The feminist books that formed me 3: Campbell and Walker.

In 1981 when I started an M.A. on a women’s history topic (nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland), I read myself into the entire (Anglophone) corpus of women’s history and women’s studies. That’s much too big a topic for today’s blog, but I just want to mention that a lot of my feminism comes from that historical reading and from my own research. But two non-historian feminists in particular changed my way of looking at the world.

First though, I want to mention some I thought were great at the time, which haven’t stood the test of time. Angela Carter’s essays (I can’t read her fiction at all) just irritate me now. And I know it’s unfair and anachronistic, but I re-read Gloria Steinem’s collected journalism in a completely new light since her sneering condemnation of the young women who supported Bernie Sanders rather than Hilary Clinton for the Democratic nomination a decade ago. Germaine Greer’s Sex and Destiny was a brilliant attack on the eugenicist population lobby, but it derailed when it attacked the hard-won sexual freedoms she had previously practised and praised. Just because thou art virtuous does not mean there will be no more cakes and ale….kind of thing. Andrea Dworkin was ahead of her time in her condemnation of pornography, but too uncomfortable to read. Kate Millett I saw speaking in UCG in 1980, and I wrote a glowing review for the student magazine, but I couldn’t read her book at all, for some reason. But the following two books are ones I re-read with renewed enthusiasm every few years.

Beatrix Campbell’s Wigan Pier Revisited was published in 1984, and, as the title suggests, it follows Orwell’s footsteps from half a century earlier while focussing mainly on women and on aspects of life ignored by that author. Campbell, born in Carlisle in England in 1947, was reared in a trade unionist/socialist family. I knew nothing at all about her when I was beguiled by this investigation of the poverty and hardship of women (and men), young and old, mainly in the post-industrial and mining landscapes of Yorkshire, Lancashire and the (English) Midlands. One thing that stuck in my mind for over 40 years is her demolition of the common argument that poor people ‘waste’ money on processed food when it would be cheaper for them to buy vegetables and cook from scratch – she actually presents sample menus and budgets to prove that a meal built around economy fish fingers is substantially cheaper than shepherd’s pie. She writes heart-breakingly of elderly women, not homeless or destitute, who wear an extra pair of socks under sandals instead of new shoes in the winter. Campbell uncovers the sexism (overt and hidden) of working-class life without demonising the men (at least one of whom she describes as ‘very nice’) who keep this sexism nailed in place. She laments the grim, circular poverty of single motherhood without condemning the girls (and they are girls) for whom becoming a ‘mam’ is the only route to responsible adulthood at a time of high unemployment. And all along she notices something Orwell completely ignored; the hidden life-maintenance work women do, work without which families would falter and communities crumble. The book was an eye-opener to me in another way too. One old woman, describing the difficult days of ‘long ago’ with men drinking the wages and keeping the wives short and never letting them go out, commented in the middle of all this: ‘As long as you had your mam!’ When I read it first I had to read it twice. Is she being ironic, saying ‘As long as you had your man?’ No, it’s mothers she’s talking about. Without your mam, who always helped you and fought your corner, you were marooned. When she died, you just buckled up and hoped you’d learned enough from her to survive.

The title of Alice Walker’s book mentions mothers explicitly. Walker is a feminist, though she’d prefer to call herself a womanist, commenting that womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens, a collection of essays, was published in 1983, and in Britain in 1984; I read it in 1985 and it is as uplifting as Campbell’s book in its gratitude for the culture of mutual female support which, while it never negates hardship, makes lives bearable and meaningful. Reared in an African-American family in Georgia, Walker saw the sacrifices her parents, especially her mother, made: ‘Her quick, violent temper was on view only a few times a year, when she battled with the white landlord who had the misfortune to suggest to her that her children did not need to go to school.’ But lifelong secondary status got Walker’s mother down sometimes and once, in exhausted despair, she asked her daughter if she didn’t think white people were ‘jest naturally smarter, prettier, better’:

My mother asked this, a woman who never got rid of any of her children, never cheated on my father, was never a hypocrite if she could help it, and never even tasted liquor.

She might be pro-choice herself, and probably enjoys a glass of wine too, but Walker evaluates her mother’s life according to her mother’s own standards of morality, which is refreshing. In the title essay, Alice suggests that women like her mother (I know, I’ve started calling her Alice, but Walker seems a bit cold and anyway Walker isn’t her real name) put all their frustrated artistry into their beautiful gardens, so that even Alice’s memories of poverty ‘are seen through a screen of blooms – sunflowers, petunias, roses…’ People came from far and wide to see her mother’s garden and to get cuttings from her. (My grandmother was the same. So were many people’s grandmothers. That’s Alice’s genius, pinpointing something so universal). In another essay, she tells a story of how her mother, who was refused government aid during the Depression by a white woman because her dress (sent in a parcel from an aunt in the North) looked too good, managed to survive the winter by swapping flour and meal with a neighbour, and outlived the white woman, in the long run. Black solidarity was real. When the prison gangs were working the land and roads near her childhood home, some men (always black) would make their way through the fields to their farm for water for their midday meal. Her mother never worried about the children walking back with these convicted criminals (to make sure they didn’t lose their way and be classed as fugitives). She knew they would be safe. They were with their own.

So what did I learn from these two books? The first thing I’d say is that they made me, as an arrogant young-adult feminist, look afresh at how my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations made their way with dignity and self-respect in a male-dominated world, and made me realise that I might even have something to learn from them. At various stages in my life I too have needed to find comfort and expression in an art/craft like gardening, at many times I have needed and appreciated my mam and other female relatives (have I ever). Secondly, they made me understand how female oppression is complicated by racial and class oppression, but how necessary it is to identify it as a separate strand, all the same. Neither woman forgets where she comes from; Walker writes (among other things) about how the n-word, even when, especially when – used jokily by African-Americans themselves, degrades black men, and Campbell writes movingly about how men cope heroically with long-term unemployment – learning to cook, looking after grandchildren – while pointing out that their womenfolk are not unemployed, and have never been unemployed. They are just wageless.

Books:

Beatrix Campbell, Wigan Pier Revisited: poverty and politics in the 1980s (London: Virago 1984). There’s a very interesting account in Lennie Goodings, A Bite of the Apple: a life with books, writers and Virago (Oxford University Press 2020) about what happened when herself and Beatrix took the book on tour to Wigan.

Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: womanist prose (London: the Women’s Press 1984). This is a collection of Walker’s journalism about politics, literature and life generally. Brilliant.

Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: the politics of human fertility (London: Picador 1984). Worth reading, certainly. The idealised Italian extended family mentioned in her earlier book puts in another appearance. The word ‘evil’ is a bit startling though.

Gloria Steinem,Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (London: Jonathan Cape 1984). This volume comes with an endorsement from Jane Fonda on the cover and there’s an essay in it about how great Jackie Onassis is, but there is a lot in it that is well worth reading too.