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Preface
    It is time to return to what feminism has to tell us. It is time to make the case for what women have uniquely to say about the perils of our modern world. The case cannot, however, be made along the lines that have become most familiar. We cannot make it only by asserting women’s right to equality or by arguing that women are qualified to enter the courts of judgement and the corridors of power. Those claims are important but they tend to be made – loudly, as they must be – to the detriment of another type of understanding, less obvious but no less vital, that makes its way into the darker spaces of the world, ripping the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves. This we might call the knowledge of women. In its best forms, it is what allows women to struggle for freedom without being co-opted by false pretension or by the brute exertion of power for its own sake.
    I say ‘women’ but of course I mean ‘some women’. No feminism should claim to speak on behalf of all women. In these pages, I will be following the paths of individual women who have taught me how to think differently, and who can help us forge a new language for feminism. One that allows women to claim their place in the world, but which also burrows beneath its surface to confront the subterranean aspects of history and the human mind, both of which play their part in driving the world on its course, but which our dominant political vocabularies most often cannot bear to face. We need to draw on women’s ability to tell that other story, to enter that domain and then return to tell the tale. We need, I will argue here, a scandalous feminism, one which embraces without inhibition the most painful, outrageous aspects of the human heart, giving them their place at the very core of the world that feminism wants to create. Certainly it will be a different world from the one that feminism is meant to aspire to – sane, balanced, reasoned, where women are granted their due portion. Not because these aspirations should not be met, nor because we want a mad world, but because women have the gift of seeing through what is already crazy about the world, notably the cruelty and injustice with which it tends to go about organising itself.
    That the personal is political has become a well-worn feminist claim. In the beginning it rightly drew attention to the way that women’s private and family lives were soaked in the ugliest realities of patriarchal power. But if the claim has faded somewhat, it might be because it shied away from the most disturbing component of its own insight – which is that once you open the door to what is personal, intimate, you never know what you are going to find. The innermost lives of women do not just bear the scars of oppression. If the women of this book are for me types of genius, it is because of the way that, as part of their struggle to be fully human, they invite us into the gutter, allowing – obliging – us to look full on at what they, in their dreams and nightmares, have had to face (unspeakable thoughts unspoken, in Toni Morrison’s famous phrase).
    So this book is also a plea for a feminism that will not try to sanitise itself. We need to go back to the original wager – that the personal is key – and give it a new gloss. Feminism should make it a matter of principle to tell the world what it has to learn from the moment when we enter the landscape of the night. I know that, for many, politics can only be effective – can only be politics – by asserting its distance from this domain. In fact, it has been the strength of modern feminism to mess with the idea of a cleaned-up politics by bringing sexuality on to the table. In a way I am simply taking it at its word, and asking: What happens when we push that feminist insistence on the inner, private dimension of political struggle to the furthest limits of conscious and unconscious