Nevertheless, we persisted
My IWD lecture on not complying in advance
Dear GFPs,
As I mentioned in my previous email, I was asked to deliver this year’s Edinburgh University annual International Women’s Day lecture — which I have now done! When I was there, the lovely people at ENDO1000 told me that after my newsletter last week you absolutely AMAZING people gave £1000 in donations to the project. That is in itself fantastic — but what is even more fantastic is that £1000 is how much it costs for each woman to take part in the research. So GFPs have fully funded a whole research participant which is just so brilliant and YOU are all brilliant and I honestly can’t think of a better way for this community to mark IWD. So thank you again — and if you haven’t got around to donating yet, you can do so here.
And as a special (and rare) bonus for the extremely generous GFPs who pay for a monthly subscription to my newsletter (and in so doing make it possible for me to carry on writing to everyone), I am sharing the full text of my speech below (GFPs who get this newsletter for free can read the introduction). Taking in the history of women in medicine, the history of Edinburgh university’s medical school, and the global backlash against women’s rights, this is an absolute beast of a lecture that took me weeks to pull together. I really hope you enjoy it.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming next time!
The future is female…or is it?
Good afternoon, thank you for having me, I’m delighted to be here today to deliver this year’s International Women’s Day Lecture.
What I’m less delighted about, though, is the context in which I’m giving it — because let’s face it, things feel pretty grim right now.
Everywhere you look, women’s freedoms and rights seem to be under threat. Government ministries focused on women’s rights are being defunded, deprioritised, or in some cases closed down altogether. Women’s reproductive choices are being taken away. Companies are one by one sensing the prevailing winds and, now that it is no longer politically expedient for them to do so, are no longer pretending to care about equality. People who have always been hostile to women’s rights are becoming increasingly emboldened, and women who fight for equality are being targeted with increased virulence both online and offline.
What a difference a decade makes.
Ten years ago it was fashionable to declare that the Future is Female, and politicians, CEOs, and celebrities were all lining up to wear “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts. From our position today, though, that future looks, at the very least, extremely strained.
But I’m not here to tell you how terrible everything is.
I don’t imagine that anyone who has come to listen to me here today isn’t aware of the turn we have taken in our political discourse. Many of you may be feeling scared, helpless, even hopeless. You may be feeling overwhelmed. And that is understandable. I’m scared. I often feel helpless and I often feel overwhelmed too.
But one thing I don’t feel — or at least, I try not to feel, is hopeless. Partly this is my natural stubbornness. I know the intention is for me to feel hopeless and I simply refuse to comply in advance.
But it’s not just that.
It’s also because I have good reason to have hope. And that reason comes from my knowledge that we have been through periods of intense backlash before — and we’ve got through them.
We have prevailed.
And we have come back fighting.
Losing in waves
The backlash always seems to take us by surprise.
We have a tendency to think of progress as linear, or even, in hindsight, inevitable. But the truth is that when you look back through the history of women’s rights, or indeed the rights of any oppressed people, there is a very clear pattern. In feminism, at least through the twentieth century, we call this pattern “waves”. First wave, second wave, third wave.
And when we’re talking about the history of women’s rights, it’s these waves, these moments of progress, that we tend to focus on — which is understandable. Everyone prefers the story where the heroes are winning — and looking back at them now, the women who got us the right to vote, who got us the right to education, who got us the right to equal employment opportunities, who got us the right to equal treatment under the law: these women feel like the obvious heroes.
But I think this understandable tendency does us a disservice.
Because, although we don’t often acknowledge it, a wave is an extremely apt metaphor for the history of women’s rights. Because just as on the shoreline, the wave crashing onto the beach is constrained by a powerful force sucking that water back into the ocean, so in the fight for women’s liberation, every wave has been met by a powerful force sucking us back into our patriarchally defined roles as The Second Sex.
And just as the history of women’s rights is the story of how we won, it is also the story of how we lost, and lost and lost and lost. And above all it’s the story of how we got back up and fought all over again.