psychic energies, skills and truths which Sun-consciousness had previously blocked. This, however, is not simply a matter for the individual woman. Just as the born-again Christian must test her faith against the witness of the infallible Bible and a worshipping church community, so too must the spiritual feminist test her intuitions in the spiritualfeminist community. Anne Kent Rush, in her book Moon, Moon, says that lunar issues in academic and scientific work must be treated by women as propaganda and reinterpreted, because ‘It is always central to listen to our own individual and collective female body experience (Rush, 1976:16). Rush’s book is not normally thought of among spiritual feminists as a seminal work, although often cited. It is, however, of interest because it typifies the rejection of the rational, ‘solar’ mind, and the demonization of reason and science, which later writers, particularly Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor in their Great Cosmic Mother (1987), work out in detail. In her belief that academic discipline actually destroys Moonconsciousness, and that, to obtain lunar benefits, we must approach the Moon with belief and respect (i.e., with faith, uncritically) Rush expresses an idea not so very different from that of the fundamentalist for whom the rational mind thwarts truth, leavingthe individual defenceless before Satanic distortion: Before your conversion, Satan had free access to your mind, and was able to feed in all kinds of negative thoughts. In many ways you become conditioned to looking at circumstances from a natural or worldly viewpoint…. Because Satan has blinded the minds of unbelievers, they are unable to understand Jesus or the things of the Spirit. They are unable to perceive spiritual truth because of their ‘blindness’; they are without revelation in their hearts. (Urquhart, 1986:143). Here the fundamentalist author equates Satan, natural, worldly and spiritual blindness. In the same way feminist spirituality equates evil, the Sun, the merely materialistic (this particularly refers to naturalistic explanations of biological phenomena), the patriarchal outer world (or ‘the world of men’) and inability to perceive spiritual truth. According to spiritual-feminist theory, scientists’ lack of lunar attunement, their spiritual ignorance, actually prevents them from properly understanding the working of nature. Sunconsciousness is incapable of realizing any worthwhile truth. This, too, approaches very closely to the fundamentalist viewpoint:

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When the non-Christian scientist or philosopher begins to reason in the field of philosophy or theology, the very nature of the subject matter, dealing as it does with the ultimate causes of the universe, makes it impossible for him to reason correctly. The distortion brought about by the fall of man into sin completely blocks the intellectual channels of such a non-Christian thinker and prevents him from reasoning correctly. (Hamilton 1964:14) The commitment of the Goddess movement to intuition and magic was made right at the beginning, when socialist-feminist women rediscovered Johann Jakob Bachofen’s Myth, Religion and Mother Right (1967). (Bachofen’s matriarchal hypothesis was adopted by the founding fathers of communism as a true picture of human social development [Gadon, 1990: 226–7]). He saw female rule as something dark and primitive which was bound to be overcome by the light of masculine reason; cosmological notions which come directly from classical traditions in Western thought. Feminist spirituality never for one moment questioned this dichotomy, but wholeheartedly embraced it, only reversing its value judgements. While Bachofen saw the male qualities of light and reason as being good and in opposition to the feminine qualities of dark and intuition (evil), the spiritual-feminist equation became: masculine (light, reason)=evil, feminine (dark, intuition)=good.

This value-switch has had dire results not only for women themselves, but also for spiritual-feminist ‘scholarship’, most of which, in consequence, is pseudo-scholarship, a disastrous mishmash of postulation, occult assertions, compounded errors, unfounded conclusions, inconsistency and wishful thinking. Since reason has been demonized, how could it be otherwise? Women have deprived themselves of the means to critically evaluate their own ideas. This part of my experience, in my final two years as a spiritual feminist, was very trying. My suggestions that we should sceptically inquire into the basis of our beliefs were

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almost invariably treated in exactly the same way as my doubts and difficulties had been in Christian fundamentalism. There, I was told that I was not fully yielded, that I was allowing my mind to be influenced by Satan. In the Goddess movement I was accused of excessive Sunconsciousness, of identifying with the male principle. When I openly expressed my view that the Irish Sheela-na-gig carvings (erotic sculptures) were perhaps not prehistoric Goddessicons but medieval grotesques, one woman refused to speak to me any more. This was not by any means the only instance in which I was shunned for questioning key beliefs, or for adopting a dissenting attitude regarding paranormal claims. This scepticism was constantly treated as spiritual impurity and interpreted as an attack upon or betrayal of my sister feminists. What finally brought me to a rejection of the feminist spirituality movement was a sickening and overwhelming sense of bad intellectual conscience. I had sacrificed integrity, yet again, for the benefits of meaning, importance and boosting an enfeebled self-esteem by belonging to an élite group. This realization was a humiliating experience. My idealism about women and sisterhood, too, had been tripped up and left lying flat on its face. As these feelings wore off I began to realize some of the reasons why the Goddess revival and charismatic revival had appeared almost simultaneously, in the mid/late 1960s. It is not only that both types of ‘old tyme religion’ give security in face of change, and satisfy aching nostalgia, but also that the radically powerless and oppressed often resort to the occult as the only means of power and importance left to them—and the only means of revenge: witness the spiritual-feminist spells against rapists, which call to mind the ‘cursing stones’ employed by the Irish country people against their English overlords. (Budapest, 1989:30) Because of its theology of a golden age (the hypothetical matriarchate) and a fall (the patriarchal takeover), spiritual feminism naturally tends towards an idea of the millenium; in other words, the restoration of matriarchy: Woman is the ally of nature, and her instinct is to tend, to nurture, to encourage healthy growth, and to preserve ecological balance. She is the natural leader of society and of civilisation, and the usurpation of her primeval authority by man has resulted in the unco-ordinated chaos that is leading the human race back to barbarism…. Only masculine ego…stands in the way of a decent society dedicated to humanitarianism and characterised by the feminine virtues of selflessness, compassion and empathy…The only remedy for the invading and consuming rot is the return to the values of the matriarchates…and the rediscovery of the non-material universe. (Davis, 1971:336) The concept of woman as inherently superior in religious, moral and sociological ways underpins virtually all spiritual-feminist writing: It is the human female who was designed by evolution itself as the link between sexuality and spirit, between biological energy and the cosmic soul. It is the human female, as the leading edge of earthly evolution, who was specifically, neurologically structured for the experience of ecstasy. For this reason, the first religions on earth were designed by women, for women and in celebration of femaleness…. Women’s cultures would not have needed to maintain themselves by energy-repressive systems, by coercive and punitive surveillance systems based on social caste, or economic status, or

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skin-color or eye color or dress, nor would there be any need for hierarchic organisation, tyrannical terrors, or political frauds. All these [are] patriarchal accoutrements. (Sjöö and Mor, 1987:429) Women have nothing to gain by adopting doctrinaire spiritual or political attitudes, though we have everything to gain from understanding why they attract us. It is not enough simply to dismiss charismatic Christianity and the Goddess revival as nothing but new forms of irrationalism, for they raise far too many questions: how we see ourselves as women, the relationship between meaning and autonomy in forms of personal and collective identity, the extent to which any definition of ‘the true feminine principle’ can help or hinder us. As a feminist and secular humanist I believe that we desperately need flexibility, creativity and the courageous willingness to constantly and critically evaluate our ideas and processes. While fundamentalisms of every kind do indeed grant security and meaning, in doing so they close possibilities for women instead of opening them, and, if only for this reason, we cannot afford them in the social and political reality of the late twentieth century. Notes Janet McCrickard was born in 1952 and brought up in the north-east of England. She received her Honours degree in Botany from Bristol University and went on to teach for twelve years, before becoming a writer and artist. She is a member of the British Humanist Association, the American Humanist Association, the Secular Society and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Her book, Eclipse of the Sun: An Investigation Into Sun And Moon Myths, was published in 1990 by Gothic Image Publications, Glastonbury. 1 A useful history of the movement is to be found in Ellwood (1973) and Wimber (1985). Readers unfamiliar with modern revivalism are recommended to consult Higton (1988). 2 Two key texts here are Bennett (1971) and Pytches (1985) which detail the supernatural gifts of the Spirit-filled Christian—including raising people from the dead. 3 Not all spiritual feminists are fundamentalists. Some sections of the movement, particularly in the United States, are liberal and plural in an almost Quakerlike way: there is nevertheless a strong, fundamentalist trend in the movement as a whole. See, however, Woman of Power, a quarterly journal of women’s spirituality which carries material from many different traditions. Likewise Woman spirit Rising (Christ, 1979) includes neopagan, Christian and Jewish contributions.

References BACHOFEN, Johann Jakob (1967) reprint Myth, Religion and Mother Right New Jersey: Princeton University Press. BENNETT, Dennis and BENNETT, Rita (1971) The Holy Spirit and You New York: Logos International. BUDAPEST, Zsuzsanna (1989) 2nd edition, The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries Berkeley: Wingbow Press. CHRIST, Carol P. and PLASKOW, Judith (1979) editors, Woman spirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion San Francisco: Harper & Row.

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DAVIS, Elizabeth Gould (1971) The First Sex , Harmondsworth: Penguin. ELLWOOD, Robert S., jun (1973) One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. GADON, Elinor, W. (1990) The Once and Future Goddess Wellingborough: Thorsons/Aquarian. HAMILTON, Floyd E. (1964) The Basis of the Christian Faith New York: Harper & Row. HIGTON, Tony (1988) Our God Reigns London: Hodder & Stoughton. PYTCHES, David (1985) 2nd edition, Come, Holy Spirit , London: Hodder & Stoughton. RUSH, Anne Kent (1976) Moon, Moon New York: Random House. SJÖÖ Monica and MOR, Barbara (1987) The Great Cosmic Mother , New York: Harper & Row. URQUHART, Colin (1986) Receive Your Healing London: Hodder & Stoughton. WIMBER, John (1985) Power Evangelism London: Hodder & Stoughton. Woman of Power is available from PO Box 827, Cambridge Mass., MA 02238, USA.

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WASHING OUR LINEN: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism Clara Connolly

Origins The Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, in February 1989, has had as equally unsettling effects on the left as on the mainstream of British politics. The campaign against the Satanic Verses has revealed an increasingly confident and militant section of the Asian community, marching under the banner of Islam rather than of antiracism. Socialists—long unused to the passions aroused by religion—were taken by surprise. Feminists, beginning to absorb the emphasis that Black feminists were placing on cultural autonomy in the face of racism, were equally puzzled by the metamorphosis of ‘culture’ into a celebration of masculinity on the streets. Though uneasy in the knowledge that the defence of free speech has traditionally been the onus of radicals, both movements left the defence of Rushdie largely to his peers in the liberal literary establishment. On International Women’s Day however, at the height of the post-fatwa furore, Southall Black Sisters (SBS) and Ealing Labour Party Women’s Section held a public meeting in defence of Rushdie which was to help dissipate such confusion. SBS, now a mainly Asian advice and campaigning centre in West London, was formed ten years ago in the heat of Black and antiracist political ferment. Its decennial report, Against the Grain (SBS, 1990), gives an eloquent account of its evolution and present concerns. Organizing against domestic violence has brought them into conflict with local community leaders and the antiracist left. Accused, in common with other Black and ethnic minority feminists, of ‘washing our dirty linen’ at the expense of antiracist unity, they have countered with a spirited attack on the politics of multiculturalism, which views minority communities as homogeneous entities at the expense of class and particularly of gender conflict (Sahgal, 1989). One of the factors that has allowed SBS some degree of toleration is the character of Southall, a Sikh (not a Muslim) stronghold, with a strong tradition of political organizing along secular lines. Nevertheless, the climate of the times gave the meeting they organized a dramatic quality. It was well attended, and a defiant statement was issued in Rushdie’s defence, insisting that women’s voices be heard over the fundamentalist clamour. ‘Our lives will

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not be defined by community leaders’ (WAF, 1989a)—the tone issued a strong challenge to antiracist orthodoxy. Encouraged by the response to this meeting, SBS decided to establish a network of women opposed to religious fundamentalism. The first meeting, at the London Women’s Centre in May 1989, drew feminists from other Asian groups, and from a variety of ethnic minorities, who, because of their struggle against powerful religious establishments abroad, could grasp the threat posed to the self-organization of Asian women. Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) was formed, with a founding statement calling for ‘the separation of state and religion in Britain as a precondition for defeating fundamentalism’ (WAF, 1989b). The initial impetus of WAF was the concern of Asian feminists to distance themselves from religious leaders— why then this emphasis on relations between state and religion in Britain? It is worth pausing to unpick the logic here, since it is the key to WAF’s political purpose. State, religion, fundamentalism Britain is in the peculiar historical position of being largely indifferent to religion in its civil life, progressive in its statutes on such key issues as abortion and divorce, and yet constitutionally professing and privileging a form of Christianity whose origins are notoriously political. There is an established church, closely connected to parliamentary institutions; a set of blasphemy laws which protect only the Christian denominations; and a state education system profoundly influenced by Christianity. Anglican churches are full of tourists and empty of worshippers, but Anglicanism remains a central component of genteel Englishness. (The more ebullient forms of Christianity are the preserve of the UK’s outer regions or lower orders.) WAF’s emphasis on the domain of politics flows from our understanding of modern fundamentalism as the mobilization of religious affiliation for political ends. The fundamentalist project has two interlinked goals. First comes the phase of politico-religious self-definition, by a process of rediscovery (or invention) of the ‘fundamentals’ of religious belonging. This invariably happens at the expense of women’s and children’s autonomy—they are regarded as communal property in need of protection, particularly in the sexual sphere, from unholy outsiders. This both enhances and reduces the status of women and children— hence the sometimes fragile nature of their gratitude to their protectors. Next comes the marching phase, when the newly conscious politico-religious movement flexes its muscles against the state. In countries like the USA, Egypt or India, where a popular strand of nationalism has been either anti—or multi-denominational, their demands have been either antisecular or monoreligious—in either case a serious challenge to the status quo. But in Britain they are for more of the same rather than less of it. So, for example, Christians can insist that Christian-in-form become Christian-in-fact (as is happening in education) and Muslims have, apparently, only to ask that majority privileges be extended to minorities. This gives the demands of Muslim fundamentalists a reasonable air, which selfconfessed moderates can support. The Rushdie affair has been the crucial catalyst of a seemingly seamless (and supraracial) Muslim consensus in Britain. It is this kind of politicoreligious affiliation, a threat to more progressive political identities, that WAF opposes. It should go without saying, but it doesn’t, that WAF supports the principle of freedom of worship—it is not an antireligious organization.

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WAF’s public profile Within weeks of its founding, WAF shot into the limelight because of our decision to picket the large Muslim anti-Rushdie march in London on 27 May 1989. There were men willing to join us, particularly from the recently founded antiracist coalition Voices for Rushdie; we decided on a women-only demonstration for security reasons, and because we wanted to highlight gender issues, under-reported until then. Forty women, mainly Asian, gathered in Parliament Square to meet the eighty thousand marchers as they approached the Houses of Parliament. The head of the march had been successfully contested by young men carrying pro-Khomeini banners and wearing the insignia of religious warriors. They were already excited by their tussles with the elders and the police. When they heard our piercing whistles and saw our banners ‘Religious leaders don’t speak for us’; ‘Rushdie’s right to write is ours to dissent’, they turned on us in fury. We were protected from immediate assault because we stood on a parapet some feet above them, and the police moved in quickly below. After twenty minutes or so of pitched battle the police decided that ‘the ladies were too provocative’, and tried to scatter us. But we regrouped further back in the square, and spent a further hour entertaining the media by fending off the attempts of the National Front—milling around fruitlessly, ignored by the marchers, they turned on us—and of contingents from the march to intimidate us. Terrified but triumphant, we retired to watch ourselves on the television news. That occasion gave WAF the opportunity to state our case in the media—within limits. Researchers always asked for ‘Muslim’ speakers, and were far more interested to hear arguments against Muslim religious leaders than against the privileging of Christianity within Britain. We had to fight hard for recognition as a ‘non-Muslim organization’ (the BBC’s words), equally opposed to all religious fundamentalisms. This was perhaps inevitable, given our origins and initial focus, and the media’s reluctance to question the predominance of Western liberal and secular values, but it did mean that many Black and ethnic minority women, sympathetic to our aims, were discouraged from openly joining the organization by the anti-Islamic character of our media image.

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We received a less patronizing audience among sections of the left, on such occasions as the Socialist Movement Conference in Sheffield, and at a large fringe meeting organized by Voices for Rushdie at the Labour Party national conference. Local women’s sections of the Labour Party, and teachers’ union groups invited us to numerous meetings to state our case. During the year, the focus changed from the right of Black and ethnic minority women to dissent from religious and ‘multicultural’ orthodoxy, to the more particular issue of Muslim schools. Education Campaign In the wake of the Rushdie Affair, Muslim demands for separate state-subsidized religious schooling have grown more confident. This has thrown the delicate ‘partnership’ between Church and State in Britain into crisis. As many as one-third of state schools in Britain are part of the ‘Voluntary’ or religious sector; the overwhelming majority of these are Church of England or Roman Catholic, and a few Jewish (CRE, 1990:4). Legally, there is no reason why Muslims, Seventh Day Adventists, or any other minority religious group should not establish their schools also, but there has been considerable reluctance by the Secretary of State for Education to grant their requests. For example, the Islamic School in Brent (north-west London) has twice been rejected. A further cause of grievance is the clause in the 1988 Education Reform Act which reintroduced a compulsory act of daily public worship in all county (or secular) schools. This must be ‘broadly or mainly Christian’ in character—a provocation to all non-Christians, including those of no religious persuasion. Against this background, it would have been impossible for WAF to adopt a position of opposition only to Muslim schools, though our interest in the education debate stemmed from this opposition. Our concern was that Muslim schools were being set up for girls, in an effort to police their sexuality, and to reinforce their religiously defined roles as future wives and mothers. It is our contention that ‘at the heart of fundamentalist agendas is the control of womens’ minds and bodies’ (WAF, 1989b). This was the basis of our objection to the idea of separate Muslim schools. Another objection is to the creation of racially segregated schools, which runs counter to the ideal of a culturally dynamic, pluralist society which is the (possibly Utopian) aspiration of many of us. But we recognize that the Christian school sector is open to that accusation, with far more justice. The Catholic Commission for Racial Justice has argued that ‘some Catholic schools pander to white parents’ desire to send their children to a white school’ (Catholic Media Office, 1984). Melanie Phillips referred to a particularly embarrassing example in a recent article: In Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End, some 400–500 Bangladeshi children languish without education because there are not enough school places for them. Yet the Roman Catholic state-aided schools in the Borough have dozens of empty places because they will only offer 10 per cent of them to non-Catholic children’ (Guardian, 1.6.90) After much internal discussion, WAF produced a model resolution on the religious schools issue. It calls for the phasing out of state subsidies to the voluntary (or religious) sector, and

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the abolition of the right to establish religious schools in the public sector; the withdrawal of the clause imposing ‘mainly Christian’ worship on secular schools; and the development of a strong antiracist education policy, which would grant rights of private worship, diet and dress for any religious group in a state school. Our aim in producing a model resolution for circulation to sympathizers was to attempt, primarily, to influence the policies of the main party in opposition, the Labour Party. (In the early eighties, the Labour Party had moved sharply to the left, and although social-democratic in character, still has many members who are radical socialists). We won support from local branches, and particularly their women’s sections, but our campaign ran into head-on collision with the party leadership’s (scandalously successful) efforts to squash local autonomy and de-radicalize its image before the next General Election. So, for example, our resolution, submitted by a London Branch to the Labour Party Women’s Conference (throughout the eighties a lively event), was ruled out of order on the absurd grounds that it was on ‘more than one issue’, and so was not debated. The party leadership were alert from an early stage to the challenge that a secularist position would pose to their refurbished respect for religious, as opposed to racial, minorities (Labour Party, 1989). This has been a serious blow to our campaign, and it is clear, with hindsight, that we devoted too much energy to trying to shift the Labour Party internally, through its (now powerless and demoralized) left and socialist-feminist members. Other constituencies A dilemma for WAF over the past year—and particularly after the early euphoria wore off—has been to define where our potential allies are, and how to use them effectively. Our position on secularism and the state, though proceeding from socialist-feminism, is, in fact, a classic democratic demand of the kind that has been fought and won long ago in other Western countries such as France and the United States. On the left, there has been a lack of sympathy for secularism for many decades. An indication is that Charter 88, the centre-left group arguing for a Bill of Constitutional Rights in Britain, remains impervious to the need for a constitutional settlement on the established Church and the right of religious minorities. One reason for this indifference is undoubtedly the mild character of established religion, which I referred to earlier. Anglicanism, the confident religion of rulers of empire, has put its ‘civilizing’ mission before evangelicalism. Another is the unfinished character of the bourgeois English revolution—with its accommodation to the ancien regime at the expense of republicanism or secularism—and the subsequent distortions of English nationalism. One of the few organizations that have offered wholehearted support for our stand on secularism has been the South Place Ethical Society, a humanist group based at Conway hall, London, and related organizations such as the Rationalist Press Association. Admirable as they are, and as valuable as is the space they provide for ‘dissenters’ of all kinds, they remain bemused by recent political developments in Britain such as the women’s and antiracist movements. On the other hand, we have had support in our opposition to fundamentalism (‘you brave girls’) from individuals and groups who would not yet consider opposing the dominance of Christianity in education—such as the Movement for the Ordination of Women, and other radical religious groupings. This kind of support, however well intentioned, is difficult to respond to, because of the sheer volume of public noise about ‘Islamic extremism’. Fay Weldon

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WAF picket of the Irish Embassy May 1990

is only the best-known example, in print, of the revitalized crusader attitude among Western liberals (see Connolly, 1990 and Desai, 1990). Some of the response we’ve had from teachers, also, is of the patronizing kind that ‘feels sorry’ for Muslim girls, while ignoring their own discomfort about the reintroduction of Christian worship in schools (they simply skip assembly). The ‘middle ground’ is treacherous for us, especially while some Black feminists remain ambivalent about, or hostile to, WAF’s anti-Islamic image, and some of the bestknown radical antiracists (like Sivanandan, at the Institute of Race Relations) maintain a careful silence on the Rushdie issue. The women’s movement We have attempted, with some success, to situate ourselves within the broader women’s movement. For example, we organized a successful benefit for WAF, in Conway Hall, an unusual venue for a women’s disco. The attendance included many lesbians, Black and white —a fact which gave rise to adverse comment from some of the Conway Hall women (‘Greenham was destroyed by them, don’t let it happen to you’). A subsequent WAF meeting expressed support for lesbians and declared that the struggle for a self-determined sexuality is an integral part of the fight against religious fundamentalism. It is a reflection on the present state of the women’s movement that we thought of launching ourselves with a social rather than a political event, but it did provide an opportunity for hundreds of feminists to express their solidarity with us. The turnout contrasted sharply with a different event we organized—a picket of the Irish Embassy in London to coincide with the opening of a case in the European Court of Human Rights, on the right of information on abortion for Irish women. Support for this came mainly

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from SBS itself, and the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Small as it was, it nevertheless was reported by the media (particularly the Independent) and helped to shift slightly our public image away from an exclusive concentration on Islam. For International Women’s Day 1990, we organized a public meeting on religious fundamentalism worldwide, with a platform of women activists from Bangladesh, Britain, Iran, Israel, Ghana, the USA and the USSR, describing how women have been fighting fundamentalism in these countries. It was a speaker from the floor, however, Rabia Janjua, who provided the real focus for the evening. In a moving speech, she described her escape with her husband from Pakistan, where they were gaoled under the laws against adultery, her subsequent ill-treatment by him, and her attempts to evade the Home Office’s determination to deport her to Pakistan, where she would be subject to harrassment or gaol. SBS have been fighting her case, but they outlined the need for a wider political campaign on the issue of refugee status for women suffering persecution on religious or sexual grounds. If won, this could create a vitally important legal precedent (see Patel, this issue). Rabia Janjua’s case represents the kind of issue that WAF can and should raise within the wider women’s movement: women subject to racism and religious persecution should be our priority, drawing white women into campaigns that Black women have been fighting for years. One of WAF’s strengths has been the number of members with political experience from around the post-colonial world, including Indian anticommunalists, Iranian oppositionists, Israeli anti-Zionists, Irish anticlerics. This has given us a determination to support feminist struggles on an international level, but it has also provided us with a dilemma. How can we help to fight the battles of women represented in WAF on their home ground? The Irish Embassy picket was one reflection of this concern, the large international platform at our public meeting another. We will continue to report the work of feminists worldwide, and involve ourselves in international networks such as Women Living Under Muslim Laws (see Patel, this issue). But it is difficult to envisage more concentrated work aimed at the governments of other countries. As WAF members, in my opinion, our primary task is to bring our international experience to bear on the situation in Britain. To do otherwise would deplete and defuse our resources. The future We have learned a painful but important lesson over the past year—that a radical analysis of religion has hardly begun in this country, and a secularist movement barely exists. We have won some support on the left (particularly those who come from strong religious backgrounds), among feminists, and among antiracists, but this support is uneven and unfocused. We cannot rely on small groups, within or without the Labour Party, to fight our cause with any effectiveness. However, we also know that there is public unease about the recent politicization of religion in this country. The Commission for Racial Equality’s recent pamphlet, Schools of Faith, which poses the need for widespread debate on the subject of religious schools, without reaching a conclusion itself, is one reflection of this concern (CRE, 1990). So there is no escaping the conclusion that WAF will have to take the lead in forging a broad secular coalition, with its direct target the state rather than the fundamentalists of any

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religion. That is the only way to recognize the legitimate grievances of Muslims (‘if they can have their schools, why can’t we?’), and at the same time contribute to driving a wedge between progressives and fundamentalists in the minority communities. It is also the only way to clarify the nature of our liberal support—is it merely anti-Islamic, or are our supporters prepared to move towards the dismantling of Christian privilege? We cannot afford to concentrate on any one constituency—feminists, socialists, radical religious groupings—but we have to draw on the strengths of them all. This sounds like an ambitious project, but our alternative is to watch from the margins of political life the further growth of religious bigotry, and racist bigotry sheltering under the name of religion. The complete separation of state and religion is not a guarantee of a pluralist society, but it is certainly a precondition. It also offers women, Black and white, a measure of legal and social protection against the efforts of fundamentalists to restrict our life-choices and sexualities. Note Thanks to Alison Light and Feminist Review issue 37 group for helpful comments, especially about religion and secularism in Britain. Clara Connolly is an Irish member of Women Against Fundamentalism. This is not an official history, but a biased view of WAF’s achievements and aspirations. To contact WAF, write to BM Box 2706, London, WC1 3XX, or ring 081–571 9595. References CATHOLIC MEDIA OFFICE (1984) Learning from Diversity: a Challenge for Catholic Education London. COMMISSION FOR RACIAL EQUALITY (CRE) (1990) Schools of Faith London. CONNOLLY, clara (1990) Review essay on Sacred Cows, Feminist Review No. 35 . DESAI, Radhika (1990) ‘Fundamentalism and the New Right’, in Women: A Cultural Review Vol 1, No. 1. LABOUR PARTY (1989) Multicultural Education: Labour’s Policy for Schools London. PHILLIPS, Meianie (1990) ‘A harsh lesson in conflict and claptrap’, Guardian , 1 June 1990 . SAHGAL, Gita (1989) ‘Fundamentalism and the Peculiarities of Multiculturalism’, in Spare Rib , June . SOUTHALL BLACK SISTERS (1990) Against the Grain available from SBS, 52 Norwood Road, Southall, Middlesex. WAF (1989a) Press statement released 9 March. Published in Feminist Review No. 33 . WAF (1989b) Founding Statement, available from Women Against Fundamentalism.

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REVIEW ESSAY: Winning Freedoms Hannana Siddiqui

Letter to Christendom Rana Kabbani Virago: London, 1989, £3.99 Pbk, ISBN

1 85381 119 X

When I was to start secondary school, my father and I went in search of a school uniform. A blazer and blouse were easy to find, and I was particularly pleased that the skirts were abundantly available. As a Muslim, my father had forbidden me to wear skirts or expose my legs in any way. I thought that with the coming of school uniform, even my father could not escape the requirements of the British school system. I thought that for the first time in my life, I was about to wear a skirt. However, when the shop assistant produced one, I was shocked to hear my father ask for a pair of trousers instead. The assistant, a little taken aback by this request, said she was unable to assist us. We went to many shops in order to purchase a suitable pair of trousers. As we wandered from store to store, I prayed. One minute my prayers were addressed to ‘God’ (in the Christian sense) and another minute, they were addressed to ‘Allah’. I was praying that my father would be unable to find a suitable pair of trousers and be forced to buy a skirt instead. Unfortunately, my prayers were not answered by either God or Allah, and I was compelled to wear trousers to school. I was disappointed. It set me apart once again from the white children. It was another aspect of my difference, which prevented me from fitting in. It also represented another defeat for me—that on the home front. I had always wanted to wear a skirt, simply because I wanted the choice and I felt stifled by the restrictions imposed on me by my family and our cultural and religious background. I believed that ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ were one and the same thing. They presented no contradictions for me. I imagined them to be merciful, compassionate, imposing no cruel restrictions or dictates on me or others. Yet, my father’s interpretation was very different from mine. He was horrified whenever I mentioned Christianity or questioned Islam. In the process of growing up, my views underwent many changes. I questioned my whole belief in God and Allah, especially as these beliefs began to throw up contradictions. I realized that my interpretation meant very little in everyday reality. In the name of my religion and culture, I was told that not only was I required to cover my legs, but I was also required to get married

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to a partner chosen for me by my family. Then I was expected to have children and, if I had an education, the use I made of it depended on my husband. Furthermore, as a good Muslim mother, I was also expected to pass on these traditions to my children in order to preserve my religion and culture. These precepts were laid down for me not only by my father, but also by the whole extended family and the community to which I belonged. I was isolated. I stopped praying to God or Allah, and when I refused to ‘fit in’, I was castigated and rejected. My parents were labelled ‘failures’. They were accused of not cocooning me from the corrupting influence of school and television, for having let me become ‘Westernized’. They felt dishonoured and hurt. My stomach churned with dilemmas. I did not want to offend and cause pain, but I had to criticize and question because I found it hard to accept what was required of me. At the same time, I was battling with my teachers and school-friends. I no longer wanted to fit in their world either. It did not matter if I was different because I wore a pair of trousers. I refused to accept the rules laid out for me by this wider society and its host culture. Instead, I punched against them, in street fights with white youth and in classroom lessons on Eurocentric history, literature and religious education. I no longer wanted to be told whether I could wear a skirt or a pair of trousers. I wanted to make the choices myself and forge my own identity. Later, I was to recognize these battles as antiracist and feminist struggles. It is because of these struggles that I do not believe that Rana Kabbani, in her book Letter to Christendom, can afford to dismiss Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, as being ‘no longer accountable’ to its non-Western readership, and politically irresponsible by its ‘frivolous mockery’ of Islam. She attemps to invalidate Rushdie’s criticism of Islam by equating it with his need to perpetuate his success as a writer by satisfying Western literary values and Western sensibilities, thereby becoming depoliticized and forced into compromise. She goes on to argue that: Success presupposes (or rewards) rejection of one’s roots, Rushdie’s (perhaps unwitting) decision in The Satanic Verses to recant a political project that he had been identified with, to go back on what he stood for, seems to me an unfortunate consequence of his success, which may have led him to feel that he is no longer accountable to his nonWestern readership. Moreover, according to Kabbani, The Satanic Verses has failed to achieve what Midnight’s Children had been so successful in doing. As a pioneering work, she argues, the latter novel resulted in the ‘advance of cultural accommodation’ because it appealed to both the Western and non-Western readership. It reflected the ‘complicated political reality to which I belong’. The Satanic Verses, however, she states, far from following the tradition of satirical writing in Islam, in its tone of mockery, added dramatically ‘to the clash of cultures, to a confrontationalism at once self-defeating and damaging’. Rana Kabbani concludes that The Satanic Verses set back the cause of antiracism. It is both extremely cynical and simplistic to argue that Rushdie’s ambitions as a writer created a depoliticization of his writing and represents a compromise to Western sensibilities. To argue that he may have done this unwittingly is simply patronizing. The Satanic Verses, far from being depoliticized, is as charged with politics as the reaction it created—with the

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politics of race and religion: of Western racism and the orthodoxies of Islam. The book echoes an exploration and questioning of religious values for those of us who have been involved in this process all our lives. It also follows Rushdie’s tradition of addressing racism. Therefore, it reflects the complicated political reality to which I belong. To dismiss and classify my views as a ‘Westernized, Muslim intellectual’ response is to deny my experiences, which have included fighting both racism and the orthodoxies of my religious and cultural background. It also denies the experiences of many ordinary Asians living in Britain, especially women, who have been castigated and censored for expressing doubt and dissent within their families and communities. It neglects the feminist struggles of Asian women across the world, who have been fighting against the imposition of religious values in their lives. These cannot be simply invalidated and dismissed as a result of too much ‘Westernization’, wittingly or unwittingly absorbed. Rana Kabbani, as a feminist, recognizes, of course, that there are aspects of Islam which are oppressive to women, but so are, she argues, aspects of Christianity and Judaism, which are both patriarchal religions. I would go further and argue that all religions are oppressive to women; they regard women as inferior, subject to the control of male members of the family. Interpretations do vary, but as the rise of religious fundamentalism on an international scale tightens its grip, demanding greater conformity to traditional orthodoxies, it has become harder to practice a more liberal version of religion. Furthermore, since Rana Kabbani identifies her feminism in religious terms, as part of the ‘Muslim Sisterhood’, her vision of liberation is compromised by the very religion that she accepts is oppressive. She argues however that there are aspects of Islamic tradition which are positive, such as arranged marriages and the wearing of the hijab. Rana Kabbani justifies arranged marriages on the grounds that ‘A Muslim girl cannot be forced to marry against her wishes, although there can be strong pressures, varying from family to family and often the result of economic difficulties’. She severely underestimates not only the effect of family pressure, but the whole religious, moral and cultural framework within which women live their daily lives, having little or no power both in the home and outside of it. The concept of izzat (honour) the fear of causing shame, and the threat of violence silence many women into compliance. The fear of being rejected and isolated from their own communities, coupled with the added problems of racism, deny many women the right to make their own choices. Rana Kabbani neglects the fact that arranged marriages are a form of control over women’s sexuality, where they have limited choice of who and when they marry, and no choice of whether to marry at all! Similarly, Rana Kabbani assumes that the hijab protects women from being regarded as sexual objects. This may be so, but surely the choice of whether to wear a hijab or not should be left with women themselves. Many women fear the imposition of the hijab precisely because it denies their sexuality and is part and parcel of a wider process of male control. For many women, the question is not simply about picking and choosing which part of Islam they wish to conform to, but a question of risking ostracization if they do not obey Islam in its entirety. Rana Kabbani attempts to marginalize the experiences of women who refuse to submit, or are forced to have arranged marriage or conform to a dress code. Choices are even more limited for working-class women, who (unlike Rana Kabbani) are less likely to have the resources to opt out and escape from pressures to conform.

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In my experience as a worker at Southall Black Sisters, I have come across many Muslim women and girls who feel that they are forced to marry against their wishes. Rana Kabbani cannot give blanket assurances to these women and girls that they can refuse to marry without facing repurcussions from their families and communities. Although a feminist, Rana Kabbani offers no hope for these women. Rana Kabbani also argues that the hijab has become a symbol of resistance from the imperialist, racist, and Christian forces of the West, which demand assimilation, and overpower and destory Eastern cultures. I accept that this perspective exists, even in Britain, where, after the Rushdie affair, some women are reasserting their Muslim identity by taking up the hijab, but I believe that such a perspective mitigates against the long-term interests of women. It poses dangers for those of us who have been working to liberate ourselves from these restrictions. These developments have to be seen in the context of wider pressures to control women. For example, the demand for separate religious schools, especially for girls, is a serious setback, because it will lead to indoctrination and pressure to return to the traditional role for a Muslim woman, that of mother and wife. Feminists who uphold these demands are prepared to sacrifice countless women and girls to the cause of antiracism. Such a position can only be retrogressive because it makes alliances with the forces of patriarchy, conservatism and fundamentalism within our communities. Such alliances do not strengthen the anti-racist movement but, rather, weaken it because they fail to incorporate other equally important struggles, by demanding equality for all within their communities.

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The failures of the antiracist left, and of progressive movements generally, have allowed the space for a new identity based along religious lines to be created, an identity which threatens the radical secular notion of uniting as black or even as Asians against racism. Instead, a religious identity divides us, demanding segregation into religious schools and forcing minority groups to compete for power and resources instead of uniting in the face of common enemies. Religous fundamentalism appeals to the most reactionary views and perspectives. Frightened by the corrupting influence of the West, conservative forces demand control over women within their own communities. These forces justify their actions on the assumption that they are the guardians of culture and tradition. Whilst some women have accepted a new Muslim identity and thrown in their lot behind fundamentalists, there are those of us who continue to resist. Women Against Fundamentalism is comprised of women from all religious and cultural backgrounds, and aims to give a coherent voice to this resistance. In other literature, Rana Kabbani has been critical of Women Against Fundamentalism, declaring it to be the political equivalent of The Satanic Verses, and dismissing its efforts to improve the lives of women by categorizing it as part of the ‘Western’ response, contributing to the racist backlash. Yet Rana Kabbani herself offers no concrete help to women faced with the oppressive aspects of Islam or those of any other religion. Rather, she prefers to retain some traditions which trap women in submissive roles. She also prefers to silence Women Against Fundamentalism by attempting to de-legitimize our criticisms, classifying our views as a ‘westernized… intellectual’ response. Here she is playing on Western guilt and Eastern scorn. Rana Kabbani encourages a united approach to racism and imperialism. Such an approach, however, constructs a monolithic image of the Muslim or Asian community, a view accepted by multiculturalists, many antiracists and conservative male leaders alike. Such a perspective hides the divisions of gender and class that exist within our communities. Rana Kabbani and her like fail to recognize that different sections of the community have different interests. The interests of women, and other less powerful sections, are often not represented. By adhering to her united front approach, based not on principles of equality, but on the need to preserve a strictly defined religious culture, she defends a set of elitist, and class-bound interests. She attempts to marginalize opposition to Islam and offers no real challenge to the inequalities that exist both within and outside our communities. Although she accepts that criticism of Islam is permissible, she also defines the parameters of acceptability of such criticism. This is an arbitrary and subjective exercise, imposing censorship and restraining freedom of speech and action. For her, it is not possible to be both Western and non-Western. She states that she knows which side she is on, and that the Rushdie affair helped her clarify this and reassert her identity as a Muslim. This contradicts her original premise that she was writing the book to reach a personal accommodation between the two cultures. She has also failed to recognize that she has utilized the West to the full by her Cambridge education, and has lived a life of relative ease in Syria by her connexions with the wealthy and powerful in the East. She herself is a product of both worlds and has access to considerable freedoms in each. However, she seems to want to deny the same freedoms to women who face the brunt of both racism and oppression in the home. Rana Kabbani betrays little or no knowledge of women, often

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from poor backgrounds, who have neither the power or the means to escape restrictions. By arguing in such terms, she is, in effect, denying the right of women to determine their own lives. I believe that it is possible to reach a point of balance between two cultures, to forge an identity that is not based on the restriction of freedom of others. This is the result of the lessons I have learned in my small struggles at home and school. I have learnt that it is not a simple either/or situation. In fact, my struggles have created a stronger bond between myself and my family, who have grown to respect my right to choose for myself. I realize that enemies exist on both sides of the cultural and racial divide, as do friends. Winning freedoms means the right to choose who my enemies and friends are. In this the hope for the future lies. Note Hannana Siddiqui is a member of Southall Black Sisters and of Women Against Fundamentalism. I have won enough freedoms to choose if I wear a shirt today or a pair of trousers tomorrow.

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REVIEW ESSAY Julia Bard

Generations of Memories: Voices of Jewish Women Edited by the Jewish Women in London Group The Women’s Press: London 1989, £6.95 Pbk, ISBN

0 7043 4205 7

The Jewish community is held up as the example of how immigrants can (and should) ‘integrate’ and ‘succeed’. A picture is drawn of a homogeneous group of people who, through a tradition of hard work and mutual self-help, have moved ‘up’ from the poor inner cities to the green suburbs where they merge in with the surrounding middle classes and keep their distinctive customs to themselves. Jews who were left behind, along with those who wear traditional Hassidic clothes, lesbian and gay Jews, and those who dissent, particularly on Zionism or religious issues, are carefully cropped out of the picture. But the new decade has brought a wave of attacks on Jewish people and property unprecedented since the war. In Eastern Europe neo-Nazis are marching and speaking openly as political stones are overturned. In Western Europe swastikas and anti-Semitic violence are becoming a regular feature of everyday life in some areas. Jewish responses to these events reflect conflicts within the community: the struggle for power and ideas; the struggle for the right to define Jewish identity and the struggle to define how the Jewish community relates to the surrounding communities. When graves were smashed and daubed at a north London Jewish cemetery, the Chief Rabbi said: ‘I think it would be wrong to over-dramatize these events. It would only feed the mills of antiSemitism.’ (Independent on Sunday, 10 June 1990). The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the community’s political Establishment, said, tortuously: ‘We are not looking at a rise in anti-Semitism, but an increase in anti-Semitic incidents.’ (Independent on Sunday, 10 June 1990). This attempt to play down, deprive of meaning and even, at times, lie about anti-Semitic attacks, is part of a wider attempt to maintain the image of a secure, comfortable community living in harmony with its neighbours. The communal leaders use political and religious orthodoxy to define the limits of the community and the limits of Jewish identity. Jewish children are brought up to believe that breaking ranks or misbehaving brings trouble for all

Feminist Review No 37, Spring 1991

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Jews, and dissenting adults are told that they have no place in the community despite anxiety being widely expressed about Jews being ‘lost’ through assimilation. A visible place in the Jewish community requires a high degree of conformity and an acceptance of one or both of two defining characteristics: religion or Zionism. Anyone who belongs to neither a synagogue nor a Zionist organization does not figure in the communal statistics and is not represented on the Board of Deputies. If, in addition, they express dissenting views on other issues, such as how to confront anti-Semitism, they are also refused platforms in the community and silenced in the Jewish press. In effect, they are driven out of the community. Or they may be co-opted. At the same time, there is a long history of radicalism amongst Jews. Socialist, feminist and liberation movements have attracted disproportionate numbers of Jewish activists and, until the Second World War, radical Jews organized prominently within the community, as Jewish anarchists and Jewish socialists, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, but also in the West. The predicament of ‘the Jew in the modern world’ has preoccupied the intellectual and radical elements within the community since the French Revolution, but, while a degree of debate in certain contexts and within restricted parameters has been acceptable to the establishment, the proposal of any progressive solutions is quickly stifled. In particular, attempts to understand anti-Semitism in relation to other forms of oppression and to forge alliances with other oppressed or persecuted communites, or with political groups confronting that oppression or persecution, are outlawed. The result for many Jews has been a sense of alienation from Jewish life and a ‘decision’ to move away from the community and towards more like-minded people outside. Generations of Memories, edited by the Jewish Women in London Group (1989), reflects dimensions of Jewish life which the communal establishment finds uncongenial. The book is one product of the Jewish Women in London Project set up in 1984 with funding from the GLC to record the life-stories of Jewish women through oral testimonies. The eight women who speak through this book are linked through their history of migration. Some were refugees from the Nazis; others were the daughters of those who fled the Tsarist Russian Empire at the turn of the century. As well as feeling, in some cases literally, misplaced in British society, they also share a feeling of being misplaced in the Jewish community; of being under pressure to conceal the real person under a conformist façade. Britain has what one progressive rabbi has called ‘a long history of absorbing immigrants so they disappear without trace’. But Jewish immigrants in this century have also been coerced by their own communal establishments into merging in with their surroundings. Ruth Adler was born in 1912 within months of her parents’ arrival from Poland. Her family’s struggle against poverty was a powerful motivation for her to ‘move on’ and ‘become British’. But there was equally strong pressure from inside the Jewish community. Taken back to Poland as a baby, she and her mother were stuck there after the First World War broke out, so she spoke only Yiddish until she was seven. She says: ‘English is my second language. For quite a while my parents and I spoke to each other in Yiddish but then a teacher said to me, “If you want to learn English you must speak English and dream in English.”…I took her advice and stopped speaking Yiddish.’ (p. 31) Only then does she reveal that this was a Jewish school which was telling her to cut herself off from her natural and fluent means of expression, from her home, her culture and her history.

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At that time Yiddish was spoken by millions of Jews across Europe. It was the language of working-class Jews, not of the Jewish bourgeoisie, who spoke the language of the countries they lived in. German Jews spoke German; Polish Jews spoke Polish. The British Jewish establishment consisted of Sephardim who had originated in Spain and had been settled in Britain for enough generations to have become, like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, part of the local aristocracy. Ena Abrahams’s childhood in London’s East End would have been as alien to them as it was to the non-Jewish upper classes: When I was six…I went to Fairclough Street School. There they were nearly all Jewish children. We used to do a double session on Friday, finish early and my grandmother used to meet me at school. She used to carry with her a straw bag with food in it, and we used to go straight away to the cinema, either to the Rivoli or the Palaseum; the place would be full of children and grown-ups, mostly grandparents or mothers. It was terribly noisy, because we used to do simultaneous translation! In fact, most of us were bilingual. I would read the captions in English—it was silent you see, the talkies were only just coming in—and translate them into Yiddish. The grown-ups used to bring food in case the children died of hunger, so everybody was eating. (p. 86) The influx of such poor, working-class Jews, many of them bringing revolutionary ideas from Russia and Poland, was a clear threat to the Jewish establishment’s carefully constructed image and relationship with the British state. There were—and are—similar manifestations of class conflict in other Jewish communities. Rita Altman was born in Germany in 1922 to Polish parents who had entered Germany illegally in 1919: It’s well known now that when the Ostjuden came to Germany, German Jews thought, my God, they’re spoiling it for us now. The division was very clearly felt; my father went to the shtiebel [small synagogue, usually in someone’s home], to the shul, and they went with their high hats to synagogue…We felt it very strongly, that division. It’s like chapel and church isn’t it? (p.116) In Britain the upper—and middle-class establishment did not encourage Yiddish-speaking Jews to come. Indeed, they co-operated in turning some back to face persecution under the Tsar, then concentrated on keeping those who did come under control. Their success was only partial. Many of those immigrants became socialists and, later, feminists. The Arbeiter Ring or Workers’ Circle, was an important factor in the political development of many progressive Jews in the 1930s. As well as fulfilling, in a secular setting, many social and material needs that would otherwise only have come from religious institutions (it operated as a burial society, for instance) the Workers’ Circle was a nonsectarian forum for a wide range of social, political, cultural and educational activities incorporating anarchists, communists and Zionists as well as the Bundists who largely founded it. Though they finally sold their building only five years ago, few young Jews today have even heard of the Workers’ Circle. Generations of Memories uncovers this rich communal resource which encouraged and enabled thousands of progressive Jews to defend themselves, to express themselves and to act politically, as well as providing a place for them to relax and move beyond the confines of their families. Ruth Adler remembers:

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My husband came to this country from Poland, where he had been a member of the illegal Communist Party. In the Progressive Youth Circle (a group within the Workers’ Circle) which he and another comrade set up in the late twenties, there were all sorts of young people: communists, anarchists, socialists, Zionists and non-Party people who were interested in political matters. We used to thrash things out in lectures and discussions. It was a marvellous time for me… I was about 16 or so. A new life opened, an intellectual life, people hammering out their ideas. It was meat and drink to me. (p. 33) When Mosley’s British Union of Fascists threatened the people of east London in the 1930s, the community leaders told the Jews to stay indoors and draw the shutters (Rosenberg, 1985). They didn’t. Many, like several of the women in Generations of Memories, joined the Communist Party which, whatever its other weaknesses, was facilitating alliances between threatened groups in the area in order to challenge the fascists on the streets. The communal leaders, though, did irreparable ideological damage by making those very people who were defending their community feel that they were not ‘proper’ Jews. According to the establishment, Judaism, the religion, practised discreetly behind closed doors, was the only characteristic which should distinguish Jews from the surrounding population. Their mother tongue, their literature, theatre, music, food, tradition and, above all, their variety, were all expendable. Ena Abrahams’s father was an atheist, and she sets a uniquely Jewish scene when she describes her family’s religious life: All the festivals were kept up, we had a kosher household but it was mostly based on superstition rather than an understanding of the ethics of religion. We didn’t ever discuss religion in our household. Except for my father to say that he believed it all to be hogwash. My mother didn’t commit herself either way…. They couldn’t really keep Shabbes [the sabbath] because if you worked, Saturday morning was a working morning. Only the governors kept Shabbes. The festivals were a great problem because you didn’t get paid…. But we always had candles on Friday night, and we always had the traditional meal. Don’t ask me when my mother ever cooked it. Of course there were poor Jews who lived according to the letter of the religious law, but this contradicted the pressure to accommodate to the surrounding culture. Whichever way they went they felt they were losing part of themselves. One way out of the bind was Zionism, a secular route to Jewish identity which seemed to break out of the straitjacket of tradition. Before Hitler’s Final Solution and the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel, the leadership of the Jewish community in Britain was anti-Zionist. It saw in Zionism a contradiction between its declared loyalty to the British state and the struggle to set up a Jewish state. This was further complicated by the British government’s involvement in Palestine at that time. By the time the Second World War was over, though, Zionism and the demand for a Jewish state was proclaimed as a cornerstone of European Jewish identity. In the aftermath of the physical, cultural and political destruction of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Zionism seemed to offer a way of making both sense of those terrible events and a fresh start.

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Official Jewish history tells of two thousand years of persecution and misery culminating in Hitler’s Final Solution—the destruction of European Jewry; and out of the ashes of Auschwitz rose the Jewish state. Twin events—or rather, two faces of the same event, one pointing backwards, the other forwards (Deutscher, 1968). Into the dustbin of history went the Nazi period, and Zionism was the lid on the top. Now Jews could hold their heads up. The old stereotype was brought out to serve the Zionist cause: never again need Jews stoop and wheedle, speak their peculiar jargon (Yiddish) or feel the shame of the yellow star. Now they had a country of their own; an army of their own and a brand new language, retrieved from their ancient heritage and revamped for the twentieth century. A cultural battle against the two most widely used languages of the diaspora, Yiddish and Ladino, was intensified and the rapidly developing Israeli culture was used to replace the range of authentic diaspora cultures which were seen to represent, and to have led to, only misery and destruction. The old (effeminate, diaspora) Jew went to the gas chambers like a lamb to the slaughter. The new (masculine, Israeli) Jew fought back. The only solution to antiSemitism was to remove yourself or to direct your energies towards supporting Israel so it could defend Jews everywhere. The Jewish world became Israelocentric, but Israel did not rule it directly. Instead, a declaration of support for Israel became the acid test of a real Jew as pluralism and a diaspora-centred view clashed with the new Zionist orthodoxy, according to which, ‘love of Zion’ unifies all Jews, overriding conflicts rooted in class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and so on. Today it enables the community’s leaders to ignore, silence and even, as has happened recently, physically exclude, those who cannot or will not suppress their criticisms. Feminists are familiar with the debilitating effects of this kind of exclusion and the degree of support people need to challenge it. Generations of Memories was conceived against the background of two strong pressures: from the Jewish community to be Zionist; from the women’s movement to be anti-Zionist—pressures which were demonstrated in the aftermath of the row between the Jewish feminists and Spare Rib in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The stark contradiction between the Israeli army’s inhuman treatment of the Lebanese and Palestinian people and the political struggle against oppression and persecution here became inescapable for many feminist and socialist Zionists. The war in Lebanon forced them to re-examine and confront the received wisdom in the Jewish community that the State of Israel is the only guarantor of Jewish security the world over. Progressive Jews in Israel and the diaspora began to expose and challenge war crimes and human rights abuses; books were written; meetings were held; groups of Jews went to the Palestinian refugee camps to offer support and to publicize what they found there. Most importantly, links were forged between Jewish and Palestinian campaigners which began to subvert the prevailing assumptions that had served the Israeli and diaspora Jewish leadership so well. Then Spare Rib published an article called ‘Women Speak Out Against Zionism’ which, whatever the merits or demerits of the political position being put, was riddled with basic mistakes (Theodor Herzl, the nineteenth-century founder of political Zionism, became ‘Hertzel, a well-known Zionist leader’), simplistically argued (Holocaust analogies, the use of which was, and is, a subject of serious debate among active antiracists and antifascists, casually littered the text) and uncharacteristically authoritarian in tone (‘If a woman calls herself a feminist, she should consciously call herself an anti-Zionist’).

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About forty Jewish feminists of all persuasions, Zionist, non-Zionist and anti-Zionist, wrote to Spare Rib, but not one letter was published. This stifling of Jewish criticism of an article explicitly directed at Jewish women was perceived, quite accurately, as anti-Semitic. The Spare Rib collective argued that it was not anti-Semitic but anti-Zionist. Clearly the collective was conflating ‘Jew’ with ‘Zionist’ in order to silence the lot of them, and the Jewish establishment was delighted because they too argue that ‘Jew’ is synonymous with ‘Zionist’ and the corollary, that anti-Zionism is synonymous with anti-Semitism. The Jewish Chronicle, which bills itself (with some justification) as ‘The Organ of the Jewish Community’, suddenly gave space to Jewish feminists, even Black and lesbian ones, who otherwise would never have graced its pages (20 May 1983). They were welcomed back into the community, but were not supported in their struggle to analyse and challenge the hostility they faced, because they were not ‘allowed’ to be in both the Jewish and feminist communities at the same time, and certainly not to link the issues of sexism and antiSemitism, of homophobia and anti-Black racism, of imperialism and class oppression, all of which were being explored at the time. Inevitably, emotional as well as political blood was shed; actual and potential alliances came adrift and most have never recovered. Although the mainstream of the Jewish community did not directly sustain its hold on many Jewish feminists, a substantial proportion retreated into ‘new’ religion and/or an apologia for Zionism. The Jewish Feminist Group began to discuss and move on from the issues raised by these events, and some Jewish feminists became active on particular issues such as support for the Palestinian struggle, but a general lack of analysis of how power is located and wielded in the Jewish community meant they could neither challenge that power nor even make contact with women who were not already part of the radical fringe of that community. The women who speak in Generations of Memories similarly do not move beyond the dilemma of identifying as Jewish yet feeling uncomfortable and out of place in the Jewish community. While several of them feel the class conflict within the community, they only challenge it outside, through the trade unions or the Communist Party. In a similar way, while Jewish feminists felt the gender conflict within the community, they only challenged it through the general women’s movement where they felt ‘safe’. And when it no longer felt safe, they were welcomed in the Jewish community whose establishment was delighted to be able to publicize ‘feminist anti-Semitism’. Miriam Metz, whose story is the final contribution to Generations of Memories, demonstrates how this reactive, defensive politics is incapable of either explaining or challenging oppression in any of its manifestations. In the early 1960s, she went to Israel and saw what was being done to the Palestinians. ‘From that time onwards’ she says, ‘I would have defined myself as an anti-Zionist, until the time of the anti-Semitic reactions following the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon, at which time I turned right back’ (p.224). She went further back still. First she describes her religious education: Until about the age of eight, alongside primary school I was sent to what I must count as another school, and that was cheder. It was a real old-fashioned cheder, none of this idea of you learn Hebrew as a modern language. This was really there to teach kids to read from the prayer book. It was a room crammed with desks and crammed with children— mainly boys; also a group of girls who sat towards one corner. The character who ran it

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walked about with a cane and the kids sat at desks and chanted. It taught me to read Hebrew from the prayer book at fantastic speed—which I can no longer do. All of which illustrates, the medium being the message, that her religious education was oppressive, coercive and reactionary. But here’s the lesson Miriam Metz draws: ‘There is a prizing of being able to read prayer fast, which doesn’t mean that you’re disrespectful of it, but it’s like running towards something, an idea which I find very exciting’ (p. 226). There are complex and important issues to explore about religion, ritual, culture and the nature of minority communities and their institutions, and Miriam Metz touches on these when she describes the support she derived from the religious community when she was bereaved. But when it comes to political injustice, ‘anti-Semitism, antilesbianism’, her response is ‘depression’ and ‘sadness’. Her resistance is only by proxy: I have the historical knowledge that even in periods of greatest depression there are resistances, there are positive things. There is that biblical saying, man does not live by bread alone. Well, woman does not live by struggle alone. If you have a rich culture, if you have a positive perspective on your life as a woman, then no matter how awful your life is, it is worthwhile. (p.242, my emphasis) The opium of the masses, to coin a phrase; not a useful means of furthering feminism. Generations of Memories illustrates conflicts and contradictions facing politically conscious Jewish women. It sets the scene for a challenge to those who hold power both in the Jewish community and outside, but lacks the editorial focus to make that challenge explicit. Nevertheless, for Jewish women to reveal and explore their own experiences, to analyse their own history and political development and to speak out about their struggle to operate in a (sometimes murderously) hostile world is, in itself, healthily subversive. The very Jewishness of the language, and the femaleness of the recollections, neither sentimentally exploited nor displayed as a museum piece, undercut the prevailing image of Jews as good ‘Englishmen’. Rita Altman describes her parents’ upward social mobility: Peddling was very hard work for the parents, especially when mother was pregnant with me. They became a little better off when they began to sell shoes, also with rucksacks… Eventually we moved from the attic to a ground floor flat with a tiny little shop. We had a nice big room with a kitchen and access to a courtyard. They actually bought furniture, not big but nice, painted white with black beading, a mirror in the middle of the wardrobe, a washstand, an ottoman sofa with a plush cover thrown over it, a radio. How happy mother was then. I remember her making gefilte fish, bringing a carp home from the market, still alive, and pursuing it on the table. ‘ Oy, kim aher! Oy,’ she’d say, ‘Kim aher! Ah!’ [Come here.] And she’d knock it on the head, poor fish. (p.108) But the book founders on the same reef as the Jewish feminist movement as a whole. Innumerable individual Jewish feminists have developed a sophisticated analysis of Zionism and religion and have concluded that the oppression of Jews can only be challenged alongside and in alliance with other groups. In attempting to make those alliances they have been pushed out of the Jewish community. The Spare Rib affair faced Jewish feminists with a

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classic choice: to speak out against other feminists and be accused of betraying their sisters, or to continue to struggle within the women’s movement and be accused of betraying their community. The assumption is that both the women’s movement and the Jewish community (and there are close parallels in other minority communities) are homogeneous and beleagured groups, unified by the threats they face. But they are not unified. In different ways they are riven by conflicts which must be fought out and resolved before those groups can serve the needs of their members. The degree to which people feel threatened by the idea of speaking out against injustice is a measure of the spuriousness of that unity and the urgency of challenging those who use it as an ideological weapon to control the group. The challengers need support and organization, strategy and tactics. They need to understand not only where they are, but also where they are going and how to get there. Generations of Memories sets the scene, describing the often painful problems of radical Jews. The editors opted for a ‘broad focus’ in order to reflect ‘the range and diversity of Jewish women’s experiences and…to explore the ways in which Jewish women’s identities are constructed and developed within and against historical and life events’ (p.8), in order to challenge stereotyped assumptions about Jewish women. But missing from the long and rather uneven introduction to the book is an analysis of power inside or outside the Jewish community: an understanding of whose interests are served by preserving the stereotype and how they maintain it in the face of Jewish women’s real lives. The editorial group takes an ‘apolitical’ stance, not recognizing that this is an ideological device to neutralize and outlaw any effective challenge to the structures that keep the powerful in power. So they are left in the odd situation of talking to women whose lives have been coloured either by their commitment to political activity or by a clear understanding of the cataclysmic political events which determined their experiences, whilst deciding not to talk to them directly about their political views: We did not wish to impose our own political agendas on the women we interviewed. In deciding how to explore the politics which women held in their earlier lives, or hold now, we made the decision that we would not specifically question women on their stances on particular political positions such as socialism, communism, Zionism and Thatcherism. However, some women did see their political commitments as key elements in their life stories. (pp.13–14) The introduction is particularly bland on the role of Zionism, which is wielded as today’s necessary credential for the right to speak ‘as a Jew’. They attempt to evade the inevitable controversy by saying: ‘In this collection of life stories, it does not appear to have played a particularly significant part’ (p.14). But the dominant ideology within the Jewish community (and accepted outside it) claims that Zionism is central to Jewish identity and Jewish life. The failure to explore such a major contradiction undermines the book’s attempt to subvert the stereotypes of Jewish women. Describing people’s real lives is a necessary first step. The next step is to break out of the ideological vice which forces us to shut up or get out.

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Note Julia Bard is a freelance journalist. She is National Secretary of the Jewish Socialists’ Group and a member of the editorial committee of Jewish Socialist magazine. She is writing a book on step-parenting. References BOYD, Roisin et al. (1982) ‘Women Speak Out Against Zionism’, Spare Rib , August 1982 . DEUTSCHER, Isaac (1968) ‘Who is a Jew?’ in The Non-Jewish Jew London: Merlin, 1981, pp. 42–59 . ROSENBERG, David (1985) Facing Up to Antisemitism: How Jews in Britain Countered the Threats of the 1930s London: JCARP Publications.

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REVIEW ESSAY: Alert for Action Pragna Patel

Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dossiers 1–6 This article attempts to show the invaluable role that the Women Living Under Muslim Laws dossiers have come to play in our political work in Southall Black Sisters (SBS). They are produced and published by the French-based Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws and encompass a variety of views originating from different ideological and political positions. We do not necessarily agree with all the perspectives reflected in the dossiers, but the Network and its unflinching support have become an essential part of our political struggle. Women Living Under Muslim Laws first began to send us written materials about their work and activities soon after SBS and other women set up Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF). Some of us skimmed through the dossiers which were then filed away, together with the wealth of other information we had received on a number of issues connected to the WAF campaign. We did not really think about them again until we were forced to by the predicament of Rabia Janjua. Women Living Under Muslim Laws and their dossiers then took on a significance that went beyond our expectations. Rabia Janjua was first referred to SBS by a health visitor from Hounslow. We were informed that she was in a very depressed state, having just given birth to a second son. Her husband had left her and she was facing a number of problems. She spoke no English. She was unable to come to our centre, so we visited her. She was living in a large bed-and-breakfast hotel in Hounslow. We met an extremely haggard-looking woman who was distressed and anxious about her circumstances. It was very difficult to understand and unravel her situation. She talked about the immigration authorities wanting to remove her and of her husband’s violence. Yet she did not have in her possession a single official document to help us understand what was happening. All her papers, she said, had been retained by a couple who were assisting her and making representations on her behalf to the Home Office. We learnt that Rabia had been raped in Pakistan by her now enstranged husband. She had been forced to marry him because she was afraid that she would not be believed by her family or the authorities. They chose to run away but were eventually found and charged with Zina

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(unlawful sex). They had been detained for a month and were awaiting trial when they were granted bail. They jumped bail, however, knowing that they would face imprisonment and public flogging as punishment. As her husband was a British citizen, he returned to Britain, promising to call her over too. He kept his promise. In 1979, she joined him. However, he had led her to believe that she would only be allowed into this country as a visitor, and advised her not to declare their marriage to the immigration officials. Married life was a nightmare for Rabia. She was beaten regularly, sexually abused, and her movements were strictly controlled by her husband. She learnt that he had been married and had countless affairs with other women before her. The beatings escalated over a fiveyear period and she was hospitalized on two occasions, the second time whilst pregnant with her second child. It was then that, with the help of a neighbouring couple, she sought the help of the courts to protect herself from further violence. Her husband retaliated by informing the Home Office that she had entered the country illegally, and he then left the country to avoid further court action against himself. The matrimonial home was repossessed by the building society, so she found herself with her two children in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. This was the situation in which we found Rabia. The immigration officials were making arrangements to deport her. The couple who she thought were assisting her had, in fact, failed to inform her or anyone else of the negotiations, entirely unofficial, that had been taking place between them and the Home Office. One day, they turned up at her bed-andbreakfast accommodation and informed her that the Home Office required her and the two children to report to Heathrow airport that evening to be deported to Pakistan. Rabia was helped by us to seek immediate legal and parliamentary assistance, and formal representations were made on her behalf to the Home Office. She was finally granted temporary admission, but had to report to a police station every day. Further applications were submitted for her to be granted permission to stay here on compassionate grounds and as a refugee, pointing out the social ostracization, as well as the Zina charge and ensuing punishment, that she faced in Pakistan. The initial response from the Home Office was to say: ‘It is claimed that Mrs Janjua may face imprisonment in Pakistan, but the avoidance of alleged crimes in another country cannot confer upon her any entitlement to remain here’. The campaign, launched by SBS and later organized by WAF, on behalf of Rabia, was therefore not simply yet another familiar, anti-racist immigration exercise. Perhaps this explains the lack of support we received from a number of the usual antiracist groups and forums. It was also about challenging religious laws, in this case the increasingly Islamized laws of Pakistan, and particularly the Hudood Ordinance of 1979, covering the offence of Zina. We were forced to examine the lives of women in another world. Some of us were forced to understand, consider, rethink our views about ‘internationalism’. The plight of women, particularly from working-class backgrounds, like Rabia, challenged us to understand their position in Pakistan under such laws. It was in this connexion that we turned to the Women Living Under Muslim Laws dossiers. They proved to be invaluable. We were hungry to know how the Zina and Hudood laws operated in Pakistan, and what the social and political implications were for women living there. Nowhere was the material as rich as that contained in the dossiers. They contained many articles written by women academics and activists in Pakistan on the subject of Zina and the Hudood Ordinance, spelling out how it came into being and its effects on countless women in Pakistan. We were able to present these to the Home Office, Rabia’s lawyers, and

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MPs as evidence of the risks to which Rabia and her children would be exposed if returned to Pakistan. Sabiha Sumar and Khalid Nadvi write of the Hudood Ordinance, introduced in 1979 in Pakistan by a promulgation by the then martial-law government, and confirmed on the statute books in 1985: The background to the Hudood Ordinance lies in the desire of the Pakistani government to bring laws…in conformity with the Quran and Sunnah (the sayings and deed of the prophet). It is an integral part of the much heralded Islamisation process…The Hudood Ordinance deals with the offences of prohibition (consumption of drugs and alcohol), zina (rape, adultery, fornication), theft and qazf (perjury)…Zina is defined as wilful sex between two adults who are not validly married to each other…Both types of zina are liable to the hadd punishment (stoning to death in public) if either a confession is obtained, or if the actual act of penetration is witnessed by four adult, pious and forthright males. Failing this the lighter punishment of tazir (rigorous imprisonment and whipping) applies…The implications arising out of the Hudood Ordinance are severe, and its interpretation by the courts has led to serious miscarriages of justice for women. Whilst zina effectively applies to adultery or fornication and zina-bil-jabr to rape, either by the man or the woman, the onus of providing proof in a rape of a woman rests on the woman herself. If she is unable to convince the court, her allegation that she has been raped is in itself considered as a confession to zina…and the rape victim effectively implicates herself and is liable to punishment. Furthermore, the woman can be categorised as the rapist herself since it is often assumed that she seduced the man.

(Dossier 3)

Sumar and Nadvi go on to show that it is mainly women from poor social backgrounds who find themselves thrown into gaol for the offence of Zina. Women often have no means with which to challenge the sometimes fabricated offences, because they are unaware of the few civil and legal rights they have. The Islamization process has effectively stripped women of their humanity and dignity and denied them their rightful place in Pakistani society. The information made available to us by the dossiers enabled us to substantiate the threat posed to Rabia if she were to be forced to return to Pakistan. It also educated us on the violation of human rights that occurs in Pakistan in the name of religion. In spite of the election promises of Benazir Bhutto to repeal the Hudood Ordinance, they have remained in existence due to the powerful influence exerted by fundamentalist forces. In fact, the proponents of fundamentalism went further, enacting Islamic Sharia laws, with the aim of bringing all legislative, judicial and bureaucratic decisions in line with the Koran. We were to take another important political initiative, which was to argue with major Human Rights organizations such as Amnesty International that women such as Rabia, facing what amounted to persecution on the basis of their gender and sexuality, should be included in their criteria of political refugees. We became aware that several Iranian women had tried to seek refugee status on the basis that, as women, they constituted a social group which was being persecuted in Iran under the harsh and extreme antiwomen Islamic laws. Their applications had failed. This compelled us to try even harder to obtain refugee status for Rabia, thereby setting a precedent for other women in similar circumstances.

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Rabia Janjua and her children

We wrote to the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws about Rabia and they immediately responded by writing letters in support of her to the Home Secretary, and supplied us with a list of human rights organizations in Europe. Through their Alert for Action leaflets, which inform women around the world of current campaigns or issues that need to be addressed urgently, they publicized Rabia’s case. They also put us in direct contact with women lawyers and activists in Pakistan, the same women who had contributed articles to the dossiers on Zina, to provide a legal opinion on the political and social implications of Rabia’s situation. Our links with Women Living Under Muslim Laws were further strengthened when its founder-member, Marie-Aimee Lucas, came to London early in 1990 to try to establish a support group in this country. We learnt that the group was formed in 1984–5 in response to a need for attention to a number of cases that required urgent action, involving women living under Islamic laws or belonging to communities ruled by Muslim religious laws. The aims and objectives of the group include, amongst others, the creation of international links between women from Muslim countries and communities and between Muslim women and other progressive feminists around the world. The excellent dossiers have been an important channel by which the group has tried to achieve these objectives. Throughout, the dossiers explain, analyse, publicize and inform us of the struggles of Muslim women in various regimes both secular and religious around the world. They portray Muslim women struggling against the daily inhuman treatment to which they are subjected. The dossiers reveal that women are not merely victims—they are challenging, confronting, questioning and fighting back. We came across the story of an Iranian woman, Ginoos Yaftabadi, whose experiences were alarmingly similar to that of Rabia.

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Ginoos was married to an Iranian man and, in May 1986, accompanied him to Japan where he wanted to study. She was eventually abandoned by her husband, who returned to Iran. In the meantime, she had filed for a divorce and entered into a relationship with an American citizen. She also had a child by him. In 1988, the father of Ginoos’s child returned to the States. In April 1989, her Japanese visa expired and the Japanese authorities began to take steps to deport her to Iran. With the intervention of a women’s group, the consequences of such action were highlighted. In Iran, according to the Iranian Civil Code, her divorce would not be recognized and her child would therefore be declared illegitimate. She would be guilty of the crime of Zina which is punishable by death by stoning. The Alert for Action circular in which Ginoos’s case was highlighted goes on to explain that between 1979–85, over a hundred women have been stoned to death, and nearly ten thousand Iranian women were tortured, gaoled or executed by the same regime in the same period. Her application for refugee status in Spain was refused. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has refused to recognize Ginoos as a refugee.’ (Dossier 5/6) One of the main objects of Women Living Under Muslim Laws, then, is to ‘increase women’s knowledge about both their common and diverse situations in various contexts, to strengthen their struggles and to create the means to support them internationally from within the Muslim world and outside’ (Dossier 3). The quality of the information contained in the dossiers is unlikely to be found elsewhere. We certainly doubt whether major human rights organizations catalogue and pull together such experiences of crimes against women. It is all the more remarkable that the dossiers are produced with the aim of not only informing, but acting on aspects of women’s oppression. We have come to forge a real alliance with Women Living Under Muslim Laws which has fed into many of the struggles in which we are engaged in this country, particularly our refusal to have a single version of the world imposed on us by religious leaders here. In their Introduction to Dossier 3, the issue thumbed through most by us, they write: It is often presumed that there exists one homogeneous Muslim world. Interaction and discussions between women from different Muslim societies have shown us that while similarities exist, the notion of a uniform Muslim world is a misconception imposed on us. We have erroneously been led to believe that the only way of ‘being’ is the one we currently live in each of our contexts. Depriving us of even dreaming of a different reality is one of the most debilitating forms of oppression we suffer. (Dossier 3) This is perhaps the most important message contained in the dossiers and one which we, through our own work in Southall Black Sisters, Brent Asian Women’s Refuge and Women Against Fundamentalism clearly recognize. Many religious women attend our centres, and each brings her own interpretation of her religion, based on her own daily reality and specific experiences. Religion is a personal matter and should be left to personal interpretation. This is of vital significance, particularly in the context of what Muslim fundamentalists in this country are trying to do. The call for separate schools for Muslim girls, and the reaffirmation of women as the guardians of the home, the private domain, are attempts to curb women’s aspirations and desires beyond their prescribed traditional roles as dictated in the Koran. The project of fundamentalists is to impose one version of Islam and leave no room for interpretation and

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doubt. Yet there is no uniform interpretation of Islam wherever Muslims live, so why should the fundamentalists seek to impose one now? For fundamentalists like Kalim Siddiqui, who has recently launched a campaign for a Muslim parliament and manifesto in this country, the issue is not so much adherence to a specific ideology as gaining hegemony by creating a monolithic and homogeneous Muslim community that is easier to control and discipline, with himself and his like as its overall, undisputed leaders. It is about political power. In the process all sorts of dishonest arguments, often co-opted from the antiracist and feminist movements, are used to justify the need to maintain a separate Muslim identity and culture. Their solutions and their concerns are not about addressing racism or the discrimination faced by women. Rabia’s case, for instance, exposed these contradictions clearly. Not one single religious Muslim leader came out in support of the campaign, despite the fact that we were equally critical of the government’s racist immigration policies which compounded her predicament. Instead, we were contacted by a diplomat from the ‘welfare’ section of the Pakistani Embassy, furious that we should expose Pakistani laws in the way we were. No doubt if we had let him talk to Rabia, something he was insistent upon, he would have given her ‘an earful’ and perhaps have attempted to silence her for daring to shame the izzat of her country. Many women supported Rabia’s campaign but, on the whole, the left, particularly the broad antiracist movement, responded to the campaign with silence. It was a clear refusal to acknowledge the issue of fundamentalism which shaped Rabia’s predicament. Such a position emanates from the idea that what occurs within a minority community must be left to those who have the power within it, that is, male heads of family and religious and community leaders, to resolve. To do otherwise, many argue, is to play into the hands of racists. We have never subscribed to this view, simply because we have never believed in the notion of a single oppressor. Such a limited and opportunistic vision not only betrays the cause of women, but actually plays straight into the hands of the state, which is only too ready to adopt social policies on schools and the family that serve to leave minority communities at the mercy of religious leaders. The result is that women become victims of male-dominated traditions and customs within the community. Ignoring the dangers of fundamentalism, or perceiving it to be a lesser evil, the left, orthodox antiracists have been silent when they have not pinned their colours clearly on the side of fundamentalism. Fighting racism has also become a fight to preserve ethnic cultures and traditions as if they are ahistorical and apolitical. The danger, for those of us who have fought for space for ourselves, lies not so much in the fact that religious fundamentalism is gaining a real grip in this country (that question is debatable), but that orthodoxy, conservatism and traditionalism are gaining currency and that religious leaders in certain communities are being given centre-stage and a new voice. There is much defending to do. Many of the organizations which we had begun to take for granted, such as Asian Women Refugees, have been attacked by organized men, often in conjunction with the local religious leaders. The demands made by Muslim fundamentalists have also given legitimacy and confidence to religious leaders in other minority communities. New forms of male organization are springing up, with the sole purpose of policing, hunting down and dragging back into the fold women who escape the constraints and violence of family life. In the face of this challenge, the Women Living Under Muslim Laws dossiers offer us a looking-glass, a chance to re-examine our struggles in the light of those waged by women in

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similar circumstances in other parts of the world. They have given women living under Muslim laws a voice, a chance to break out of their isolation, draw inspiration from each other and expose the lies they are fed. Similar initiatives need to take place for women whose realities are constructed within other religions, in order to enable us all to tear through the barriers of language, nationality and religion. Postscript On 8 of August 1990, Rabia Janjua was granted ‘exceptional leave to remain’ in the United Kingdom by the Home Office, until 18 August 1991. She will be able to apply for an extension on her leave to remain after that. Her application for refugee status was refused. Dossiers and information on Women Living Under Muslim Laws can be obtained by contacting the following: WOMEN LIVING UNDER MUSLIM LAWS 34980 Combaillaux (Montpellier) France Tel: (33) 67 84 27 59. CHANGE PO Box 824, London SE24 9JS Tel: (071) 277 6187 Note Pragna Patel is a member of Southall Black Sisters and of Women Against Fundamentalism.

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Women of the Arab World Edited by Nahid Toubia

Zed Books: London 1988, £7. 95 Pbk, ISBN 0 86232 785 7, £26.95 Hbk, ISBN 0 86232 784 9 In Search of Shadows: Conversations with Egyptian Women Wedad Zenie-Ziegler

Zed Books: London 1988, £7. 95 Pbk, ISBN 0 86232 8071, £29.95 Hbk, ISBN 0 86232 806 3

For Arab feminists, 1 September 1986 is a date which will be remembered. On that day, hundreds of women from fourteen Arab countries responded to the call of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and gathered in Cairo to take part in the very first openly feminist conference to take place in the Arab world. Women came from a variety of political backgrounds and defined themselves as feminists from a multiplicity of perspectives. But they all had the same objective: the political, social and economic liberation of women in a region of the world which, in the

Feminist Review No 37, Spring 1991

words of participant Fatima El Mernissi, had so far seen itself outside the moving tide of history. They gave papers, engaged in sometimes heated discussions, argued about tactics and strategies. This book is the exciting, albeit much abridged, result. Although published in 1988 Women of the Arab World has lost none of its relevance. Most chapters look at specific issues in a particular country—women and health in Sudan, Yemenite women and employment, the Palestinian women’s movement in the Occupied Territories, the exploitation of women and the origins of the state in the Sudan, Lebanese women and the development of capitalism. Others examine theoretical issues potentially pertinent to all Third World women. Fuad Zakaria’s contribution on the Muslim Fundamentalist attitude to women stands out in this respect both because his is the only contribution by a man (Zakaria is a progressive Islamic theologian), and for its clear and powerful expose of the manipulation of religion by men who interpret Islam and design its rules to further their own, patriarchal, ends. At a time when fundamentally reactionary religious groupings all over the Muslim world are making a comeback under the guise of the protection of Islamic culture and history— and the recent overwhelming victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria’s local and municipal elections is a point to that effect— Zakaria’s piece is a timely contribution to the current debate around the ‘sanctity’ of socalled religious edicts and the misrepresentation of religion. It helps understand the convoluted thinking of these self-styled interpreters of Islam and the methods they have used to

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demean women and alienate them from their social history. Feminist author Fatima El Mernissi’s chapter on the ‘A-historicity of the Arab Identity’ is no less challenging and courageous. Mernissi’s contention is that selective and distorted readings of history have rendered Arab women strangers to their culture. As they call for change, women’s voices are suppressed for the sake of preserving a society which uses the past as both a model and reference for the future. Another bold chapter which has provoked much discussion is Rita Giacaman and Muna Odeh’s analysis of the Palestinian women’s movement. The authors look at the dynamics between national liberation and women’s liberation and see a paradoxical reality emerge. That the national question de facto encourages the liberation of women and at the same time limits its development. The various chapters that make up the collection may sometimes lack cohesion in style, language or political perspective. Also, the issues of sexuality, gender construction and sexual definitions are remarkable by their absence. In view of the defiant stance of the book, their avoidance—voluntary or not— should have been explained. But it remains that all the authors—and notably Nawal el Saadawi in her exhaustive introduction—share in the belief that feminism is not a static, or stagnant, ideology, that it is not a Western diversion, nor is it the property of women in the West. And most importantly, that feminism is not ‘just about women’ but rather a tool with which to understand, analyse and change the world. The editor, Nahid Toubia, is to be commended for a good, nonintrusive job. Her passionate introduction alone, on the nature of feminism, deserves to be read and reread. So, too, the courageous women who through this book have made their demands clear and unequivocal. They have vocally

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confronted the contradictions of religious, political, social and economic Arab women’s realities, and have not hesitated to discuss publicly contentious issues so far only argued about in the privacy and security of our closed circles. In contrast to the brimming intensity, energy and political commitment of Women of the Arab World and the prospects for change it offers, In Search of Shadows stands as a well-investigated anthropological research whose author remains outside the reality of her object of study. Wedad Zenie-Ziegler is a Christian Egyptian woman who left Cairo for Canada at the onset of Nasser’s revolution and who describes herself as a member of an ‘ethnic’ (sic) minority in Egypt. She returned to her ancestral home for the purposes of the book, ‘to look at the country with fresh eyes and experience it through the lives of women with whom I had been in contact without really knowing them’. She conducted extensive interviews with peasant and working-class women, some of them maids of her family or of her friends. What emerges from the women’s answers to her promptings are profoundly oppressed lives, firmly stuck in the cyclical and seemingly never-ending round of daily chores, strings of pregnancies, sexual abuse and exploitative work. The tone of her analysis—sometimes unwittingly condescending, at other times genuinely sorry—is such that when she comes upon a woman who has fought and transcended her socially and economically prescribed status, the author is unable to integrate this seeming oddity in the body of her inquiry. The reader is unsure why the ‘madams’—as opposed to the maids—have not been included in this research and therefore how comprehensive the author’s scope and brief is. Although Wedad ZenieZiegler has the honesty at the end of her book

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to partially question her own motives in undertaking this task and the possible presumptiousness of her approach, her analysis remains one which offers no hope for progress through change. Lilian Landor

LIP Pamphlets The Right to Choose—Questions of Feminist Morality by Ruth Riddick

£2.50, ISBN 094621 85X

Ancient Wars—Sexuality Oppression by Ethna Viney

and

£2.50, ISBN 0946211 833 The Politics of Seduction by Trudy Hayes

£2.50, ISBN 094621 949

A Kind of Scar—The Woman Poet in a National Tradition by Evan Boland

£2.50, ISBN 0946211 795

From Cathleen to breakdown of Ireland by Edna Langley

Anorexia—the

£2.50, ISBN 0946211 99X

Ireland Between the First and Third Worlds by Carol Coulter

£2.50, ISBN 0946211 930

Has The Red Flag Fallen? the Fate of Socialism in the 1990s by Helena Sheehan

£2.50, ISBN 0946211 779 Attic Press: Dublin, 1990

‘LIP’ is the overall title of seven pamphlets published by Attic Press, the Dublin-based women’s publisher. These pamphlets represent an innovative approach to publishing. They are all short, provocative,

polemical pamphlets on contemporary issues and controversies by Irish women writers, thinkers and activists—Attic’s own description. Writers have the opportunity to explore serious issues without having to conform to the academic rigours often required by journals and to deal with political issues in a way that might not be acceptable to political publications. They are stylishly produced in an easily recognizable standard format and are lively and refreshingly unacademic. They cover a range of topics: sexuality and reproductive rights, nationalism and women’s relation to national culture, and socialism. For the purpose of this review I will group them thematically, dealing first with those on sexual politics, briefly looking at the one on socialism and finally those on nationalism. The latter in my view are the more interesting. The Politics of Seduction, by Trudy Hayes, explores ‘male sexual dominance and female sexual passivity’ which she sees as being a major aspect of male power. She draws on a range of disciplines to substantiate her argument: feminist theory, including the politics of rape and pornography; twentiethcentury sexologists; Judaeo-Christian teachings; and literature. It is almost always taken for granted that the protagonist is male. There is one positive reference to lesbian seduction, other wise the focus is heterosexual, hardly surprising given that the bias of the analysis is male hatred of women. Although the theme is specific, her analysis is too wide-ranging, and it has little reference to the specific situation faced by women in Ireland, because she fails to focus on the nature of oppression faced by women living there.

Ancient Wars—Sexuality and Oppression,

by Ethna Viney, looks at sex and sexuality within the context of women’s position in society. She looks to the history of misogyny

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as an explanation for this. Again there is little that is particularly Irish in her analysis, though she does mention that Ireland is a society which is ‘deeply ambivalent about sexuality’. There is very little discussion of sexuality, either in feminist circles or in the public arena, the ‘Contraception Debate and Abortion Referendum are the nearest the country has had to a discussion on sexuality’. This would have been an interesting issue to explore. Why the silence? Is it just misogyny? She is critical of narrow definitions which equate sexuality with clitoral and vaginal orgasms. For her, giving birth is the climax of female sexuality, a pleasure denied women due to the medicalization of birth, an even narrower definition than those she seeks to refute. There is also a resume of the struggle around sexuality issues in the women’s movement. Indeed, a very simplistic analysis of splits in the English women’s movement and the demise of the Irish feminist movement is explained in terms of internal tensions and personality differences. If I didn’t know different I might be left thinking that there are no feminist activists in Ireland today. The solution posed: men need to become more caring and nurturing. How is this to come about?

The Right to Choose—Questions of Feminist Morality, by Ruth Riddick, argues

that equality for women hangs on women being moral agents, that is, ‘the first right we must assert for ourselves is the identity of personhood not simply in spurious equality with men but as having an elemental involvement in the world of morality and decision-making’. The degree of moral autonomy accorded to women is dependent on whether they are considered as ‘persons’ or ‘relatives’. Women are assigned only relative status by the Irish Constitution. They are ‘mothers’ and ‘wives’ with ‘duties in the home’. In Ireland, women’s lack of control over their

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fertility clearly shows that women aren’t regarded as moral agents. A woman’s right to decide whether to have an abortion is a fundamental moral right and therefore a central feminist demand. A woman’s right to choose is no longer on the agenda in Ireland; the focus has shifted to women’s freedom of access to information. One of the effects of the abortion referendum is that it is now illegal to give information which may help women to procure an abortion. Ruth Riddick’s approach to the subject is interesting, although limited, given her years of active involvement around the issues. She neglected to look in any detail at the role of Catholicism as a dominant ideology, and the kind of moral schizophrenia which it condones. She does mention the ‘conservative Catholic morality mitigated by pragmatic compassion’. What is the effect of this kind of hypocrisy on women? I was surprised that the analysis and main references in these three pamphlets were exclusively drawn from the writings of North American white radical feminists. Where is the socialist-feminist analysis? Ireland, too, has its socialist-feminist activists. There may be more similarities between the position of women in Ireland and other countries who’ve had a colonial past than between Ireland and the USA. I also expected more of a focus on the peculiarities of the Irish situation. Apart from Ruth Riddick’s pamphlet, this is sadly lacking. The three pamphlets on nationalism approach their subject matter from different perspectives, though sharing an approach which is critical. A Kind of Scar—The Woman Poet in a National Tradition, by Evan Boland, is a personal, political exploration of her struggle to establish herself as a national poet. ‘Women have moved in a relatively short time from being the subjects and objects of poetry to being the authors of it.’ For her there were no role models—male

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poets depicted women as passive, decorative and ‘raised to emblematic status’. This was especially the case when women and nation were fused. This technique was even used by many poets who had no nationalist loyalties. This is a distortion of women’s reality while at the same time women are not, according to Boland, ‘especially visible in Ireland’. While she is critical of the kind of nationalism presented through poetry and song, the glorification of the struggle and the failure to acknowledge that women, too, had a part in that struggle and grief, there is no real questioning of nationalism as an ideology. Her task is to claim a space for herself within it where she can tell the truth and express the experience of women in its complexity. Edna Longley in From Cathleen to Anorexia —the Breakdown of Ireland is bluntly critical about nationalism informed by Unionism or Catholicism as a ‘failed conceptual entity’. Unionism, she argues, is a reactive philosophy composed of a coalition of sects, interests, loyalties and in-coherent hate; southern nationalism is preoccupied by Church and State and Sinn Fein offers nothing progressive. These ideologies simply widen the polarities. She cites several examples from literature to illustrate the ways in which the separation is maintained— for example, Protestant artists and writers get little acknowledgement for their work, whatever their political allegiances. Women are also affected by this. Nationalism has ‘residual power over the images and selfimages of women’. It effects the way they lead their lives and the way their struggle is portrayed. Social change will never be achieved while Ireland hangs on to these defunct ideologies. But her own solution is also inadequate as it fails to deal with fundamental issues of power and powerlessness. Unionists are in control, in terms of numbers and ownership of wealth in Northern Ireland. The nationalists are the

oppressed minority. She fails to address this reality. Despite the shortcomings, this is a provocative and creative piece of writing which dares to question a number of ‘holy cows’. I was sometimes lost when she referred to current debates in Ireland. Perhaps this is because the pamphlet is based on an article published in The Irish Times (Southern Ireland’s leading liberal newspaper).

Ireland, Between the First and Third Worlds, by Carol Coulter, on the other hand,

argues that nationalism has revolutionary potential, but it needs to be ‘freed from the pseudo-nationalism created by the southern state’. She outlines how Ireland’s colonial history has been reinterpreted ‘to present successive nationalist movements as expressions of an uninterrupted fight for the Catholic faith’. She emphasizes the need to understand and recognize our colonial past and says that Ireland would do better to make allegiance with other colonial countries rather than its current preoccupation with being European. Her prescription for change —Ireland, north and south, needs to develop a radical nationalism. But here lies the weakness as she fails to define what she means by nationalism. She refers positively to some of the radical strands which existed within old Sinn Fein, but they were always marginal. This is also the case today. Sinn Fein is known not to hold radical views on women’s issues. The pamphlet is a good read, particularly in its analysis of the conservative nature of Ireland’s post-colonial power structures, but it fails to ques tion or clarify its understanding of nationalist philosophy.

Has the Red Flag Fallen? the Fate of Socialism in the 1990s, by Helena Sheehan,

asserts the importance of developing socialist politics in a world where internationalist capitalism has a stranglehold. It gives a clear definition of capitalism and socialism. It is a

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useful introduction and is written without jargon, but it doesn’t say anything new. Finally, the pamphlets on nationalism are thought-provoking. I haven’t read much on this issue which approaches it from such different perspectives. They are challenging and a worthwhile read. I was, overall, disappointed by those on sexual politics and am left to wonder how much their content actually reflects current feminist debate in Ireland. Whatever the limitations I look forward to reading similar productions from Attic. Joan Neary (Thanks to Clara Connolly for the latenight discussion and support.) ‘We Were Making History’. Women and the Telangana Uprising Stree Shakti Sanghatana (Lalita K., Vasantha Kannabiran, Rama Melkote, Uma Maheshwari, Susie Tharu, Veena Shatrugna)

Zed: London 1989, £8.95 Pbk, ISBN 0862 32679 6, £32.95 Hbk, ISBN 0 86232 678 8 When thugs paid by the feudal ‘Nizam’, ruler of Hyderabad, tried to take away Chakali Ailamma’s standing crops, hundreds of peasants, women as well as men, helped her to gather them and defended them with slings, stones, chilli powder and pounding sticks. It was the beginning of a communistled uprising which, between 1945 and 1951 was to involve three million people and three thousand villages. After Independence from the British the Nizam fell. The army forced the resistance movement into the forest. The Communist Party in India split between those who were

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pro-Soviet and those who were pro-Chinese. Amidst heavy losses the Communist Party called off the struggle. The militant peasant movement was broken and defeated. Its participants were abandoned to negotiate with everyday life and the incomprehension of their children. The forces which had decided their destiny were remote from Telangana. When the women’s group, Stree Shakti Sanghatana, arrived to record the life-stories of women who had taken part in the Telangana people’s struggle, they found that they were partly recording testimonies about how memory endures many years of defeat. Dudala Salamma asked, ‘why did you all come this far?’ She had grown old in the intervening years, given everything away and now could only walk with a stick. But she retained her memories: ‘There is so much to tell—my story: a house, courtyard and all they looted—looted it all. I had a cot with headboard, woven with cloth tape and a large bed on it. It was a nice decent house. I fed the communists and they said “you fed them, tell us where they are”, and tortured me. They hung me with ropes under my arms, sprinkled water on the ropes and put a spiked board full of nails under me. My feet were split into bits (crying). I was in bad shape. They tortured me so much.’ Skree Shakti Sanghatana reflect: ‘When Dudala Salamma returns with the urgency of a clock that must strike the hour to the pension that never came, she speaks not only of money, but also of a life that was given and a vision that was betrayed.’ Dayani Priyamvada was the daughter of the chief police officer, much respected in his village. When she was fifteen, influenced by her communist brother-in-law, she slipped away from home to join the rebels. Through the Party she found the strength to break so drastically from her assumed destiny and to continue living against conventions. She

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expresses the political and personal paradox which she has lived, turning ‘a deaf ear to idle talk’: ‘We learnt to live without caring for all the pressures we faced. That is why although I lost something too precious to be lost I still have an affection for the Party. Even if my life was ruined as an individual, the Party was not wholly responsible after all.’ Drawn first to the communists because they were doing good work, later the women began to understand that they were part of a wider movement. ‘We were full of firm confidence. We believed that this struggle which our comrades are fighting would bring us a socialist society. These dreams were smashed. Crushed like an egg.’ The story told by the women of Telangana is thus both an account of the emergence of the consciousness that life could change and the painful accommodation of this vision awakened, but not realized, amidst defeat. It could be recognized by people in many differing contexts from John Bunyan to the Sandinistas. It leaves those who were making history suddenly abandoned by it. But the obsessive passion will not die within them. ‘How can the dream of a new order that the Sangham (organization) spoke of ever leave us…And how can that hope die?’ asks Chityala Ailamma. We Were Making History is at once a remarkable chronicle of rebellious peasant consciousness and an exploration of how the revolutionary process and the assumptions of the politics of gender held by the Party affected the women. This is not an antiquarian exercise for Stree Shakti Sanghatana themselves are engaged in questioning how to create a socialism shaped by women’s needs as well as men’s. Their very appearance seems to embody long-silenced grievances which begin to crystallize.

Saidamma saw her husband shot in the village by soldiers: ‘No one came to ask us what did you suffer? Like you ask now…They just shouted slogans and went away.’ Manikonda Suryavathi sold her silk wedding saris and dedicated herself to the Party. But one day she spoke at a village meeting in dangling ear-rings. Years later she remembered the stern letter of reproof from the District Secretary. The Party tended to blame women for infidelities, banned marriages, wavered about girls leaving their families, assumed childcare was the women’s individual responsibility. It was a political stance which denied the necessity of tackling gender differences and asserted an abstract equality. However, this universalist vision was capable of unifying despite diversities. It also left the women with concepts which transcended everyday reality, the desire for equality and well-being. It held out hopes so powerful they cut many bonds which constrained them; it gave them great courage. ‘When we left home and stepped out braving all this’, Dayani Priyamvada recalls, ‘we did so in the faith that there was a good future, a fine society coming, in which all of us would live really well. We dreamt that in families there would be no such thing as women bending before men. We dreamt that we would live so freely and happily. But repression came so soon that we never had time to question whether that equality was there in the Party itself.’ The women of Telangana thus not only tell a story of valour but of the particular strains of giving themselves to a political movement which empowers even though it denies many aspects of their experience as women. So their chroniclers are listening both to a narrative and to an unfinished political creative labour. They alert us to reading oral accounts with all our senses. Then we are able to ‘hear the questioning, the wavering,

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even the outright rejection of explanations as we read against the grain of the volubility and listen for the gaps, the hesitancies, the silences, the evasions’. To record a life is an act of trust and power. ‘You hold the pen, it all comes from my stomach’, the paralysed Dudala Salamma tells the younger women. The narrator depends upon the chroniclers but knows all too well the differences between life and words. None the less, there is a certain recognition between women in different circumstances who refuse to accept the world as it is. Dudala Salamma assumes they will know why she risked so much for the communists: ‘You ask why did I feed them? Why have you come here to see me? Why do you roam about for the Sangham (organization) or for women? I too wanted to do the same thing. At least you can read a few letters but me, I used to graze buffaloes.’ The dream of ‘a good future’ was abandoned by history in Telangana but, because the members of Stree Shakti Sanghatana searched with resolve for ‘a lineage of resistance and growth’, their experiences can be handed on to many other women who spend their lives roaming about questing for equality, freedom and happiness in the world. The memories of the women of Telangana defy the emergence of a future ‘sealed off from change’. We Were Making History is thus both a moving record and a dramatic act of political intervention. The power of such testimonies is transmitted over time and circumstance. It is a book not only about women’s heroic past but about the dilemmas of socialism and feminism today. Sheila Rowbotham Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra- American Culture and the

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Contemporary Literary Renaissance Edited by Joanne M.Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin

Serpent’s Tail: London 1990, £12.95 Pbk, ISBN 1 85242 180 0

Recently, I saw an excellent show detailing the life and work of Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley, the first Black woman stand-up comedian, during the course of which ‘Moms’ related how she worked with all the greats of the time—Ma Rainey, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday and others. She also talked about the racism which affected them all and the downright difficulties of being a Black woman determined to make it on her own terms in a racist, sexist and generally hostile environment. The show made me remember ‘Moms’ Mabley, and appreciate her in a way that I did not when she was alive and performing in our midst: another Black heroine rightfully revived and revered. In the same way, the women—performers, writers, poets, doers and thinkers—who are the lovingly portrayed subjects of Wild Women in the Whirlwind are themselves given new life by the substantive scholarship on their lives, which this book documents. Wild Women consciously sets out to ensure that these women and the history they represent are not lost to generations. Likewise, the women (and men) who contribute to this latest anthology in what is now becoming a long list of exemplary publications setting out Black women’s story are Conscious of their responsibilities for note-taking. Wild Women is very much an American production—mainly North American, but with a smattering from the southern hemisphere. That said, however, it is

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apparent that its allegiance is within the diaspora. Andrée McLaughlin’s essay on the quest by Black women then and now for humanhood and wholeness makes the important point that the fortunes of Black American women are inextricably intertwined with that of their sisters in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific. ‘To safeguard the future and move on closer to freedom necessitates healing the disjunction Western culture has exacted between Black people and their community, history and African ethos,’ she writes. It is important to continue to make those references and cross-references, repairing, as it were, the damage of the Middle Passage, when we could not speak each other’s language nor fully establish the ties that bind. Wild Women is also concerned with space and time and Black women’s place within the continuum; and it argues for that place as a matter of urgency. A number of essays stand out for me in this collection. Daphne Duval Harrison’s evocation of Sippy Wallace, the ‘Texas Nightingale’, and Billie Jean Young on the civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer, are thorough and accessible and, for me, gave flesh to the names that I’ve heard for years but realized, in reading this text, that I knew almost nothing about. Barbara Smith, as always, speaks with depth, clarity and quality in her essay on Black lesbians in 1980s fiction. A recurring theme throughout Smith’s work is the gulf which divides Black lesbians and Black women who are not lesbians. I was reminded of a workshop which she ran at a Black women’s conference in New York a few years ago. The subject of Black feminists’ responsibility to help bridge that gulf through a literary dialogue was raised. The discussion which ensued, though painful and exasperating, helped to provide an important

baseline from which to continue the dialogue between Black feminists—both lesbian and hetereosexual. It is one which springs from a mutual understanding of and respect for our diverse cultural starting points and which recognizes the value to be gained from them. In this essay, Smith rightly argues that, without this kind of interchange, the scope for hetereosexual feminist critics to err through active homophobia characterized by a refusal to acknowledge and accept our lesbian sisters, or the passive homophobia of ignoring them, remains great. I like to think, though, that we have moved on somewhat from the days when, a few years back, a lesbian member of a Black feminist women’s group with which I was involved, stood up with great trepidation and came out to us, with no feeling of assurance (I later learned) that she would continue to be embraced by us. All of us—Black lesbian and nonlesbian feminists—must grapple with this one. I am convinced that we do. But the process is a long one and the path not easily defined. The guideposts which Smith and others continue to erect, however, are vital for us all to get there in the end. If there is a criticism of this anthology, it must be the fact that some (though by no means all) of its contributions are so steeped in the language of academia that it is hard to see who, outside of the contributors’ own students, will relate to what they have to say, and more to the point, take it on board. If feminists and feminist principles, in particular Black feminism, is to move beyond the fringe, then we must be careful not to leave people behind. Black feminist criticism and thought must ask the crucial ques tion of who it is we’re trying to reach. My answer to this is that it must be those within our communities who regard us as an aberration; who judge that it is not necessary to listen to what we have to say about equality for

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women because we are not understood within those communities. Recently, a friend who is a polytechnic lecturer, and a feminist, related that she finds it impossible to use many of the ‘Bibles’ which we feminists regard as sacred, with her students. ‘They just would not understand them,’ she said. If we are to be taken seriously, and it is to this that I and other Black feminists are pledged, then we must make ourselves accessible—to the trade-union activist, the idealistic young woman student and the community organizer alike. Barbara Smith’s definition of feminism is a good one which should be borne in mind in this context. She writes: ‘Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women—as well as white, economically privileged hetereosexual women. Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement.’ Finally, it was good to note the presence of men in the anthology. As Black feminists, we have long argued that we are not divorced from our communities. The dialogue between Black women and men cannot be allowed to lapse, for therein lies change. Melba Wilson

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The Photo in the Locket (For Louise) Jackie Kay

I

There are things I don’t tell her private things, a garnet necklace slipped between black silk and cotton. My new friend gives me an African name writes letters often; one comes with a spicy bun, a can of black grape and an old photo of she and her sister— two black girls side by side in identical white lace dresses big bows on their nappy (a word I’ve just learnt) hair and ankle socks. So clean. Black people are hot on hygiene. White people sleep with cats and dogs.

I don’t talk about these things. My past is locked in a travelling trunk. Inside: Sabena, my nanny, my mother her long black fingers shine like reeds lit by moonlight; my house; the swimming pool; my old white public school. I’m ashamed. I didn’t think much sometimes I see the black man’s face at the window, coming to get us.

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My mother is white. My father is white. My lover is white. At night we lie like spoons breathing the same cold air inside the room with two outside walls. We snuggle under blankets, sometimes turn in unison our bodies all mixed up. We can only meet here in bed my fingers inside her high tide she making a rivulet run through me in a rush, a gush till we are both beached up.

When my family first met her they thought I was undoing my past through her. It’s not like that. I love her. Not like I loved Sabena. I love lying next to her the dark of her skin, the pale of mine. Sometimes I want to tell her if you knew what it was really like: servants living in corrugated huts outside no electricity, no running water you wouldn’t be lying here kissing my breasts. I keep it hidden. Locked—a photo inside a locket that never opens In the morning I wake before you the pale winter light peeps through our skin, side by side, in sharp relief. Something I’ve been reading in Midnight Birds makes me feel like Judas; I get up make toast and tea. I am five years old again looking out this kitchen window. Somebody turns the palm of my hand up and asks why it isn’t black. Is your bottom black someone sniggers. Then they all laugh. I put loose leafs in the teapot. Let them brew.

POETRY

Last night we talked into the small hours again. You said they used to call you specky. The toast burns. I pull it out furious. It is not the same. It is not the same. I don’t want to play it out on you. You get up for breakfast. ‘I’m always making the fucking toast’ before you rub the sleep out of your eyes.

Yesterday I said a terrible thing. My tongue is full of old ideas. Sometimes they slip out like falling rocks. Warning. Landslide. I can’t repeat it. She’ll repeat it for me. Often. So that I don’t forget. This is a nightmare: the soft laughter then this sudden storm. I don’t know where we go wrong. I am all that. True. I lived it. Now I live with her. Together. Not as servant and Madam. No. Not like that, I don’t believe her. As lovers, as lovers, as lovers. Words chase me like bullets overhead. Kaffir. Wog. Kaffir. Wog. Between tight teeth I whisper. I hug say sorry let’s go back to bed. We’re too young. This is too heavy. I’d like to stop seeing white like whitewash on hospital walls like a blank projection screen; black like onyx stones or moist earth. What am I doing with you if all I want is to make you eat shit for your ancestors?

It’s better for her now down here in London. Yet still with her friends I shake a little when I’m pouring tea.

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Waiting for discovery. They disapprove I’m sure of the two of us together. At clubs we separate for the evening come back together in bed much later where no eyes watch like marbles. Tonight while she sleeps. I lie thinking of home. I miss the land. The red dust roads the jacaranda tree, picking ripe avocadoes or mangoes. I miss the words, the whole tutti. I don’t talk of this. Even memories lead to trouble. Especially memories. Which school. What house. Which friend. We were brought up on different worlds: she on mince and potatoes, drizzle, midges; me on mealies, thunderstorms, chongalolas. II

Now I tell you almost everything. Something shifted like sand a while ago and the sea thrashed out and in, carrying my secrets back with the eventide. And my tongue returned to the cave in my mouth. You tell me when you were wee you stood on a baby chick, squashed it how you felt it for years underfoot. I tell you our rabbit Harvey was strangled and buried in our very own back garden. Now, some of your memories are mine. We move on. We don’t forget. We change not like amoebas more like plants keeping the same stem.

Now we are light years away. Sometime ago I opened my trunk and showed her a photo of Sabena. Then it all came out. My strawberry dress.

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The school assembly. Hot rain on dust. Bit by bit we sat and picked till I laughed and cried like some huge waterfall—giggling and howling. Note Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961. Her poems have appeared in various anthologies. Both her plays, Chiaroscuro and Twice Over are published by Methuen. Her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers, will be published by Bloodaxe in 1991. She is currently Hammersmith and Fulham’s writer in residence.

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RESPONSE: MORE CAGNEY AND LACEY Lorraine Gamman

I was rather flattered to be described as a ‘theoretical guerrilla’ in Beverley Alcock and Jocelyn Robson’s article ‘Cagney and Lacey Revisited’ (1990). Yet it was clear from this article (and the debate that Alcock and I had within the pages of Spare Rib in 1988) that there has been some misunderstanding about the female gaze argument made in ‘Watching the Detectives’ (Gamman and Marshment, 1988). Alcock and Robson assert that ‘Gamman seems to be saying little more than that it is important to have strong female characters with which to identify’ (Alcock and Robson, 1990:43). This crude reduction completely misrepresents my position which I would like the opportunity to restate within the pages of Feminist Review. My whole point about the female gaze in the context of looking at TV cops Cagney and Lacey was not to claim that these characters were progressive ‘heroines’ (I use the word ‘protagonist’ throughout). On the contrary, I suggest that a TV series which emphasizes female friendship and features scripts around some feminist issues—such as rape, incest, abortion, pornography, violence against women—opens up a space for female spectatorship not adequately addressed by most earlier feminist film criticism which had been influenced by Laura Mulvey’s ideas about the male gaze of classic narrative cinema. This might not seem like a very startling insight but, at the time I wrote my piece, like other contributors to The Female Gaze, I found myself in disagreement with ‘orthodox’ feminist film criticism. The viewing space offered by some moments of Cagney and Lacey seemed to be important to me. Not simply because this series featured the first female buddies I’d ever encountered on television, but because I couldn’t find anything that adequately explained my experience of watching them. In the past, film critics like Mulvey, Johnstone et al., with their appropriation of Freudian/ Lacanian ideas to the study of film, appeared to have inadvertently created a blind spot to female spectatorship on and off the screen. They weren’t, for instance, interested in the female voice on the soundtrack. This cannot be overlooked in Cagney and Lacey, not only because the voices of the characters are so distinctive but, as John Ellis has identified, ‘TV demonstrates displacement of the invocatory drive of scopophilia (love of looking), to the closest relation of the invocatory drives, that of Hearing’ (Ellis, 1982:137). Yet the voice of female characters has been ignored by many feminist film critics who seemed obsessed with image at the expense of narrative: strong women characters were subsequently dismissed because their image was said (when analysed within a rigid psycho-

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Watching the detectives

analytic framework) to constitute ‘phallic displacement’. In this schema, female viewers who fancied female characters weren’t discussed or were said to be identifying with heterosexual men. I felt the theoretical formulations underpinning the above argument were inadequate. It seemed the issue of active female spectatorship was being denied by some feminist critics largely because the Freudian/Lacanian framework of their criticism (i.e., the construction of woman as passive and as non-man, i.e., lacking the penis) was far too constraining in terms of its conceptualization of female desire which was never imagined to be autonomously ‘active’. My point in raising issues about female spectatorship wasn’t simply to ‘invert’ Mulvey’s framework as Alcock and Robson suggest. Nor even to raid Mulvey like a smash-and-grab artist, but rather to argue against the psychoanalytic straitjacket (which had lost sight of Freud’s original emphasis on bisexuality) and to call for a new theoretical framework with which to analyse women and film.1 In ‘Watching the Detectives’ I called for a framework that would ‘allow conceptualization of how other dynamics of identity—such as race, class and generation—may influence identifications made by viewers of the visual media’ (Gamman and Marshment, 1988:25). I imagined, when I criticized the use of psychoanalytic concepts in my article, that new work would adopt some other method of measuring spectatorship (e.g., empirical evidence, for instance, which I recognize is still not satisfactory). In 1990, it is clear that a satisfactory model is still required to analyse female spectatorship. Today, I must admit, an adapted psychoanalytic model, one that can address female desire as active, seems more useful to me than no theoretical analysis at all. To get back to Cagney and Lacey—a series which has now ‘ended’ and which is being repeated on British television in 1990. In retrospect, since writing my somewhat enthusiastic

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article in 1987 (for publication in 1988), it is clear that the portrayal of Cagney as an alcoholic conspires against a positive reading of the role of the single woman in the series as a whole. (A decline which dramatically contrasts with Mary Beth’s increased domestic happiness, not to mention material wealth acquired in later scripts after her husband found employment). In the early days of Cagney and Lacey (when I wrote my piece) there were few signs that the conservative elements in Cagney’s and Lacey’s characterization would be allowed to surface so adversely in new scripts. But even with the wisdom of hindsight, I think Alcock and Robson’s comparison of Cagney’s character with that of the single woman in Fatal Attraction is completely overstated. Overall, Alcock and Robson dismiss important arguments about female spectatorship in Cagney and Lacey because they choose to focus on the ‘closure’, on episodes televised at the end of the series, rather than the more progressive earlier episodes I discuss in my article. Their method is content analysis and their stance is a moral, rather than theoretical, engagement with issues about spectatorship. To address their main argument, Mary Beth (the married one) may at times ‘be the agent of patriarchy who drags Christine back to the straight and narrow’ but this is not always so. Her characterization is often more surprising. Throughout the whole series, the representation of Mary Beth is contradictory: later scripts do change her relationship to Harvey so that she is no longer the main breadwinner. Yet it is unsatisfactory to simply ‘fix’ her as ‘patriarchal woman’, because her structural position within the series is more complicated than this and at times engages with questioning patriarchal relations. There is no doubt, as I mentioned in 1988, that in Cagney and Lacey there is ‘a heterosexual presumption’ underlying the female gaze. Lesbianism, as I also mentioned in 1988, is the ‘repressed of the series’—the taboo subject that cannot be discussed even though the programme has addressed many issues of feminist interest. Yet this repression does not, and cannot, ‘fix’ the viewer’s experience of watching homoerotic imagery which is implicit in many of the scenes. This homoerotic imagery is structured within the series (some episodes, like the one on breast cancer more than others). The spectators’ relationship to this imagery (identification, voyeurism, etc.) concerns the structural position of the viewer to the text rather than any simple ‘act of choice’. I think Alcock and Robson rather miss this point, perhaps because they seem bogged down by the assessment of whether the images/characters of Cagney and Lacey are ‘ideologically correct’ or not. The above line of argument takes us into the moral dimension that I wished to avoid when writing about Cagney and Lacey the first time around. My interest now, as in 1987/8, was not in the moral purity of the characters but rather in the space the relationship of these female buddies opens up for the female viewer—a space not comparable to films Hepburn appeared in: her roles in film meant she never engaged in the relay of female looks associated with the development of a female buddy narrative. Despite the many contradictions, there are moments when Cagney and Lacey does disturb eighties’ mainstream television images of women. How many pregnant and working women have you seen on the telly defending a woman’s right to abortion? These moments, in addition to the homoerotic imagery and the narrative focus on citizen’s rights (rather than only the point of view of the police) still seem important to me. Not only because, as a precursor, Cagney and Lacey appears to have pioneered a place for other TV series featuring female buddies (like South of the Border)2 but because the origins of this production contradict the

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idea put forward by Mulvey in 1975 that the ‘avant-garde’ is the only place where feminist film-making practice could make an intervention. For the above reasons, I think it is important not to ‘dismiss’ Cagney and Lacey simply as a conservative text. Rather, I suggest we should note some of the so-called reactionary elements identified by Alcock and Robson, but still hold on to the positive aspects of the series, whilst examining the contradictions between them. Nowadays, perhaps, Cagney and Lacey should be seen as an early and valid attempt, if flawed, to introduce some feminism into the popular arena. After all, it did take some feminist ideas out of the ghetto and made use of them to entertain women who may never before have associated feminism with pleasure. Notes 1 The journalistic articles in The Female Gaze, particularly those on race, were commissioned in an attempt to escape the psychoanalytic straitjacket which seemed to constrain much previous work on the subject of women and spectatorship. 2 South of the Border is worthy of further investigation, particularly as the representation of these detectives does not ‘separate’ them so distinctly from the lawbreakers.

References ALCOCK, Beverley and ROBSON, Jocelyn (1990) ‘Cagney and Lacey Revisited’ Feminist Review No. 35, Summer . ELLIS, John (1982) Visible Fictions London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. GAMMAN, Lorraine and MARSHMENT, Margaret (1988) editors, The Female Gaze: Women As Viewers of Popular Culture London: The Women’s Press.

LETTERS

Dear Feminist Review, For some time now, we have been worried about the state of feminist politics. Reading the collection of articles on lesbian sexuality in issue 34 confirms our fears. It seems there has been a definite turn towards libertarianism—and feminist theory and practice is the worse for it. The vast majority of pieces fail to problematize heterosexuality and male dominance. Instead, all attention is turned inward, upon our own sexual practices and feelings. That is not to say that such things should not be theorized—they should. But that is just what these articles do not do. These practices must be contextualized. And we need to look at a wide range of personal and institutional practices from a lesbian-feminist perspective, not just sexual ones. The sexuality articles in Feminist Review 34 do not facilitate discussion in an overpolarized climate. For example, it is true that Sheila Jeffreys’ book Anticlimax gives short shrift to those whose theories she opposes. Yet, Margaret Hunt’s response gives the same in kind, and even then fails to engage with Jeffreys’ primary problematic (heterosexuality). The piece by Ardill and O’Sullivan on butch/femme begins to ask some interesting questions about identity, but then goes on to use heterosexually defined words like ‘fuck’ completely uncritically. The articles on lesbian porn in film and literature neither define porn nor attempt to theorize erotica. Feminists have spent energy deconstructing the notion of ‘consent’ only to see its oppressive meanings appropriated by libertarian feminism. SM is a problem because, like porn, it says ‘no’ means ‘yes’, it calls pain pleasure. Its practices and language obfuscate rather than illuminate gender relations of power. It seems that what is fashionable in lesbian-feminist politics these days is an ‘anything goes’ libertarianism. This is in keeping with sexual pluralist theory that has, in the name of choice and agency, constructed a concept of ‘sexual minorities’ that are due ‘equal rights’. The effect of this has been to de-politicize homosexuality.

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Ultimately, it is sexual liberalism that has asserted itself within feminist politics (as economic liberalism has within Marxist politics). Is feminism about our ‘right’ to choose from a range of supposedly equal sexual practices/products? Perhaps it is the resilience of capitalism that has led to a resort to liberalism within radical social movements. Feminism used to have more imagination than this. In sisterhood Didi Herman Davina Cooper London Dear Feminist Review, In Sue O’Sullivan’s interview with Cindy Patton (FR No. 34, Spring 1990) it is argued that while not wanting to ‘suggest all over again that children lie’ we might usefully consider ‘the complexity and importance of fantasy’. Later in the same article ‘one instance of abuse’ is compared to ‘twenty-five occasions when a child can’t have her room as she wants it’ and it is suggested that recalling abuse may be partly a question of ‘personality’ leading a woman to (mis)take a ‘relatively harmless memory’ as a clue to past abuse. I would expect to find such insidious notions presented in male psychoanalytical writings from earlier in this century but was disturbed to find them reiterated in this interview in Feminist Review. Such notions have had, and continue to have, a destructive affect on our struggles to confront male violence. Women are still informed by professionals, family and friends that they are just imagining things or misinterpreting innocent cuddles; that what happened to them wasn’t that bad on the general scale of routine disciplinary abuse toward children or that they are ‘allowing’ the abuse to affect them more than it should do (especially if the sexual attack was ‘only’ a one-off incident). I agree that it is important to explore how childhood (and adult) experiences of sexual violence are interpreted, recalled and reconstructed and how they relate to other experiences of what it means to be a child or a woman. However, I think that the terms in which sexual abuse was discussed in this interview ignored the social context within which many women still live (where experiences of sexual violence are not ‘essentialized’ but are systematically undermined and trivialized) and denied the particular pain, isolation and fear of both the original assault(s) and the process of remembering. In sisterhood, Jenny Kitzinger Glasgow Dear Feminist Review, In issue 34 you carried an article on the subject of the ideas of Sheila Jeffreys which actually included a lengthy section purporting to be about CAP and including a graphic of one of our leaflets which was full of criticisms of the campaign which seemed to be based on glaring inaccuracies about the most basic facts about our organization and the ‘Off the Shelf’ campaign which we initiated in conjunction with the National Union of Students Women’s Campaign.

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We feel that the issue of pornography, especially in the current political context which includes the appearance of several different campaigns around the issue, all run by women, the ‘Off the Shelf’ campaign, the Dawn Primarolo Bill and the forthcoming government review on the evidence to link pornography with sexual violence, is a highly topical one for feminists; it deserves more than a passing reference within an article about the theories of an individual woman who incidentally is not a member of CAP or, as far as I am aware, any other antipornography group. We also take exception to the slapdash attitude displayed by the author who got even the most basic facts wrong—throughout collapsing us in with a separate organization, the Campaign on Pornography and Censorship, failing to recognize that two campaigns exist, not one, and that, although we are allied in the sense that we share an analysis of pornography which sees it as linked to sexual abuse and sexual discrimination in general, we are independent groups and advocate different actions and, in particular, different legal strategies. She also accused us of making an alliance with moral-majority supporters which we have never done. Nor did she bother to speak to us to check her information before going to print. While we accept that FR is not responsible for how careful every author is about their information, we do know that women will assume that a journal of the quality and reputation of FR will contain material that is informed and accurate. Therefore, we would like Feminist Review to grant us the chance to correct some of the more basic inaccuracies (some might say lies) printed in this article about CAP and ‘Off the Shelf’. We would also welcome the opportunity to submit an article for a future issue of FR which presents an analysis of what the antipornography movement that is emerging in this country is actually about, including the politics, aims and history of the ‘Off the Shelf’ campaign, as well as putting forward why we believe this issue to be of crucial concern to feminists now. We hope the collective will decide to give this issue the space and attention it deserves and to grant us a right of reply and your readers the chance to make up their own minds. Best wishes, Ms Sam Chugg Director The Campaign Against Pornography London Dear Feminist Review, If one wished to accord Feminist Review No. 34 (‘Perverse Politics: Lesbian Issues’) the status of ‘feminist’ analysis, it might best be seen as an object lesson for all women in the efficient functioning of patriarchal oppression. The peculiarly efficient nature of this oppression lies largely in its ability to cause the oppressed group to oppress itself: so much more effective than external coercion. A powerful means by which this can be achieved is a feminist publication that analyses oppression in such a way as to function as an instrument of that oppression. To argue that women do, think or feel certain things does not mysteriously transform these into ‘feminist’ thoughts, feelings or actions. On the contrary, it may be seen as an ample demonstration of patriarchal oppressive power. ‘Large numbers of women occasionally engage in acts which by some people’s definition would be SM.’ (Margaret Hunt, p.40). ‘Now that

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butch/femme has finally achieved respectability and is sweeping sections of the visible British urban lesbian cultures…’ These days talk is about… the pleasure and powerfulness of being femme—of being free [sic] to be seductive, looked after, adored, as well as adoring.’ (Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan, p.79 and p.84 respectively) To find a whole article on butch/femme issues (Who pursues who? Who fucks who? What with?) without a single reference to issues of power and the role of such constructions in the accommodation into heteropatriarchal structures of a potential threat, made us feel we had mistakenly picked up a copy of Penthouse. However, more disturbing discussion was to follow. We are accustomed to the trivialization and minimization of child sexual abuse in the patriarchal media, yet to find, in a feminist publication, such violence minimized and equated with being prohibited from having one’s room as one wants is something else (Interview with Cindy Patton by Sue O’Sullivan, p. 126–7). Although within each article reference was made, in passing, to debate and the existence of alternative perspectives within feminist theory, there was a frightening unanimity in the views expressed. The prevailing strategy of the issue, writing off revolutionary feminist theory, and spuriously equating it with Thatcherite rhetoric of re-emergence of ‘Victorian values and the renewed sanctity of the family’ (Inge Blackman and Kathryn Perry, p.78), is a cheap debating trick borrowed from patriarchal academe. It will not be constructive or useful in furthering understanding of oppression or the development of feminist theory and practice. The passive acceptance of the type of ideas reflected in this publication as ‘accepted wisdom’ would itself be an instrument of our own oppression, but that’s where we came in… In sisterhood, Rachel Perkins Margot Lidstone London

NOTICEBOARD

International Federation for Research in Women’s History The International Federation was founded in 1987 as a section of the International Congress of Historical Sciences and now has twenty-two countries affiliated through local associations. The UK point of contact is via the Secretary, The Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Senate House, London WC1E 7HU. Lesbian and Gay Equality The Association of London Authorities has published a report entitled ‘Lesbian and Gay Equality Now’. Price £5. ALA, 36 Old Queen Street, London SW1 9JF. Women’s Studies at Australian Universities Bibliotech have just published a dossier of Women’s Studies at Australian Universities. Available from GPO Box 4, Canberra, ACT 2601. Calls For Papers

Hypatia

Special Issue: Feminism and Language Edited by Dale Bauer and Kelly Oliver. Recently, feminists have become concerned with the ways in which language can construct reality. This issue will bring together a variety of feminist analyses of language. Papers dealing with the following and related issues are welcome: the theoretical implications of linguistic studies which suggest that Women and men use language differently, the relationship between language and oppression, feminist strategies for reconceiving or revising language, the strategic advantages or disadvantages for conceiving of a uniquely feminine language, analyses or developments of theories which maintain that the structure of language is phallocentric, analyses of the ways in which language is controlled

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and used by men, feminist criticisms of traditional theories of language. This issue of Hypatia will be devoted to publishing critiques of traditional conceptions of language and developing feminist alternatives. Deadline for submissions is 1 April 1991. Please send submissions to either: Dale Bauer, English Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison WI. 53706, or Kelly Oliver, Philosophy Department, George Washington University, Washington D.C. 20052.

Flaunting It

First USA national graduate student conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies. Proposals and enquiries: Cheryl Kader/Thomas Piontek, Department of English and Comparative Literature, PO Box 413, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA.

Women’s Studies Network (UK) Association

New Directions for Women’s Studies in the 1990s? A conference to be held in London 6/7th July 1991. Areas of focus: International Feminisms; Commonalities and Differences; New Developments in Feminist Theory; The Women’s Movement and Women’s Studies. Papers and proposals: Jackie Stacey, Department of Sociology, University of Lancaster, Lancaster LA1 4YL. Phone: 0524 65201 ext. 4171. Conference enquiries: Ann Phoenix, Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, 1 Brunswick Square, London WC1. Phone: 071 278 2424. Women: A Cultural Review

Feminist Review welcomes the appearance of Women: A Cultural Review published by Oxford University Press, and wishes them every success.

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1 Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practice, Davis & Goodall. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh OUT OF PRINT. 2 Summer Reading, O’Rourke. Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal & Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley. 3 English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group. On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin. 4 Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy. 5 Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell. Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis. 6 ‘The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska. The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay. 7 Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell. Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breitenbach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson. 8 Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley. The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble.

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9 Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male Power, Cockburn. Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall. 10 Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, Weir & McIntosh. Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers. 11 SEXUALITY ISSUE Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark. Talking Sex, English, Hollibaugh & Rubin. Jealousy and Sexual Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womanslaughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT. 12 ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, McRobbie. Khomeini’s Teachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906–1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel. 13 Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and the Poetic Tradition, Montefiore. 14 Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Profamily Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell. Teaching Film, Clayton. 15 Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles. Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval-Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurstfield. 16 Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn. Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Interview with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and ‘The Family’, Caldwell. 17 MANY VOICES, ONE CHANT: BLACK FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carmen, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black women Organizing Autonomously: a collection. 18 CULTURAL POLITICS Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films, Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn.

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19 The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Refuges for Battered Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence. 20 Prisonhouses, Steedman. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh. What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke. 21 Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby. 22 Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ramazanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza. 23 SOCIALIST-FEMINISM: OUT OF THE BLUE Feminism and Class Politics: A RoundTable Discussion, Barrett, Campbell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming Socialist-Feminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson. Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. Socialist-Feminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh. Report from Nairobi, Hendessi. 24 Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim. 25 Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris. Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of De-radicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin. 26 Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Clément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir. 27 WOMEN, FEMINISM AND THE THIRD TERM: Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips. Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Re-reading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughts on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt and Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon. 28 FAMILY SECRETS: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE: Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American

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History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Woodcraft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & Macleod Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills. Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers. 29 ABORTION: THE INTERNATIONAL AGENDA: Whatever Happened to ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman. Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the realm of necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey 30 CAPITAL, GENDER AND SKILL: Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of I ntercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi. 31 THE PAST BEFORE US: 20 YEARS OF FEMINISM: Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of ’88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. 32 ‘Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists, Gorelick.

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33 Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim and Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939) The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. 34 PERVERSE POLITICS: LESBIAN ISSUES Pat Parker: A tribute, Brimstone. International Lesbianism: Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsburgh, Italy, Fiocchetto. The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez & Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the issue: Lesbian fashion for the 1990s, Blackman & Perry. Butch/Femme Obsessions, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International Archives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality An interview with Cindy Patton, O’Sullivan. Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory, Hamer. The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn. 35 Campaign Against Pornography, Norden. The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes over ‘Mutterlichkeit’, Chamberlayne. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-National Reception, Mani. Cagney and Lacey Revisited, Alcock & Robson. Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Rolley. Deviant Dress, Wilson. The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980, Ross. Women in Professional Engineering: the Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values, Carter & Kirkup. Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression, Briskin. Poetry: Bufkin, Zumwalt. 36 ‘The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory, Minsky. Feminism and Pornography, Ellis, O’Dair Tallmer. Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship, Rodgerson & Semple. Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say, Segal. The Woman In My Life: Photography of Women, Nava. Splintered Sisterhood: Antiracism in a Young Women’s Project, Connolly. Woman, Native, Other, Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha. Out But Not Down: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing, Edgerton. Poems: Evans Davies, Toth, Weinbaum. Oxford Twenty Years On: Where Are We Now?, Gamman & O’Neill. The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstockings Movement, Walter.