Jenny Turner · As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes_ On Feminism · LRB 15 December 2011 (print version)

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Jenny Turner

Young women, the state and public order in Britain, as seen in clippings from the

newspapers, August 2011: Natasha Reid, 24, pleaded guilty to stealing a television from a

Comet in North London during the riots of 7 August. Her mother said she was baffled by

her own behaviour she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleadedguilty, along with her sister and a friend, to entering Argos in Croydon: The tragedy is

that you are all of previous good character, the judge said, as he sentenced them to six

months each. Chelsea Ives, the 18-year-old shamed former Olympic youth ambassador

shopped by her mother, pleaded guilty to criminal damage and burglary on the Sunday,

and to violent disorder (a Somerfield in Hackney) the following evening. The public seem

to automatically place me in an unnamed category for thick, low-life individuals, which isnot me at all, Chelsea wrote from behind bars in a letter intended for the novelist Gillian

Slovo, but which theEven ing Stan dardused as an occasion to run her big-hair camera-

phone-in-the-mirror Facebook picture yet again. She began a two-year jail sentence this

month.

Here, in a nutshell, is the problem with feminism. Young women of good character losing

their heads and wishing they hadnt. You feel so sorry for them, but cant you sense what

enny Turner As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes: On Feminism LRB 15 December 2011 (pri... http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n24/jenny-turner/as-many-pairs-of-shoes-as-she-likes/print

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they tasted in the air as they were doing it: freedom, fury, the power for once of being

young and strong and agile and a homegirl, the flat-out joy of getting your hands on some

free stuff. This is the best day ever, Chelsea said, while looting the T-Mobile store.

Trainers, clothes, mobiles, iPods, Macs possession of these things is tantamount to

human rights, a writer called Charmaine Elliot posted on Blackfeminists.blog,

remembering her own youth in London. I took a trip to Selfridges one afternoon to visit a

friend and was struck by advertising slogans that said, la Barbara Kruger, I shop,

therefore I am. And I couldnt help but wonder that as I couldnt actually shop, ergo what?

At the UK Feminista summer school in Birmingham meanwhile, Emily Birkenshaw, 24, a

teaching assistant from York, was learning how to go floppy when arrested. Youreheavier then, so you cant be carried, she told the Observer. It just felt really empowering.

UK Feminista was launched last year by 29-year-old Kat Banyard, whose first book, Th e

Equa lity Illusion , came out at much the same time. The event is set to harness the recent

upsurge in interest in this previously unfashionable social movement, a press release for

the summer school said. In June UK Feminista had joined forces with Object (the stress

goes on the second syllable, I ob-ject), another newish bright-young-feminists

organisation, to campaign against the recent opening of a Playboy nightclub in London.

Eff off Heff, stop degrading women! protesters chanted. No more sexist men, Playboy

empire has to end!

Look at them on YouTube, having their genteel shout and waving their Ban the Bunny

placards: Ob-ject, women not sex objects. Thats not what empowerment looks like/This

is what empowerment looks like! Idealistic, well organised, compassionate and let-them-

eat-cakey, these young women have no place on their neat clipboards for disturbance,

unintended consequences, humour or even humility when faced with the pressures and

precariousness of most peoples lives.

More from YouTube, late September. Object and UK Feminista have been busy, dressing

up in white overalls with red ink on their faces, waving cleavers outside the XBiz

pornography trade show in Bloomsbury: Just a bunch of pimps and butchers/ Who trade


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Germaine Greer, of course, a feather-cut hipster dryad: Its a cinch to have an orgasm. I

can give an orgasm to my cat! And ever since, this book-as-bomb model has come to stand

for the progress of feminism in general: Naomi Wolf (The Beauty My th , 1990), Susan

Faludi (Backlash , 1991), Ariel Levy (Fem ale Chauvinist Pigs, 2005) big-selling first

books by American upper-journalists, young and clever and energetic, bright-eyed and

bushy-haired.

Unexpectedly, though, Engles film also captured the shadow, a living ghost, of something

else. In one especially mustardy-looking fragment, a young woman and a toddler in a

crochet tabard are seen falling out with each other in a dingy kitchen, over the foaming

horror of the twin-tub washing machine. It doesnt say so, but this moment comes from aBBC film called People for Tom orrow , made by Selma James in 1971 and now available on

open access on the BBC website. The film follows everyday women in Peckham, Belsize

Park, Bristol, reflecting on what might change in their lives and how to go about making

this happen, in a movement that is plain and concrete, but builds into an elegant dialectic.

Its very bad for children to just see the woman doing all this mopping-up process all the

time, the mother is saying in this fragment. Ive been fighting it all my life, myconditioning from my mother, and here I am doing the very same thing to my two

daughters.

Jamess Wages for Housework movement is now remembered, if at all, as a frippery, a

jokey badge pinned to a Wolfie Smith lapel. But actually it was an intellectually ambitious

attempt to synthesise Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism, and not with the usual

sellotaped hyphenations. Domestic work, while not recognised as work because not paid

for, is as necessary to the economy as the waged sort. The workforce needs to be fed,

clothed, cleaned for, comforted, as does its progeny, the workforce of the future. We place

foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure, James wrote with her

co-author, the Italian socialist-feminist writer Mariarosa Dalla Costa, in The Pow er of

Wom en and the Subversion of the Comm unity (1972). We assume that all women are

housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives. That is,

y y p p j y y p p

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on a world level, it is precisely what is particular to domestic work that determines a

womans place wherever she is and to whichever class she belongs.

For many years, the only widely available piece of Jamess writing has been this Pow er of

Women booklet, generally a good sign when you saw it on a new friends bookshelf, smalland shocking pink. The film, though, is a better introduction, and begins with James

herself, earphones on and thumping away at her typewriter: Like millions of women

everywhere, I am a typist. Im a housewife, a mother, and Ive been a factory worker. For 25

years Ive been involved in revolutionary politics. She was born in New York in 1930 and

came to Britain in the 1950s as the wife of C.L.R. James, whom she had met when she was

a teenage activist. Her writings, a selection of which will be published next year, presenther politics as emerging directly from her daily experience. On how C.L.R. helped her to get

started:

The way to do it, he said, is to take a shoebox and make a slit at the top; then

whenever you have an idea jot it down and slip the piece of paper into the

shoebox. After a while, you open the box, put all these sentences in order andyou have a draft I knew that if I stayed home from work to put the draft

together, I would end up cleaning the cooker or doing some other major piece

of housework, so I arranged to spend the day at a friends house I had no

distractions or excuses. I opened the shoebox, and by six or seven that evening,

just as hed said, I had the draft of a pamphlet.

The point of Wages for Housework was not to reduce politics to dirty dishes, but the

opposite: dirty dishes became one index of a job, a role, a domestic ballet that included

managing the tensions of and servicing in every other way those women and men who

do waged work, school work, housework and those made distraught by unemployment;

absorbing expressions of anger that are not allowed elsewhere; doing the volunteer stuff

no one else has time to bother with, from church societies to library support groups, from

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food co-ops to disaster appeals and all this going on constantly, ceaselessly, even more in

peasant economies than in richer ones. The major part of unseen and uncounted

housework, she added, is done in the non-industrial world. James also tried to uphold a

clarity and honesty about race and class differences among her comrades, without

brooding or sentimentality or presumptuousness or more-oppressed-than-thou guilt-

tripping:

What weve been trying to do is to develop a unified view of the world, that

is, a holistic view of all the divisions among us and how they connect, in order

to build the movement to undermine these divisions We are divided in

many, many ways. Naming and examining those divisions, we can come to a

unified conception of the real relations among us, both subtle and stark.

James has never been a popular figure in the Western womens movement, and is snubbed

in most mainstream accounts. There are accusations of fanaticism, cultishness, sectarian

behaviour. Like Jehovahs Witnesses, Jill Tweedie wrote in a 1976 piece reprinted in a

collection ofGuardian journalism, Selma James and her sister enthusiasts harangue

conferences, shout from soapboxes, gesticulate on television, burn with a strange fever.

Even Barbara Ehrenreich gets a little snitty: Battles broke out between lovers and spouses

over sticky countertops, piled-up laundry and whose turn it was to do the dishes, as

though there can be no way of thinking about domestic labour except treating it like a

sitcom, with all the sharpest lines reserved for you.

In People for Tomorrow there is a conversation, towards the end, between James and a

young man, sweet face and ginger sideburns, out shopping with his permed-and-set young

wife. How much time do you spend with your children? Selma asks, off camera.

Oh, very little, just one day a week, which is Sunday.

Dont you think youre missing something?

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The man agrees that hes missing the children, but can anyone suggest a better way?

Well, thats what Womens Liberation is trying to figure out, Selma says.

Do you think its worthwhile? she asks the wife, and the wife says No, and giggles. We

asked her what she thought she might lose, Selma says, and the wife says that she just

cant see a man with the children all day. I dont think anybody should be with the

children all day long, Selma says. But why shouldnt he be with the children some of the

day and you some of the day too, and perhaps even together? And perhaps even in a

neighbourhood, all the parents in the neighbourhood helping with the children?

Thats probably a good idea, the husband says. But youd have to alter the whole structureof work, for instance, wouldnt you, to break days up into half-days, as far as work goes?

Thats what we want to do, Selma says. Thats one of the ideas we want to explore.

Forty years on, and the changes are in some ways astonishing: where I live in South-East

London just up the road from where James filmed one of the rap groups its quite

common to see men caring for children, waged, in schools and nurseries, and, unwaged, inthe home. Part-time work is common, as is flexi-time, homeworking, freelancing, multi-

tasking. Equality is regulated by statute. Theres a state-funded nursery and a Sure Start

childrens centre in the primary school across the road; there are two libraries in easy

walking distance, four playgrounds, two parks; and many other things that, when you look

at them from a distance, make Camberwell look like the New Jerusalem, except that when

you come up close, you see how crummy they are, and compromised, and half-baked.

Perhaps another reason James gets missed out so often is because for more than half a

century, she has kept her attention patiently focused on such perpetually disappointing

realities. Why keep having your nose rubbed in all this when you could be reading about

something more amusing instead? And yet, if you stick with it, youll start to see why

people like her care so much about public services, crappy and underfunded though they

are, and likely to get so much worse. They give you a break, a safety net, a respite; and

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judgmentalLivin g Dolls (2010). Anti-porn porn, basically, with an interesting relationship

to prole-baiting the word vulgar neednt refer only to a persons state of undress.

From Porn ography : Men Possessing W omen (1981) to the ghastlyNew St at esm an article

of 2000, in which she wrote about her own drug-rape in a Paris hotel room, the exemplarof this stuff was Andrea Dworkin, who wrote again and again about sexual victimisation,

her own and that of other women, in fiction and non-fiction, in journalism and memoir. I

used to find it surprising that such a figure got written about so often, and with such

affection, in the broadsheet newspapers, until I realised: brilliant copy. Obsessive feminine

masochism infused with the ecstasy of public self-exposure, in the words of the excellent

Laura Kipnis. A perfect storm of high-profile narcissism, wrapped in an invitation forsocial rebuke.

What Dworkins writing manifestly wasnt, however, was any sort of thought-through

anti-rape campaigning. In the memoirHeartbreak(2002), the last book Dworkin

published before her death in 2005, she wrote: Ive spent the larger part of my adult life

listening to stories of rape I couldnt move, I could barely breathe I was afraid of

hurting her, the one woman, by a gesture that seemed dismissive or by a look on my face

that might be mistaken for incredulity.

Suppose you are that one woman. Would you turn for help to an egomaniacal victim-

magnet barely able to stop herself dashing off to write about her pain at your story?

Wouldnt you prefer the company of somebody quiet, damped-down, unflappable, with that

trained social-workerly restraint that can seem so bland and frustrating, but which comesinto its own the minute someone is actually hurt. How did I become who I am? Dworkins

memoir continues. I was torn to pieces by segregation and Vietnam. Apartheid broke my

heart. Apartheid in Saudi Arabia still breaks my heart I cant be bought or intimidated

because Im already cut down the middle. Andrea Dworkin, a cosmos, multitudinous and

all-suffering in her gigantic dungarees.

Members of the London Feminist Network featured centrally in the third Activists film in

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Vanessa Engles series Women. I suppose it all comes down to male violence against

women, one says. Sexual violence, says another. Sex trafficking and female genital

mutilation. Sexual violence, in particular domestic violence. Porn is like a huge issue for

me. It becomes impossible to leave your door without being mortally offended, says the

beaming and vibrant Finn Mackay, a star activist in her early thirties. That is a sick, sick

society.

Mackay says she first wanted to be a feminist when she was six or seven and heard about

Greenham Common. She left home as a teenager to join another womens peace camp,

then moved on to build the LFN, Object and the reborn Reclaim the Night. Shes now

writing a PhD about her feminist activities, goes to a feminist meeting most nights andgets at least a hundred feminist-activist emails a day. I have the feminist rage its a bit

like taking the blue pill in The Matrix you understand, you look differently at the

workings of society. Its a language of religion, almost, complete with conversion and

regeneration and separation from the surrounding world.

Denise Riley, as before:

Can anyone fully inhabit a gender without a degree of horror? How could

someone be a woman through and through, make a final home in that

classification without suffering claustrophobia? To lead a life soaked in the

passionate consciousness of ones gender at every single moment, to will to be a

sex with a vengeance these are impossibilities, and far from the aims of

feminism.

Further problems with gender self-saturation were luridly on display in an essay called

American Electra: Feminisms Ritual Matricide by Susan Faludi, published inHar pers

last year. American feminism hasnt figured out how to pass power down from woman

to woman, to bequeath authority to its progeny, she argued, and her essay collects a

hilarious list of indictments gathered from activist gatherings and scholarly conclaves:

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Da Vin ci Code. And as for feminist blogging, isnt it just one of those back-bedroom

hobbies, like home-made porn and crafting, that suddenly becomes visible because the

technology allows it? (Zadie Smith on the great tide of pornography in 2001: Its not all

bad news. Were talking women whose sexual desires are no longer sublimated into the

making of quilts.) Both Redfern/Aune and Banyard try hard to reach younger readers in

need of a basic introduction, and seem to have decided that doing so necessitates missing

out all the interesting stuff, politics and economics and feuds and splits. I suspect this view

may be mistaken.

Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers, Nina Power writes

towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Wom an . She then hands over to ToniMorrison speaking to Time magazine in 1989. On single-parent households: Two parents

cant raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community The little nuclear

family is a paradigm that just doesnt work. It doesnt work for white people or for black

people. Why we are hanging onto it I dont know. On unwed teenage pregnancies:

Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income

can The question is not morality, the question is money. Thats what were upset about.On how to break the cycle of poverty, given that you cant just hand out money: Why

not? Everybody [else] gets everything handed to them I mean what people take for

granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Thats the shared bounty of class.

What about education? If all these girls spend their teenage years having babies, they

wont be able to become teachers and brain surgeons, not to mention missing out on cheap

beer, storecards, halls of residence. To which Morrison, with splendour, rejoins: They can

be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons.

Thats my job. I want to take them in my arms and say: Your baby is beautiful and so are

you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me I will

take care of your baby. Thats the attitude you have to have about human life.

Power, who teaches philosophy at Roehampton University, comes to feminism from an

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campaigners, let alone in government, advertising, the popular media etc.

This has not always been the case. A critique of the tight-knit nuclear family as a breeding-

ground of consumerism, neurosis, misery in general, was central to feminism in the 1970s.

This is Adrienne Rich on the institution of motherhood in Of W oman Born (1976): Itcreates the dangerous schism between public and private life; it calcifies human choices

and potentialities. It has alienated women from our bodies by incarcerating us in them.

There is much to suggest, she wrote, that the male mind has always been haunted by the

force of the idea ofdependence on a w oman for life itself, the sons constant effort to

assimilate, compensate for, or deny the fact.

Richs book was extremely influential in its time, and such arguments resulted in the

growth of the nurseries and of shared parenting of 1970s North London, where attention

was given to childrens health requirements, play space, schooling, mothers housing

needs, anything else we could think of, according to Lynne Segal. And yet, a few decades

later, all this seems buried, Planet of the Apes style, under heaps of chicklit and

Supernanny andI Dont Know How Sh e Does It, and the collected pures of Annabel

Karmel. How has what went before been so thoroughly forgotten? The Power-Morrison

double act does exactly what such interventions are meant to, flashing up at a moment of

danger, laying bare the evidence of a crime.

Power makes no effort to explain how this happened. Instead of choking up on guilt, anger,

scholastic hairballs, she just waves the sheer crystalline simplicity of Morrisons insights

in front of her: water under the bridge, guys, no need to go on about it, so long as we all doour very best, from this moment on.

Except that suddenly, last spring or thereabouts, the emphasis of Powers blog changed.

Overnight, almost, it turned itself over to the anti-cuts movement, with flyers, listings,

e-petitions, links. And Power herself seemed to lose interest in vintage feminism, writing

instead about kettling and hyperkettling and the brain injuries sustained after last years

anti-tuition-fees demo in London by the philosophy student Alfie Meadows. Lecturers,

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Defend Your Students! she bolshily entitled her contribution to a collection called

Springtime: The N ew StudentRebellion s. It must be relevant that the first university

department to close as a result of government cuts was philosophy at Middlesex, where

both Power and Meadows studied.

And as if on cue, James and her comrades were out in force this June at the first London

SlutWalk, given that name after a police officer in Toronto suggested that if girls didnt

want to be raped of an evening, they should avoid dressing like sluts. So obviously lots of

people not just women wanted to dress up as sluts to point out the absurdity of this

position; and lots of people, like me, wanted to march in solidarity, wearing our usual

boring clothes. A little girl marched in a fairy costume. A transgender couple marched inmatching wigs, hiking sandals, gigantic inflatable penises. WHAT WERE WOMEN

WEARING IN LIBYA, CONGO, DARFUR WHEN THEY WERE RAPED? read one placard;

WE ARE ALL CHAMBERMAIDS, said another, with a little picture of Dominique

Strauss-Kahn; Selma James had a home-made sign with PENSIONER SLUT on it, and a

little heart.

A couple more items from the scrapbook. International Womens Day this March was

marked by the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup with a piece in the Observerabout her new

charity, the ingeniously acronymical Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust, aka Great.

The Great website has a big picture of Mariella, wan and elegant in a row of smiling

African women refugees: From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra

Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women. In May they

had a big charity auction in a new ultra-luxury hotel with the most exclusive guest list

and an unforgettable performance from Mark Knopfler. No wonder those refugee ladies

are grinning from ear to ear.

Also on International Womens Day, Power wrote in the Guardian about Rage of the Girl

Rioters, the title of aDaily Mail piece about the anti-tuition-fees day of action last

November. She saw theMails treatment as the latest in a long line of attacks on womenwho campaign directly against the state, such as suffragettes and rent strikers and

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bra-burners, miners wives and 1990s ladettes. What looks to be a moral criticism, she

writes, frequently masks a deeper political and economic fear what shall we do when

young women are academically successful, economically independent, socially confident

and not afraid to enjoy themselves? Could there be anything more terrifying?

Rage of the Girl Rioters! I thought as I was reading. This I have to see! So I looked at the

Mails website, and found some interestingly dialectical comments under the piece. I dont

appreciate my daughters picture being [in this section] She was actually coming out

from a crowd rush after nearly fainting! writes a lady from West London. In your typically

misogynistic attempt at smearing these protesters, says a young man from Kuala Lumpur,

I have to hand it to you. This must be one of the coolest collections of photos Ive seenfrom the day. Not so long ago, it was impossible to imagine young women, young people,

or anyone really, protesting in numbers about anything; now, theyre on the streets and

furious all the time. TheDaily Mail, concluding its analysis: Thus, for the first time in a

protest filled with confrontation and hatred, young girls took centre stage. Now everything

is up in the air and changing all the time.

Among the recent books consulted in the writing of this piece:

The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Men & Wom en Today by Kat Banyard (Faber,

2010)

Dead En d Fem in ism by Elizabeth Badinter (Polity, 2006)

Fem inism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Wom en's Labour an d Ideas to Exploit the

Worldby Hester Eisenstein (Paradigm, 2009)Sex, Race and Class Th e Perspective of W inn ing: A Selection of W ritings, 1952-2011 by

Selma James (PM Press, 2012)

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Wom en an d th e Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy (Free

Press, 2005)

How to Be a Wom an by Caitlin Moran (Ebury, 2011)

Meat Mar ket: Fem ale Flesh un der Capitalism by Laurie Penny (Zero, 2011)One Dimensional Wom an by Nina Power (Zero, 2009)

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Recla im in g t he F W ord: Th e N ew Fem in ist Movem en tby Catherine Redfern and Kristin

Aune (Zed, 2010)

Dream ers of a New Day by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2010)

Vol. 33 No. 24 15 December 2011 Jenny Turner As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes

(print version)

pages 11-15 | 8120 words

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 1 5 January 2012

From Richard Beck

I think that Jenny Turner and I want the same thing: a revolutionary feminism

committed to overcoming the family, transforming economic life and providing people

with better choices than the ones currently offered them (LRB, 15 December 2011). It is

rare to see someone want these things in writing, in public, in a mainstream

publication. So why was her essay so hard for me to like? Mostly, it is that Turner wants

to use historical analysis to figure out what the future will be like, and her history is

garbled and wrong.

For example, she points out that Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed suffrage for freedmen

in the years following the Civil War. Stanton, along with many other first-wave

American feminists, was an abolitionist first. Abolitionism taught them organisation,

political tactics and rhetorical fire, and they spent decades giving speeches, circulating

pamphlets, and being called nigger lovers as they walked down the street. It was only

after the Civil War, with abolition completely achieved, that Stanton and other

feminists lodged their opposition to the 14th and 15th Amendments. The reason is they

expected a little reciprocity from the cause to which they had devoted so many years,

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and got none; those Amendments let male-only suffrage go unchallenged. It is perfectly

legitimate to criticise Stantons decision to oppose these amendments, but it is

contemptuous to imply that it was made on the basis of nothing more than

self-absorption.

Who ever heard of a radical-feminist movement taking its understanding of

historical change from a man? Turner asks. Well, everybody, actually. Shulamith

Firestone wrote that Freud grasped the crucial problem of modern life. There was also

Marx, who radical feminists discussed (and still discuss) all the time. She claims that

consciousness-raising was invented by lesbian separatists, women who wanted to build

a man-free, women-only tradition of their own. This is completely backwards. Radical

feminists of all kinds invented consciousness-raising because they felt domestic life hadisolated women from one another, and that it might be useful to have a little space to

work out ideas together. The lesbian separatism came later.

These details matter, especially in an essay that gives the impression of a strange

contempt for feminism in general. Whenever Turner finds an event, or a protest, or an

idea that she likes, it is usually some exceptional individual woman who is behind it.

Whenever she disapproves of something, then feminism, or Womens Liberation, or

libbers, or the radical-feminist movement is to blame. I sympathise with almost

everything that Turner wants for feminisms future, and I agree with her that certain

strains of feminist thought have been misguided and counterproductive. But she also

seems to want to do without any kind of movement at all, or at least to forget about any

movement that preceded her writing her essay.

Richa r d Beck

Brooklyn, New York

From Michael Nabavian

Jenny Turner is disappointed in Western feminism for too often wanting to have its

cake (by adopting a critical stance towards whatever seems to hinder women from

having the lives they want, or ought to want) and eat it (by declining to challenge the

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economic and familial structures within which these hindrances come about). But

Turners own attempt at a radical challenge to the world as it is does not inspire

confidence. She quotes with approval Toni Morrisons claim that the nuclear family

just doesnt work it causes narcissism, consumerism, overeating, undereating and

self-harm, according to Turner and applauds Morrisons vision of a world in which ateenage single mother who aspires to train as a brain surgeon can readily do so, thanks

to fellow community members willingness to take care of her baby for free. Turner

assures us that the rightness of this line of thought is obvious once you come to think

about it; presumably this is why she presents no evidence to support the correctness of

the diagnosis, much less the viability of the solution.

Michae l Nab avian

London N5

From Andrew McGettigan

In her piece on feminism Jenny Turner incidentally misrepresents the motives behind

the closure of Middlesex Universitys Centre for Research in Modern European

Philosophy, now transferred to Kingston University (LRB, 15 December 2011).Government cuts did not lie behind the decision. Rather, philosophy did not fit with

Middlesexs international strategy and the university knew that by closing the centre, it

could keep the money awarded for its strong research performance in 2008 and use it

for something else. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will continue to

give Middlesex something in the region of 175,000 per year until the results of the

next national assessment of university research are known sometime around 2015-16

even though most of the staff who generated that income are now at Kingston.

Middlesex closed its highest rated research unit in order to take a profit on it.

An dr ew M cGet t i gan

London N1

Vol. 34 No. 2 26 January 2012

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From Beatrix Campbell

Jenny Turners scrapbook on feminism begins and ends with girl rioters flat-out joy

and what might be called shopping situationism (LRB, 15 December 2011). The young

women who joined last summers riots are, she tells us, the problem with feminism.

But what is this problem? Young women losing their heads or feminists who didnt?

Yes, the riots were a problem: the medium collective larceny and incendiary violence

obscured the inaugural message, that a black man, Mark Duggan, had been shot to

death by the Metropolitan Police. The riots exposed a crisis of politics: a cruel gap

between the cause and consequences of Duggans death. That crisis is those girls

tragedy; it is our tragedy. Why doesnt Turner address this? What has feminism done to

deserve her rant?

One soul is exempt from Jenny Turners splatter critique: Selma James. Those of us

who belong to the Womens Liberation generation remember well Jamess Wages for

Housework campaign. Jenny Turner is right about one thing: James was never popular.

Her virtuoso sectarianism was not attractive, and her leftist populism named an

important issue (unpaid domestic labour) without challenging the power structure that

produced it.

The Womens Liberation movement didnt adopt Wages for Housework because it

didnt challenge the patriarchal political economy, or the domestic division of labour, or

men. Far from being an intellectually ambitious attempt to synthesise Marxism,

feminism and postcolonialism, its theory was crude and its practice toxic.

However, a host of women certainly did undertake intellectually ambitious work.Juliet Mitchells essay, Women: The Longest Revolution, published in 1966 inNew

Left R ev iew , a pioneering analysis of the lacunae in Marxism (relations of social

reproduction and the sexual division of labour), was a founding text of British

feminism. Womens Liberation was animated by a torrent of intellectual endeavour and

awareness-raising (derided by Turner as sitting around but really another term for

thinking). This didnt impinge much on Wages for Housework, or on Turner either. Shefinds alluring a slogan most of us thought was bonkers.

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identity politics but as a way and this is the point, after all to overcome the

subjective and social injuries of subordination.

Strange, says Turner, how often feminism hasnt engaged with race and class. Strange, I

say, that she hasnt registered the intensity of these engagements. Cue her allusion to

the white American abolitionist and suffrage campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Turner says she opposed votes for black freedmen. No, not quite: she insisted on votes

for black men, and women blackandwhite, at the same time. It split the suffrage

movement. The great Sojourner Truth, born into slavery, had sympathy for this

argument. She told the American Equal Rights Convention in 1867 that man is so

selfish that he has got womens rights and his own too he keeps them all to himself.

Multiple oppressions and modalities of power have always inevitably circulated infeminist politics.

This brings us to Turners larger problem: politics itself. She gets all roused up over the

wrong question. Why did a book catalyse feminism, she asks. Being a book, it only

works for middle-class women. So, working-class women dont read? Actually,

Womens Liberation bounced out of activism not texts: the detonator was black and

white womens humiliation within the liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s:

the Freedom Rides, the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. The American Womens

Liberation movement was born out of resistance to racism, war and male chauvinism,

in that order. These histories are withheld from Jenny Turners undignified tantrum.

We learn that she is angry but she is angry with the wrong people.

Bea t r i x Cam pb e l l

London NW1

From Jim Valentine

Jenny Turner attributes the phrase straight up the down escalator to the economic

historian Teresa Amott. Actually it derives from Bel Kaufmans title for her novel Up

the Dow n Staircase, published in 1965. The novel portrays the challenges, frustrations

and triumphs of an idealistic English teacher in an inner-city school and was made into

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a film and a stage play.

J i m Va le n t in e

Woodland Hills, California

Vol. 34 No. 3 9 February 2012

From Jenny Turner

Beatrix Campbells letter about my piece on feminism raises a lot of interesting and

interconnected questions and its going to take me some time to think about them

before I can respond in a joined up and useful manner (Letters, 26 January). But she

can be assured that I am thinking hard already and will continue to do so.

One small thing, however, about Wages for Housework. I wasnt around in the 1970s so

I dont know anything at all first-hand about how members of this group might have

conducted themselves at conferences and so on. From the Selma James writings I have

read, however, it doesnt seem to me true that her ideas fail to challenge the patriarchal

division of domestic labour. I realise that this is the criticism levelled at James by many

socialist feminists e.g. in Campbells own Sw eet Freedom : The Strug gle for W om ens

Liberation (co-authored with Anna Coote, 1982) but it really does seem to me to miss

a useful point. Once youve named unpaid domestic labour as a category, doesnt it

become much easier precisely to break down and move beyond that division? And isnt

there something to be said for a form of politics that makes that point so clearly, and

with wit?

I didnt mention Juliet Mitchell in relation to this question because unlike James she

doesnt have a new book out, and my piece was basically structured as a review of

recent books. Itll make an interesting topic, though, for some future feminist historian.

Is the Wages for Housework approach really that incompatible with more orthodox

socialist feminism, or might the two traditions not in many ways work well together? I

wish I had made this point better in the piece as published, and that I had given more

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t B iti h i li t f i i i l Id t i l t t if I i t it



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space to British socialist feminism in general Id certainly try to if I was going to write

a sequel. Though at the moment, Campbell may be relieved to hear, Im nowhere near

doing such a thing.

J e n n y Tu r n e r

London SE5

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Ltd., 1997-2012 ^ Top

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Documents

Jenny Turner · As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes_ On Feminism · LRB 15 December 2011 (print version)