Fuel for the backlash?

May 27, 1998
Issue 

Big Women
Written by Fay Weldon
Produced by Tariq Ali
Four-part series on ABC TV
Sundays at 8.30pm
May 24 to June 14

Review by Lisa Macdonald

Fay Weldon, the much-loved feminist writer, says of this series: "The world is full of little women. I am telling the story of four women who refused to be little and who changed the world with more than a little help from their friends. It reveals both the best and worst of women."

It certainly does. It also reveals both the best and worst of Weldon.

Big Women is an entertaining, "real life" drama that follows five feminists from their early days of exploratory, women-only, take-off-all-our-clothes-together consciousness-raising groups in suburban lounge rooms in 1971 to their increasingly diverse lifestyles, hopes and expectations in 1996.

The characters — ranging from Layla (played by Daniela Nardini, of This Life fame), whose powerful, acerbic personality and wit drive the pace, to the principled but somehow pathetic Stephie (brilliantly played by Anatasia Hiller) — engage you from the start.

In and around the activities of "Medusa", a feminist publishing house in London, these women dream, argue, agonise, love and compete in a candid depiction of the "sisterhood" that many of us experienced in the women's movement in the '70s and '80s.

The influence of producer and 1960s Marxist Tariq Ali is clear (London's "feminism-is-a-bourgeois-con" Trotskyists come in for a well-deserved serve or two!), and Weldon's famous ability to convey the injustice and tragedy of the oppression of all women via the mundane, day-to-day trials and tribulations of her characters is still strong.

The problem with Big Women is that, while it sets out to describe the diversity of feminism through a diversity of characters, it tells only a small part of the story. Unfortunately, it is the same part (although told with a different slant) as that told by almost every mainstream, often hostile commentator over the last decade. With Big Women, Weldon has written yet another version of the official history of the women's liberation movement.

That history focuses almost exclusively on those feminists whose vision of women's liberation did not involve activating large numbers of ordinary women to change society fundamentally (rather than achieve gender equality within its parameters).

Instead of recording the massive, active, campaigning nature of the early movement (there is only one scene, at the Greenham Common peace camp, which indicates that such a movement existed), the series records the ideas and experiences of those middle-class women who either aimed to convince the powers that be to free women by presenting them with good arguments, entering the academy and getting published, or tried to live their lives with no contact with men or their "patriarchal structures". Both wings of this liberal feminism eventually made their peace with the system to pursue personal solutions.

This is not to say that Weldon is unaware or uncritical of the limitations of liberal feminism. Big Women is sprinkled with short snatches of dialogue reminding us that women of colour face an oppression that most white liberal feminists barely acknowledge, and that, as some women break through the glass ceiling (the '90s feminists are portrayed as young Thatchers), the majority of women still suffer poverty, violence and super-exploitation.

However, these acknowledgments are tokenistic. No central character represents the experiences or needs of working-class women, and to the extent that one of the main characters, Alice, does genuflect to the idea that class position is a factor in women's oppression, her evolution into crystal gazing and semi-madness trivialises the idea that leftists had anything enduring to contribute to the development of feminism.

Neither is Weldon unaware or uncritical of the contradictions inherent in radical feminism. This makes for some hilarious and sharply insightful scenes (especially in the bedroom, where the "patriarchal enemy", all too quickly and enjoyably, becomes the "master").

Weldon's inclusion of a few home truths about the how the real world forces compromises on "sisterhood" and makes hypocrites of careerists and separatists makes for many funny scenes.

Being able to laugh out loud at some aspects of life in the movement without feeling vulnerable, guilty or self-denigrating is refreshing. For Marxist feminists, who can put liberal feminism in its proper context as just one strand (although eventually the dominant one) in the movement, and who have always battled to expose liberalism's limitations and hypocrisy, Weldon's satire is also cathartic.

The trouble is that Weldon isn't satirising just liberal feminism. In Big Women, liberal feminism is feminism — Weldon is satirising feminism.

Seeing the failure, on so many fronts, of the liberal reformist strategy for liberating all women, Weldon makes an assessment of the movement that is ultimately extremely cynical. For those of us struggling to rebuild the women's liberation movement and defend it from attack by a strengthening anti-feminist right wing in most countries, this cynicism (summed up in part four of the series) makes this film dangerous.

While it may have been intended as the story of how a handful of strong women "changed the world", Big Women will leave many older feminists feeling despair (as Weldon seems to): was all the struggle worth it? Among younger women, it will do little to inspire or attract them to the women's liberation cause. And worst of all, since the series was made for a mass audience, it will leave thousands more ordinary people believing that "feminism has a lot to answer for".

By regurgitating the official line — that feminists see and treat men as the enemy, that feminists are unfulfilled and unhappy people and that feminism has created a generation of callous careerists to whom human, much less female solidarity and collective struggle are anathema, Fay Weldon has, probably unwittingly, provided more fuel for the backlash.

Watch it and see what you think.

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