Once upon a time I shared a rickety east-London house with five twenty-something lasses. We were each broke, in debt and buried by bookshelves (old stacked-up empty wine-boxes from City merchants) twice the size of our wardrobes (cheap hanging rails from the fashion market). It felt oddly voyeuristic to browse the others’ books… I knew that mine were a catalogue of hopes (things I wanted to know), guilts (things I wished I knew already) and dreamlands I wanted to escape into. A bit like an underwear draw, really.

I remember vividly the white-spined snoopy comics packing-out the front room, the silver-blue oxford classics stacked along the dresser, and the postmodern Introducing… series brimming out of the bathroom fireplace. But I browsed and thumbed only hesitantly and sheepishly.

What luck, then, that there’s such things as Book Memes. And that friends, if you ask them nicely, can be persuaded to divulge the deepest secrets of their bookworlds. Because it’s one thing to see the creased and worn silver-blue spines, but quite another to know what they’ve meant.

This, then, is the first guest book meme. From the Princess of Pub Quizzes (she can petition me for another name anytime)…..

One book that changed your life

My usual answer to this question is Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which I read when I was 16 and which moved me deeply with its poetic meditation on aestheticism and the continued need for engagement with the mess of life. However, it would be, I suppose, a dull meme if Hesse swept the board so I offer instead Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which I came across at around the same time and read in the space of a single train journey. It’s a difficult thing to classify - it’s at once fiction, history and philosophy - but it felt as though I was less reading it than it was reading me - stripping away all of my assumptions about reality and humanity and forcing me to re-evaluate everything around me. I sincerely felt as I finished it that I had become a different and, I hoped, more sensitive person. It stays with me fifteen years on as an increasingly nebulous sense memory, since I’m scared to revisit it, but an immensely precious one nonetheless.

One book you have read more than once

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read this; it’s the ultimate comfort book for me and I’ll often pick it up to read a few pages when

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Thank you to Villa Villekulla for tagging me…

One book that changed your life:

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
I met a cool young bloke in a queue in Durham when I was somewhere between the pits of misery and heights of drunken delirium, aged about 16. I was just beginning to eat again, defiant, muddled and troubled (he didn’t know). A few days later I received in the post Hesse’s Siddhartha (and a ten page letter). Reading it I got hopeful, excited and light. It was a fresh way of looking at things, making the stuff of life stark and beautiful. There was no hiding.

One book you have read more than once:

20thC Photography: Museum Ludwig Cologne

I like pictures a thousand times more than I like words. I’m not sure there’s any book I’ve read more than once, let alone a feminish one. For me, finishing a book is such a major achievement I can’t bear to double-up my tally by repeating one. (I still recall with horror the time my sister finished Mathilda for the second time, and then - it was 10pm at night - proceeded to turn it over and start reading again at page 1. I realised then that there would be some things in life which I will never understand).
This fat, flickable book of 20thC photography, bought for a song at a remainders shop, is a real friend. It’s about bodies, joy, pain, beauty, glamour, suffering and the gritty reality of 20th Century human existence. It’s personal and it’s political and I can pore over the same photos for hours.
The one above is Tina Modotti’s Mother and Child

One book you would want on a desert island:

Well, it would depend on how deserted the island was. Assuming total isolation, I’d go for the world’s biggest, fattest, idiot-to-expert guide to astronomy, given that the stars would be the only ponderable things actually there with me. If there’s stuff going on on the island, like fauna and flora (and bugs), I’d like the world’s biggest natural history book. I wouldn’t worry about feminism if it was me alone with the cosmos.

One book that made you laugh:

Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
All of them, but especially this:

One book that made you cry:

Thich Nhat Hanh, Call Me By My True Names

This book of poetry may also be the one book I’d want on a desert island:

…I’ve dreamed of drinking dewdrops
that sparkle with the light of far-off galaxies.
I’ve left footprints on celestial mountains
and screamed from the depths of Avici Hell, exhausted, crazed with despair
because I was so hungry, so thirsty…

One book you wish had been written:

A light, engaging and grounded book about how to be a calm, clear feminist in 21st century daily life.

One book you wish had never been written:

Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500-1800 (1979)
For me, this is the archetypal case of lazy, masculine history that gets status (in this case an unendingly in-print paperback Penguin edition) simply because the bloke in question is a Big Name and there’s a nice grand narrative which fits readers’ existing prejudices.

But it’s bad history, plain and simple. It’s so famous and so widely-read and -quoted, I think this book is part of the reason most people think we’ve ‘progressed’ from higgledy-piggledy extended families where parents didn’t care about their kids, half of whom died before they were five anyway, and much less about their partners - to a happy bliss of nuclear family intimacy, love and stability in the 20th Century.

It just wasn’t like that! Extended kinship groups as he describes were already gone by 1500, there’s evidence of deep family love even further back than that - and I stick my tongue out at anyone who claims nuclear families were a blissful norm in the 20th Century.

One book you are currently reading:

A very special copy of Alice Walker’s Living By The Word, signed by her after a talk at the Hackney Empire and given to me by Miss Morgan on, if I remember correctly, the top deck of the Number 11 bus to Liverpool Street. I’m impressed by the peacefulness of it, and by the fact A.W. can be so grittily incisive about so much. And I’m in awe of her fulsome ecofeminism.

One book you have been meaning to read:

A History of Women in the West (All five volumes)
After I’d already spent the cost of two volumes on photocopies in libraries, I realised it’d be cheaper to actually buy them: a myriad collection of awesome articles on women’s lives from the Greek Antiquity to the late 20th Century (with lots of good pictures). Even second-hand they were still pricey, but I ordered the shipping-by-sea option of the cheapest set from the States and broke into the higher echelons of mastercard debt. They eventually arrived in Westminster after I’d already left the newsroom for my sabbatical in Europe, in a fantastically huge grey canvas sack, weighing a tonne. They reached me in East London just in time for me to send my brother off with a tenner to get a wheely carry-case from Petticoat Lane. I plonked them in, with a couple of Luce Irigaray’s and the Patterner’s own meaning-to-read collection (which included Ulysses), and off we headed on Eurostar. We hefted and hulked the bag through the Paris Metro, but it didn’t survive the Patterner’s flying leap down a 10 metre flight of stairs, and so we had to continue our journey carrying the book-tonne by hand.

The sabbatical has become eternal and the meaning-to-read books sit ominously on our bodged oak-and-stone shelves. So far only two of the five volumes have made it out of their foam packing… so when I say I’ve been meaning to read them, I really mean I’ve been meaning to read them - actively, expensively and exhaustingly, for quite a while.

UPDATE:

Ah Yes! ….I tag: The folks over at the unconvention, Norvicensian, rgrp, Jolie at Confessions of a Blogwitch, and all the E1 Ladeeez.

I’ve just put together a Three Guineas Redux. Everything I wanted to know about Woolf’s book on Wednesday, but has taken me four days to dig up and distill. I’ve written it because, firstly, my mind is not unlike a sieve and, second, because it’s so good I want the gems of the book to be available to those (like me, last year) who want to read it, to really take savour every word, but just don’t have the time. So it’s partly to remember and partly to cheat.

After all, there’s only so many hours on buses and the tube topping-and-tailing a working day. And in any case, when I was on the beloved numbers 8 and 38 in London Town I’d prefer to rest my dreary computered eyes and quietly soak in the metropolitan company. I had newspapers at breakfast, precious few moments at lunch, Gun Street Girls at tea-time and a lover in bed - no wonder I never finished Elaine Showalter’s Inventing Herself or ever started Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.

So please check it out and let me know what you think: » Three Guineas Redux

If you like it, I’ll do you another. Maybe even a Second Sex Redux, if I dare…

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

a feminish redux: all a girl needs to know

Full text online:
University of Adelaide Library, electronic texts collection: Three Guineas

Recommended printed editions:
Penguin (Classics) ISBN: 0141184604 | Oxford (Classics) ISBN: 0192834843 | Blackwell (Critical ed’n) ISBN: 0631177248

i. the book in a nutshell
ii. what else the book says
iii. about the author
iv. key passages, quotes
v. Three Guineas trivia
vi. publications about Three Guineas

i. the book in a nutshell
Three Guineas is Virginia Woolf’s most controversial and polemical feminist work. The essay was written in Winter 1936/7 and published in 1938 to the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the muscle-flexing of fascists in Italy and Germany. It takes the form of a letter replying to a request (from a grey-haired old English barrister) for a guinea (21 shillings - about £1.05 in new money) towards a Society for the Justice, Equality and Liberty of all men and women. A donation, it is claimed, would help to prevent war.

By all means take your guinea, says Woolf, delighting in the fact it’s one she, a woman, has earned herself ( ‘the professions’ were only unbarred in 1919). But first she will give one guinea for women’s colleges:

if [daughters] are going to be restricted to the education of the private house they are going… to exert all their influence both consciously and unconsciously in favour of war. Of that there can be little doubt. Chapter 1

and a second to a society for the advancement of women in ‘the professions’:

to help women to earn their livings in the professions is to help them to possess that weapon of independent opinion which is still their most powerful weapon. It is to help them to have a mind of their own and a will of their own with which to help you to prevent war. Chapter 2

Woolf’s comprehensive, elaborate and well-defended argument over 190 pages is that the more women there are in positions of power (in politics, science, culture or the church) the less warmongering society will be. Three Guineas was an original foray into 1930s debates about war because it tackled head-on “what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man’s game — that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male.” (Susan Sontag)

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Muhajababes is great. A young woman took it upon herself to wrangle time off work and spend money she didn’t have to dive alone into the heart of six Middle Eastern countries to meet the young women and men affected by her pro-Iraq-war politics. Awesome. And then - what’s even more nails - Allegra Stratton chiselled three months of investigative adventuring into a book not only vividly heaving with everyone she met, but lit up with expedient shards of political history, and drenched in the very 21st century youth culture she’s checking out - with allusions, I’m embarrassed to confess, I didn’t always get. It’s not often you find a politics/current-affairs book whose chapter-headings read like album tracks: “Requiem for Zen”, “Wasta“, “Gezzing”, “Fulla Pink”…..

I recommend anyone to read Muhajababes because I guarantee you’ll feel, in addition to being knackered and over-inputted (not more than after a crazy fun weekend with friends), absolute relief. The young lads and lasses Muhajababes introduces us to are just very human and very real - as confused and independent-minded and soaked in telly, media, music and politics as us lot in Europe. They’re not, as the Daily Mail would have us believe, a culturally-alien gulf apart - and I even mean that of the teenage ‘martyr’ who let Allegra touch his Hamas card. Instead, as the strapline would have it - the young ‘uns of the Middle East are ‘cool, sexy and devout‘ - a thoroughly modern and reassuringly liberal combo.

And if the Muhajababes aren’t sure whether to veil, it’s not so very different from me not being sure whether to wear make-up. Mascara, lipstick, eyeliner - they’re a big question for me that I’m continuously re-answering: it’s about gender and it’s about independence and it’s also about other-people’s-views-of-women. And it’s not at all clear which is more empowering, wearing make-up or not wearing make-up; veiling or not-veiling. I’m glad that the lasses of the Middle East are negotiating their own naughty/nice (gender conservative/gender radical) route through 21st century culture. (There was I thinking I was radical wearing a trouser suit to the Westminster newsroom one day and flip flops and a tomato-red felt skirt the next…) The appeal of down-to-earth 21st century-style Islamic teachers who offer -moderate- spiritual relief from culture-consumption-overload, their teachings simultaneously translated into half a dozen European languages, even rang a few Immanent Grove bells…

I’m relieved because reading Muhajababes I really saw the dynamic impermanence of mainstream culture in the Middle East. Things are changing weekly, monthly, and people are constructing - negotiating- their own path through the soup. I’m uncomfortable with conservatism, unbreakable mores and cultural fear-of-change. And I think, at some level, I’d thought it was there in the daily-lived Islam of the Middle East. But the people Allegra met were not like that. In so far as they were, for example, religious, they were so freely and pro-actively, appropriating the teachings for themselves in a critical way (using the gems of modernity while they’re at it - bit of texting here, webbing there, bluetooth for him, DNA test for her). If millions of under-25’s across the Middle East are following the ’sheikh of chic’ Amr Khaled (and changing their lives as a result) it’s not because he’s just another old important imam they have to respect (he isn’t), but because he’s got straight-talking wisdom (of a sort) about the things that matter: masturbation, porn, or growing flowers in your tower-block…

The picture of the young Middle East I got in Muhajababes was relieving - but it’s the story of the old liberalism/communitarianism chestnut. You can have limitless choice in a liberal set-up: go to whatever churches or mosques you like, drive a car, die your hair purple or cover it in silk, and from that liberalism opt into whatever sets of communitarian rules you like (for example, opting into rules that say go to this particular mosque, don’t drive a car, and only cover your hair in, say, blue nylon that doesn’t go with your eyes). But what happens when everyone hops from liberalism’s choices onto the same restrictive communitarian bandwagon? What becomes of freedom-of-choice then when, for example, 85% of women in your country have veiled? Who’s protecting the right-to-choice of the other 15%?

Maybe it’s hard to be a feminish/feminist and oppose international actions to protect this liberalism (which was, at one level, what the Iraq war was all about). I s’pose I just think that armed interventions are different from peaceful ones.

Housework bothers me. But not because it is of itself bothersome - I’ve had some of the calmest moments of my life holding a broom, feeling my body sway backwards and forwards, settling into the unendingness of it… knowing millions of people world-over are, in the same moment, sweeping their mud-floors, their front door-step, their kitchen lino. In those moments I’ve noticed the pointlessness of it (”this dust will sure-as-anything be here again next week”; “gees, how many thousands of hours have my ancestors spent just sweeping - and what have they got to show for it? Where are they all now? Dead!” etc.). And somehow by touching this endless pointlessness of it through time and space, it’s actually become quite soothing to do it: “I do this because it is part of surviving. And I survive in the same way my ancestors survived, and my fellow-humans survive. I do this so I can live in a clear space. So I can respect these three rooms where I live, so they can help me to be happy, and so I don’t cringe at dust when I put my feet on the wooden tongue-and-groove slats every morning. I wouldn’t want to pay someone to do this for me because it’s one of my few chances (chopping wood/ carrying water not forthcoming at the minute) to engage in the fundamental work of staying alive - and connect to my basic human condition.”

No, housework bothers me because girls do it and guys (more often than not) don’t (Beloved Patterner excluded).

When I was younger, the boys got the wood in and we girls tidied up. They made their beds, sure, but it was the two daughters who ‘put the wash in’ and helped fold socks in front of Blind Date on a Saturday night. I remember being strangely confused that my little bro had to be shown how to use the washing machine age 16 - how on earth had he got away with not knowing?

But it’s not his fault - it’s just how the cookie’s been crumbling for, well, a few hundred generations.

And the recipe for this particular girls-tidy/boys-carry crumbly cookie is complicated. It’s about society’s gender roles, it’s about women-at-home, it’s (perhaps) about psychological predispositions to multi-tasking, and it’s about our particular home-drilling by Mum. It’s about what we read and think; and what, as children, what was said to us - and read to us. And this is all changing.

I remember once, in a dusty corner of the University Library desperately avoiding finals revision, I fell into flicking through yellowing periodicals around me - and found a feminist children’s story in Signs magazine. I read it all and it was great: Girl has adventures home-alone; Mum gets in late at night; Girl clears up naughty mess quickly, but she’s not caught because Mum’s still snogging the current boyfriend in the car. I thought, Wow! If only I’d had that as a child: Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson (and Ronald Dahl for a bit of a shake-up) don’t exactly a liberated woman make.

This all came to me today because I’d heard that the Famous Five books have been revised so that the boys do some housework. My first reaction was, Fantastic! My second was, What does the Daily Mail think?

Row faster, George! The PC meddlers are chasing us!
Neither the Famous Five nor the Secret Seven are any longer permitted to pursue their adventures without hindrance from the PC zealots. Julian and Dick are now required to do the housework with the girls. Already, Mary and Jill of the Adventurous Four have been ‘updated’ to Pippa and Zoe. It can only be a matter of time before the stop-at-home, cake-baking mummies of Blyton’s fiction will be sent out to work in shipyards as crane drivers while the daddies have to relinquish their City jobs and become house-husbands.

The logic is priceless Mail:
1. Boy picks up broom
ergo
2. Mother must drive a shipyard crane
ergo
3. World order has collapsed and palpable madness undermines All That’s Good.
ergo
4. Boys mustn’t sweep.

You gotta laugh, if only because things have already changed. The cookie’s crumbling differently because the dough mix ain’t the same, and the Daily Mail doesn’t matter (that much - though it matters a darn sight more than it should).

So Thank God I’m an 80’s child not a 50’s housewife… and that twentysomething blokes don’t think us twentysomething girls are crazy for insisting on ‘taking it in turns’ (though I have a niggling feeling that my twentysomething bloke was read feminist children’s books as a child).

It’s dusk. An hour ago I leapt out of the car to check out the garage door - more demolished by the mason than we’d anticipated. After a day working my mind through feminist philosophy, I was suddenly worrying about grey cement and stones being not quite in the right place.

And then - bam! It’s arrived. I knocked it on my head, rubbed the silky smooth finish on my cheek and bashed it and boshed it to see how real it is. I shouted out loud and hit the front with my index finger - It’s real. It’s here. She’s really done it. A real proper, sassy, nails book. Allegra you rock.

So I stood, wedged between the cement mixer and the steel props, in the fading light, ravishing the black-on-white. I flew through the introduction - impatient to know the final Pitch… (there’s been a lot of proofs since Allegra and I chewed life and politics for 4 hours at the improbably patient -we only had coffee and cake- Story cafe)

It’s great. Telling it straight on these leaves of tree-pulp, bound by glue, matt-glossed with plastic…. Fearlessly stating to the anonymous reader exactly how-it-was - to be young, idealistic and political in 2003. The girl’s frank, honest and direct. The War Question was a tricky unspoken one between us, after that Saturday in February, raised only when there was safety in numbers (I remember a ranshackle collective of two-dozen party apparatchiks, young journalists and think tank interns grappling with the whole hog one late weekday evening, perched on Spitalfields Market vegetable pallets in the attic).

It’s true that the Disagreement motivated each of us and we’re each still playing out the logical conclusions of our position. I tried to make it to Iraq in the relative-peace of Winter 2003/4 (to interview the women excluded from the ‘democratic’ state-forming and capture as much DV footage as I could) but the insurgency exploded in Basra. I was forced to channel my determined, frustrated courage elsewhere. It ended up as persistent, outspoken principled opposition to war by men-in-suits - those within my Westminster newsroom and beyond. Meanwhile Allegra stuck to her guns, kept reading and asking questions, learnt Arabic, and saved her unpaid leave for the less dangerous corners of the Middle East. I saved mine for six months in retreat in a Zen monastery in France, with no newspapers and no politics.

I reasoned that if I have ideals this strong, about war or feminism or politics (and I got pretty worked up on behalf of the women in Iraq in spring 2004), I want to see them clearly - to know my inconsistencies, my anger, my frustration, and go beyond them to manifest myself in a way that’s more raw, more honest, more deep.

Which is why you can find me here, in a remote village among pierres taillees and bellowed shouts across the place (France are playing Portugal in the World Cup Semis), living out my pacifism and thinking out my feminism. And I’m fondly proud of my awesome friend Allegra, for living out her ideals and thinking out her thoughts on the dusty streets of Beirut and the in clatter of the political metropolis - and for realising the fruits of her quest in print. I’m sure that integrity and honesty - and fearless idealism - are where it’s at.