Men Explain Things to Me (11 page)

My feminism waxed and waned, but the lack of freedom to move through the city for women hit me hard and personally at the end of my teens, when I came under constant attack in my urban environment and hardly anyone seemed to think that it was a civil rights issue or a crisis or an outrage rather than a reason why I should take taxis and martial arts classes, or take men (or weapons) with me everywhere, or take on the appearance of a man, or take myself to suburbia. I didn’t do any of those things, but I did think about the issue a lot (and “The Longest War” is, for me, the third visit to that violent territory of women and public space.

Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together—maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto. Much culture also works that way, and though I have been the named artist on all my books and essays, good editors have been the quiet forces that make the work possible some of the time and better. Tom Engelhardt, the editor who is also my friend and collaborator, has opened the door for much of my writing in the past decade, since I sent him an unsolicited essay in 2003. TomDispatch has been a paradise of like-minded people, of a small organization with a powerful reach, of a place where my voice doesn’t have to be squashed or homogenized to fit. It is telling that more than half the material in this book was written for TomDispatch, the letterbox in which I send letters to the world (and which the world seems to receive very well, thanks to the site’s amazing distribution).

The essays that appear in this book are edited versions of work previously published. “The Longest War” and the other essays in this book that first appeared at TomDispatch were studded with links to sources for statistics, anecdotes, and quotes. They would have made ponderous footnotes, so those sources are not given here but can be found in the online versions.

“Men Explain Things to Me,” “The Longest War,” “Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite,” as well as “Pandora’s Box and the Volunteer Police Force” all appeared at TomDispatch.

“In Praise of the Threat” is the only thing that I’ve ever published in the
Financial Times
. It came out there on May 24, 2013, as “More Equal Than Others: http://www.ft.com/intl /cms/s/2/99659a2a-c349-11e2-9bcb-00144feab7de.html.

“Grandmother Spider” was written for the one hundredth issue of
Zyzzva Magazine
, the San Francisco—based literary journal.

And the essay on Virginia Woolf was originally a keynote lecture to the binational Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf in 2009 at Fordham University.

About Haymarket Books

Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.”

We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day, which gave us May Day, the international workers’ holiday, reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. These struggles continue today across the globe—struggles against oppression, exploitation, hunger, and poverty.

It was August Spies, one of the Martyrs who was targeted for being an immigrant and an anarchist, who predicted the battles being fought to this day. “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement,” Spies told the judge, “then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.”

We could not succeed in our publishing efforts without the generous financial support of our readers. Many people contribute to our project through the Haymarket Sustainers program, where donors receive free books in return for their monetary support. If you would like to be a part of this program, please contact us at [email protected].

About Dispatch Books

As an editor at Pantheon Books in the 1970s and 1980s, Tom Engelhardt used to jokingly call himself publishing’s “editor of last resort.” His urge to rescue books and authors rejected elsewhere brought the world Eduardo Galeano’s beautiful
Memory of Fire
trilogy and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
Maus
, among other notable, incendiary, and worthy works. In that spirit, he and award-winning journalist Nick Turse founded Dispatch Books, a publishing effort offering a home to authors used to operating outside the mainstream.

With an eye for well-crafted essays, illuminating long-form investigative journalism, and compelling subjects given short shrift by the big publishing houses, Engelhardt and Turse seek to provide readers with electronic and print books of conspicuous quality offering unique perspectives found nowhere else. In a world in which publishing giants take fewer and fewer risks and style regularly trumps substance, Dispatch Books aims to be the informed reader’s last refuge for uncommon voices, new perspectives, and provocative critiques.

Dispatch Books’ first effort,
Terminator Planet
, explored the military’s increasing use of remotely piloted drones, which have turned visions of a dystopian future into an increasingly dystopian present. Now teamed with Haymarket Books, one of the leading progressive publishers in the United States, Dispatch Books exposed and analyzed the new model of US warfare with
The Changing Face of Empire
by Nick Turse and explored the untold story of how the wounded return from America’s wars in
They Were Soldiers
by Ann Jones.

About the Author

© Jim Herrington

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of fifteen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
;
The Faraway Nearby
;
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
;
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
;
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
; and
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
(for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award); and atlases of San Francisco and New Orleans. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to
Harper’s
and frequent contributor to the political website TomDispatch.