This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 40, Winter 1999/2000.
As the millennium hype reached its climax, members of the Trouble & Strife collective discussed whether or not it had any significance for feminists.
Joan Scanlon: So, what is the feminist take on the millennium, Dianne?
Dianne Butterworth: Well, speaking for all feminists around the world (not)… it is a particular cultural arrogance — a Christian celebration…
Joan: Except that most people don’t know that it’s got anything to do with Christianity..
Debbie Cameron: It’s a nice round number. The fact is that it has got to do with the way we date, starting with the birth of Christ, in a historically inaccurate manner. But it’s about thousands of years. And it strikes me that a thousand years is an ungraspable amount of time; it’s just far too long. There has been all this fuss about the record of the millennium, or the dog of the millennium, or the hero of the millennium — and they have all been people (or dogs) who were in the news last week. I think it’s a shame in a way that we are not celebrating the end of the century, because that would be far easier to grasp, and feminists could relate to that better too.
Stevi Jackson: Even thinking about the last thousand years, which is what much of the TV coverage of ‘the history of the world’ has been about, we’re still trying to deal with what happened in 1000 AD.
Liz Kelly: I think it’s all been done through the version of history that we set out to challenge and question anyway. Those versions are all about the great men of history and there are hardly any women in these accounts — or the great wars of history…
Dianne: Which is ironic, since most wars, over the span of two millennia, are insignificant.
Debbie: If you look at history over two thousand years, a lot of things are going to seem insignificant. I think it makes feminism look insignificant. Even calculating it from the start of the early modern period, and saying there was feminist activity in the 15th century, feminism is just a blip on the millennial clock. How do we feel about the millennium? Do we feel like celebrating?
Joan: No. And not particularly for feminist reasons. It’s just a nonsensical thing to celebrate. It depends partly on what you feel about New Year to start with. I’ve never thought the New Year was anything worth celebrating. The calendar itself is a completely arbitrary way of organising time.
Debbie: It would have to be wouldn’t it? The alternative would be not to divide time up at all!
Joan: That doesn’t mean we have to celebrate arbitrary units of time.
Liz: I know all of those things, but they are still the structures that we have to live with in our everyday lives. They may not be the same structures that everybody in the world lives by, but they are the ones that you are located through and within.
Joan: I don’t feel located in it…
[general hilarity and raucous laughter]
Debbie: Sorry, we don’t believe you. The days of the week are part of the trouble…. So when you don’t turn up for a meeting on a Wednesday do you say: Yeah, well, it’s just an arbitrary male division of time!?
Joan: All I mean is that New Year’s Day has absolutely no relevance for me at all, and this so-called festive season seems merely to offer men the pretext to get pissed at their annual office party and grope female colleagues with impunity. And as far as New Year itself is concerned — it doesn’t feel like a new year to me. New Year was originally marked in the Spring, and with our absurd reorganization of the calendar, it now lands on January 1st, which certainly doesn’t mark a new year in terms of the seasons.
Finding alternatives
Dianne: So would you mark, for instance, the Spring equinox?
Joan: I’m not completely barking… but it would of course make more sense to mark the Spring equinox, and if it were the general cultural trend to do so, then I would feel far more inclined to celebrate than I do on the first of January. For us as feminists, it’s also got to do with the rituals that are associated with certain public events, and singing Auld Lang Syne doesn’t appeal to me remotely.
Liz: But you’re presuming that if as a feminist you choose to follow certain traditions that you do them in the way they’ve been done with a traditional patriarchal meaning.
Debbie: I think there is a widespread feeling of ‘bah humbug’ and ‘why are we celebrating the millennium?’, and ‘what’s to celebrate?’. I’m certainly not affected by the fact that the division of time is arbitrary; I know it is, but since we’ve got this great fat number, it does become a time for taking stock…
Liz: That’s how I see New Year. You have time off work and it’s an opportunity to think and reflect on the previous year — what’s been good about it and the things that weren’t, the things that I might want to be different, and I use it in that way. Also, I think there is amongst feminists a disengagement from collective celebrations of anything, because the collective is everyone, and it includes men. But I really do think there is something significant about large scale collective social celebrations.
Dianne: I think that’s true if we expand that from celebration to marking; but there is a sense in which a collective marking of events is imposed on us. There is a reason why news readers wear poppies on Remembrance Day but not ribbons for International Day to End Violence Against Women, and part of my distrust of things like Remembrance Day is because it represents a choice that has been made, which I am not party to. I am required to keep silent to mark those particular deaths, and yet I am silenced at other times when I try to talk about other things. So it’s not simply that I rebel against collective celebrations that include men; it’s about asking who has decided that I should mark this event rather than that. Who has decided to put up a dome or a ferris wheel, and what is the feminist response to these monuments?
Joan: Moreover, we are talking about this in terms of a celebration, and actually Christmas and New Year are two of the most traumatic times for many people, who are either homeless, mentally distressed, living on their own not from choice, or living in a violent situation. If you’re short of money there’s nothing to do, nowhere to go, everything’s shut down; and it’s a time when others flaunt their wealth. And it’s a time when the crisis lines get most calls — and we are talking about reclaiming it for a different kind of celebration? I’m not saying one should ignore it; there are things we should actively be doing to make it less of a crisis for a large cross-section of people.
The problem with history
Stevi: Instead of getting hung up on whether we should celebrate it and how and why, perhaps we could look at what feminism might have to say about the passage of time, because everything that is going on in these very naff television recordings is trying to understand immense social changes, and from a feminist point of view that is potentially significant and in that sense the marking of years does matter because that is one way in which we can measure social change and we can talk about what women’s lives were like in the 15th century and what they are like today. Although of course, as Debbie was saying, that’s far harder to do over the span of a millennium, let alone two. Over a century we could really take stock of what feminism has achieved and what is hasn’t achieved over that period and it would actually be very useful to do that instead of being forced into a bigger time span where the big markers of social change are on the whole the classic male public events. One of the things that is interesting in all this historical stuff is that a lot of the feminist history that has been done has just vanished. It’s been written out.
Debbie: And the feminist challenge to what it is to do history in general, so you don’t see many programmes that suggest that the everyday and the domestic matter at all; its all the old boys’ stuff about dates and battles…
Stevi: And style — women appear there — they wore different frocks in the 15th century…
Capitalism in Camelot
Debbie: Coming back to what Dianne was saying about everyone having to mark this date, and how the form of this celebration impinges on one… What do we feel about putting up a dome or a ferris wheel and that kind of thing? I’m looking forward to going to the dome, and one of the things I want to do is look at it critically from a number of points of view because I think it’s a very indicative construction — I think what the millennium tells us about is our culture now rather than what’s gone on over the last thousand years. I think it’s significant for instance that this dome is half paid for by lottery money and half paid for by capitalism, in naked form: the sponsors are British Airways, British Telecom, Tesco, Ford. Big business pays for this shop window to advertise how wonderful they are, how philanthropic, and I think it’s going to be an incredibly indicative spectacle about the way we live now and the place of consumerist capitalism in our society. The zones are labeled body, mind and spirit (which has been renamed the ‘faith’ zone); there’s communication (sponsored by BT); there’s journey (which is all about cars and sponsored by Ford); there’s learning (sponsored by Tesco, a supermarket)… I don’t think it’s going to be that much fun for someone like me, but on the gender issue I feel quite ambivalent, because it really is showcasing quite a lot of famous women on the architecture and design front — I don’t think it’s going to be masculinist; it’s self-consciously multicultural; women have been players on the so-called litmus group which has been deciding what’s going to be in it and how it’s going to be treated and so on. Floella Benjamin was a very influential figure and so it’s a kind of emblem of equal opportunities new Britain, and in another way, because the values of it are so completely unradical in every conceivable respect, it’s just a consumerist thing.
Dianne: Or is it about how women have been drawn into a patriarchal, capitalist enterprise. Its life span is something like 20 years (and the internal structure is to be removed after a year), and there have been a certain amount of criticisms from environmental groups. Now if I choose to participate in the design and construction of that — and that is my contribution as a woman — what does that say? Do we say congratulations, a woman is doing that?
Debbie: Why is that a choice? I would agree with you if you are saying feminism isn’t just about all the great individual women artists to go with the great men; it’s a collectivist movement. When they did the Festival of Britain in 1951, or the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851, women weren’t represented in the same way or to the same degree as they will be in the dome, and I do find that a cause for celebration in a certain way, even if I don’t think much of Zahar Hadid or Eva Jiricna… Women do have the opportunity to make those choices now, and they didn’t in the past.
Dianne: I’m glad I’m living now rather than two hundred years ago. But if we celebrate the success of one or two women architects or designers as the sum result of hundred and thousands of women working to bring about social change, then I think it makes feminism invisible. The fact that Ford is setting up the journey zone to promote the car industry, and there’s a woman on the panel choosing which cars to exhibit, doesn’t seem very exciting. Now, if feminists were celebrating the millennium — and maybe one of our questions should be why aren’t we doing an alternative celebration, and what would that look like?
Debbie: The millennium womb! That was another dome issue — the body zone — which kind of genitals is it going to have… And now I think it’s a kind of Siamese twin hermaphrodite.
Stevi: It’s partly a distinction between the women who have made it, who have bought into capitalist patriarchal society and those who haven’t. If we look at recent social change, over the last few decades, some women have done very well (educated, white, middle class women) while at the other end of the social scale, women’s lot is as tough as it’s always been. Lots of things aren’t changing; despite all the rhetoric about equality, vast numbers of women are still servicing men in a number of ways, violence against women is still rife… And once you move outside of this country, particularly if you look at the poorer countries of the world, it becomes increasingly evident. Sure, some women are making it, and that is progress, but it’s important to keep it in perspective.
Joan: Isn’t that precisely what is wrong with the millennium, that it requires us to look at progress as if it were some kind of linear process, when we know that’s not true. You can’t map out the changes in women’s lives in that way.
Debbie: That’s absolutely true; those kind of celebrations do make you think not only in terms of linear progress, but that history is a narrative of progress, and towards the future, as if things can only get better. Popular history is like that, and there is an awful lot to critique in the manner of these celebrations, but I do have this sticking point which is this: Is there anything we are ever going to celebrate, sisters? We don’t like these great collective events, but we don’t set up our own alternatives, so we end up never celebrating anything.
Joan: We do have International Women’s Day, but in most European countries, certainly here, we are pretty bad at marking it.
Futuristic fantasies?
Liz: I think in the 70s and to some extent in the 80s there was much more of a celebratory as well as a critical culture amongst feminists and we saw it as being really important to celebrate ourselves, each other, the movement, whatever it might be, and we don’t do those things in the way we used to. And I really miss that, but the sociologist in me — and also the me that wants to think in the possibility of community and connection across differences, one of which is gender — also thinks that those celebratory things give you a glimpse of what might be possible. There’s less anxiety, less stress, more sense of coming together over something positive and it does give me some sense of possibility.
Joan: I can’t share that at all, that desire, or even that notion of community. In fact, I find that idea really quite problematic. I would like to see more opportunities for celebration amongst feminists, and the collective marking of events which remind us that there have been some gains for women — as well as the remembrance of other events too — but at this stage I feel we are miles away, light years away, from the potential for celebrating in a community across gender…
Dianne: Because we know that at the celebration some man is going to rape a woman, and some other man is going to get drunk and abusive…
Debbie: Liz is talking about being a presence within a larger public space, not just our own space, where we protect ourselves from men.
Joan: But why is that desirable?
Debbie: It’s utopian, a moment of utopianism that interrupts the general dystopia, the general feeling that we probably all share with you that being in a public space with men is usually a bit of a trial. But if there’s a big public party, I think what Liz is saying is that you get a glimpse of what it might be like if you took away the oppressive relationships, and feel safe and have pleasure.
Liz: Of course most of the time you are on your guard, you’re watching, but sometimes there are these moments, and I find them really important, because for me they are about still holding on to some belief that change is possible, and it’s actually quite hard at times…
Joan: I think you can hold onto the belief that change is possible without that particular utopia; in fact I think utopianism is partly about having to imagine a world in which things can change dramatically because you have given up believing that you can change the real world. So for me those two things are in complete contradiction. I’m deeply suspicious of utopianism, but I haven’t given up believing that things can change.
Debbie: I suppose it depends whether or not you believe that holidays, or things like the millennium are time out from normal life…
Joan: Or whether they are an extension of it…
Christmas vs New Year
Debbie: Yeah, I think there is a tension around that. Clearly, as you were saying, Christmas is a lot of work for women, and a lot of danger for women who are in violent relationships. It’s a hard time for people who are lonely or homeless or poor. It’s not time out for most women.
Joan: I’ve heard a lot of women lately, on the market stalls, in the pub, saying: Surely it’s not come round again. Why can’t we have Christmas every five years?
Dianne: But clearly there are certain compensations. Many women also get a lot of pleasure from it; from the celebration of the family…
Stevi: Precisely; the work that goes into making it ‘a good Christmas’ for everyone, and women’s responsibility for that, is tied in with the whole ideology of the family, and the inevitable disappointment when it doesn’t live up to the ideal of the proper family Christmas.
Debbie: I think there’s very little that’s reclaimable for feminists about Christmas — both from a family and a religious point of view. When I lived in Oxford and we tried to celebrate it in feminist collectives, I always felt truly dejected and depressed at the end of it; the attempt to politically subvert everything about it, from not eating meat to not having anything to do with anybody’s relatives, not watching the Queen’s speech — I think you can imagine — while trying to have a celebration. I would rather have been grouching about a family scenario. But a millennium; we’ve never had one before in anyone’s lifetime.
Joan: You’re right that you can’t just avoid these public moments of celebration. But, ironically, I think there’s far more to reclaim about Christmas; there is plenty of pagan symbolism: decorated trees and food and drink; and there’s also all the potentially socialist agenda about poverty, with kings bringing gifts to a child in a stable; and all the controversial stuff about the nativity and the marginalisation of paternity… it’s largely about extending those issues and those pleasures — of gifts and food and so on — beyond the family. I find it much harder to see what you can do with the New Year.
Debbie: But we can do anything we like with the millennium. There’s no tradition.
Dianne: Why would we celebrate two thousand years of patriarchy?
Debbie: It must be nearly over then?! We’d celebrate the possibility of the future being better than the past. We’d celebrate having a few days off.
Liz: Potentially we could have done loads of things. We could have celebrated women’s resistance.
Stevi: Maybe this is a time for utopian visions. One of the reasons feminists find science fiction attractive is this sense of possible futures — social worlds that are organised differently. Maybe you could think about celebrating the millennium in a feminist way both by looking back and seeing what women have achieved, despite all the odds being stacked against them, how they have resisted over time — and we could also look forward and think; what is the kind of world we would want to live in?
Debbie: We know that it’s totally contingent, that it’s two thousand years, and that counting started from a date we don’t care about — it’s even the wrong date for that — but we have to understand that we are not as yet the mainstream of culture and that it’s not a kind of wonderful political strategy to opt out of that mainstream and not see any opportunities within it when we don’t have any alternative. I don’t want, when I die, for all my memories of feminism to be of great political events that I was at demonstrating or something like that. But I’m afraid they are going to be, because it’s so long since we didn’t respond to some public occasion by saying: ‘Fuck that, I’m not buying in to all that.’
Joan: I can imagine wanting to be part of a celebration that was about the 20th century in relation to feminism, looking at what has been achieved globally, and then taking that as a springboard to see what might be possible in another century. Because although one century is a blip in terms of the timeline suggested by the millennium, it could be very exciting to acknowledge what has happened in such a relatively short time, and perhaps the millennium has had a stifling effect on our ability to acknowledge social change.
Debbie: The 20th century has been feminism’s high point, however you cut and slice it.
Liz: And I increasingly think that unless we claim some level of success, some level of having made a difference, what is there to keep us going? Many of us are so critical that it’s as if we have done nothing, and I think that’s really demotivating in terms of having any political energy.
Dianne: I agree with you. But what’s to dictate that we celebrate on this particular date?
Debbie: Well, no-one’s going to turn up if we make it next March 8th. Nobody except ourselves.
Dianne: But isn’t that who we are talking about? Aren’t we looking at an alternative celebration?
Debbie: Don’t we want to publicise what we are celebrating to a wider world? If only those who are already feminist have access to our ways of making meaning in time and space, it’s going to be all over when we die, which I’m increasingly feeling is not too far away!
Dianne: But the choice, as it exists now, is whether we participate in those larger millennium events or have an alternative celebration.
Liz: I think the issue is that we didn’t even have those discussions. We didn’t discuss whether or not there was any use in making feminist representations about what was in the dome.
Debbie: Everybody isn’t going to the dome. But on a local level there could have been some intervention about what to spend the lottery money on. And increasingly we do have this attitude: Oh fuck all these moments of public hype, because they are all so commercialised, and centralised and regimented, we do have this great reaction against them, which means that as a feminist you always have a bad time. Although I do plan to go and see the fireworks. I don’t think fireworks are just for men.