In the fall, my husband and I went away for one night to Wilmington, Vermont. It was nothing special, just a last minute “get me out of here!” type weekend. The highlights were finding a chaga mushroom on a birch tree, speaking at length with a horndog of an old farmer who chased women on the northern New England contradance circuit, stopping to pick fruit from every wild apple tree we passed on the road home, and the book yurt. Part of West End Used Books, the yurt was stuffed with genres that I love, including a significant collection of second-wave feminist ephemera. There I picked up In Women’s Soul, a women’s anti-war datebook from 1972. 50 years ago!
This calendar, published by the War Resisters League in NYC, combines dates from the history of radical feminism (Jan 3 1793: the birth of Lucretia Mott, abolitionist and feminist), the recent history of anti-Vietnam War and anti-nuclear activism (Aug 6 and Aug 9 1945: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the intersection of these two (May 16 1967: Nhat Chi Mai immolates herself in Saigon to protest the war; Oct 10 1969: Navy Nurse Lt. JG Susan Schnall drops antiwar leaflets from an airplane onto California military bases), and abolitionist and Civil Rights activism (Aug 30 1964: Fannie Lou Hamer and Ruby Doris Robinson lead the Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention). There is also artwork of and by women, and quotes by women thinkers and activists of many identities and communities, including Puerto Rican, South African, African-American, Vietnamese, Dutch, white American; students, philosophers, mothers, activists, and politicians.
My copy of this datebook has only a few quotes included, in a neat, slanted, blue ink cursive hand, and some thick crayon coloring over the black and white line drawings on some pages. It was not used for keeping appointments, so what I know of the woman who had this planner before me was that she was interested in philosophy and human nature, she had a careful, attentive hand, she wanted an end to the Vietnam War, she lived in or near Wilmington Vermont, and she was raising at least one young child. So she is probably, now, if she is still alive, perhaps around 75 or 80 years old. I am honored to share this book with her, and with you, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, in the name of peace and liberation, and International Women’s Day.
One of my favorite writer discoveries of the past two years is Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist and science fiction writer most active from the 1970s-1990s. She held a fundamental belief in the power of language to promote peace, and more specifically, the power of language in the mouths of women to promote peace. Her series The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense is based on this premise: that everyone has the right and ability to protect themselves from the power that words demonstrate and carry. But in her masterpiece, the Native Tongue trilogy, she investigates the possibility of women on the offense: in a feminist-dystopian future world, generations of women create a new language of their own, called Láadan. The premise of these books is that how we speak forms how we are able to think. Láadan, which Elgin fully developed into a working language with a dictionary and grammar, solves problems of subjectivity, relationality, and certainty that she believed were symptoms of patriarchy baked into our linguistic patterns.
Here’s what I mean: at the beginning of a “speech act”, in which one person says something to another, a small word (“morpheme”) is included to clarify what the speaker’s intention is. If they are asking a question, they begin the sentence with “Báa”. If they are making a request (commands are rarely given, and only to small children), they begin with “Bóo”. If they are giving a warning, they say “Bée.” Imagine how many times you wouldn’t have to say “statements are not questions” at the beginning of a Zoom Q&A if you used this system! These morphemes can then even be further clarified, as to their emotional content: they can be made in anger, celebration, fear, jest, love, pain, poetry, story, or teaching. To me the clear intention is to make subtext text; to make passive-aggressiveness impossible, to make the language match the inner life of the speaker so that it is legible to the listener, and probably also to the speaker herself. How would you know yourself differently if you had to choose different versions of the word “joy” depending on whether it was for no good reason, for foolish reasons, for bad reasons, or despite negative circumstances? How might questions about “hysteria” and “overreacting” (concerns that Verbal Self Defense helps to protect speakers against: “know that you are under attack”) disappear if the speaker is given the power to identify her own state of mind, rather than having it ascribed to her by her listener? How might consent be reimagined if we had a language with “beneficiary” morphemes, that show whether something is done freely, against one’s will?
This all may sound complicated. And it is! Because we are! Elgin believed that Science Fiction is a woman’s genre because it is the only form of storytelling that allows us to reimagine the givens of our world, all the way down to its language, in order to resist the oppressions of patriarchy. This month, this seems like a very good exercise.
In Láadan, the month of March is called Abóo or Ahesh: the grass month. “Bíide eril meloláad with menedebe shalath wáa. Eril methi ra ben daneth. (Once there were many women who felt grief, and for good reasons. They had no language.)” What can we speak into the world, together, this month?
Wow, what a revelatory post! Thank you!