Lessons from past women of spirit
Journalist Helen Lewis tells why feminism is not a self-help movement designed to make you feel better about your life but a political movement that must achieve political change
rape was criminalised in New Zealand in 1961, it seems; marital rape not until 1985.
“I wanted to write about it because it was really germane to the theme of the book, which is about being disobedient. I had always been a ‘good’ girl. I’d worked hard at school, I’d gone to university, I’d got a good degree, gone straight into a career. I felt there was enormous pressure on me, and actually being free of that was quite liberating.”
Also, a big problem with feminism is it’s “very susceptible to shame and people feeling that they can’t talk about certain things — whether that be female bodies or female experiences like childbirth or the menopause — because there is huge pressure in our culture to say that these things are private but they have huge impacts on public life too”.
Acentury and a half ago, women could not vote, own property or control their own fertility. Finally, in 1918, after decades of peaceful and at times violent agitation by the suffragettes, the British voting rolls were extended to women — those with property and aged over 30. In this country, which followed English law from 1840, all women had gained the vote 35 years earlier, in 1893, thanks to the dedicated campaigning of women like our $10-noter, Kate Sheppard.
Now, though, everywhere you look, critics are trying to pull icons down, says Lewis. “Cancel culture” makes any feminist pioneer’s reputation “fragile and provisional”. The American television critic Emily Nussbaum nailed the problem: “When you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you.”
But women’s history should not be a shallow hunt for heroines, Lewis writes. “Too often, I
Feminism is not a selfhelp movement designed to make you feel better about your life. It is a political movement and therefore it must achieve political change.
— Helen Lewis see feminists castigating each other for admiring the Pankhursts (autocrats), Andrea Dworkin (too aggressive), Jane Austen (too middle-class), Margaret Atwood (worried about due process in sexual-harassment accusations) and Germaine Greer (‘where do I start?’).”
Humans are flawed, struggling inside vast, complicated systems. Lewis was keen to restore complexity to feminism’s pioneers, who were often not “nice”, to recontextualise their struggles and tactics, to erase the airbrushing. Coco Chanel, for example, ran her own design house. She also had as a lover a Nazi officer, may have been a German spy and tried to remove a Jewish investor from her company.
“The real Coco Chanel was clever, prejudiced, talented, cynical — and interesting.”
Marie Stopes wrote one of the first sex manuals and ran sexual health clinics; she also promoted eugenics. Refuge pioneer Erin Pizzey now advocates for the men’s rights movement.
“I think there is a kind of feminist ‘end of history’, where we assume that we’ve achieved a final perfect understanding of things and thank goodness, we’re not like these blighted people in the past. Those who got women into universities used to put the pretty women in the front when the inspectors came round, because the whole case they were trying to make was that this wouldn’t turn women into hideous harridans who were unmarriageable; they made an argument on respectability.
“And it’s easy now to say, ‘Well, that’s an illegitimate argument strategy’ but would you have tactically looked at that and made a different calculation yourself at the time? I think it’s very hard to say that you would have done.”
More battles lie ahead. “For example, sexual violence. The conviction rates are extremely low and the processes are really long and drawn out. Which is unfair on both people who are accused and their accusers, to have people on bail for years, waiting for trial.”
Another is unpaid caring labour.
“We’ve never really cracked the idea that women have moved into the workforce in a huge way since the 1970s and actually you need two incomes in order to buy a house.”
Or who does childcare or elderly care with an ageing population?
“There’s no way in the current system for all of that to take place. And as a result of that people are feeling incredibly overstretched.”
Societies need decent paid maternity and paternity leave (“Most people who have children quite like them,” Lewis notes), accessible abortion, equitable divorce laws, equal pay. Technically,, she says, there is equal pay in the UK but it turns out from recent court cases that we don’t. The Equal Pay Amendment Bill is currently meandering through the New Zealand Parliament.
“Feminism is not a self-help movement designed to make you feel better about your life. It is a political movement and therefore it must achieve political change,” says Lewis.
So, women need to unite over common issues, clear boundaries, concrete demands. “There’s that line from Frederick Douglass: ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand.’ Well, you need to have the demand. And then you need to look around and say, ‘Who agrees with me, can I get more people to agree with me and then once we’ve got enough people who agree with me, this is what we’re going to do.”’
Getting agreement is the hard bit. Some feminists, such as Julie Bindel, argue for a lessinclusive feminism. Bindel, who said Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to Be a Woman “should be consigned to the rubbish bin”, is also writing a book about feminism. “I believe women should be liberated from male supremacy rather than constantly asking, ‘How can we include more men?”’
Feminists also often differ on the issues of prostitution, pornography and transgender rights.
Trans rights is one of the biggest, most controversial issues in feminism right now, says Lewis. A key question is whether trans women should legally be able to be in women’s spaces, like changing rooms, refuges, prisons, shortlists and sports. Its proponents claim that everybody has an innate gender identity, she says.
“Which to me is an untestable spiritual belief. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be respected but it does mean that it’s asking people to accept something really big. And to me something fundamentally conservative: the idea that I have, in some respects, a female ‘soul’ is not so far away from people in the 19th century who thought that women’s brains were different and they couldn’t go to university. So, people should absolutely be able to wear what they like, socially transition, very happy to call people whatever they want, that just seems to me a matter of basic respect.”
On prostitution, Lewis prefers the Nordic model: you criminalise buying sex but not selling it. Most people in prostitution, she suspects, would prefer to have a job that is not so dangerous or stigmatised, so we should look at making sure those who want to get out can.
Apart from the grim messages of pornography and whether the biggest consumers of it — men — could “talk a bit more about ethical consumption”, she is not a particular fan because it has all of the economic problems of internet journalism.
“People being ripped off, their content being scrubbed of identifying details, aggregator sites making a huge amount of money out of other people’s work, and performers themselves having very short careers.”
Such robust views mean Lewis has had a fair old trashing during the years. Some of the more printable epithets about her as a “difficult woman” are racist, transphobe, middle-aged
— at 29 — absurdly posh, a blacklister of writers, ruthlessly careerist. One telling criticism pinned her as “white, straight and cisgendered, the top of the feminist food chain in terms of intersectionality”.
In a footnote, she writes: “For the record, I wouldn’t describe myself as either straight or cisgendered. ‘Respect for how people identify’ seems to only work one way.”
I wonder if she thinks men can be feminists. “Yes, but foot soldiers, not generals. I once wrote that the most feminist thing a man can do is pick up a mop.”
Okay. And do men or women give her a harder time?
“When I interviewed Jordan Peterson in 2018, if you read the comments under the Youtube video, there’s a lot of how ugly I am, how stupid I am, I’ve got terrible hair, these feminazis just don’t know anything. In the words of the Big Lebowski, that’s just your opinion, man. But if someone [within feminism] says you’re racist or transphobic or homophobic, that’s a charge I take incredibly seriously,” says Lewis.
“Those are the things that hurt. So, I have been surprised that I have received as much trashing from women as from men.”
Funnily enough, after I interviewed the controversial Canadian psychologist (who has since been reported as suffering a prescription drug addiction in Russia) I got no such slurs,
I say. Lewis laughs and says the slagging was instructive.
“Rather than deciding there are good people and bad people; and we don’t need to listen to the bad people, trying to understand why people think differently to you without necessarily thinking that they’re bad. I don’t think Jordan Peterson is a bad person, or that he doesn’t have any insights at all.
“Therefore, I wanted it to seem like a conversation where I came to him with a level of respect and interest in his viewpoint.” She laughs again. “I’m not sure whether he felt the same about me.”
Has the criticism made her more defensive, or more understanding? “I’ve always had pretty sharp elbows. I think you need them to survive as an opinion writer.”
When she was at the New Statesman — she now writes for The Atlantic — she ran a feature called “What I Got Wrong”, on people who’d had very strong opinions that they’d since changed and what changed their mind. She’d like to see more of that.
“Because one of the things about cancel culture is the idea that people don’t change. Or something that someone said when they were 17 is representative of them now. Or we are represented by our worst moments when we flew off the handle with to try and stay open to criticism.”
Frustration with “all this is sorted” thinking can also be applied to the fight for human rights and employment rights, with the rise of precarity and zero-hour contracts, she agrees.
“History has to be continually re-taught and renewed and refreshed in people’s minds, otherwise it dies, it’s powerless. It’s very easy if you’re young — I certainly did this — to think it’s natural to basically have a 40-hour working week, of course the weekend has existed since the beginning of time. And that I can switch on my tap and clean water comes out or, if I get an infection, I can get antibiotics or you can be immunised against measles.
“One of the real problems about politics is that success breeds complacency. We’re seeing that with Holocaust survivors, the last generations of them dying. That lack of a direct link to the past and witness is allowing people to subtly — and not so subtly — rewrite the history of the 20th century, downplay what happened. That’s why I’ve always loved history; it’s about reconnecting people to how the world has progressively got better.
“Unarguably we are less violent than we were before, fewer children die young, the average healthy years you’ve got is hugely better — across the world. There’s terrible poverty still, but absolute poverty is reduced. And that didn’t happen magically. That happened because a lot of people fought really hard to make it happen. That, to me, is an optimistic story in a time that often feels very pessimistic.”
Zela Charlton got the shock of her 90-year-old life. There, on her Skype, was not only an incoming call, but the photo profile of a 100-year-old man she didn’t recognise.
Now, if you believe in things like karma, fate, kismet or whatever, the tale of Zela, of Northland, and Reg Booth, of Dorset in England, will appeal. It may also persuade you that our digital world is capable of not only precise and efficient communications — but also some happy, random, human interaction.
“I live on a 10-acre block,” says Zela (as we shall see later, this is a massive understatement), “and habitually go out in the morning, sit and check my email while the dog chases rabbits.
“It was about 10am and my Skype activated — and I found myself looking at a picture of this old man. I didn’t recognise him at first. Well, I mean, he was an old man; I hadn’t seen him for about 35 years.”
She answered the Skype call. The man on the other end said hello. What followed was a brief period of utter confusion. Reg didn’t know who she was or how he had accidentally called her. She didn’t know who he was or why he was calling.
Turns out one of Reg’s grandchildren had set him up with a new phone and had transferred contact details. Zela and Reg
— a former colleague of her husband Alan when he was a detective in the UK — hadn’t communicated for many years and then mostly by letter.
“I didn’t know what was happening and neither did he,” says Zela. “It made me laugh out loud — the two of us talking in complete bewilderment. He didn’t know who I was,
I didn’t know who he was and neither of us knew why we were talking.
“Once I got over the surprise and realised who he was, we chatted away for about 15-20 minutes. It was wonderful — though he rang me again a few nights later, when I was in bed. I think he called me on my ipad which I keep by the bed. He’d done it accidentally again, so he obviously hadn’t quite mastered his phone at that stage.”
A centenarian and a nonagenarian on Skype (even if accidental) is not only warming, it’s an illustration of the fact that many of our seniors are not as disconnected, nervous about or defeated by technology, as some might think. Many willingly embrace the internet to enhance their lives and form valuable connections.
Research by Chorus shows that, in
New Zealand, over-60s are more connected to their friends, family and local communities than any other age group. They realise the importance of that connectivity — whatever form it takes — and use a combination of online and offline tools to keep in touch and connected.
Nearly two-thirds of 60-plus people are optimistic about the future with 61 per cent keeping in touch by phone, 53 per cent by email and 18 per cent by messaging.
Zela, at 90, is still very switched on as befits a woman well known in Northland for her kiwifruit growing, her art, her work as an art teacher and journalist. Thanks to a reliable broadband connection, she accesses the internet whenever she wants, currently keeping an eye on the Chinese coronavirus scare as it could affect her business.
“One of my granddaughters Skypes me from time to time, I do online banking, I read the news — I like the Guardian and some of the US papers — and I do a lot of research. I am wildly curious — I am on the internet between 3-4 hours a day. It’s an incredible asset and Google is just marvellous — it’s great for finding out things when the computer in your head is full up.
“It reminds me of Alice In Wonderland when Alice went down the rabbit hole and everything was different but just the same.”
In their time, Zela and her husband Alan have worn many career hats — he was an art teacher, an advertising executive and a policeman; she was head of art at Kamo College for several years, worked at the Northern Advocate newspaper producing a page called Senior Forum and her art — particularly her lino prints — is wellknown and sought after. She has also recently published a book of poetry.
Her Glenbervie Orchard, near Whangarei, was hand-planted in 1981 after Alan was diagnosed with cancer. He couldn’t work because of regular chemotherapy sessions so the pair (who emigrated to New Zealand in 1973) changed their plans for a horses/cows/ sheep two-hectare block to kiwifruit.
They knew nothing about kiwifruit but threw themselves into gaining knowledge: “We were lucky enough to have beautiful volcanic soil and the kiwifruit gave Alan something to do on the days he wasn’t having chemo. Growing things doesn’t take as much energy or stress as looking after animals or a job.”
Alan’s cancer turned out to be terminal but she and the kiwifruit are still going strong, with the orchards producing about 500,000 top quality gold kiwifruit a year. While a manager now does much of the daily work, Zela is still very much connected with the business, consulting with the manager regularly.
As for digital connectedness, she keeps in touch with friends and family — now including Reg Booth — by email and online.