BOOKISHGAL

I’m starting another little series, that I’m calling “Earthquake Books” — books that either changed my whole world view, or otherwise had a huge impact on me, or opened my eyes, or got me really interested in something.

I decided I might as well start with a whopper, or at least one whose title and subject matter might be a tad…controversial. Women of Ideas, & what men have done to them, by Dale Spender. Betcha can tell it’s a feminist book, huh?

I first read this book, published in 1982, while taking a Feminist Theology graduate course at Syracuse University in 1989. I had only come out of fundamentalism a couple of years earlier, and still wasn’t sure about some of the things I’d been taught to despise when I was a fundie. Women’s rights, for example. But by the time I was finished that course, my mind had been changed completely, and I was a feminist. I guess you could say I’d had my “consciousness raised,” though it seems they don’t use that phrase much any more.

To say the book is “by” Dale Spender isn’t entirely accurate. She compiled writings by women through history, from Mary Astell and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the mid-1600s up to the writers in the 1960s who really set the stage for the massive advances for women in the 1970s and 1980s (many of which we have lost again since then). In between chapters, she wrote the commentary that connected them.

Spender, who is an Australian feminist, educator, and consultant on the new technologies and new intellectual wealth, wanted to show how the male-dominated media of all ages works consciously and diligently to wipe women’s intellectual history from the record. The feminists who began writing in the 1960s had no idea that they were treading the same ground that previous waves of feminism had already gone over. Rather than being able to build on what had been learned and studied by those earlier women, these later feminists had to start from scratch, to learn and study the same things all over again.

Spender gathered once-published writings by female political theorists, female textbook writers, female medical writers, novelists, magazine publishers — countless women that the 1960s feminists had never heard of — women that even the feminists of the early 20th century had never heard of.

And at the same time I was reading this book for the course, I was reading another book — by a man — claiming that it was obvious that women weren’t fit for intellectual leadership because they had never produced anything of intellectual value. Meanwhile, Spender was demonstrating how men had made sure to deny women the education or the possibilities of producing that intellectual value. Which guaranteed that that later male writer could happily make his claim, since his male compadres had engineered it. Yet any time a woman was properly educated (and sometimes the woman had to educate herself since the men tried to deny her), Spender showed that the woman produced excellent work, political treatises, math and astronomy textbooks, medical books — easily on a par with any man.

To demonstrate to us female readers just how much of women’s intellectual history had been lost, Spender talked about how at the time of her writing this book (1982), there were fewer women’s magazines and other publications than there had been during the feminist movement of the 1920s. The huge, flourishing women’s publication industry had been almost completely wiped out — they hadn’t just stopped publishing, but even the memory of them had been erased, until someone really went digging.

Spender’s book absolutely stunned me. It made me want to cry. It still makes me want to cry, when I see how today’s media is once more working at full heat trying to “princessify” young girls all over again, and turn women back into purely sex objects and primarily baby-makers, dragging them out of the intellectual arenas and locking them up in the home as their only rightful place. AGAIN.

This book made me a feminist. I wish now, as I wished back in 1989, that it could be required reading for every high school girl, and every woman in society who hasn’t read it yet. Because from what I’m seeing now, it’s clear to me that we need another  feminist movement, before everything we gained from the last one is deleted again from history, and our daughters and granddaughters have to learn everything from scratch, all over again.

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