I feel I may have perorated about this before
The book that made me a feminist.
I mean, did they not realise that they were feminists before then?
I remember coming across the term in, it was either Girls' Crystal or Schoolfriend - which were not the girls' comics we had bought for us, but had passed along by, I think, my mother's friend along the street who had a daughter a few years older than me - so it was not even in Girl, which, on reflection, had a clear stealth feminism agenda of stories of Heroic Women of the Past, including the Pankhursts, Elizabeth Fry, Ms Nightingale etc, as well as ongoing series about women having careers - way back in the 50s.
So a) I knew it was a thing and b) I knew, from approximately aged 8, that that was one of the ways I defined myself.
And when Some Bloke I Was Seeing in the early 70s made some crack about Women's Lib being an American fad that had made its way to these shores I was already able to call upon Clio, muse of history, with her codfish.
So what I want to know is, do these books make feminists or do they give them a means of defining what they already are, even if they haven't put it in those terms?
And okay, one occasionally comes across women who have read one book or maybe two, and considers that they lay down the rules for how a feminist should be... but I don't think that's particularly in play in this piece.
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I can't resist drawing attention to this, after all the recent woezerising about how social media and phones and tablets are causing the loneliness epidemic: The way I assuage loneliness, as a housebound 83-year-old living alone, is to use my Samsung tablet to play Scrabble and chat to or Skype people online, to shop online so that I can look forward to deliveries and exchange pleasantries with postmen or couriers. Quite. Exactly. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2701100.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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