Words: Stella Small (she/her)
Feminism is not the keepsake of a moment we no longer inhabit…It is easier to inherit the aesthetic of struggle than the discipline of it; the continuation of the fight for liberation is becoming harder, but ever more necessary.
In 1987, my grandmother finalised her divorce. After leaving the lawyer’s office, she bought a Bang & Olufsen record player – the first purchase of her newfound financial independence. The timing was good. The Proclaimers had just released their debut album, and only a decade earlier, women in Britain had finally been able to open their own bank accounts without the signature of their father or husband.
A quiet horror comes with putting yourself in the shoes of a woman born in a previous generation. The focus on linearity in the study of history is something many postcolonial and feminist thinkers have urged us to move away from. One of its side effects is the notion that the female mind and body were once capable of enduring the hardships they were subjected to, perhaps even unaware of the injustice of these things. These are hardships that most of my Western peers and I will hopefully never encounter: the rates of infant mortality, rape and brutality permitted under law, and marriage as subjugation. It is easier to believe women did not understand the oppression they experienced. The truth, of course, is that brutality felt like brutality, and the excuse of the “social norm” did not dampen that reality.
Will women look back at my life and feel the same? Will they envy me, or will they pity my ignorance? By many metrics, I am free, yet I still feel a prisoner to that perverted panopticon which Margaret Atwood calls, ‘The ever-present watcher through the keyhole… the woman with the man inside watching a woman.’ How do we escape the eyes of patriarchy when its observation begins in childhood?
Sometimes womanhood itself feels alien to me. In a society entrenched in overconsumption, the femininity we are encouraged to strive towards is a market demographic designed to keep us paying the perpetual self-improvement fee. We may now have our own bank accounts, but how much freedom do we really have over what that money must buy? Achieving beauty and body standards – standards which have always been rooted in classism and racism – is a pastime we are coerced into by corporations to keep us weak and hungry, to keep a tariff sitting on our pay slips. When I feel like I am failing at the project, I must remember that this is their goal. Under capitalism, there will always be another hand offering to feed us – we need to bite it instead.
As the policing of gender has been rebranded, this alienation has been extended to others. Globally, the rights of women and trans people are contested in the political and social sphere. The themes are ancient: a push for the state to control our bodies and dictate the definitions. In recognising the misogyny behind efforts to turn back the clock, we must remember that the rights we treat as commonplace are not as concrete, nor as universal, as they are touted.
Feminism is not the keepsake of a moment we no longer inhabit. The social justice explored during the peak of “girlboss feminism” in the 2010s was flawed, but we cannot fall at the first hurdle. It is easier to inherit the aesthetic of struggle than the discipline of it; the continuation of the fight for liberation is becoming harder, but ever more necessary.
In liberal democracies, we must fear complacency. An existence that remains palatable to patriarchy is not one of freedom. Many powerful figures would be happy for us to spend our time and money reducing ourselves to something we are not. They will be content for us to fret about our own morality amidst the complexities of capitalism and sexist institutions, for it is not a discourse that has ever kept them awake. I must resign myself to be content with my own imperfection. I want to learn and make mistakes. I want to be a citizen with obligations larger than my own self-presentation.
Women from 200 years ago would not recognise my life. I must continue to make it unrecognisable, while refusing the comfort of treating their struggles as souvenirs. Had she divorced a decade earlier, my gran would not have been able to buy that record player. But, today, it stuns in her front room.
My body, at least, is free – I owe myself the dignity of evading the diets and standards that would have it recaptured. Last year, I got my first tattoo, in honour of my mother and grandmother. I took it very seriously. There’s every chance I was the first woman in my family to do such a simple thing. When it comes to honouring the past, that’s where I started, and it applies here: what was once unheard of can become ordinary, and what is ordinary must still be defended.
