March 7, 2004

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own it.

WITH the above statement as the starting point, if we look at how prior to the feminist presses women’s writing was suppressed and that publishing was an exclusively male industry, we would concede the need for exclusive presses for feminist writings. Men were the ‘gatekeepers’ of culture and women were silenced and ignored. Ideas that were actually male ideas were portrayed as the ‘norm’ and women did not have their say.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the emergence of literary groups, such as the Bloomsbury set, and the development of presses, like the Hogarth press, gave some prominence to feminist writers. But these were not mainstream, and certainly did nothing for women writing in the so-called third world. These works were largely overlooked until the feminist rebellion of the 1970s. However, the feminist presses would not have had such success if it were not for the women’s liberation movement, which raised awareness of a whole range of women’s issues and were a source of great support and motivation for the feminist writing. To this day the presses subscribe to this ideology. Thus the advent of the feminist presses can be located in the context of the women’s movement.

So, were the feminist presses successful in their objective of overcoming the patriarchal industry? The website www.feministpress.org forces one to come to the conclusion that the feminist presses indeed illuminated women’s history, brought their culture to the attention of the masses and increased the number of women writers who were able to get their work published.

Among the myriads of books recommended in the website are:

Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Short Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan by Ann C. Carver, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang. This anthology introduces the short fiction of 14 writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnicities, age and political perspectives.

Joss and Gold by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. At the centre of this engaging “un-love” story is Li An, a smart and strong-willed Malaysian woman of Chinese descent. The conflicts that surround Li An in the politically charged atmosphere of Kuala Lumpur in 1969 intersect with her own internal contradictions. With insight and wit, Lim shows us that what we expect may not always be what we get, but all roads lead us, ultimately, to our deepest selves.

Changing Lives: Life Stories of Asian Pioneers in Women’s Studies edited by the Committee on Women’s Studies in Asia. Thirteen women from eleven Asian countries narrate their individual passages into feminist consciousness and the monumental effect of women’s studies on their personal and professional lives.

Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo. Changes explores the complex world in which the lives of professional working women have changed sharply, but the cultural assumptions of men’s lives have not.

Sultana’s Dream and Selections from “The Secluded Ones” by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Roushan Jahan (Editor). Sultana’s Dream, first published in 1905 in a Madras English newspaper, is a witty feminist utopia — a tale of reverse purdah that posits a world in which men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war non-violently and restoring health and beauty to the world. “The Secluded Ones” is a selection of short sketches, first published in Bengali newspapers, illuminating the cruel and comic realities of life in purdah.

Truth Tales by Kali for Women (Editor). In these short stories translated from seven of India’s languages, the writers and their heroines reflect the mosaic of Indian life: they are old and young, rural and urban, rich and poor.

Women Writing Africa Volume 1: The Southern Region by Margaret J. Daymond, etc. (Editors). In this landmark collection of voices both well-known and rarely heard outside Africa, this first volume reveals a living cultural legacy that will revolutionize the understanding of African women’s literary and cultural production.

The Feminist Press purports to be a non-profit literary and educational publisher dedicated to publishing work by and about women. The Press’ creation and continued existence are grounded in the knowledge that women’s writing has often been absent or underrepresented on bookstore and library shelves and in educational curricula — and that such absences contribute, in turn, to the exclusion of women from the literary canon, from the historical record, and from public discourse.

As one goes through this website, the names of other feminist organizations keep popping up. I discovered that the best website to at least enumerate all the groups involved in publishing in the Asia-Pacific region was www.spinifexpress.com.au In this website are listed many that we are familiar with like Kali for Women, Simorgh and Shirkatgah of Pakistan, Women for Women of Bangladesh. But it was interesting to see feminist publishing endeavours in Indonesia with Kalyana Mitra, a women’s group based in Jakarta since 1985. Debra Yatim, a short story writer and one of the founders of the group, has written extensively critiquing the resurgence of fundamentalism in Indonesia. Then there is the work of Kumari Jaywardena, the internationally reputed historian and activist in the civil rights movements in Sri Lanka.

Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, and Women, the State, and Cultural Identity in South Asia are just two of her many publications. The women’s centre, which brings out regular publications is CENWOR (Centre for Women’s Research) is located in Colombo.

Networking among women is not new. Women have always instinctively sought out each other, kept in touch with each other and stood by each other. Feminism could not have become a worldwide movement without the information sharing among women. Thus given the history of friendships and collaborations with feminist organizations, Spinifex networking with Asia is more of a good thing. The site seeks to create a space on the worldwide web, which could be shared by similar organizations located in the Asia Pacific region.

In the 1990s the Internet globalized the world and also allowed women writers to begin to imagine — if only to imagine — the possibility of a diverse, mutable, international culture where all boundaries were permeable and where global feminists helped shape what people thought. But like the end of the Cold War, the rise of modern media, the emergence of global feminism was met by a backlash. Feminist writers rapidly felt the impact of the backlash. Before the 1990s, human rights organizations could point to few examples of women writers persecuted for their beliefs.

Suddenly the number of such writers began to rise rapidly, as did the seriousness of their cases. In 1993, Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarussian oral historian who interviewed Russian soldiers about the war in Afghanistan, was put on trial by the military. In 1993 and 1994, the “Five Croatian Witches” were charged by the Zagreb gutter press with insufficient nationalism and subjected to a “trial by public opinion,” which eventually drove three of them into exile.

In the face of this backlash a feminist organization grew within the International PEN called Women’s World in 1994. The context was the first UN Decade of Women, which began at the UN Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985. Many date the birth of global feminism, with its combined emphasis on economics, health and human rights, to the Nairobi conference. The same decade saw a huge growth of feminist publishing worldwide, signalled by the First Feminist Book Fair, which took place in London in 1984; a second was held in Oslo in 1986, and a third in Montreal in 1988. These book fairs drew large numbers of women writers and publishers not only from Europe and North America, but from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arabic-speaking world.

Several of Women’s World’s most active members first met at the Fifth Feminist Book Fair in Amsterdam in 1992. Then followed a series of international meetings of women writers.

In 2002 the Women’s World website went up called www.wworld.org. The website declares that, “We have formed the Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development, or Women’s WORLD, because nowhere on earth are women’s voices given the same respect as men’s. In a few countries, a few women are heard some of the time; in most countries, our words are greeted with polite indifference and mere lip service is paid to our concerns; and, in far too many countries, women who try to have a public voice are met with hatred, contempt, suppression, exile, or death.

“Whether the agency of suppression is the state, the publishing industry, religious authority, or the family, all forms of silencing and exclusion must be seen as censorship. When certain subjects are made taboo to women-subjects like war and peace, religion, or law, this is censorship. When people who write critically about gender arrangements cannot find publishers, this is censorship. When girls are not taught to read and write, this is censorship. Gender-based censorship is a human rights abuse that must be fought. The world cannot afford to use less than half of its wisdom.”

The website provides links to many writings on the subject of censorship and is interesting for the present women in times of war.

A related issue presented is the use of language which opens up so many compelling questions about the way language is used by feminists, particularly in academic writing, thinking, and research. Among the issues are what role does gender play in the way we find a “writer’s voice”? Are there writing processes and products that better reflect the feminine than those traditional ones that we learn? Is personal experience a touchstone in ways of knowing and writing? By considering these questions and others, women explore the implications of feminist theory for expository writing. Among theorists discussed on this website are Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, Virginia Woolf, etc.

Bulgarian-born Julia Kristeva who studied French literature in Paris and trained as a psychoanalyst, wrote Tales of Love and Black Sun, which include transcripts from her analytic sessions. Feminists turn to her work in order to expand and develop various discussions and debates in feminist theory and criticism. Kolkata-born Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the author of Myself, I Must Remake (1974), a historical-biographical study of W.B. Yeats’s poetry. It was the publication in 1976 of her introduction to and translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology that signified her entry into the elite theoretical ateliers in France.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is a critic whose theoretical strengths have been retrospectively identified and revised by successive generations of readers and critics. First, her call for fiction whose “stuff... is a little other than custom would have us believe it” and the example of her nine novels were seen as defining her as a major British high modernist. Then she was reconstructed as one of the founders of contemporary feminism. Her emphases in her novels on the experiences and inner lives of her female characters, her discussions in her criticism and reviews of women authors, and especially her essay on women and writing, A Room of One’s Own led to her elevation as a literary “mother” as an alternative to the many “fathers” available to male writers.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)