Silences build atop silences, a city of silence that wars against stories.

The Mother of All Questions, by Rebecca Solnit, 2017 (essays)

Ahh. It is so refreshing to take a break from the news, from work, from social media and read a book where I want to dog-ear every page, like Year of Yes, Shonda Rhimes’ hysterical, inspiring memoir.

Ditto The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit’s latest book of feminist essays, albeit for mostly entirely different reasons. (I did switch from dog-earing to colorful mini post-its, for anyone concerned.)

What a beautiful gift to women and girls – to everyone.

Even if just 1% of your cells are feminist …

If just once you’ve cringed in empathetic pain when hearing the injustice of how a girl or a woman was treated …

If you yourself are a girl or woman who has ever been silenced …

You will love this book!

“[This book] addresses the rapid social changes of a revitalized feminist movement in North America and around the world that is not merely altering the laws. It’s changing our understanding of consent, power, rights, gender, voice, and representation. It is a gorgeously transformative movement led in particular by the young, on campuses, on social media, in the streets, and my admiration for this fearlessly unapologetic new generation of feminists and human rights activists is vast.” -- Rebecca Solnit

Can I get a Hell yes!?

Throughout the 12 essays selected for TMOAQ, Solnit delivers both good news and bad in almost poetic fashion, the pace and selection of her words mirroring the emotions evoked. Yet she’s also carefully done her homework.

I’m going to let some of Solnit’s excellent research speak for itself. Note that all of this occurred just within the last 100 years …

• In 1927, seven years after women gained the vote nationally, only 19 states allowed women to serve on juries.

• In 1961, the Supreme Court upheld Florida’s automatic exemption of women jurors.

• No woman became a priest in the Anglican Church in the United States until 1944, none in the Church of England until 1994.

• The first woman rabbi in the United States was ordained in 1972.

• No woman has been ordained in the Catholic Church.

• No woman served on the US Supreme Court until 1981.

• At Harvard Law School … the first petition for a woman’s admittance was in 1871, and the first woman entered in 1950.

• The first woman undergraduate at Yale entered in 1969. The reception women received there was so hostile that in 1977 the nation’s first Title IX lawsuit for campus sexual harassment and rape by professors, Alexander v. Yale, was filed.

• In the original Star Wars trilogy, women other than Princess Leia speak for 63 seconds of the films’ 386 minutes, a recent investigation concluded. Those 63 seconds are divided among three women in the three films for what amounts to about a third of 1 percent of the running time.

• In 1993, Oklahoma and North Carolina became the last states to make raping one’s spouse a crime.

  
  

So. We still have far to go.

Solnit brings to light injustices that really have only just begun to be righted. Take the following example, re PTSD research and rape victims ...

“David Morris, in The Evil Hours, his remarkable book on trauma, notes … that rape victims and soldiers have much in common. Trauma disrupts the narrative of a life because it shatters memory into shards that will not be recognized as a credible story, sometimes even by the teller – thus some survivors of rape and other atrocities emerge with fractured stories that are seen as signs of their unbelievability, unreliability, untrustworthiness. Thus rape is an act that seeks to shatter the self and its narrative, sometimes followed by legal proceedings that require the self to reassemble as a coherent narrative (but not too coherent: successful testimony must be neither too clinically cool nor too emotionally overloaded). A friend who works in the field says that many women report sexual assault for altruistic reasons: to prevent it from happening to someone else.”

“Morris continues, ‘Despite the fact that rape is the most common and most injurious form of trauma, the bulk of PTSD research is directed toward war trauma and veterans. Most of what we know about PTSD comes from studying men.’ There is, in other words, a silence about who suffers this affliction that further silences women. Silences build atop silences, a city of silence that wars against stories.”

Powerful. The implications are as massive as they are deep. Think of the careful way veterans are treated, rightfully so. Of the services they are provided and honors they are given. And still they struggle to heal.

Now think of the millions upon millions of women who suffer in silence. Often not only without help, but with continued abuses.

(If you are a survivor of rape or other sexual assault and you've never been told it, hear it now: You are a WARRIOR. Keep fighting for yourself, keep learning how to love yourself. And don't be afraid to ask for help from professionals trained in healing trauma.)

Here are a few more insightful points from Solnit's essays to ponder …

“‘We are volcanoes,” Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked. ‘When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.’ The new voices that are undersea volcanoes erupt in open water, and new islands are born; it’s a furious business and a startling one. The world changes. Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity. And the history of silence is central to women’s history.” ******** “Who has been unheard? The sea is vast, and the surface of the ocean is unmappable. We know who has, mostly, been heard on the official subjects: who held office, attended university, commanded armies, served as judges and juries, wrote books, and ran empires over the past several centuries. We know how it has changed somewhat, thanks to the countless revolutions of the 20th century and after – against colonialism, against racism, against misogyny, against the innumerable enforced silences homophobia imposed, and so much more. We know that in the United States class was leveled out to some extent in the 20th century and then reinforced toward the end, through income inequality and the withering away of social mobility and the rise of a new extreme elite. Poverty silences.” ******** “If the right to speak, if having credibility, if being heard is a kind of wealth, that wealth is now being redistributed. There has long been an elite with audibility and credibility, an underclass of the voiceless. As the wealth is redistributed, the stunned incomprehension of the elites erupts over and over again, a fury and disbelief that this woman or child dared to speak up, that people deigned to believe her, that her voice counts for something, that her truth may end a powerful man’s reign. These voices, heard, upend power relations.” ******** “In 1927, seven years after women gained the vote nationally, only 19 states allowed women to serve on juries, and, even in 1961, the Supreme Court upheld Florida’s automatic exemption of women jurors. Which means that many, many trials for gender violence and discrimination were heard by all-male juries in courtrooms with male lawyers presided over by male judges, a setup in which a woman victim’s voice was extraordinarily likely to be discredited and silenced (unless she was testifying against someone in another silenced group: white women were sometimes used by white men as weapons against Black men). And that in this as in so many other ways, women did not have a voice in their society.” ******** “In 1993, Oklahoma and North Carolina became the last states to make raping one’s spouse a crime. Lack of jurisdiction over one’s own body is a form of silencing, a way of making what one says have no value, and words without value are worse than silence: one can be punished for them.” ******** “Only in California and New York in recent years did affirmative consent become the statewide standard for consensual sex on college campuses. … The previous criterion had been the absence of dissent, which of course meant intimidation, intoxication, and unconsciousness could all be read as consent. Silence was consent, in other words, as though silence said one thing when it can say so many, as though the burden was to issue a no rather than elicit a yes.” ******** “University and legal authorities sometimes express more concern over the future of campus rapists than that of their victims and are often more inclined to grant credibility to the former than the latter. The consequent unwillingness of many survivors to cooperate with the legal system results in a loss of their legal rights, in silencing, in allowing rapists to go unpunished and often to act again, and in a society (the United States) in which only 3% of rapists serve time for their crimes.” ******** “Women are instructed, by the way victims are treated and by the widespread tolerance of an epidemic of violence, that their value is low, that speaking up may result in more punishment, that silence may be a better survival strategy. Sometimes this is called rape culture, but like domestic violence, the term narrows the focus to one act rather than the motive for many; patriarchy is more useful overarching term.”

Why don’t I just go ahead and copy and paste the entire book, you’re thinking.

But these selections are taken from just the first 38 pages!

OK, well, and one more …

"What matters most in celebrity cases may not be that a few are belatedly held accountable for past crimes. It’s the message that these cases deliver: that the age of impunity is over; that in the future, it will not be so easy to get away with committing such crimes. In other words, the world has changed enough to change the odds for victims and perpetrators. Women have voices now."