Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing Uneasy With Feminism
Saturday October 13, 2007
If you regard the Women's Lib movement of the '60s and '70s as a social and political wildfire that swept through the consciousness of middle America, then Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook was certainly fuel for the flames.
So why is it that forty years later, Lessing would prefer to loosen her ties to the women's movement and pooh-pooh any suggestion that her book changed lives? Is it a case of hindsight as 20/20 vision?
I've come to accept that feminism is just another 'f' word for many twenty- and thirty-somethings. But to hear 87-year-old Doris Lessing distance herself from it makes me wonder...and worry.
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad she won the Nobel Prize. But I wish she had made an equally noble gesture and spoken out as an advocate of women's issues.
Instead, she seems to be kicking the ashes, making sure the fire is out.
Comments
Perhaps now she is elderly and more reflecting,she has realised that although feminism has empowered women to believe they can do as they like without any responsibility,the fact remains that its greatest legacies will be the demise of both the states and the UK.
What Lessing has said is that aspects of women experience that she spoke about in the Golden Notebook, especially the question of women’s freedom was not on the agenda of feminism at that time i.e in the 60s. I see no reason to be bothered about her stand. What Lessing expounds in her novels is the free woman’s experience and of prime concern to women, feminist or not!
With regard to Michael Savall’s comment: do your knuckles drag the ground or what? A man who is confident in his own masculinity is not reluctant to rejoice in the rights of others – that includes women.
The inspiration and vindication that Doris Lessing gave to we women at that time can neither be negated by time nor even by her, if that is what she is doing. I would have wished her to elaborate on her current distance, to explain what she finds does not accord with her ideas then or now, and to tell us to what extent. Freud, Jung, Michelangelo, Einstein, etc., have all been superceded with time, but that does not negate their original contributions. I still say: “Thank you, Doris Lessing, for your courage and affirmations which have helped me and so many others to find our own courage and affirmation, and congratulations on your well-deserved award!”
Dr. Hema Nair R makes a good point, concerning women feminist or not. Patricia Flynn-Williams using the invective of am ‘churlish feminst ought to be ignored, if not reprimanded. HOw dare she speak to someone like that, who makes a fair point? I assume because she thinks that the authors’ feminist concerns are the only real ones, and that she has no children, or is a single parent with a sperm donation from the bank, bringing up little johnny as a wearing dresses, so he can commit suicide with a note saying ‘I am a boy’, rather like Dr. Money of Yale’s child, in order to prove cultural relativism was true.
I am with Michael Savel here, and Doris Lessing; We are facing rapid ruin, but in any case terrible suffering in society. Keep your god-given intelligence intact. It’s about time we had some honesty in the ‘facts ‘ given by feminism, womens studies, and the media whores.
I dont know about my knuckles dragging along the ground but my heart certainly does.The author is quite entitled to her doubts,the same as everybody else should be,male or female,to label someone as insecure in their sex is sexist in itself.As usual,
a radical feminist can accept no argument,no change there then,Patricia Flynn Williams.