Ms. Lessing refuses the label “feminist.” There is a good Wikipedia quote about this. She said (in 1982):

What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, ‘Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.’ Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I’ve come with great regret to this conclusion.

When The Golden Notebook gained popularity among a certain set here in fly-over country in the mid-sixties, it was clearly a (lowercase ‘f’) feminist work. Lessing’s need to disassociate herself from “Ms.” magazine feminism notwithstanding, she was obviously feminist in that egalitarian context that underscores the 19th amendment to the US Constitution, the suffragist’s amendment. A year or so ago Lessing wrote a little bit around this in the Guardian. In that brief article she says,

Meantime, other “feminist bibles” had appeared, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex being the best. Which brings me to something no one believes. When I wrote The Golden Notebook it never occurred to me I was writing “a feminist bible”. The 60s feminists were not the first in the arena. “The Woman Question” dated from the 15th century. In communist circles in the 40s and 50s feminist issues were much discussed. But the second sentence of The Golden Notebook is: “‘The point is,’ said Anna, ‘as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’” This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its “structure” said. Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture.

So I became “a feminist icon”. But what had I said in The Golden Notebook? That any kind of singlemindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness. (This may be observed most easily in religion and politics.)

Whether she is a feminist by her own lights or not, I choose to see her like my grandmother: an independent woman, less concerned with the label than the facts, and certainly a feminist role model in terms of her actions and her words.

Something else I find interesting is this: when Lessing speaks of “the fall of communism” in the Guardian article linked above, she is speaking of the break-up of a unified international movement in the fifties following Khruschev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes against humanity. Here in USia, we are taught to think of the fall of communism as something Reagan inspired and punctuated by the destruction of the Berlin wall. Lessing sees that fall as happening thirty years earlier for entirely different reasons. I bring that up because here in web-land people are having a hard time getting their minds around the perspectives this rare and insightful genius has to share with us.

I was concerned also about Ms. Lessing’s references back to that seemingly golden time in Zimbabwe’s history, when whites ruled. No one would defend Mugabe, but it was the white leadership that created Mugabe. Ms. Lessing seems to have forgotten this fact.