At Woodford and as a support act for Ember Swift, I saw performance poet Alix Olsen. She was a little full-on for my Woodford-space sensibility but exactly right for a pre-Ember event. She does a rap about the women who went before us, Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, and a bunch of other feminists. She invites the audience to contribute their own heroes and she adds “my mother, my grandmother” to the list. Mine would have to include Eleanor Roosevelt and Emma Goldman and Emmeline Pankhurst and Mary Wollstonecraft and Barbara Kruger. And Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a whole bunch of others. Hélà¨né Cixous. Luce Irigaray. I mean, where do you start? And where do you stop?
And now we have two new women making momentous moves: Liberia and Chile both have women leaders today. Michelle Bachelet becomes the first woman elected to lead Chile while Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was inaugurated yesterday as the first elected female President of an African nation. Geena Davis may have made a stupid joke about little girls seeing her on screen and thinking “I want to be president”, but it really is important, that representation of the possibility of female leadership.
Anyhow, I want to go see the Kruger exhibition at ACCA but I’d rather not go alone. Anyone else interested for tomorrow during the day?