Dale Spender: Favourite Feminist Author

Okay, you may laugh. And you younger women may roll your eyes a bit, while male readers may be horrified. I just thought of one of my very favourite female authors, in honour of Women’s History Month.

One of my favourite female authors, ever, is feminist writer Dale Spender. I consider one of her books to be my virtual Bible of Feminism: Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them. Sound inflammatory? Oh, you bet, and with good reason! Honestly, I defy any younger woman to read the book from beginning to end and not experience a high degree of anger. In fact, I would make this book required reading for any younger woman in my society, especially those who think we “don’t need feminism” any more. (Drinking the kool aid! Wake up!) (Ahem. Sorry.)

Women of Ideas was one of the books that completed my exit from fundamentalism, and the fundie view of “women’s place” in the world. I finally understood what hogwash I’d been brainwashed with. Never again. Never again.

Ms. Spender starts with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and works her way methodically through other women writers like Angelina and Sarah Grimke, George Eliot, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir — the list is endless — right up to the 1960s and 1970s (the book was published in 1982). She reprints many of the writings, which show the progress of women’s thinking about equality and about the arguments men were using to portray women as inferior beings in the society. Then Spender describes the context, the reaction to those writings, and what the male-controlled society of each writer’s time did to try to suppress the insights each woman developed.

I first read this book in the 1990s, when magnificent progress had already been made to bring women’s issues into the public eye. There were countless women’s magazines, female writers, changes to laws, all sorts of markers of progress that had made women in the North American cultures among the most free and equal in the world (even knowing there was still more progress to be made). What stunned me was the discovery that there were as many women’s magazines and publications in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century as there were in the 1990s!

So why had the feminists of the 1960s had to start from scratch, and reinvent and rediscover everything that the feminists of the nineteenth century had already discovered and learned? Because the male-dominated society had wiped the historical record clean. All those writings of the previous century — unheard of and unknown. It was as if the women who had exploded all the myths about women’s inferiority had never existed, and had never written. Betty Friedan and those who came after her had to learn everything from scratch, and begin at the beginning again, rather than building on knowledge that already existed.

And if it could be done once, it could certainly be done again. Women’s history and learning and understanding is never safe. Anti-women philosophies never rest, in their attempts to diminish and delete women’s history, and women’s rights. They never rest. No advance that women make can ever be taken for granted, but has to be actively maintained and pushed forward, or it will quietly and carefully be removed again while women aren’t looking. History has demonstrated this, more than once.

Ms. Spender chronicled all this. And it made me so furious that sometimes I had to put the book down for a few days just to let myself cool off. I had one experience where I was in the middle of the book, riding up an escalator behind a man in a suit, who looked very self-important and commanding. And I swear, I had to grit my teeth and hold myself back from punching him in the kidneys. A total stranger!

That was when I made the humourous vow: “Never read this book when you’ve got PMS.” Ha!

But believe me, despite that one day, it wasn’t PMS that made me angry — it was the historical facts. And what makes this book as valuable now as it was in 1982 is the fact that the attempts to roll back women’s progress never stop. I see it happening again, as advertising and the general cultural attitude seems to be using women’s bodies more than ever, to sell products, to please men, and to convince high school girls and even ten-year olds that they have no value whatsoever except as adjuncts to some boy or man. What they say in history lessons or whatever is very different from what they do, and our poor younger women have no idea how they’re being manipulated.

This makes me want to punch the people behind those campaigns — almost certainly men — in the kidneys again. And the Religious Right, which has piles and piles of money, is not innocent in this campaign to Put Women Back In The Kitchen With Babies, Where They Belong. I know this from having been one of them for decades, but I also just listen to how my two nieces talk, to know that women’s equality will be undermined as quickly as the fundies can manage it, if we don’t resist them. And my poor brainwashed nieces would help suppress women because their fundie males say it’s “God’s will.”

I’m waiting for the Third Wave of feminism to begin, and I will jump into that pool with both feet. And I’m hoping that Women of Ideas will be reprinted and used again, as young women rediscover — again — that they are people in their own right, and better not be messed with.

As far as I’m concerned, Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them should be required reading for everyone. Men included.

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