Abstract
Introduction: The Best Laid Plans of Mice and (Wo)men
The writing of this article was disturbed by a personal event that underscored the nature of the theme pursued in it. My mother was taken ill with a urinary tract infection (UTI) that led to a short stay in hospital and a period of convalescence with us. My mother is a stoical, energetic woman of 80. Her very stoicism meant she refused to accept how ill she was, and as a result she became severely dehydrated. Her silence in response to repeated phone calls meant we checked in on her, and she is now recovering from what was an unpleasant and unsettling experience.
My mother’s attitude to her body – and she is not unusual in this – has always been one of assumed control. Yet, as the sociologist in the medical humanities, Arthur Frank (2002) points out in the title of one of his books, all of us live ‘at the will of the body’. In this article, I explore the problems of adopting an overly optimistic approach to the body, which suggests, in a reversal of Frank’s words, that the body lives ‘at the will of the mind’. I offer, instead, an approach grounded in the pessimistic tradition in philosophy. This approach runs contrary to what we as individuals, and as a society, might like to be the case. In addition, this approach poses a challenge to some dominant strands in contemporary feminist thought, made apparent by bringing to the fore the ageing female body. It might be assumed that a pessimistic philosophy such as the one pursued in this article is wholly negative; yet, it need not be read in this way. A pessimistic perspective may well reflect a healthy realism about the universe we inhabit that, paradoxically, enables us to live more flourishing lives. As Joshua Foa Dienstag (2006), philosopher of the varieties of pessimism, writes, ‘pessimism is a terror that liberates’ (p. 178).
Neoliberal Optimism and Its Discontents
In order to identify the optimistic shaping of human being and the human body in current politics and some influential feminist theories, it is necessary to begin by exploring, briefly, the dominant economic philosophy of our age, neoliberalism. 1
Neoliberalism and, its close ally, globalisation are shaped by confident claims that human society now stands at ‘the end of history’. This phrase, made famous by Francis Fukuyama (1992), expresses a common conclusion advanced in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet system in the late 1980s: consumer capitalism and the celebration of the individual had ‘triumphed’ over communism and collectivist politics. The return of authoritarian and nationalist forms of government in recent years has led Fukuyama (2022) to significantly refine his position, acknowledging the discontent with economic liberalism, and attempting a return to the classical construction of philosophical liberalism. Certainly, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–2022 significantly challenged the supposed consensus with its upbeat vision of the future of human society. The Global Financial Crisis alerted the Western world to the problems of assuming unending economic growth; the Pandemic acted as a reminder of the limits of an account of humans which envisages them as always and everywhere transcending the world of organic processes. Both crises hinted at that other presence haunting our age: climate change, and, with it, the possibility of human extinction and planetary death.
Despite these pressures, it has proved extremely difficult – even well-nigh impossible – to shrug off the comforting categories of neoliberal consumerism. The image of the human that has arisen from this reframing of enlightenment values – namely, that we are radically free, rational choice-makers, who stand out from the rest of the animal world – is one that seems almost ‘natural’, despite indications of the considerable damage this vision is doing to the world on which we depend for our very existence.
Digging a little deeper, it is easy to see why this image of the human is not in its death throes and is unlikely to be any time soon. The philosophy of neoliberalism is fundamentally optimistic, finding a ready place in the hopeful desires of the human heart. ‘You can be whoever you want to be’, its siren voice tells us. ‘There are no limits that should be placed on your desires or abilities’. ‘Nothing constrains you–certainly not history, and definitely not the world itself’. 2
The shift away from a class-based politics to one grounded in individual identity to some extent supports this optimistic perspective. To argue for a politics based on collective identities clashes with the centrality given to the individual. Under the new economic liberalism, class is a category fraught with difficulty. All are conceived as ‘romantic free spirit[s]’ (Standing, 2014: 15), who are not constrained by context but who are responsible for creating their lives as they so choose. The collective identity of class no longer acts to differentiate different economic groups and their respective concerns: ‘we are all middle class now’, to adopt then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s soundbite from 1998 (in Evans, 2007: xiii). Yet, as bell hooks (2000), Gillian Evans (2007) and Guy Standing (2014) detail, class under neoliberalism remains as significant a category for understanding systems of injustice as ever. To suggest these challenges to no small extent the hopeful philosophies of the individual which shape contemporary liberalism. The move away from the collective in favour of the unshackled, creative individual is similarly reflected in current feminist discussions on the nature of sexual identity. The biological stratum of sex is now viewed as something which is as illusory as social constructions of gender, and thus nothing, it is claimed, constrains the identities an individual might forge.
Yet, a spectre haunts this positive image of human potentiality: the spectre of the body and its limits. If the realm of the natural world and finite reality challenge claims for endless economic growth, so claims for the radically independent individual are tempered by the reality of human dependence on physical processes. Rather than engage with the limits placed on mutable creatures who come into being, exist for a time, and then pass out of existence, the temptation is to concentrate one’s attention on ways of transcending them, the implication being that there are no limits by which the human individual – or human society more generally – should be constrained.
Reading the Body
The most contentious of contemporary feminist discussions revolves around determining the relationship between sex and gender. Beneath this debate lies, largely unacknowledged, the question of limits. How is the body to be read?
The history of misogyny cannot be ignored, as Greer notes, because of the damaging stereotypes that have been used to read the female body (see Clack, 1999). For example, Genevieve Lloyd (1984) describes the ways in which ‘Woman’ has acted as a cypher in the Western philosophical tradition for that which (masculine) Reason rejects. As ‘Man’ is to Reason, so ‘Woman’ is to Nature (Ortner, 1972; Plumwood, 1993). ‘Woman’, identified with the body, with physicality, with feeling and emotion, is excluded from dispassionate reflection and the ‘spiritual’, both of these attributes being routinely associated with ‘Man’. The attributes of the female body, and specifically the role of the female body in reproduction, far from being viewed as indicative of creative power, are theorised to render Woman less spiritual, less contemplative than Man, and thus inferior to the male.
Yet to acknowledge the differences between male and female bodies is not to be bound to the cultural readings that have attended to them. The move towards ‘body theology’ and ‘ecofeminism’ in the latter part of the twentieth century was concerned to wrest the body from misogynistic interpretations. Out of the work of key proponents like Lisa Isherwood (1999, 2008) and Val Plumwood (1993), the body emerged as not just central to identity, but as that which anchors ‘the human’ explicitly in the natural world on which we depend for our existence. There was no place for Cartesian dualism in their work: I am my body and my body is me. This embodied self was conceived as a fundamental part of the physical world, and this connection enabled better, healthier framings of the relationship between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’ worlds. We are not separate from, but part of, all that is.
It is strange, then, that the dominant feminism of the twenty-first century has moved away from this connection. The most influential of today’s gender theorists is Judith Butler. Her reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s social construction theory of Woman offers a significantly more upbeat account of the possibilities of gender than that offered by feminists like Greer. For those influenced by her theories, identity is located in feelings and choice, detached to a large extent from the imperatives of the body. Rather than make the body the ontological basis for identity, the body becomes as malleable as gender itself. ‘“The body” is itself a construction’, Butler (2006 [1990]) writes in
Which all sounds liberating, even up lifting.
But let us pause, for things are not quite what they seem.
If the sexed body does not provide at least a relatively stable starting point for female identity, thus acting as a unifying sign for challenging stereotypes of the qualities of those bodies, what does it mean to be a feminist seeking the liberation of
In Butler’s thinking, the problems of forging a united women’s movement become even more apparent. Reworking Beauvoir’s social constructionist account of gender as ‘performativity’ (Butler, 2014), attention shifts from the liberation of
Yet, is identity only ever shaped by ‘cultural norms’ and how we do or don’t play with them? What of the body
An example from an interview given in 2023 by the actor, comedian and trans activist Eddie Izzard makes plain this new terrain for female identity. Izzard tells the interviewer that in her personal life, she now wants to be known mainly as Suzy. Explaining this decision, Izzard goes on to say, That was just me feeling that I am gender fluid. . . I’ve decided for my 60s, I’m going to be based as a trans woman, but I’m still gender fluid. I prefer she/her, but I don’t mind he/him. You can choose. (Rampton, 2023)
This is the powerful statement of someone determined to shape their identity as they choose. To consider some of the theoretical assumptions supporting this assertion might seem inappropriate, even insensitive. It is important in embarking on any analysis of this statement not to claim too much from one example of identity creation. There are many different reasons and attitudes that people have towards their sex or gender, or for the desire to create an alternate identity to one based in the sexed body. A key tenet of feminism is, it seems to me, to enable a brave space for tussling with complex questions and, crucially, the impact of cultural attitudes on women’s experience of the world. This is the revolutionary message of feminism: that women’s words, experiences and ability for critical reflection matter. As Michèle Le Doeuff (2003) says, during her discussion of the ideas of the early woman philosopher, Christine de Pisan, ‘it is by being an active subject, questioning and building for all women, that she will rediscover her own dignity’ (p. 137). And so, with some degree of trepidation, let us consider the social context for Izzard’s words.
Suzy Izzard ‘decides’ to be a woman in her or his 60s. Her identity is not fixed by biological necessity; it could be changed – transformed – at a later date. One can almost feel the sense of liberation found in making this choice. Yet, the control exercised in making these choices is not, unfortunately, the only aspect of being human. Not all of life is amenable to the ‘negotiations’ to which Armour directs our attention or to the fluidity which Izzard embraces. If we turn to the ageing (biological) female body, we are confronted by features of life which we might much prefer not to be the case. Life involves death, decline, illness and sadness as much as growth, health and happiness. As Clare Chambers (2022) notes, ‘the body is a real thing, one that opens possibilities
The Radical Challenge of the Ageing Female Body
The optimism supporting neoliberal capitalism requires the
Curiously, such resolute optimism has not tamed death, for, to borrow Philippe Ariès (1981) term, death is now ‘wild’ (p. 28). Death in Western liberal societies is no longer conceived as a necessary and inevitable part of life, with the result that it has to be obscured, consigned to the margins of our cultural and social discourse. Death is too disturbing and upsetting to be acknowledged as a very real presence in the midst of which we live unless our engagement is driven by the desire to find ways of defeating it. As Ariès says, identifying this problem-solving aspect of a technocratic and scientific age is not to deny the fears of death felt by all civilisations. Humans do not ‘enjoy’ thinking about death and would rather not do so. Yet, as Ariès (1981) goes on, There are two ways of not thinking about death: the way of our technological civilisation, which denies death and refuses to talk about it; and the way of traditional civilisations, which is not a denial but a recognition of the impossibility of thinking about it directly or for very long because death is too close and too much a part of daily life. (p. 22)
As Ariès details in his investigation of Western European attitudes, the framing of death through shared religious rites and rituals, and a shared language, means that it can be – to some degree – tamed
For our largely secular times, where no such shared narrative exists, the inevitability of death and that which leads to it – ageing – has to be hidden from view, masked by cosmetics and surgeries that suggest decline and death need not be part of the Brave New Human Life. While this might sound life-affirming, the consequence of consigning death to the shadows is to render it even more terrifying. With each passing year, we are confronted with the reality of death that stands at the end of all experience. Friends and family die; we may find ourselves at the mercy of terminal illness. Try as we might, we cannot escape what Wittgenstein (1979) called ‘the majesty of death’ (p. 3). Divorced from a shared religious or cultural tradition that finds a place for death in rituals, language and practices, the easiest response to death’s awesome presence is to deny it. To think about death in anything other than ways which seek to overcome it is to succumb to depression or negativity, and much energy is spent ensuring we cultivate thoughts which are ‘sound and healthy’ (Tolstoy, 1981 [1880], p. 94), in much the same manner as Tolstoy’s Ivan Illych in the classic novella from the nineteenth century.
Given the habitual identification of mutable matter with the female body,
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it is no surprise that attitudes to its ageing reveal most clearly this continuing cultural disquiet. The imperative to achieve growth and flourishing is reified in the male gaze directed at the youthful female body, but more than this. In a society whose norms remain fixed by the dimensions and experiences of the male body (Criado Perez, 2019), the changes of the female body in time pose a disturbing challenge to attempts to cultivate the illusion of changelessness. Victoria Smith’s analysis of the hag makes plain the role the female body plays in the sexual economy of a masculinist society: Beauty, like gender, is relational; women have been obliged to remain forever young so that men can delude themselves that they are not ageing themselves. (Smith, 2023: 51)
By exploring the ageing female body, a vista opens up onto that which must be hidden. For Smith, this reveals the shadow side of cultivating choice as the heart of identity. In rejecting the formative role of the body for identity creation, women are forced to pay the price, she argues. Attacks on ‘biological essentialism’, launched by Butler and her followers, impact most keenly upon the ageing female body, for ‘what could be more biologically essentialist, more an admission of defeat before the arc of progress, than physically ageing while female?’ (Smith, 2023: 66) Suzy Izzard may freely choose to spend her 60s as a woman, but Smith suggests we look at this freedom from the perspective of the ageing biological female. Izzard’s transgender body will not age like that of a postmenopausal woman: which is not to say that there are not important aspects of ageing common to men and women. But differences do matter, too, and to start from the postmenopausal body makes it a rather more difficult task to feel empowered, if biologically female.
NHS Scotland (2023) provides a helpful if necessarily downbeat list of the health risks associated with life after menopause: increased risk of cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, UTIs, urinary incontinence, vaginal dryness and all ailments grounded in the physical processes of the biological female body. As a woman approaching her 60th birthday, I’m not convinced I would ‘choose’ this, if I had a choice. (I’m pretty sure my mother, with her recent experience of a UTI, would not ‘choose’ the body that heightened this possibility.) And so, while wishing to affirm Suzy Izzard’s liberating choices, I am left unsure as to what exactly is being chosen, for it does not seem to be the material experience of biological femaleness after menopause.
Are there limits to the choices we can make? Returning to Victoria Smith, this daunting possibility, emerging from reflection on the experiences of the contested female body, haunts contemporary gender politics. Rather than address the question of limits directly, the ageing female becomes the problem. She must be rejected, dismissed as ‘the hag’ who is out of touch, destined for the scrapheap of history. The hag thus emerges as a disturbing figure, for she challenges confident assumptions about choice and control. To age while female is to exist as a reminder of that which forms the backdrop to human life. Humans exist as temporal beings, subject – as everything is – to entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.
As Smith notes in identifying ‘hag hate’ (Smith, 2023: 6), there is nothing new in rejecting the old female body: ‘ageist misogyny has always existed’ (p. 7). As she points out, ‘ageing while female remains a deeply unsettling transgression’ (Smith, 2023: 28). A woman who is no longer capable of procreation or providing a beautiful mirror for the male finds little place remains for her, other than acting as a reminder that the changes of ageing happen to all, regardless of how one presents one’s identity. The transformations of postmenopausal life, felt in the female biological body, are not easily embraced, for they reveal the realities of ageing and the inevitability of death. The hag’s body, once youthful and fecund, is ‘diminished’ in terms of both qualities.
Mockery is nothing new when it comes to the inevitable ageing of the female body. Quentin Massys’ (1466–1530) painting, ‘The Ugly Duchess’ (1513) provides a good example. Massys depicts an elderly woman as grotesque. Her skin is wrinkled, her ears and nose extended by age. Her lips curl over toothless gums in a leering smile; her hair is thinning. This theme is repeated in his Temptation of St Anthony (c.1520–1524; painted with Joachim Patinir), but with an additional message. A trio of lovely maids tempt the saint with their youthful flesh, while a laughing old hag hovers in the background, her low neckline revealing breasts that are wrinkled and sprouting tufts of thick hair. Massys reminds his viewer that there is no radical distinction between old and young women, for female flesh
Victoria Smith’s analysis ends at this point: the hag bears testimony to the fears of a society that cannot accept the reality of age and physical change. An alternative reading might be possible. Yes, the hag certainly alerts us to the blindspots of our age, but might the language of the hag – the presence of the hag, even – be embraced? Rather than focus solely on the misogyny that lies beneath her depiction, might we, instead, enter the creative Time of the Crone? To do so requires a return to our feminist past, for in the writings of some feminist foremothers, we find a different place for the Crone as a mighty aspect of life made real in the lives of women.
Enter the Crone
One of the problems that dogs feminist history is that each generation gets bogged down in what Mary Daly (1991 [1979]) calls ‘the spooking experience of “Old is New”, or “It’s as if nothing had ever happened”’ (p. 348). The language of denoting ‘waves’ of feminist activity doesn’t much help resist this phenomenon. What is ‘new’ is viewed as ‘better’, just as one wave replaces the last. 4 The possible connections between feminists of different generations are repeatedly demolished in favour of an implicit Hegelian narrative of the progressive unfurling of history. What is old must be rejected if a ‘better’ future is to be created, and, when it comes to women’s lives and politics, the rejection of the old female body is vital in order that patriarchy maintain its grip. As Daly (1991 [1979]) notes, ‘the [patriarchal] program for the erasure of Crone-ology (her term for women’s chronology or women’s history) is the erasure of Crones’ (p. 349). Heaven forfend that successive generations of women are able to build upon their foremothers’ hard-won wisdom. Heaven forfend that female beauty and youth should cease to be the sine qua non of the flourishing female life.
For religious feminists from the 1970s onwards, the figure of the Goddess provided a significant revaluation and celebration of the different stages of a woman’s life cycle. Not for nothing did Carol Christ famously proclaim that women needed the Goddess (Christ, 1979). Commonly expressed in the triune form of Maiden, Mother and Crone, the theologians who followed her allowed the power of imagination to shape reflection on the changes inherent in being female. As Melissa Raphael (1999) in her introduction to this movement notes, we should be wary of reading the figures that form the Goddess too literally (p. 68). Rather, the triad Goddess acts as a metaphor for the cycles of the female body over time, and this is where her radical potential is found: Where female biology is more or less profane in patriarchal religions, it is now sacralised by its transposition into the changing ‘body’ of the Goddess as she too passes from Maiden to Mother to Crone. (Raphael, 1999: 69)
Far from being abject, as is the case under patriarchy, the female body becomes a vehicle for the divine. For the purposes of our discussion, the Goddess’ manifestation as Crone offers a counterpoint to philosophies that cluster themselves around the youthful, productive stages of life. For neoliberal societies, work and productivity are the defining concerns, their scope so complete that it is only in the world of work that we can ‘produce, discover and explore ourselves’ (Rose, 1999: 28).
The Crone, her wrinkled skin and greying hair, inhabits the Third Age, and alerts us to an altogether different but equally important aspect of life. She reminds us that death is part of life, rather than something that can be avoided. Life is not a static progression, but a dynamic dance, the changes of the body in time continually calling us to remake our relationship with the universe that formed us. Indeed, the clear-eyed realism of the Crone warns us against any romanticising of ‘women’s experience’. Claims that to be ‘cisgendered’ or a ‘Natural Born Woman’ makes one privileged or is a state to be desired (an assumption strangely common to both sides of the contemporary sex/gender debate) is challenged by the presence of the Crone. Caught up in the world of transformation that is the world of chance and change, there is a cost to being a physical human being that undercuts the possibility of adopting a solely optimistic approach to embodied life.
By embracing the Crone in our own ageing bodies, a different way of being is encouraged. We are called to acknowledge the change inherent in life, and – crucially – to accept the place of our lives in that ever-changing frame. Entering the Time of the Crone, the task is to reflect on where we are now and where we have been. We are called to share that hard-won wisdom with others across generational divisions: to create spaces in which truths can be shared and women heard into speech. ‘In the fatherland’, Jane Caputi (1993) writes, ‘women are exhorted to reduce the signs of ageing. Yet, in truth, the signs of ageing are the signs of Powers. It is by increasing them that we enter into the plenitude of the Crone’ (p. 222).
It is an arresting phrase: ‘the plentitude of the Crone’. It brings us starkly face to face with the challenge. Ageing brings the possibility of wisdom while inevitably involving decline and the loss of powers. It questions the emphasis on choice and individual freedom and demands that we place our lives in a broader, universal frame. So, what does Caputi mean by ‘plenitude’? Is she rendering the Crone subject to the preoccupations of optimism by suggesting her as a figure of flourishing, or is a different way being held out?
For the reasons stated thus far, I am wary of philosophies that would brush aside the existential terror at the heart of life, along with the anxiety this necessarily awakens in us. There are no easy answers to being contingent beings in a world of chance and change. Yet in embracing the Crone, a different way of engaging with human limits is being held out to us, one that resists ‘either/or’ and instead seeks ‘both/and’. For in the figure of the Crone, we are confronted with a threat and a promise. Indeed, threat and promise are interwoven, just as they are in this glorious and disturbing cosmos. The Crone is uncompromising in reminding us of that which cannot be changed. She demands through her very being that we accept the coming of age. It is disturbing to acknowledge that there is no way of escaping our eventual fate. Yet, wrapped up in this confrontation with entropy is the benefit which comes with acknowledging her presence. She challenges Western society to accept that ageing is not an act of failure or something we could turn into a ‘success’. Rather, it is a part of life for all those lucky enough to move into the later stages of life. Pretending that ageing and death are aberrations that could be avoided is not without cost: for the elderly, who this attitude isolates and shames, and for those whose dependence as a result of sickness and incapacity challenges the neoliberal myth of self-determination and independence.
Moreover, the Crone demands we reject the unhealthy optimism that emanates from neoliberalism and which makes accepting human limits so difficult. Dienstag’s (2006) description of a new philosophical pessimism dovetails rather nicely with the message the Crone brings. ‘While pessimists may posit a decline, it is the denial of progress, not an insistence on some eventual doom, that marks out modern pessimism. Pessimism . . . is the negation, and not the opposite, of theories of progress’ (p. 18).
It is worth spending a little time with his words. The pessimist is not the doom merchant, the naysayer, determined to make us despair of life. Their challenge is to the relentless pursuit of progress with little regard for the cost our world is forced to pay for the industrial and technological processes’ advances that are so closely aligned with this so-called ‘progress’. As if to confirm his words, in January 2022 MIT’s Steven Gonzalez Monserrate published the results of a 5-year investigation into the environmental costs of ‘the Cloud’, that seemingly abstract and ethereal entity, that saves data and which supposedly transcends time and space. The image conjured up by the language of ‘clouds’ is misleading, for, as Monserrate (2022) details, this ‘Cloud’ has a greater carbon footprint than even the airline industry (p. 7). We are so immured to the comforting language of human detachment from the physical world, immersed in the misleading idea that we are the choice-makers in control of our environment, that it can come as a shock to realise that the very technology on which we rely for this reassuring sense of human transcendence is contributing to the climate change which threatens the world, our home. My fingers race over the keyboard to type those words. The feeling of exhilaration at getting my thoughts onto the screen in front of me is tempered by the knowledge of
There are no easy, comforting answers to her question. However, we need to be alert to them, to avoid shying from them in the name of some ‘better’ way of being human. Instead, we might train our eyes to seek the disruptive presence of the Crone.
Theological sources are not the only place where we find her. The Crone’s disturbing, troubling (perhaps liberating?) presence can be discerned in traditions where we least expect her.
When old women feature in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, their age is invariably presented as a means of showing God’s creative power. Sarah, whose barrenness undercuts God’s promise to make Abraham father of a mighty nation, is 90 years old when God promises to make her fertile (Genesis 17). In Luke’s gospel, this narrative is reflected in the story of Elizabeth. She and her husband Zechariah ‘had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years’ (Luke 1: 7). As a woman who was unable to conceive, I find these stories disturbing, for they reveal all-too-clearly the preoccupations of patriarchy. It is only in bearing a child that the worth of a woman is affirmed. Languishing in the redundancy of menopause, Sarah and Elizabeth require an act of God to become fully woman, the disquieting reality of the theological contention that ‘with God nothing will be impossible’ (Luke 1: 37). Yet, lurking in Luke’s Advent narrative is an alternative image of ageing womanhood. In the figure of Anna the Prophet, Luke’s readers are presented with a woman who is not reduced to the economy of productivity, but held up as a source of hard-won wisdom (Luke 2: 36–38). Described as ‘very old’ – she is at least 84 – she is living in the Temple where ‘she worships night and day, fasting and praying’ (Luke 2: 37). Encountering the infant Jesus, she proclaims him to be the one who will bring liberation to Jerusalem. Not all will find her message compelling or accept it. Yet, it is notable that here, in the pages of a set of scriptures that are foundational for the faith of so many, an older woman’s very age is venerated as a sign of her wisdom. She is the truth-teller, the one who draws on her experience to guide the path of others.
Our feminism needs the Crone. Accepting the limitless possibilities held out by neoliberalism, we diminish the need to take bodies seriously, their place in the world, as well as what they mean for identity. The Crone forces us back to think of ourselves as animals in the physical world, connected to the movements and connections of all that is: for better
Footnotes
Funding
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: 31–36).4.
for discussion of feminist history and its shaping.