Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts
Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985), by Joanna Russ, is, as its title indicates, a collection of feminist essays, most of which originally appeared in 13th Moon or Sinister Wisdom. ("Not For Years But For Decades" originally appeared in The Coming Out Stories in 1980.)
Russ dedicated Magic Mommas... to Dale Spender, "who is showing us the way", and praises Spender's "wonderful, crucial new book", Women of Ideas: What Men Have Done to Them in her introduction (p. 10).
Magic Mommas... primarily focuses on matters related to women's sexuality, fantasies, and relationship to pornography. In her introduction, Russ disclaims that most of the essays are not offered as "illustrations of accurate theory" (p.16); she posits them as warnings ("go thou and do otherwise") instead. But she adds that she may "be too harsh on [her] past self", and tells the reader to decide.
Russ also excepts "Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement" explicitly from this disclaimer.
The essay "Pornography By Women For Women, With Love" is one of Joanna Russ's articles on the subject of slash fiction, and an early analysis of this phenomenon. (Russ also wrote another article for the Star Trek fanzine, NOME 8.)
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Not For Years But For Decades
- Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement
- Being Against Pornography
- News From the Front
- Pornography By Women For Women, With Love
- Pornography and the Doubleness of Sex for Women
Quotes
From the introduction, p. 10:
- Spender's formulation of feminist theory isn't final either, of course, but I'm going to propose as the primary demand of patriarchy what she chooses from Matilda Joslyn Gage (1873)2: that women's resources be available, non-reciprocally and without pay, to men. If men have an unreasonable and unjust double amount of authority (intellectual and other), self-esteem, time, energy, leisure, cultural importance, wealth, freedom, and so on, this is precisely because they have stolen our labor and the wealth it produces, our self-esteem, our claims to knowledge and achievement, and our possibilities for autonomy and freedom. We are not merely excluded from male activities and institutions; our resources have been appropriated by men as their own in a massive theft lasting for centuries.
From "News From the Front", p. 77:
- The feminism I know began as politics, not rules for living. To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressues were what feminism was all about. Makeup, for instance, is a feminist issue not because using makeup is anti-feminist and scrubbing your face is feminist but because makeup is compulsory. Those who don't see the distinction are building a religion, not a politics.
References
- Russ, Joanna, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Feminist Essays, 1985, The Crossing Press, New York, 119 pages.