Maintain the Rage by Renate Klein

FiLiA Session 16th October 2021

When we had the idea to put together an anthology of old women’s writings, Susan and I hoped from the very beginning that this volume to celebrate the 30th birthday of our publishing company Spinifex Press would be our present to young women.

The result Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation exceeded our expectations. Many of the 56 women over 70 writing in this book, want the exhilaration, stresses, anger and joy they experienced through their 40 or more years of feminist activism passed on to younger women.

The passing on of feminist knowledge in our increasingly fast-read, fast-experienced and fast-forget-everything time is truly of the utmost importance.

No doubt for all of us once we reach a certain age – and that can be 30 or even less – it is incredibly annoying to see articles about something apparently totally new and exciting – when we have already read about this topic years ago or even written about it ourselves! Just imagine how much more annoying this feeling is when you reach the mighty milestone of being 70+!

While the word ‘feminism’ these days is used more often than, say, 10 years ago, unfortunately it is often a ‘feminism light’ or indeed a ‘faux-feminism’, that the media serves up for us. Still thin as stick insects, still tottering along in high heels and still dressed in revealing clothes and fawning over men, these ‘choice’ feminists lecture us on ‘our bodies, our rights’ to be ‘sex workers’, ‘surrogates’, as well as CEOs and world explorers. What’s often missing is the ‘lived experience’ on the one hand – which is not something one can do much about as a young person – but, more importantly, knowledge about our feminist herstory and our role models: old women that enable young women to make sense of their past and present – and offer glimpses into the future.

From the late 70s to the end-90s some lucky women learnt such radical knowledge in Women’s and Lesbian Studies before they were queered and post-modernised out of existence – or turned into depoliticized Gender/Sexuality/Trans studies where few if any of the texts are by radical feminists that connect the Women’s Liberation Movement with the present. This is a very serious problem that is difficult to turn around – although the radical feminist books still exist and some of their authors are still alive and discussion of their writing can be found in countless radical feminist groups on Facebook or the internet in general. Forming a book club is one small solution.

But in order to find these books, you need a starting point: a friend that points you in the right direction, your feminist mother or grandmother if you are lucky to have such women in your life, and perhaps even a dinosaur professor in some university who has managed to survive the many variations of ‘woke’.

And this is where Not Dead Yet enters the picture. 36 of the 56 contributions in the book are an incredibly rich source of knowledge about feminist actions, organisations founded, important books written and discussed, public protests, feminist campaigns, and feminist solidarity events to show that ‘sisterhood’ was – and is – alive and well (even if, as we are all mere mortals, disagreements and quarrels will always exist).

There are threads through many of these stories about the hard work done to abolish prostitution, surrogacy, pornography and other forms of violence against women. The fight against pornography gets harder and harder. Boys try to enact how they see men treat women in their porn diet – ubiquitous and easy to obtain on the internet – and young girls are bombarded with such vile porn these days that they believe that choking and slapping is ‘normal’ in heterosex.

The other 20 contributions in Not Dead Yet range from a hilarious account of a challenging coastal walk in the North of England where the ‘old woman’ was condescendingly belittled by the leader, only to show him up as a silly twat as of course she would, to reflections on art in a feminist’s life, to turning one’s hand to restoring vitality to soil that was denuded. Creativity, wit and irony are not missing from the women’s tales and some are also profoundly moving, such as a 81-year-old ‘rabble-rousing’ radical lesbian feminist’s ‘body scan’ of her many crevasses and creases which she finishes with “I gently rub lotion over it with love” (Sandra Butler, p. 42).

Not Dead Yet is indeed our gift to women of all ages but especially young women who hopefully will take from these stories insights into lives lived to the fullest with tales of amazing courage, hard work and always, always the belief that “there is an alternative,” patriarchy is not god-given: it can be abolished even if the fight is long and arduous and often consists of one step forward and two backwards.

Another message that comes through loudly and clearly in the stories is the powerful, creative and important use of anger that, living in a technopatriarchy, we absolutely need to survive. Anger is not hate. Nor is it violence. Anger is expressing our grievances when we hear yet again – once a week – how a man killed his female partner, sexually abused children, forced women who are not part of the dominant group – white and western middle-class – to live below the poverty line, face homelessness and have their disabilities untreated. And often, on top of all that structural inequality, misogyny and plain old sexism manage to survive and even thrive as in the new transgender scam where two plus two equals five, full-bodied men with penises say they are lesbians and demand access to female spaces including our beds. And children’s bodies are mutilated with powerful dangerous drugs that have long-lasting disastrous consequences.

We all – young and old – need to maintain our rage. Our anger to stand firm and insist on the human rights of women not to be erased. We must not be compliant and meek. We have a right to exist. And more: to enjoy our lives, excel at what we want to do and enjoy happiness.

We need to be brave to work towards this goal when we face both the puppets of the trans empire as well as the cowards among ‘ordinary’ women and men who believe that staying silent will save them from attacks. We need to show solidarity with those who are in the firing line. We also need to remember the saying, and I paraphrase: “First they came for the Jews and I said nothing, then they came for gays and lesbians, and I said nothing, then the disabled, the gypsies … and finally they came for me.”

There is no safe space for anyone unless the world is a safe space for ALL women – wherever in the word we live. But this goal is definitely worth fighting for even if the challenges of escalating male violence as well as the man-made climate catastrophes are formidable. But as Susan B Anthony said a long time ago: “Failure is impossible.”

May Not Dead Yet. Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation contribute to this struggle.