DISCARDED QUOTES
Pankhursts/Suffragettes
Mary Davis, a biographer of Sylvia Pankhurst, argued that Sylvia’s political life,
“raises many tactical and strategic issues which face feminist, anti-racist and socialist activists today. It poses questions about single-issue politics, the nature of alliances and, in particular, in the case of women’s suffrage (and, indeed, many other ‘women’s issues’ of today), the relationship between gender and class...I believe that I am not alone in taking the view that Sylvia’s strategy, based as it was on an alliance between class and gender, did far more to win the vote for all women than the more elitist and ultimately diversionary politics of her mother and elder sister.” (Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics, Mary Davis, p3)
The alliance of class and gender, as Davis describes, was also extended by Sylvia Pankhurst to critique an interwar racialisation of class, something we pick up on in the next chapter.
Ellen Carol Dubois argues that the impact of World War One on the women’s suffrage movement, as well as the worker's movement, was overwhelmingly negative: “It shattered the socialist-feminist link that underlay suffragism’s growth and vigour. The war split the suffrage movement in two, just as it did international socialism. The majority of socialists and suffragists advocated preparedness, war work, and service to the state.” (Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights, Ellen Carol Dubois, p272)
"The War had rent the women's movement in twain." (Sylvia, p593)
“The birth of organized feminism in Britain took place against a background of anti-slavery enthusiasm, but its development was consolidated during a period of popular imperialism...feminist ideology and practice were shaped by the social, economic and political forces of imperialism to a far greater extent than has been acknowledged.” Vron Ware
“Gender played a crucial role in organizing ideas of ‘race’ and civilization’, and women were involved in many different ways in the expansion and maintenance of the Empire…During the late Victorian period when theories of race and eugenics were being used to bolster the concept of the innate superiority of the white race above all others, English women were seen as the ‘conduits of the essence of the race’. They not only symbolized the guardians of the race in their reproductive capacity, but they also provided - as long as they were of the right class and breeding - a guarantee that British morals and principles were adhered to in the settler community, as well as being transmitted to the next generation.” (Vron Ware, Beyond The Pale, 37-38)
Suffragettes/BUF
Women Workers/Socialists
Mary Davis highlights the role played by working class women suffragists: “In a remarkable refutation of the class prejudices of the established suffrage societies and the gender-blind myopia of the labour movement, these ‘radical suffragists’ (notably Eva Gore-Booth, Sarah Reddish, Sarah Dickenson, Selina Cooper and others), consciously set about the task of forging an alliance between feminism and socialism.”
Black Feminism
"Such views were reflected in the now-iconic ‘Many Voices, One Chant’ edition of Feminist Review in October 1984. As Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar wrote in their featured article ‘Challenging Imperial Feminism’, ‘white, mainstream feminist theory, be it from the socialist feminist or radical feminist perspective, does not speak to the experiences of Black women and where it attempts to do so it is often from a racist perspective and reasoning.’"
"True feminist theory and practice entails an understanding of imperialism and a critical engagement with challenging racism – elements which the current women’s movement significantly lacks, but which are intrinsic to Black feminism." (Thomlinson, p164-5)
"It is unsurprising that one of the most powerful theoretical statements produced jointly by a Black and white woman came from two women who were grounded in the socialist feminist tradition, Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Margaret Coulson. They argued in their influential article ‘Transforming socialist feminism: The challenge of racism’ that: 'An analysis of racism must be central to socialist-feminism . . . an analysis which we all, as socialist-feminists, need to develop is based on the idea of a racially structured, patriarchal capitalism...This leads us to examine how ‘race’, class and gender are structured in relation to one another. How do they combine with and/or cut across one another? How does racism divide gender identity and experience? How is gender experienced through racism? How is class shaped by gender and ‘race’? To take these questions on does require a fundamental redrawing of the conceptual categories of socialist-feminism, and it may help us develop a more adequate politics.' It is in such statements that the ambition of Black feminist thought not just to expand but transform the remit of white feminism is most fully realised. Many white feminists – though certainly not all, or even the majoritywere moved to action by such statements. However, developing this ‘more adequate politics’ was a painful process." (Thomlinson, p167-8)
"it is clear that Black women's activism developed out of the Black left at the same time as white feminism developed out of the white left." (Thomlinson, p65)
"Black women’s activism should not be seen as imitative of white feminism, but as a phenomenon rooted in a very different history, with a very different dynamic in terms of its political focus and modus operandi."(p67)
"After the BUFP women’s caucus apparently stopped meeting, the most significant event of this wave of activity in the early 1970s was the formation of BBWG in 1973. Initially starting off as a Black women’s study group – Gail Lewis claimed that it was formed out of women from the Race Today collective and the radical Black Brixton-based bookshop, Sabarr – the group quickly evolved and included many women who had been involved in the Black Power movement, such as Gerlin Bean and Olive Morris. Their origins are eloquently described in the first paragraph of the first issue of their journal, Speak Out: 'The Black Women’s Group began in late 1973 mainly with women who were involved in the black movements in the late 60s and early 70s. Since then many other women have joined the group. Over the years we have attempted to study and analyse the situation of black women in Britain and the third world because such an analysis has been long overdue.' " (p69)
"The early seventies saw the first Black women's caucuses being formed within the Black Power organisations in London." (The Heart of the Race, p148)
"We formed the Black Women’s group in 1973… We came mainly out of Black organisations. Some had left and some were still there, but on the whole the organisations we came from were in the process of disintegrating… Straight away we got accused of ‘splitting the movement’, of weakening organisations which were already on the way out… But for most of us setting up an autonomous group for Black women was really necessary at that time… there were issues that related to us as Black women, like women’s work, our economic dependence on men and childcare… it was a chance to put them at the top of the agenda for a change… We didn’t want to become part of the white women’s movement. We felt they had different priorities to us…" (The Heart of the Race, p149)
"We were very wary of charges that we might be 'splitting the Black struggle' or mobilising in a vacuum or imitating middle-class white women. These were the kinds of criticisms Black men were making at the time. We couldn't be - in fact, we never were - anti-men, in that sense. But it was so good to be in a group which wasn't hostile and didn't fight all the time. That sense of autonomy, of woman-purpose was something everybody felt at the time, though. The attack was that we were all just a bunch of lesbians, implying we just got together to discuss our sexual preferences and weren't serious about taking anything else up which had relevance to the Black community. We were determined to prove them wrong on this, because it was a label which really undermined what we had set out to do at the time. We would not have called ourselves 'feminists' by any means - we didn't go that far for many years. It took us a long time before we worked out a Black women's perspective, which took account of race, class, sex and sexuality." (The Heart of the Race, p150)
"The attitude of the 'brothers', however, often undermined our participation. We could not realise our full organisational potential in a situation where we were constantly regarded as sexual prey."
(The Heart of the Race, p143-4)
"It is within this context of the radicalisation and mobilisation of Asian youth that we have to understand the development of the Asian women’s movement; and, as we shall see, its primary constituency was radicalised young Asian women who could not find a space in the male-dominated world of Asian anti-racist activism." Thomlinson, p78
"We would not wish to deny that the family can be a source of oppression for us but we also wish to examine how the black family has functioned as a prime source of resistance to oppression. We need to recognize that during slavery, periods of colonialism, and under the present authoritarian state, the black family has been a site of political and cultural resistance to racism." (Hazel Carby, White Woman Listen!)
Heart of the Race: "for most of us setting up an autonomous group for Black women was really necessary at that time… there were issues that related to us as Black women, like women’s work, our economic dependence on men and childcare… it was a chance to put them at the top of the agenda for a change… We didn’t want to become part of the white women’s movement. We felt they had different priorities to us…"
Sara Ahmed: “feminism’s transition from an innocent white past to an innocent diverse present, leaves whiteness intact at the centre, erasing both racism and anti-racist critiques from the story of feminism.” (Jonsson, p95)
"There was a constant tension for Black women between wider community and specifically women’s politics. Nevertheless, it also helps us to understand why it was that Black feminists were the first to analyse the intersection of race, class and gender. Debates around how precisely these interacted were one of several issues, alongside Afro-Asian unity and sexuality, that both split the movement and transformed its praxis, as the next part of this chapter will explore. Yet, having been pushed to the margins of left activism, they were also in the perfect structural position to make new and exciting connections in political theory." (Thomlinson, p88)
"As a member of the Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP), Bean played a key role in setting up its Black Women’s Action Committee, which would remain a highly visible chapter of the BUFP in years to come. With the founding of the BLF a year later, Bean soon gravitated to this new group and ensured they too set up a women’s caucus. These caucuses formed an intimate network of politically active Black women and allowed them to discuss gendered issues outside of their organisation’s general meetings. In 1973, a meeting between the BLF’s Gerlin Bean and Zainab Abbas, and the defunct Black Panther Movement’s Beverley Bryan, Liz Obi and Olive Morris, culminated in the forming of Brixton Black Women’s Group (BBWG). This new group signified the consolidation of these various women’s caucuses into the beginnings of a cohesive Black women’s movement, facilitating the later emergence of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). With the growth of this Black women’s network came the evolution of gender as a more prominent issue within wider discussions regarding Black liberation."
"The NHS was also felt to be racist in its administration of fertility drugs such as Depo-Provera, a focus of major campaigning from almost all Black women’s groups. Depo-Provera was a contraceptive injection that was supposed to provide protection against pregnancy for three months. However, there were concerns about the long-term impact it had on fertility, and the drug’s adverse side-effects such as irregular or heavy bleeding, weight-gain, and depression. It was widely administered to Black and particularly Asian women during this period. This was seen to be the result of racist doctors in the NHS who deliber- ately wished to limit the fertility of Black women by not explaining fully the functions of the drug and the complications that it could cause. Indeed, the campaign against Depo-Provera was one of the few in which white women were involved" (Thomlinson, p72-73)
"As Stella Dadzie remembered:
'[ . . . ] there was an assumption that if Black women wanted to become feminists, that to some extent they had to embrace that line, rather than bring in their own perspectives. And a good example of that was the women’s right to choose you know, which was a major campaign and a very worthy one – a woman has a right to choose...But in a context where we were trying to draw attention to the behaviour of doctors towards pregnant young Black women – which often involved tying their tubes without their consent, or giving them long-term contraceptives without any concern for the long-term health implications – for Black women it was also about, about a woman’s right to choose to have a child.' " (Thomlinson, p168)
"Our abuse at the hands of the Family Planning service is intensified even further by the many popular racist myths and stereotypes which abound about Black Women's sexuality, enshrined within medical science. Black women's ability to reproduce has come to be viewed as a moral flaw, to be frowned upon and controlled - so much so that doctors frequently take it upon themselves to exercise control over our fertility in the interests of (white) society. The consequences of this are evident in the numerous cases of Black women who receive unwanted sterilisations or terminations, or the damaging long-term contraceptive DP (Depo Provera), all in the interests of controlling the numbers of 'unwanted' Black babies." (Heart of the Race, p103)
"It's for reasons such as these that, when the Women's Liberation Movement took up the issue of 'Abortion on Demand' in the early seventies, Black women had to point out that we have always been given abortions more readily than white women and are indeed often encouraged to have terminations we didn't ask for. It's for this reason, too, that when the women's movement demanded 'free, safe, and available contraception for all women', we had to remind them that for Black women this often means being used as guinea-pigs in mass birth control programmes, or as objects 'research' when new forms of birth control need to be tested. And when the same women talked about 'A Woman's Right to Choose', we responded that for Black women, this must also mean having the right to choose to have our children, planned or unplanned. For us, the politics of women's health have always had that added racist dimension - a dimension which has been overlooked far too often by the white, middle-class women who constitute the majority in the women's movement." (The Heart of the Race, p105)
While a limited viewpoint on social relations in Marxist accounts was not enough to trace back the specific relations of exploitation these women faced, the violations of bodily autonomy had lasting effects on women, within a wider spectrum of relations of exploitation. This suggested relations of “womanhood” were discoverable only through the negation of womanhood as a positive ideal.
"white feminists found it difficult to conceive of themselves as racist." (Thomlinson, p29)
"Although many white feminists during this period were well aware of racism in England, they were unable to translate this awareness into practice, and generally failed to reflect on their own racially marked identities. There was also a degree of condescension towards Black women present, with white feminists often viewing women from ethnic minority backgrounds as in need of rescue from their own ‘backwards’ and patriarchal cultures. In this way, some white feminists were clearly acting within the matrix of colonialism, although they would have been horrified to have been so described." (p33)
"White women in the British WLM are extraordinarily reluctant to see themselves in the situations of being oppressors, as they feel that this will be at the expense of concentrating upon being oppressed. Consequently the involvement of British women in imperialism and colonialism is repressed and the benefits that they—as whites—gained from the oppression of black people are ignored. Forms of imperialism are simply identified as aspects of an all- embracing patriarchy rather than as sets of social relations in which white women hold positions of power by virtue of their "race." " (Hazel Carby, White Woman Listen!)
"The benefits of a white skin did not just apply to a handful of cotton, tea, or sugar plantation mistresses; all women in Britain benefited—in varying degrees—from the economic exploitation of the colonies. The proimperialist attitudes of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminists and suffragists have yet to be acknowledged for their racist implications. However, apart from this herstorical work, the exploration of contemporary racism within the white feminist movement in Britain has yet to begin."
Indian feminist Madhu Kishwar complained in Scarlet Woman, ‘I think another alarming tendency within at least certain trends of feminist thinking in the West is to disown racism, to disown imperialism. We’ve nothing to do with it. Men created it, so, well, it’s their problem.’
"The herstory of black women is interwoven with that of white women but this does not mean they are the same story. Nor do we need white feminists to write our herstory for us; we can and are doing that for ourselves. However, when they write their herstory and call it the story of women but ignore our lives and deny their relation to us, that is the moment in which they are acting within the relations of racism and writing history." (Hazel Carby, White Woman Listen!)
“The categories of gender and race as they are understood in Britain today have thus been fundamentally co-constituted through the process of colonial modernity...The foundations of British feminism, similarly, are inextricably linked with histories of Empire, steeped in the logic of white superiority.” (Innocent Subjects, Terese Jonsson, p15)
"It is important to note that the increasing anti-racist activity that the movement witnessed was uneven. Far from all white women embraced these critiques. Some simply ignored them; others reacted with hostility. Ruth Frankenberg noted in an article for Trouble and Strife entitled ‘White Racism: more than a moral issue’ that the ‘predominant response’ to the Black feminist critique ‘has been one of uncomfortable silence’. Nevertheless, this critique did draw more pro-active responses from some white feminists." (Thomlinson, p170)
"a central question of these debates is how white feminists reconciled (or failed to reconcile) a conception of themselves as good, or moral, with the idea that they too could be racist." (Thomlinson, p173-174) (Thomlinson, p169)
"There was a similar debate in Cambridge in 1984, when a RTN march calling for ‘better policing’ was organised. Indeed, it was this call for safer streets through better policing that was particularly contentious. It rang hol- low for Black women who knew through personal experience that ‘more policing’ was unlikely to mean ‘safer streets’ for the Black community"
"As Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Margaret Coulson commented: 'Not only is it racist for women to march through Black areas with demands for safer streets for women (which women?) but also, to understate it, we don’t know many black women who see police pro- tection as any way of doing this...Certainly Cherry Groce and the family of Cynthia Jarrett are unlikely to have any illusions about better policing.'
The invocation of Groce and Jarrett was a powerful one, reminding white women that innocent Black women had been killed and injured at the hands of white male policemen. As such, what was essentially a protest against violence against women that in theory could have been a campaign that united Black and white women, instead became a divi- sive issue due to the insensitive manner in which the RTN marches were carried out by white women. And again, rather than overt discrimina- tion, it was this insensitivity, a failure to think through the ramifications of their actions, that led to the accusation of racism that was levelled at white women." (p170)
BBWG analysis of white antifascism in the late 70s: "For them racism is embodied in the National Front, which is regarded as a cancer that contaminates the non-racist. Therefore, if it goes, racism will also disappear . . . [They] have failed to understand the true nature of racism in Britain." (Thomlinson, p135)
"anti- racist CR groups were soul-searching affairs that took the individual on an agonising quest for the racism inside themselves. Such groups were predicated on the assumption that white women – even those who were dedicated anti-racists – inevitably held racist attitudes and assumptions, due to the nature of the society that they were a part of. Once found – so the theory went – such attitudes could be rooted out. This was essen- tial for women to become better activists (and people), for what could be more contradictory than a racist anti-racist? Thus, the anti-racist CR group quickly began to be seen as a necessary pre-cursor to anti-racist activism." (Thomlinson, p147)
Gail Lewis and Pratibha Parmar described the WLM attempting to tackle racism through “personal consciousness-raising." (Gail Lewis and Pratibha Parmar reviewing Angela Davis and bell hooks books, Race and Class, Volume 25 Issue 2, October 1983)
"As this period progressed, Black female activists drew increasingly from white feminist theory, and interacted more frequently with white feminists. In particular, the emphasis on Marxist analysis and anti-imperialism amongst Black women allowed for a common discourse to be shared with (white) socialist feminists. By this point, many activist Black women felt comfortable terming themselves ‘feminist’" (Thomlinson, p64-65)
Gail Lewis remembered when discussing the demise of BBWG:
"The other thing that happened was the grants strategy; you know, we became a bloody employment committee with workers...We stopped doing the things that we used to do, like standing on street corners selling papers...WE weren’t knocking on doors any more. All we had to do by then was to give out a few leaflets through the council premises. At first we didn’t; at first we would go out and encourage women, but we weren’t doing that anymore; instead we just put it through the internal Lambeth mailing. We had become bloody managers, and this is what happens so often. You know, to get funding you have to meet certain criteria; to meet those criteria you have to adopt certain structures and to a great extent the structures dictate the relationships." (Thomlinson, p196)
"For hooks, as for many other veteran feminists, the perception of identity politics as either avoidable or necessarily negative was second wave feminism’s first mistake: ‘[w]omen do not need to eradicate difference to feel solidarity. We do not need to share common oppression to fight equally to end oppression’ (hooks 1986: 138)."
“A feminism that seeks power instead of questioning it does not care about justice.” (Feminism, Interrupted; Lola Olufemi, p5)
“The violence of this world can seem at times overwhelming and all consuming, but it is important that we use feminism as one of the tools to make sense of it and to fight back through organising, movement building and grassroots rebellion.” (Olufemi, p144)
“Black feminists have always understood the importance of difference and tension.” (Feminism, Interrupted; p144)
“I think the dismissal of ‘identity politics’ really misunderstands the claims it makes. The Combahee River Collective clearly outlined their understanding of it when they said they saw their task as ‘the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.’ They recognised the limits of dominant frames of Marxist thinking and used lived experience to flesh it out and expand it, so that it might properly attend to their lives and be useful to them. Nobody knows more about racial capitalism than the black worker, nobody knows more about the gendered implications of labour than women workers. To dismiss the claims they make from those positions, as if they don’t have material consequences, is lazy...The creators of identity politics, more than anyone else, were aware of the limits of identity markers which is why they argued for an integrated analysis not an absolutist one.” Lola Olufemi
"Increasingly, the effect of state funds on our community has been to neutralise its militancy; political mobilisation has come to be seen as a salaried activity. A whole generation of 'ethnic' workers and race relations experts has been born who are accountable not to the Black community but to the State which pays them. Their brief, however unwitting, is to keep the lid on the cauldron, and their existence is seen as proof of the governments 'concern' to soften the effects of its own institutionalised racism." (The Heart of the Race, p179)
Carby
"transformations of sex/gender systems brought about by colonial oppression, and the changes in kinship patterns that result from migration, must be assessed on their own terms, not just in comparative relation to other sex/gender systems. In this way patterns of subordination of women can be understood historically, rather than dismissed as the inevitable product of pathological family structures. At this point we can begin to make concrete the black feminist plea to white femi- nists to begin with our different herstories. Contact with white societies has not generally led to a more "progressive" change in African and Asian sex/gender systems. Colonialism attempted to destroy kinship patterns that were not modeled on nuclear family structures, disrupting, in the process, female organizations that were based upon kinship systems that allowed more power and autonomy to women than those of the colonizing nation."
"It is impossible to argue that colonialism left precapitalist or feudal forms of organization untouched. If we look at the West Indies we can see that patterns of migration, for both men and women, have followed the dictates of capital."
"In other words, the work that the women do is a force that helps to keep wages low. To relegate "women of color" in the periphery to the position of being the victims of feudal relations is to aid in the masking of colonial relations of oppression. These relations of imperialism should not be denied."
"The level of generality applied to the "Third World" would be dismissed as too vague to be informative if applied to Western industrialized nations. However, Molyneux implies that since "Third World" women are outside of capitalist relations of production, entering capitalist relations is, necessarily, an emancipating move."
"the use of such theories reinforces the view that when black women enter Britain they are moving into a more liberated or enlightened or emancipated society than the one from which they have come."
"Feminist theory in Britain is almost wholly Eurocentric and when it is not ignoring the experience of black women "at home," it is trundling "Third World women" onto the stage only to perform as victims of "barbarous," "primitive" practices in "barbarous," "primitive" societies."
"Too often concepts of historical progress are invoked by the Left and feminists alike, to create a shading scale of "civilized liberties." When barbarous sexual practices are to be described, the "Third World" is placed on display and compared to the "First World," which is seen as more "enlightened" or "progressive." The metropolitan centers of the West define the questions to be asked of other social systems and, at the same time, provide the measure against which all "foreign" practices are gauged. In a peculiar combination of Marxism and feminism, capitalism becomes the vehicle for reforms that allow for progress toward the emancipation of women. The "Third World," on the other hand, is viewed as retaining precapitalist forms expressed at the cultural level by traditions which are more oppressive to women."
"The experience of black women does not enter the parameters of parallelism. The fact that black women are subject to the simultaneous oppression of patriarchy, class, and "race" is the prime reason for not employing parallels that render their position and experience not only marginal but also invisible." (Hazel Carby, White Woman Listen!)
Carby: "When white feminists emphasize patriarchy alone, we want to redefine the term and make it a more complex concept."
WLM
“the role of high-profile white feminist columnists becomes to ensure that they are seen to understand the issues at stake, while also reframing the debates to ensure that their relevance and central positions within them are not threatened. Their role is to articulate the ‘reasonable’, liberal position which claims to hear ‘other’ marginalised voices, encourages them to speak, but chides them when they become too angry or demanding.” Jonsson, p156
“Power relationships between feminists of colour and white feminists remain largely the same. The intersectionality and privilege debates thus illustrate how difference can be incorporated into a white liberal feminist framework, and even welcomed, as long as the white people involved do not have to give up any power.” Jonsson, p157
56-57 As Jonsson argues, “the extent to which the concept of intersectionality can usefully shed light on how the interlocking systems of domination operate depends on the lineage of intersectional theorising which one engages with.”
"For Lynne Segal it was the increasingly torturous debates around heterosexuality that ‘produced the final and fundamental rift between feminists at the end of the 1970s and which shattered any potential unity about the nature, direction and goal of feminism’..." https://literariness.org/2017/10/26/identity-politics-the-politics-of-identity/
Morning Star
Trans woman who is against “trans ideology” writes in the Morning Star saying, yes, Laurence Fox anti-wokism is racist and of the ruling class but... we need an anti-wokeness of the Left
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/cancel-culture-drive-working-class-people-away-left
Headline: "Simplistic politics and online ‘cancel culture’ drive working-class people away from the left"
Subheading: "Just because the right says it is anti-woke, that doesn’t mean the left must be pro-woke. To defeat bigotry, we need vigorous debate, collectivism and patient engagement, not witch-hunts," says KRISTINA HARRISON
"it is simply not good enough to take the position that because the right say they are anti-woke politics, that we must be pro-woke.
There is a degree of popular working-class backlash against woke, which in the case of the new women’s movement in Britain is not at all fundamentally about bigotry but about the gross injustices being done to women in the name of woke identity politics.
Further, a section of the Leave-voting working-class heartlands responded at least in part to the increasingly woke characterisation and in many cases cancellation of them as gammon, racists and idiots.
They unsurprisingly feel driven away from the left, not only because of the betrayal of the promise to respect the EU referendum result but also because of the sneering abuse directed towards them from many middle-class woke lefties."
"If we want to ensure that workers “lending their vote” to the Tories does not become a more permanent arrangement and if we do not want to drive potentially hundreds of thousands of working-class women into the arms of the Tories, then part of our task should be to make clear that while first and foremost we should oppose all attempts to normalise racism and other forms of bigotry under the cover of anti-woke, that woke politics in Britain today is at best a barrier to defeating the right and at its worst — seen through the lens of gender identity politics — it is absolutely riddled with staggering sexism and misogyny, it is dangerously anti-democratic, anti-materialist and anti-working class in practice.
The materialist left and the feminist left are right to reject woke because only a class-based socialist politics can effectively bring people together to fight oppression, exploitation and the right.
There is a difference between the interests, motives and response of the Establishment to woke politics and the interests, motives and responses of Leave-voting working-class people in the former Labour heartlands or of a women’s movement sickened by the abuse of themselves and their basic rights at the hands of woke identity politics.
To fail to recognise that and indeed to conflate them all as one regressive bloc against which woke politics itself must be defended is to ghettoise the left, write off vast swathes of working-class people and to repeat the error of moving away from class politics by embracing elitist cancel culture."
"The materialist and feminist left are anti-woke because we’re for a more effective way of fighting bigotry, oppression and exploitation using the methods of class politics, democracy, vigorous debate, collectivism, patient and respectful two-way engagement and agitation, working together despite sharp disagreements to build grassroots campaigns and trade union organisation, to take action together against the common enemy, because we recognise our common interests and because we have a basic respect for our brothers and sisters despite those sometimes large and painful differences.
Woke politics is the opposite. It is elitist and super-moralising, cancelling working-class people with ease, in simplistic black-and-white terms, despite many having long histories of being against prejudice, including many fine socialists, feminists, human rights activists and women’s sector workers.
Woke culture elevates, not debate and politics but moral absolutism, authoritarianism and hysteria, the tools of the witch-hunter.
Instead of patient engagement, it tries to pour shame on dissenting individuals who do not rapidly conform, to ostracise and sometimes dehumanise them, to use the boss to discipline or sack them.
The woke left is actively no-platforming feminists and other opponents of fascism. It is trying to prevent the independent speech and meetings of women, to intimidate, bully and threaten attendees and supporters."
"It is riddled with sexist and misogynist threats, entitlements and assumptions. It is an extremely divisive form of middle-class moralism and ultra-liberalism.
The left must address this divisive and intolerant culture and its middle-class/neoliberal roots. It must turn decisively back towards its materialist and working-class origins, back towards collectivity and solidarity with other workers and all of the oppressed, not towards more hyper-individualism and hyper-moralism, not towards ever more competitive and hierarchical “oppression-olympics” and with an ever greater rejection of material reality.
It is the left’s failure thus far to address these issues, including its now relative weak-rootedness in important sections of the working class, which has allowed this widely despised cancel culture to thrive.
With its sneering class or educational snobbery, it’s unjust and often vile assumptions about working-class women it actually undermines the left’s vitally important messages about oppression, division and unity.
One thing which is so very divisive in our movement, for example, is the presumption of anti-trans hatred made against anyone, no matter their political record or character, no matter any other evidence to the contrary or even if they, like me, are proudly trans themselves."
"If they disagree that gender identity should overrule biological sex or contend that what are being claimed as rights by many trans people unfairly remove rights and autonomy from women, then they are assumed to be bigots as if there could never be any other explanation than hate for asserting that binary sex is real and highly significant to billions of human beings or for recognising and asserting that it’s unjust that the rights claimed by most members of one group threaten to take away rights and autonomy from another group.
To assume hatred as the only explanation for that is against natural justice, is disingenuous and is corrosive to working-class solidarity.
Transphobia is a real and life-crushing prejudice for many trans people. We have a long way to go to defeat it, but too many activists are crying wolf so repeatedly and with such hyperbole and misrepresentation that it would raise even Orwell’s eyebrows.
Transphobia is a word now so tragically and dangerously cheapened that it is steadily losing its power.
For much of the time in Britain today it simply means disagreeing with identity politics or believing biological sex is dimorphic, real and significant.
It is both a travesty and a tragedy which is actively undermining the real fight against anti-trans hatred, against the disadvantage and discrimination faced by many trans brothers and sisters.
The detachment from the material reality of sex inevitably finds its corresponding equivalent in a detachment from political reality. Facts become irrelevant, only feelings matter, just never the feelings of anyone else, especially women.
It is precisely because woke cancel culture has (rightly in all too many cases) become so widely despised, as the epitome of an obnoxious, holier-than-thou elitism that it threatens to open the door to the right. Some of us have been warning of this danger for a number of years."
"The loss of Labour’s heartland working-class support in the recent general election and the even bigger disaster that Jo Swinson brought on herself should have made it clear that dismissing working-class Leave voters as idiots, gammon and racists and dismissing working-class women concerned about the rights of their sex as idiots and transphobes is not a winning electoral strategy.
The left can only defeat the right with the working class at its heart, with a sober grip on material reality and a unity built on solidarity in action, on a principled fight against all oppression (including trans oppression and women’s oppression) and on patient engagement and respectful treatment of fellow working people with whom we often have big, even painful disagreements.
Before we can defeat Johnson and his bigoted government, we must turn away from middle-class cancel culture to a collectivist model of patient, respectful agitation and to a frank debating of differences — above all to action in defence of our services, communities and workplaces against the government.
The Labour Party should be turning towards the working class, not turning its back on the working class after looking down its nose at us or after treating working-class women as objects to be redefined by others, not subjects in their own story.
If we want to cancel Johnson’s government it’s time to cancel “cancel culture” itself. We need an engagement culture, a collectivist culture, a working-class culture. Oppose all bigotry but choose socialism not wokeism to do it."
HISTORY WRITING BY US
Pankhursts/Suffragettes
Women’s suffragism in Britain was never unified. Tracing the splits within the famous Pankhurst family gives us a longer perspective on “womanhood” as an identity formed through colonialism.
Such rivalry had always existed. As women’s movement organisations proliferated in the Victorian era, several small suffrage groups from the 1860s onwards tended to share a similar approach focused on lobbying politicians and power-brokers, operating very much within the law and unsuccessfully trying to use legal routes to the franchise. As Sylvia wrote of that period: "The women's movement, in short, passed from timidity to timidity." (Sylvia, p50) These groups were often in competition with each other but largely remained on the margins of mainstream politics. The composition of such groups were solidly middle class, often with connections to the Liberal party If you look at the leading women in the 1860s/70s, like those on the initial committee for the National Society for Women's Suffrage, you mostly have the daughters and wives of MPs, manufacturers, industrialists, landowners and merchants.
Splits were opened up in the movement early on between married/non-married women's rights. By the last decade of the nineteenth century small gains were made in the form of local franchise rights and women could be elected as Poor Law guardians - i.e. middle class women could be democratically elected to administrate the poverty of working class women. As the US suffrage movement was in part mobilised by the codification of women's disenfranchisement by the Reconstruction Amendments, a similar origin story pertains in the UK movement: "The [Reform] Act of 1832, by employing the term 'male person', for the first time in English history, expressly debarred women from exercising the franchise it created." Excluded again in the 1867 Act. (Sylvia Pankhurst, p30 and p40)
Within a few years of its founding the WSPU grew to be a large and impressive, highly centralised, organisation. Its direction mirrored, in many ways, that of the US suffrage movement. The organisation was elitist and hierarchical, dominated by Christabel Pankhurst. It received huge sums of money through donations, had an effective and sophisticated media strategy (its own newspaper had a circulation of 40,000 at its height) and could mobilise huge numbers for demonstrations. by 1910 the WSPU had 110 salaried staff. it had "an income and central offices far exceeding those at the disposal of the Labour Party". (Sylvia, p222-223)
The direct action the Suffragettes are known for began to develop from around 1909. Campaigns of window-breaking and other criminal damage (including large scale property damage and targeting of high ranking government ministers for heckling and violence. Sylvia suggests there was a conscious decision towards property damage after police assaults on suffragettes at demos in central London. i.e. might as well get beaten up for doing something if we're going to get beaten up anyway. can speak to the interesting disjuncture between militant tactics and conservative politics.) garnered mass publicity, and general condemnation (this included criticism from many other suffrage groups and labour movement organisations), not to mention ferocious police violence. Titillating press coverage was captivated and horrified by Suffragette “violence,” subverting as it did, the gendered expectations of how middle class Edwardian women should behave. The tactics led to many stints in prison for Sylvia, her mother (Christabel was hidden in self-imposed exile in Paris for much of this period) and dozens of others who conducted sleep, thirst and hunger strikes inside, often being violently force-fed by the state. Sylvia critiqued this strategy years later, remarking: “the movement required not more serious militancy by the few, but a stronger appeal to the masses to join the struggle.” (The Suffragette Movement, Sylvia Pankhurst, p36) She was not against militancy but clandestine vanguardism at the expense of coalition-building and deeper organising: “Secretly planned militancy was a method of desperation adopted in the hope of shortening the longer struggle.” quoted in, (Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Davis, p32) The strategic shift of the Suffragettes from lobbying for reforms to what would now be called “terrorism” complicates the movement’s image. Respectable, nationalist memorials to them today cynically emphasise the legalistic results of their campaigns. Their actual confrontations with state figures and property, however, were also not incommensurable with Suffragette allegiances, like Extinction Rebellion today, to the nation. as with much memorialisation, historical figures and movements are open to wide ranging identifications in the present. This includes affirmative, nationalist identifications with the Suffragettes by "gender critical" feminists today. Britain is on the “front line” of a “battle” against “gender ideology”, writes Dana Vitaslov. "Just as at the beginning of the past century,” she continues, “when British women of the First Wave were grappling with the injustice of being denied the right to vote, women are now fighting the unfairness of being denied the freedom of thought and expression. Although women and feminists in many countries are currently battling gender ideology, it is in the UK where the clashes seem most severe. A century ago, it was here the fight for women‘s suffrage took the most ferocious form." something here about innocence and victimhood, the idea that white women can't be oppressors (re racialised/trans people). that the rhetoric of "gender critical" feminists must speak on behalf of all "women" who are threatened by transgender people or "ideology".
Splits formed within the Women’s Social Political Union (WSPU) as leading members dissented from Emmeline’s and Christabel’s militaristic command leadership. Even loyal supporters and lifelong friends found themselves being expelled. A bitterness developed between competing suffrage groups. The WSPU had come to see itself as something resembling a true vanguard
In 1912, Sylvia founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), a large working class movement rooted in London’s radical East End. ELFS participated in multiple struggles, not only for suffrage. It had “by 1917...30 branches nationwide (the majority in the East End), capable of mobilising thousands of women.” (Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Davis, p37) Sylvia was expelled from the WSPU in 1914 as she aligned more and more with socialist causes. She was particularly censured by Christabel for publicly expressing solidarity with Irish trade unionists fighting for their right to unionise in the famous Dublin Lock-out dispute. Institutional and family ties cut, Sylvia was ensconced in the East End radical scene, and set up one of the best known radical newspapers of the period which she edited for a decade. At its height it had a circulation of around 10,000. The changing name of the paper - from the Woman’s Dreadnought to the Workers’ Dreadnought - showed the changing ideological basis and political focus of Sylvia and her comrades, who included working class women like Charlotte Drake, Melvina Walker, Nellie Cressall as well as the young Jewish sisters Rose and Nellie Cohen. Involved in anti-war campaigns, rent strikes, and practical organising to share the burdens of local women left without husbands, food or income. (According to her son Richard: "During the first years of the war she established the Mothers' Arms, a maternity clinic and Montessori school, and four other clinics, two cost-price restaurants, and a co-operative toy factory designed to provide work for persons unemployed on account of the conflict. She also founded the League of Rights for Soldiers' and Sailors' Wives and Relatives, to work for better pensions and allowances." (Introduction to The Suffragette Movement, Sylvia Pankhurst)Their feminist focus wasn’t diminished by the turn towards revolutionary class struggle as the whole movement was impacted by its own “Revolutionary Time” ushered in by the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Easter Rising the year before. ELFS organised demonstrations demanding equal pay, prison reform, and an end to “sweating” labour, with strong labour movement collaboration. Especially from dockers of the East End, many of whom were married to women from ELFS
Meanwhile, the WSPU continued to move rightwards with a stridently nationalist imperialist reaction to Britain’s entry into war. Emmeline and Christabel renamed the organisation the “Women’s Party,” rechristening their “Suffragette” newspaper “Britannia.” (The Pankhursts setting up of a “Women’s Party” bought into a wider notion held by other parties that there was such a thing as a “women’s vote”, that women as a section of society could be approached electorally as a homogenous interest group. It had all but folded by the end of 1919.) They suspended all suffrage activities, subordinating everything to the war effort (they advocated compulsory national service for women instead) and women’s war work, This met with strife as unionised male workers went on strike to oppose women in munitions factories, which Emmeline Pankhurst was horrified by both for its sexism and its lack of patriotism. (The Aftermath of Suffrage, June Purvis, p20) believing “the eventual reward for such loyalty would be the parliamentary vote.” (The Aftermath of Suffrage, June Purvis, p19) Britannia adopted a passionately nationalist, imperialist stance.
WSPU/Women’s Party figures commonly spoke in eugenic terms, linking their roles as women and mothers to the propagation of the white race in service to nation and empire. Christabel laid bare her clear eugenicist ideological underpinnings through her concern for the health of "the race." In her pamphlet "The Great Scourge" about venereal disease, she advocates woman suffrage as a cure to this epidemic, claiming it would bring women the independence and autonomy to refuse sex and marriage. The pamphlet is scathing of prostitution. Christabel new line became: "Votes for Women and Chastity for Men!" The British women’s movement reproduced much of the imperialist and racialising discourses of the ruling class. Another individual example would be late Victorian writer and charitable campaigner, Ellice Hopkins, a public speaker and Evangelical feminist who believed firmly in women’s suffrage. Her feminism was, above all, concerned with the moral conduct of women, particularly the poorest women in society. Redolent of anti-porn and anti-sex worker feminism in our own time, Hopkins campaigned to “rescue” prostitutes from their sinful activities, calling for the policing of pornographic materials and pushing for the state to take away young girls, for their own protection, from poor or incompetent parents. Hopkins’ interest was in the moral well-being of the young, the nation and the Empire and she believed that the role of womanhood was key to this. Later in life she began to focus her efforts on poor men with her White Cross Army, an international charity she set up to teach working men how to be morally pure. In her 1899 book, The Power of Womanhood; or Mothers and Sons, Hopkins expanded on her vision of morality, Empire and womanhood: “The great British Empire, the greatest civilizing, order-spreading, Christianizing world power ever known, can only be saved by a solemn league and covenant of her women to bring back simplicity of life, plain living, high thinking, reverence for marriage, chivalrous respect for all womanhood, and a high standard of purity for men and women alike.”
Christabel argued the necessity of women’s enfranchisement on the narrow, essentialist basis that women had “a service to render, to the state as well as the home, to the race as well as the family.” quoted in, (Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Davis, p97) Sylvia later noted of Christabel: “she urged, a working women's movement was of no value: working women were the weakest portion of the sex...Their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for the contest...we want picked women, the very strongest and most intelligent!'" In contrast, in the editorial of the first issue of Sylvia's Woman’s Dreadnought, launched on March 8, 1914, International Women’s Day: “Some people say that the lives of working-women are too hard and their education too small for them to become a powerful force in winning the Vote, many though they are. Such people have forgotten their history.”
The splits that formed in the workers movement around the war tell the story of the Labour Party’s further integration into Britain’s state apparatus. Most leading Labour politicians supported the war effort. Trade union leaders agreed to limit strikes during war-time. Conversely, syndicalist and shop steward movements engaged in militant strikes, eventually efforts were made to form a Communist Party. Sylvia was centrally involved in Britain’s nascent Communist movement, adopting an anti-parliamentarian position, remarking that the “movement in Great Britain is ruined by Parliamentarism.” quoted in, (Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Davis, p78)
Christabel wrote: “I consider pacifists a disease,” calling out anyone who so much as flinched at anything less than the total destruction of the German enemy. Footnote: Christabel also demanded mass conscription from the earliest stage, and called for mass internment of male and female "alien" enemies of all ages. Her pro-war zealotry was McCarthyesque in her diatribes against "weak" members of the Cabinet. Returning from her travels in North America, Emmeline had “changed [her] views profoundly.” As she put it, after “the general strike...I saw that there were only two issues before the country, and that anyone who had the real interests of women at heart would stand firmly behind Mr. Baldwin [Stanley Baldwin, Tory Prime Minister] and the Government. I am now an Imperialist.” Interview in the Morning Post, quoted in, (The Aftermath of Suffrage, June Purvis, p30-31)
As Emmeline and Christabel’s horizons narrowed to view votes for some women as an end in itself, a movement for itself, Sylvia’s perspective continually expanded. She first saw the vote as a vital class and gender question, a way of opening up other paths to social justice. Footnote: Exclusion of women from public life , from professions, from working (carried out by convention, family hierarchy or trade unions if not directly by the state/private institutions) was pervasive. And in some ways did encompass women across class and other divides. It also made some rich women angry and therefore more likely to be interested in contentious politics.
While her mother and sister insisted on equidistant independence from political parties footnote: Christabel Pankhurst insisted that the WSPU's quest for woman suffrage depended on their neutrality towards the parties. Sylvia "detested" her sister's "incipient Toryism". (The Suffragette Movement, p221), Sylvia couldn’t see the struggle against patriarchy as separate from the class struggle and the workers movement from which many of the Pankhursts’ politics had originated. Footnote: The Pankhursts were a family of middle class reformers, with links to liberal and social democratic circles in the late 19th century. Emmeline Pankhurst and her husband Richard, an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage, had earlier set up a short-lived group called the Women’s Franchise League - the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a member. The couple were early members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Keir Hardie was a close family friend and sometime political ally. Emmeline and Christabel started their own organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903, after growing frustrated at a lack of support for women’s suffrage within the ILP and the wider workers movement.
Class division ripped through the question of citizenship and women’s rights just as constitutional reform neared and rights were bestowed by the state. Footnote: Some suffragists genuinely cared about universal suffrage and working class struggle, many didn’t. Some men in the labour movement strongly supported women’s suffrage, others vehemently opposed it. The Labour Party, founded in 1906, showed inconsistent support for the cause in its early years. Keir Hardie was a passionate fighter for women's enfranchisement. Colleagues such as Ramsey MacDonald and Philip Snowden, even Margaret Bondfield (the first woman cabinet secretary), were anything but. Social democratic groupings failed to show solidarity with the struggle for women’s suffrage. Their publications disparaged suffragists, often using sexist language. Whilst critique of the middle class politics and composition of the suffrage movement and some of its tactics was often merited, men in the socialist press also often misrepresented suffrage organisations’ actual positions and failed to show solidarity with women on the receiving end of brutal state violence, imprisonment and torture. Prominent figures on the Left, like Belfort Bax, were determined sexists. He strongly opposed women’s suffrage, as did H. M. Hyndman, founder of the SDF. Eleanor Marx, a contemporary of Bax and Hyndman, observed that “even the working man for the most part still looks upon the women of the household as domestic animals, more or less his personal property.” (Yvonne Kapp, p636)
The looser contours of the question of emancipation tightened as the question of how change happened became polarised by assimilation questions – in which order should different groups be enfranchised? Footnote: The demand of the WSPU was for women’s suffrage on the basis of equality with men, a sleight of hand more likely to lead to an equality of voting rights for men and women of property, leaving a majority of women and some working class men still disenfranchised.
Britannia was horrified by the Russian Revolution. Emmeline advocated armed intervention. Footnote: After the war, low on funds and needing them to raise the four baby girls she had adopted, Emmeline Pankhurst, in her 60s, embarked on a speaking tour of North America. She regaled crowds about how “the great work confronting the women now is the suppression of Bolshevism” (quoted in The Aftermath of Suffrage, June Purvis, p24). She worked to spread awareness about the dangers to the race, the nation and the Empire, of venereal disease and prostitution. She and Christabel condemned war-time strikes, and later opposed the 1926 General Strike. Emmeline was set to stand for Parliament as a Tory candidate but died in 1927 before the vote was cast.
In 1918, a bill passed enfranchising all men (The War drove this) and some propertied women over the age of 30. Footnote: Post-suffrage politics in the interwar years was a period of division, demobilisation and demoralisation for the women’s movement. A national backlash against women and feminism followed the war and Britain’s enfranchising legislation of 1918. Attacks on women voters and women politicians as ignorant and inferior were commonplace. A broader sense of unease prevailed about the demographic female majority, much increased by the Great War’s carnage. Particular negative attention was paid to women’s employment, viewed as a direct cause of (white) male unemployment. It took another decade before all women over 21 got the vote. By then, Sylvia saw the struggle as being so much bigger:
“Women can no more put virtue into the decaying Parliamentary institution than can men: it is past reform and must disappear. The woman professional politician is neither more or less desirable than the man professional politician: the less the world has of either, the better it is of it.” (Woman's Dreadnought, Sylvia Pankhurst, 15 December 1923)
The Pankhurst family’s political trajectory: While Sylvia and Christabel had their own divergent paths, the third and
The story of the Pankhursts, in this way, mirrors the elitist and reactionary progressivism of Stanton and Anthony, if not for the dissident exception of Sylvia Pankhurst (by no means the only one), who committed herself to workers emancipation and anti-racism, focusing especially on organising side-by-side with working class white women, as well as Black and Jewish workers, in the East End. Just as Stanton and Anthony became more committed white supremacists, white women reformers and suffragists later became Klanswomen and some of the Suffragettes became fascists, or simply imperialist Conservatives. What these divergent passages in the US and UK suffrage movements force us to recognise is how rebellion is not necessarily non-conformity. And as this thesis develops, we shall see how the emergence of powerful workers movements in both societies would remain politically and imaginatively negated, because the lessons of this period were not part of the institutional memory of labour movements in the capitalist heartlands.
As in the US context, the fight for women’s suffrage changes in terms of its character, form, content and composition from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century to 1918-1920, when each country’s legislature enfranchised some women.
Women’s rights campaigners across Europe and the US took up positions for or against the Russian Revolution as political trajectories diverged wildly through times of upheaval.
While the WSPU were attempting “propaganda of the deed,” one of their rival organisations, the long-standing NUWSS, under the liberal, gradualist leadership of Millicent Fawcett, had rapidly grown in size. Its composition had become somewhat more working class, benefitting from tireless organising by working class women in the trade union movement, particularly in Northern industrial towns. As the NUWSS grew impatient with its natural ally, the Liberal Party, they took the opportunity to pivot towards the Labour Party, who by that point were ready to support some form of women’s suffrage, confirmed by a TUC resolution in 1913. (From Liberal to Labour With Women's Suffrage: The Story of Catherine Marshall, Jo Vellacott, p299-301) Into a space vacated by the WSPU, a suffrage-workers movement realignment fell back into place, though the young Labour Party remained a small player when it came to Parliamentary arithmetic.
Sylvia remained in the WSPU until she was expelled in 1914. The political differences she had with her sister and mother were profound and were to grow more so as they eventually went their separate ways, remaining estranged for the rest of their lives. The direction of the WSPU mirrored, in many ways, that of the US suffrage movement. The organisation was elitist and hierarchical, dominated by Christabel Pankhurst, with
Whilst “New Unionism” brought more women into organised labour, 90% of unionised workers were still men by 1914. The direct enmity between middle class women reformers and men of the workers movement was, however, increasingly challenged by the emerging voices of working class/socialist women who were also suffragists. Groups such as the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage had a more working class composition than most other suffrage societies. These were mostly women factory workers, organised within their trade unions, often involved in the Women’s Trade Union League. They supported union and party representatives who advocated women getting the vote. Women textile workers from Northern England presented a petition to Parliament containing over 37,000 signatures demanding women’s right to vote. Mary Davis highlights the role played by working class women suffragists:
“In a remarkable refutation of the class prejudices of the established suffrage societies and the gender-blind myopia of the labour movement, these ‘radical suffragists’ (notably Eva Gore-Booth, Sarah Reddish, Sarah Dickenson, Selina Cooper and others), consciously set about the task of forging an alliance between feminism and socialism.” (Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Davis, p18) The ILP committed to women’s suffrage from 1905 but the Labour Party conference in 1907 came out against it. All ties between the WSPU and the workers movement were cut. The WSPU (and the radical feminist) critique of patriarchy made the oppression of all women identical, while representing this identity through their own experiences, upon which all other experiences were measured. This dependence on a skewed moral reasoning and comparativism, had other effects. Middle class suffragettes also projected the idea of patriarchy onto male labour – particularly the threat of racialised male labour, rather than that of bourgeois men. This not only helped ratify the authority of patriarchal male union representatives over labour, as a motley crew, requiring moral discipline and form, but completely obscured the agency of women workers, whom they proceeded to represent negatively, as women needing moral rehabilitation. Similar attitudes emerged in the 70s. Domestic violence against women was essentialised to working class men, even as many middle class institutions in Labour and social movements and wider society, were harbouring their own abusers. Working class women and victims of domestic abuse were related to as helpless victims, requiring the aid of middle class women. Some middle class Marxist men revelled in the caricature of the macho, woman-beating, working man, as a sign of working class authenticity. (Alex: My mum's point about this. Have to think about how to cite it. There will be writing about it i'm sure. Chris harman, in particular, she noted. Lots of New Left men were womanisers, misogynists, and lots of them openly bragging about "slapping" women around.)
From Suffragette to Fascist
Divergent paths underline that the demand for suffrage alone was no clear indicator of political content. Emmeline and Christabel settled on a conservative imperialism. The horizon of their ambitions became the enfranchisement of women like them. In the end, they envisioned little change to women’s roles in society, not to mention the lives of women colonised and exploited across the Empire. A small number of ex-Suffragettes sought the lost fellowship they remembered, as well as a promise of ultra-nationalist renewal, in the form of Oswald Mosley’s fascists. Formerly a Tory MP turned proto-Keynesian employment minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government, Mosley quickly moved from a failed venture called the New Party, by launching, in 1932, what would become the largest fascist party in British history.
Canadian-born Mary Richardson committed arson, set off explosives and destroyed works of art in service of the Suffragette cause, serving over three years in prison for her crimes. By middle age, Richardson had been active in the Labour Party and the ILP, repeatedly standing as a parliamentary candidate for Labour as late as 1931. Then she joined Oswald Mosley’s BUF in 1933, citing “its policy of imperialism and action combined with discipline” (Julie Gottlieb, p151) as her reasons for joining. Richardson soon became Chief Organiser of its Women’s Section (Women made up approximately a quarter of the total membership.) Richardson explained in a public correspondence between herself and Sylvia in 1934 that she "was first attracted to the Blackshirts because [she] saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service and the ability to serve which [she] had known in the suffragette movement." (Gottlieb, p164) Having ascended to a position of power and established a National Club for fascist women, Richardson had also feuded with Mosley’s mother, a powerful figure in the party, and had left by 1935, expelled for challenging the BUF’s unequal pay structure.
The primary fascist vision for womanhood was as “mothers of the race” and wombs for the state, though the BUF liked to play up its claims to inheriting the Suffragette tradition. Footnote: The legacy of the Suffragettes - and the definition of feminism itself - became a battleground, claimed by its veterans who had scattered themselves across the political spectrum. The international socialism of Sylvia, the Conservative imperialism of her mother and sister, and the fascism of BUF women all laid claim to the legacy of a movement based on women’s autonomy, self-activity and direct action to bring about a change in women’s legal and political status that, once enacted, they were sure would not be reversed. Though women in Britain were enfranchised, veterans of the movement to secure this right shared a sense of anti-climax. Many felt let down by the state and disillusioned by the next generation of women inheriting rights that were so fiercely fought for.
Each Suffragette-turned-fascist had attempted to integrate into the existing system they had previously put their bodies on the line to oppose. They stood unsuccessfully for each of the main parties: Richardson for Labour, Allen for the Liberals and Elam for the Tories. In some ways, Elam, Allen and Richardson’s resentful (Feminine Fascism, Julie V. Gottlieb, p155-156), and highly racist, lashing out following political defeats are comparable to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s path in the years following the disintegration of the AERA. A similar personal trajectory can also be noted on the British Far Right today. Anne Marie Waters, founder of the “For Britain” party, following her lost leadership campaign in UKIP, is an interesting case. A Dublin-born lesbian, Waters is somewhat reminiscent of our suffragettes-turned-fascists in that she had twice previously sought (and twice failed) to gain selection as a Labour Party parliamentary candidate before turning towards a more hardened Islamophobic politics.
At least three WSPU members’ trajectories show quite how wildly the paths out of women’s suffragism could diverge. Canadian-born Mary Richardson, who committed arson, set off explosives and destroyed works of art in service of the Suffragette cause, served over three years in prison for her crimes. By middle age, Richardson had been active in the Labour Party and the ILP, repeatedly standing as a parliamentary candidate for Labour as late as 1931. Then she joined Oswald Mosley’s BUF in 1933, citing “its policy of imperialism and action combined with discipline” as her reasons for joining. Richardson soon became Chief Organiser of its Women’s Section. The Women’s Section had been established in March 1933 and, for a short time, published its own fortnightly newspaper, The Woman Fascist. However, the autonomy of the Women’s Section quickly waned and came under the tightening control of the leadership. Over the course of the 1930s leading women figures in the party became more and more devoted to Mosley’s leadership cult as “moderates” left and the BUF further embraced National Socialism. BUF women were every bit as racist as the men. A virulent antisemitism was effectively synthesised through discourses on “women’s issues.” The figure of the dominating and predatory Jew (always gendered as male), was often depicted as either the unscrupulous employer of British women or a demonic perpetrator of sex assaults and sex traffic, and purveyor of pornography. The party’s antisemitic propaganda commonly cast Jewish men as a particular threat to the nation’s women. Women made up approximately a quarter of the total membership. The BUF maintained a sizable number of women members throughout its existence. This period saw an extensive production of policy, speeches, rhetoric, party publications and propaganda outlining the party’s ideas about the role of women, the structure of the family and sexual propriety in the organisation and in a future fascist Britain. There was a clear gender hierarchy and an essentialising ideology to determine what kind of tasks women and men were good at or naturally suited to. This applied to work within the family, the party and in a future fascist society.
The party saw “women’s work” as generally being limited to caring and nurturing jobs like teaching and midwifery. Such gendering of women’s work, and of women workers as potentially damaging to masculinity, was hardly unique to fascist ideologues either then or in the century since. According to BUF doctrine, if women were to reach leadership positions in a fascist Britain, it should only be to lead other women. The ideal for the party was a highly developed economy with full employment of the male citizenry and a sufficient “family wage” structure allowing the vast majority of women to remain in their “natural” domestic sphere.
The BUF sought to politicise “women’s sphere” alongside male rule over politics, war and the family. They wanted to emphasise, rather than invisibilise, domestic work, claiming it represented women’s value to the state and to fascist life. Theirs was a credo of ‘separate but equal’ as part of a unified whole. As Mosley put it in his manifesto, The Greater Britain, “we want men who are men and women who are women.” (The Greater Britain, Oswald Mosley, p54) A 1934 article in the party publication Blackshirt proclaimed: “Fascism sees women as complementary and equal to man, standing beside him in no less honourable a fight, living a no less noble life, achieving in domesticity things parallel and of equal importance with man.” (quoted in Feminine Fascism, Julie V. Gottlieb, p102) Women’s involvement in the far right was not new, indeed the first fascist group in British history was founded by a woman. The British Fascisti was set up by Rotha Lintorn-Orman in 1923, a young woman from a wealthy family inspired by vitriolic anti-communism.
Into this political firestorm of economic depression, mass unemployment and postwar resentment would eventually step the British Union of Fascists (BUF)
Whilst BUF policy was undoubtedly constructed by a majority male leadership, it would be wrong to characterise the women fascists of the BUF as downtrodden bystanders or an irrelevant minority. It would also be wrong to suggest that they were any less passionate in their fascist beliefs as compared to their male comrades. There was little direct exclusion of women members from party functions. Women were involved in most activities that the party carried out: marching, stewarding, public speaking, fundraising, selling newspapers and fighting. There was a Women’s Defence Force, who were trained in both ju-jitsu and first aid and involved in the constant street battles with Jews, Communists, and others.
BUF women also stood as election candidates. Fascist women, like the Women of the KKK, were seen as highly effective assets when it came to recruiting new members to the party. BUF women were to the fore when it came to electioneering and presenting a ‘softer’ face of the fascist movement. A party publication, The Fascist Week, explained in 1933: “Fascism in Britain knows that its women members go a long way to help the cause; and that it is a woman’s influence that has converted many male members.” Julie Gottlieb agrees: “The feminine presence on the door-steps of the nation went some way towards disarming public apprehensions of BUF hooliganism and disorderliness...women were to act as the publicists, the temptresses, and the vendors of fascism to a British market suspicious of fascism’s machismo and masculine aggression.” (Feminine Fascism, Julie V. Gottlieb, p68, p70 and p94)
The BUF proudly trumpeted the fact that they stood more women candidates than the other parties (10% in 1935 election compared to Tories 3.2%, Labour 6.3%, Liberals 6.8%) Though these parties put up more candidates in total. As Mosley said: “We have a higher percentage of women candidates than any other party in this country and they play a part of basic equality. We are pledged to complete sex equality. The German attitude towards women has always been different from the British, and my movement has been largely built up by the fanaticism of women; they hold ideals with tremendous passion. Without the women I could not have got a quarter of the way.” (quoted in Feminine Fascism, Julie V. Gottlieb, p43)
There was an even stronger dependence on women’s involvement in the party in its later years as World War Two began and male Blackshirts began to be drafted or interned. Women members took on responsibility for the party’s “peace campaign” - largely a front for recruitment, especially of women disillusioned by war and to demoralise a war effort the BUF opposed. The party was officially proscribed in 1940 while most of its leading members were interned, including several women.
BUF women were sexualised by the press and within party culture though the sexual culture of British fascism was highly ambiguous, cycling between the sexual objectification of women and the conscious desexualisation of them. Fascist women were ordinarily valued internally for their physical health, beauty and strong characters, for qualities of firmness as well as maternal nurturing. Sexualisation of women Blackshirts by the mainstream newspapers. “The Blackshirt movement is essentially one of youth. The women’s sections are adding - Beauty. The women and girls of Britain are flocking to the movement. Many of them are strikingly beautiful.” ‘Beauty joins the Blackshirts,’ Sunday Dispatch, 29 May 1934.
For British fascist women the scapegoat was Jews and an emasculated and decadent liberal democracy, more often than not associated with Jewish manipulation. The BUF used the term "Financial Democracy" as an antisemitic dogwhistle for the corrupted national state.
Like we saw with the WKKK, a culture of social movement organising expanded into a party politics of everyday life. The organisation of party structures and social life was used to cement gender roles, to spread and harden racial hatred. Official BUF weddings were held between members, happy couples consecrating their vows before party and leader. And whilst the KKK bonded through their enjoyment of racist blackface performance, the BUF enjoyed “Jazz Without Jews” played by the “Aryan Dance Band.” (Feminine Fascism, Julie V. Gottlieb, footnote 101, ch2)
The BUF liked to publicise its ex-Suffragettes as strong militant women with a role in society, even if fascism promised to do away with liberal democracy and voting rights entirely.
The fascist ex-Suffragettes were vocally scathing about political paths taken by other suffragists following enfranchisement. They grew scathing of parliamentary democracy altogether. While the “feminine fascists” would ultimately decide that both the vote and liberal democracy itself should be eschewed for the dictatorial rule of fascism and the corporate state, many would continue to identify strongly with the legacy of the Suffragettes and to believe that women should play an active role in politics.
“In some sense, the ex-suffragette fascists still regarded themselves as feminists. However, they had become detached from the feminist movement which, like most fascists, they regarded as a symptom of a degraded political system.” (Martin Pugh, Slate). In keeping with past white women’s movements, women “of the race” were seen by the BUF as guardians of morality and respectability. Women party members led the BUF’s opposition to pornography, prostitution and what they saw as the loose morals and sexual perversion of modern society, something usually attributed to Jewish/Communist influence. The family unit was seen as the domain of the fascist woman. It stood as microcosm of the perfectible fascist state. White British women, “Mothers of the Empire or Britannia’s daughters” at the height of imperium, were to British fascism the “gatekeepers of the national community” (Feminine Fascism, Julie V. Gottlieb, p106) - key to the survival and growth of the race. “it was not just as mothers that British women performed a central role in maintaining the Empire: the ideology of white womanhood, structured by class and race, embraced women in all their familial roles. Whether as Mothers of the Empire or Britannia’s Daughters, women were able to symbolize the idea of moral strength that bound the great imperial family together. In their name, men could defend that family in the same spirit as they would defend their own wives, daughters or sisters if they were under attack.” (Beyond The Pale, Vron Ware, p162) Fascist women were also enlisted in a priority struggle for the fascist project: the regeneration of British masculinity and the flourishing of a warrior society. British manhood was seen to have been emasculated by feminism, moralism and immigration. Like the Second KKK, BUF ideology chose to deny the importance of class divisions in society. Unity was to be found in racial purity and service to the state.
"From a psychological perspective, to varying degrees of intensity, each believed that she was owed more than she had received for her dedication to the women’s suffrage struggle, and that this inheritance had remained wanting. In their ultimate rejection of liberal democracy, each in her political life personified the disillusionment and the disappointed hopes of politicised women in post-suffrage Britain.” Gottlieb on Elam, Allen and Richardson - (Feminine Fascism, Julie V. Gottlieb, p155-156)
...as it was for Britain’s mothers and daughters of the Empire, to the white race and its futurity. At this moment of imperial crescendo, everyone beneath, was subject to the most violently racist, patriarchal, classist reductions. Vron Ware shows us the importance of the discourse of family and “race” in the ideology of the British Empire and the role of British feminism within it.
Sarah Champion, Labour MP and “Asian Grooming Gangs” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306396819895727
Women Workers/Socialists
Women’s involvement in the labour movement in Britain had actually been stronger earlier in the 19th century. Women were more active in the strikes, riots and movements of early industrialisation, under the banners of Chartism, Owenism, abolitionism and beyond. By the time of Chartism’s decline, the male-dominated trade union movement had become more solidly wedded to an ideal of gendered spheres. The aspiration to be a male breadwinner earning a “family wage” took hold, even if that was never the reality for the majority of working class women in much of the industrial period. It was considered shameful to many working men if their wife also had to work. A gendered division of labour was maintained by both employers and male craft unions and guilds that excluded women, leaving a situation in which women were encouraged not to work. If they wanted to or had to work, they were limited to certain forms of labour on the lowest pay, invariably labelled “low-skilled.”
Henry Broadhurst, general secretary of the TUC, said at the 1875 congress that the target of the trade union movement was “to bring about a condition...where wives and daughters would be in their proper sphere at home.” (TUC Congress Report 1875, p.14) Women factory workers were ultimately viewed as lower paid competition, but of course they were kept lower paid by the organised male workforce refusing to open up unions and apprenticeships to women. As Louise Raw describes, “during this period working-class men effectively colluded with the bourgeoisie, seeing male solidarity as more important than their class identity.” (Striking A Light, Louise Raw, p13).Broadhurst, like many other TUC leaders over the decades, ascended the trade union bureaucracy into a political career. He was Under-Secretary in the Home Office in the mid-1880s amidst police crackdowns against the growth of new socialist parties and the Irish freedom struggle.(Eleanor Marx: A Biography, Yvonne Kapp, p318)
Groups such as the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage were composed mostly of women factory workers, organised within their trade unions, often involved in the Women’s Trade Union League. They supported union and party representatives who advocated women getting the vote. Women textile workers from Northern England presented a petition to Parliament containing over 37,000 signatures demanding women’s right to vote.
Montefiore was a member of both the Social Democratic Federation and the British Socialist Party and had long-running battles with socialist misogynists like Belfort Bax and H. M. Hyndman. She held public debates on feminism and women’s suffrage with Bax and others in the pages of socialist newspapers and journals. But at the same time, Montefiore also kept a distance from the suffragism by and for middle class women. “never more than at the present time did we need a straight and sincere lead on the part of Socialist women on this subject; because an insincere use was being made of the principle at the present moments by societies which, if they could get votes for propertied women, would light bonfires from one end of England to the other, and say they had won the enfranchisement of women.” (Dora Montefiore, Justice, November 9 1912) Groups such as the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage had a more working class composition than most other suffrage societies. These were mostly women factory workers, organised within their trade unions, often involved in the Women’s Trade Union League. They supported union and party representatives who advocated women getting the vote. Women textile workers from Northern England presented a petition to Parliament containing over 37,000 signatures demanding women’s right to vote. Mary Davis highlights the role played by working class women suffragists:
“In a remarkable refutation of the class prejudices of the established suffrage societies and the gender-blind myopia of the labour movement, these ‘radical suffragists’ (notably Eva Gore-Booth, Sarah Reddish, Sarah Dickenson, Selina Cooper and others), consciously set about the task of forging an alliance between feminism and socialism.” (Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Davis, p18)
Mary Macarthur, organiser with the Women’s Trade Union League, said of the women’s suffrage movement: “We have… a tremendous suffrage movement in England, but unfortunately the supporters of that movement are mainly middle-class, leisured women. They are asking for the suffrage on a limited basis, a basis that would not enfranchise the women we represent. If the bill were passed, not 5% of the women we represent - 200,000 women - would get the vote.” (quoted in Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism, Barbara Winslow, p16) The counter demand of the workers movement, including the new Labour Party, was for “adult suffrage,” that is universal suffrage of the citizenry. The two demands were at loggerheads. The enmity between middle class suffragists and men of the workers movement would increasingly be challenged by the emerging voices of working class/socialist women who were also suffragists. The socialist feminist and suffragist, Dora Montefiore, was involved in socialist and communist organisations in both Britain and Australia. Montefiore, herself born into privilege, wrote and spoke in advocacy of women’s rights as part of the overall struggle against capitalism. She commented on the bind faced by her and other socialist women in favour of adult suffrage: “Adult Suffragists are in a curious position, they have one day in the week to fight reactionary women and another day to make a stand against apathetic and hostile Socialist men.” (Dora Montefiore, Justice, May 8 1909)
The Matchwomen’s Strike
Louise Raw’s study of the strike explains some of the context of how gender was being constructed at the time:
“In the matchwomen’s story issues of class cannot be separated from those of gender. Their strike took place against the background of extreme conflict in the workplace, and it has been argued that the effects of this conflict both contributed to the strikers’ exploitation and motivation, and coloured contemporary and historical accounts of their actions...
...The ‘return’ of women to the domestic sphere, whether or not they had ever exclusively inhabited it in the first place in reality, was being offered as a palliative for all manner of nineteenth-century ills often laid at the door of the working poor, from the lack of ‘social purity’ to insobriety, neglect of children, and the overall degeneration of the race. A powerful consensus had united behind the banner of ‘domestic ideology’, uniting disparate groups whose concern with the conduct of these women’s lives arose from vastly different motives.”
Louise Raw argues that “New Unionism,” though marking a brief upsurge in class struggle before a backlash from capital and state, marked tangible progress for women within the workers movement.
“New Unionism was a beginning rather than an end for women trade unionists: they would face - and indeed continue to face - a long battle for true equality and representation within the movement. It was, however, their first significant advance since the 1840s, and membership among women grew steadily from 50,000 in 1888 to 432,000 in 1913.” (Striking a Light, Louise Raw, p170)
What Raw fails to acknowledge is the important context of a racialising British nationalism that characterised so much of the New Unionism and as a result the important role of the Jewish working class of the East End is absent from view. As we shall see later, whilst many workers of Irish descent became accepted and integrated into the workers movement through the struggles of New Unionism, other “Racialized Outsiders”, as Satnam Virdee terms them, could not escape racial exclusion from a workers movement which overwhelmingly agitated for immigration controls against Britain’s working class Jewish population. Indeed, that same year of 1888 in the East End there was street violence against Jewish residents, being collectively punished for their supposed connection to the Jack the Ripper killings. (William Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, p73)
A useful way for us to look back at the contradictions of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain is by contrasting the political lives and the strategic and ideological parting of ways within the premier family of the movement: the Pankhursts. While mother Emmeline and older sister Christabel followed many of the paths we’ve seen taken by the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
Black Feminism
At around the same time as Hazel Carby asked what do you mean we, a poem called ‘What Chou Mean We, White Girl?’ by Lorraine Bethel, a member of the Combahee River Collective, was gaining popularity in the US movement.
“We came mainly out of Black organisations. Some had left and some were still there, but on the whole the organisations we came from were in the process of disintegrating. There were a lot of charges and counter-charges, which I felt had nothing to do with me or my struggle. I had begun to meet in the previous months with other Black women in the caucus meetings. Straight away we got accused of ‘splitting the movement’, of weakening organisations which were already on the way out. The brothers gave us a hard time over that. Some sisters felt very strongly that we should stick it out within the organisations and try to strengthen the women’s position within them. But for most of us, setting up an autonomous group for Black women was really necessary at the time.”
Also addressed is the agency of Black women organisers in relation to the white feminist movement. It wasn’t just within the power of the dominant grouping - white middle class women - to exclude or sideline the concerns of a racialised minority within the nation. Black feminists rejected a movement that didn’t address or prioritise the reality of their lives. Maintaining a global, anti-imperialist perspective was a grounding feature of a developing Black feminist praxis:
“We didn’t want to become part of the white women’s movement. We felt they had different priorities to us. At that time, for example, abortion was the number one issue, and groups like Wages For Housework were making a lot of noise, too. These were hardly burning issues for us - in fact they seemed like middle-class preoccupations. To begin with, abortion wasn’t something we had any problems getting as Black women - it was the very reverse for us! And as for wages for housework, we were more interested in getting properly paid for the work we were doing outside the home as nightcleaners and in campaigning for more childcare facilities for Black women workers.”
Despite evident tensions around the Wages for Housework campaign, Marxist feminist critiques were able to differentiate how gendered and racialised divisions of labour were organised around value production: including both value-productive work and reproductive work not directly mediated by the market, as comprehensive of capitalist accumulation. The Combahee River Collective, OWAAD and others were more specifically reconsidering the patriarchal limits of Black Power and the whiteness or “colour blindness” in the feminist movement. Their work criticised social movements that monopolised categories such as ‘Black’ and ‘woman’ without considering the limitations of their universalisation. What is clear from this history is that the concept of "identity politics" - in the context of the time - was representative of a rich and crucial political development that challenged previous orthodoxies in mainstream feminism as well as socialist, communist and liberation politics.
WLM
The WLM in Britain developed in the 1960s out of both the oppression women faced in local contexts and inspiration from the movement’s take-off in the US. It takes form within, alongside and in reaction to the tectonic tumults brought about by Black movements, the New Left, anti-war and anti-imperialist movements. Like their forebears of previous generations, a few women travelled back and forth between British and US movements ensuring the continuation of that exchange. There was a considerable current of political and organisational exchange through much of the 19th century and the early 20th between social movements. A perpetual motion of speaking tours by leading figures and passionate campaigners criss-crossed the Atlantic. Strong alliances and friendships were forged through the campaigns to abolish slavery, the fight for women’s rights, and the struggle to put an end to Southern lynching. American figures we’ve spoken of like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton made several trips to Britain in their lives.
relevant to white feminists specifically who were much more comfortable targeting fascism rather than racism, the state, contemporary Britain. White racism on the Left came from uninterrogated nationalist liberal/conservative ideologies of ‘race’ and imperialism. Many women subscribed to liberal “colourblind” arguments, regardless of which part of the movement they were in.
Many would come to look back on the WLM as being characterised by pain and bitter discord. Such strength of feeling can partly be put down to the care and investment so many thousands of women put into a movement which had formed them, leaving participants differently marked, impacting the trajectories of their personal and political lives. If the movement did divide over issues of “identity” and difference, however, it did so because majority groupings within it were unwilling or unable to transform the movement to meet the needs and lived realities of other women. It splintered and fractured, as all movements do, as they grow, and previously ignored voices become raised and force their way into history.
https://literariness.org/2017/10/26/identity-politics-the-politics-of-identity/
Transphobia
The HRC in the US tracks violence against trans people, providing regular reports. In December 2020 they wrote:
"Since 2013, HRC and other advocates have tracked more than 200 cases of anti-transgender fatal violence across more than 30 states and nearly 110 cities nationwide. Although each case is unique inits tragic circumstances,we know this epidemic disproportionately impacts trans women of color, who comprise approximately 4 in 5 of all anti-transgender homicides."
Bindel continues: "they're not feminists, i mean they're really not feminists. I mean we can have this discussion forever about whether Margaret Thatcher was a feminist, whether Beyonce is a feminist, whether Katie Price is a feminist. They may be strong women, they may be vocal, they may have a vagina, or they may not, but they are not feminists. Every other social/political movement has a basis, has a set of principles and beliefs, right, the working class movement does, the anti-racist movement does, and feminism does. And it is the one social political movement that everybody seems to think they can re-write and own, and actually it is about overthrowing the oppression that women face from patriarchy, from men, from male supremacy, whatever way you want to say it. These dickheads, these keyboard warriors, these identifarians, are not feminists. They are whingeing narcissists. And they think that they can identify as feminists because actually we are quite a nice movement, we tend not to chuck the nutters out, right, we tend to embrace them. This is the problem with some of the Left." (continued) Man in the audience counters that personal identifications have always informed political grievances and movements. "Identity politics when properly constructed, because we're all talking about the loony, outer, bits of it, which make easy targets for us all, easy peasy, identity politics can and do work." He challenges Bindel that Gay Liberation and Women's Liberation have benefited each of them and that she can't just "kick [identity politics] to the side."
Bindel replies that what was good about the movements of the 70s and 80s was "political activism" not identity politics. "Identity politics is something different, I think. It's about 'I am therefore I am. And it is self-serving narcissism. But political activism to end oppression of particular groups is totally necessary." The way Bindel relates the “1st wave” of “Identity Politics” to the “narcissism” of the “2nd wave” suggests a universal subject, “women”, fractured by an errant and self-seeking ideological subject. This periodisation of fracture is reformulated again by socialists that suspect “identity politics” came after organised labour and had some role in breaking with it.
The British reaction against “Gender Ideology” best exemplifies the political triangulation of “identity politics'' – the use of a leftwing theory to supply the anti-establishment gesture required of a conspiratorial premise. Opposition to “gender ideology” expands the reactionary gestures of 70s and 80s women's movements, while caricaturing the rest of this movement wave as ”divisive” “identity politics” and putting the actual “debates” in a memory hole. The “identitarian left” is caricatured as both apolitical and dangerous, while a classical adoption of liberal virtues of “free speech” shape a romantic homology between British “Gender Critical feminists” and the Suffragettes.This romancing of the Suffragettes has been a regular routine for the respectable liberal centrist since at least the 90s. Transphobia has finally given this stock image “cause” after years of reactionary politicians wearing Suffragette colours at parades and event days in parliament. Institutions such as Women’s Place UK work within the unions and the contemporary Labour Party to lobby and push back on legislation for Trans people from the “left” of the two-party system. Corbynism did not usher a break with this tendency. There were statements in support of Trans people but never any concerted push back against the development of this “gender critical” caucus within the party. The homology with First Wave suffragism is in this sense, not inaccurate. An uncritical valorisation of British Suffragism as Stage One of the progressive movements of women, undergirds the softer pastorals of British transphobia. The idea of a neat and even progress of women's rights replays again a “stages '' view of history, which cannot recognise the struggles of trans people at any stage of “the fight for hard won women's rights” and pits trans activism as an enemy formation threatening to roll them back.
In 2017, Donald Trump was hosted by anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council, at its annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC. As Hélène Barthélemy of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, reports, this is a “prime networking event for the Christian right where anti-LGBT and anti-Muslim rhetoric is rife.” The report focuses on the strategic thinking organising the keynote speeches of attendees at the summit. Meg Kilgannon, executive director of Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County, drew on her own experiences fighting school boards to prevent LGBT education becoming part of curriculum considerations. Kiligannon argued that targeting LGBT movements as a whole was not working, but targeting Trans people has far more room for maneuver. Separating the “T” from the “LGB”, as she explains, provides the right with a better strategic footing: "Explain that gender identity rights only come at the expense of others: women, sexual assault survivors, female athletes forced to compete against men and boys, ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty, economically challenged children who face many barriers to educational success and don’t need another level of chaos in their lives, children with anxiety disorders and the list goes on and on and on."
For Kilgannon, an example of effective coalition building includes the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC), a group that unites religious and non-religious women to oppose transgender rights. The co-founders of the group are sexual assault survivor Kaeley Triller Haver and lesbian activist and radical feminist Miriam Ben-Shalom, who was discharged from the U.S. Army for declaring herself a lesbian in 1976. Killigan also cautions against the tabloid model of conservative news media. She advises her attendees to play nice and “never attack LGBT or trans people” directly. Instead use leading questions that can more successfully split the LGB from the T. Killigan knows that the right can leverage considerable media power, but to succeed, they will have to leverage the liberal media format as well. If anti-LGBT aguments can be leveraged “out of concern” for other minorities, then the right is no longer carrying the stigma of white supremacist reaction. If the need for a ”transgender debate” can be advanced “out of concern” for other minorities, those who resist having their existence debated, can be related to as aggressive, bullying other minorities, and violating free speech. Thirdly, Killigan advises her attendees to “not approach the topic of gender identity with religious arguments”, but to create wedge issues around ““biology and reason.”
and Phoenix reduce to leftist "keyboard warriors" - products of postmodern deconstruction; a new strain of saboteurs, who are actively fighting to unwind the struggles of feminists like herself by gesturing or “performing” any “identity that they like”. Cold transphobes leading “gender critical” research networks in one space
The Southern Poverty Law reporter, Barthelemy, interprets the speech, saying, “The list could almost read like a manifesto for intersectionality, if it weren’t for its exclusion of some key groups, most notably transgender people themselves.” Barthelemy clearly recognises “intersectionality” as a mode of analysis that relates different forms of oppression, but in effect, reproduces a caricature of it by making this analogy. Is the right really using a kind of adapted “intersectionality” framework to exclude Trans people, or is the right following a more conventional path: pitting gender, race, and class divisions, to forward violent exclusionary goals? We will come back to this question. The importance of the Barthelemy report is that it evidences more complex coalition building than, arguably, the right had ever achieved in the past:
Conservative movements always used “free speech” and other “democratic virtues” to get their views heard. What is different here is the observation that the right have allies in this struggle across the political spectrum. The liberal framing of a so called “transgender debate” has produced the space for triangulation. Writer and co-editor of Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson, has written on how this US conservative right strategy of “pitting” identity fractions was reproduced again by a British liberal press:
the Guardian has opted to uncritically reproduce the key claim of this secular/religious anti-trans alliance: that the debate around transgender recognition is a case ‘where rights collide’ (as the title has it), with trans women and cis women pitted directly against each other.
The extent to which the Guardian “opt” for transphobia is one potential question worth examining here. Is the Guardian “opting” to be transphobic, or is transphobia implicit to a debating form that “pits” viewpoints in order for readers to explore them? The editors seem to internalise the rhetorical form of transphobia as the received terms of the debate. At the same time, they can claim to be following through on the “complexity” of the legal contestation. The Gender Recognition Act contests the legal form given to the the sex binary and allows self-identitifcation of gender. This will apply to all women. Though, as Gleeson argues, “trans women” are not the only people this change in the law will apply. As a British intersex woman, Gleeson argues the gender Recognition act does not go far enough. “Not all intersex variations are immediately obvious at birth. But infants born with those that are obvious run the risk of being given “corrective” surgeries.” There is not enough in the Gender Recognition Act to protect against “corrective” surgeries on children. “The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 outlaws all female genital cutting, with up to a 14-year jail sentence, but these laws can go unenforced in the case of intersex infants (even those assigned female).” This institutional relation to mutilation has been erased by a mainstream press, which associates the risk of “mutilation” with young people who choose transition. Gleeson also highlights the specific situation of Trans men, “among the main beneficiaries of any reform”, which the Guardian editorial bracketed as ”less controversial”. The concrete experiences of people transitioning are various, though a qualitative report into the conditions of so many people, contradicts the transphobic frame of the debate – “trans women” / “women” – and the “pit” the Guardian constructs for this opposition.
The Guardian opts for transphobia, because the editors are minded to think this way. Guardian workers have reported transphobic senior employees and writers within the institution. At the same time the “debating” form of the news media follows the colonial form of identification given to the liberal form of the state. The ideological aspect of this “debating” form is not only the points of view that are selected, but the logic of opinions itself. The logic of opinions is formed through a limited public sphere and absolutism of free speech. If someone refuses a debate on campus, or organises with other students to “no platform” a debate, because the speaker is racist or transphobic, they have spoken out of turn, by refusing to let others speak. This tautology maintains the setting of speech and this setting is organised through the power and leverage of institutions. Supportive campaigns for Trans rights organised through NGOs must work within this setting. They are limited by the inauthentic “voice” pertaining to a “pitting” of opinions. The public sphere separates one issue from others, and all issues from the qualitative concrete conditions they exist within. This encourages an inauthentic frame of debate for every “issue” and this inauthenticity is leveraged by the right to represent protest as inauthentic, or more, manipulative and gerrymandering. This trivialisation effect is mediated through talking points that are designed to be trivial. When the “transgender debate” as such was targeted by Stonewall as the vehicle for “transphobia” and one they would no longer facilitate, they crossed the rubicon of abstract equality. They were correct, the formalisation of a “transgender debate” supposed a debatable existence. At the same time the organisation had transcended formal equality by identifying the fallacy of equality under these conditions. The right had found a key to describing the “authoritarianism” of the trans activists, accelerating the roll back of what progress had been made. Trans people are not only under attack by a chauvinist and scheming far and religious right, or a liberal commentariat, they are subject to the formal contradictions of abstract equality, expressed in ferocious attacks on their existence.
We can see this exemplified in the case of a British woman, Maya Forstater, who went to an employment tribunal after being fired by an international development NGO for transphobia. It is noteworthy that in the case of Forstater her transphobia was picked up by the Washington office, and reported to the British. Forstater took her case to the High Court and won. At one point in Forstater’s case, it was raised whether her views of “women” and “sex” could qualify as a “philosophical belief” under the 2010 Equality Act – a defence that Forstater later mocked. Her beliefs did not come to her through philosophy, despite the support of Kathleen Stock and other philosophers of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Executive Committee, Forstater argued, they came to her, “by the same mechanism that sex itself does. We are descendants of a long and unbroken line of sexually reproducing ancestors.” Women are “hardwired by a billion years of evolution.”
Forstater chides philosophers, even her own supporters, who seek a philosophical basis for “gender critical” viewpoints, and dismisses how theories of “race” factor into it: “Race is skin deep; a million years old, to sex’s billion.” While there are some residues of 70s and 80s theories of patriarchy in this dismissal, especially the centring of patriarchy as the only meaningful division, the way Forstater frames her theory of sex and society as evolutional, rather than social and political, has more in common with nineteenth century biogical essentialism and liberal racism. The “gametes definiton” of sex, Forstater argues, “relates to the fundamental experience of being a woman or a man. Your mother was a woman. Every mother ever was a woman. People who have ever worried about getting pregnant or not getting pregnant, or their ability to get pregnant are woman.” The centring of the reproduction of the human race, for Forstater, identifies what is essential about sex. The essential “mission” of heteronormative society – one that has long been used to persecute trans and queer people – is blandly restated. Forstater rounds the circle: “People who has [sic] ever worried about getting someone pregnant or not getting them pregnant, or their ability to do so are men.” This definition of sex makes “the ability to get pregnant” fundamental to the identity of the sexes. Less an evolutionary inevitability than a Victorian assumption and a moral experiment British colonial officers imposed on the colonies, along with penal codes punishing “unnatural offences” between men or between women. The colonial binary of the sexes supplanted a range of indigenous forms of sexuality and gender. This gave order to occupied societies, regulating and persecuting those who defiled this moral standard (including colonial officers themselves), before returning back to the homeland and informing new statutes in law and moral codes at the heart of empire.
“There is no way to switch between these two categories,” Forstater blithely concludes. “(Very occasionally people are misdiagnosed at birth.) https://hiyamaya.net/2021/01/11/philosophy-and-the-gender-debates/#more-3757
Forstater worked as a researcher in an international development think tank, facing outward to ex-colonial countries she was tasked with analysing. Many of these countries have laws outlawing homsexuality and trans people that directly extend from British colonial imposition. Her views are anchored in an evolutionary histogram, like the “anglo-saxonism” of the Colston defenders in Chapter One, which cannot – or will not – account for the colonial construction of race or gender. The contradiction of “gender critical” transphobic feminism is that it has no coherent theory of sex but a variety of mismatched justifications for claiming strict coherence with the sex-binary. The reasoning shifts and iterates with every challenge, leaving an array of “rebuttals” and “slogans” that seek to better manufacture the “simplicity'' and “self-evidence” of the exclusionary premise. This oscillation between strict adherence to “biological facts” and historically emaciated surety, feeds an insecurity that seems to push people further and further into the “deep time” of the evolutionary principle, towards the kind of “we were put on this earth to procreate” aphorisms of pub bore homophobia, remediated as a moral and philosophical crusade.
What gives coherence to this ideological formation is not a debate, or an exploratory and reflective historicization of “relations of oppression” and “relations of exploitation” as was advanced by the most radical thinkers of the 70s and 80s womens movements, but good old fashioned networking and the good favour of a transphobic press. British transphobia is in large part facilitated through a media-rampart of bourgeois feminism that has multiple reactionary tendencies. This section of the press has helped to progress liberal transphobia from comment pages to the very centre of government. The Forstater case encouraged Liz Truss, Equalities Minister, to advise the government withdraw Stonewall’s employment scheme, which had offered added protections to employees against the discrimination of LGBTQ+ people, in a variety of instituions, including the NHS. The conspiratorial notion that “identity politics”, which in Britain, has been mediated through the dual-spectre of the “trans lobby” and “critical race theory”, was destroying civil liberties, has been the means by which the Tory government has successfully stepped up its destruction of civil liberties, after decades of trying to untie the British state legislature from the last few employment and legal protections offered by Equalities Law. The postwar “free speech” bugles of cold-war rhetoric are re-dreamed through a fantasy of “cancel culture” for a middle class rampart of professionals with networks and parliamentary inroads, who engage “equal rights” as their own issue, and use this as the means to dismantle a framework of new rights absolutely necessary for other people to exist as they wish, to live with basic dignity, and gain added protection from dangers inherent to a hetronormative society
The state is constantly having to adapt so an important function of the state is to create a memory and impression of the state as permanent. The state always has the same problems, especially labour problems. The feeling “I'm going nowhere” is a very common feeling, why is that? This expression applies to the fracturing of time and memory. We can see this in the weird quirks and games being played with history. The essentialism of the category (“truth” “free speech” “class” “women”) motivates discourses attacking “identity politics”– a name for those troubling what is essential. Whereas “identity politics” itself rejected the essentialism of the category. Anywhere there is essentialism, there is also a readymade term for it – a weird little gimmick to weave a polemic around.
Mallory Moore
Moore cautions against exaggerating the power of transphobic “radical feminists,” who she argues “are engaged in something more mundane…putting a commentariat friendly feminist or gay-liberation gloss on defending a set of norms which cut across trans people.”
“TERFs,” writes Moore, “are themselves not the most significant political force in society affecting our lives. They have a very significant presence in the media (thanks in part to their ability to serve as a fig leaf for more conservative interests) and this makes them very difficult in general to pay no attention to.”
Moore offers a distinction between “anti-transexualism” in the 80s, and a new more forthright discourse of “gender ideology” today:
“There have admittedly long been old and often bitter fractures in feminism over how feminists should understand or analyse the ideas and activities of trans people, and particularly trans people in political activity, but the idea of a monolithic Gender Ideology which is not so much about the wider prevailing social ideology of gender but instead addressing trans people as an invading force conquering society and overturning previous defended norms has a more interesting history, and it is in particular this conception (the one that specifically targets trans people as its main focus of fear, anger and frustration) that sets the colloquial idea of Gender Ideology apart from previous radical feminist theories of transsexualism and so on (which were often rooted not in the idea of trans people destablising things too much but instead in the fear that trans people may not destabilise them enough).”
In the 80s, radical feminist theories of “transexualism” claimed that gender-norms were being “reinforced” and maintained by “displays” of femininity, and this remains a “soft” lever for transphobia in Britain. Moore’s point is that the connection to 70s radical feminism does not suffice to explain the projection of “Gender Ideology” as a total threat to civil society – a society radical feminists of the past themselves wished to threaten. This new reaction cycles back further to the imperialist formulation of gender and nation, under the shadow of race science and “civilising” rhetoric.
Moments of Solidarity
In recounting these histories of parallel and intersecting movements on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, it has been necessary to focus on the moments when alliances break down and when solidarities fail, when movements separate and the “identities” produced historically, through power and politics, help to create and perpetuate categories of separation. But that is never the whole story. We want to show the instances of solidarity along the way as well. Not just to give ourselves cheer, though we need it, but because solidarity is a practice, and the knowledge of history and the development of theory are part of any movement’s toolkit to build on this practice.
There were white women who connected their own experience of injustice into true acts of anti-racism that were able to push beyond charity and into solidarity. In 1832, Prudence Crandall was persuaded by a young Black girl, Sarah Harris, to admit her to the school Crandall was principal of in Connecticut. The wealthy white parents told Crandall that Harris had to go, but when Crandall refused, and in an act that became common for much of the next two centuries wherever schools were integrated, the white parents removed their daughters from the school. Crandall chose to reopen as a school for Black girls from across the region. The town of Canterbury, Connecticut turned against Crandall and the school, fearing it would lead to “social equality” and “miscegenation.” Crandall was briefly arrested as was her seventeen year old student, Ann Eliza Hammond. Crandall and her students were barred from buying products in the town’s stores and accosted in the street. A “Black Law” was passed to outlaw the teaching of Black girls from out of state, specifically to get Crandall’s school closed down. When that became tied up in court, locals attacked her home with metal bars and attempted to set it on fire. As Crandall’s home was also where the students were schooled and where they lived, Crandall finally decided to close it down, after eighteen months of her and her students withstanding the town’s insults and violence. (Samuel J. May, "Miss Prudence Crandall and the Canterbury School," Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & co., 1869, p. 39-72. https://web.archive.org/web/20121031133845/http://www.yale.edu/glc/crandall/03.htm)
In Britain, Catherine Impey, a Quaker like Crandall, was heavily involved in campaigning against racism, and published the first anti-racist journal in the country, named “Anti-Caste.” Impey was particularly involved in the fight against lynching in the American South, setting up a solidarity organisation with Ida B. Wells Barnett on one of her visits to Britain. In 1888, an elderly Frederick Douglass sent five dollars to support Impey in the continuation of her work with a note saying: “I think, however, that you are more needed in America than in England.” (from Anne Donlon https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147828170.pdf) Vron Ware points to Impey developing a fuller practice of solidarity over time:
“Catherine Impey, whose views on racism were expressed through her columns in Anti-Caste, was also born into an anti-slavery tradition. However, the changes she made to the masthead of Anti-Caste from 1888 to 1895 revealed that she was more in touch with the aspirations and achievements of black people….the aim of her journal moved from being ‘devoted to the interests of coloured races’ to claiming black peoples’ equal right to ‘protection, personal liberty, equality of opportunity and human fellowship.’ This change reflected a shift from a conventional philanthropic stance, in keeping with her Quaker background, to a more active recognition of the autonomy of black struggles for racial justice.” (Beyond The Pale, Vron Ware, p215)
We’ve seen numerous examples of Black men whose anti-racism work has led them to develop deeper anti-sexist practice, often in advance of other men. Frederick Douglass was a lifelong supporter of women’s rights who never stopped advocating or campaigning for women’s suffrage. indeed Douglass attended a women’s rights meeting on the day that he died. Charles Lenox Remond, a prominent African American abolitionist, was among those who led the walkout of the 1840 anti-slavery meeting in London when it was decided that women would be forbidden from participating. Furthermore, early Black labour organisations were open to women in ways that white unions were not. The National Convention of Colored Freedmen passed a resolution on the equality of women in 1848. The National Colored Labor Union (NCLU) remarked specifically at their founding in 1869 that they aimed not to repeat “the mistakes heretofore made by our white fellow citizens in omitting women.” Shortly afterwards, Mary S. Carey was elected to a leadership position on the NCLU’s policy executive committee. Black organisers also often invited white women’s rights campaigners to attend their conferences.
THEORY/ANALYSIS/OPINION FOR ARTICLES
Sylvia
Sylvia, and others like her, represent the best legacies of women’s suffragism. (Sylvia was also a staunch anti-fascist and advocated free love between equals as opposed to formal marriages by contract.) A feminist strand which recognised women’s need for self-activity in a patriarchal society that oppressed them, but saw it didn’t oppress them all the same. She saw that those most exploited in Britain (and its colonies) should be centred in political strategy and learned that suffrage alone was insufficient to change society in the ways it needed to be. One of her biographers, Barbara Winslow, wrote: “She exposed the narrow class bias of the middle-class suffrage organizations, thus questioning their concept of feminism. She was equally a challenge to the male chauvinism of the socialist Left, which dismissed or ignored women’s struggles, whether for the vote, equal pay or sexual freedom.” (Sylvia Pankhurst, Barbara Winslow, preface xxi)
Transphobia
Britain’s endless “transgender debate” has shone a light on the racist assumptions of a “centrist” identity that prides itself on having the moral high ground and esteem of the reasoned thinker. Economist journalist Helen Joyce’s, Trans, set out to defend a “gender critical” stance on the immutability of sex. It features no trans voices, but a definitive theory of trans people. US liberals generally tend to be more sympathetic to trans rights, so what’s up in Britain? Joyce sought to reclaim a language of “segregation” to roll rights back, referring to that familiar spectre of Americanisation to defend her reasoning:
“Chattel slavery and racial segregation have marked America in many more obvious ways, but for the purposes of this book, the most significant are that they have invited false analogies between race and sex, and poisoned words and phrases such as ‘exclusion’, ‘segregation’ and ‘seperate but equal’.” It has become close to impossible for left-leaning Americans to articulate arguments based on material differences between the sexes. For them, all ‘discrimination’ is patterned on white privilege and black oppression. The word’s original meaning of acknowledging difference is almost completely inaccessible.”
The word Joyce is talking about is “sex.” Words have been cheapened by Americanisms, threatening to subvert British reason. She continues, “I am not American; I don’t know what it is like to have a psyche shaped by the legacy of slavery…All I can do is fall back on logic and science, and say once again why single-sex spaces are not analogous to racial segregation.” Britain’s oppression of Black and Asian women is never mentioned. For Joyce, sex has a higher reality than race: “differences between the sexes are material and significant, with consequences that go beyond law or custom; those between different skin colours and ethnicities are not.” Last chapter we explored the historical contexts of a divisive, constitutional equality - a crucial fracture separating white middle class women from racialised/working class women. Joyce’s argument restates this division. It is in the case of transphobia where fractured histories of womanhood extend and "identity politics," divorced from its radical origins, takes on the most violent conspiratorial form.
Trans draws the reader’s attention to four billionaires, including George Soros, who “have shaped the global agenda” for trans rights. Three of the four are Jewish. Joyce claims that money is mostly funneled through these individuals’ charitable foundations - a conspiracy promoted by US white supremacist anti-trans activist, Jennifer Bilek, among others. This conspiracy has been warmly received by countless anti-trans fronts in Britain, including within the main parties. Joyce had previously cited and promoted Bilek’s work, even interviewing her. Twitter – the viper’s nest of “cancel culture” – was used to bring wider attention to this connection. Joyce refuted it, threatening to sue anybody calling her antisemitic. She had some reason to claim innocence of (active) antisemitism insofar as she seemed to have passively and opportunistically reproduced the antisemitic structure organising her book from someone else. Indeed, once Bilek saw the passages, she accused Joyce of plagiarism, for not citing her.
The status of the professional is the emperor's new clothes of British transphobia. You have to be fully invested in the good graces of court journalism to believe anything original is being produced by the nation’s top minds and bestsellers. How could a book be called “Trans” and not feature any testimony from trans people? Joyce constructs an empty, reified image of trans activism through a ludicrous construction of “Trans” as a signifier of ephemerality and absence. This container allows for racist, misogynistic conspiracism to be gathered into it. Joyce's book is alarmingly typical of a small but effective “gender critical” promotional culture organised within the professional classes of British liberalism. Behind the mask of reason, a simmering hatred splutters on in Britain. A popular base of “ordinary” (mostly) white women - in their words, “Adult Human Females” - organise around “gender critical” talking points and conspiracy theories online, joined by transphobic men. But the face of the movement resides in the professions, part of a lineage of a British white feminism that organises through institutions of the state. Wang’s critique of innocence in the last chapter gets a new context here. Joyce depends on testimony to guarantee her own immunity from accusations, even as she refuses it to the women she writes out of the picture. That Jewish colleagues defended Joyce as “not antisemitic” was proof enough of innocence. But it changes neither the conspiratorial structure organising her book, nor the colonial historiography shaping its transmisogyny.
Trans voices on Twitter have been instrumental in challenging centrist chauvinism, which often extends to anti-immigration, anti-roma, anti-Black, antisemitic, and Islamophobic currents. This challenge is received as victimisation, and whatever examples of online abuse they have received, are, in conformity with the conspiratorial logic, identified with and as the fault of trans people. The victimised professions often defended in “gender critical” reasoning – journalism, literature, law, medicine – are actually infrastructures of state mediation, which are not bastions of innocence, but creations of colonial knowledge. They are retooled as the protectorate of British reason against trans people.
In fact, trans documented histories are centuries old, as is the participation of trans women in feminist and queer struggles, and “women’s spaces.” Trans women are made the enemies of lesbians, while examples of lesbian and trans solidarity, and trans-lesbian life, are plentiful.
Morning breakfast shows now debate whether letting people drown in the channel would be the more humane approach to dealing with the “migrant problem” as this would deter others from risking their lives to make the trip. As is becoming more obvious to people in Britain, immigration control is not an issue of security or citizen democracy, or “free movement”, but a means of differentiating human life. Whereas some have rights, some have no right to life.
These are dangerous convergences. They rest on a conformist principle: what is, is. This gesture can use history however it wants. It is, as trans excluders love to imply, common sense, “ideology free.”
“Gender critical” transphobia is said to be on behalf of “all silenced women'' that are “afraid to speak up”, while the historical struggles of women who fought against the exclusionary universality of “women” as a biological “reality” are silenced. Trans people are chillingly reduced to a “trend” of neoliberalism.
In fact, trans documented histories are centuries old, as is the participation of trans women in feminist and queer struggles, and “women’s spaces.” Trans women are made the enemies of lesbians, while examples of lesbian and trans solidarity, and trans-lesbian life, are plentiful. Trans people are caricatured as “refusing Biology” yet trans and intersex people are bringing qualitative historical insights into biological conditions medical science had deemed irregular, unworthy of consideration. Trans people are caricatured as “refusing Biology” yet trans and intersex people are bringing qualitative historical insights into biological conditions medical science had deemed irregular, unworthy of consideration.
Womanhood and Fracture
“Class-first” socialist arguments are opposed to “identity politics” because, it is alleged, a “language of oppression” is used to distract from the exploitation of the working class. The Black feminist critique marks the birth of identity politics. Though when we go back and look at what was being said at the time, we find something else. Black feminists were challenging feminists and socialists for not emphasising class enough. Some socialist feminists today relate to women as a “class”, borrowing from a Marxist language of “class solidarities”. Trans-women are accused of using “identity politics” to divide this class. The viewpoint of Black feminism was that working class women were also in a struggle against middle class women. Ostensibly, Black, Trans, or White women could be on either side. The lesson of the Black Feminist critique is thus far reaching. It was not theorising Black women as “particular” to the universality of the working class, but asking why Black women have seemed to stand outside of all universals. The “interlocking struggles” hypothesis of Black feminism maps over to histories of class struggle because it begins with a differently exploited working class.
The capitalist class relation has no theoretical purity. How we think of each other as comrades in a class struggle has no theoretical cushioning. The class struggle is historicised by racism in much the same way Walter Benjamin saw history as a pile-up of sediment and rubble. What we are left with is what we get to theorise with. There is no back-world of theory we can return to which cleanses “class” of its historically artifactual character.
Callaghan, in the 1970s, pressed harder on wages and introduced “cash limits” in public services, splitting public from private, instigating an angry working class response. Black and Asian workers, largely employed in the public sector, were central to this. The integration of more Black and Asian women workers into shop steward movements in the late 70s and 80s came very late. Thatcher had failed to prove her economic alternative, but was able to opportunistically exploit these historical divisions in the working class, which had been formalised over generations.
The work of Black feminists shadowed the historical progress of categories that erased Black women from knowledge. The category “woman” was troubled by this critique; that tension remains today. The intervention of Black British feminism was partly a critique of “white feminism” substituting “class” for “patriarchy” or a formalism of “class” that couldn’t relate the experiences of Black women to class struggle. It troubled the view of socialism as the emancipatory politics. Such division abounds today amidst the hatred spewed about “identity politics.” What the transphobic conspiracy about “gender ideology” shares with that of surging moral panics about “critical race theory” and “wokeness” is a hatred of theories suspected of “dividing people.” What moral panics of “identity politics” and “postmodernism” and sledgehammer attacks on “critical race theory” are positioned to reject is the ambiguity of this interlocking of history. This position is not limited to the right, but a methodical position of conservatism, adapted to the left. This is an uneasy conclusion to make, as all these moral panics eventually conclude in the hounding of leftwing people by conservatives, so let us be clearer. “The left” is not a homogeneity, though it is not an innocent tradition of opposition either. The forms of reactionary anti-capitalism we sometimes explore in this book also did not emerge from “the left” but from moments of ideological interlocking – namely, war, but also, moments of reconstruction as well. “The left” is a product of different moments of “reconstruction” and various ideological inheritances associated with “progressive” eras. The dominant left tradition, socialism, has a twisted heritage of interactions with the British and American state, because of this.
This reduction is antithetical to how Marx himself endeavoured to understand a more complex interaction between historically emergent “social modes of production” and capitalist relations of exploitation in his major work of critique. The study of women and children’s roles in England’s industrial division of labour in his ‘chapter on the working day’ offered a case study on the laws of motion that forced a gendered differentiation of wage-labour. The value-form was leading to changes in the form of the family and the “working class.” The matchwomen’s strike was one product of this alignment, Black feminists were addressing another. What is useful about history are the lessons it offers about social forms and how they emerge emphatically in the experiences, and interminable stresses, that mediate damaged life. Marx analysed the forms of value determining these stresses. Though how these categories appear at this level of abstraction couldn’t account for how the relations appear in concrete historical situations. His critique of the categories of political economy – value, capital, money – also motivates a degree of distance and suspicion as to the explanatory power of categories. Nowhere in Marx, for instance, is a theory of “class” dropped from on high, like a cartoon anvil on the head, claiming to be the category that explains all others.
Negativity is not a theory, but some theory of negative feeling must be found. Reactionaries look for a “theory” that unlocks the negativity of the Left. They search academia, chase shadows and create folk devils, ending up spooked by their own conspiracies. There is more negativity than there is a coherent Left. Here is the dangerous escalation. States are proving themselves ready to create left-wing enemies to destroy and the violence falls first on racialised and LGBT populations.
The Black feminist critique of identity cascades and cascades, layer by layer, unsettling petrified narratives and comfortable grooves, hence a suspicion ‘it’ is at fault for being particularist and divisive. What it opens up, in fact, is an enriched historical content. This compels us to travel back and forth through time to further trouble the identities history constructed.
Black feminism anchored a critique of this problem in the 1970s. Its enduring relevance is extended by the conspiratorial reactions to it.
The problem of universal identity thinking is disavowed when a portrayal of identity politics as particular and unconstructive is foregrounded. This cheap positivism, far from being militant, harmonises a far more dissident and interesting situation.
Pitting workers organisation against movements to abolish forms or gender, race and sexual oppression, which, with incredible abandon, continues apace in the most well funded socialist publications, not only worms the brain, it misrepresents the heterogenous form of labour in the so called golden age of workers movements.
Marxist feminist critiques were able to differentiate how gendered and racialised divisions of labour were organised around value production: including both value-productive work and reproductive work not directly mediated by the market, as comprehensive of capitalist accumulation.
Convergences between trans exclusionary feminism, sex worker exclusionary feminism, right wing telepopulism and christian fundamentalism, are becoming better understood as a more combinatory reaction to this more advanced critique. The contemporary face of “white feminism,” which has been an aspect of feminism throughout the centuries, has one of its latest permutations here. “White feminism” depends on the state to reinforce a bourgeois conception of ‘womanhood’ that ultimately excludes or flattens the majority of women’s experiences. Moral panics around trans women are commonly accompanied by moralistic hostlity towards women sex workers. In calling for an end to prostitution, the state is inevitably invoked as the last guarantor of womanhood, through de facto if not always direct criminalisation of sex workers
The basis for women’s unity could only be reached through a more expanded viewpoint on historical divisions, and therefore constructions, of the working class and womanhood. The only other way to unify was to disavow the problem by calling for unity instead. Another way of disavowing a problem is by writing a theory. The purpose of theory is not always to illuminate a problem. If a problem arises that cannot be seen by a theory, the problem can also be made particular to it. Theories can also be sophisticated ways of shifting blame. Black feminists of the 1970s were identifying divisive theories of “women” and the “working class” in social movements and getting blamed for being divisive. The Black feminist negation was a problem that had to be engaged with as central or not at all. Whether a capitalist mode of patriarchy was organised in theory by the patriarchal wage/housewife conundrum, or patriarchy/women binary, the same problem emerged time and time again. In both cases, the risk was that “women’s liberation” could not account for other relations of oppression in the “First World” that did not feature in these schemas, bound as they were to different relations of exploitation. Feminists struggled to do this without opening up splits within the central theories of the movement. It is important to hold tight to this problem for a while.
The CRC revised the historical contribution of early 19th century Black feminists to critique the colonial construction of “womanhood” – this was regenerated for a modern critique of American economic conditions. Before this intervention there was no clear differentiation of relations of exploitation from relations of oppression. The organising prism of civil rights for “Black” people and “Black power” as a militant affirmation of blackness, lacked the capacity to differentiate the way Black women were gendered and exploited differently. From this standpoint a more expansive critique of class composition was made possible.
In the last chapter we explored some of the ways the concept of “interlocking oppressions” could be interpreted and how this concept related to various theories of the time. We argued that the CRC provided a historical revision of America’s class society based on the way relations of oppression were constituted historically within the democratic franchise. These legal and material histories of oppression had crystallised in economic “relations of exploitation” specific to the experience of Black women in American capitalism. We use “relations of exploitation” deliberately here as an analytical term that differentiates the Black Feminist critique of race and gender from the Marxist class analysis that was dominant at the time.
The “forced recruitment of wage-labour in the colonies”, Banaji argues, as well as the capitalist form of slavery, which gave rise to modern commercial capitalist states, complicates an understanding of capitalism that essentiallises “wage labour” as the indicative “form of exploitation” organising “relations of production” in the capitalist system,
Relations of production are simply not reducible to forms of exploitation, both because modes of production embrace a wider range of relationships than those in their immediate process of production and because the deployment of labour, the organisation and control of the labour-process, ‘correlates’ with historical relations of production in complex ways.
“gender critical” feminism relates to the older “stage” of feminism and the more recent stage. The “stages” historiographic model can be helpful in plotting changes over time. It can also lead us to believe one moment necessarily leads to the evolution of another. Whole systems of knowledge were wiped out by colonialism. Black feminists recognised this and revised history, understanding that the available categories of explanation were limiting what could be understood. Capitalism “moves on” in a very strange and uncalculated way for a supposedly rational system.
A relevant question for this chapter is, therefore, how was the theory of “identity politics'' applied to Britain? And is “identity politics” even a theory? Splits over theory in the 80s had real consequences.
It is “between equal rights”, as Marx wrote, “that force decides”. The critique of “neoliberalism” as left-adjacent, “rights-based” whitewashing of left militancy, has been a feature of various critiques from feminist, anti-racist, and socialist movements from the 90s and onwards. The best of those critiques could adjudge the role of the state and state adjuncts in mediating relations of exploitation and oppression through new legal assimilation strategies, as a means of pacifying dissent, or as the means to more skillfully regulate a new labour and immigration problem. The worst made a song and dance about lightweight “progressive” paraphernalia – films, television, rhetoric, imagery and marketing brochures – to skewer “identity politics” as a post--68 cultural formation begraddling naive activist minds. The latter critique is the dominant one. It misconstrued the more complex determinations organising the neoliberal state, the ways in which identification regimes were evolving, and how these were dealing with dissent.
Theoretical splits of this magnitude could be recognised constructively, interpreted as voluntaristic or moral deviations from a unified programme, or tidied up and off somewhere more convenient.
Marxist feminism was also contributed to by white women who recognised race as crucial to an expansive critique of capitalism. The oppression of women is mediated by wage relations of one extent or another. This remains a rich hypothesis, though wage relations also do not map over to “relations of exploitation” neatly. As Carby and others demonstrated, the theoretical neatness of the Marxist problematic, and its explanatory power, could not always account for varied relations of exploitation and varied deployments of labour historically constituted.
Even in the same workplace environment, workers can experience crucial differences of exploitation that impact their bodies and potentials for resistance differently. Relations of exploitation are so various and differently configured across localities, that reducing them to a “class analysis” can mystify more than it explains. We suspect that “class analysis” is attractive to socialists because it sounds militant and might rub up liberals the wrong way, but where do people sit down and offer a “class analysis” under the stress of an exploitative situation? People hear each other out, get the picture of a general grievance, the quality of the antagonism, who's involved, the politics of the setting, who's blocking it, then work out something. If there is a class analysis it is ‘under the hood’ of a concrete, collaborative analysis of that something. In a pandemic where the risk to health is so extreme, we can begin to see the importance of examining the concrete details, where a lack of ventilation in a room where one person is working can impact them disproportionately more than another. Indeed, cramped conditions, especially around chemicals, have always induced injury. Employers want to keep employees at the legal level of abstraction and wage bargaining. Liberal feminism at the level of abstract biology. Shop stewards movements of the past were cultures which resisted union negotiation at this level, but the same lessons stand for all areas of life. The radical imaginaries of feminism always seem to begin with a casting of light over the cracks that
The Combahee reading of “identity politics” and Black British feminist critiques of “white feminism,” valued individual and group inquiry. The writing was partly informed by testimony or report. This is how Black feminist publications could bring together varied analyses of relations of exploitation indicative of the experience of Black women at work, at home, vis a vis the state. Inquiry became collective when groups gathered to share these testimonies and reports.
We want to see more published opposition to this in print, because for this group, the sanctity of the letter and the page is a fetish and fraternity.
While this connection cannot be overstated (Black and Asian NHS workers were part of a unique postwar setting) one historical affinity of British Black feminism is to the migration of women to work. The creation of what we call an “empty polity” makes the modern British polity particular to other Western states – the US, or France, for example. There was never any formal contestation over “equality” in Britain as a universal right. The potential for radical equality that organised Radical Reconstruction, was not the same vision for the proletariat in Britain. Suffrage came together bric-a-brac, through state concessions to organised labour and popular protests or moral campaigns by liberal reformers, not through constitutional struggles or revolutions. While constitutions provided one colonial architecture, Britain maintained instead the “heritability” of tried and tested colonial governance. This heritability of social control extended to its colonies, where moral cadences commingled with local modes of production. They created violent divisions of sexuality and caste that formalised the rigours and principles of an “empty polity” under construction.
They were not formal citizens and had little constitutional case to make, as equal rights were made on a moral and transactional case-by-case basis through parliamentary representation. Working class women were not considered at all, unless a moral case could be made for them by upper class British women. Moral virtue, or self-activity and strike, were the only options on offer to working class women suffering harrowing industrial conditions, which Black and Asian women in the postwar setting would organise against.
apart from the fact that writers associated with Black feminism remain autonomous from the Marxist tradition, and require no justification for being “inside” or “outside” it,
We relate to Black feminism as Marxists doubtful of some of the assumptions of some Western Marxist historiography and respectful of a Black feminist tradition which is methodologically various, purposely troubling categorical assumptions and forms of knowledge-gathering.
At the same time, the disseminated archives of past struggles provide a memory of negation – struggles, events, documents, readings, memories, critiques. The more we spend time with these histories, the more we see how capitalist state systems are not timeless. Historical reflection slows down time, compresses and articulates the past as closer than we thought, leaving a trail back to how it came to pass. Historical research is also a process that sensitises us to the rifts of time. The historical passages we include in each chapter sometimes shift about, but they evidence the same problem of “interlocking struggles” for different periods and circumstances. In the next chapter we remain in Britain and ask how identity relates to borders? What struggles were for and against the British border? How does it divide people?
“White feminism” depends on the state to reinforce a bourgeois conception of ‘womanhood’ that ultimately excludes or flattens the majority of women’s experiences. Moral panics around trans women are commonly accompanied by moralistic hostlity towards women sex workers. In calling for an end to prostitution, the state is inevitably invoked as the last guarantor of womanhood, through de facto if not always direct criminalisation of sex workers.
Carby
What’s most apparent in Carby’s commentary is not only the relationship of economic exploitation to race and gender, but an exposition of different relations of oppression captured within the concept of patriarchy. These differences cannot be accounted for by the identity “feminism” without understanding the different forms of exploitation women face – without this qualitatively historical outlook, women were not seeing one another. This misidentification was expressed in theoretical splits - not to be confused with pedantry, or an inability to allow for different theories. Splits betray real, practical problems of organising across societies that alienate one differentiation of “the people” or ”the working class” from another. They are often represented retrospectively as divisive, “cultural” or petty. Black feminist negation was often recieved as “negative” because it didn’t allow for consolidation within a European colonial framework. Black feminists’ standpoint was their starting point for critique because things that were obvious to many Black women were being obscured altogether by whites and, in a different sense, Black men. The concept of “interlocking oppressions” shouldn’t be mistaken for a liberal equality approach which isolates forms of oppression in order to regulate them as separate interests. The term “interlocking” captures a problematic, but not the historical methodology that brought different Black feminists together to formulate a critique. One which presents a methodological rupture with Marxist ‘stagism’ and proclaims that “wave” and “stage” periodisations tend to centre the whiteness in feminism. Black feminism also enriches the Marxist problematic. It engages the peculiar deployments of labour, without being neatly aligned to Marxism or feminism. Rather, it is a productive, in many ways prophetic, critique of reactionary conclusions that can be derived from Marxist as well as liberal historiography. Black feminism exposed whiteness as historical and unresolved - perhaps unresolvable without the dismantling of concepts and structures. This negation offers us the tools to look closer at the “identity problem” not as one limited to “race” or “gender” – or any other common arrangement of “identities'' interchangeably cast – but a consequence of treating relations of production and “forms of oppression” as undifferentiated and isolated phenomena. This persistent phenomenon is stuck on repeat. Problems of capitalism that are captured by the term “identity” and vulgarised in pejorative explanations of “identity politics” can be better traced back to state identification regimes and related “misidentifications” of exploitation and oppression. The Black feminist critique advances the problem of identity as also one of separation. A problem that existed long before “identity politics” became a way of naming it.
"It should be noted that much feminist work suffers from the assumption that it is only through the development of a Western-style industrial capitalism and the resul- tant entry of women into waged labor that the potential for the liberation of women can increase. For example, foot-binding, clitoridectomy, female "circumcision" and other forms of mutilation of the female body have been described as "feudal residues," existing in economically "backward" or "underdeveloped" nations (i.e., not the industrialized West). Arranged marriages, polygamy, and these forms of mutilation are linked in reductionist ways to a lack of technological development."
Carby argues that such "barbarism" continues in technological/industrial capitalist leading nations like the US in medical experiments on Black and colonised people. And also that empowered women, with more autonomy/collective power/decision-making power/etc. and different forms of gender relations have thrived in different kinds of society. Notably such relations attacked by European colonialism.
The casting of Black and colonized women solely as victims (of Black patriarchy, backwardness, or even white (male) imperialism) has the added effect of writing significant resistance and militancy led by women of colour in both colonies and metropoles (and the connection between these two) out of history entirely.