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Maya Angelou on feminism

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Maya AngelouHer indomitable stance against racism, injustice and rape resonated with people from all walks of life.

Since the death of Maya Angelou last week, the scale of tributes pouring in shows just how much of a cultural idol she had become, but she did not stand for idolisation.

Her whole purpose was to express her own vulnerable humanity through a series of painfully honest autobiographies so that others would feel empowered to express their own.

Poet, activist and writer, Maya Angelou was probably best known for her first memoir, Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, for delivering the inaugural poem at Bill Clinton’s swearing-in ceremony in 1993 and for receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, from President Obama in 2011.

She did not shy away from politics throughout her life, seeking out friendships with prominent activists such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Indeed she did not shy away from anything.

Her death last week has led to an outpouring of collective grief and tributes from many prominent names – among them Barack Obama, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison – but equally from thousands of less well-known names who have taken to social media to mourn her passing.

The scale and depth of the tributes from the great many whom Angelou’s words touched is testament to how well her own indomitable stance against racism, injustice and rape resonated with people from all walks of life.

Angelou wrote about her experience of rape as a child and the years of horrified muteness she adopted when naming her rapist led to his death.

She wrote about that experience over 40 years ago – despite an even deeper culture of silence and shame around rape than we have today – when she came to realise that she could not let herself, or others, be reduced by the experience.

Angelou was quoted both on her support for a woman’s right to choose on matters of abortion and on the strength she found in choosing to keep her own teenage pregnancy and raise her son, Guy, against all the odds.

In Gather Together in My Name, published in 1974, she wrote about living as a single mother in California and spending two years working alternately as a pimp and as a prostitute. She managed to capture both the dissatisfaction she herself gained from the work and the fact that sex workers are not necessarily powerless victims, but can and sometimes do make choices to enter that line of work of their own accord.

In short, she had that most human of gifts: the ability to see all sides of an issue.

She spoke out about how her own challenges helped her grow stronger because she believed she owed that honesty to the world.

“Too many people tell young folks, ‘I never did anything wrong … I have no skeletons in my closet’,” she explained, a falsehood which she felt disallowed young people to forgive themselves and go on with their lives.

Angelou did not even shy away from critiquing Anglo-American feminism.

“The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love,” she said, “I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”

Instead, she spoke about a kind of “womanism” – a set of qualities including strength, commitment, sexual fulfilment and a profound understanding of gender equality – which she saw especially among black women.

However, fixating on one aspect of identity was not her game.

“I speak to the black experience,” she said, “but I am always talking about the human condition — about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.”

In a 2008 interview for Feminist.com, Angelou was asked what her wish would be for the children of the future, and she said: “I wish that we could look into each other’s faces, in each other’s eyes, and see our own selves.

“I hope that the children have not been so scarred by their upbringing that they only think fear when they see someone else who looks separate from them.”

In that lies her true legacy, and the lesson feminism should learn from Maya Angelou.

As Lauren Davidson so rightly points out, too many people who call themselves feminists argue over what other women should and should not be doing with their clothes, their bodies, their careers, their families and their lifestyles, and in those divisions we lose the core sense of what feminism is fighting for: to let the world see and accept women from all walks of life and all manner of backgrounds as equally human.

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