INTRODUCTION:
WE BEGIN WITH WHAT IS NOT YET COMPLETE
Feminism is unfinished business.
The reasons it is unfinished are legion: political, economic, social, experiential, having to do with violence and race and capital, families and states and empires, sexuality and reproduction and the actions of men. It is unfinished because gender is still a reason to be killed, harmed, denied, exploited. But there is one more reason: feminism is unfinished because it is the work of imagination.
Feminism is a politics of emancipation, and the first thing needed for such a politics is to see the need for one. For women to begin advocating for themselves meant an imagining of women together as a collective force. To call yourself a feminist is to insist on connecting your life to others, and that was and still is a political act.
For example: in 1892, African American scholar and educator Anna Julia Cooper wrote in A Voice from the South,
Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”
Cooper spoke in the first person I but also adamantly in the we of black womanhood, crediting the first edition’s authorship to “A Black Woman of the South.” Her charge—that liberation was truest when entered into with those who were most marginal—was also a challenge to her audience. She asked of us to follow her I in order to make a we.
Two decades later, in the first women’s literary journal in Japan, Seitō, Yosano Akiko argued that claiming the I was a revolutionary act in a society where women were seen as inferior. That is, claiming the I could tell about the conditions of the we:
I desire to write entirely in the first person.
I who am a woman.
I desire to write entirely in the first person.
I. I.
One century later, the Tamil and Dalit poet Sukirtharani spoke both for herself and all those living at the frayed edges of societies and towns. In her 2012 poem “A faint smell of meat,” the poet’s I blends into her we:
In their minds
I, who smell faintly of meat,
my house where bones hang
stripped entirely of flesh,
and my street
where young men wander without restraint
making loud music
from coconut shells strung with skin
are all at the furthest point of our town.
But I, I keep assuring them
we stand at the forefront.
The productive tension between the I and the we—between the personal and the political, between the social expectations given and the life one lives, between articulating experience and claiming political voice—is the driving struggle and foundational act of feminist practice.
As this book shows, this is a practice enacted again and again around the world, often in tandem with other movements of revolutionary change: during wars for empire and territory, Europe’s waves of revolution, the abolitionist struggle against slavery, the spread of capitalist modernity across the globe, workers’ battles for labor rights, the post-colonial independence movements in the Global South, the black freedom struggle in the United States, the rise of the digital age. Modern Western feminism is often historicized as a series of waves, from the first wave of women’s suffrage and abolition activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the second wave of the 1960s to ’70s that took up harassment and rape, marriage and abortion, lesbianism and sexual double standards. The 1990s and 2000s brought the third wave, with its reclamation of sex and its insistence on diversity and individual empowerment, and now we are said to be in a fourth wave fueled by technology, the #MeToo movement, intersectionality, and trans politics. Historically speaking, these definitions are about as useful as they are incomplete, but the metaphor is instructive: waves keep breaking upon the shore.
Because feminist politics coalesces around bodies forced into a hierarchy of gender and sex, part of the work of feminism is also to imagine a future when the idea of “woman” as an oppressed group no longer needs to exist. That is, feminism sets out to destroy the conditions of its own emergence. As the Argentinian feminist movement Ni Una Menos put it, as their call for a women’s strike spread across Latin America and the world in 2017: “We organize to change everything.”
“Feminism” as a term didn’t come into common English usage until the 1910s, a particularly revolutionary worldview born out of the women’s movement of the nineteenth century and the battle for suffrage. The word was first included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1933 and defined legally: “the advocacy for women’s rights.”
In making selections for this book, I’ve understood feminism to be the twinning of the self to the collective, from exploring what it is to inhabit a gendered body to breaking apart the idea of “woman” altogether. You’ll see myths of female power as well as calls for legal reforms, private musings alongside revolutionary theory. Since part of feminist practice as I understand it is to transform a world that wants to minimize you, you will also hear from women not talking about women and feminism at all but instead conducting scientific experiments, fighting racial violence, struggling for national independence or socialism or communism, fighting apartheid, discovering comets, forming workplace unions, making art. All of these practices are, to my mind, part of the feminist work of expanding the scope of the world.
You will not see women’s voices here who sought in some way to minimize the world, narrow it, keep it conservative. Versions of “feminism” have been used as a justification for imperial wars, as a form of white supremacy or a language borrowed by states to overwrite the voices of women seeking redress from state-sanctioned violence, as cover for denying the many differentiations of race, sexuality, class, bodies, citizenship status. Where we do hear from women who have at some point aligned themselves with exclusive projects, my co-editors and I have noted this for the reader and decided to include the piece because we believe it has had some long-lasting impact on expanding the political imagination of feminism: it has helped give us the tools to push against exclusion and make the world bigger.
In Old English, the word woman was a combination of the word for “wife” and the word for “man.” As man just meant “person,” woman was thus a “wifely person.” Very obviously, the word is flawed. Recognizing its limitations is also part of feminism’s work.
Consider the testimony of Thomas Hall, an English colonist in Virginia. Hall’s story emerges in the historical archive because in 1692, the male-presenting Hall’s identity and genitals came under scrutiny from colonial Virginia’s highest court for laying with a servant woman known as “Great Besse.” Hall, born as Thomasine, donned men’s clothing to fight in France and to emigrate to America. When the court demanded to know “ether hee were man or a woeman,” Hall replied that he was both.
This book enters feminism through Hall’s eyes, not the court’s. In the court’s zealous demand to pin down gender identity and regulate unruly bodies and desires, I find the structure of oppression I believe feminism fights against and imagines beyond. In the regulation and constraint of all of us made to be women or men, there is a shared, if ever-shifting, ground for political work.
The women in this book are visible in the historical record because they were able to use words to scratch their mark on the surface of the world. Each voice marks the many who were left out of the archive, who could not write or publish or act in public, whose words and actions have been lost. Their absent chorus stands behind the voices that appear here.
As you read, let the women’s words pull on you.
Words can be a claim—Greek lyric poet Sappho, 590 BCE:
although they are
only breath, words
which I command
are immortal.
Or a celebration—Buddhist nun Sumangalamata, collected in the Therigatha, the oldest collection of women’s literature in India, 500s BCE:
Free, I am free!
How Glad I am to be free
from my pestle.
My cooking pot seems
worthless to me.
And I can’t even bear
to look at his sun-umbrella—
my husband disgusts me!
Words can be a complaint—an anonymous poet in medieval Spain:
Why should I be with a husband bound
who merely orders me around?
Or a threat—Lucrezia Marinella, part of the Venetian intellectual class, 1601:
If women, as I hope, wake themselves from the lengthy slumber by which they are oppressed, then these ungrateful and overbearing men would learn humility.
Or a force—American renegade Mary MacLane, 1902:
If I could live, and if I could succeed in writing out my living, the world itself would feel the heavy intensity of it.
Words can mark the coming storm—Zeina binti Mwinyipembe Sekinyaga writing a letter to a Tanzanian regional newspaper in 1926:
Know ye that we women are bereaved without a death, are hungry in the midst of plenty, and are dead while still living.
Or promise lust and adventure—Hayashi Fumiko, in her autobiographical novel of a female drifter looking for meaning and whiskey, 1928:
Words can invoke those unable to speak—Chicana writer and activist Cherríe Moraga, 1979:
I am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother speaking for her
And words can defy—Mauritanian poet Mubaraka bint Al-Barra, on writing in a country where words are the province of men, 1994:
I belong to a social category … where to be a woman poet means to question the very foundation of womanhood.
Words, it turns out, can help us live. As bint Al-Barra tells us, despite the burning of her books in the 1980s, “I simply had to continue writing.”
For those who have been collectively denied, words carve out space in which to exist. As American poet Emily Dickinson, master of the precise and cutting phrase, wrote, “She dealt her pretty words like blades.”
This is more than metaphor. Sometimes, when a woman’s words didn’t enter the historical record, her cutting actions did. For example, Michele de Cuneo, an Italian nobleman who sailed with Columbus, described trying to rape an indigenous woman in the Americas. He ended up cut:
While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun.
So let us end with a description from the year 1100, of the Japanese female samurai Tomoe Gozen:
Once her sword was drawn, even gods and devils feared to fight against her. Indeed, she was a match for a thousand.
Let each voice in this book be a match for a thousand. Let each voice cut.