It’s also been a very long time between visits to Jeanette Winterson’s work so when this book threw itself in my path I bought it on impulse. Later on I realised it was signed and was obviously delighted by serendipity. I have adored Winterson since my first reading of the Stone Gods. Every book of hers I pick up is somehow unexpected, the mundane becomes interesting, mixed in with fairytale or a retelling of a play. Characters can be the largest giantess caricature or the most real, full of humility individual (who just so happens to be a robot) speaking from a repeating world. Much like a lighthouse on the edge of a dark choppy ocean, I keep coming back to Winterson. She has become a bit of a hero of mine.
I can’t exactly pinpoint why she is though, perhaps it is the variation in her work, the obvious experimentation and blend of elements that build up very different books. There is no set genre to her work. Maybe it’s the queer that seems to run through a good portion of her work, which isn’t shoehorned in as a fetishised exhibit. Or maybe it is a combination of a lot of things with brilliant story telling. Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere doesn’t fall short of her usual intelligent, style, but it has a healthy dose of the conversation ease found in Why be Happy when you could be Normal?
Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere – Jeanette Winterson
Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere is short enough to read in an hour and adapted from lectures. Published at the anniversary of a hundred years of (white) women (in Britain) getting the vote. It manages to say a lot of important things loudly, sometimes with humour, but is thought provoking and a great quick insight into history. While it is chewable if you’re well versed in suffragette history it may be nothing new to you, but it is written in a way that I found quite invigorating. Courage is both a reminder of how far we’ve come and a hopeful nudge to keep going and if you’re new to feminism and new to the history of gender equality then I implore you to give Courage a go.
Alongside the edge of wry humour and likening suffragettes to Pussy Riot there is an extra spoonful of passion that toes the line of anger. Courage is the size of a postcard and a good third of it’s 72 pages are taken up with Emmeline Pankhurst’s famous 1913 speech ‘Freedom or Death’. But any anger within Courage is justified and comes from disenfranchisement, and frustration. And for something so slim and seemingly brief (it’s brief at first glance only) it riled me up.
Winterson reminds us there is still a war of the sexes going on, there is still inequality on the street and in the work place and in the home, but the glaring truth of this battle is that discrimination of any kind is never rational it only pretends to be rational. Arriving at the present day having women taking up more space than the previous hundred years is not a justification for saying feminism is finished and there is no more work to be done. It is a common mistake to make to think that it is a fight won. It is a revolution that is still singing and is still unfinished.
Why? Feminism can always be more inclusive, more intersectional, louder, clearer, and more instrumental in keeping the autonomy of bodies through health care, choice, and consent, safe (for a few). Winterson remarks on biology as destiny being an old fashioned idea, and the need for more women in technology, the success of the recent #MeToo movement, and equal pay.
She recalls the Marriage Bar where certain jobs and careers were not open to married women. That it wasn’t until 1975 the Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to manipulate the labour market in favour of men. Although it may be clear that society is still dealing with the long shadow thrown by previous constraints, Britain is a rich and progressive country, but we have food-banks and large-scale poverty. Winterson mentions the 2008 crash, exploitative gig economy, domestic violence and Trump. And rather than being fear mongering, or a battle cry, I left it feeling hopeful and recognised.
I think what I’m getting at is Courage reminds us that if we sit in the shit for long enough, it stops smelling, but it doesn’t stop it from being shit that we’re sitting in.
It reminds us of the long shadow cast by systems that seek to dominate, belittle, and remove autonomy, and how fighting for equality, here and abroad (and of course with intersectionality) is still really important. It reminds us that Feminism is still a working part of every day equality, and if we give it up to the past as a dirty word or something that belonged to a previous century we will be doing ourselves a disservice. If it is “retired” or cast aside as irrelevant, we will be loosing a great part of the arsenal that belongs to the spheres of civil rights and equality.
The Shelf Wanderer 