It has become increasingly difficult to change our minds, to question our own views or to find common ground with people we disagree with, all of which makes Natasha Walter’s new book both refreshing and exhilarating.
In her ebullient 1998 debut The New Feminism, Walter hailed Margaret Thatcher as a trailblazer. In this fiercer, bleaker work, she rips into the “glossy language of aspiration feminism”, “the message that the individual woman can do anything she wants if she only has the necessary courage”. That kind of feminism inspired an “explosion of books and films about pioneers and heroines, about bossy women and gutsy girls” which retold the feminist story as “a succession of isolated campaigns, led by outsize individuals”.
Instead, Walter advocates for ecofeminism, and for solidarity and sisterhood, “narratives that focus less on how I win on my own, and more on how we thrive together”. She’s serious about that “we”, marshalling stories from across the globe. Walter founded the charity Women for Refugee Women in 2006, directing it for the next 15 years. During that time she was struck by women’s complaints of environmental degradation, their despairing at the “heaps of toxic waste that had grown up behind their homes”. Meanwhile feminism was being commodified by companies like Missoni, which copied the pink pussy hats knitted, for nothing, by feminist protesters, and sold them for £140 apiece. And by Dove, which promised “real beauty” and inclusivity while making billions of single-use plastic shampoo sachets that, according to Greenpeace, have clogged up sewers and contributed to floods in places like the Philippines (Dove states that it has made an “agenda-setting commitment to tackle the global beauty industry’s plastic waste issue”).
She also saw some feminists who had supported the charity switch their energies to focus solely on British women, who they insisted needed protecting from migrants. No wonder she invokes indigenous scholar and healer Yuria Celidwen’s belief that political journeys must start with grief. But she also draws hope from Holly Archer (not her real name), a victim of grooming, gang-rape and abuse who has set up a project in Shropshire supporting survivors and “refuses to let her story be exploited by those who would use it to drive hatred and division”.
I’d forgotten until she reminded me here that the slide into dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale starts with climate change. In real life, too, women suffer first and most from environmental collapse. Rising sea levels in Bangladesh send women travelling miles further to fetch fresh drinking water. In north-east Syria, the radical women of Rojava – who fought off the extreme misogynist forces of Islamic State and are resisting authoritarianism from the new Syrian government as well as attacks from Turkey – struggle to feed their families because of water scarcity and food shortages. Nevertheless, they are “building something new”.
Walter travels there to interview them and finds “the most determined feminists I have ever met”. It’s exhilarating to meet them on these pages too. One of the most joyous moments in the book comes during a conversation with Bahiya Mourad, who set up a mala jin, or women’s house, in 2011. For a while she and her comrades evaded the authorities’ attention because they seemed like harmless old women, but when the government did try to close them down, they beat them off with sticks. Part of their work involves helping women who want to marry against their parents’ wishes, and, says Mourad, “often we end up dancing at their weddings”. In a book that can sometimes feel hopeless, it’s a vital reminder that feminist joy is not about buying a £140 pink pussy hat, but about helping other women – and, maybe one day, celebrating with them when the seemingly impossible has been achieved.
• Samantha Ellis is the author of books including Chopping Onions on My Heart and How to Be a Heroine. Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter is published by Virago (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
