Pam McAllister and the other women (although two men
did co-author one article, More Power Than We Want) contributing were
not only pointing out the failings of patriarchy and the existing world-order,
they were looking forward, expectantly, to a different future. Importantly,
they recognised that the future and the present were intricately linked (one of
the many wefts and warps woven into the book) together. As McAllister put it in
her Introduction:
‘A
new world, the world I long for, cannot be built with the tools, psychology,
belief systems of the old. It will be born of the changes encoded in the
details of our lives as we are living them now. The fabric of the new society
will be made of nothing more or less than the threads woven in today’s
interactions.’
The title of the book comes from the title of
Catherine Reid’s essay – Reweaving the Web of Life – in which she tells
the story of a group of women calling themselves The Spinners. The Spinners
were allied with the “Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance” opposed to the
construction and then continuance of a 620 MWe nuclear reactor on the
Connecticut River.
Reid’s essay tells how The Spinners used
thousands of yards of coloured yarn, threads, and strings which they secured to
various trees, and then began spinning and weaving before the police could
respond. Significantly, the nonviolent action of The Spinners took place
just three days after the beginning of the accident at Three Mile Island nuclear
reactor.2
The story of The Spinners is one of dozens of
examples of the use of nonviolence by women cited in the book.
McAllister writes of how a Tarot card reading helped
her with the strength she needed to write the book. One of the cards she took
was labelled Strength and showed a woman stroking a lion. The
convergence of feminism with nonviolence and strength is clear in the
symbolism.
It is no coincidence that McAllister wove together the
threads of feminism with those of nonviolence. In common with many feminists at
the time, McAllister raged at ‘patriarchy’s brutal destructiveness’ and
refused to adopt it’s (violent) ways. Furthermore, she asserted that she ‘refused
to give in to despair or hate or to let men off the hook by making them the
“other”.’
In that statement McAllister alluded to one of
patriarchy’s underpinnings – that of separation and disconnection. McAllister,
and the other contributors were having nothing of that sort of divisive
thinking. For many within progressive movements of the time this (idea of non-separation)
was quite a radical thought.
All but one of the contributors were US based, which
was a deliberate decision on McAllister’s part. She intended following up with
a book featuring contributors from other parts of the world. That idea morphed
into two books presenting stories of women using nonviolence from all over the world:
- You Can’t Kill The Spirit (1988) and This River of Courage
(1991).
Reweaving the Web of Life
is a landmark book, bringing together as it does, many contributors writing
about the theory behind feminism and nonviolence, as well as telling stories of
actual experience.
For anyone wishing to delve deeper into ways to
re-weave the web of life, then this book is a must-read.
Notes:
1. Pam McAllister (ed.), Reweaving The Wed Of Life:
Feminism and Nonviolence, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1982
2. The Three Mile Island accident was a partial
meltdown of one of the reactors at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant
in Pennsylvania in March 1979. At the time, the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) rated the accident at Level 5 on its 7-level International
Nuclear Event Scale. It remains the most significant nuclear accident in US
commercial nuclear power plant history.
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