Events, Dear Girl, Events: An Autobiographical Essay

Abstract

This article takes a detailed look at the author's political history, finding, within it, several common themes that recur over several decades. Benn's feminism first emerged both as a result of a childhood immersed in mainstream Labour politics and her rebellion against some of the accepted conventions of family life. The piece then charts her involvement in a number of socialist feminist causes in her twenties before moving into a phase of political and fiction writing rather than direct activism. Benn also discusses how an individual's politics, and political activity, inevitably shifts over the years in direct response to both political and economic change and more intimate experience. In her early forties, and as a parent of young children, Benn, by now a journalist, essayist and novelist, became actively involved in promoting the cause of comprehensive education, thus forging a new relationship with older traditions and places, including mainstream national politics. This leads her to reflect on the continuing reluctance that many women feel about engaging in politics, but also the importance of them doing so. The piece ends with reflections on the author's current work on the lives of young women in the early twenty-first century and the fresh challenges that face our ‘collective daughters’ in both a personal and political sense.

Keywords:

• Parliament
• Labour Party
• feminism
• comprehensive education
• Virginia Woolf

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Margaret Bluman, Faith Evans, Paul Gordon, Jane Miller and Lesley Thomson for general encouragement and detailed comments on earlier drafts. All remaining faults are, of course, all mine.

Notes

¹See http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk