Heather Brunskill Evans from FiLiA in conversation Bec Wonders

Heather: I am interviewing Bec Wonders from Scotland, a PhD student at the moment at Glasgow School of Art. And your PhD research is on second wave feminism. One of the things that FiLiA wants to do is to amplify women's voices. And I think your PhD research is doing exactly that. So I'm fascinated to find out what it's actually about. If you could just describe it a little bit. 

Bec: Essentially, I am most interested in telling the story of feminism, particularly the second wave feminism through print. And second wave feminism is sort of renowned for the prevalence of women's publishing as a sort of political strategy to essentially remediate what publicness and things in the public mean because you know, publishing as a tool can be traced back to the sort of well-known from this outcry, the personal is political and it sort of makes sense on two levels. On one level it contests the public sphere and what issues are worthy of concern in public and on another feminist politics have sort of continuously recognised that the relationship of two people say the most dominant relationship of husband and wife is a, is a type of society. It's a type of public relationship that is regulated by the state and not an exempt sphere of personal liberty, but the sort of political structuring of the personal.

Publishing comes into that because, and I'm informed here by Nancy Hartsock, who sort of argues that women understand themselves relationally. And that is in part because things that inform our lives, you know, body as the battleground, say menstruation, childbirth, abortion, these things all are structured, sexualised and instrumentalised by the State.

And so in that sense, because women are by necessity having to understand themselves in this relational way, and men do not, you can understand sort of print culture. And I'm looking specifically at periodicals from that feminist standpoint. So it's useful for understanding communication between women and feminist periodicals, because you know, previous strangers who didn't know themselves became collaborators through these relationships and identities that, that periodicals help mediate. 

I'm looking specifically at the UK context as well, because even though there's sort of ample evidence of this in the US and Canada in France, and also notable examples in India, the UK has sort of been overlooked a little bit and I'm most interested in, I guess, the type of networks that feminist periodicals helped create. And women who lived through the second wave might remember publications like Wires, which was essentially a printed newsletter that sort of became this network infrastructure, this sort of directory of academics and activists and organisations that was regularly sent out sometimes irregularly because of the sort of analogue time.

But in that sense, it became this underpinning this glue that held together the infrastructure of the women's movement. So that's sort of what I'm trying to, re-narrate through print because unfortunately as Megan Morris says, there's nothing worse than being condemned with the women of the late sixties and I'm trying to sort of dispel that myth.

Heather:   That's fantastic. but I really do think the second wave feminists were so vilified in the 1990s and the early 21st century. That it's wonderful to me that a young feminist is now trying to revisit that history and to reclaim it.

Interestingly, I think what you said is, if I understand that correctly, if I just feed it back to you, what I think you said is that even before second wave feminism, there was the idea that the body was just something that was a material object. It was personal. It had nothing to do with the political and the second way feminist movement shifted that completely, upturned that concept and said the body itself and the experiences we have through the body are absolutely connected to the political.

And then that was one of the driving forces of second wave feminism, which is a lesson we seem to keep needing to relearn because it was lost. I think it's dangerous to society when women start talking about the politics of their own bodies personally. 

Bec: Yeah. And I suppose that is there's an added, really interesting component or relationship between women and print because these bodily boundaries that structure female activity, they inform the ways that we behave, women behave and define experience in a relational way. And I think print became this sort of natural extension of that because in creating this relational print network between women, it's not something that on the scale and in the specific methods that women use. It's not something that The socialist movement or the black radical movement used in the same way. 

The print activity has been sort of ubiquitous among all activist movements. But I'd say particularly the second wave of feminism, it has this sort of unprecedented explosion of these strategies. And I think it speaks to the way that women experience themselves through these relational bodily boundaries that are imposed.  

Heather: Do you distinguish them between the print media of that second wave feminist used and the kinds of ways that feminists now write and share ideas with each other, which would be through social media?

Do you think there is a qualitative difference in some way, or is this just a current version of something that's already happened? 

Bec:  A good question. And I think people of second wave of print activity, it's now kind of becoming a more studied subject and I'd say that people would disagree on that question. 

My answer however would be that I think in some ways there are extensions of these conversations, but one crucial difference I'd say is the ownership of means of production. So I think in the digital age, it's much harder to say own a server and of course we're having conversations today online through these social media platforms that are mediated by large corporations. 

And so as women, to have control over the press is to have control over freedom of the press. 

There's a really interesting scholar, Indian feminist scholar, and also who was involved in second wave print activity. Ritu is her name and she basically argues that today there's an increased visibility of women's writing. So, you know, memoirs and autobiographies of celebrities and politicians, and sort of the pop culture uptake Margaret Atwood and Handmaid's Tale. Despite that feminist publishing as a whole has regressed into conflicting modes of production in the sense that commercial publishing is interested in the movement as market and not the movement as resistance.

And so in that sense I'd say we no longer have control over this sort of infrastructure, this network. It's a very centralised means of communication, social media, right? Like it's not distributed or decentralised in the way that feminist print culture was because it was so idiosyncratic there wasn't an overarching board, a board of directors there, wasn't sort of this hub of control.

It was these different groups formed simultaneously in the case of the UK all across the country. And in that sense, it was much more difficult to target. It was much less vulnerable, but when we have a centralised communication infrastructure, like social media, women are a lot more vulnerable.

Heather: Yeah, I understand. I think it's a fantastic analysis.

 Do you have any idea yourself as to why the print communication between women and the politics of that and the fruitfulness of those activities ended?

Bec: I think that what I'm finding really interesting is sort of tracing the shift from radical and revolutionary feminism to sort of more liberal and the neo-liberal feminism through the loss of woman owned printing and publishing. 

There are, for example, in the UK there's Virago Press, which is still alive from the second wave, but what happened with them is that essentially they're now, an imprint of Little Brown which is owned by Hachette Livre, which is a multi-billion-dollar company.

So although Virago was still an openly feminist press that is still alive, it is no longer controlled by women they sort of have to compromise on that in some sense.

I don't think those feminist, second wave feminist publishing houses and presses wherever necessarily designed to last more than say a decade because feminist publishing happens in this sort of contentious sphere where you have to negotiate both economic viability and utopian, radical ideology. A lot of these feminist publishers were anti-capitalist.

I think that in part it's the lifecycle of a movement. I think you could make the point that it ended naturally, but also a lot of independent publishers at the time were subsumed into larger subsidiaries and larger companies. So it wasn't just the feminist independent press that got eaten up by the bigger giants. 

I think it's a combination of things and it's not just one reason, but what's interesting is that you can sort of trace a shift towards a more liberal feminism through the decline of the feminist press.

Heather: Yes. But there seems to be a revival at the moment. I was interested in the opening of the Vancouver Women's Library in 2017 of which I think you were quite instrumental. So if you could tell us a little bit about that and the consequences of opening the Women's Library, that would be great. 

Bec: The Vancouver Women's Library started as a kind of idea to share books between friends and I think, along the way, we kind of realised that we wanted it to be a project that kind of became an antidote to this myth of library neutrality because I think as feminist well-known neutrality is just another word for the male status quo. So we intentionally wanted to exclude any texts that were written by men.

And so in that sense, explicitly become a service by women for women. And it, and it was just a project between sort of three friends. I had an art studio in the downtown east side of Vancouver at the time, and it was about a hundred square foot, really small. And we just decided to start with our own personal collection about 80-100 books and we launched it in February of 2017. 

We had a sort of suggestion function on our website where you could browse the catalogue and so you could see what we have, but you could also suggest books that you'd like us to acquire as we could somehow get our hands on funding.

 So we opened the library and on the opening night, there was a protest organised by a group called Gays against Gentrification, and about 25 to 30 people gathered outside with signs. They barricaded the only entrance. And I remember it was a really sort of snowing, freezing, nights so women were prevented from coming in. During the opening protestors came inside. I'd say maybe 10 protesters came inside. They distributed an open letter, which had been circulated online before, but we had no idea that they were going to come and protest physically. And also the reason that I mentioned the suggestion function is because we had not received any suggestions of books to acquire at that point.

So they came inside carrying signs. They smoked inside. They poured red wine on books that were deemed violent. I think it was a Janice Raymond book that they poured wine on. They pulled a fire alarm. They tore down a poster of the Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas and they stole a carton of wine.

At that point, I decided to call the cops, not because I'm a fan of police, but because I was legitimately sort of frightened and the sort of usual ensued, they were calling me a cop sympathiser. And then the next morning, I believe the outside of the gallery, which was shared by other artists was spray painted with things like ‘class war,’ ‘no TERFs, no SWERFs’ and ‘this space hates women.’ 

And I think the most interesting thing that sort of happened from the protest was the open letter, which contained a list of books that the group claimed engendered violence and should be removed. They essentially start off this letter by saying that the library needs to have a policy of not featuring titles that are written by non-trans women and non-sex workers that de-humanise speak over an advocate harm towards trans women and sex workers. And so the sort of usual culprits are in that: Sheila Jeffreys, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Janice Raymond. You know, sort of publicly ‘bad women,’ but then there's some interesting additions to this.

So Adrienne Rich's A Woman Born was in it. This essential lesbian feminist piece of writing that's informed quite a bit of queer theory actually. The Female Man by Joanna Russ, which is this kind of sci-fi feminist novel. And then Buddhism After Patriarchy, you know, Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach, which is this kind of self-help book. I mean, the list is of itself sort of worthy of a study.

I think what must have happened was they just looked at everything before, you know, 1990 and said that is what engenders violence, because I can't really explain some of the connections. But essentially we were accused of being complicit in the deaths of trans women and sex workers.

Looking back now, it just seems like a total non-sequitur to accuse a free independent library, we only had about a hundred books, of enacting violence against sex workers. When what we did do, we carried literature that included the sort of empirical frontline evidence suggesting that men who buy sex cause women to experience sexual violence on a daily basis and that was happening in that neighbourhood. 

It just speaks to their, I think reactionary way from which this protest was inspired. It's amazing that, or it's very telling that they didn't go to the Vancouver Public Library for example, to protest or that they didn't go to one of the biggest developers in the downtown east side to protest gentrification, which was another thing they were accusing us of.

I think it speaks to sort of finding a vulnerable target and finding something that explicitly excludes men. 

In its formation, we wanted to clearly say that we're for women and we exclude men. And I think that is probably one of the things that, that inspired the protest.

Heather: I'm wondering what your feelings and thoughts are now that's a couple of years ago now, isn't it? Presumably was shocked and frightened and so on, obviously, you phoned the police, but are you more inured or numb towards the fact that these arguments that have been consistently made that to hear a woman's voice and to hear a woman express ideas, which unless it complies with a particular kind of ideology, is seen as actual violence. So you could be predated upon as it were you, you could be violently enacted towards, and you are charged with being violent. That's what happened in 2017, the same arguments are reproduced all the time now on Twitter.

Tweets that are absolutely nakedly violent towards women are allowed. Any critique, a thoughtful critique that, that might question some of the ideology about whether trans people are men or women, is regarded as violence. 

So I suppose my question is in a long winded kind of way, is: Are you as shocked now, as you were then, or are you just getting used to these kinds of arguments?

Bec: I mean on the face of it, it's always a bit shocking, but I think that it speaks to the kind of larger, I think especially young people feel kind of guilty in this kind of as social justice is becoming kind of more mainstream and identity politics. The concept of identity politics is sort of shifting.

I think there is this collective guilt that young people especially feel and they feel the need to do something. And the easiest way to do something is to dog pile online. But I think also that what I've learned through that specific experiences, there's a difference between a conversation or a dialogue in good faith. And then there's dog piling for the sake of dog piling. 

I think that it shows because actually when we opened in our statement, which was later changed, and this I may do differently where I to ever do something like this again, and so in our initial statement we wrote self-identified women are welcomed and still the protest ensued. 

So I think that it's impossible to find a common ground because the goal was never to find a resolution. If there, if there is an argument that is approached in good faith or a discussion approached in good faith, or with the sort of goal of camaraderie and resolution, then it may be worth engaging.

But I think the vast majority is unwinnable. When I realised that it just kind of took this weight off my shoulders because there's a lot that is just. noise and I think it really takes away from the energy of the women's movement. And I think that it's important not to get caught up in the small end of the debate, there's big battles to win for women. 

I think that a lot of these sort of protests and of course it's shocking, especially what's happening on Twitter. And I think that there's some battles there that are worth following in what putting the sort of collective weight behind.

But, you know, in the end, I think that there's something about keeping the bigger picture in mind and not getting sucked into these attacks and accusations that are designed to slow us down. 

Heather: I wonder if you have some idea that you would like the ways of organising print media and communication for women, whether you would like to revive that now as some kind of alternative, or are you analysing it as a period of history that in a sense has gone, it's important to recognise it, but that it's finished.

 Or do you have a plan for rethinking how the women's voices to be not only be amplified, but that they should be there at all. Given this silencing, this attempt to silence women from speaking that's going on in the number of directions at the moment.

Bec: I think the Vancouver Women's Library sort of signalled a renewed interest, I think in printed feminist media, I think because, and this is something that happens or because of the protests, because it was so public and so controversial, a lot of women came to us because they found out about us through that. And I think that the enthusiasm and the sort of the urgency that was felt for a women's library, comes as a continuation of this historical feminist counter-public that began in bookstores and archives. And I think is now being recirculated through the different social discourses. 

But I think also there's a lot of sort of nostalgia and romanticism in play. And, and I think trying to revive something exactly how it was. And I think that that's not an option. It might be an option for an art project or a documentary, or, you know, a one-off thing that sort of tries to show how beautiful some of these publications were. But I think that there are other conditions that feminists are informed of now. 

But what I do think would be useful is to have this kind of directory, this idea of a network back in play because I think there's a lot of groups working even with the social media, I think there's a lot of women working in isolation because it is hard to find causes or projects that you may put your weight behind because of the backlash, women are working very quietly. And I think that's important because I think that to not get distracted by the noise that's happening on the surface, there's a sort of grid sort of roots underground that are growing quietly and I think that's great.

 But I also think there's something to be said about the Wires type web of connecting activists with academics, with researchers, with organisers. And that is one thing that I feel is possibly missing and we could be taking some lessons from the second wave, but also something that I find interesting when reading through these periodicals is the attitude towards internal conflict of the feminist movement. So a lot of the times you'll read a publication like Trouble and Strife. Maybe some listeners will remember this and the kind of letter section in the beginning. Maybe there is one letter where the reader disagrees with the previous and the disagreement will span over several issues where the original author will reply and so on. But I find that way of conflict and disagreement that happens through periodicals is quite the sort of building of solidary.

It's not to say that differences don't matter that they don't have an impact or that they can't filter and split a movement. But I think that first of all, the fact that it would take months for these disagreements to happen just because of the circulation of the periodical. Nowadays, it's online and people get offended and react. And I think it's a much quicker way of misunderstanding someone's point. 

And I think another interesting thing is that no matter how scathing the criticism was, such letters were always signed with, in sisterhood, yours in sisterhood, in struggle with love and hope, a sister resistor, you know, things like that. And I think in its most generous interpretation, this can be read as a sense of solidarity across difference. 

And I think that's something as well that maybe taken from a kind of print culture is sort of the inevitability of internal conflict and disagreement. It's just impossible to have a movement that agrees with everything and where it all goes swimmingly and we all live in socialist heaven.

I think it's really a struggle. And I think learning how to kind of conceptualise those struggles and internal conflict would be really helpful for a lot of women who may get dismayed or step back or discontinue her activism, is understanding it the larger way that conflicts have happened throughout feminist history. So that's another really important thing that could, in some ways, be revived or highlighted from feminist print culture.

 But you're right in the sense that, as it was, that would not make sense to revive, neither could it be.

So it's about, re-imagining certain helpful aspects of it for today's world and today's context.

Heather: I know that you're saying two different things in relation to the sort of constant noise of conflict that's going on. On the one hand you're suggesting that the roots of our resistance go underground, so let's build on those and just shut down the injection of conflict from the outside as it were, into the feminist movement.

But within the movement itself, you're suggesting that we look at the arguments that are going back and forth so quickly and that women should develop some kind of way of not just rejecting that or getting into a fight or putting somebody out. But to negotiate around that because I think there is quite a lot of hurt about that at the moment.

It saddens me very much because the natural conclusion and the end is just to, to walk away because it gets too painful being involved in it. And the last thing we need to do is to be walking away from each other.

Bec: Yeah. I think you're right. There's sort of two aspects to it and, and they may be divided by our relationship to the larger public and even the ones who don't want us to succeed.

And then there's the sort of internal relationships and internal struggles. And I think that it's not that differences don't matter or that conflicts don't matter. I think there's genuine things that are worth having conflicts about, and that might result in groups splintering. And I think that's just sort of a natural part of any activist movement.

 But I think it's the way I suppose we approach those conflicts and the way we make sense of them and thinking about the periodical sort of helps. 

There's a scholar called Margaretta Jolly and her research is on letter writing between women and the second wave. And she talks about the sort of open letter format as a kind of velvet boxing glove, which kind of signals an extension of comradery.

Although intending to punch into hurt, these fists have soft palms inside softer gloves. Epistolary framing. So the framing of the format of the letter signals a sort of continued longing for feminist love and like I said, signing off and in sisterhood while at the same time sort of framing a critique was this way of kind of signalling comradery across difference.

But also I think there's a risk of internalising methods that are used ‘against us’, I often see feminists who are being attacked, then employing that same rhetoric and that same method internally. And I think, again, that is predictable and a sort of natural aspect of any type of organising, 

But I think it's really important to become aware of that we don't succumb to tactics and methods that we disagree with, or that have hurt us in the first place. And that's really difficult thing to do. But again, I think women of the second wave, women who came before us, there's this sort of treasure trove of material and women still alive today, who we can really use for both learning from maybe what went wrong, but also a kind of wisdom about the life cycle of the movement and how to kind of perhaps mitigate against circumstances that declined and morphed into the third wave. 

So what I get most frustrated about, I think is a kind of dismissal of women who came before us because they're alive and well. And you know, and even if they're not, there's this sort of abundance of material that just needs to be sought out. And from which so many lessons can be learned.

And I think a common reaction is always how a lot of conflicts that we're having today say, Israel and Palestine and women in the eighties were having that same discussion. How do we get beyond that kind of circularity of history of arguments coming up again and again and again? And I think it's by looking back and sort of not underestimating women before us and really understanding ourselves as a continuation rather than starting from scratch.

Heather: Have you been involved at all in trying to keep the feminist library in London afloat or even to have premises. Have you investigated that at all? 

Bec: I have donated and gotten a ticket to their opening. So I'm hoping that over the summer they manage to open.

I know how difficult it is to do that, and they have a lot more material than we ever did. So, you know, it's a real struggle. And also I really hope to be able to use some of their archives for my research, but most of all, I've been in touch with, um, one of the board members, Gail Chester, who was instrumental in founding it and who is also a kind of feminist book historian. I've been monitoring their progress and I'm really excited for them to open up. 

Heather: Okay. I just got one more question for you. I wondered how you imagined yourself in a few years' time after you've done your PhD, where is the PhD going to lead you?

Bec: After my PhD knock on wood that I finish it.

I hope to take up a postdoctoral position somewhere, continue my research. My research has always been connected to a kind of more practical utopic activist division of a feminist future. And I think part of that is, I keep banging on about this network between women.

A goal of mine is to start a database of sort of a repository, a kind of Yellow Pages or White Pages, wherever you’re from, of women, of feminists. 

So that's in the last year has been on my radar. I'm going to have to find the right time when it makes sense to start that not because of my own time, just because when do you ride the wave, when does it make sense to launch something like that? So I'm keeping an ear to the ground and I hope that, that this sort of directory of women and it would be online because that makes the most sense, but it would be informed by the logic of a printed network. And also, there's a media historian, Lisa who considers PDFs, for example, as an extension of printedness. And in that sense, it is an extension of this sort of logic that, that was born out of the second wave. And so I'm hoping that something like that is on my horizon and beyond that, just more, more research and more conferences and of course, feminist activism. 

Heather: Well, and not only do I wish you every success with it and delighted in just at a personal level, that someone I, you is putting your intellectual abilities and your political activity into this.

Cause it's so important. Otherwise, I think we are in danger of writing off the past and starting young families thinking that they're reinventing the wheel. Okay. Back. I hope that we meet up one day. I've not met you personally before, but I hope I do at some point in the future.