A Vindication of the Rights of Women

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Tony Benn:Five democratic questions

• What power have you got?Where did you get it from?

• In whose interests do you exercise it?• To whom are you accountable?• How can I get rid of you?• Education is seen as a source of ‘emancipation

and enlargement’ from the beginnings of the democratic movements. It gives the capacity to ask these questions and challenge tyranny.

Consistent contradictions• ‘the conscientious mistress who suggests to her fifteen year old servant that she shall go to the

Girls Club on her evening out’ or to ‘the magistrate (who) orders the boy of fifteen who is charged with stealing to be placed on probation and to join a club.’ She asks, as many have since: ‘What precisely are the possibilities of these `clubs’ in which people seem to place such confidence? Are they anything more than harmless groups of young people which have a vaguely benevolent flavour, where girls are encouraged to grow into non-disturbing young women and where manners and morality are inculcated with a little mild social life?’ Jephcott,like many before and since, wants to pursue a different view: one of the youth club as a training ground for democratic citizenship: ‘the club can give them actual experience of a small community that is founded on consciously co-operative and friendly principles rather than those of competition and ‘grab for yourself, no-one else will help you’. Boys and girls who have experienced for themselves the value of co-operative living are likely later on to want to establish these same methods in the adult world. The community has somehow to teach its younger members that unless society learns somehow to live co-operatively peoples’ lives will be consistently overshadowed by wars and insecurity, by unemployment, low wages,poor holidays, dull schools, and old,overcrowded houses that cause ill health and unnecessary work.’ Equally, she pursued a view that schools had in fact denied many boys and girls opportunities for learning: ‘The boy’s ears may be opened to the ‘undying sonnet’ or the girl may be made aware of the ideals that lie behind the trade union movement. The avenues are unlimited but they are not particularly easy to come by without some older person’s guideance....In the main such sources of satisfaction have been closed to young people when,at fourteen,the State puts blinkers on their eyes and says ‘Your education is now complete.’ Poverty not only deprives these boys and girls of the best things: it constantly exposes them to the worst.’ (jephcott,1944: 160).

Feminism and democratic practice

• Wollstonecraft’s tradition: to count women and make women count in the democratic,egalitarian movement.

• Reason,virtue (especially courage) and knowledge (rooted in experience) the foundations of women’s education that equips them to fight tyranny.

• ‘Bin the beauty box.’

‘Unlike the Mahometans......’

• ‘Surely such weak creatures are only for the• seraglio.’ The ‘other’ of democracy?• What lives...what connects....what stirs..... As

another place to start, beneath and beyond to ‘reason’

• What practices move us away from competitive individualism and towards connection? What educates and informs our dreams and desires?

Being the change....

• Prefigurative practice: a women’s movement case study.

• Lessons from the 1980’s: managerialism, governance, and policy are not friends of the movement for social transformation.

• Professionalising virtues may also not be the way forward.....`anti-oppressive practice’ as professional code ?

Forces that enable change

• Reason.....access to universal languages of rights...or of potential/strengths: against deficit models.

• Virtue: especially of courage• Roots in the local and here and now , but

networks and visions beyond the local and the here and now.

• Openness to the future and to a changed set of social relationships.

• What material resources are needed to sustain and protect alternative models of education?

• Independent Organisations: eg Women’s Aid ? Association of Informal Educators.

• Struggle for alternative public spaces/Protection against the market?

• Geographical locations: spaces and places. Eg gay public space Importance of cross-class spaces and initiatives.

• Links to other movements: going ‘beyond the fragments.’• Listening to young people’s dreams and visions, especially

those of the most marginalised.