Intersectional Feminism

Considering the legacy of Fay Weldon's feminist characters

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Last week, I was saddened to hear of the death of Fay Weldon, author of 31 novels including The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, and The Cloning of Joanna May.  Weldon also wrote collections of short stories, TV films, and newspaper and magazine articles, including the first episode of the popular 1970’s TV series Upstairs, Downstairs, (think Downton Abbey), for which she won a Writers Guild Award.

Weldon, a self-declared feminist, often wrote about the dispossessed; the downtrodden women who rose to take revenge on their persecutors.  This made her novels uplifting and liberating, as well as uniquely different.  She created strong female characters, and her writing was often funny, ironic, and subversive.  She described her female characters as ‘overweight and plain women’ who had been rejected, and she challenged the lack of equal opportunities for women. 

Born in New Zealand and hailing from a literary family, Weldon’s first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967.  But it was her book The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, published in 1983 at the age of 52, which was to propel her into the mainstream.  The book, which was made into a successful TV series, was about one of Weldon’s typically rejected ‘plain’ women, Ruth, whose husband Bobbo leaves her and their two children for the younger, slimmer, and prettier Mary Fisher.

The book is a surreal journey into central character Ruth’s attempts at revenge on the couple who destroyed her marriage, taking such extreme measures as altering her appearance, having sex with many men in order to desensitise herself, and working at the care home which houses Mary’s mother.  Eventually, she ensures that the couple’s two children and Mary’s mother have to move in with her ex-husband and Mary, ensuring that their romantic liaison is scuppered.  When Bobbo is later sent to prison, causing Mary a breakdown, Ruth takes over Mary’s identity.

The story is disturbing and extreme - but I think that was Weldon’s point.  Her writing was challenging as well as ironic.  She claims that she was always an advocate for underrepresented women in the media, sparked by her disgust at witnessing a male director give a starring role in a TV show Weldon herself had written to the most attractive female, without even considering whether she had any talent.

She was often critical of feminism, however, claiming in a 2017 interview that though feminism was responsible for much social change, she felt that the feminist movement had not really supported women different to themselves. 

Weldon had a point. 

Much has been written in recent years about the way women of colour were left out of the feminist discussion, leading to white, middle-class women taking the lead in discussions of sexual equality.  Mikki Kendall’s fantastic book Hood Feminism: Notes From A Movement That Women Forgot perfectly encapsulates this idea.  In a particularly poignant example, Kendall explains how difficult it is to simply ‘lean in’ as a woman of colour, when you are struggling to keep yourself housed, fed, and clothed.

Recent discourse has begun to consider Intersectional feminism, which believes that all women regardless of race, age, physical or mental ability, gender identity, sexuality, religion, or socio-economic status deserve equal rights, and this has become a growing movement.  In Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back, for example, Harilyn Rousso speaks of her frustration at the able-bodied feminist movement, finding solace in her growing involvement with the disabled women’s community, which allows her to discover a positive identity for herself as a disabled and rebellious woman.

This week, the UK government took the controversial decision to block the Scottish gender bill, which would allowing persons 16 years and over to change their gender identity. The new reforms would see the current system for legal recognition of gender to be simplified and speeded up. The current system insists on the applicant presenting a diagnosis of gender dysphoria via two medical reports, to a gender recognition panel. Furthermore, they must have lived in their acquired gender for at least two years. The newly proposed Scottish reform would allow for a self-identification system for people who want to change gender, as well as lower the age from 18 at present to 16.

Much of the backlash appears to be regarding trans women’s rights in women-only spaces, fueled in part by the JK Rowling social media furore amongst ‘TERFS’ – trans-exclusionary radical feminists – who believe that trans women should be excluded from women only spaces.  

Photo by Baran Lotfollahi on Unsplash

Though the term was officially recorded in 2008, the division between trans-exclusionary feminists and trans-accepting feminists has been around since the 1970’s, when groups of gender critical feminists made threats against many trans women for existing in women only and lesbian spaces. In Trans: A Memoir, Juliet Jacques navigates the publishing world where she suggests that even in liberal and feminist spaces, transgender identities go overlooked and misunderstood. 

These ideas would fit with Weldon’s own criticism of the era in which she was primarily writing.  Though her female protagonists may have been ‘overweight, plain women’, they were often not women of colour, women with disabilities, or trans women facing violence at the hands of other women who felt that they ‘didn’t belong’.  Their fates were often dictated by plain old patriarchal misogyny, whilst other women remained unrepresented in both fiction and legislation.

In her 1997 novel Big Women, (again made into a successful TV series), Weldon features a collective of women who set up a publishing company during the 1980’s, publishing books by women, for women, reminiscent of the Virago imprint.  Though the premise of the book is interesting, Weldon creates female characters within it that are difficult to like.  As the book explores the relationships and personal struggles of the women, there is little in the way of female solidarity, and the women are shown to have a disregard for anyone who doesn’t match up to their ideal of feminism, including ostracising the women who choose to be mothers and put their children before the cause. 

As Weldon had claimed herself in 2017, there was little representation of anyone who wasn’t white, intellectual, or middle-class within the feminist movement, and perhaps Big Women was her attempt at portraying this discrepancy.

Weldon has been compared to Muriel Spark (newsletter coming soon!) and Angela Carter, and I can see why.  Her stories are often macabre, fantastical tales; her female characters complex and sometimes difficult to like.  But her enduring popularity shows that there are many readers who want to hear the stories of the downtrodden and the imperfect. 

Though Weldon’s books did not represent all sections of the feminist movement and were celebrating the under-represented women she saw around her when she began writing, in the current ongoing discussion around inequality for many who identify as female, Weldon’s challenging women brought new life to the discussion.

Postscript:

As you might have noticed, I have introduced a paid subscription option for ‘A Narrative of their Own’.  This newsletter will always remain free to anyone who wants to read it.  I have been overwhelmed by the positive response to the newsletter since starting back in August 2022, and to everyone who has already subscribed - a huge thank you!

Researching and writing these newsletters has quickly become my creative highlight of the week.  I love researching writers and texts to introduce to readers, as well as finding connections with the current cultural zeitgeist. 

My reasons for launching a paying option are to provide the financial resources to pursue my research into 20th century women writers and what we can learn from them about our 21st century lives.  This will also enable me to purchase more obscure texts that I would like to bring to readers but which I may be unable to access in libraries. 

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Kate