DORIS LESSING
193
blacks should not use irony: In Zimbabwe, which is the place I know
most about in this respect, the black population is so funny. They have
such a wonderful command of irony, humor, sarcasm, the whole gamut.
I can just imagine myself standing up, saying "No, no bourgeois emo–
.
I"
bon.
The women's movement of the nineteen-sixties was born out of
political movements, just as the previous feminist movements were born
in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Because they
were born in politics, they had all the characteristics of a political move–
ment in the full flush of its start - including intolerance of the past. They
believed that they occurred for the first time in history. Sex began then
too; as Larkin, the poet, said, "we invented sex in the sixties." Not only
were these movements intolerant of the past; they were ignorant of the
past. They wouldn't learn from history, and there was a great deal to
learn from it. Above all, political movements as they begin are in the
grip of an elation, which I myself have undergone when I was young.
And this elation makes it quite impossible to think about anything. All
progress is identified with the group that you're a part of. You are
good; everyone else is bad. They are stupid and you are clever, and you
are going to change everything. This is a recipe for any left-wing (also, I
have to say, right-wing) political movement.
There was also a strong dislike of older women, which led to the
undervaluing of the categories of women I mentioned before, because
younger women - and I'm again speaking from my experience - tend to
fear older women because of their fear of their own future. Also, all
political groups and oppositions split endlessly. This of course is what has
happened to the women's movement.
Another thing inseparable from political movements is rhetoric: that
is,
the use of sloganizing, oversimplifying ideas for the purpose of arous–
ing people. One of the results of feminism being grounded in a political
movement is that some of the attitudes go back to colonialism.
Throughout this entire period, well-off and privileged white feminists
have gone out to places like Zimbabwe to tell the local women what
they should be doing and thinking. Now, the first time I encountered
this, I'd been on two trips around Zimbabwe at what they called the
"grass roots" level. And I heard a couple of native women talking
about some feminist from Europe who'd been to tell them what to do .
Some of these women bring up large families on as little as sixty, seventy,
eighty dollars a month . They are unimaginably poor. They work so
hard. Because in the past men were hunters and defended everyone and
went to war, unless they happen to be in a structured job they tend not
to
do anything. The first thing you hear when you go to any third
world country is "the women do all the work." I heard women say at
