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If Joanne Harris won’t defend women, I won’t support her
The Society of Authors is neglecting fundamental duties
I am a coward. I travel to faraway places alone, I have been to war and down sewers and into dangerous places. But I am a coward because I do not have the guts of Kathleen Stock, or JK Rowling or Rachel Rooney or any other of the creative and clever women who have been hounded out of jobs or given regular death threats because they have dared to say in public what should be banal.
I have not spoken at meetings while people have pelted rocks at the windows trying to drown out women simply trying to have a debate. I wish I had the guts and I hope that one day I will find my stern stuff (I’m still smarting over a Twitter troll who said I had a paunch), because this modern assault on women’s rights, and the capture of countless institutions — including far too many schools — by Stonewall gender ideology is unprecedented and appalling.
I have one thing in common with these fabulous, free-speaking women. We are authors. Our books range from non-fiction to essays to history to philosophy to children’s literature. And authors have another thing in common: they often belong to the Society of Authors, a membership association — a polite version of a union — that exists to represent anyone who writes books. I have been a member for years. I pay £120 or so a year to access the helpful website, to read The Author, the in-house magazine, to ask for help and advice when I need it.
I have paid willingly and thought it good value. So yesterday I wrote an email to the membership team that I hesitated over. My email was about Joanne Harris, chair of the members’ committee at SOA, the body that oversees SOA decision-making. Last week, Harris — whom I have met at one of the book festivals that make me both love authors and think them bloody weird — tweeted a poll. It was, we suppose, in response to JK Rowling’s tweet of her latest death threat, in turn a response to Rowling’s expressing her dismay over the stabbing of Sir Salman Rushdie.
Yes. A woman expressing concern over the vicious attempted murder of a fellow author gets threatened with death for doing so. Harris’ response to this? A Twitter poll asking authors if they had received a death threat, with the responses “yes”, “hell, yes”, “no, never” and “show me, dammit”. It was crass and cruel and she quickly deleted it.
But it was no surprise from Harris, whose loud refusal to express support for Rowling and other hounded authors has been consistent. So has the silence of the Society of Authors, which has not publicly defended free speech in the case of Kathleen Stock (bullied out of her job); Rachel Rooney (who quit children’s publishing because of abuse); Julie Bindel (who has been abused for over a decade) or JK Rowling (death and rape threats too frequent to mention).
An open letter published yesterday acknowledged a Society of Authors statement on 15 August, but it was “too little, too late”. Harris role as chair, the letter said, is untenable. I agree: so my email asked for the Society to make a strong statement defending the female authors who are being targeted for their free speech. I sent my email before I noticed the SoA statement but I want more than “we do not get involved in individual debates or in disputes between authors”.
This is cowardice, when the abuse is individual and the price paid by women is individual. So my email stands. Unless the Society better defends the freedom of women to speak, to debate, to write, and unless it investigates the behaviour of its chair, I don’t want to be a member anymore. It’s a small thing, I know. But small things make big ones.
I stand with the adult human female writers who stand for free speech. Expelliarmus wokeus twaddlus!
expellamus wokeum twaddlum…?
Very nice article. Thanks.
Joanne Harris needs to get a grip. Salieri is not a good look on a woman in her fifties.
Joanne Harris needs to be cancelled. Woke fascists need a taste of their own medicine.
the second part of your comment was unnecessary
Ok Rose – time to be brave.
Start a new writers organisation, one that supports writers and doesn’t suppress writers in accordance with fashion or the latest ideological beliefs.
The LGB Alliance and Sex Matters did it. You can too.
Surely a woman ( adult human female) has the right to free speech especially in the face of so much absurd misogyny in society that is so damaging to the few rights we biological women have gained through great sacrifice and hard work.
Your essay is wonderful, but why keep referring only to ‘women authors’? Everyone is being intimidated by the demand that we say things that we do not believe and denounce things that we know to be true. This is a problem for all thinking people who believe in the virtue and value of free thought, free speech, and civilized disagreement.
Suggest you join the Free Speech Union, Rose. And cancel your membership of the Society of Authors.
Well said. But the SOA should defend free speech for *all* authors including men.
Excuse me! Being fired for performance is not the same as being fired for beliefs, holding or expressing them. Don’t equate them. Joanna Harris is going to get the axe because she utterly failed to defend certain members of SoA, based on their beliefs. (She’ll resist departing her unpaid position, her only claim to media glory.) Cleaning house is not canceling the dust.
Joanne Harris is obnoxious, but calls to remove her will only seem like cancel culture, which should be avoided.
To fight against ‘cancel cuture” WILL require some cancellations to be made,
We absolutely should cancel the woke.
If you don’t use your enemy’s weapons against them you won’t last very long.
I understand the position is unpaid. Furthermore, if she is deemed unfit for that position she is replaced rather than cancelled.
Exactly. It’s not about her beliefs. It’s about her performance in her role.
Actually it’s entirely about her beliefs, because it all stems from her bizarre belief that her son is a girl.
I beg to differ. She could both hold her beliefs about gender and perform her role neutrally, for the benefit of all her members.
She could indeed, but she clearly won’t, presumably under pressure from him/her/it.
Her child is now named Fred. It would appear that it is Fred who believes he/she/they is a boy (I don’t know the ‘preferred pronouns’ in this case). We can never know what Joanne Harris really believes, only what she says she believes.
Yes a trans man, she wouldn’t misgender her daughter, & I think he is in his twenties not a child.
With even the best will in the world this is an example of the utter confusion (it is reported in press he is trans girl, that is natal boy) and why open debate is being called for! For everyones sake. It needs generous, sensible, sensitive leadership which Joanne Harris is clearly not offering.
Cancel the woke harpy anyway.
Maybe all authors should cancel their membership & found a Society that has a serious interest in representing & championing all authors no matter what they write.
Have we learned nothing since the fiasco of Lady Chatterley’s Lover?
Thankyou: good to have the courage of our convictions and stand our ground!
I’m confused. The author declares that she is a coward, then goes on to declaim cowardice displayed by others. So she wrote an email, and then wrote this piece to tell us she wrote it. Take a bow, I guess?
You’ve never heard of rhetoric, clearly.
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