by Liz Byrski
On one of my many research trips to Bangladesh for my book Broken Bangles, I discovered so many reflections of myself that I grew dizzy. I felt completely at ease with the proliferation of women’s groups run by sari-clad NGO workers; we adopted one another. They introduced me to a remarkable Bangladeshi feminist from the past, unknown to Western feminists – just like Clara – and another woman to add to my collection of feminists from other cultures and ideologies.
Begum Rokeya Hossain, more than a hundred years ago, created her own utopian vision in her 1905 satire Sultana’s Dream. In a country called Ladyland women run the country: women are the politicians, the scientists, the soldiers and the traders. Where are the men? In Ladyland it’s the men who languish on soft couches inside – the harem – in purdah – in total social isolation. Rokeya’s husband, an unusually progressive man for the times, remarked on reading her story, ‘What a splendid revenge!’ Rokeya wrote her satire ten years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous work, Herland, in 1915.
Three years ago, inspired by Rokeya’s writing, and together with a small core group of Australian Muslim women, I began an online magazine written and produced by Australian Muslim feminists called Sultana’s Dream.4
The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.
Gloria Steinem
I have always admired disobedient women in history, literature and real life. There is something about being a disobedient woman that is intoxicating and liberating. Clara Z., Rosa Luxemburg, Begum Rokeya, Emmeline Pankhurst and the English suffragettes, the New York garment workers, Simone de Beauvoir, Scheherazade, Madame Bovary, Marie Curie, Miles Franklin, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Susannah Prichard. Disobedient women in real life, literature and on the screen, joined by a chorus of nameless, faceless women around the world who have rallied, marched, shouted, refusing to surrender to prejudice and the social shackles of the period in which they lived. I thank them all.
The latter decades of the twentieth century marked the epicentre of my own feminism but, using the language of the times, I don’t think being a ‘women’s libber’ ever meant being ‘cool’ or ‘hip’. Neither was it ‘fashionable’ in the nineteenth century; risky – yes; unpopular – yes. Women rallied, in spite of being ostracised, knowing they needed numbers to win the right to vote, own property and the rights that men took for granted.
And in the twenty-first century – where are we now? Is the era of female empowerment over? Julia Gillard, as Australia’s first female prime minister, would have something to say on the subject.
Feminism has a PR problem – but then it always has. The mantra ‘No, I’m not a feminist, but …’ I find tedious. Do we need a surge of celebrity feminists to make the ‘f’ word functional once again or more Dale Spenders asking ‘Why not? What’s your problem?’ Reducing the number of weight loss articles in women’s magazines, diluting recipes and trimming fashion promos is not going to happen. A petition banning the Kardashian family from social media and magazines may be doomed to failure – someone else just as embarrassingly puerile would step into the spotlight. Western women seem trapped between thinking they have it all, but knowing deep down that sexual harassment, discrimination, rape and family violence remain with us. Pay gaps between men and women today are no laughing matter – a woman earns less than eighty-two cents for every dollar a man earns.
I sometimes fantasise about having my own signature flag, my own identity icon, incorporating black, red and purple. Flying defiantly from my rooftop or (in more maudlin moments after an hour at the gym) draped over my coffin, my imagination plays with colours and what they mean to me. Perhaps it’s just as well that I write non-fiction, for any attempts at fiction could easily lurch into the horror genre.
So here I shall nail my colours to the wall. Black, red and purple – my three identity colours – a colour testimonial of a kind. A last hurrah!
Why black? Because black makes me invisible; I become an observer, sitting in the corner noting the foibles of human behaviour. I watch silently. Black is the opposite of white! I need say no more. And I don’t believe in surrender; black gives me licence to be dangerous, to feel like a literary anarchist – my pen is my bomb and I’d look good in a long black coat and a sinister-looking black hat … ‘Catch me if you can!’
Red? Good old red! It helps me remember; serves as a radical and rebellious symbol of affiliations that do not die. I feel I belong to this group of dissenters – women and men; my membership has not lapsed. Red sometimes makes me feel a little bit blue when I look at the world and the conflicts and think that nothing has changed.
With purple I am a part of the twenty-first century; I step out of the wings, taking my place as an older woman: confident, irritating and a purple pain-in-the-arse. I am reminded of my purple-patch days; nostalgia settles in. Perhaps one has to reach a certain maturity before donning purple for its soul; its depth is quite overpowering. Purple lurking in the background sometimes forcing its way to the front, a reminder of all the disobedient women I have known and have yet to meet.
These three colours are my identity markers – my very own tricolore.
Vive la difference!
Towards Metamorphosis – Amanda Curtin
I started lying about my age in my mid-forties. It wasn’t intentional, but whenever I was asked how old I was, I would say forty-four. Unthinkingly.
My GP frowned at my patient record one day and announced, in a disapproving voice, Actually, Amanda, you’re forty-eight. I was genuinely shocked – not at being forty-eight (which was shocking enough) but at the unconscious externalisation of my disbelief that any number greater than forty-four could possibly relate to me.
As fifty approached, I felt compelled to do something to mark – if not celebrate – this milestone, to stare it in the face. I declared I would get a tattoo.
The inevitable question – Why a tattoo? – was hard to answer. Perhaps it was a nod to the teenage goth I probably would have been if goths had been around when I was a pallid sixteen-year-old with darkly gothic tastes. Perhaps it was just resistance to the idea of growing old gracefully. It felt like a promise to myself, written on the skin. A rejection of the stasis of forever forty-four. Possibility. Hope.
It wasn’t until I had committed to the tattoo, when I had chosen my self-inscription, that I could put a word to all of this: metamorphosis.
The world is full of metamorphosing older women. A cheese plate taught me that.
The cheese plate in question was a gift my friend Pat received for a significant birthday. Brightly painted, it came with a matching knife, the shape of which confirmed that, despite appearances to the contrary, the plate and knife were indeed meant for cheese.
There was nothing cheese-related about the image on the plate – no wedges of Swiss, rounds of cheddar, a pear or an apple or a bunch of grapes. Instead, there were three glamorous women wearing wide-brimmed hats trimmed with roses. (Even now I wonder about the association of those women with cheese.)
I didn’t understand the significance of the gift until Pat showed me the poem that had come with it – ‘Warning’ by Jenny Joseph1 – and I realised that the colours the cheese-plate women were wearing were red and purple.
Jenny Joseph’s poem has become a rallying cry for many women coyly referred to as of a certain age. In a deceptively quiet, sedate voice, the poem’s narrator speaks of what she will do when she is ‘an old woman’, which amounts to relinquishing the sober, conventional behaviour of the younger self who pays the rent, doesn’t swear, sets a good example. The old woman the poet aspires to be is delightfully extravagant, bloody-minded, spontaneous and individualistic – spending her pension on brandy and summer gloves, eating whatever she wants, learning to spit. And the image in the poem that has come to be associated with the old woman’s raft of subversive behaviour
s is the wearing of a purple dress with a red hat, regardless of the clashing colours, regardless of suitability.
The poem ends with the narrator musing over whether she should start behaving a little more like her older self now, so as not to shock people later – a suggestion (indeed, a warning, as the title tells us) that her present responsible self is only a veneer, and the flamboyant woman within might break free at any moment.
The women decorating my friend’s cheese plate were not an especially fitting representation of the poem’s wickedly defiant old woman, but this was a gift given, and received, in an acknowledgment of her spirit, and intended as a celebration of growing older as a positive experience – as a process of becoming.
That becoming works both ways cannot be denied. Here’s a fundamental negative: ‘For ageing women, invisibility is both a feeling and a reality, and the silence of not being addressed is deafening.’2
It’s a given that women over fifty are socially invisible. On the net you can find any number of articles attesting to this. Many of them especially bemoan the loss of visibility to men. Apparently (and my learned source is the Oprah Magazine), it is Darwinian. Men are biologically programmed to notice only women young enough to bear them children, shoring up the future of their genetic imprint.3
But this doesn’t explain the blinkered gaze of younger women.
A common scenario for women my age: you’re at the counter of a newsagency, waiting to pay, your packet of envelopes in one hand and your cash in the other. The young assistant, female, serves two people before you, and you are patient – anyone can make a mistake – but when it happens for a third time you speak up.
Oh, sorry, she says, genuinely surprised at your apparent materialisation in front of her eyes. I didn’t see you.
I have a theory that when young women ‘don’t see’ older women, they are unconsciously closing their eyes to the fleshly proof that their youth is not forever. The ‘not seeing’ is literal. But it’s a metaphor, too, for something more wide-ranging and disturbing: fear of social dismissal. ‘To grow old as a woman in Western society is to become devalued.’4
There’s a chasm between being invisible and being written off.
In my experience, the only perspective from which visibility actually increases as a woman grows older is the institutional. Within a week of turning fifty, I had received an appointment from the Department of Health’s BreastScreen program, and an invitation involving nasty little sticks and sample containers from the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program. While I applaud these screening programs that help save lives, I was unnerved by the sensation that I had suddenly become a body in need of surveillance. And don’t get me started on the letter I received from a geriatric research team inviting me to participate in a study on depression among ‘older Australians still living in their own homes’.
Hilary Mantel observes that in the time and place of her childhood, women over fifty were not invisible; in fact, they were so sturdily visible that they ‘blacked out the sky’ and ruled the world. I love Mantel’s suggestion that we revive the spirit of these women, who were ‘unyielding, undaunted and savagely unimpressed by anything the world could do to them’.5
To be ‘savagely unimpressed’ – now, that seems something admirable for an invisible woman to aspire to.
My friend’s cheese plate made retrospective sense of something I’d seen years before in the city of Perth: a lunchtime army of women wearing purple dresses and red hats.
It was like a loosely interpreted uniform, consistent in colour but not in expression. Some had chosen long and flowing purple; some, tailored; others, raceday purple with frills. And there were hats of straw and hats of silk, embellishments of net and bows and beads and flowers.
The other element of the uniform appeared to be laughter: loud, uninhibited, in-your-face.
I now know they were members of a worldwide movement inspired by Jenny Joseph’s poem and aimed at making ‘invisible’ older women impossible to miss. Redhatters, as they are often called, are women aged fifty and over who meet in public for social outings, dressed in their own interpretation of purple and red.
Red-hat groups have few rules. Members are not obliged to engage in good works or onerous committee duties; they are not, in fact, obliged to do anything.6
I began to wonder about these thousands of redhatting women. Their obvious motivation was to reclaim their visibility in the world. But were they also expressing something that was the equivalent of my tattoo?
In the studies and stories I read, it appeared that, for many redhatters, the main attraction was being the centre of attention: ‘You wouldn’t believe the amount of attention we get’,7 ‘It is amazing that when you put a red hat on, the people that notice you, the men that will talk to you’. 8 Some said that being a redhatter made them feel younger, more confident, more important.9
However, ‘having fun’ and ‘being silly’ seemed to be prized above all else:
I don’t have to prove myself anymore … I just want to do fun things.10
When we get on our purple and our red, we’re allowed to be silly …11
Red-hat groups say that while the focus is on fun, they also fulfil a valuable social function, providing avenues for socialisation and friendship among women who have lost partners, friends, work, purpose.12 And the collective ‘don’t care’ attitude certainly works against stereotypes of the older woman selflessly devoting herself to others while fading away into beige or pastel oblivion.
But there are contradictions in the philosophy underlying redhatting, as a US study points out. On the one hand, the movement challenges ageist attitudes and limiting gender roles, by encouraging women to be self-focused, loud, visible and ‘unladylike’; on the other, it supports the conventional and the traditional by encouraging ‘the ladies’ to dress for the male gaze in hyper-feminine attire.13
Either way, I couldn’t see the seed of my own nebulous notion of becoming here.
The popularity of redhatting seems to be declining in some places, with groups disbanding, having lost their enthusiasm for ‘dressing up in the garb and all that’.14 And I found some trenchant critics.
‘Elderblogger’ Ronni Bennett wrote of feeling discouraged ‘that so many older women are organized for such a shallow objective.’ 15 Comments on her blog post ranged from women defending redhat ideals to those just as critical of them:
Wearing that stuff is like donning a uniform, but without any real meaning or purpose.
… it made me think of teenage girls all being unconventional in exactly the same way.16
Like, say, goths?
I asked my friend who had received the cheese plate bedecked with red and purple ladies whether she had ever been tempted to become a redhatter. She was polite but firm: I have nothing against it. It’s just not for me.
Within the dominant colour system of the modern west, older women’s dress is associated with muted, dull, soft colours like beige, grey, lilac and navy-blue … [This] relates to the more general practice of ‘toning down’ … Purple is an ambivalent colour, associated with royalty and gorgeousness, but also vulgarity and coarseness. In emphasising this colour, Joseph’s poem encapsulated the resistance to demands to tone down behaviour and dress, and to become grey and invisible.17
I have always been that person who admires bright, beautiful colours in a shop window and then asks the assistant, Does it come in black? (See? Closet goth.) But last year my friend Wendy gave me a gorgeous purple silk scarf to celebrate the publication of Elemental (which features such a scarf), and on a whim I bought a dress in the same colour. This out-of-character purchase was not a grab for attention in the style of the redhatters – but …
You know, in retrospect, I should have asked whether it came in black.
Let me tell you a story about a failure to metamorphose.
The 2014 Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) featured Israeli-based Batsheva Dance Company’s Deca Dance – ten pieces drawn
from choreographer Ohad Naharin’s twenty-year repertoire.
I wish I’d been able to watch all ten pieces. But I missed one, and I saw one of the others in the most superficial way because by then I was in a state of shock – physical, adrenaline-fuelled shock.
Attending Deca Dance had been a last-minute decision, and I went alone, thrilled to have scored a single seat about ten rows from the stage and just off centre. From the beginning, it was spectacular, the choreography startling, the energy and artistry of the eighteen dancers electrifying.
And then … and then …
Here is an extract from a review of Deca Dance – not of the performance I went to but of the same show performed at the New Zealand Festival a few weeks later:
One excerpt was understandably the audience’s favourite and mine too. Dressed in slick black suits and fedoras, the dancers slowly left the stage and coolly selected members of the audience … Back on stage, however, the coolness disappeared and the party began.
Not once were the participants put down or ridiculed by the dancers, as so often is the norm in this kind of interaction. At the close of the piece, everyone dropped to the floor, leaving one couple dancing in close embrace.
Then suddenly the male dancer hit the floor as well, leaving the lone woman happy to take her well-deserved ovation.18
Now, this review requires a little insider deconstruction because, as you have probably guessed, I am intimately acquainted with the experience of that lone woman.