F 'em!
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My next call was to Shulamith Firestone, who has been very reclusive after her 1970 groundbreaking book, The Dialectic of Sex. Like Millett, she wrote her first book at twenty-five and had already founded and left several influential New York feminist groups, such as Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists, by the time it was published. Dialectic had a tight, ambitious, radical argument. “The missing link between Marx and Freud” was how it was billed on the back cover. The point of feminism, Firestone argued, was to “overthrow the oldest, most rigid” class system—caste based on sex. The book was a bestseller, but Firestone left the movement soon after it came out and fell off everyone’s radar. In 1998, she published a lovely, tiny book of disturbing vignettes about people with mental illnesses, called Airless Spaces. She called me when the book came out to see if I would review it. I seized the moment to get her involved in the classics project. After many phone calls with me, my agent, and the editor, in which we agreed to very specific terms (no new introduction, the same artwork as the 1970 edition, no publicity responsibilities on her end), Firestone agreed to participate. My agent negotiated for months to get the rights to Dialectic back from William Morrow.
Days before she was to sign the contract, Firestone called and said sorry for the trouble, but she had decided she no longer wanted the book to come out. It hadn’t made her life any better when it came out originally, and she didn’t want to go through any of that shit again. (“Refusing a career as a professional feminist, Shulamith Firestone found herself in an ‘airless space,’ approximately since the publication of her first book The Dialectic of Sex,” reads the back cover of Airless Spaces.) I sputtered something about how my generation should have access to the book, that it could change lives and consciousness, and didn’t she care about that?
No, frankly, she didn’t. “If your generation really wants it, there are a few old copies available on Amazon.com,” she said. “I don’t feel a responsibility to bring out the book just because you want it. I’m very sorry.”
There had been so much back and forth, months and months of negotiating these tricky concessions, hours of phone calls, and then poof! It was over. I couldn’t believe that I thought it was the patriarchal publishing industry keeping these books out of younger feminists’ hands when, in a way, it was the authors themselves. As I came to terms with the fact that my vision for a series of feminist classics wasn’t going to be realized, I started to see the lesson in Firestone’s actions. Her book was a challenge to the inevitability of the female role, especially that of the mother who has to forgo her own needs by constantly privileging the needs of her progeny. It’s true that men spend significant amounts of time mentoring other men—it’s the positive side of the old boys’ network—but men don’t feel that they owe other men this. With women, perhaps because we’ve only recently entered the public sphere, there is a sense that mentoring and torch passing steal from one’s own hard-won store of power.
LESSON #3: DO IT YOURSELF.
By saying that she wasn’t going to give me or my generation any intellectual nourishment—what I perceived as our inheritance, our due—Firestone spurred me to look at myself and my own book to fill that role. The book I was writing with Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future, would have to be an “important feminist book” if I thought the world needed such work so badly.
LESSON #4: FEMINISM MEANS REJECTING RECEIVED WISDOM.
Which brings me to the challenge implied by the Veteran Feminists panel: Are today’s feminist books important? Obviously, I think so. And although we may not be writing the “first” book about rape or the “first” nonsexist children’s book, we are writing the books taught in women’s studies programs across the nation. We are writing the books (and zines and songs) that inspire girls and women and guys to say, “I didn’t realize that I was a feminist until I read your book” (or zine or song, and so on). We are, most critically, writing the first feminist books written by people raised with feminism “in the water,” as we argue in Manifesta.
Amy and I sought to describe the feminism we saw every day in our peers. In doing so, we had to shake off the received wisdom of current feminism. We had to discard the idea that the only important books were “radical” ones in which patriarchy was the problem, where women defining themselves as a “class” was the clear solution. We had to repudiate the myth that younger people rejected feminism itself, and point out that they (we) may be rejecting a definition of feminism coined in another time.
There is clear value in the past—especially the singular history of the Second Wave, when so much changed so rapidly. In a relatively few years, these women went from facing back-alley butchers to creating a movement for legal abortions, from girl writers never getting assignments to important journalists and authors. By the end of the ’70s, there were female firefighters and words for—thus acknowledgment of—date rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. There was a women’s music scene and a national feminist magazine.
But there, I believe, is even more value in the present. Manifesta was published in October 2000 and is now taught at hundreds and hundreds of schools, from Harvard to Winona State, from Lynwood Alternative High School in Ohio to McGill University in Canada. There are indeed feminist books published right now (Slut!, Cunt, Don’t Believe the Hype, Listen Up, Black White Jewish, Stiffed, Yell-oh Girls, Harmful to Minors, Body Outlaws, Colonize This!, and many more) that are relevant to the thousands of men and women taking women’s studies courses today.
“I would say any band that’s operating today is more important than bands that came before. They’re more important because they exist,” said Ian MacKaye, the lead singer of Fugazi, in an interview in the Punk Planet anthology We Owe You Nothing. Existing feminism is widespread, permeating every corner of the culture and every person in it. More people identify with feminist values than did thirty years ago. Furthermore, young people today (male and female) have grown up in a more feminist environment. People live feminist lives without knowing the label—women run marathons and universities, men are stay-at-home dads. Given this, those wise words from Karen Durbin can be turned back on the Second Wave: Read our books and participate in our events. Even if you spit out 99 percent of it, reading the books and understanding what younger feminists are doing is a feminist act.
The much-lamented and longed-for radical movement was both a boon and a curse for writing, by the way. In the ’70s, radical feminists regarded writers—even the important ones—as “ripping off the movement,” as Alix Kates Shulman reminded everyone when she received her medal at the VFA event. The ideas were the movement’s; any attempt to sign one’s own name was an act of unforgivable egotism. Writers were the mercenaries in this revolutionary war, fighting by writing, simply in order to make a buck or forge a male-identified career. A writer has to write, though, and she’ll do it even if she’s misunderstood or maligned. As the women at VFA kept saying, the feminist writer’s job is to tell the truth. Those women, writing in a different time, were also writing to answer an ignorant question posed by their male colleagues: “Why are there so few great women writers?” Their answer to that bit of received wisdom was a flood of work and a call to sexist, patriarchal society to open its damn eyes.
LESSON #5: YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT, BUT SOMETIMES YOU CAN.
Coming full circle, the Feminist Classics series actually worked out. We had hesitated about approaching Germaine Greer, certain that she would say no because of a somewhat nasty biography of her published by a subsidiary of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but she agreed to let us bring out The Female Eunuch. It appeared in March 2002. Around the same time, Firestone called to say she had changed her mind. She wanted The Dialectic of Sex to be available after all.
IN THE YEARS since I initiated the Feminist Classics series, my opinion about the enterprise has evolved. I still believe the books deserve to be in print—but not because they are more important than the books written by my peers. I beli
eve in the series for the sake of parity. Every movement has its classic texts. We deserve access to ours.
—Originally published in Dissent, spring 2002
EPILOGUE
In the decade since this piece was published, we’ve come out with only one more feminist classic, the novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. The book is wonderful and still widely read and relevant, despite its being forty years old. The need for the Feminist Classics project has diminished a bit during this transition in publishing. Shulamith Firestone’s contention that her book is findable if someone wants to find it is more true than it was then. Still, women’s history—and particularly the stories and contributions of the Second Wave—are not embedded in American history classes the way the stories of other movements are. I am constantly inspired by how daring, smart, and liberated younger people are and at the same time baffled that there is almost no common understanding of feminist history. Women and women’s achievements continue to be erased from the history taught in our schools.
So, to echo Karen Durbin, one of the ways to combat that erasure is to educate oneself and to read the books that came before—not all of them, but an array—and get a sense of the figures and the times. If I became school’s chancellor at Feminist Fantasy Camp, I would recommend the following reading list as a great start:The Mermaid and the Minotaur, by Dorothy Dinnerstein
The Dialectic of Sex, by Shulamith Firestone
Daring to Be Bad, by Alice Echols
Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
Ain’t I a Woman, by bell hooks
Killing the Black Body, by Dorothy Roberts
Backlash, by Susan Faludi
The Girls Who Went Away, by Ann Fessler
Manifesta, by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
Push, by Sapphire
When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, by Joan Morgan
The best part of being a feminist is that we don’t have to wait for others to tell us what is important or valuable—we figure it out ourselves. I imagine you will make your own list of great feminist books, send that list to friends, and anoint them classics. For that list of books to grow, evolve, and continue to be passed around is the best possible legacy for the Feminist Classics series. It transforms an individual’s passionate endeavor into a chain letter for feminist consciousness.
WOMYN’S MUSIC 101
The feminist historian Gerda Lerner once said that the only continuous thread in women’s history is that it is constantly lost and recovered, lost and recovered. Therefore, it always seems as if big leaps for women’s rights sprung fully formed, like Athena, out of the head of some daddy figure who got there first, and with no connection to the radical women who laid the groundwork. Witness the Second Wave: In the late 1960s, many of the women who became the leaders of feminism were rooted in male-led civil rights and Students for a Democratic Society movements. They honed their revolutionary skills while getting sexually harassed and confined to coffee-girl and typing duty. Still, they initially felt no relationship to the bluestockings, the radical suffragists who marched for their rights one hundred years earlier, decked out in hideously unfashionable legwear.
But then they got it. By 1968, women’s liberationists like Shulamith Firestone decried the “fifty years of ridicule,” the scorn heaped on those brave women before anyone picked up their torch. These women turned their raised consciousness and organizing skills away from SDS and SNCC and toward an independent movement for women’s liberation. Soon, Shulamith Firestone and others, like Ellen Willis, Kathie Sarachild, and Alix Kates Shulman created the Redstockings, a radical feminist group that paid homage to the First Wave bluestockings (an epithet hurled at early feminists). The name also incorporated a political experience that those women shared—being red diaper babies, the children of communist or communist-leaning radical parents.
Flash forward: It’s 1999, and the fear of being called a bluestocking has been replaced by the Second Wave progeny’s distrust of being a (hairy, humorless, possibly gay) “feminist.” Similarly, among female recording artists in a male-dominated business, there is the terror of having one’s work labeled “women’s music,” and thus binned with records by “cheesy singer-songwriters” of the 1970s, who, the stereotype goes, played kumbaya folk while wearing overalls, smocks, and terrible bi-level haircuts. So, to elaborate on the insight of Gerda Lerner, another distinguishing feature of women’s history is that the fear of being identified as “dorky” or “gay” precipitates our dropping the reins on huge chunks of history.
So, twenty years before Lilith Fair was a twinkle in the founder, Sarah McLachlan’s, eye, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was bringing female acts, all the way down to the bands and crew, to a female audience. Three years before Michigan put the “y” in a word that didn’t know it needed one, there was a Y chromosome–free music festival held annually in Champaign-Urbana. Seventeen years before Ani DiFranco bucked the major labels by starting Righteous Babe, there was Olivia Records. Meanwhile, Olivia was the first indie women’s label to train female engineers and producers, but not the first label to be owned by a woman. A quarter century earlier, Mary Lou Williams, a jazz pianist and composer, started Mary Records. You’ve heard of Lilith Fair and perhaps the fact that women dominated the year before Lilith was founded, but do you know about the radical women who seeded this flower? Let’s talk about Ladyslipper, Olivia, Michigan, and Cris Williamson and, while we’re at it, Riot Grrrl and Mr. Lady.
IN 1976, FEMINISM had just found its way to a commune in the rural South, and Laurie Fuchs, age twenty-four, was electrified. After attending the women’s music festival in Champaign-Urbana, she discovered her outlet. “Someone had gone to a Holly Near concert in Durham and brought an album back. It was the live one, and I wanted it,” Fuchs recalls. “But there was no way to get one except from the artist in the lobby. That was distribution at the time.”
Pondering this inability to find music by women who weren’t the token Joni, Joan, or Judy led to doing some research. As it happened, Fuchs discovered a rich history of women who had taken control of their careers—at least for a time—and an even deeper history of women whose work was lost because it wasn’t archived. A major label recorded Melvina Reynolds’ music, for example, but then dumped her masters in a vault and never released them—a typical story at the time and even now. Elizabeth Cotton, a maid for the Seeger family, had written “Freight Train,” later made famous by Peter, Paul and Mary. When Fuchs, now living in Durham, made visits to the libraries of University of North Carolina and Duke to expand her research, each library had a measly two or three recordings by women—“basically Bessie Smith and that’s it”—among thousands and thousands by men. “I had this dawning realization—it wasn’t that the history of women’s music didn’t exist,” says Fuchs. “That history just wasn’t documented. So I thought I’d start this tiny little mail-order business and take my table around to local events.”
That year, Fuchs created a mail-order catalog devoted to distributing women’s music. She realized that Ladyslipper had to function on two levels: uncover the history of women in music and make recordings by female artists available. “When I first started the catalog, I thought I could cover everything recorded by women,” says Fuchs, laughing. “In the catalog right now, we run between 1,500 and 2,000 titles—it’s more than we find other places, but it doesn’t begin to touch the entire body of work.” Compared with huge independent distributors like Koch, Ladyslipper is small change, but Fuchs manages to offer the world’s most comprehensive annotated catalog of recordings by ladies from all genres—classical women who composed anonymously, world music, punk, and, of course, “women’s music.”
Women’s music is where Fuchs began, distributing releases from a wave of new performers—Alix Dobkin, Ferron, Meg Christian, Cris Williamson—who were making music “for, by, and about women.” Better, these women were bucking rules about what they were allowed to look and sound like, and learning ho
w to be engineers, backup musicians, and producers. In short, a coalition of self-determining women in the music industry was being built. All of these new womyn were on indie labels (Women’s Wax Works was Alix Dobkin’s; Redwood was Holly Near’s), but the most influential, quintessential, lesbionic label was Olivia Records.
Olivia, named for a feisty heroine in a pulp novel who fell in love with her headmistress at a French boarding school, was the brainchild of ten radical feminists (Furies and Radicalesbians) living in Washington, D.C. They wanted to create a feminist organization with an economic base so that activists wouldn’t burn out or have to go find a “real” job, but they didn’t know what this should be. Meanwhile, an unknown singer-songwriter named Cris Williamson came to D.C. to do a show and was shaken to greet three hundred to four hundred women fans. “She became so nonplussed that she forgot the words to her song, and out of the audience came this voice and it was Meg Christian singing it back to her,” says Judy Dlugacz, a founder and current owner of Olivia. The next day, on the radio show “Sophie’s Parlour,” Cris suggested that it would be cool if women had their own label. Olivia was born.
In 1973, the collective put out a 45 with Meg Christian on one side and Cris Williamson on the other. Yoko Ono responded and said that she wanted to do a side project with Olivia, but the collective lovingly declined. “The image that we were projecting was that we had our own music and vision,” Dlugacz recalls. “And I think we weren’t smart enough at the time to realize that [Yoko] could have been a good thing.” Without hooking up with anyone high profile, they made $12,000 with that 45, enough to put out Meg’s first record and, soon after, Williamson’s—The Changer and the Changed.