Anne Summers

Our reading needs change, and the books we revisit constantly grow in number, but if I must choose, I will nominate Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) for the way it forced me to confront the ugly fact that the works of so many of the (male) writers I admired – specifically Norman Mailer, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller – were predicated on a deep hatred of women. This changed me forever.

‘Women who want to be equal with men lack ambition.’ This was the rather damning assessment of equality-based or liberal feminism scrawled on public walls in the 1970s and 1980s. It took a swipe at the strategy of achieving civil and economic equality on men’s terms. It sought a radical agenda of change that would bring about profound alteration to the deepest social, economic and psychic structures of gender identity, patriarchy and capitalism. It demonstrated, even then, that ‘equality’ did not have unqualified support among women. Thirty years later, Anne Summers is in a position to consider how this strategy has stood up to repeated attacks, and its overall gains and shortcomings.