Germany

This subject came up the other day in a class I am teaching, when I explained to a student that one of the slogans of the German feminist movement of the late 70s, early 80s had been: "to hell with a bigger piece of the pie, we want the whole fucking bakery!" It was immediately apparent that my student did not understand the slogan's intended spirit--he immediately said something like "take control of everything." No, I said, it's not about taking control of everything, it's that we (as radical feminists) don't have any interest in this whole damn "piece of the pie"-game--we want the whole fucking bakery so that we can bake a completely new pie, with new ingredients, new recipes, new everything, not so that we can control existing institutions.

We aren't in the market for "control"--we're looking for bread, bread and roses. Gainful employment. Meaningful life.

My experiences in the German feminist movement--nearly ten years, from 1984--1993, put the whole "feminist enchilada" in a different light. I rarely comment on these things, for fear of stepping on toes or sticking my finger in the wrong freshly-baked serving of banana cream pie. Looking back now, though, it still feels to me like the American feminist movement has been forced into a box where its almost single-minded focus must be on the ability to fuck freely and to keep scripture off its soul!

The German feminist movement, at the time--and to some extent still today--had the luxury of focusing on more of those "bread and roses" issues: the transformation of economic structures and work environments to render them amenable to "meaning life" for women; creating sustainable economic paradigms in which women of all colors, creed and sexual orientation could be gainfully employed, doing meaningful work and at a comfortable living wage. And to me, these issues remain of central concern. Priority concern. Here's hoping this "personal is political" story might shed some light on the whole spectrum of "feminisms" that are out there, the different forms and focuses they may or may not take.

In the 1980s, I spent a lot of time working with witches. In Europe. Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, and above all in Germany--the place where the greatest number of historical witches is said to have gone to the grave in the Burning Times. In Italy, where the Witches, rather than be burned at the stake, filled their pockets with stones and walked into the sea--only to emerge centuries later, in the form of the women with whom I was working. In Ireland, where I once sat for hours on end in this little Witches' Hill. There's an inscription on the back of this picture. It reads: October 30, 1987. Love, Margareta.