Gail Chester - In Other Words: Writing as a Feminist

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
FEMINIST THEORY

IN OTHER WORDS

Writing as a feminist

Edited by

GAIL CHESTER AND SIGRID NIELSEN

Volume 18

First published in 1987

This edition first published in 2013

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This collection 1987 Gail Chester and Sigrid Nielsen

The individual chapters 1987 the authors

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-53401-7 (Set)

eISBN: 978-0-203-08796-1 (Set)

ISBN: 978-0-415-63829-6 (Volume 18)

eISBN: 978-0-203-08411-3 (Volume 18)

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Writing as a feminist

Edited by Gail Chester and Sigrid Nielsen

Hutchinson

London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg

Hutchinson Education

An imprint of Century Hutchinson Ltd

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Century Hutchinson Australia Pty Ltd

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Century Hutchinson New Zealand Ltd

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New Zealand

Century Hutchinson South Africa (Pty) Ltd

PO Box 337, Berglvei, South Africa

First published 1987

This collection Gail Chester and Sigrid Nielsen 1987

The individual chapters the authors 1987

Set in 10 on 12 Linotron Plantin by

Input Typesetting Ltd, London SW19 8DR

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Anchor Brendon Ltd, Tiptree, Essex

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

In other words: writing as a feminist.

(Explorations in feminism; v. 12).

1. Women authorsBiography 2. FeministsBiography

I. Chester, Gail II. Nielson, Sigrid III. Series

809.89287PN471

ISBN 0091646812

As feminists, we have stressed the need to be aware of other women's roles in making our writing possible. Working together, and with our contributors, has kept us going and changed our ideas and we have benefited from the efforts of a great many women over the past fifteen years and earlier. However, some people have been particularly helpful in getting this book together, both directly and indirectly. The initial source of inspiration for the book and the conference from which it sprang is Ellie Siegel, who was instrumental in organizing the conference and would have been our co-editor if she had not had to return home to the United States. She has supported us from afar throughout this enterprise. We would also like to thank our contributors, for being so easy to work with; all the women who wrote papers for the Edinburgh conference, and all who volunteered their labour; everyone at Lavender Menace Bookshop, which handled much of the administrative work for the conference; Gay Jones and Prudence de Villiers of In Other Words Bookshop, Plymouth, for providing the book's title; the Explorations in Feminism Collective for encouraging us to submit the manuscript, and Claire L'Enfant at Hutchinson for accepting it and making many helpful suggestions; the members of our respective writing groups, for their support; and Cathy Burke, Eileen Cadman, Mary Collins, Daphne Davies, Jane Hustwit, Bob Orr, Pratibha Parmar, Laure Paterson, Cathy Phillips, Ros Schwartz and Lesley Sillitto for reasons too numerous to mention.

This book has been written by women of many different ages and backgrounds, living in Scotland, Ireland, and England. Some of the authors have never before published a piece; others are established writers. They use writing for many different purposes: to earn their livings, examine their experiences, communicate their feelings, further their politics; and all of us are writing as feminists.

Each of the contributors would probably provide her own definition of feminist writing and her own account of what led her to write from her feminist beliefs. The editors own routes to writing have been completely different from each other: one of us wrote fantasy fiction about amazon heroines, dreamed of being a writer from an early age, and then stumbled on Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex in a supermarket. The other saw writing as an ordinary skill, like mental arithmetic, and only began writing when she joined a feminist group and discovered it produced a magazine. Despite these different approaches, writing plays a vital part in forming our perceptions of our lives as women, in working out our feminist views and in communicating them to others.

In the same way, writing has been crucial to the lives of women all over the world, in the past and now. Writing is essential to women's struggle for liberation from second-class status, poverty and enforced silence. Feminism, literacy and education for women are closely linked worldwide; illiteracy is a central part of women's subordination. Most liberation movements make a priority of teaching reading and writing to their supporters and women have taken the lead in organizing and running such programmes (see, for example, the introduction to Sisterhood is Global, Robin Morgan (ed.), Penguin, 1985). Most totalitarian governments, on the other hand, realize that writing is a danger to their rule. A significant proportion of Amnesty International's prisoners of conscience are writers and journalists; and the authors and publishers of the original feminist samizdat, Woman and Russia (Sheba, 1980), were forcibly exiled from their country. One of the most moving sessions of the 1986 Oslo International Feminist Bookfair was Writing as a dangerous profession, where women from Spain, Kenya, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Uruguay spoke poignantly of being imprisoned by the authorities, and of being rejected by their own communities, simply for communicating in writing with others. Even in supposedly liberal societies, minority groups often experience difficulty in writing or getting an audience for their work.

Perhaps this is because writing can be a powerful force for change, not only individually, but by enhancing group effectiveness. NUPE, the trade union which represents mainly manual workers in the public sector, has made support for literacy its official policy and together with other unions has developed a programme called Workbase, which provides literacy and numeracy classes. With their tutor, a group of women cleaners in Sheffield learnt how to organize their writing, take notes at meetings, and write down what they remembered later on. As a result, they gained the necessary confidence to challenge the hierarchy of their own union and elected the first woman shop steward at their largely female workplace.