Section:GDN 12 PaGe:5 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 17:13 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

• The Guardian
  Thursday 8 August 2019 5

tarot. Urban Outfi tters stocked spell
books. The makeup brand Urban
Decay released an “Elements” eye-
shadow palette decorated with
alchemical sigils; Sephora briefl y
off ered “witch kits” with tarot cards
and bundles of sage inside, which
were pulled due to public outcry.
Pagans accused Sephora of
trivialising their beliefs, but Native
American protesters also pointed out
that smudging with sage – a practice
that comes attached to its own long
history of religious persecution –
wasn’t for witches or luxury beauty
retailers to claim. At its lowest
points, witchcraft stopped being
subversive or frightening and
became just another costume.
But the old, dark power – the
choice to worship something other
than patriarchy’s gods, to reject and
read backward the narratives of the
dominant culture – was still there.
The Trump administration
represented a breaking point for many
PHOTOGRAPHS: REX/AP/REUTERS women. After decades in which

The Book of Gutsy Women may

make you cringe, but I’d rather

read it than not hear the stories

Yomi

Adegoke

T

he ever-insightful late Toni Morrison

once famously said: “If there’s a book

that you want to read, but it hasn’t been

written yet, then you must write it.”

The publishing industry’s appendage to

that is: “ And even if it has, write it

anyway.” This week, it was announced that Hillary

Clinton and her daughter Chelsea will publish The Book

of Gutsy Women – about the women who have inspired

them and are “leaders with the courage to stand up to

the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done”.

Over the past few years, a slew of similar books has

attempted to fi ll the yawning gaps left in recorded

history regarding women’s contributions. Elena Favilli

and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel

Girls and it s sequel taught girls to aspire to something

more than tiaras and coma-kisses. Books aimed at adults

such as 100 Nasty Women of History, the Forgotten

Women series, Bloody Brilliant Women and A History

of the World in 21 Women inspired but also educated,

focus ing on the many pioneering

women who were rubbed out of

school textbooks. There are several

more titles dedicated to the strides

many wondrous, hitherto invisible

women have made in specifi c fi elds,

countries, and time periods. The

Little Leaders children’s series, for

example, profi le s “bold black

women” in history.

On the surface, it may be tiresome

to see another edition added to the

canon. But it is interesting that,

despite the increasing number of

these titles, how little crossover

there is in the women selected to be

profi led. For every odd repetition

of Malala Yousafzai and Frida Kahlo,

you would, if you bought a copy of

each of these books, still stumble

across women you have never

heard of, simply because there are

so many who have been erased

from history.

Publishing is, notoriously, a

bandwagon industry, jam-packed

with doppelgangers and duplicate

titles, but the continued popularity

and production of books on forgotten

heroines signifi es a real hunger to

hear about the other half of history.

The number of pages that continue

to be fi lled demonstrates just how actively women have

been sidelined in historical storytelling. In our attempts

to document “herstory” through them, it will probably

take hundreds of years before we are even close to

evening out the balance. You could add another few

hundred years on top of that for the time it will take to

document the stories of the most sidelined – all the

women who were not white, upwardly mobile,

heterosexual and able-bodied.

The incessant focus on women who live up to a

“kick-ass” or “bad-ass” label may feel like a pain in one

to some – after all, just like men, women want the

freedom to be utterly mediocre and then be heralded for

it many years after their deaths – but I’d rather them be

“gutsy” than silenced.

For every mention

of Frida Kahlo,

you can still

stumble across

women you’ve

never heard of never heard of

presumed-to-be-monstrous woman

was ritually castigated by a man who

led crowds in chants of “lock her up”.

Watching the chants take over the

fl oor at the Republican national

convention, Rebecca Traister wrote:

“I was not the only person in the room

to be reminded of 17th-century witch

trials, the blustering magistrate and

rowdy crowd condemning a woman

to death for her crimes.” The new

feminist identifi cation with witches

seemed to draw from every version

of the myth at once: mystical and

monstrous, feminist academia

and horrorcore aesthetics, drawing

them together in one angry,

intentionally ugly repudiation of

American patriarchy.

This is not to suggest that witch

fever was always admirable or never

silly. Witchcraft, like feminism itself,

went mainstream, and in doing so, lost

some of its vital power to shock and

disturb oppressors. The “spirituality”

tag of Gwyneth Paltrow’s online

shop Goop features articles on

The witch

has always

been the

feminist

monster

of choice

sophisticated thinkers dismissed

patriarchy as simplistic or irrelevant,

it was revealed to be alive, well and

out for blood – the ethos which still

ruled the US government and

defi ned, or ended, count less

women’s lives.

The resurgence of patriarchy was

partly embodied by Trump himself,

whose fear of women, and embrace

of sexual violence as a means of

correcting them, was never less

than 100% obvious; Trump was not

only repeatedly accused of sexual

assault, he boasted about “pussy

grabbing ” on tape. But, partly, this

political awakening was just a

matter of stripping back our denial

to realise how we had always been

living: yes, Trump was accused of

sexual misconduct, but so were

several previous presidents. Yes,

supreme court justice Kavanaugh

was confi rmed over reports of

sexual assault, but the same thing

had happened 30 years ago with

Clarence Thomas. Yes, Roe v Wade

was going to fall, but in most parts

of the  US, abortion access had been

stripped so far down that it might as

well be illegal. Patriarchy had been

the truth all along. It was progress

that was the phantom.

T he witch lives

between dark and daylight, the

safely settled village and the wild

unknown of the woods beyond.

The backlash years of the early 21st

century revealed to many women

something we had always suspected:

we had never belonged to that

daylight world. We had tried; we

had worked; we had been loyal to

the rules and values of society as we

knew it. But, no matter how far we

thought we had come, or how often

our mothers told us we could do

anything, we still lived within a

system that used female bodies as

grist to maintain male rule. In the

story that patriarchy told about

itself, we were always going to be

the villains. And if that was the case,

we might as well make some magic

out of it.

If the village didn’t want us,

we might as well head out into

the woods.

There is a fi re on the horizon.

You can see it burning, out on the

edges of the world. The violence we

have survived can be our guide to

what needs to change. The fi re that

burned the witches can be the fi re

that lights our way. Our power is

waiting for us, out in forbidden

spaces, beyond the world of men.

Step forward and claim it. Step

forward into the boundless and

female dark.

This is an edited extract from Dead

Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity,

Patriarchy and the Fear of Female

Power by Sady Doyle (Melville House,

£14.99). To order a copy for £13.99,

plus free UK p&p for orders over £15,

go to guardianbookshop.com or call

0330 333 6846

Culture coven:

Tilda Swinton

in Suspiria;

Sarah Jeff ery

in Charmed;

the new Sabrina

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