Tribute to Sylvia Townsend Warner follows campaign to nominate overlooked women

“The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they “know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are”.

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© Photograph: Supplied

© Photograph: Supplied

© Photograph: Supplied

Director, actor and a co-founder of Monstrous Regiment, whose work would concentrate on women’s experience

In 1975 the stage director Susan Todd, who has died aged 83, teamed up with the actors Gillian Hanna and Mary McCusker to form Monstrous Regiment, a national touring company that would always have a majority of women members, and whose work would explore the experience of women, past and present.

Taking their title from the Scottish fundamentalist John Knox’s notorious treatise The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, the company started with Claire Luckham’s Paris commune-set Scum: Death, Destruction and Dirty Washing (1976); the following year came Caryl Churchill’s witchcraft play Vinegar Tom. Todd herself wrote Kiss and Kill (with Ann Mitchell) about domestic violence (1977-78), and – in 1979 – collaborated with me on the company’s first play involving a male writer, bringing the worlds of student revolution and schoolgirl romance into crashing contradiction, in Teendreams. As in all of the early Monstrous Regiment shows, Todd was also a member of the acting company.

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© Photograph: Roger Perry

© Photograph: Roger Perry

© Photograph: Roger Perry

Lots of people on the left dismiss these women as fake feminists. Can they really be feminists in any meaningful sense if they organize against trans women? Can't feminism just drum them out of its ranks? I'd like to suggest that there are strands of thought that are both authentically feminist and irredeemable — even fascist. An article-length intro to the argument fleshed out in her latest book, Enemy Feminisms TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, Sophie Lewis, for Lux, makes the case that we must reckon with the reactionary and fascist threads that run through the history and present of feminist thought.