"What is a 'felt sense' of Feminism" - by Rachel Hewitt

[JulesJules]

https://open.substack.com/pub/rachelhewitt/p/what-is-a-felt-sense-of-feminism?r=62sv0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

I love Rachel Hewitt's writing (eg In Her Nature) and this piece really resonated with me, wanted to share.

Great article-thanks for sharing!

VERY interesting article. As a 20 year old I don't think I'm up to her current feelings yet but her comments make so much sense when she talks of how she used to feel. At school and college it's STILL the case that boys are forgiven for so much more than we are, and it's accepted that we'll help them when they're down (as well as helping each other).

What a bizarre upbringing and education she had to make her think that way - I cannot imagine it. One thing about nuns (from the Irish teaching orders), they don't educate girls to serve the needs of males. And my (happily married) mother would have thought it ludicrous too.

The more I read the more I felt that I no points of connectivity with the way RH thinks.

This resonates
Trust your instincts. Is like how we can feel that someone could be a threat.
The culmination of years of experience of misogyny and sexism is bound to inform your feminism

But what resonates? This bollocks: For example, girls are raised to invest respect and hopes of success in men, and to feel disparagement towards other women. She might have been. I wasn't.

It is obvious from what she writes that the education she received was profoundly misogynist, and that she has internalised that misogyny. That is sad. It is also not universal. Maybe she should try unpicking what went wrong in the institutions she studied at (particularly the effects of the stultifying Oxbridge tutorial/supervision system, designed to produce compliant members of an establishment), rather than blaming 'women'.

She says: Unpicking women’s ingrained mistrust of other women seems to me to be perhaps the most radical component.

Leaving aside the question of how has she limited her reading in order to make that seem like an original thought (I hope she has st least heard of the Women's Liberation Movement), maybe she should sign up to Mumsnet.

particularly the effects of the stultifying Oxbridge tutorial/supervision system, designed to produce compliant members of an establishment

I’m confused about this - some of the most robust and stimulating intellectual debates I’d had in my life (at that stage) were in this system! Why is it stultifying and producing compliance?

It's a problem in the arts and social sciences. Almost every university in the world expects students to attend many lectures - which are personal interactions with academics - with a wide range of different, often mutually contradictory opinions and approaches, as well as to do extensive reading and take part in some small group tutorials. Breadth of exposure to ideas, quite limited exposure to individual one-to-one guidance. It encourages diversity of thought.

I’m lost. Oxbridge also expects students to attend many lectures (as well as supervisions/tutorials). So I don’t understand your point.

Sorry - probably a derail from the original topic of the thread. I thought there was something interesting in the idea of the article, but with some odd over-simplifications, strange examples and leaps of logic.

Yes I see what she is saying. I can relate to it a lot.

I too felt these instinctive feelings around my own survival needs that as a female child I needed to abandon completely in order to have attachment in my very patriarchal family. Male children in my family were subjected to very different preferential treatment compared to female children.

As an aside I would definitely have experienced nuns in Irish schools as being major proponents of the patriarchy in a way another poster didn’t experience. Priests were in and out of our school and absolutely revered which females were not, in our case the Bishop’s palace was next door to the convent and the nuns waited on him like he was royalty, whereas girls were placed firmly in the realms of those who had to mind everyone, very subordinate, women’s very rigid role in the family was repeatedly emphasised to us. Very warped ideas about sexuality was taught as fact.

I really don't identify with this either.

I don't doubt that there are people raised this way. But I sometimes wonder how much people's own internal issues (maybe from family or something else?) are making them see things like their education or community in the same way.

Essentially, I think it's not that unusual for people to project their own issues on to what they see around them in society, in their place of work, educational institutions, etc.

So - how much of what she is describing was really in that environment, how much is her projecting?

What order was that @Alibababandthe40sheets ? They vary so much - my schooling was Salesian and Mercy, but I know that the Mercy province where family members went to school had attitudes very different from the place I attended.

@TempestTost, like you I wondered how much she's back-projecting stuff she learned at home onto the world in general. I really could not have imagined anyone during my lifetime centering male interests that way. Obviously I take feminism too much for granted - and reading it has made me wonder about the motivations of one particular problematic long-ago colleague. I thought her bullying and manipulation was just about career ambition, but if she was centering male approval it might have been more complex than that.

She really should join Mumsnet.

@DeanElderberry the Presentation order. There were some very nice and very committed nuns but progressive they were not.

That's interesting. A friend of mine (my mother's generation, so born late 20s) was Pres, and spent years in rural Africa as nurse /midwife /pharmacist /only trained medic for 100+ miles - splendid woman. When she came back the order, far from being proud, were appalled at her independence. Very sad, and not at all in the spirit of Nano Nagle who was very independent and didn't let the men put her down (they tried).

@DeanElderberry I would suggest that more “progressive” ones were the missionaries who travelled but many nuns joined the noviciate aged a very innocent naïve 18, were educated to become teachers and essentially did not grow past that teen stage and taught for the rest of their days. We had nuns into their 80s still teaching. Very childlike, very rigid, very innocent but very much proponents of the patriarchy, we also had some harsh pretty strict again rigid ones running the school and boarding house. Don’t forget nuns ran mother and baby homes and industrial laundries too. I remember complaining to my TDs around the time of the mother and baby homes and one of the responses back from one of the older TDs was about how progressive his upbringing was. He was totally blind to what was going on around him and I’d have to ask of him why he was the one who became the TD in this very progressive family not one of his sisters. I would suggest that their respective upbringings would likely have a part in that.

I'm Irish, raised in a rural community, and I was taught by nuns and brothers and they very strongly enforced the patriarchy. My family and community were all intensely patriarchal. In my life, I was told constantly that daughters were not as good or important or useful or helpful or wanted as much as sons. Women were allowed to have a wee job like being a secretary or maybe a nurse before marriage but following marriage their function in life was baby- and home-making. I was considered a nonconformist because I literally couldn't stop standing up for myself in the face of all of this and I moved away from there as soon as I could.

Rachel's essay does speak to me on a number of levels, my understanding of feminism was very instinctive as a child (I simply wanted justice, parity, and the opportunties given to boys). I studied Western political thought and Feminist political theory at Uni and my feminism became more academic and removed from instinct. As a much older woman, my feminism has changed again because women are having to fight for things that we thought were settled as ours decades ago - my feminism is back to seeking justice but now it's angry rather than idealistic.