Remedios Varo, ‘Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst’s Office’
The word ‘woman’ has become a floating signifier in recent years - perhaps it always was - so untethered from the earth that it appears to float many miles off the ground, sparkling curiously in the distance. Women, as feminists have frequently pointed out, have often been defined negatively, or sometimes even as the negative, the nothing itself. Whatever it is we are, we are not that. This emptiness has in turn led to a confusion of amenability: if you are nothing, then you are open to being anything and everything to anybody.
Everybody both knows and doesn’t know what it is to be a woman, including women themselves. Women are not children, though they have sometimes been treated as something similar. To be understood and to understand oneself as an adult, as a rational, autonomous being is harder than it looks: for men too, after all. We live in an infantilising culture. There are rewards for playing along, and there are punishments for stepping out of line. These are not always the punishments we imagine. It is very easy to be a ‘feisty’, ‘outspoken’ woman if all you are doing is repeating what the culture wants you to say, but a bit louder than others.
Just over a hundred years since women got the vote in the UK, it’s clear that there is a crisis in the relationship between women and politics. This is not only, or really at all, the problem of political representation (the quantitative measure of women’s participation), but rather something to do with the terms on which women are allowed to participate in the political at all.
To be interested in politics, that is to say, to want to have a say in how we all live together, is, intentionally or otherwise, to say something about human nature as such, about who we are. Given women’s late entry into representational politics - though let us not forget our Queens and other past players - the history of politics cannot ignore this formative exclusion: just as it cannot ignore the men who were also historically excluded on the basis of class or race.
But how conditional it all feels. So many women are politically dispossessed today. There is something unutterably gloomy about Ministers having to spend time defending the use of the word ‘mother’ in legal documents. Or companies avoiding using the word ‘women’ to describe, well, women. Like someone wrote the word on a sheet and stubbed it out with a cigarette, and the whole cloth slowly burned outwards.
Women are often taught to be nice and kind. There is nothing wrong with being nice and kind, though if you have no choice but to be these things, and if you are punished for not being them, this is not ideal. Politics appeared to offer a certain kind of equality, but it largely turns out to be the equality of agreeing with what was already said. If you do not agree you are scorned, sometimes by other women who have already agreed to agree with what was already said. Yet disagreement is the very reason for politics existing in the first place.
There is no point in being nice if it means not telling the truth. There is no freedom in fear. It is necessary and good to get beyond the point where you care what people you do not know and will never know think of you. To be free is to be free to think for oneself. There is no way around this. Either you are interested in freedom or you are not.