The Unity of All Women: Horizontal Feminism by Maura Hennessey

Another guest blog and I am opening this blog up to others who also wish to guest blog in the hopes this might become yet another community nexus of those of us who wish to promote this new (old) vision of feminism. It should be apparent that Maura and I share a similar vision here.

“It was a true sisterhood. What bound us together was the spirit within, the spirit of the feminine. Equals.”

We were walking together on the grounds of the Complutense University in Madrid when my mentor and former profesora spoke those words to me. We were discussing the feminist movement of the last years of the Spanish Republic, known as “feminismo.” Feminismo gave rise to the Mujeres Libres, the Free Women of the Civil War.

“The Americans are crazy, Maureen. They will replace the Patriarchy of men with a Patriarchy of women. Who speaks for the poor or for the Moors(her word for African)? No one. It is a vertical feminism, and it will oppress and marginalise in the name of liberation, and I tell you Chica that no greater abomination exists than women denying their spirit of sisterhood and instead becoming the oppressor. They will, you watch.” Her lesson of the day to me had begun.

The feminism of 1930′s Spain had its roots in Existentialism and in Humanism. It was pro-active rather than reactive. Women advocated for each other and on behalf of each other. It was not exclusive to any class or race, or even sex; its nature would not permit that. “You find the feminine within all willing to recognise it, Maureen. Some people more than others, for they have been taught to shut it away or that it is weakness rather than strength.”

It was a horizontal feminism, as she expained to me, rather than a vertical feminism. Vertical implies a power structure, horizontal implies equality. Sisterhood demands equality and therefore a horizontal feminism was the trademark of the Feminismo and the later Anarcho-Feminism of the Civil War and the Mujeres Libres.

Horizontal feminism was born eight thousand years before Christ, two thousand years before the beginning of the chronology of the Bible. It began in rooms of women sifting grain or weaving, and was given voice by the singing of the women and by their drumming, using the grain sieves. Women lent their skills and time to each other for the benefit of all.

As a sisterhood, horizontal feminism demands responsibility for the welfare of all of the members of the community. That which women have in common, the divine feminine which marks us as sisters, is precious and is to be nurtured and cherished whatever the form it takes and in whomsoever it appears. By its nature defining us as women, it would therefore be that force which brings our sisters of unique journeys such as our trans sisters to the table of the Espirit Feminine.

Horizontal, not vertical. Therefore there is no superior position, no special privilege recognised. No racial preference, no class distinction. Women function as a family, as a community and by consensus.

During the Civil War, with the disappearance of services and resources, Femisimo and horizontal feminism was put to its most practical test. Communities of women created schools, hospitals, established militias and brigades, raised each other’s children as a communal family, worked as doctors, soldiers, teachers, engineers, writers, nursemaids cooks, and succeeded in sustaining an idea of equality while under attack from the Falanagist/Franquistas/Nationalists and the Luftwaffe. The women, Las Mujeres, yielded to no control but their own.

Horizontal feminism reaches across all lines and distinctions. It is not exclusory, it thrives by inclusion and what each sister brings into it. The sisters of the community are defined by a force within, a flame that each member, each sister, each woman has an obligation to nurture, cherish and to protect in one another.

The Lesbian must bear responsibility for, cherish and nurture the feminine spirit within her straight sister, her trans sister, her “moorish” sister, her poor sister, her Islamic sister; in short, the totality of womankind. The others are moved from within to do the same.

“We are one or we will be none, Maureen” she told me in English to emphasise the point with the alliterative accents.

Equality merely begins with horizontal feminism; a first step if you will, but without this step there is no possibilility of equality at all.

 

Guest Post: Greer and Raymond: re-examined in different light by Maura Hennessey

By way of introduction I will reveal that Maura Hennessey, Irish lesbian activist extraordinaire, has visited our home in the Catskills and along with a board member of HRC we shared an evening of spirited and delightful debate on feminism past and present. Her “friend of operative history” is a mutual one.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was an epoch of foolishness; it was an age of wisdom…”

In short, it was the 1970′s. A brash, angry and outspoken woman named Greer was caught up in and in fact one of the public faces of the feminist movement in the British Commonwealth. In Boston, a young graduate student was working upon expanding the ideas of her doctoral supervisor and rumoured lover. Her work on gender and feminism would be perceived as largely theoretically sound to a point, making a sudden leap to come to a conclusion nearly inconsistent with the first few chapters of her work. Her name was Janice Raymond.

“To understand what came after, it is important to know what came before.” In this case, it is important to understand the milieu in which both of these women arrived at the conclusions that are forever associated with their names.

Feminism arrived with not so much a trumpet blare as a cannon blast. Partly it was fueled by the availability of contraception, which meant that “good girls could…and did” and partly it was a reaction to the sociological experiment known as the Eisenhower years . The sexual revolution was on and with it a rapid and vertigo-inducing shift in ideas about women, women’s roles, women’s rights.

Donna Reed and June Cleaver were replaced by Angela Davis and Bernadine Dohrn(or Bernadette Devlin, if you were overseas). The stereotyped conservative, deferential housewife was exposed as a mockery of women, contrived to encourage a TV-opiated television audience to accept and to accomodate the dominance of men

Roles and stereotypes were ripped away, derided and condemned as what they were, sociological chains wrapped around women to keep them in their places serving comfortable a patriarchy deluding itself that it was exercising noblesse oblige in caring for their servant-wives and servant-daughters.

Into this age, this milieu and this sociological revolution came the higher awareness of transsexuality. The public began to hear of cases more frequently. These women now in the public eye were conventional in speech, in behaviour, in belief and in behaviour with perhaps the exception of Dr Richards. They were by and large heterosexual and socially conservative. Much as women of the fifties were shaped by the social constructs of men, the presentation of trans-women of the 1970′s was as well. Donna Reed and June Cleaver had returned, only now they emerged from the operating room. The culprit was the standards used for operative selection, permitting only women attracted to macho men, demure, feminine, attracted to frilly things. Man had become God and created woman in the image of his own fantasies and his own misogynistic desire for dominance. Man wrote the criteria for the surgery, insuring only women from the fifties languishing in the 1970′s could achieve their goal of mind-body agreement.

New women were coming into existence, it seemed, garnering public attention, and these new women were caracitures of the goals of women radicals, the antithesis of the feminist desire to shatter glass ceilings and glass walls, to end the control of men over their reproduction and thier bodies. The new women would in the end use conservative ideals, conservative life choices, and conventionalism to survive “in a man’s world.” By and large they are not to be blamed, this was the price of surgery and men had written the rules.

To women like Raymond and Greer, it seemed as if the Stepford Wives had arrived upon the scene. Worse, they seemed to have equal media access to send a decidedly anti-feminist image in nations where women were struggling for independence of men and equality to men. The anger and rage towards the men who had created post surgical Mrs. Cleavers spilled out in poisonous draughts upon their creations, whether or not they were truly ‘caricatures.’ An entire class of women was condemned in a fashion just as separatist, just as elitist and just as noxious as that of the men who Greer and Raymond were declaring their separate identity from.

Raymond and Greer condemned an entire group when their anger was at the man made social image of women carefully selected and crafted by male medical professionals. Over time, women freed themselves of the expectations of men and trans-women found medical professionals who would do likewise…

But ….the Stepford Wives, the ‘Desparate Corrected Housewives,’ these are still with us. Anti-feminist, conservative, demanding purity in their ranks, we know them by various names. Embracing a conventionality of the 1950′s, defining their group as heterosexual, frequently anti Lesbian their socialisation as women seems to be out of 1950′s and early 1960′s television; one wonders if they would appear in black and white or in colour were you to meet them.

I remark upon the socialisation because for the past 40 years women have had, unless living in a polygamous Mormon compound or a fundamentalist enclave, broader views of roles women can play, women’s sexuality and even women’s spirituality than is to be found amongst the heirs of Greer’s and Raymond’s targets. Worse, they choose, out of some desire for separatism and ‘legitamacy’ the lives, beliefs and roles of the trans-women of decades ago who had no choice but to be what their masters in the medical establishment meant them to be or they would never see the inside of an operating room.

They condemn Lesbians, they condemn radicalism, they condemn women’s spirituality which even Girl Scouts are exposed to and either overtly or covertly participate in. Though overinclusive, there remains a truth to Greer’s condemnation, though she points it in the wrong place.

There are caricatures, but in limited numbers, clinging to conventionality, defining others out of their cohort, roundly condemning women’s radicalism of spirit, spirituality, politics or sexuality. They are not amongst us, for they desire separateness of identity while claiming at the same time the title of women. While a conventionalised and more reactionary Greer points in one direction, the true anti-feminist caricature is to be found in the opposite.