The Atlantic, to which I have been a diffident subscriber over the years, recently ran a
piece on Erin Pizzey, a British domestic violence advocate (
h/t Janice Fiamengo). As it turns out, Pizzey is a complicated and interesting figure whose violent and verbally abusive mother sparked her subsequent political interests — ones which sometimes aligned with institutional feminism, and sometimes did not. That story, a much longer and better one, is told in her autobiography
This Way To The Revolution, and also in the links Helen Lewis'
Atlantic story provides. Particularly, her responses in this
interview are enlightening:
Dean: So, you have recently, in the last year or so, published a book called This Way to the Revolution: A Memoir from Peter Owen Publishers. What can you tell me about that book, Erin?
Erin: I’ve always tried to tell the truth about the
beginnings. I was one of the first people in England to get involved
with the Women’s Movement and what I saw there, I knew perfectly well
was going to be extremely destructive. And, when I began to stand up at
these great big Collective meetings—and interestingly enough there were a
lot of women from America who came over with initial instruction to
show the British women how to be radical feminists. They’re a pretty
frightening crowd and I got screamed at a lot partly because I said many
women like myself, who are married, with or without children are
perfectly happy to have the choice to be able to stay home. So, in the
end last year actually … it took me 10 years to get this book published,
it was turned down by every major publisher in this country. ...
Pizzey's father worked for the British Foreign Office in Tientsin at the time of the communist revolution, so she had an up-close look at their methods:
[The communists] had marched up the driveway and [her parents] were arrested. They were very
lucky, my parents, because they were just under house arrest. Most of
the others were put into prisons. ... So, I had no
love of Communism from the very beginning. From what I saw when I was in
these great big collectives was really Marxism. We were all organized
into groups in our own homes and told that we must have
consciousness-raising sessions. And I remember the woman who came to our
[feminist] consciousness-raising and when she finished, I said this has nothing to
do with women, this is actually Marxist. I said so we’re supposed to go
to work full-time and put our children into care provided by the
state—like the Communist government—and why are we calling this
liberation? And so very quickly I was booted out and went off to open a
community center for mothers and children. ...
So the feminists of that era drew a lot of their playbooks directly from the communists. It's an interesting story, but to Lewis, it's mainly a story about
Lewis:
Reading [This Way To The Revolution], I could feel the familiar grooves of the arguments about feminists versus “ordinary women.” There has long been a tendency to depict feminism as an elite project, and university-educated women are more likely to describe themselves as feminists.
Finding herself promoted deputy editor at the
New Statesman, she got caught in the maelstrom following the publication of Caitlin Moran's
How To Be A Woman, with now long-established patterns of insult and
magic words hurled like so many hand grenades: "privileged", "transphobe", "
white feminist", and on and on. She receives a Twitter pile-on that didn't really end until ... wait, whose story is this? It could be worse, but it could have been a lot shorter, too.
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