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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'Rousing, hopeful and important reading' - Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women Had enough? Feeling hopeless? Don't give up - join the rebellion. Activist, journalist, founding leader of the Women's Equality Party and 'modern-day suffragette' (Evening Standard) Sophie Walker presents an inspiring, five-step journey to incorporating activism into our lives. Featuring stories of new and seasoned activists - including Amika George and Jack Monroe - campaigning on a range of issues from reproductive rights and poverty to the environment and access to education - the book shows us how to see activism not as a series of pitched battles but as a positive, lifelong learning experience. Escape the numbing effects of despair, learn to channel anger, arm yourself with hope, practise perseverance and connect with others compassionately. Five Rules for Rebellion explains how we can convert our confusion and impatience into a powerful force for change. 'Thoroughly engaging, empowering and inspiring ... blows invigorating air into the weary world of politics and makes you want to get out there NOW and do something about it' - Ailbhe Smyth, co-director of Together For Yes and convenor of Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment
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Seitenzahl: 249
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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CONTENTS
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For Vanessa, Tanya, Emma, Jodie, Sam and Karen – the best support squad a woman could have. With love and heartfelt thanks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sophie Walker spent twenty years at Reuters as an international journalist and news editor. After a long and trying journey supporting her elder daughter through a diagnosis of autism, she started campaigning for disability rights, particularly those of girls on the autism spectrum, for Ambitious About Autism, Include Me TOO and the National Autistic Society. In 2015, she helped to create the Women’s Equality Party, Britain’s first feminist political party, which she led and grew into a movement of thousands across the UK. Sophie ran for London Mayor in 2016, and in 2017 stood for election to Westminster, campaigning for equal pay, affordable childcare and an end to violence against women. She was named by Vogue in 2018 as one of the ‘New Suffragettes’ and was dubbed by the Daily Telegraph ‘this generation’s Emmeline Pankhurst’. She is now co-director of Activate Collective, a fund to support female community activists to run for political office, and Chief Executive of Young Women’s Trust which campaigns for economic justice for young women. Sophie lives in North London with her husband and four children and is still trying to figure out how to get back to Glasgow, where she grew up.
INTRODUCTION
It’s six thirty in the morning. The sky is clear blue, and the air is cool on my face.
I stretch up and down; check my laces; swing my arms once – twice – and set off running. Down the street, around the corner, through the park.
It is a beautiful July morning in London. In my ears, BBC Radio 4 broadcasts news from around the world.
In Helsinki, US President Donald Trump has declared in a news conference with Vladimir Putin that he believes the Russian president over his own intelligence agencies on the issue of Russian interference in the US presidential election.
From Geneva, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is calling for access for aid workers to almost a quarter of a million Syrians stranded with no shelter or food in the desert near Jordan after fleeing a Russian-backed offensive in Deraa, the birthplace of protests in 2011 that sparked this ongoing civil war.
In London, it is announced that the architects of Brexit will be fined for irregularities in financing their part of the 2campaign that broke Britain in two. The police watchdog meanwhile says the Force’s response to rising hate crimes in the wake of the referendum has been inadequate.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, still trying to work out what to do, staggers through Westminster clutching votes to herself like straws. Members of Parliament are to vote on whether to go home early for summer break.
In California, blazes have erupted and are spreading across thousands of acres of land every day, putting the lives of locals and emergency service providers at risk.
It feels as though the whole world is on fire and there’s no one to put it out.
Through a series of unexpected events that we’ll get to in a bit, on this morning, as I run, I’m the leader of a national political party. It’s a new party, with new ideas and a whole lot of brilliant, thoughtful and inspiring campaigns and campaigners. Yet, as I pace past tidy houses on my street, turn right towards the park and cross over still-quiet roads past parked cars, with this dreadful state of affairs ringing in my ears, I feel desperate about my capacity to do anything about any of it. There’s just so much of it. I wonder how I can keep going in the face of such enormous barriers to a fair and peaceful world. I wonder how I can persuade other people to keep going. I wonder how many people listened to the news this morning and thought that any attempt to change the world was pointless. I wonder how many simply switched it off, or turned to a different station or channel. I wonder how many caring people quailed at that catalogue of sadness and outrage. And I wonder whether anyone, anywhere in the world, has figured out how to keep 3firefighting when the fires keep breaking out in new places with flames that seem ever hotter and more destructive and smoke that feels like it might choke you.
I inhale lungfuls of fresh air and consider. We need a movement of millions to tackle all of this stuff. We need a plan that’s simple and effective and also sustainable, because we’re going to have to fight these fires in shifts, over a long period of time. I wonder, what kind of plan would work for that? Wouldn’t it need to be vast and involved? Or should it be short and to the point? Would it need to detail practical measures for activism? A strategic approach? Offer powerful inspiration? Or do we essentially need philosophical comforts? And where would I find all of the answers to this? Who should I ask?
I finished that run sure of one thing. We have to make sure the destructive blazes are snuffed out. We have to sow a better world for all of us. We can only do this together. Saving the world has to involve you. Our plan to save the world has to ensure that you can keep going when I’m flagging, and that I can keep going when you’re flagging.
At this point you might be undecided about joining the rebellion – or about the need for activism altogether. Perhaps it doesn’t seem worth it, given the scale of the problems. Perhaps it seems as though you individually can’t make a difference. Maybe you think the change shouldn’t start with you but with people in other countries, ones that are doing far worse than us on carbon emissions, or access to education, or human rights. Look, bear with me. Bear with my vision that there can be something better. Consider this suggestion that there is something you can do about the state of the world.4
Don’t laugh it off.
Don’t put this book down!
Whatever you do – don’t decide not to care.
Not caring is no way to live.
Not caring leaves the way free for billionaires to bend entire countries to their will. Not caring leaves politics to people whose primary consideration is the desire to protect their own interests. Not caring leaves decision-making to people who lack compassion and imagination. On 8 November 2016 – the US election day that ushered in the pussy-grabbing, immigrant-denouncing apologist for white nationalism, President Trump – British journalist George Monbiot sent this tweet:
The choices before the American people are:
1. The same old shit
2. An entire vat of shit, in which you will drown Vote 1. It’s all there is.
George was clearly flagging that day. It’s a shame, because a lot of people were listening to him. We have to cheer George up. And we have to not be like him in that moment. Because dismissing everything as shit makes you complicit.
Let’s instead build something new.
Come with me.
At this point I’d like to take a moment to set out what help this book aims to offer. Key to this activist message is practical 5support and encouragement: a resource of information for developing the talent you might not yet know you have. But to be clear: this is not a message about fixing yourself first. Because if you’re a curious or contemplative person, you’ve probably tried that, at the urging of other books. You’ve probably read the ones that say you need to improve yourself before you can improve anything else, and that you need to do that work alone. The guilt and cynicism that those books can foster is stifling. Perhaps you’re feeling sceptical now because you feel like you’ve tried everything already and you’re tired of it. That’s understandable: a walk into the ‘self-help’ section of the average bookshop shows tables piled high with lessons for women that they’re not good enough – while the philosophy and business sections encourage men to be thoughtful about life without suggesting such levels of inadequacy.
The ‘ourselves’ in the title of this book is a very deliberate word. This is not a book to tell you and you alone to try harder. I’ve tried yoga, jogging, eating green, baking and mindfulness. All of those things are good and lovely, and they help build strength and calm, but on their own they are just coping mechanisms for people existing within systems that don’t allow them to live freely. The message to ‘be your best self’ is a deeply cynical one when it is addressed from within an unacknowledged structure of oppression. Eating chia seeds is not going to change the systems that prevent change itself. And it’s pointless urging people as individuals simply to try harder when there are centuries of legislative, cultural and economic inequality to overcome. The messages to women, classified as second-class citizens and discriminated against over thousands of years of 6patriarchy, demonstrate this particularly well: ‘Come on, ladies, all you have to do to deal with a sexist workplace is grow a thicker skin!’ or ‘Come on, ladies, all you have to do to not get raped is to not do anything that might encourage a rapist’ or, my personal favourite in terms of sheer absurdity, ‘Come on, ladies, all you have to do to get equal pay is learn how to ask for a pay rise!’
This book is not going to tell you that the brave new world hinges on you establishing a better work–life balance while maintaining a steady dress size. The brave new world hinges on us shaking off the shackles of despair or anger or hopelessness and making contact with others who are just like us – people who are trying to come up with new ideas and ways of behaving and interacting in order to move our societies, democracies and institutions out of the mud in which so many are floundering. We can only do this work together, and we can only do it if we reach people who have never considered – until now, perhaps – that they might be able to change the world.
We need new activists. We need new campaigners. We need new ideas. We need new spaces for new leaders and new ideas to find one another. We need to think about what leadership is and how more than one person can lead at the same time and how collectively we can inspire each other to step up. We need to make room for people to try and fail and be able to talk about making mistakes or simply wonder aloud for a while what the answers might be.
One of the most important things I learned as an activist (to date; I’m learning new things all the time) is that other 7people have much, much better ideas than me. I consider that a key part of my work is to:
a. find those people and put them together with more people;
b. absorb those ideas and come up with a plan for how we might make them work in practice; and
c. find more people and more ideas.
Being an activist or a leader is not a job title but an action. One of the most important things I learned as a leader prompted me to step out of that job and write this book: the best way to build power is to give it away. Effective leaders build self-sustaining collectives and movements. They know when to get out of the way for someone with a different perspective and when to hold out a hand and walk forward together with another. Leadership, under the old heroic model, where the masses appoint one man (it’s usually a man) to go into battle on behalf of millions, is a crazy and ineffective model whose time is long gone. Yet still we cling to it because human beings are tribal and we believe that our tribal leaders must always be right and certain in all things. And in order for our leaders to be right, someone else has to be wrong. All of that rules out almost immediately any kind of leadership by people brave enough to try new ideas before they’ve been tested to destruction, or by people brave enough to lead alongside other people with different opinions. And it certainly rules out people who look and sound different, and whose opinions, mannerisms and life experiences are different. People who might need different 8ways in which to work, grow, learn and maintain the confidence with which to try to change the world.
I never intended to be an activist. I never intended to be a politician. I certainly never intended to be a leader or a (very minor) public figure.
Those things happened because friends and respected colleagues advised and encouraged me, and I listened and I took the hands that were held out to me. They also happened because in the (plentiful) moments when every screaming, frightened nerve told me to stop, I stood up anyway, hands clenched so no one could see me tremble. I’ve ended up doing what I’m doing because I couldn’t not do it anymore. When the work is wonderful, I wish everyone could see how wonderful it is and be inspired with me. And when the work is bloody hard, and I don’t know how to keep going, I wish everyone who felt like that in the same moment could know that we are all working together, that this is a movement and that we can find support in each other.
One of the questions I often get asked as I go about my work is: ‘I want to do something about this. But how can I be brave?’ This question appears in letters from thirteen-year-old schoolgirls and is asked at workplace presentations by women in their twenties. Forty-something women ask it at local party branch meetings. Very cool, influential people who I would never have believed could worry about lack of bravery have asked it backstage at events.
My response is this: It is easy to be brave in a world that is built to fit you. Where everything from the height of the handrails on the underground to the temperature of the air 9conditioning in your office to the pills you take at night for your heart disease are all designed to your physiology. Where the media reflects people who look and sound like you. Where you have sufficient money in your wallet and food in your belly. Where you can move around in the world without fear. Where you know that your voice will be heard. The world is largely not built to fit people who are not male, white, wealthy, straight and non-disabled. The people at the margins of that template live and grow and move and try to thrive despite it. So, if you are asking yourself nervously, ‘I want to do something about this. But how can I be brave?’, you already are, because you’re preparing to make yourself even more uncomfortable in a world that is structured to make sure you always know your place.
I am only brave in the sense that I refuse to know my place. Every time it’s suggested to me that I should sit down and be quiet, I get very cross and claustrophobic and refuse, and consequently find myself in all sorts of trouble.
There are many things to feel daunted about when you look at the world. It’s not just that so much seems wrong but also the potential personal cost of trying to do something about it. The potential personal impact of trying to intervene is high in our 24-hour media, social media, blogging, Instagramming, digital billboarding, feel-it-with-me world. Who on earth would want to stand up and say, ‘Listen to me!’ in that hubbub? Who would feel confident of being heard? Who would want to risk looking foolish? Who would want to expose themselves to the tidal wave of trolls ready to take anyone apart who expresses an interest or opinion that differs from theirs? It’s entirely natural 10to want to keep your head down. To curate your social media to show only pictures of shopping and holidays, shared only with family and friends. To stay indoors and surf Netflix instead.
It’s so much easier to keep quiet. That’s what people with power rely on. They need us to keep quiet and to feel powerless in order to maintain their own power. You not challenging them props them up almost as much as if you were campaigning in support of them.
Don’t be daunted. Don’t dismiss your power. Fear of being noticed is a fear of being rejected, but guess what? You have already been rejected. The systems that aren’t working for you are already dismissing you. You might be ridiculed or disliked by nailing your colours to the post. But the reality is that decisions are being made for and about you every day by people who don’t like you or don’t see you. Those decisions include not making decisions about you – hence the neglect and dismissal you’re feeling. So, you might as well be visible.
Different people have different ideas about what makes an activist. I have seen people who seemed to be born to it – who came into the world raging and declaiming, or inquiring and organising, or questioning and persisting. I’ve heard people say they were born activists, driven to make change for as long as they can remember. Others were convinced as a child that they wanted to make the world a better place. I think those people are brilliant, and quite rare.
We need born activists, but we also need activists who come to it late – the far wider and growing network of people who 11have for weeks, months and years experienced and observed injustice, double standards, cruelty and hypocrisy … until one day they simply can’t put a lid on those experiences and feelings any more, or theorise or drink them away, or numb them in the myriad ways our world beckons us to.
Does that sound like you? I think that you, like the many other people who become activists, have been made into one by the hundreds of incidents that mark you every day, pushing you to conform to a shape that suits society rather than your true self. I think most of us reach a point where we eventually step out of the mould into which our society has pressed us precisely because we are tired of being moulded. I think we become activists because we reach a breaking point. Because we want to smash that mould.
When I was seven years old, my mum gave me a badge that said: ‘Girls Are Powerful.’ It was a small round button badge with a multicoloured, rocket-shaped font that fizzed and shouted. I remember looking at it and feeling as uncomfortable as I felt thrilled by it. It said out loud something that I’d only ever said inside my head. It made my skin prickle.
I pinned it to my blazer and wore it to school, where the boys in my class took one look and laughed out loud. ‘Of course they’re not,’ sneered one, confident and contemptuous already in his tiny man-skin. I felt furious and hurt that he had squashed something nascent in me and had forced confirmation of something I didn’t want to admit to myself just as I had started to rise up against it.
When I was nine years old, I was the monitor for school art class, tasked with helping to prepare for my form’s painting 12sessions. I had to dispense the water pots, bearing faint rainbow rings from earlier sessions, and the paintbrushes, with splayed bristles and peeling wood handles, and plastic trays fitted with discs of watercolour paints. I also had to direct each table monitor to the newspaper pile – fluttery bundles of tabloid pages to be spread across our desks as protection against the mess. Among the pages were photographs of bare-breasted women in small lacey knickers. The boys would roar and point and laugh. The girls would make themselves a bit smaller, huddle over their paintings and make sure not to catch anyone’s eye.
When I was eleven years old, there was what used to be called (in the way that public parlance can diminish women’s distress) a ‘flasher’, across the road from the school playground, who called out in a friendly, gentle and persistent way until we came over to the railings. When he had our attention, he exposed himself and became laughingly excited as our realisation and distress grew.
When I was thirteen years old, skinny and gawky and geeky, a boy in my form class said I was disgusting for being so unnaturally tall and unwomanly. He said it to me in form class and said it to me when he passed me in the corridors. He took up a seat behind me in physics class and, winking at the other boys across the room, leaned forward and whispered in my ear when the teacher wasn’t looking a stream of contempt for my lack of charm, beauty and curves. After a while he didn’t bother whispering anymore but would lean back lazily in his chair and call it over to me without moving his eyes from the blackboard or his workbook. His friends would take up the chant.13
When I was fifteen years old, I went through a Goth phase. One night I went to my favourite club wearing a short black skirt and ripped tights. I painted on black eye make-up and crimped my hair. When it was time to leave, I had to wait for ages on the street for a taxi. When I eventually found one, the driver took me home via a long and circuitous route, saying nothing to me as he circled back streets I didn’t know and waste ground far from street lights, until I was so frightened that he was looking for a quiet place to attack me that I cried and curled up into a ball on the back seat. Once I was frightened enough, he drove me home and let me out, where under the bathroom light I examined myself, my face and my clothing, and thought I must have brought it on myself.
When I was 21, I visited a boyfriend in the United States who was spending the summer there working. In the Maryland beachside apartment he shared with a group of other male students all working in the local bars and restaurants, I found porn magazines on the Formica kitchen table, peeled back and left open at the money shot – something to be viewed casually over breakfast, perhaps. I reeled back from the pictures, horrified. ‘Don’t be such a prude,’ my boyfriend told me.
I used to argue with that boyfriend and his friends. When I did, they would grin at each other behind my back and call me ‘feisty’ – a non-threatening version of ‘brave’, a descriptor for women and animals.
When I was 27 and newly arrived in a journalism job, a senior colleague offered to tell me more about the company over a drink. When we got to the pub, he explained that he could work better with me and do more for my career if I slept with him. 14
When I was 30, I got pregnant by mistake. My boyfriend and I, knowing each other only a little, nonetheless decided to commit and move in together and look forward to our baby. We both worked for the same company and were both talented and young and ambitious. As the weeks ticked down to my maternity leave, I started to feel very anxious about my future prospects. One day, fretting about the time I would be away from work, I said I wished that we were better able to share parental leave. ‘But I don’t really need more than two weeks,’ the father of my child told me.
When I was 38, divorced and juggling a big work promotion carrying heavy responsibility with single motherhood, my daughter was diagnosed with autism. The process had taken five years. We kept being told that only boys got autism. I expected relief and support after we got the diagnosis, but instead we were sent away to get on with it and denied disability living allowance or special educational needs provision. I changed my work to part-time so that I could support my daughter and do the hours of bureaucratic administration necessary to fight her corner against the authorities. One day – one of many such days – her school rang me to tell me she had lashed out at another pupil. It came to light that the other pupil had been bullying her, one of a ring of persecutors that had ridiculed and threatened her for months on end. ‘She brings it on herself,’ the school’s special educational needs co-ordinator told me, explaining that my daughter’s disability made her, as a girl, particularly hard for the other children to deal with. Because girls were supposed to look and play nice.15
No single one of these events made me an activist. But the combination of them – and many more – did.
To write this book I interviewed a range of activists up against conditions and challenges very far removed from the struggles of a white Western woman like me. Their stories and experiences are extraordinary in their range and for the grit and determination that these women have consistently shown. I felt inspired and very humbled by what I heard, and I hope that in sharing these thoughts and suggestions with you, we find between us many more new activists to join their efforts. I hope also to show that everyone can be an activist, and that a great many experiences – whether that of a student in Europe protesting the climate crisis or a Syrian campaigner desperately trying to stop the bombing and detention of ordinary people – are linked by a golden thread. Life comes at us thick and fast with injustice, and it won’t stop until we each, and together, do something about it.
As feminist activist Julie Bindel put it to me: ‘These feelings just chip away at you. I’ve never known a woman who had a Road to Damascus moment. It’s always something that women and girls know – that things aren’t fair. And from that it’s about opportunity – being in the right place at the right time, being a bit rebellious perhaps – all kinds of things that can be a combination of chance and impetus that then leads you to take on feminism as a priority.’
Imagine finding more ways to create those moments of opportunity, from moments of pain and despair. Imagine finding and giving a voice to all the people currently tussling in still-silent near-mutiny about a whole range of injustices and 16inequalities. Imagine lifting up all the people who have tried and tried but are finding it so hard to keep going. Imagine bringing together all of those people. Imagine if we all could find each other.
Imagine all of that potential – activating all of the people who are nearly at the tipping point but don’t know it yet. Maybe they have been resisting that pull. Maybe they feel that it’s too daunting. Or maybe they are ready and have in fact been waiting for you all this time. Imagine the impact of inspiring anew the tired but seasoned activist with years of experience and perspective.
This is not a book to teach the technical skills of activism – the practicalities of changing the law, writing policies, mustering social media algorithms for successful campaigns. This is a book that explores how we can maintain energy and determination in the face of enormous barriers, and how we can adopt activism as a philosophy for life, rather than seeing it as a few pitched battles.
I want to challenge the alarming stereotypes of activism that people have raised with me as reasons they couldn’t consider themselves campaigners – that it’s for adventurers and thrill-seekers, or thick-skinned, seasoned debaters, or a macho band of brothers and just rarely a feisty sister. Together with you, I want to seek out the skills (and awareness of the skills we were born with) needed to create a version of activism that suits us all, inspires us all and sustains us all.
Activism is a rollercoaster. This book plots those downs and ups in a way that will help you to recognise and connect to the feelings you’re having, so that you can channel energy 17from them and nourish and maintain your activism. In the chapters to come, I set out five essential rules of engagement that aim not just to suggest helpful choices but also to show the context in which we make choices and how that context affects our capacity to resist and persist. The five rules are interconnected – embracing one leads you to the next, and the next – in a circle of learning and growing. Because activism isn’t a linear journey with a clear starting and stopping point. Activism is a philosophy for life.
To be clear: activism is founded on rebellion. Becoming an activist means rejecting that what we’re told is simply the way of things, and instead demanding a better world.
Welcome to the rebellion.
Now let’s go and start changing the world.18
