Witches: The Transformative Power of Women Working Together

by Sam George-Allen

Overview

A celebration of the revolutionary potential of women working with other women, and a powerful statement about myths like the "cool girl" or the "catty workplace"

Covens. Girl Bands. Ballet troupes. Convents. In all times and places, girls and women have come together in communities of vocation, of necessity, of support.

In Witches, Sam George-Allen explores how wherever women gather, magic happens. Female farmers change the way we grow our food. Online beauty communities democratize skin-care rituals. And more than any other demographic, it's teen girls that shape our culture.

Patriarchal societies have long been content to champion boys' clubs, while viewing groups that exclude men as sites of rivalry and suspicion. This deeply personal investigation takes us from our workplaces to our social circles, surveying our heroes, our outcasts, and ourselves, in order to dismantle the persistent and pernicious cultural myth of female isolation and competition . . . once and for all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612198347
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	01/28/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,006,759
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sam George-Allen is an Australian writer and musician. Her essays and cultural criticism have been published in the Guardian, the Griffith Review, the Lifted Brow, LitHub, and Overland. She lives in a village in Tasmania with her partner, a dog, a cat and five chickens. Witches is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

I started pulling tarot cards while writing this book. The writing was hard and I was filled with self-doubt, so I turned to the cards in the way I have always turned to the magical in times of crisis. I trusted them because I can’t control them. Even when they told me bad news—failure on the horizon, friends to be lost, the Wheel of Fortune in reverse—they helped.

The germ of this book got into me in another time of turmoil. A few years ago, I found myself suddenly and furiously envious of another woman’s success. It was like having an uncontrollable crush. I couldn’t stop thinking about her: comparing myself to her, finding reasons to resent and dismiss her. It was very upsetting. Wasn’t I supposed to be a feminist, the good kind, one who builds her sisters up rather than tearing them down? Why was my basest nature choosing this moment, as I was carving out a career writing about gender and women’s work, to make itself known? I went to the cards again, and I pulled one for me, which I immediately forgot, and one for her: Justice, reversed.

It was an injustice, what I was doing, and what was happening to me. It felt unnatural to begrudge this person her happiness. It was making me miserable. I did not think I was born with thesefeelings in me, and when I took hold of that thread and pulled, the whole wicked tapestry started to come apart. I wasn’t born with these feelings, but I had been feeling them, in one way or another, for a long time—since I was a teenager, at least. I’m still part of a society that neither likes nor trusts women, particularly when they’re working together. Even though they may have changed, learned to disguise themselves, those seeds of loathing were still there.

I hate admitting it now, because it’s other women who make my life what it is today: meaningful, complicated, challenging and rewarding. I have surrounded myself, by luck and by design, with women who ask a lot of me, who give a lot to me, who are willing to sit at my kitchen table and argue with me for hours until we both have straightened out how we see the world, how we think the world should be. I owe women a lot, just for the pleasure of being in their company.

In the first episode of the second season of the excellent Netflix series GLOW, a show that is, in many ways, about the things that women do together (and also about a bunch of female amateur wrestlers making a low-budget TV show called Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), there’s a moment that made me reach for my pen. The women have just returned from filming a title sequence at the mall, where they’d hammed it up in character, Welfare Queen and Liberty Belle taking swipes at each other with bunches of shopping bags, Britannica and Beirut chasing each other around stands of sunglasses. They are standing in a group, laughing with one another, relaxed and excited about what they’ve just made. The director, Sam (played by Marc Maron at his neurotic, curmudgeonly best), approaches."Hey," he says. "I don’t like when you’re in a clump, whispering." He gestures dismissively. "Spread out so I can see you."

I wrote it down. Spread out so I can see you. It’s almost a joke—but not quite. Maron’s character doesn’t like it when women are doing stuff he doesn’t know about. He finds it unnerving. A lot of people do.

For those invested in maintaining the status quo, there’s a lot to be gained from preventing women from getting together. A population that is divided, distracted and economically depressed is unable to demand to be released from oppression. Isolated women are easier to sell things to, easier to control, more easily compressed into the very few ways to acceptably be a woman. All this is made even easier if that woman is inculcated into a tradition of mistrusting others like her. For a long time, we’ve lived in a culture that tries to spread us out so it can see us—and so we can’t see each other, except from the corners of our eyes.

We’re taught to enjoy female rivalry. We look for and expect it. Celebrity feuds fuel the whole tabloid industry. The ongoing success of the many iterations of Real Housewives is predicated on the same principle. Films, books and magazines aimed at women all sell the same, sorry story of women competing with one another, often for the attention of men. And we buy it. In 2016, a study by several sociologists on feminine rivalry found that their young, female subjects ‘constructed comparisons and competition among women as never-ending and seemingly natural’. The narrative has become so ingrained as to appear spontaneous, immutable and as naturally occurring as the weather. It is simply the way things are.

So when women choose to align with one another, it takes us by surprise. We look at it sideways; like GLOW’s director, we are suspicious. Suspicion often goes hand in hand with derision, because if you strip a group of their credibility, you strip them of their perceived threat, too. Consider the mockery of women-only spaces on university campuses, the dismissal of teenage fangirls, the smirking devaluation of all-girl music groups, the sneering contempt of writers and readers of romance fiction. Mothers and daughters are pitted against one another, persuaded to be jealous, to compete for the love and attention of the father/husband; sisters, similarly; friends are always kept at arm’s length in case they should prove smarter, prettier, more successful; organisations of women are frumpy or frivolous, not to be associated with; artistic efforts by women are gimmicks. To be taken seriously one must be alone among men.

What is the threat that women in groups pose? There are shades in Sam’s anxiety of Margaret Atwood’s eternal  observation—men are afraid that women will laugh at them, while women are afraid that men will kill them—but the truth is that women together are a fundamental force for change. The change has already begun; we are seeing it happen before our eyes. Beyoncé’s all-woman touring band; Taylor Swift’s famous girl squad; Parris Goebel’s jaw-dropping dance troupe; and, of course, the many women, visible and invisible, who have become a part of the #MeToo movement, which has begun the hard—and previously impossible—work of toppling a crooked pyramid of corrupt and predatory men, a movement that repre-sents probably the greatest and most conspicuous collaboration of women since the suffragettes. In the wake of #MeToo, it becomes clear why those who benefit from the patriarchy have been so invested in keeping women isolated from one another. And these are just some of the feminine collaborations rising in the public consciousness. When I look at them, I feel my heart leap in an unfamiliar way. I see glimpses of how the world could be.

Editorial Reviews

"Counters common misconceptions about female friendships . . . Compelling, thoroughly researched, and thoughtfully written." —The Sydney Morning Herald

“While it takes into account the lived experiences of many kinds of women, Witches never offers one fixed definition of what it is to be a woman. Instead, it highlights the endless possibilities of what women can achieve by boosting each other up.” —Kill Your Darlings
 
“George-Allen uses Witches to make space for other women to speak.” —Sydney Review of Books

"This book is a forceful rejection of the titillating stories of female rivalry that are so tirelessly recycled in the office, in pop culture and in political discourse... full of surprising insights." —Washington Post

From the Publisher

2019-09-25
A quirky, wide-ranging look at women's lives.

Tasmania-based writer and musician George-Allen makes an engaging book debut with "a memoir of learning, and unlearning," motivated by her realization that despite being a feminist, she had "internalized misogyny." In a patriarchal society, writes the author, women are discouraged from banding together because "isolated women are easier to sell things to, easier to control, more easily compressed into the very few ways to acceptably be a woman." Hoping to counter the assumption that all women are "catty, backstabbing, untrustworthy bitches," she set out to investigate women whose identities are connected to their senses of community: teenagers banding together to follow fashion trends or protest gun violence; girl bands; beauty vloggers and bloggers who "construct a narrative completely devoid of the male gaze"; sportswomen who find emotional power in training their bodies; dancers; midwives, who provide "the purest expression of care for women, by women, with women"; sex workers; farmers; nuns ("a whole bunch of women hanging out together, doing secret spiritual things"); and witches. "If a witch is a woman on the margins," writes the author, "then we're all witches." Dance, she discovers, serves as more than artistic expression. "The women I spoke to," she writes, "use dance to preserve culture, tackle body dysmorphia in refugee girls and facilitate discussions about race and intersectionality." Although ballet has been criticized for insisting that dancers "spend a lifetime whittling their bodies into ethereal objects," George-Allen finds, instead, that it gives women a chance "to be unapologetically physical, to strive for athletic excellence, and to be rewarded with unadulterated praise." One of the most interesting chapters focuses on transgender women. As a straight, white, cis woman, the author grappled with the question of what makes a woman, finally concluding that gender is complex and socially constructed, "like money, or manners: imagined, held together by shared belief." As she talked with a friend who transitioned, the author admits, she felt her own identity transform from "a whole, dull thing" into "a million brilliant bits."

An uplifting celebration of women's power through communion.

Kirkus Reviews