At the root

Every time I get into an emotional slump or an intellectually tricky spot, my friend Karen says to me, ‘Go back to your core texts.’

It’s a misleadingly studious-sounding and very arts-degree piece of advice, but it’s probably some of the best I’ve ever received because what she really means is: go back to those books, films, stories, songs and ideas that changed you, that sparked a new understanding in you, that helped you decide what it was you found really important.

Perhaps the studious tone of the advice isn’t totally misplaced, because the first book I always go back to is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I came across it in my second year of uni, not through gender studies but through the philosophy department. I took a class on existentialism because I wanted to immerse myself in Sartre, but it was The Second Sex that eventually consumed me.

I found the book strange, startling and occasionally confusing, but every now and then a passage would resonate so strongly with my own experiences that it would lodge itself in the forefront of my consciousness, demanding I pay attention. Not being able to get it out of my head I would underline words, scribble notes in the margins, copy whole passages out onto paper just to make sure I’d processed them properly.

It was her discussion of the woman in love that knocked me about the most at the time:

Every woman in love recognises herself in Hans Andersen’s little mermaid who exchanged her fishtail for feminine legs through love and then found herself walking on needles and live coals. 

I spent a lot of time kicking the football in party dresses as a kid (so to speak) and in my late teens I listened to a lot of Tori Amos because she gave voice, however cryptically, to a half-acknowledged set of instincts that were fundamentally frustrated by and yet still found themselves drawn to the aesthetics of traditional gender constructs.

and in the mist there she rides
and castles are burning in my heart
and as I twist I hold tight
and I ride to work
every morning wondering why
“sit in the chair and be good now”
and become all that they told you

I couldn’t say in all honesty that Beauvoir alone made me call myself a feminist. But if Amos’ songs prised open something inside me, Beauvoir put into tough, articulate sentences those feelings that I’d previously only ever expressed instinctively, or approached metaphorically through art or music.

At the 2010 MWF, one of the most rewarding and interesting panels I had the privilege to attend was ‘From Woolf to Wolf’. Sophie Cunningham, Monica Dux and Emily Maguire talked with MWF’s own Jo Case about feminist literature: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth respectively. It was heartening to see so many people of all ages at a session on feminist writing, but even more so to hear women talking about how those books – and many others besides – so profoundly influenced or changed them. And I remembered telling my mother about my experience reading The Second Sex. How it made me angry, afraid, astonished and excited all at once. She said she felt the same when, as an 18-year-old, she found Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. ‘Reading that book,’ she said, ‘was the first time I’d ever really thought: perhaps the world doesn’t have to be like this.’