Word: feminist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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FIFTEEN YEARS AGO Robin Morgan observed the beginnings of a feminist movement in America. In Sisterhood is Powerful she wrote of an incipient movement that exists where three or four friends or neighbors decide to meet regularly over coffee and decide to talk about their personal lives. It also exists in the cells of women's jails, on the welfare lines, in the supermarket, the factory, the convent, the farm, the maternity ward, the street corner, the old ladies home, the kitchen, the steno pool...
Morgan's work--the result of a 12-year effort and a staff of hundreds--is a collection of essays by women in 70 countries worldwide. The contributers, who detail the status of women and the extent of feminist movements in their countries, range from longtime activists of established movements--like Simone de Beauvoir on the state of French feminism, and Amanda Sebestyen, a veteran of the British movement--to women who write under aliases to avoid persecution from their governments. "La Silenciada," (the Silenced One) writes of Cuba, and we hear from an "anonymous white South African feminist...
...yearly "maternal" deaths are due to improperly performed illegal abortions. The figure is almost as high through of most of Africa where, the Nigerian contributer writes, abortions are only granted when the women's health is in danger. And in South Africa the "anonymous" white South African feminist" reports, black women are "often forcibly sterilized after having children in State hospitals...
...feminist struggle seems one which makes gains little by little: Forster says that it requires a steady stream of women who are willing to serve as the "example on which a particular law shall be reformed." To play this role, for Norton as for other women, entails, a tremendous personal sacrifice...
Women, of course, did not always want to be faced with the new choices which Sanger's activities created. And Forster says that winning the vote produced complaceney. The feminist movement then needed an ideology to propel it Forster credits Emma Goldman, a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States who was active in the anarchist movement with providing this ideology According to Goldman real emancipition begins in the soul after all the outer traps have been removed, internal tyrannies still keep women in subjection...