THE VERSO BOOK OF FEMINISM
THE VERSO BOOK OF FEMINISM
Revolutionary Words from
Four Millennia of Rebellion
Edited by Jessie Kindig
with Sophia Giovannitti, Charlotte Heltai, and Rosie Warren
First published by Verso 2020
Collection © Verso 2020
Contributions © The contributors 2020
Introduction © Jessie Kindig 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-926-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-980-1 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-927-6 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Bembo by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For all those whose voices and actions were ignored or never recorded,and whose writing was never published.You will never be silent.
CONTENTS
Introduction: We Begin with What Is Not Yet Complete by Jessie Kindig
Acknowledgments
Sources
Permissions
Index
INTRODUCTION:WE BEGIN WITH WHAT IS NOT YET COMPLETE
Feminism is unfinished business.
The reasons it is unfinished are legion: political, economic, social, experiential, having to do with violence and race and capital, families and states and empires, sexuality and reproduction and the actions of men. It is unfinished because gender is still a reason to be killed, harmed, denied, exploited. But there is one more reason: feminism is unfinished because it is the work of imagination.
Feminism is a politics of emancipation, and the first thing needed for such a politics is to see the need for one. For women to begin advocating for themselves meant an imagining of women together as a collective force. To call yourself a feminist is to insist on connecting your life to others, and that was and still is a political act.
For example: in 1892, African American scholar and educator Anna Julia Cooper wrote in A Voice from the South,
Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”
Cooper spoke in the first person I but also adamantly in the we of black womanhood, crediting the first edition’s authorship to “A Black Woman of the South.” Her charge—that liberation was truest when entered into with those who were most marginal—was also a challenge to her audience. She asked of us to follow her I in order to make a we.
Two decades later, in the first women’s literary journal in Japan, Seitō, Yosano Akiko argued that claiming the I was a revolutionary act in a society where women were seen as inferior. That is, claiming the I could tell about the conditions of the we:
I desire to write entirely in the first person.
I who am a woman.
I desire to write entirely in the first person.
I. I.
One century later, the Tamil and Dalit poet Sukirtharani spoke both for herself and all those living at the frayed edges of societies and towns. In her 2012 poem “A faint smell of meat,” the poet’s I blends into her we:
In their minds
I, who smell faintly of meat,
my house where bones hang
stripped entirely of flesh,
and my street
where young men wander without restraint
making loud music
from coconut shells strung with skin
are all at the furthest point of our town.
But I, I keep assuring them
we stand at the forefront.
The productive tension between the I and the we—between the personal and the political, between the social expectations given and the life one lives, between articulating experience and claiming political voice—is the driving struggle and foundational act of feminist practice.
As this book shows, this is a practice enacted again and again around the world, often in tandem with other movements of revolutionary
