And Still, We March
A Revisited Conversation With Marissa Bate About Her New Book
Today marks the release of And Still We March, a book by the author and journalist Marisa Bates. A look at the battles of wars waged to protect reproductive rights through her our journey into her family history, the book was originally called Wild Hope.
It was one of my favourite books from the end of last year. The writing is beautiful, immersive, lyrical - I just simply adore this book. The anger, the rage, the agony - and the sheer abundance, the beauty of being hopeful against the blindingly stupid, multiple obstacles. This is gorgeous writing.
This is an interview I conducted at the time; to mark the re-release, I have taken off the paywall for this ‘dispatch.’ Marisa is also on this service, over at .
And Still We March is out now.
Obviously we're here to talk about Wild Hope; I absolutely love the book. I really like the concept that it's analysing the 50 years since Roe vs Wade. Without wishing to sound like this is a completely obvious question, do you think there is hope with respect to the attack on reproductive rights?
It's a really, I think it's a really important, I think that was *the* question [of the book], right? And if I have to come down, especially after having, I have to come down on an answer, especially having made that trip, my answer is yes. And the reason my answer is yes is because of the women I met.
There is hope because there are so many dedicated individuals working towards better reproductive rights. And I only went to the States.
We know these people are in Northern Ireland, we know these people, and people who do this work in dangerous countries, where it's dangerous to do it, like in Poland or in Russia. So yes, I think there is hope.
And I think, but I think you have to kind of search, you have to find [it], you have to kind of search it out. And you have to understand hope not as a whimsical [concept] - sure everything will be great, everything will be fine. Let's just keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. But hope as a, almost as a verb, hope is something you have to [do], hope takes work and hope isn't always a feeling of joy or ease, hope can be quite frightening. And you kind of have to hold steady with it. And I think it is hope, there is hope, but you have to understand what the context of that hope and that hope doesn't mean that you are blind to the reality of a situation or the how bad things currently are. But it means that there's a belief, I think, that change is still possible.
And so I think part of, for me, part of writing the book was really grappling with the word hope and trying to understand what I think it means and what it means to other people. And actually when I writing a book, I came out of it with like, no, hope is the work, hope is the hard work of, of do, of making change. And in that context, yes, there is hope, on reproductive rights.
I sort of feel like you've answered my next question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. How do you find or look for it? So very often we talk about there's a concept on the internet of things such as glimmers, for example, tiny moments about feeling hopeful. But how do you find it and how do you look for it?
That's a really good question. I think it's about going towards the thing that you are most worried about. If you are worried about reproductive rights, I found hope with the people working in reproductive rights. I found hope amongst the activists, the lawyers, the elected officials, the women who work in the health professionals, people who work in clinics. I think when we are worried about something, there is a human instinct to pull away from it. And actually, the closer I got to it, the more hope I found.
So I think it's engagement, I think when we engage, we can be frightened and we can be, you might assume it can make you think things are even worse because I've just met this woman who's told me this terrible story and now isn't this awful. But actually, it's only through engagement that you find where people are trying to make the change. So I think engagement is a really important part talking to people, the conversations. I know like real life isn't kind of, real life isn't like my book, which is just not, calling out [to] women and being like, can I come into your office and have a chat?.
But I do think that a lot of the work of the book was about conversations with people and even if it was unintentional, there was often hope to be found in what people were saying. So people and community and engagement.
And I think there is a responsibility on people to not dismiss the work of good people just because they haven't seen them. So if there is a situation that feels hopeless, ask yourself, well, have you come, have you done any research? Have you found any people who are trying to change this? Have you found any groups who are trying to change this? Could you support them? Could you donate? Could you retweet them?
So I think a lot of these people can feel a bit invisible and I was very interested in trying to expose the people who are doing the work without the fanfare and actually say, look, this kind of hard work is going on all the time. We just need to look a bit harder for them.
And it can, it's not easy to find and I think it's a really interesting question like how do you find it? It is leaning into the world not away from it that I think you find hope.
I would also like to ask you about the birth of your son because the book obviously ends, sort of bookmarked with this event. And I was wondering if that change ever kind of, your thoughts make a change about the trip that you undertook or whether it's sort of underlined the message of the book?
Yeah, I definitely, in some ways, it reinforced a lot of things.It made me see, you know, I think I had visited a lot of these different women who work in different fields or to enhance women's rights in one way or another. And I was very grateful that they'd given me their time and their expertise and their insights. I just thought, great, I'm acquiring all this great wisdom and insight.
And then when I had my son, it was like, oh, okay, I saw that differently because I think…. it’s hard to explain, but I felt like I was the end of the chain. Like all the older women before me came before me and they were passing it all down onto me. And now there was someone below me. And now I had the responsibility of passing that on.
And suddenly, then there's conversations I saw that they weren't just generous with their time, but perhaps they too felt that responsibility. That we have a responsibility to pass things on to the next generation, to those younger than us, if we also want to see change.
And so that did shift, I wasn't just the end of the chain. I was kind of part of the chain. I think, I guess definitely having my son, I looked at these women in such awe and then I thought, God, what's he going to think of me? You know, what have I done? What have I done? But what am I actually doing in my day to day life to work towards the change that I would like to see in the world?
And I think having a son made me feel like I was suddenly super accountable to someone. But, you know, suddenly, like one day I want him to turn around and say, so what did you do? What did you do about it, Mum? And I can say, well, and I think that definitely changed something.
I think in terms of my convictions, like my passion around feminism, my passion for reproductive rights and reproductive justice, my passion for storytelling, it was just burned brighter. And I think becoming a parent does feel like all the dials are turned up in good way and bad ways, you know, everything. But, you know, any anxiety or insecurity that's turned up too, all the good stuff's turned up and then all the passions turned up. You know, a psych kind of, especially that first year where everything is so intense all the time.
And so I think having been pregnant and gone through labor, the idea that you would force a pregnancy on another human became even more barbaric when I understood through my own experience what that involved and what that feels like. And the fact that you would force that on children, which is what's happening in some States now, is barbaric.
And so I think, you know, coupled with all the kind of new mother hormones, was this sort of new appreciation for what carrying a baby to term and what giving birth means. And also now what raising a child means and it only made me more sure in my belief that every woman should have a right to an abortion, a safe abortion.
The next question I was going to ask, and we sort of touched upon this, was there ever a particular moment that made you stand up and say, I am a feminist? I ask this because there are people such as Laura Bates, in her last nonfiction book she wrote about ‘the list ‘where all these kind of moments would accumulate and it was sort of sparked off when she was in fact assaulted where she said, actually, I'm not going along with this anymore. What was it that made you a feminist?
I don't think there was a moment like the Laura Bates one. I think it was an accumulation of things that by the time I was a young, I mean, not even a student, actually, in my early 20s, I suddenly joined the dots. And I'd realised that things I'd seen my mum go through, things I'd seen other women in my family go through, things I was noticing in society that it was all kind of, like it was all linked. And I remember sort of being about 24 or 25 and just realising that it felt like there was this tide pushing against me. But I think it was a gradual process of realisation.
I mean, mostly it's so much around my mum as well, a single mother who had to go up against the sexism in the workplace at that time in the 90s and the early 90s against working women, let alone against working mothers, let alone against working single mothers.
She had discrimination with [the] school gates by other women who thought she was not there enough for my brother and I. And she just powered on. And I think… later on she was in an abusive marriage. And just those things when I realised that they were very personal things to my mum and to my life, but they are also very common things that happened to a lot of women. And they tell these much bigger stories of women's positions in society and the inequality and how it manifests in different ways, economic ways, discrimination, violence. It was all playing out in the story, in what I had seen at home. And I think by the time I was starting to really think about these things.
And then of course, that was not that long before what we now called the fourth wave and bubblings of a resurgence of feminism on the internet, very early kind of websites. And then tipping over into things like the Everyday Sexism, the project by Laura Baytes and then right up to Beyonce standing in front of a massive sign that reads feminist. And so I think just as I was sort of having that like reflections on what I'd seen that | was in, was a story in my life, but was a bigger story about the patriarchy.
Along comes its movement that says, this is why we need feminism again. Well, you know, so I think they were them, they, that was a bit of a process for me. And then once I got there, once I was like, oh yeah, then it's just been this pillar, like of an identity. It's absolutely like just this thing that I haven't been, you know, I can only, I can mean only, but I only ever want to write about women. My journalism is all around women. You know, my boyfriend's always like, can you please stop reading books, like all you’d read is books about women's pain? Like can you try and read something else?
Like I can't, like women's stories, it just, they feel like nourishes me and it feeds me and it infuriates me and everything and, and yeah. And so since that realisation has really kind of shaped me, I think, and [in] quite a big way.
I sort of want to ask you about how you carried out [the ability] to talk to opponents of women's rights. There's such a brilliant chapter with the phrase ‘would you like to talk to the granddaughter of Phyllis Schlafly?’
Well, I actually didn't [set out to talk to her] because as you know, there aren't lots of opponents to abortion rights in this book and, you know, I didn't, I didn't want to write a like balanced, you know, is abortion a good or a bad thing? But that's not this book, this book is a book of passion, this is what I believe and it wasn’t there to persuade anyone. There are brilliant journalists to do that and there's brilliant books that will do that, but that wasn't what this was. It wasn't a book to figure out whether we should, you know, whether we should have abortion rights or not, it was a book to understand how women feel.
So I wasn't looking for these big opponents, but obviously Phyllis Schlafly was such a central figure in the story of women's rights in some ways, she was absolutely their front and center in terms of opposing it, in terms of successfully blocking the Equal Rights Amendments (ERA), which is still the case today. I mean, she literally, it was about to pass and she, you know, with the work she did with the Eagle Forum, the community of women she built, her absolutely endless amount of books, she undid that state by state by state by state. She was an absolute political force. She helped Reagan get in the White House. And so she is this kind of giant in American 20th century history, I think, and a bit overlooked ironically, I think, because she's a woman, which of course, something she would never have admitted.
I mean, it's a weird, contradictory feeling because obviously, I disagree with [that] first, actually, so powerfully. And I actually think so much of her messaging was very, very harmful and hateful, you know, [it was] hate speech [with respect to] things like gay marriage and gay rights. So it's a weird thing to kind of have this sort of excitable fascination around someone that has done to my mind such harm, did such harm. But her granddaughter was very nice. Her granddaughter was, I think, very, probably quite politically different from her grandmother, but very loyal to her grandmother.
I had very fond memories of growing up with her, loved her dearly and wanted to defend her, protect, maybe not defend, but respect and to some extent, protect the legacy of her grandmother.
So it was an interesting conversation. I mean, she didn't give too much away. It felt a little bit like kind of PR damage control. Like this is what we want the world to know about. Our grandmother, as opposed to, you know, a real kind of heart to heart about the complications of your grandmother being Phllis Schlafly.
But yeah, it was very exciting and it was just very interesting because I think it's for most of us when individuals become historically significant, they almost become a little less human to us. I was getting not the feminist take on Phyllis Schlafly or the conservative take on Phyllis Schlafly. I was getting the human take on Phyllis Schlafly. You know, memories of the freezers stocked with ice creams when they'd go around to play in the pool on a Sunday. So it was quite remarkable. It was just really remarkable that my journey by chance had taken me there. I felt very lucky. And actually I think, you know, Phyllis Schlafly displayed a lot of the traits that the women I was writing about in Wild Hope displayed. She was just using them for a different ends. She was as committed, as focused, as relentless, as hopeful, I'm sure she would have said, to her cause as the other woman I was talking to. And I think that was an interesting one too, isn't it?
Well, how will it always be tricky to talk about women because there's so many of us and we're so different. And yet we still like to kind of talk about strong women. And yeah, strong women are great, but what if they use their strength to discriminate?
And so it was an interesting reminder of how impossible, an important reminder of how possible it was about to talk about women in general terms and how complicated they we all are. And, you know, that's just a good reminder in life, I think, generally.
My last question for you is, what people who may wish to write a book or to become a writer, do you have any advice?
Keep writing. Keep writing. Just keep writing. There's loads of advice out there on how to find an agent, how to get published. It's all about there. You can find it. There's a really good advice out there for free. But I think there's a writer - it has to be like, it's a practice. It's a labor of love. It's not what Instagram tells you it is. And it shouldn't be. It should be hard work. It should be commitment. It should be writing loads and loads and loads of bad words to find possibly one good sentence.
It's always been one of those people who write to realise what I'm thinking. If you have a piece, a commission piece or a newspaper magazine, obviously you have a better idea of what you're going to say. But often I will write to understand how I'm feeling of thinking. And that's, you know, the writing for me is a whole process that's so important to, you know, write to get to the writing that I want to be writing. And so that's why I think the more you just keep doing it, you keep doing it, you keep doing it, even if it feels like it's going nowhere, even if you've had a ton of rejections from agents or publishers, even if no one's reading it, just keep writing.