International Women’s Day and feminism every day
In her book published last year, Amia Srinivasan wrote: “Feminist theory is grounded in what women think when they are by themselves, what they say to each other on the picket line and on the assembly line and on the street corner and in the bedroom, what they have tried to say to their husbands and fathers and sons and bosses and elected officials a thousand times over.”
In trying to think about how best to mark International Women’s day today, I went back to read it. I was struggling with the question of, as a City paper, do I write about diversity in our boardrooms of both gender and race? As a London paper, do I write about the women who have been killed on our streets? Do I write about the men who did the killing? Do I write about the women emotionally maimed by the abuse they have been subject to? Do I write about the erosion of feminism and women’s rights and access to abortion? Do I write about the successes of women to fight for their rights under oppressive regimes? Do I use the personal pronoun “I” at all, is this about me? Do I actively mark it or do I instead continue to push more women to write for our pages?
All of these things deserve space every day of the year; that is my main gripe with International Women’s Day. Feminism is what spills over the edges, it is the exhaustion as well as the joy. It is the conversations had amongst women in quiet evenings about the slights they experience because of their sex. It is also the laughter and the freedom they experience in the company of each other.
How could all of these things be limited to a 24 hour period, a week? It is the everyday existence of women from different backgrounds in different circumstances who find ways to hold each other’s hands, raise children, have careers, have neither and both, in a way that works for them. It is a continual striving for more freedom to do that with less strictures. Feminism for some is holding placards and fighting for women who can’t fight for themselves, feminism for others is the simple fact of living their lives with all the love, honesty, rage, sorrow and care they can muster.
The part I left out of the quote from Srinivasan is crucial. She starts it with “at its best”, that’s what feminist theory is. She ends the introduction with this: “Too often, feminist theory prescinds from the particular of women’s lives, only to tell them, from on high, what their lives really mean. Most women have little use for such pretensions. They have too much work to do.” We all have work to do to get to “at its best” today and every other day.