Nellie McClung: Likable Rebel Brings our Series to a Challenging Close

It was with a sense of celebration and a tinge of sadness that the Philosophy Club brought our "Rebel with a Cause" series to a conclusion this past Thursday. Hats were the order of the day as we doffed our cap, so to speak, to charismatic campaigner for Canadian women's suffrage, Nellie McClung (1873-1951). Never without a stylish hat as she hit the campaign trail and took her message of a better lot for women from one public venue to the next, her apparent lack of anything even remotely resembling a 'bad girl' persona found us questioning whether 'Our Nell' actually belonged in our rebel hall of fame. If a split opinion on this matter precipitated a discussion of what, in fact, constitutes 'bad' behaviour when you are operating in a world that treats you badly, it was clear that the Nellie we had come to know through Charlotte Gray's (2008) look at her life and achievements (Nellie McClung) and Janet Fiamengo's (2008) examination of her use of rhetoric ("Nellie McClung and the Rhetoric of the Fair Deal") was our most obviously 'likable' rebel. Moreover, we could not help but be impressed by her extraordinary oratorical skills, by her unfaltering commitment to a cause in which she believed, and by the integrity she showed in the face of both heady accolades and vicious attacks.

Never too big for her boots but leaving behind a mightily formidable pair of boots to fill, there was something solid about Nellie McClung, something good. And no, this solidity, this goodness, had little to do with her allying of female suffrage to the Christian Women's Temperance Union - a tactic, this, that probably spoke as much to her conviction that alcohol abuse on the part of men was having a detrimental effect on women's and children's lives, as to her determination not to alienate the majority of women from a cause - attaining the vote - that, at that point in time, was seen by many as hot-headed and radical: a threat to home and family. Rather, it sprung from the way Nellie moved in and through the world: buoyant, fiesty, generous, hard-working, kind, compassionate, conscientious...wholesome.

And yet, for all that she was wholesome, she sidestepped the slippery slope into sticky sweet as a result of the sharpness of her wit. That, and because she was clever and charming. Using these assets to her advantage, she became popular. Though she spoke about prohibition and women's emancipation, her speeches were considered to be great entertainment. People - all sorts of people - flocked to hear her speak. If Nellie McClung was a rebel, she was a mainstream rebel. She was to early 20th Century women's rights what Ellen de Generis is to early 21st Century gay rights: personable, accessible, nonthreatening; using girl-next-door ease and a home-spun sense of humour to break the proverbial centuries-old ice.  First, with pushing through the vote for women, and second, with the constitutional bestowing upon women of "personhood" as a member of The Famous Five, Nellie McClung revolutionized Canadian society whilst sporting a fine-feathered hat.

All to say that Nellie McClung raises important questions about the trope of the female rebel - questions that we explored through exercises that probed how Nellie differed from the other 18th, 19th and 20th Century rebels in our six week survey, and where the similarities lay. In terms of the latter, here's a word of caution to any future female rebels out there: expect to be demonized for being a negligent mother or daughter or wife or partner as a result of being faithful to your cause; and brace yourself for a barage of comments about how you look and what you wear irregardless of whether you comply with feminine conventions of the time or not. Sorry, gals...Plus ca change and all that...

From Nellie up close, we proceeded on to Nellie in context. Working from insights I had gained into the trope of the female rebel through specific points raised by participants during the course of our six sessions together, we created eight thematic headings. Using these themes as our jumping off point, we crafted a collective treatise about the female rebel.
The treatise itself reflected each one of our rebels...

From Mary Wollstonecraft, we borrowed the form. Entitled "A Vindication of the Female Rebel," our own version of this tract-style argument famously used by Wollstonecraft and designed to justify and defend a certain cause or course of action, began with Wollstonecraft's famous line, "It is time to effect a revolution in..." and concluded with a comment she had made in a letter to her sister just before she wrote her landmark Vindication, "...And I am going to be the first of a new genus...I tremble at the attempt."

From Leonora Carrington, we borrowed the method. Returning once again to the surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse with its celebration of "the mystique of accident," we built a separate "collective collage" around each of the eight themes that comprised our 'Vindication.' Asking ourselves whether the end result of this game-like approach to serious tract-drafting would, as Max Ernst insisted, be a case of "mental contagion" revealing the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group," we were equally interested to see whether this exercise in cross-pollination would reveal an understanding of the female rebel that bespoke common sense, nonsense or a whole new sense.

From Colette, we borrowed style. This seemed fitting, given that Colette has been called France's greatest literary stylist. It also presented a significant challenge, having to "make sparks fly" between each of the words we used. For this, according to post-structuralist thinker Gilles Deleuze, is what style is. In the case of Colette, sparks flew between words because of her glorious juxtapositions. Just as her attitude to life was to dwell in the "marvelous commonplace," so too did her prose: these kinds of unexpected word twinnings setting off within the reader little ripples of pleasure, little tingles of suspense. This, of course, was the root (and route!) to Colette's reputation as a sensualist: her words, the way they jostled for a place and slipped into a certain position in any given sentence, creating a richly sensual experience for the reader. Roland Barthes has suggested that whereas literary form is cultural, literary style is personal: style being our own special signature - the individual twist - with which and through which we embellish the literary conventions of our society and era. Which meant that we didn't all have to produce sensual writing a la Colette...But that in working towards making those sparks fly, we did have make our writing sizzle towards some end or other, as well as stamp our own individual mark upon the 'Vindication .'

From Margaret Sanger, we borrowed tone: a strong and forceful tone at that. This was, after all, a 'Vindication' of society's defiant and challengers, its subversives and fighters...Not much to make light of there. And as Margaret Sanger had been quick to point out when fielding accusations that she had no sense of humour, she wasn't in the business of making light. In her unflagging support of the poor and the voiceless, she was, in her own words, the spokesperson for those people "who have nothing to laugh about." Leave that to the Nellie McClungs of this world, she might have thought to herself - to those rebels who have the tact of a diplomat and the gift of the gab, and can elicit from even the solemnest of subjects a heartfelt belly laugh as she works the crowd. No, in being the one to set the tone of our 'Vindiction' it was evident that our "magnet for controversy" Margaret Sanger was sticking to her guns. Which meant, somewhat ironically, no guns...Calling not for "frothy tin horns screeching - a popgun here, a popgun there" but rather, for "the deeper sounds of an outraged, angry, serious people," what Sanger's instructions regarding tone were telling us is that those Colette-ish sparks were going to fly in the name of an outraged and angry and serious end product.

Finally, from Nellie McClung, we borrowed the orator's gift of craft and delivery. This was, after all, Nellie's week, and fired up as we were on her prodigious rhetorical skills as exemplified in the script of her 'mock parliament' stage triumph in Winnipeg in 1914, as brought directly into our living room courtesy of an old 1938 CBC radio clip of her address to a Parliament Hill audience as a plaque was unveiled in honour of The Famous Five, she was bound to play a starring role in our 'Vindication.' In terms of craft, we followed Nellie's standard speech formula when assembling our collective collages: a few lines to "disarm" the doubters, a development of our key arguments in order to "engage and convince," and, to end, a spirited "call to action" which put the walk back into the talk. In terms of delivery, we wore hats, of course; but also, tried to inject a little of Nellie's impeccable timing and eloquent flare as we each, in turn, delivered a segment of the finished 'Vindication.'

As for the themes that kept emerging as we worked the trope of the female rebel over our six weeks together, that we spun an exciting line of philosophical questioning in and through and around during this time, and that we attempted to evoke in our final 'Vindication,' these were: The rebel as a set of contradictions; The rebel as a distinctly female trope; The rebel as a site of on-going struggle; The rebel as a case of 'complicated kindness'; The rebel as necessarily 'bad'?; The rebel as 'to ego or not to ego...'; The rebel as a troubling heroine; The rebel as a troubler of Time.

We brought the series to a close by turning the focus on ourselves: reflecting on which of the five rebels we most resembled, least resembled, liked best, liked least, would most like to borrow something from; contemplating those aspects of our own characters that most lent themselves to being a rebel, and those aspects that found us scurrying for cover at the very mention of the 'r' word. The results of this exercise in self-reflection were revealing. If we were refreshingly divided when it came to selecting our rebel of choice and our rebel alter-egos, we were almost unanimous in our admiration of the rebel's ability to put her convictions and/or cause well ahead of the comfort that comes of being liked and esteemed by others. Similarly, we were generally humbled and awed by the courage that each of our rebels seemed to possess, and by the single-minded determination that kept them 'on task' for a sustained period of time, and often in the face of relentless opposition.

As we handed out 'Certificates of Achievement' that not only marked Club participants' 'graduation' from this latest wwp learning experience, but also spoke to their respective rebel acts during the course of it, we raised a glass to both the Class of Spring 2012 and to welcoming more radicalism - more appetite for life and living fully! - into our lives. We are looking forward to a shared celebratory meal with our fantastic Philosophy Club members at the Nurtury in early June. And we are already planning the next Philosophy Club series, which will take place when we return from our wwp roadshow across Canada.

Margaret Sanger: Rebel with a Singular Vision

This past Thursday's salon evening – our last before we break for the summer and head out West with the wine women and philosophy roadshow -  was entitled "Stepping Up, Speaking Out, Standing Apart." Drawing on insights gleaned from our current Philosophy Club series, "Rebel with a Cause,"    participants explored what it takes and what it breaks to put one's vision for a better world ahead of all else. To help us with this work we focused in on a woman who certainly did just this: American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). Our chosen 'conversational' format for the evening was soapbox oratory - a 'step up, speak out, stand apart' form of address that Margaret Sanger enthusiastically embraced in the name of her cause – legal and easily accessible birth control for all women – and employed, albeit with butterflies in her gut, in a variety of ways throughout her life.

Because Club members had already spent four weeks exploring the trope of the female rebel, they were counted on to act as co-hosts for the evening. At an informal level, this meant helping anyone who hadn't been part of the session to understand more about how we had worked this trope: through the lens of 'The Master's Tools' as elaborated by Audre Lorde; through the notion of 'world-traveling' as suggested by Maria Lugones; and through the lives and works of three other rebel women – 18^th Century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, French woman of letters Colette, and surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

On a slightly more formal note, and in preparation for the evening, Philosophy Club members had  been asked to read excerpts from Ellen Chesler's 1992 biography of Margaret Sanger, Woman of Valor; a chapter from Margaret Sanger's An Autobiography, (1938) in which she reflects back on the period of her life – 1914 – when she produced her radical magazine promoting birth control, The Woman Rebel; and a selection of editorials that appeared in this magazine, along with details of Sanger's indictment for 'Misuse of Mails' that followed the publication and distribution of it, as discussed by Esther Katz.

Out of this rich body of material, Club members were expected to pick up on a concept or to select a passage that spoke to Margaret Sanger's cause-related brand of rebelliousness, and that equally spoke to them. Then, they were to craft a short oratory piece out of it. In delivering the resulting piece, they were encouraged to experiment with the soapbox that sat in the middle of the room – to stand on it, sit on it, refuse it, do a handstand on it, whatever!...Just so long as they experienced what it felt like to negotiate a place for themselves in relation to that soapbox and to the assembled crowd, and to take note of the feelings that accompanied that negotiation. But that is to slightly jump ahead. First, before we starting using that soapbox, we had  to familiarize ourselves with the history of this egalitarian and generally improvised form of communication.

Also known as street-corner oratory, the two or three decades preceding World War I are considered to have been the heyday of soapbox oratory in both the UK and North America. In England, the consolidating of the North-East corner of London's Hyde Park as 'Speaker's Corner' in 1872 paved the way for a lively soapboxing culture that continues to this day: this former site of the gallows, where public hangings had been sure to draw a sizable crowd, giving way to the educating and entertaining perogatives of free speech. Though largely a platform for political and religious proselytizers, basically anybody with some bone to pick and some semblance of an elevated platform from which to do that picking (wooden crates in which soap was delivered just happening to be cheap and readily available, hence the adaption of the term 'soapbox') was welcome to participate. And because crowd heckling was an equally important part of the formula, this was a form of entertainment that everybody could get involved in.

In a previous salon evening devoted to the art of conversation and the value of asking good questions (see blog entry on February 11, 2012), we had looked at how the Golden Age of Salon Culture in France, and to a greater extent the growth of Coffee House Culture in England, had loosened the hold of the ruling classes over freedom of expression, and had acted as both training ground and semi-public forum for the exchange of ideas and opinions. If these institutions marked the beginnings of the democratization of talk, the evolution of soapbox oratory marked its pinnacle. To soapbox or to listen to someone soapboxing required no official venue, no entrance fee, no formal credentials. Here was an art form that was aimed at the masses and that, moreover, represented the concerns of the masses. For accompanying the burgeoning of street corner oratory both in the UK and in North America was the burgeoning of trade unionism, of anti-religious sentiment, of calls for universal suffrage, of radical politics, of educational reform, of activism aimed at improving the lot of the disenfranchised and the disadvantaged...In short, it was an out with the old and an in with the new era. In the UK, this meant breaking free of the straight-laced yoke of Victorianism. In the USA, this meant an insistence that the First Amendment, as constitutional rhetoric, translated into the right to free speech, as practiced on the factory floor and the busy street corner. In Canada, this meant severing the umbilical cord with England and the emergence of national identity, national health, and national heroines like Nellie McClung...But more on her next week!  

In effect, the soapbox was where you honed your skills as an effective speaker and where you cut your teeth if you wanted to become a leader. In the days before the radio became a feature in every home, it afforded you and your cause a certain degree of visibility and a grass roots kind of following. In a sense, yesterday's soapboxers are today's bloggers...Which brought us back to the present, and that soapbox sitting in the middle of our salon, and our Philosophy Club members taking courage in hand and one by one stepping up, speaking out, standing apart. 

Appropriately - given that we were using this forum to learn all we could about Margaret Sanger - we had a club member who miraculously found herself channelling the dogged and tenacious proponent of 'family limitation' as she struggled to reconcile herself to having little time for her own family given the extraordinary demands of her vocational cause. Moved by the plight of poor working class women whose health and that of their existing children was severely jeopardized by their inability to limit additional pregnancies, Sanger drew on her experience as a young working nurse in the slums of New York to make a convincing case for both legal and affordable contraception and her own self-sacrifice.

Fast-forward to Margaret Sanger at 78, and two club members who had remodeled the soapbox into a Punch and Judy style stage in order to re-enact, with puppets, her famous 1957 TV interview with a chain-smoking Mike Wallace. Wallace's hounding of an ailing Margaret Sanger was relentless and her answers to his leading and pointed questions were tentative at best, incriminating at worst. If that interview has gone down in history as one of this pioneering woman's lesser moments, our club members' brilliant re-enactment of the interview constituted one of wwp's finer moments. So too did a beautifully delivered rendition of one of Sanger's spirited editorials in her inaugural issue of The Woman Rebel, in which she urged women to revolt against repressive laws denying them freedom over their own bodies. In between these stand out moments we were equally awed by a call to celebrate rather than repudiate the contradictions inherent in Sanger's personality and political choices; by an ode to Sanger as an inspirational working class heroine; by an impassioned critique of the kind of slandering and scapegoating that Sanger has been subjected to in recent years by pro-lifers, among others, who have twisted her words and robbed them of their original context in order to denounce her; by a clever analysis of Sanger's ability to ride between camps and rally a wide range of supporters to her cause; by a consideration of the message of hope that Sanger brings to women who are being personally demonized today for believing in, and fighting for, a cause that will be seen as part of 'natural' and 'common-sense' thinking tomorrow; and by a rousing tribute to the Sangers of the world who give women the courage and means to empower themselves and others.

Taking this message of empowerment to heart, those attending the salon who had not participated in the Philosophy Club were invited to try out the soapbox and give voice to their own concerns. A stirring soliloquy to package-less broccoli – yes, broccoli! - will live on forever in the memories of those of us lucky to witness it. On this verdant note, a few final words from Margaret Sanger which speak to her contentiousness as a public figure and the wide range of emotions she evoked:

            “I have been called in turn a vile person, a person with a barnyard philosophy, a God-send, the greatest woman of the century, the counterpart of Abraham Lincoln and a horrible creature...Rather conflicting epithets, but I go on doing what I believe to be right, carrying a message of help, as I believe it to be.”

In the spirit of Margaret Sanger we'll be carrying our 'Rebel with a Cause' series to its rightful conclusion this coming Thursday, when we turn our attention to Canadian suffrage campaigner Nellie McClung.

Leonora Carrington: Rebel-in-Exile

Coming together for the fourth session of our current Philosophy Club series last Thursday, we found ourselves considering the female rebel through the lens of surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington. Born into a well-to-do family in Lancashire, England, in 1917, Carrington’s childhood and adolescence reads as a litany of expulsion. Refusing to cooperate in both the classroom and the games hall, she was expelled from two successive catholic boarding schools. Resisting the feminizing agendas of finishing schools in first Florence, then Paris, she failed to make it to the finishing line of either. If she found refuge from familial and societal expectations in art, what fueled her creativity was the alienation she felt from the high society world into which she had been born, and the anger she felt over the role within that world for which she was being groomed. She hated being a debutante, and turned her official ‘coming out’ party at the Ritz in London into a shocking short story that made a mockery of the ‘marriage market’ mentality informing this archaic upper class ritual. After running away to Paris with Max Ernst at the age of 20, she quickly rejected the ‘muse’ moniker assigned to her by the surrealist fraternity and became a serious painter in her own right. Finding herself on the run yet again – first from the Nazis in Occupied France in 1940, soon after from her childhood nanny ‘minder’ following a stint in a mental asylum in Spain – she responded to being disinherited by her father by entering into a marriage of convenience, escaping war-torn Europe, and making her way via New York to a life of personal and artistic freedom in Mexico.

It was here, at last – a refugee exiled in a foreign country – that Leonora Carrington stopped pounding rebellious fists against a world into which was supposed to fit (and didn’t) and started creating a world into which she did fit – a world that revolved around making art, cultivating friendships with other artists-in-exile, raising children, fighting for causes (amongst these, women’s rights), learning all she could about her adopted home, living by her own personal ethos: “To yourself be true, then you will not be false to anyone.” It was here, too - with these biographical details under our belts - that we began to 'work' Carrington’s story in the context of what we have learned about the female rebel thus far, and to coax from her story new insights into this complex and, at times, paradoxical trope.

A quick survey of Paris-based 1930s Surrealism got the ball rolling: not only did this revolutionary anti-bourgeois art movement form the backdrop of Carrington's artistic and literary practice; the movement's over-riding exhortation to use any means necessary to "lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion" clearly resonated with how Carrington had led her life from the outset. Small wonder that Andre Breton, who penned the manifesto from which this exhortation is drawn, called Leonora Carrington Surrealism's "authentic heroine"...Seeing, in this young, beautiful and "transgressively independent" woman who subverted social conventions and enjoyed a wildly bohemian lifestyle, the very embodiment of his movement. If the philosophical tenets underlying the Surrealism within which Carrington was initiated and then put on a pedestal were brought home to us when we played "Exquisite Corpse" - a party game created by Breton et al to highlight "the mystique of accident" which was, for the Surrealists, a metaphor for life itself - it was through doing a feminist reading of Carrington's 1938 "self-portrait" that we began to see how "wild child" Carrington had subverted, in turn, the relatively passive role of "femme-enfant" assigned to her by the male Surrealists, and started to carve out a richly intuitive surrealist tradition that was independent of them.

Fast-forward about 70 years to some wonderful film footage of Leonora Carrington being interviewed in her Mexico City kitchen by British journalist Joanna Moorhead - a cousin of Carrington's who, on discovering the existence of this long-lost artist relative, went off to Mexico to 'find' the black sheep of the family. A better 'portrait' of the female rebel at age 90 one could not find...Carrington is sharp, funny, insightful, tough, her own person. She insists that to intellectualize art, to try to explain what one of her paintings means, is to totally miss the point...For a woman whose life has been defined by exs - expelled, expulsed, exiled, expatriated -  there is one 'ex' that Carrington will not abide, and that is explication. In spite of what Carrington might have to say about our inevitable fall into analysis, we work this idea: seeing in Carrington's youthful flights from anything that might have tied her into a role, pinned her to convention, the possibility that to rebel is to be active, to be in movement - ever resisting the narrowing down, the cinching in, the packaging up, that accompanies ex-plication (from the Latin plicare - to fold away).

This idea was carried forth into our viewing of Ally Acker's video rendition of Carrington's short story, "The Reluctant Debutante." In addition to providing us with the perfect forum for exploring how "active" resistance and "passive" complicity can, at times, walk hand-in-hand in the persona of the rebel, this surreal tale of a 'masked' hyena who almost succeeds at 'passing' for a young woman at her 'coming-out' ball provoked an important discussion of the impact that social class and economic privilege can have on becoming a rebel in the first place.

Leonora Carrington died just last May, at the age of 94. She never courted publicity, which means that you won't find much about her, or by her, in the library or bookstores - not in Canada, anyway. That said, she is famous in Mexico. And luckily, there has been a renewal of interest in her life and art in the UK over the past few years, due in large part to Joanna Moorhead's efforts in organizing a retrospective of her work, along with that of other women surrealist artists, in 2010. We can be grateful, too, that Carrington lived well into the era of mediated hyper-visibility, which means that you can catch her in a number of candid interviews on You-tube, and in so doing get a marvelous sense of what she was like as a person. In terms of getting a glimpse into what becomes of the much-mythologized 'wild child' rebel when she grows up and grows old, this on-line resource proved invaluable to the Philosophy Club: allowing us to bring our evening to a close with a discussion of age as it relates to the female rebel; linking us, interestingly enough, back to our Invisible Matron series, and the question of whether women grow more or less radical as they age.

Next week, the Philosophy Club draws on what we have learnt thus far about the female rebel and leads our monthly members' salon evening. The rebel at the centre of this salon event is birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, and the conversational form that we will be using to explore Sanger's life and work is soapbox rhetoric. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Passionate Rebel: Colette's Ode to Life

Last Thursday's Philosophy Club paid tribute to a woman who lived life according to her own rules whilst simultaneously writing about that life in a manner that broke with literary convention. If a key task on this third session of our current six-week series was to learn what we could about the trope of the female rebel through the life and writings of French novelist, memoirist, actress and journalist, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), an equally important task lay in getting to the bottom of what made Colette's prose revolutionary. To do this work, we had to step away from how we had understood the term, revolution, in relation to Mary Wollstonecraft - that is, as a large-scale political and social movement - and turn inwards instead.

Here, Julia Kristeva's notion of "revolt" as a creative energy sweeping through an individual and triggering a kind of re-birth proved helpful: enabling us to distinguish between writing that provides a mindful kind of plaisir and writing that provokes a stab of bodily jouissance; highlighting for us the difference between Wollstonecraft's pursuit of a world for women organized around rational thinking and reasoned response, and Colette's apolitical commitment to playful paradox and bodily sensation. And just as our chosen method for getting to know Mary Wollstonecraft - 'deep thinking' - was a 'fit' with that particular rebel's philosophical take on the world, this week's exploration of earthy 'child of nature' Colette found us taking the cue from our bodies.

Coming into the session we had each read an excerpt from Judith Thurman's 1999 biography, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette; selected pages from Colette's 1920 novel, Cheri; and a summary of Colette's writing about love, as discussed by Julia Kristeva. What was it, we asked ourselves - warming to this somewhat unorthodox methodological approach - to read with one's body? to think with one's body? to come to know with one's body? to look for one's body - or the body of someone else, for that matter - in a given text? What exactly did Colette mean, we asked ourselves, when she stated: "When my body thinks...all my flesh has a soul"?

Kristeva, as it happens, is particularly interested in where bodies lurk in our thoughts, in the language we use, in the texts we write and read...And Colette, for Kristeva, is one of the few writers who manages to successfully infuse words on the page with the body. By 'the body,' what Kristeva means is the bodily drives - the body's vitality and energy. When words come alive on the page, when they spark off each other and we as readers find ourselves riding a breathless and seamless wave between what the text is saying and the bodily sensations accompanying what is being said, then what is happening - according to Kristeva - is that the bodily drives are being discharged by the musicality of the prose - by the prose's very rhythms and tones. Here, of course, we were returning to old terrain examined in salons past: to our explorations of poetry and photographs, respectively, as art forms that can be 'read' in a bodily way; to our look at the highly gendered representational systems at work in the symbolic world of heraldry.

For her part, Kristeva goes to great lengths to point out the difference between bodily drives as represented in a text and bodily drives as discharged through a text - the latter being what Colette manages to achieve as a prose stylist, and wherein lies the "secret" to what makes her prose revolutionary...an explosion of "phonetic rapture" that "writes the relation between 'meaning and feeling,' and between 'sense and sensation." For our part, we workshopped this difference between representation of the body and an active evocation of it through a series of inter-related group exercises: looking first at representations of Colette's much-photographed body in search of 'cultural readings' of the prevailing themes that constituted her life and her oeuvre; delving next into a set of recipes penned by Colette which contained far more signs of life, if you like, than your average chicken casserole. As voluptuous women with names like Veronique and Juliette sallied forth out of our 'readings' of these recipes, we reflected on the "marvelous commonplace" that was Colette's natural dwelling place, on the voracious appetite for life that she possessed, and on her writerly ability to "infuse passion into words" and in so doing, transform an everyday recipe into a highly charged sensual experience.

Of course, in addition to examining Colette's stylistic acrobatics, a good part of the evening was spent becoming familiar with the scandals that dogged her as a result of her unconventional love affairs and her daring stage performances; with the criticisms that greeted her as a result of the company she kept and the causes (including militant turn-of-the-century suffragist-style feminism) that she eschewed; with the mix of scorn and admiration that she attracted as a result of her staunch refusal to be anything other than true to herself in an age when women where expected to be true to the needs and wishes of everyone but themselves.

As for Colette earning a place in our Rebel Hall of Fame, we were unanimous that she indeed deserved to be there...Less united in our appreciation of the qualities that got her there. What all of us did feel is that Colette gave us a taste of freedom that was intoxicating, and a hunger for the simple bodily pleasures of life. In her embracing of a hedonism that celebrated female passion and rewrote the way that women, young and old, lived their sensual proclivities, what Colette gave us is an early example of sex-positive feminism. In her ability to pique the interest of others (an endless stream of biographers have attempted to 'capture' Colette!) whilst remaining strangely elusive - a free spirit in life as in death - what the 'self-interested' Colette teaches us is that paradox, if perturbing, also has the power to excite and endure. As we head into our fourth session of the series this Thursday, it will be interesting to see how the "creative contradictions" inherent in the "marvelous commonplace" that also describes the surrealist world of rebel-in-exile artist and writer, Leonora Carrington, compare to those that defined the free-spirited rebel realm of Colette.

The Gift: The Art of Giving and Taking

Last Thursday evening's salon took on the seemingly benign topic of “The Gift.” Warm and fuzzy feelings were few and far between, however, as we set off on this particular foray into the realm of give-and-take. Instead, we found ourselves on prickly ground as we navigated the highly gendered history of gift exchange, and struggled to come to terms with our own positioning as gift-givers and gift-takers.

The conversational forms around which the evening's exploration was organized were “the quote” and “the cliche”: gift-related examples of the former serving as 'thinking prompts' in the various group exercises dotted throughout the evening; spontaneous eruptions of the latter - “Never look a gift-horse in the mouth!” - leading us to question from whence these “metaphorical flat tires” had sprung, and to query the 'common-sense' assumptions they promoted and perpetuated.

A quick survey of the group established early on that most of us – though happily, not all – felt more comfortable giving a gift than getting one. That said, the terminology associated with being on the receiving end of the transaction did have an impact on how we experienced this discomfort...Taking and Getting – both derived from active etymological roots – causing greater unease amongst many of us than the more graciously passive business of Reception. If, as we were fast discovering, there is a whole etymological minefield underlying the 'art' of giving and taking, we were also learning that the personal politics involved in everyday gift exchange in Montreal 2012 have their roots in those dynamics of competition and rivalry, of losing face and saving face, that have characterized gift exchange since time immemorial.

For starters, the very word exchange signals trouble at mill – deriving, as it does, from the Latin, cambire, which means 'to barter,' which in turn traces its etymological roots to the Old French word, barater, which means 'to cheat.' Yes, that's right: before we even got to French social philosopher Marcel Mauss's seminal 1925 text, The Gift, and his discussion of the crucial link between gift exchange and the establishment of kinship lines and social systems, we knew that we were in for a corruptible ride in an uneven playing field.

And that was only the beginning. For how about the word gift itself?...A word which, whether you were an Old Norse seafarer or a High German scribe or an Olde English knight had but one universal meaning – “payment for a wife.” True, the gift's etymological equivalent – the word,
'dowry,' from the Latin dos (gift) – did morph at some point along the way from a gift made by a man to his future bride's parents, to the money or property or goods promised alongside the woman to her future husband at marriage. The principle, however, remained the same...Women, as feminist theorist Gayle Rubin (1975) has argued, were part of the "perishable wealth"
which, along with other produce such as yams or pigs, were "trafficked" back and forth between men, and ultimately converted into "imperishable prestige."

As might be expected, this knowledge that historically-speaking we women had been the bounty, not the barterers, did influence our subsequent working of Marcel Mauss's assertion that "gift exchange allows people to oppose each other without slaughter and to give without sacrificing themselves to others" (our emphasis). It also informed our reading of Mauss's interpretation of society as "arising from the exchange between subjects" – asking ourselves just where our subjecthood lay in a society where we were also the object of the exchange. Paying special attention, as Mauss had, to the mechanics of giving and taking inherent in the North American Native Potlatch ceremonies, we wondered (as Mauss hadn't!) whether women fared better in a gift exchange economy based on giving away more than you got back, or in a market economy with a tit-for-tat mentality. Reflecting, finally, on Mauss's main argument that "there are no free gifts" – that gift-giving, though ostensibly a voluntary act, in fact creates an endless cycle of obligation and hence, obligatory ties, between individuals and groups – we pondered the shift women in Capitalist societies seem to have made from being the primary currency of exchange to the primary purchasers of gifts.

It was a shift that took us away from Mauss's traditional kinship systems with their emphasis on the “preservation and enhancement of face,” towards more familiar forms of 'facing-off' in an arena of exchange: to existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre's public park, for example, where the “gift” of the grass's lush greenness is “stolen” when Hell arrives in the guise of Other People; to cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss's restaurant in the South of France, where two diners who are strangers and seated opposite each other use the “gift” of a glass of wine to “substitute a social relationship for a spatial juxtaposition.” If, in each of these cases, the “gift” in question is still inextricably tied to some form of reciprocal arrangement between Self and Other, the kind of gift that the latter part of our exploration revolved around relied not only on a dissolving of that distinction between 'I' and 'You,' but equally, on a relinquishing - a giving up, if you like - of one's own subjectivity. From the gift as a strategic unit of exchange, we were moving on to the gift as the felicitous by-product of an unexpected encounter.

Not surprisingly, much of this re-thinking around the gift comes from feminist and post-structuralist camps. On this particular evening, it was French writer and fierce proponent of l'ecriture feminine, Helene Cixous, who had pride of place at our salon bonfire.

Contrasting Cixous's concept of the feminine 'Realm of the Gift' to that of the masculine 'Realm of the Proper', we saw how the former's “libidinal economy of spontaneous generosity” created an opening to difference, to the Other, and not least, to “a giving without thought of return.” Such an opening, we could see, was just not afforded within a value system organized around the Proper (as in “one's own”) with its emphasis on acquisition of personal property and its striving towards self-aggrandizement. Yes, Cixous's “cosmic” 'Realm of the Gift' with its offer of a “deconstructive space of pleasure and orgasmic interchange with the other” was a far cry from what we had encountered by way of the gift up until that point – evoking in some of us a somewhat startled "huh?"; in at least one of us the desire to just "get some of that cosmic interchange for myself!”

Over tea and culinary gifts from our members – Kathy's gingersnaps and Bernice's chocolate toffees – we discussed the phenomenon of, and etiquette around, re-gifting. Then we brought the evening to a close by penning, individually, a quote that wrapped up – in words rather than paper and ribbons – our respective feelings about “the gift.” The results were profound and inspiring, and felt like small exquisite gifts offered up to ourselves and to each other. We want to thank all of you who participated in this challenging and stimulating salon evening, and we look forward to seeing our members again on May 10th when we come together for the last time in this Spring 2012 salon series, step up on those soapboxes, and pay tribute to the female rebel.

Revolutionary Rebel: A Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft

The Philosophy Club came together yesterday evening for our second session of wwp's Spring 2012 series, Rebel with a Cause. In keeping with the driving force of this week's rebel, Mary Wollstonecraft - that firebrand 18th Century campaigner for a good education for girls and women and with it, entry into the realm of "rational citizenship" - matters pedagogical created a unifying thread for the evening's discussions and exercises. Amongst our concerns: the various strategies we had employed to get the most out of our first set of assigned readings; those moments of exaltation and frustration accompanying our respective learning processes; what for each of us constituted a "good" educational experience in the context of wine women and philosophy; and what it did to us physically, emotionally, and mentally to "think deeply."

Building upon this thread we compared Wollstonecraft's ideas about education to those of Jean Jacques Rousseau - for indeed, the tract for which Wollstonecraft is best known, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), was written in large part to challenge Rousseau's suggestion that girls, because of their possession of "unique traits" that differentiate them from boys and fit them well for their primary future roles of wife and mother, do not require the same education as boys. To add nuance to this debate between Wollstonecraft and Rousseau over whether women and men are innately different, as well as to help us in our ongoing collective task of shaping a working methodology that embraces rather than erases our own differences, we wove in another thread: Audre Lorde's (1984) suggestion that we have to develop tools for using the plurality of human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives, and in so doing work towards dismantling the kind of simplistic binary thinking (good/bad; superior/inferior; man/woman) that both underlies and feeds into those hierarchical power relations that produce, at the bottom of the heap, a "dehumanized" subject. This particular thread - somewhat incongruously! - led us back to Mary Wollstonecraft's central argument: that without a proper education, without the chance to develop their ability to reason, women were being deprived of their basic right to become fully human.

Yes, it was an evening of many threads and of these threads, a dense and sometimes complicated pattern was woven. But in the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft's creed that the "intellect will always govern," we were performing mental gymnastics in order to get to the heart of what made this "daughter of the Enlightenment" tick.

Virginia Woolf's (1929) moving portrayal of Mary Wollstonecraft's 'catching' of the revolutionary bug that swept through Europe, and specifically France, in the latter years of the 18th Century offered an important insight into how our rebel-of-the-week's democratic principles were transformed into decisive action...moving being the operative word here, as Woolf's prose positively gallops along at the same pace that one imagines Wollstonecraft tore through life. Not only did it lend an added visceral dimension to our understanding of Wollstonecraft; it also allowed us to experience vicariously the swirl of revolutionary talk and activity into which Wollstonecraft was drawn as she "dashed" over to Paris and, in the midst of all that turmoil, penned her indignant and no-nonsense Vindication.

Working Woolf's text alongside Wollstonecraft's own words, we were able to see how this early proponent of female education turned her personal experiences into a powerful rhetorical tract; her most heartfelt convictions into real-life experiments. Bringing into the discussion some definitions of 'Revolution' drawn from The Feminist Dictionary, we could see how the tendency of Revolutionary forces to dismiss women and their concerns once the main battle has been won had made a number of woman-centred philosophers and writers feel more than a little cynical about just how 'revolutionary' these man-led revolutions actually are.

If this latter observation echoed a comment made by Sheelah on week one - that perhaps the always-thorn-in-the-side rebel is to female as the soon-to-slide-into-power revolutionary is to male - the actual act of bringing these various texts into dialogue gave us a chance to practice the art of on-the-spot synthesis and analysis. Which was fitting on this particular evening, given that an exuberant interweaving of practice and theory was, in fact, a defining feature of Wollstonecraft's approach. Because for all that she celebrated reason over passion, the rational mind over the unruly body, she did not shy away from her own passions and she was not afraid to revisit and revise her theories when those passions shed new light upon them. Our revolutionary rebel, we realized, was a mass of contradictions and moreover, not afraid to embrace those contradictions. The world, however, was not so ready to embrace them...Which is probably why Wollstonecraft has been variously referred to as a "prim moralist" and an "immoral wanton," as a "hyena in petticoats" and a "pioneer," as a "high-priestess of loose-tongued liberty" and an "uncompromising idealist"...Which is probably why she has flowed in and out of favour over the past 200+ years.

At the end of the day, though - and her day ended abruptly and painfully after giving birth to her second daughter at the age of 37 - Wollstonecraft was an egalitarian feminist in that she felt that women should strive to be equal to men: enjoying the same opportunities; benefiting from the same rights and freedoms. And though she saw femininity as a "man-made" social construct, she was willing to work her ideas within a system that men had created, rather than strive to overthrow that system: challenging not the idea that women should remain in the private sphere fulfilling their roles as wives and mothers, but rather, insisting that they had to change the way they performed said roles. For Wollstonecraft, this meant performing them with the same reasoning mind, rational judgment, and set of virtues that men were expected to possess out there in the public sphere. For Wollstonecraft, it was education and education alone that would prepare women to be better mothers and wives in the private sphere, and expand women's choice and chance of occupation if they opted instead for the public sphere. To Audre Lorde's famous declaration,"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," Mary Wollstonecraft would have probably retorted, "The house is fine. Just give me those master's tools so I can get into it!"

Reflecting on how much a person and their beliefs are a product of their time, we considered whether rebels were necessarily of their time, ahead of their time, or timeless! In light of Mary Wollstonecraft's egalitarian agenda, we also considered just how much of a rebel she actually was. Our tentative conclusion was that the term "revolutionary rebel" probably fit her perfectly, combining as it does that mix of stepping up and standing out for your cause whilst simultaneously, staying within certain boundaries, certain limits - keeping that old revolving door turning, turning. What we all enjoyed about Mary Wollstonecraft was her willingness to treat life as an experiment, the "spontaneous enthusiasms" she expressed for people and ideas, and the "responsive vibrations" her quick mind and active spirit appeared to have provoked in and for others.

As we turn from the rational and reasoning Mary Wollstonecraft whose passions sometimes ran away with her, to the bodily and bawdy Colette who was one of France's most lively and provocative intellects, we will take these reflections forward with us.

Philosophy Club up and running...And Nan Brodie is with us every step of the way

The wwp Philosophy Club came together on Thursday evening for the first session of our Spring 2012 series. Entitled “Rebel with a Cause,” this latest six week philosophy experience revolves around the trope of the female rebel, and the role that having a cause plays in the birth and evolution of her real life incarnation.

First on the evening's agenda was a toast to Rona's grandmother, Nan Brodie, who sadly passed away on March 18th at the age of 102. Nan is very much part of the wwp story, having been a strong supporter of this educational venture for women since its inception. Our studio up at the Nurtury is named after Nan, and a portrait that she commissioned of herself on her 100th birthday presides over the Nurtury dinner table. A woman who lived by her own rules, who had a wonderful sense of humour, who was a staunch defender of the underdog, who was keenly interested in other people, who enjoyed good food, fine clothes and beautiful hats, who loved to travel, who moved house at 98, who taught one granddaughter how to fish and flew in Concorde with the other – Nan's appetite for life was an inspiration to those who had the good luck to know her, as well as to those wwp members who have come to feel that they know Nan through Rona's stories of her indomitable gran. Nan – you live on in the spirit of wine women and philosophy, and you will be greatly missed.

It struck us, as we raised our glasses to Nan Brodie, that Nan's approach to life resonated far more with that of the Rebel than with the Invisible Matron who animated our last Philosophy Club series. It was a fitting observation as we turned to the task of hammering out a suitable methodological approach for this current series: a task that necessitated a brief return to where we had already traveled together as a working group.

To recap: last session we adopted a method of inquiry called “Feminist Standpoint Epistemology.” Sensitive to the needs, history and societal positioning of the Invisible Matron, this was a method that allowed us to privilege and honour each and every woman's own 'lived experience' and locate from within this experience a valid and valued 'standpoint' from which to speak. A generous and encouraging methodology, it lent itself well to our task of luring the Invisible Matron out of the shadows, standing patiently by as she caught her breath in the limen, and then gently prodding her outwards and onwards towards greater visibility and a stronger sense of her own voice.

In terms of this voice, we quickly realized that in moving into the realm of the rebel, we were making a move from voice as “finding it” to Voice as “Shouting It!” Thinking back to the Invisible Matron, we could see just how much of the literature we had looked at during that series spoke from a confessional standpoint and a highly personal place. It was a voice struggling to find itself. It was a voice that spoke for itself, of itself, and to itself – sometimes, though not always, with a thought for those other selves out there who might hear it and recognize it, and in that moment of recognition, feel less isolated, less alone. But that voice's primary purpose was to put itself and its experiences on the map. It was a voice that had to speak this way, for what it was saying had not been voiced before. It was a voice written out of official histories. It was a voice that wasn't seen to matter in the grand scheme of things. By writing themselves into the public sphere, our Invisible Matron diarists and letter-writers and biographers and novelists had carved a place for themselves in people's consciousness and paved the way for those wayward rebels who concern us now.

Or had they? Certainly, there are plenty of rebels out there who would beg to differ on this point – and how! What is clear from the outset is that our rebel isn't content with the confessional mode. Our rebel has done with talking of herself to herself in the vain hope that someone out there will hear her and sympathize, empathize and, god-forbid, mobilize! No, our rebel's chosen voice is the tract, the treatise, the avant-garde novel or performance, the shock-value painting. What concerns our rebel is action. For most of our rebels, voice is action.

In this context, voice comes to incorporate a wide range of expressive forms...literary, artistic, physical, behavioural – in fact, one of our collective tasks as a rebel-centred working group will be to see just how far our definition of “voice” can stretch. Another will be to unpack the very term “rebel” – a term which, given Philosophy's tendency to fancy itself as Christianity's rebellious cousin, is surprisingly under-theorized within the realm of traditional Western philosophy. And while we're at it, we'll be taking a stab at the term “cause” too – attempting to break it out of its philosophical straitjacket of “causality” and find for it a more engaged and engaging raison d'etre...Starting, as we did together on this first evening, with a look at it through the etymological lens of causerie, or "informal discussion."

Our own causerie soon took us into the terrain of those rebel women who will inspire us as we do this philosophical work: “founder” of modern feminism Mary Wollstonecraft, surrealist artist in exile Leanora Carrington, Belle Epoque author and 'bad girl' Colette, American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and Canadian suffrage fighter Nellie McClung. Each of these five women enjoyed considerable success as a writer, even when their reputations as rebels sprang from other aspects of their lives. Each of them challenged the way women were expected to behave and act and live, and championed greater freedoms for women – albeit in their own very individual ways. And with the exception of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose short if eventful life took place in the latter years of the 18th Century, each of them “came of age” as a rebel in the first half of the 20th Century. Where they differ, however, is in the way they related to their respective cause(s), the way they lived their rebellion, and the way the rest of the world perceives both them and their rebelliousness.

For example, some of these female rebels were motivated by an irrepressible desire to change something they didn't like about their situation or that of others. These rebels didn't necessarily set out to be a rebel, but they did feel compelled to act. You could say that their cause found them, turned them by necessity into women who walked on 'the wild side' of societal norms and conventions.

Then there's that other type of rebel... The one who – even when born with a silver spoon in her mouth (or perhaps, some might venture, because of it) – is hell-bent on spitting that spoon out and turning herself and her world upside down. Unable to settle, creative and impetuous, expelled from schools and fired from jobs, driven sometimes by anger but equally by devilry, obstinacy, desire, adventurousness, passion, or sheer joie-de-vivre, this rebel stumbles over causes and attracts causes to her and will even go out and find herself a cause if needs be. Among those causes, “The Cause” will often feature, for in her very rebel being-ness she defies traditional ways of being a woman and she confounds those who seek to restrict her choice of roles and impose restraints on her rights and freedoms. But she's a rebel-first-cause-second kind of woman. She doesn't necessarily chose to be a rebel. She just can't help it!

A number of individual, paired and group exercises throughout the evening allowed us to start getting to know which of these two types of rebel sat more easily with us, which – if any – we identified with, and what your typical female rebel “looks like” at different stages of her life. We also explored the idea of the rebel as a distinctly female positioning and with it, a form of protest, in a world that has not only marginalized women but imposed limited possibilities and strict codes of behaviour upon them within those marginal spaces. This is a point we will pick up again next Thursday as we look at Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in light of the place and context she wrote it – Paris during the French Revolution.

But to return to our task for this particular evening...Because for all that we had worked the rebel and the cause, we were still a working group in search of a methodology. We knew it had to jive with our trouble-making, rabble-rousing protagonist. But here's the catch...How to create for ourselves and for our group as a whole a comfortable and productive working space within a method that reflects the spirit and nature of our sometimes prickly, sometimes difficult, sometimes dissident, central trope? For indeed, just as our last Philosophy Club session found us stepping into those sensible midlife shoes of the Invisible Matron (if only to prove how little those shoes really said about her), this session is really about pulling on those steel-capped boots, climbing up onto that soapbox, and feeling, speaking and living the rebel within us. This means finding our way into her if she isn't immediately apparent to us; it means finding a way to express her that sits easily and is heard; and it means finding a way to inhabit her that makes us feel like we can change the world, fight for a cause we believe in, find a cause to believe in, know what to do when a cause finds us, or simply see rebels and their causes from a new perspective.

And then we found it...a methodological approach called “'World'-Traveling.” Created and developed by Argentinian-born feminist philosopher Maria Lugones (pictured below), this is an approach which seeks to break down the boundaries, as well as create connections and importantly embrace disconnections, between all of your various 'selves' and all of the other 'selves' out there occupying their respective, if multiple, 'worlds'. This is an important point to Lugones' way of thinking: this idea that each one of us is not a unified 'self' but a cluster of selves, one of which – depending on what situation we are going into or what system we are having to negotiate – will be called upon and sent into that particular 'world' to do our bidding. We do this traveling between 'worlds' quite unconsciously on a daily basis, suggests Lugones, so why not mobilize it and use it as a way to consciously and lovingly travel into unfamiliar 'worlds' and expose ourselves to difference? For indeed, the struggle to reach across our differences and create something fruitful, exciting and revolutionary out of those differences (as opposed to ignoring them, skirting around them, or becoming totally paralyzed by them) lies at the heart of Lugones' project.

Lugones' primary technique for 'world'-traveling is playfulness, and the result of this play – if indeed, your 'world'-traveling is successful – is a concrete change in your own sense of who you are. Through 'world'-traveling, you can develop what Lugones terms a “Mestiza Consciousness” - that is, a consciousness which is actively resistant, which is prepared to challenge oppressive rules and conditions, and which is located not in any one 'world' but rather, in-between 'worlds.'

Next week, we'll be drawing on Audre Lorde's theorizing of difference to help us work towards a “Mestiza Consciousness.” And in addition to delving into the life, writings and Revolutionary times of our first rebel, Mary Wollstonecraft, we'll also be learning more about what it takes to be a successful 'world'-traveler Maria Lugones-style. In the meantime, thanks to our Philosophy Club members for making the first leg of this new journey such an invigorating and pleasurable experience. I don't know about the rest of you, but I am looking forward to 'world'-traveling together!