A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  Her trajectory as a writer prefigured the journey of the women’s movement. She was always just ahead of her time: ushering in new thinking, pointing out truths of women’s lives and injustices. She told us how an understanding of feminism could bolster us and give us courage: ‘When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.’ Much of what she said we understand now, but so many of us didn’t know and feel it then.

  Margaret Atwood (in her New York Times review) remembered hearing Adrienne Rich read her poetry and wrote approvingly of its anger and art: it ‘felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer . . . One of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it but what you think about yourself.’

  Adrienne Rich first came to us as the author of the utterly revolutionary Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, which Virago published in 1977; she wrote of the elevation of motherhood as a patriarchal myth and pinpointed the ‘exquisite suffering of ambivalence’ that is the state of being a mother. When we published her essays, On Lies, Secrets and Silence in 1980, she travelled to Britain for publication. London feminists and poets were ecstatic to have this erudite, inspiring woman in our midst and quickly I was able to arrange events for her at the Poetry Society, Conway Hall, and the ICA in London, and later in Brighton.

  She was a small woman, aged sixty, and wise in the ways of the world; though daunted by her genius, I quickly saw that she took a generous measure of me and others. I accompanied her to her hotel with her partner, the novelist, Michelle Cliff. (I didn’t have to put her up—Virago paid for that—but I did, proudly, have a dinner for her at my house.) The receptionist looked at the room information and then, blushing, said, ‘Oh, so sorry, we’ve got a double bed reserved for you! Oh dear . . .’ As I was rushing to smooth things Adrienne, calmly, graciously, put out her hand for the key and said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ She looked frankly into the eyes of the young woman. ‘Thank you.’ Acknowledging being lesbian in such a public way was still far from common.

  Then in Brighton, at an all-women event, a very worried young woman asked Adrienne, ‘What about men? My boyfriend?’ Adrienne nodded and said, ‘Take care of yourself.’ She knew that women had to understand and liberate themselves to begin with.

  After that trip she sent me a Christmas card: ‘We thought of you as we drove through Canada from Buffalo to Detroit in September. May the new year treat you well and your holidays be full of joy. With affection, Adrienne.’ These are small things to remember against the towering intellect revealed in her writing, but I recall them because they were kind gestures and showed she understood that in order to learn and to change you need a teacher who does not condescend.

  Her tiny, grey-haired presence on stage at the ICA was electric. In a precise, soft American accent she answered questions about motherhood, about feminism, about poetry and about the possibility of change, the importance of words. One answer she gave spoke to me deeply: she said the world pretends to universality, as if ‘mankind’ refers to us all, but no. This word is more than mere incorrect terminology; it is demonstrably telling us women that our experiences are invisible, of no count. When people use the word ‘universal’, she said, it doesn’t mean humankind, ‘it means male’. As she writes: ‘Feminism begins but cannot end with the discovery by an individual of her self-consciousness as a woman . . . Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognize that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither objective nor value-free, nor inclusively “human.” Feminism implies . . . that we proceed to think, and act, out of that recognition.’

  I sat in that audience feeling a visceral, physical response—as if a lens over my eyes had been lifted, as if I had been duped or blindfolded and only now could see clearly. It took my breath away.

  That observation of Adrienne’s, and my response, I know, now reads as almost commonplace but it wasn’t then. I am not alone in marvelling at the difference in our understanding between those days and now. The poet and essayist Katha Pollitt wrote after Adrienne’s death in 2012, ‘Woman as Other is such a familiar trope now it’s hard to imagine it was ever a hard-won intellectual discovery . . . She took on our gravest perplexities and injustices . . . and asked . . . Who would we be if we could change our world?’

  I remember Adrienne with such fondness. Thinking of her makes me long for her wisdom to help negotiate the world today. She understood the obligation we have to one another, however imperfectly we manage it: ‘We cannot wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.’

  The Jewish American writer Grace Paley, the doyenne of the short story, called herself a ‘somewhat combative pacifist and co-operative anarchist’. She lived her politics: in the 1960s campaigning against Vietnam, going to jail, organizing marches and neighbourhood campaigns. But she showed through her writing that the female world of childcare, husbands, food, and care was just as important politically as the big gestures of the more male socialist and anti-war politics of the time. She was so busy living her politics and her life—teaching, and managing family and community—that the world had to be satisfied with her extraordinary but small body of work. ‘Life is short and art is long,’ she used to say.

  Her collections of stories, Later the Same Day, Little Disturbances of Man, and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which were published as Virago Modern Classics, are dialogue-driven vignettes of noisy, boisterous, largely immigrant New York. ‘When you write, you illuminate what’s hidden, and that’s a political act.’ She said, ‘I wanted to write about women and children, but I put it off . . . I thought people will think this is trivial, nothing. Then I thought, It’s what I have to write. It’s what I want to read. And I don’t see it out there.’

  I went to visit her in New York and met her in a noisy little café, where we sat in the nook of the window, around the corner from her Greenwich Village apartment. Her five-foot figure, topped with wild, white hair, was familiar on Lower Sixth Avenue. In the café she nodded to many, calling out ‘Hi honey’ in a Bronx accent, embracing others, then returning to the table with an intensity and warmth that swept us up once again. We were with her daughter, a woman in her thirties with a long blond plait nearly down to her waist, and my husband, John Annette. After a while, Grace said, ‘Let’s go,’ and we followed her out and down the street. More nods and hellos and at her apartment block she unlocked the big front door. She had lived there for years, and it was rent controlled so it was hers for life, but as we trailed up the stairs she said she couldn’t live there right now. Knocking on her own door and calling out ‘Hello?’ as we filed in behind her, she nodded to two extremely languid, youngish men who were lying on the sofa and the chair in the living room. They called back, groggily, sleepily, though it was mid-afternoon by now.

  In the kitchen we grouped around a tiny round table. There were four wooden chairs, one of which was missing a seat. Grace fixed this by piling phone books across the frame and then plopped herself down, a bit higher than the rest us. She smiled and leaned on the table. We took our cue from her and sat quietly, conscious of the men in the next room. I wondered why we were there.

  Then, after five minutes or so of complete silence, Grace leaned on the table, stood up, and said, ‘Okay. I just wanted to do that.’

  Back on the street she said, ‘I have given the apartment to those guys for now. They’re not well. They’re sick.’ She shrugged. ‘Come on.’

  Had we just lived one of her short stories? In her art, families, emotions, obligations, and politics all crowd in on top of each other—as in her life—but ‘it doesn’t preach; it doesn’t demonize or lionize; it doesn’t nobly set out to illustrate a set of
beliefs or ideals. Indeed, it often undercuts them with sly self-awareness.’

  She understood how love, humour, forgiveness, and understanding, rather than a singular and unbending political stance, could be the medium of change. A self-proclaimed co-operative anarchist, that’s the way to be.

  And then, sometimes, a political lesson comes from the audience, the readers.

  Ursula Owen commissioned Beatrix Campbell to follow in George Orwell’s footsteps to write the 1980s version of The Road to Wigan Pier. It was a clever way to be part of the Orwell events of 1984—but also an important way to look at contemporary poverty and politics. As our blurb had it, ‘This time the journey north has been made by a woman—like Orwell a journalist and a socialist, but, unlike him, working class and a feminist. Out of this investigation comes her passionate plea for genuine socialism, one informed by feminism, drawing its strength from the grassroots and responding to people’s real needs.’ Wigan Pier Revisited went on to win the Cheltenham Literature Festival Prize in 1984.

  When we published the book Bea and I went on the road: and one of our stops was a crowded, very noisy working men’s club in Wigan. We squeezed ourselves alongside the bar and then managed to get things quietened down for Bea to speak and for me to lay out the books for sale. Under a dartboard, against the clinking of the glasses and through the swirling smoke, Bea spoke to the crowd. She is a wiry presence with wild curly hair and a northern accent, and she caught the mood correctly. She was funny, honest, and hard-hitting, talking about the research for her book, getting people to talk about their lives and what needed to be done. Some of them, involved with the miners’ strike of the time, were bitterly familiar with injustice.

  Then it was opened to the floor. Before answering the first question, Bea began with a self-deprecating preface indicating that she was just a modest woman, not unlike those in the audience. Immediately a large woman rose up, interrupting, angrily pointing, ‘If you—you who have written books, you who go on telly and the radio, you, who come here to talk to us tonight—if you say you are not important, what the hell does that make me? That makes me absolutely nothing.’

  We reflected on it on the train home. Perhaps we had thought we were encouraging these women to talk about themselves as feminists? Ha! These women were way ahead of us: they knew all about hierarchies of power and they wanted Bea to own hers proudly. It was a profound lesson for us both, not least that we had to go to a working men’s club in Wigan to get it drummed into us. Grassroots politics, power: there are so many ways to gain awareness and make change.

  But power for individual women and for feminist presses—that is complicated.

  Celebrity feminism—fame of authors, feminist businesses, and successful feminist books—was a concept that, for many, fought with the mood of the times. Even today, one of the insults thrown at the author of, among other books, the radical and bestselling The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf, is ‘celebrity feminist’—and I am dismayed that it is feminists who hurl it. We can work out why men fear powerful women, but why do women fear them? Celebrity feminism could be seen as a force for good. We seem to be fine with groups of women standing up together—women in parliament; the Women’s Equality Party; the Women’s Prize for Fiction; the Fawcett Society; Virago, even—but the woman who is seen to put herself above others is bossy, a tall poppy, the one too big for her boots, with ideas above her station. But isn’t that what we need? Women who do have ideas above their station? Modesty, likeability, and anxiety not to be too grand: these may be female qualities which help make friends, but we need more than that from our women leaders. It could be down to plain old jealousy but to my mind it’s bigger and more complex than that. I think our anxiety is because though we women make up more than 50 per cent of the population, we still feel as if we were a minority group. Because we don’t see enough women in positions of control, because it is not yet ordinary and an unremarkable fact that women have power, we are therefore highly critical of the particular women who are visible; we only approve of them when we feel they really represent us. When they don’t comply with our views we seem to want to tear them down and say, that is not what I, as a woman, think; she doesn’t represent me.

  The obvious answer to this female problem with power is to have more women in power. Of course. We need more of what the British broadcaster Mishal Husain calls ‘second women’, explaining:

  ‘While we owe a great deal to those who smashed glass ceilings and led the way . . . the follow-up is vital.’ It means the first women were not one-offs.

  We need women in power to be an ordinary, unremarkable fact.

  Though of course sometimes it is plain old jealousy; women are human, after all!

  Conflicting feelings about power and representation have existed within the women’s movement from the beginning. In 1975 Susan Brownmiller published the hugely influential and revolutionary Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, one of the first books to locate the imbalance of power—rather than sex—in rape and to challenge the notion that it was a woman’s problem to fix, that it was us who must change our ways, curtail our lifestyles. ‘The ultimate effect upon the woman’s mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act. To accept a special burden of self-protection is to reinforce the concept that women must move about and live in fear and can never expect to achieve the personal freedom, independence and self-assurance of men.’ It was ground-breaking and became a huge bestseller.

  However, it didn’t please all.

  ‘People in the movement were starting to say “We don’t need stars,”’ Brownmiller remembered in an interview more than forty years after publication. ‘When I announced to my consciousness-raising group that I’d finished writing it, someone said: “Why don’t you be the first feminist without ego who doesn’t put your name on the book?” . . . Another time, when I was giving a talk on a college campus, a woman raised her hand and asked: “Why did you put your name on Against Our Will? All your ideas came from our movement, after all.” . . . I said: what page did you write, sister?’

  My younger self—the one back in that gymnasium meeting, the one over-schooled (bullied?) in what the ‘correct’ feminist answer was—wants to stand up and loudly applaud this bolshie, honest feminist. My guess, though, is that no one did that that day.

  The phrase ‘be the first feminist without ego’ strikes me sharply, as it immediately catches the tension in feminist writing and publishing. Of course, as feminists, what we wanted was deep-rooted change; we wanted to hold up to the light everything that had been taken as received wisdom. We wanted to turn the balance of power in our private and public lives—and indeed many feminist presses and shops and organizations did that very thing and redistributed power and responsibilities and evened out pay and hierarchies. But that demand for a radical shake-up sat (and sits) awkwardly alongside individual creativity and is hostile to books that catch the mood or are brilliantly marketed—or both—and become bestsellers, with the result that their authors became famous and even rich. In our case it sat uncomfortably with some feminists that our success made Virago stand out in the eyes of the general public and often looked better and more successful than our sisters in publishing. Whereas some of the smaller presses—Onlywomen, formed before us, and later Sheba—were genuinely alternative and it was fair for them and their fans to contrast themselves with us, it was odd for us to see the Women’s Press, formed in 1977, held in higher esteem by some feminists as an indie press that did not pursue commercialism when they were not independent but in fact part of Quartet, owned by Naim Attallah. And of course they too wanted and needed to turn a profit. This tells me a great deal about how people see what they want or need to see. That said, we had a good relationship with the Women’s Press.

  The conflict here—the contradictions of using traditional methods to sell radical ideas—caught Virago fair and square. We didn’t protest it was otherwise; in fact, we acknowledged that paradox and, knowing
exactly what we were doing, were happy to exploit almost any means to challenge patriarchal attitudes—we still do.

  But the problem of celebrity feminism has dogged all the presses and feminist authors and bookshops. Lynn Alderson from the Sisterwrite bookshop collective, set up in Islington in 1978, recalls, ‘We didn’t do book signings as we thought it was a bit star-worshippy, we were a bit holier than thou at times. But it was very much frowned upon in the movement to be famous or stick your head above the parapet—we were determined not to have leaders and it was very difficult at times for those trying to do things publicly when all they got was criticism for it.’

  All social movements need charismatic leaders, need key books or speeches or songs that become anthems, to galvanize and steer the course, and what is true about the second-wave feminist movement (and, I would say, much of the third and fourth waves too) is that authors ignited much of the change.

  Successful authors become sought-after spokeswomen, icons, figures of significance. The second wave of feminism rose alongside the 1970s/80s new style of ‘marketing’ authors as personalities because newspapers, magazines, and television programmes were opening the doors both to ‘lifestyle’ pages and to ‘women’s issues’ pages. The media wanted these women and the publishers supplied them: celebrity feminists, in all their contradictions, were the inevitable result. It might make some—including the authors themselves—uncomfortable, but before the days of social media it was almost the only way for us publishers to get our messages out beyond the Women’s Liberation news sheets or magazines such as Spare Rib.

  Then, as today, women authors famous for their feminism generally took their fame and fortune seriously. Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, co-founded the first Women’s Therapy Centre; Naomi Wolf started courses on leadership for women; Margaret Atwood generously supports many charities and campaigns and, among other organizations, International PEN; Kate Mosse, a co-founder of the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) works with it still; Sandi Toksvig co-founded the Women’s Equality Party; J. K. Rowling founded the charity Lumos; Åsne Seierstad supports education for women in Afghanistan; Natasha Walter founded Women for Refugee Women; Maya Angelou was never afraid to speak out against injustice; Sarah Waters gives much of her time and support to LGBTQ+ causes; Deborah Frances-White raises money for charities that help refugees; Jessica J. Lee founded The Willowherb Review to bolster nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour.