Layers upon layers of herstorical forgetting

Working at the Feminist Library is a fascinating learning experience. The other day, a student from Sterling University paid us a visit. We got talking. It turned out that, like many other feminists before her, she did not know about the Library until that day.

It hurts me every time. Every time there is an event at the Library, we have plenty of young feminist visitors like that. Let me just add, the Library has been around for well over four decades now. It is home to one of the most incredible collections of feminist materials. Something like 8,500 titles, including periodicals, poetry, fiction, as well as theory, including classics, such as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique. It also holds the only feminist bookshop in London, as well as countless events every year.

I used to, naively perhaps, assume that all London feminists know about it. I don’t anymore. I did, however, start using their feedback as a source of research to try an solve the mystery of why they don’t. There is surely no doubt that they should – whenever I meet a new feminist who didn’t, I invariably hear ‘I can’t believe I did not know about it!’

What I found out probably won’t surprise you, if you’re an active feminist. But I still think it’s worth talking about. Thinking about it can lead to some interesting conclusions.

Here are some of the key reasons I found:

1. The fragmentation of our movement remains a painful reality. Some of it is due to the political differences between campaign groups. At certain points, those differences become so pronounced that they morph into infighting. I wish there was  more talk of collaboration between groups, because I honestly think that at least some of the differences are not as insurmountable as they seem to us when we don’t really talk to each other.
2. But there is also at least one other reason for the fragmentation: technology. I used to find it hard to believe when women from the Second Wave would tell me about how it used to be easier to find groups and communicate with other feminists. But now I see it more clearly. The advent of the social media has made it almost too easy for us to start our own groups and ‘new’ campaigns. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see so much feminist activity happening nowadays. Yet having thousands of groups can make it very confusing for new feminists to find the right space for them. I should know, it took me a couple of years to find my way around, and I’m still far from knowing all the feminist organisations around, 10 years down the line. Older feminist tell me that back in the days of the Second Wave, if you lived in London, all you had to do to know what was going on and where, was to find a copy of the London Women’s Liberation Newsletter.
3. But all of this is down to a more disturbing, deep seated issue which is at the heart of patriarchy: the division of women. Whenever I think about it, I am reminded of Gerda Lerner, one of my most cherished teachers, who talked about the division of women into the good and the bad ones being one of the very roots by patriarchy sustains itself.

And this brings me to, what seems to me, the inevitable conclusion of this train of thought. Garda Lerner, to my mind, was one of the most incredible feminist teachers. And yet, she is perpetually forgotten by the movement. Do not get me wrong, I don’t blame feminists for this act of forgetting. I blame patriarchy. As long as women do not know their history, we will forever be making the same mistakes over and over again. And forgetting Gerda is like forgetting women’s history itself, for she is the foremother who established the discipline of women’s history. She deserves a special place in our feminist memory. And yet barely any woman I speak to knows her. Patriarchy makes us relearn our history over an over again. And we have to do it ourselves. Because mainstream history books hide it from us.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I’d learned that this year was the 50th anniversary of the Second Wave – and yet, I did not know about it. It did not make the news, unlike the centenary of the vote – even though that’s not until next year. As a lover of women’s history, the realisation that I didn’t know makes me ashamed. But more than anything it makes me angry – at the history books that blind us, still, to the herstory pages, erased as not sufficiently relevant; at the historians, teaching us all history as if it was only in men’s interest to know.

Perhaps it is time, that we forgot about the mainstream history books altogether and started feminist schools, with textbooks of our own, that would paint a truer reflection of our society, and the women that play a part in it.