We celebrate today an historic victory as women’s right to vote was enacted into law in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
The struggle for the equality of women is ongoing today, especially in regard to the right of bodily autonomy, without which there is no freedom, and the right to safety, without which freedom is meaningless; women’s reproductive rights and right of consent are under constant attack by theocratic Gideonite fundamentalists and the existential threat of the Patriarchy.
Power asymmetries in gender relations and the dynamically unstable struggle between autonomous and free creative play in the performance of identities of sex and gender and their authorization, limitation, and control by hegemonic and patriarchal forces of repression are pervasive and endemic, and this we must resist.
The work of the historical suffragettes, heroic pioneers of liberty whom we honor today, remains unfinished, for the gears of the vast machine of systemic inequality which makes half of humankind slaves of the other half continues to grimly enmesh us in its works, invisible when unexamined, for the beneficiaries of unequal power must question and challenge their own privilege if we are to free ourselves of its malign dehumanizing force. Seizure of power is not enough; we must also abandon power over others to escape the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
Patriarchy survives because like all systems and structures of hegemonic elites it co-opts and assimilates those in whose name it claims to operate. It will vanish when men unite with women to dismantle it as liberation from tyranny, and not before.
Here I speak of parrhesia and what Foucault called truth telling, the exposure of injustice and inequality as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, for nothing can be confronted and changed if it remains unseen. This process of reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of becoming human is neither simple nor easy; for no one gives up power willingly, unless there are greater benefits to be won in so doing, and as we may also say of racism and the legacies of slavery and imperialism it is a terrible thing to awaken to the fact that one is the beneficiary of an ongoing crime of sexual terror.
I am framing this issue in the most repugnant way I can imagine to signpost that abusive systems perpetuate themselves and control their victims by turning some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and exploit the others as internalized oppression, and in the context of Patriarchy it is both men and women who must unite in solidarity and revolutionary struggle to become free.
The destabilization of our ideas of men and women, of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty, identity, virtue, and performative roles, as transformative change and liberation from authorized identities of sex and gender is crucial to this work of chaotization and autonomization. All human beings are both male and female within themselves, at all times, for the psyche is dyadic and also in continual processes of change; moreover identities of sex and gender are not only social constructions of our history as stories and narrative structures, but are also an infinite Moebius Loop wherein we exist everywhere at once as a condition of being, rather than a spectrum with limits and fixed referents like queer and straight, dominant or submissive.
Let us free ourselves of the historical legacies of inequalities which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
How do we arrive at a point in our lives where we may throw back the curtain and pronounce with Dorothy; “You’re just an old humbug”?
I once taught a linked pair of classes through the English and History departments, a Modern American History class entitled A Useful Past: Constructing an American Identity, together with a Modern American Literature class entitled A Woman Reinvents Humankind: Gertrude Stein’s Modern World, in which I presented the organizing idea that who we are today is a consequence of this one woman’s reinvention of the possibilities of language as self construal, and of the literary revolution she ignited.
Today I’m rereading Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Orlando; here is how I describe it in my literary blog; Orlando is an allegory of time, history, identity, and gender, in the form of a fictionalized biography of her great love, Vita Sackville-West. It also inspired and served Gertrude Stein as a model for her great novel, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
With a main character who is an immortal shapeshifting time traveler, with the enviable power to change genders as the occasion requires, Orlando is stunningly modern for a novel of 1925 and parallels Djuna Barnes’ Surrealist masterpiece Nightwood. Astounding, delightful, and strange, as important an influence as Gertrude Stein or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, as fearless a revolutionary provocation as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Albert Camus’ The Stranger, as gloriously transgressive as Anais Nin’s Collages, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, or William S. Burroughs’ magical-Surrealist alternate world trilogy of American history which ends with The Western Lands, and as marvelously written and fun to read as Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry or the Absurdist satires of Kurt Vonnegut, Orlando merits its place among the Great Books I have returned to throughout my life for inspiration.
Iron Jawed Angels parts 1 & 2
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18839.Orlando
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/19th-amendment-anniversary-women-vote_n_5f2d719dc5b64d7a55f2dddb
Here are some reading recommendations on the subject of Feminist thought:
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks is wonderful and engaging, and the first book I would recommend to a high school student or anyone new to the subject.
For the best general history, read The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America by Ruth Rosen.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/333276.The_World_Split_Open?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_83
Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant, erudite, and savagely satirical trilogy is by turns delightful and disturbingly horrific, and a must-read for everyone; Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528190-men-explain-things-to-me?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_24
Women & Power: A Manifesto, by Mary Beard has the finest writing on the subject of power and gender relations ever, by anyone.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36525023-women-power?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_42
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Undoing Gender, Senses of the Subject, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political, Judith Butler
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85767.Gender_Trouble?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_55
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49427.Sexing_the_Body?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_66
The Deepening Darkness: Loss, Patriarchy, and Democracy’s Future, and its sequel Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance
by Carol Gilligan, David A.J. Richards, together comprise the most relevant ideological framework for understanding and resisting patriarchal repression yet written.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5701098-the-deepening-darkness?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_64
Camille Paglia’s notorious and incendiary Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson remains a glorious and strange theoretical work on the origins of culture in gender inequalities and identities.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101157.Sexual_Personae?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_68
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner together comprise a riveting and brilliant interrogation of femininity and masculinity in our civilization.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/365940.From_the_Beast_to_the_Blonde?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_67
Women, Race & Class, by Angela Y. Davis is an excellent guide to the idea of intersectionality by an iconic figure of revolutionary struggle.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/635635.Women_Race_Class?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_40
Of course everyone should read the work that originated Feminism as a Humanist philosophy and a development of Existentialism in the new translation, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, H.M. Parshley (Translator & Editor), Deirdre Bair (Introduction).
I enjoyed Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison, by A.S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48227.Imagining_Characters?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_166
Sex and Subterfuge: women writers to 1850, by Eva Figes is an excellent critical history of literature.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3855892-sex-and-subterfuge?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_56
For a sense of the scope and diversity of ideas and the historical development of Feminist theory, A Companion to Feminist Philosophy by Alison M. Jaggar (Editor), is among the finest general introductions, though as with all her works intended for academic scholars.
One may also find reflections which speak to our own truths in the source works of the pioneers who have shaped our civilization since de Beauvoir; Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/257649.Sexual_Politics?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_31
And there are a few studies of Feminist theory, ideology, and philosophy which I find illuminating;
Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings
Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory, Suzanna Danuta Walters
The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity, Amy Allen
The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1443454.The_Politics_of_Our_Selves
Doing Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity, Susan Archer Mann
Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity, Alison Weir
As I wrote in my post of March 3 2022, Frighten the Horses: Performing Identities of Sex and Gender as Revolutionary Struggle and Guerilla Theatre; On this anniversary of the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade led by Alice Paul, let us frighten the horses, and through our public performance of identities of sex and gender seize ownership of ourselves, reclaim the narratives of liberation from the marginalization and silences of historical authorization of identity, and shift the boundaries of the Forbidden through transgression of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas.
Freaking the normies, we called it in the San Francisco of my youth; enactments of difference and uniqueness as revolutionary struggle and guerilla theatre, in which we seized public spaces as our stage. As in the spectacle of human possibilities of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, strategies of confrontation which valorize totemic figures of transgression act as rituals of liberation, seizures of power, and the transformation and reimagination of authorized identities and of humankind.
Go ahead, frighten the horses; for none of us need stand alone, and if they come for one of us, they must be met with all of us.
Thousands of women paraded through Washington D.C. on this day over one hundred years ago, the first such event on a massive national scale after sixty years of the fight for women’s suffrage.
It was a public declaration of freedom from fear, and of solidarity in the face of horrific repression. One hundred women were hospitalized this day, attacked by mobs unrestrained and enabled by the police, merely one incident in a decades long struggle against violence and control, and against the deniable forces of a government wholly vested in the Patriarchy. And before that, millennia of enslavement, dehumanization, marginalization, and the silencing of women’s voices.
But after that day, the world has never been the same. Women had stood up to the brutal tyranny of force and control in defiance and refusal to submit, and that is a genie which can never be put back in its bottle. This is the secret of power; it is hollow and brittle, for it fails at the point of disobedience. In the words of the great Sylvia Plath; “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
In this time of darkness when atavistic forces of Patriarchy and Gideonite fundamentalism scuttle from beneath their stones to attempt once again the re-enslavement of women through control of reproductive rights and denial of bodily autonomy without which there is no freedom, and which infringes on our universal right to health care as a precondition of the right to life, which together threaten dehumanization and theft of citizenship, let us claim and raise again the suffragette banner bearing the catchphrase of liberation which Alice Paul appropriated from Woodrow Wilson, “The time has come to conquer or submit.”
The Suffragettes, a reading list
Votes for Women!: American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot, by Winifred Conkling
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33590224-votes-for-women
The Women’s Suffrage Movement, by Sally Roesch Wagner (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40265076-the-women-s-suffrage-movement
Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists, by Jean H. Baker
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1082544.Sisters
Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, by Jean H. Baker (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1082545.Votes_for_Women
Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, by Sally G. McMillen
t
And Yet They Persisted: How American Women Won the Right to Vote,
by Johanna Neuman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50498670-and-yet-they-persisted
Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words, by Lynn Sherr, Susan B. Anthony
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224519.Failure_Is_Impossible
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/267295.Not_for_Ourselves_Alone
Alice Paul: Claiming Power, by J.D. Zahniser, Amelia Roberts Fry (With)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18781414-alice-paul
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, by Catherine Clinton
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183212.Harriet_Tubman
Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, by Nell Irvin Painter
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256976.Sojourner_Truth
Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life, by Sally G. McMillen
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22104324-lucy-stone
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, by Barbara Goldsmith
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216659.Other_Powers
The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age,
by Myra MacPherson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18170162-the-scarlet-sisters
Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote, by Johanna Neuman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34791112-gilded-suffragists
Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds, by Nancy A. Hewitt
Torch of Liberty 
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