Interview with Susan Hawthorne, author, poet, philosopher, feminist and publisher.

Together with Renate Klein, she is co-founder and director of Spinifex Press, a leading independent feminist publisher that celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016 in Melbourne with a festival of radical feminism.

(00:00) Cows in Chennai 

(01:24) How controversial was the concept of separatism when Susan Hawthorne was working on the book in the 70s?

(06:29) When the oppressed want to fight the aggressors, they do set up separate groups...

(07:42) Is thinking of the women's movement as national struggles and the opposition as IMF useful? 

(12:49) Are non-political women only spaces useful too? 

(16:39) Where should we stand on the issue of protecting women (for example with women's only carriages) and changing men's behaviour? 

(20:30) Class and gender - how does class change the ideas of Susan Hawthorne? Memories from India. 

(24:28) Is separatism a long term solution? 

(31:41) For the men who has never been in the position of struggle because of their gender or background, what can they do? 

(34:00) The difference between the image of feminism and what it has turned out to be as we have studied it. 

(35:10) The clarity of In Defence of Separatism

(36:12) Final thoughts, recommendations for our reading list. 

In the 1970s, Susan Hawthorne wrote most of In Defence of Separatism but struggled to get it published. The concept was controversial then as it is now. The basic idea is that men have access to more power than women, and that therefore any relationship between men and women, whether at work, in the family or anywhere else, will always have an unequal power dynamic. Separatism is the only way to allow women at the very least some rest and time to heal, but also a ground for political awareness which will allow women to collectively break free from patriarchy once and for all. We also talk about men who harass women, White Tiger and macro-economics. 

Zillah Eisenstein is a Professor of Politics at Ithaca College. She's a feminist activist and scholar for over twenty years, she is the author of Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, The Female Body and the Law and The Color of Gender - and the book we wanted to speak about "Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case of Socialist Feminism".