LITMIR.BIZ

      First published by Verso 2020

      Collection © Verso 2020

      Contributions © The contributors 2020

      Introduction © Jessie Kindig 2020

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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       Verso

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      US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-926-9

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-980-1 (US EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-927-6 (UK EBK)

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Typeset in Bembo by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

      Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

       For all those whose voices and actions were ignored or never recorded,and whose writing was never published.You will never be silent.

       CONTENTS

Introduction: We Begin with What Is Not Yet Complete by Jessie Kindig

       The Verso Book of Feminism

       Acknowledgments

       Sources

       Permissions

       Index

INTRODUCTION:WE BEGIN WITH WHAT IS NOT YET COMPLETE

      Feminism is unfinished business.

      The reasons it is unfinished are legion: political, economic, social, experiential, having to do with violence and race and capital, families and states and empires, sexuality and reproduction and the actions of men. It is unfinished because gender is still a reason to be killed, harmed, denied, exploited. But there is one more reason: feminism is unfinished because it is the work of imagination.

      Feminism is a politics of emancipation, and the first thing needed for such a politics is to see the need for one. For women to begin advocating for themselves meant an imagining of women together as a collective force. To call yourself a feminist is to insist on connecting your life to others, and that was and still is a political act.

      For example: in 1892, African American scholar and educator Anna Julia Cooper wrote in A Voice from the South,

      Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

      Cooper spoke in the first person I but also adamantly in the we of black womanhood, crediting the first edition’s authorship to “A Black Woman of the South.” Her charge—that liberation was truest when entered into with those who were most marginal—was also a challenge to her audience. She asked of us to follow her I in order to make a we.

      Two decades later, in the first women’s literary journal in Japan, Seitō, Yosano Akiko argued that claiming the I was a revolutionary act in a society where women were seen as inferior. That is, claiming the I could tell about the conditions of the we:

      I desire to write entirely in the first person.

      I who am a woman.

      I desire to write entirely in the first person.

      I. I.

      One century later, the Tamil and Dalit poet Sukirtharani spoke both for herself and all those living at the frayed edges of societies and towns. In her 2012 poem “A faint smell of meat,” the poet’s I blends into her we:

      In their minds

      I, who smell faintly of meat,

      my house where bones hang

      stripped entirely of flesh,

      and my street

      where young men wander without restraint

      making loud music

      from coconut shells strung with skin

      are all at the furthest point of our town.

      But I, I keep assuring them

      we stand at the forefront.

      The productive tension between the I and the we—between the personal and the political, between the social expectations given and the life one lives, between articulating experience and claiming political voice—is the driving struggle and foundational act of feminist practice.

      As this book shows, this is a practice enacted again and again around the world, often in tandem with other movements of revolutionary change: during wars for empire and territory, Europe’s waves of revolution, the abolitionist struggle against slavery, the spread of capitalist modernity across the globe, workers’ battles for labor rights, the post-colonial independence movements in the Global South, the black freedom struggle in the United States, the rise of the digital age. Modern Western feminism is often historicized as a series of waves, from the first wave of women’s suffrage and abolition activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the second wave of the 1960s to ’70s that took up harassment and rape, marriage and abortion, lesbianism and sexual double standards. The 1990s and 2000s brought the third wave, with its reclamation of sex and its insistence on diversity and individual empowerment, and now we are said to be in a fourth wave fueled by technology, the #MeToo movement, intersectionality, and trans politics. Historically speaking, these definitions are about as useful as they are incomplete, but the metaphor is instructive: waves keep breaking upon the shore.

      Because feminist politics coalesces around bodies forced into a hierarchy of gender and sex, part of the work of feminism is also to imagine a future when the idea of “woman” as an oppressed group no longer needs to exist. That is, feminism sets out to destroy the conditions

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