Common Parlance

‘It is 1988 and I no longer feel I know what “feminist” means’: thus Gillian Allnutt commenced her selection of ‘quote feminist unquote poetry’ in the crowded, four-part anthology The New British Poetry. The hedging section title tries to have it both ways, announcing feminism as the guiding theme but casting doubt on it in the same breath. Allnutt worried that the word that ‘has been part of common parlance in this country for the past twenty years’ has now lost its status, becoming an embarrassment even on the political Left (1988: 77–8). She registered a historically specific impression, in which feminism was beginning to be presented as part of the recent past, with the present defined by ‘post-feminism’.

Writing at the same time, Cora Kaplan also recognised feminism as already a historical matter. If the second wave of the women's movement had begun in the late 1960s, it was now twenty years old. The conservative political climate of the 1980s, Kaplan proposed, was not congenial to celebrating this history. Some of the connections between imaginative writing, cultural criticism and practical politics that were naturally made in the 1970s had now diminished (Kaplan 1989: 22–3). As Lynne Segal had written, the women's movement of the 1980s had lost some of the purposive unity it had known in the previous decade (1987: xii).

Yet none of these writers was ultimately out to concede defeat. Feminism might be declared an anachronism by the 1990s, but this rhetorical tactic was largely a way of denying its unsettled claims.