Rereading Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing A Woman’s Life, published in 1988 led me to reread Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, 1938. Heilbrun is calling for “new texts,” new concepts of what a woman’s life could be. Woolf gave the world powerful new texts that have made it possible for me to live the life I do in 2008. She never went to school or university. She was grown before women could hold professional positions in England and vote. She achieved great things in a time when the message “women can’t…” was pervasive. Three Guineas was her response to the role of women in the effort to respond to the crises in Europe that led to the Second World War.
She also states forcefully that until women are free to choose what they want in life, no one is truly free and there can be no peace.
UN Resolution 1325, passed on 31 October 2000, says that member nations should:
ensure increased representation of women at all decision making levels in national, regional, and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict.
Clearly, this resolution is still honored in the breach rather more than not, but that it exists as an aspiration for the world is a result of women writing texts that did not exist before the twentieth century.
The WIP is a place where women and men can write new texts here and now (a favorite expression of Woolf and the original title of a book that ultimately became two different ones, The Years and Three Guineas). It is part of the most important work in the world at this time of crisis, not just of nations and empires, but of the planet.
How can we further this work?
New Texts
Posted in The WIP Talk, Uncategorized
I was recently at a conference of the Council on Contemporary Families (contemporaryfamilies.org), a group devoted to getting the press to report accurately when they talk about research on families. One reporter spoke of the difficulty of getting stories about family issues in the paper. Another said that a very nationally prominent newspaper’s research on their readership shows that women in their 20s and 30s are particularly unlikely to read the newspaper. The reporter was drawing a connection between the two things–perhaps the newspapers won’t print what women are interested in, so they lose women readers. But newspapers are downsizing and going out of business because of reduced readership (particularly as news is available on the web). But the newspapers don’t seem to make this link, continuing to see things such as Sports coverage more important than trends in relationships, sex, child rearing, divorce, how families make ends meet, and who is doing the housework, topics that, somehow are still of more interest to women than men. What does this have to do with VanNess’s post? She argues that we need new visions of what women’s lives can be. I agree. But we also need more respect and importance given to what women’s lives and interests are now. The very future of the press may depend upon it!
Paula England
Thank you for this post. I really appreciate your mention of resolution 1325 because it so clearly recognizes the crucial role of the feminine perspective in conflict resolution and sustainable peace. Women’s perspectives in media will make the much-needed difference in developing and promoting workable and sustainable solutions to global conflicts, and when women are given equal voice – i.e. the same opportunity and authority as men – we will be much closer to global peace and understanding. I also hope that presenting news from a feminine perspective and presenting issues that matter to women readers will bring women’s voices and our solutions to the much needed conversations the media ought to inspire.
Kate, the WIP is providing women an opportunity to speak out with authority. Thank you for that.
I keep thinking about the “International Women’s Peace and Solidarity Mission in Basilan and Mindanao,” the group of women peace advocates from Asian countries who rallied to support Muslin communities in the Philippines, which Ismelda reported about on October 31 of 2007.
Those women called for enhancement of the role of women in the peace process and for “truth-telling, not just news-telling.”
The US media have strayed far from truth-telling by publishing outright lies and by withholding important information at crucial times. The WIP’s commitment to truth-telling requires courage, principle, and hard work. It is a step toward peace.
And Paula, thank you for those reflections. The concerns of the women in the Philippines were some of the ones young women in the US are interested in, especially making ends meet and child rearing. Maybe just respecting women’s interests is a major part of texts needed today.
Woolf’s The Years was an effort to show authentic experiences of women, what life was like for them, often very constrained and limited compared to that of men. And, just as now, the men of Woolf’s time, even her normally supportive husband Leonard, were not very interested in that book.