Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

oil on canvas, 54"x82", from the series “Ablution.”
    3. “Untitled” (performance documentation at San Diego/Tijuana border), oil on canvas, 60"x72", from the series “Pressing Matters.”
    4. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 70"x80", from the series “Ablution.”
    5. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 72"x60", from the series “Teleraña.”
    6. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 72"x60", from the series “Teleraña.”
    7. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 53"x57", from the series “Ablution.”

Acknowledgments
     
    There are so many people to thank. Marina Sitrin was a great friend and supporter and “Men Explain Things” was written at her instigation, and for, in part, her younger sister Sam Sitrin, and Sallie Shatz took me to that strange party in Colorado where it all began. Friendship with older feminists, notably Lucy Lippard, Linda Connor, Meridel Rubenstein, Ellen Manchester, Harmony Hammond, MaLin Wilson Powell, Pame Kingfisher, Carrie and Mary Dann, Pauline Esteves, and May Stevens has been valuable and reinforcing, as has that of younger feminists—Christina Gerhardt, Sunaura Taylor, Astra Taylor, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Elena Acevedo Dalcourt, and many others whose fierce intelligence about gender politics makes me hopeful about the future, as does the solidarity of the many men in my life and in the media who are now attuned to and audible on the issues.
    But perhaps I should start with my mother, who subscribed to Ms. Magazine when it first appeared and kept up her subscription for years after. I think the magazine helped her, though she struggled for the four decades that followed with the usual conflicts between obedience and insurrection. For a child who had devoured the Ladies’ Home Journal , Women’s Circle , and anything else I could find to read, this new publication was a fiery addition to the diet and a potent tool to use to reconsider much of the status quo inside that house and outside. Which didn’t make it easier to be a girl in the 1970s, but did make it easier to understand why.
    My feminism waxed and waned, but the lack of freedom to move through the city for women hit me hard and personally at the end of my teens, when I came under constant attack in my urban environment and hardly anyone seemed to think that it was a civil rights issue or a crisis or an outrage rather than a reason why I should take taxis and martial arts classes, or take men (or weapons) with me everywhere, or take on the appearance of a man, or take myself to suburbia. I didn’t do any of those things, but I did think about the issue a lot (and “The Longest War” is, for me, the third visit to that violent territory of women and public space.
    Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together—maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto. Much culture also works that way, and though I have been the named artist on all my books and essays, good editors have been the quiet forces that make the work possible some of the time and better. Tom Engelhardt, the editor who is also my friend and collaborator, has opened the door for much of my writing in the past decade, since I sent him an unsolicited essay in 2003. TomDispatch has been a paradise of like-minded people, of a small organization with a powerful reach, of a place where my voice doesn’t have to be squashed or homogenized to fit. It is telling that more than half the material in this book was written for TomDispatch, the letterbox in which I send letters to the world (and which the world seems to receive very well, thanks to the site’s amazing distribution).
    The essays that appear in this book are edited versions of work previously published. “The Longest War” and the other essays in this