Why Today’s Feminists Need Both Audre Lorde and Margaret Atwood
By: Tara Wanda Merrigan
Tags: Feminism, Audre Lorde, Womens March, Metoo, Margaret Atwood

Women’s March 2017 participant holds a sign with an Audre Lorde quote. (Wikimedia Commons)

Women have marched, protested and spoke out in the year since Trump took office, because women’s rights, especially those concerning reproductive health, have been threatened again and again. Here is a partial list that demonstrates the current administration’s stance on women’s rights:

The president backed plans to defund Planned Parenthood and signed legislation that will enable state and local governments to prevent abortion providers from receiving federal funds.

Trump backed House Republicans’ American Health Care Act, which would have allowed insurers to deny coverage to women with “preexisting conditions,” that ranged from mundane procedures (C-sections) to serious circumstances (past sexual assault).

Trump has appointed conservative judges to the federal courts who seem likely to support his anti-abortion stance.

Trump’s education secretary scrapped Obama-era guidelines for investigating campus sexual assault.

Because of the instances included above and many others, women and their allies took to the streets on Saturday in cities across the U.S. for a second Women’s March. Thousands are expected to participate. Anger, after all, is a powerful impetus. And women have plenty of reasons to be angry in 2018. Audre Lorde, a black poet and activist who was integral to feminist politics in the 1970s and 1980s, knew well the power of anger. In 1981, speaking at a women’s studies conference, she said:

Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.

Audre Lorde has been a major intellectual inspiration for the feminists of 2018. Her quotes are frequently posted on Twitter. Women’s websites list Lorde’s words among the quotes marchers might write on their posters. Lorde’s essay collection A Burst of Light was reissued in September to meet demand for her work.

Audre Lorde stands at a blackboard. (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s easy to understand why 2018’s feminists, who want a big-tent movement, find Lorde’s circumspect and uncompromising philosophies attractive. Lorde recognized that women come to feminist activism with different life experiences, and she encouraged her fellow feminists to recognize and respect those differences. In the 1981 speech I quoted above, Lorde said: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” This is exactly the philosophy championed by the organizers behind the Women’s March; these organizers want to be cognizant and supportive of all women, whether they be racial minorities, undocumented, transgender, queer, etc.

But anger, that force Lorde recognized to be a propeller of activism, can also cause movements to sunder. Infighting was rampant among the radical feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s, and most likely was a major impediment to activists trying to achieve actual political and cultural progress. Infighting caused Anselma Dell’Olio, founder of a feminist performance art ensemble, to publicly resign from her group. Ti-Grace Atkinson similarly resigned from the Radical Feminists, which she helped found, due to infighting. (Thus her famous saying: Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters.) Radical feminist Jo Freeman wrote about feminists’ detrimental infighting habits in Ms. in the 70s, and Vivian Gornick did as well for the Village Voice.

Author Margaret Atwood. (Flickr)

I was therefore apprehensive when I saw the response Margaret Atwood’s #metoo op-ed garnered on Twitter. Atwood became a wildly popular figure among contemporary feminists after Hulu adapted her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Female activists went so far as to even show up at pro-abortion protests wearing the garb of the female reproductive slaves in Atwood’s speculative fiction. Last weekend, however, Atwood became the target of some feminists’ anger for issuing a caution against the tidal wave of sexual assault accusations. Saying that #metoo is a symptom of a broken legal structure, Atwood wrote:

But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained.

The tone of Atwood’s op-ed was abrasive — it sometimes felt like a lecture delivered from a preacher’s pulpit — but it seems like many Twitter users reacted to the content of her op-ed, her call for due process and judiciousness. To some, it was an affront to the needs of the victims of sexual assault and harassment. For example, one writer tweeted: “I wish you would think about the impact of your words, and the humanity of the people who were (and are) upset by them. I wish you would move past anger at the criticisms you’ve received to reflection on them. It seems, though, that’s all it will ever be. A wish.” Others said that the title of Atwood’s article “Am I a Bad Feminist?” elided Roxane Gay’s important contributions to contemporary feminism by not explicitly referencing the author or her Bad Feminist essay collection.

Atwood took to Twitter in an attempt to defend her position and respond to those critical of her #metoo take. But it seems her attempts to communicate with her detractors ended in frustration. “Taking a break from being Supreme Being Goddess, omniscient, omnipotent, and responsible for all ills,” she tweeted. “Sorry I have failed the world so far on gender equality. Maybe stop trying? Will be back later. (Next incarnation maybe.)” The tweet, with its off-putting sarcastic tone, earned more than 300 responses, including many from her Twitter detractors doubling-down on their criticisms.

It was disheartening to see feminists fight another feminist over something that ultimately meant little in terms of material outcomes: Atwood’s opinion was not going to be enshrined in legal codes, anti-assault activists would continue to do their work, and the media would continue to cover #metoo revelations.

In the past year, I have often wondered how Audre Lorde, who died in 1992 from breast cancer, would respond to contemporary feminists’ adoration of her work. She would be in her 80’s today, and if her line of thinking continued along the same lines as it did when she lived, I feel that she would be amused but somewhat critical of the contemporary feminists who hold Lorde quote signs. She might not want the personal recognition. She might find Twitter feminist infighting disheartening.

I believe this to be a fair guess because Lorde was, after all, one of the three women poets who in 1974 made the premeditated decision to accept the National Book Award, if one of the women won, in the name of all women. Lorde’s competitor Adrienne Rich ended up winning the award, but Lorde and Rich as well as Alice Walker, another nominee, understood that the achievement of progress depends upon unity across differences. Their acceptance speech went thus:

We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color, identification, or derived class: the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the pregnant teenager, the teacher, the grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress, the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet; the silent women whose voice have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work.

I hope that today’s feminists continue to look to Lorde as a source of inspiration, especially when it comes to the importance of unity.