It served the culture, and from it all of our lives followed. I was in my thirties and already twice married, twice divorced, when that first feminist trumpet was sounded and I awakened, as though from a dream, to the single most important realization of my life: the conviction that men by nature take their brains seriously and women by nature do not was an acquired belief, not an inborn reality. I was born into an immigrant working class family that was also Jewish and left-wing so I don’t remember a moment when I was not aware of and moved by the political-ness of life but it was only now, in the seventies, that I felt it viscerally. For me, and a few thousand others like me, discovering feminism in the early 1970s provided such a moment. It remains one of life’s great mysteries, that moment of political readiness when the elements of experience and circumstance are sufficiently fused to galvanize an idea whose time has come. Matchgirls participating in a strike against Bryant & May, London, 1888 George Gissing’s novel captured our two-steps-forward, one-step-back journey to the “new” woman and man.
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