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Travelling in the Wrong Direction

Lorna Finlayson

Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny by Sarah Banet-Weiser

Duke, 220 pp, £18.99, November 2018, ISBN 978 1 4780 0291 8
Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance by Carol Gilligan and
David Richards
Cambridge, 162 pp, £21.99, August 2018, ISBN 978 1 108 47065 0
Feminism for the 99 Per Cent: A Manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy
Fraser
Verso, 85 pp, £7.99, March, ISBN 978 1 78873 442 4

Life as a feminist in the 21st century can be disorientating. Viewed from one perspective,
feminism looks to have reached a high-water mark. By the end of the last century, women in
many countries had formally secured the freedom to vote, to hold property, to receive higher
education and to enter professions formerly the preserve of men. In the UK, legislation
enshrining equal pay and prohibiting discrimination on grounds of gender or marital status
was passed in 1970 and 1975. Of course, formal freedom and equality can and do co-exist with
actual inequality and unfreedom. But most analyses suggest that the worldwide gender pay
gap gradually narrowed over the later part of the 20th century and has continued to do so;
meanwhile, women’s representation in fields traditionally dominated by men has been
growing steadily. In recent years, a feminism focused on this ‘unfinished business’ has gained
an unprecedented degree of mainstream acceptance. It has become the norm for political
parties, corporations and academic departments to pledge to improve the proportion of
women in ‘leadership’ positions. As Sarah Banet-Weiser observes, the rhetoric of female
‘empowerment’ is now a standard marketing tool. Feminism hasn’t just acquired
establishment approval, it has managed to become voguish. As Banet-Weiser puts it, we are
‘living in a moment in North America and Europe in which feminism has become, somewhat
incredibly, popular’.

Yet the period since the end of feminism’s ‘second wave’ – roughly since the early 1980s – has
also been one in which things have in many respects got worse for the majority of women. In
the rich nations of the global north, women have been disproportionately affected by the
dismantling and privatisation of public services, in particular the provision of care for
children, the disabled, the sick and the elderly, areas in which women perform the majority of
the labour, paid and unpaid. Women in the global south, in addition to economic hardship,
have to contend with the effects of climate change and with endemic conflict (including a
seemingly endless series of Western wars of intervention). As with austerity, the greatest
costs of ecological disaster and modern warfare are inflicted on women and children.

What is so disorientating isn’t just that the feminist movement has attained apparent
maturity and success just when the conditions of so many women’s lives are desperate and
deteriorating, but that it should also be necessary – yet oddly so difficult – to argue for the
relevance of those conditions to feminism. Austerity, war and climate change have not been
prominent concerns in the most visible feminist campaigns, which have focused instead on a
relatively narrow set of issues: increasing women’s representation in various spheres, or
pursuing legal, policy and cultural changes in the areas of sex, sexuality and the body – the
law against ‘up-skirting’ is a recent example.

Those who defend these priorities tend to do so on grounds of strategy and conceptual
integrity. Not everything that affects women’s lives can be a feminist issue, the argument
goes, unless a ‘feminist issue’ is defined too expansively to be useful. Even to list the things
that affect women’s lives disproportionately may be to include too much, given the tendency
for those at the bottom of social hierarchies to suffer more from everything, whether famine
or plague or economic recession. There are all sorts of problems in the world, and feminists
must focus their energies. To fail to do so, on this view, would be to rob feminism of its
distinctiveness, at the same time rendering it unnecessarily divisive. Instead, we should
separate the pursuit of gender equality from other issues of social justice. To demand equality
in these terms is to say nothing about the kind of world or society we would like to see –
except that women and men should be equal in it. This has the advantage of simplicity. It also
holds out the promise of a feminism that transcends traditional political oppositions.

This mode of thinking has become so ingrained as to seem commonsensical. But once we
consider what precludes and what might promote gender equality in practice, the appearance
of simplicity evaporates. ‘Equality’ is an almost infinitely malleable concept, but it’s hard to
defend an interpretation of it that makes an issue like austerity irrelevant. Given that
austerity has reduced women’s incomes by substantially more than those of men, it could be
said to constitute unequal or discriminatory treatment. It exacerbates existing inequalities in
wealth and earnings. It has increased women’s financial insecurity and so their dependence
on men. It has made it impossible for many women to combine caring responsibilities with
study or work. By reducing funding for women’s refuges, it has left many women effectively
trapped with violent or abusive partners. It has led to an increase in ‘survival sex’ – women
selling sex in order to pay rent, or to feed themselves and their families. Austerity has, in
other words, wreaked damage in the ways that feminists profess to care most about.

Where feminists do express a concern with the gendered effects of austerity, they are often
quick to assimilate it to the problem of under-representation. Discussing a report from 2015
by a group of women’s charities called ‘A Fair Deal for Women’, the group’s spokeswoman
Florence Burton remarked: ‘Perhaps it is women’s woefully low representation in the top
positions in our society that means they have become the load-bearers of austerity.’ Sonia
Adesara, a doctor and ambassador for the organisation 50:50 Parliament, has argued that
better representation for women is key to addressing the impact of austerity on women’s
health: ‘What 50:50 believes is that if we want to get women’s lives and experiences
prioritised, we need … those who are in positions of making power to be truly representative
of the diversity of this country.’ In this way the discussion is returned to familiar ground.

The underlying assumption here – that women in power will enact policies that better serve
women’s interests – is rarely made explicit. But at this point in history, it can hardly be said
to be untested. The recent period, in which the representation of women has increased in
many fields – including in Parliament – has also been dominated by the politics of austerity
and neoliberalism. And in Britain at least, the proposition that female political leaders will
look out for their sisters has now faced two rather spectacular counter-examples in Margaret
Thatcher and Theresa May. It is far from obvious why we should expect women in power to
practise a different or more feminist politics. Feminists have long been sceptical, with good
reason, of essentialist claims about women, which have traditionally served to legitimise or
disguise our subjugation. The idea that women are inherently more peace-loving or
empathetic isn’t substantially different from familiar sexist stereotypes.

The suggestion that women’s experience, rather than their nature, provides them with
superior insight into – and sympathy with – the anti-patriarchal project makes only slightly
more sense. Our social standpoints differ in significant ways according not only to gender but,
crucially, class. Those in positions of political and economic power who purport to represent
women belong by definition to a class of women for whom austerity isn’t a major determinant
of the conditions and possibilities of life. Initiatives for the advancement of women in politics
or in business might make a difference to women of this class – but to almost no one else. It
shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that spokeswomen for feminist groups so often see everything
through the prism of a politics of representation; and it should be equally unsurprising that
the select few championed or elevated by this politics often do so much to harm and so little
to help women in general.
For all its visible success, the currently dominant version of feminism is, in the eyes of many
of its supporters, fragile and endangered. Movement on representation and on the gender pay
gap has been slow, and may be beginning to stall. In the case of pay, it is likely that this is a
consequence of the broader social and political trends in which feminists have taken relatively
little interest. To take just one example, in 2017 legislation was passed requiring certain
employers to publish data on the relative pay of women and men in their organisations. One
of the early revelations was that several large academies and academy chains – the legacy of a
drive by New Labour and Conservative governments to open the state school system to
‘market competition’ – were among the worst culprits for gender inequality. This wasn’t
because of an imbalance at management level, where salaries routinely run to six figures.
Rather, the disparity reflected the fact that women were vastly over-represented in the lower
tiers, where pay has been falling in real terms for many years.

There is also a backlash against some of the legislative and cultural changes this form of
feminism has helped bring about. Donald Trump has propelled misogyny to the fore of
American politics by personifying it in an especially pugnacious form – much as Jair
Bolsonaro has done in Brazil. This year, the anti-immigrant and anti-feminist party Vox made
striking electoral gains in Spain, and promised to repeal legislation against gender violence,
which it sees as biased against men. Comparable parties in the UK have been too busy stoking
anti-immigrant sentiment to bother much with other bigotries, but the anti-abortion views of
such prominent Tory Brexiteers as Dominic Raab and Jacob Rees-Mogg, as well as the Ukip
MEP candidate Carl Benjamin’s public speculation as to whether or not he would be willing to
rape the Labour MP Jess Phillips, show that the potential exists in this country too.

In the world beyond formal politics, Britain’s newly marketised universities are increasingly
willing to promote ‘controversial’ figures and to endorse clickbait posing as research. Last
year, the University of Essex hired Gijsbert Stoet, a psychologist who believes that ‘biology’
accounts for the low numbers of women working in maths and physics, and that a ‘bias
towards women’s issues’ is concealing the truth that men are the more socially disadvantaged
gender. In March, Cambridge offered Jordan Peterson a visiting fellowship at its Faculty of
Divinity (under pressure, they later retracted the offer). The views of figures like Stoet and
Peterson find an eager audience not least among Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), who deploy
the notion of male victimhood to great effect. Banet-Weiser documents the growth, especially
online, of ‘popular misogyny’: MRAs mirror a popular feminist narrative that presents
personal empowerment as the solution to historical injury with a counter-narrative insisting
that men are the real victims, and prescribe ‘confidence-building’ and manipulative or
abusive ‘seduction techniques’ as a solution.

Many see such phenomena as part of a new backlash against feminism that is bound up with
populism, a mysterious and powerful force whose sudden emergence has endangered the
political establishment which feminism has fought so hard to join. The term ‘populism’ does
not refer to any distinct or unified object. Its main function is to insinuate an equivalence or
continuity between left and right-wing challenges to the status quo by identifying allegedly
shared features – such as ‘outsider’ status, popularity among the working class, or a divide
between the elite and ‘the people’. Thus it joins antisemitic conspiracy theorists with
socialists and even social democrats, who may also believe – it’s reasonable enough, after all
– that a small elite hoards wealth and power. In this way of thinking, the question of who is
thought to be in charge – Jews, feminists or capitalists – is of secondary importance.

Presenting the threat to feminism as a corollary of the emergence of populism makes it

possible to avoid giving critical attention to the hegemonic form of feminism and the politics
to which it has acquiesced. This is exemplified by Carol Gilligan and David Richards in
Darkness Now Visible, as they seek to account for Trump’s rise ‘seemingly out of nowhere’.
They tell an intricate psychological story, based on Gilligan’s earlier work on moral reasoning
in boys and girls, about the ways in which patriarchal society distorts the development and
‘dims the moral intelligence’ of people of both genders. Yet a purely psychological account is
insufficient to explain historically specific phenomena. Seemingly mindful of this, they
discuss the immediately preceding phase of American politics, describing Obama as ‘a man of
immense grace’, ‘wise beyond his years’, married (as they mention on several occasions) to ‘a
woman clearly his equal’ (that much could be said of Trump too). Obama, they claim,
embodied a model of manhood that challenged the patriarchal norm. This, compounded by
the prospect of a woman, Hillary Clinton, becoming president, was an intolerable threat to
the patriarchal order.

Missing from this picture is the possibility that both men and women voted for Trump not
simply because of their investment in a patriarchy that they perceived to be under threat, but
because they associated that threat with a social and economic order that denies them the
means to live satisfactory lives. Angry or frightened white men are turning on anyone they
can – women, immigrants and foreigners – in an attempt to retrieve some sense of
superiority. Angry or frightened white women, many of whom have no interest in a feminism
preoccupied with ‘representation’ in an unreachable political or socio-economic class, are
doing the same: the majority of white American women voted for Trump.

Also absent from Gilligan and Richards’s book is any criticism of Clinton, or the political
order she represents. All they can say is that she was robbed. They do find time to scold
Bernie Sanders’s supporters. His female supporters – the non-voters and those who ‘wasted
their votes mindlessly’ – are identified along with their Trump-voting sisters as victims of a
campaign that ‘conspicuously deployed gender to shame men sensitive to their loss of stature
and drive the women who care for them into perceiving feminism as a threat’. Here Gilligan
and Richards join those feminists who lined up to shame the women who dared to criticise
Clinton or to favour a left candidate. Gloria Steinem speculated that Sanders’s female
supporters were only in it ‘for the boys’; Madeleine Albright threatened ‘a special place in hell’
for unbelievers.

Genuine progress can provoke a backlash. But that is not the most illuminating reading of
what happened in America in 2016 – or in Britain, for that matter. That reading also comes
uncomfortably close to arguments that anti-immigration sentiment is a consequence of an
unduly tolerant and inclusive immigration policy. Hillary Clinton recently argued that Europe
‘needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame’ of right-wing populism.
One or two steps further down that road we find Tony Blair explaining that if we really want
to tackle the far right, immigrants must be forced to ‘integrate’. Such narratives get things
backwards: they assume that racism against immigrants is caused by excessive
multiculturalism, rather than being a continuation of racism already endemic in a society
which, moreover, does not serve the interests of the majority of its people. The same holds in
the case of feminism. Trump didn’t happen because feminism had gone too far but because,
in a way, it hadn’t gone far enough, or had travelled in the wrong direction. His rise wouldn’t
have been any less likely had 50 per cent of CEOs been women. But that isn’t the only way to
think about feminist progress. Rather than accepting existing soci0-economic structures as
fixed and asking for more representation for women at the top, it is possible to ask what kinds
of social change would be needed in order to empower women in general, most of whom are –
along with most men – stuck somewhere near the bottom.

‘An anti-capitalist feminism has become thinkable today,’ Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya
and Nancy Fraser argue in Feminism for the 99 Per Cent, ‘in part because the credibility of
political elites is collapsing worldwide.’ They are right. But the long hegemony of a version of
feminism that is in league with a discredited politics has made alternatives more difficult to
articulate. Too often, a ritual incantation stands in for a serious attempt to do so: feminism
must be intersectional, international, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist and so on. Lengthening lists
and acronyms – LGBTQIA, WNBPoC – ensure that multiple oppressed groups are ‘included’,
as if this were sufficient to prevent complicity in all-that-in-which-feminists-should-not-be-
complicit.

Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser occasionally fall into this trap. At other times, they reach
for an idea developed by Marxist feminists in the 1970s, that capitalism depends on the
unpaid ‘reproductive’ labour of women: all the activity that contributes towards maintaining
the ability and readiness of (usually male) workers to go out every day and produce profit for
capital. This labour often isn’t visible as ‘work’, but it includes a long list of tasks traditionally
and still disproportionately performed by women, such as cleaning, cooking, washing, child-
rearing and the provision of various kinds of care. According to the authors, who are among
the organisers of the international women’s strikes that have been held annually on
International Women’s Day since 2017, the strategic withdrawal by women of productive and
reproductive labour has the capacity to damage patriarchy and capitalism at their roots in a
way traditional trade unionism cannot. By ‘withholding not only waged work, but also the
unwaged work of social reproduction’, women strikers ‘have disclosed the latter’s
indispensable role in society’.

It is less clear that the women’s strikes have the potential to do more than this. After all,
Mothering Sunday – the day when we ‘appreciate everything that mums do for us all’,
according to our overlords in advertising – also discloses the importance of women’s
reproductive labour. As attempts at the strategic withdrawal of labour power, these strikes
are severely limited compared with organised industrial action. The withdrawal of paid
labour hits the capitalist in the form of permanently lost profits. The withdrawal of unpaid
reproductive labour is less straightforward. If the labour takes the form of care for vulnerable
others such as children or elderly relatives, withdrawal may not be an acceptable option. In
the case of labour that isn’t a matter of life and death – washing up or vacuuming – the
woman will either do it later, or someone else will. Or no one will, and the house will get
slightly messier. At best, a husband or boyfriend might be shamed into doing something the
woman normally does. The capitalist doesn’t suffer, or even notice.

The central insight – that women’s work is work, and that capitalism extracts profit from it,
albeit indirectly and invisibly – is important, but I have never been completely sure what we
are supposed to do with it. Indeed, its original proponents took the idea in divergent
directions: some, such as Silvia Federici and Selma James, founded the movement Wages for
Housework; others, like Angela Davis, looked forward to the abolition of private ‘drudgery’
and its replacement with socialised services. For many, ‘reproductive labour’ is a sufficient
answer to the question of why feminism must be anti-capitalist: since capitalism exploits the
unpaid labour of women, it is incompatible with gender equality; if you want to get rid of
patriarchy, you have to get rid of capitalism. But to argue that capitalism profits from
women’s subordination isn’t quite the same as arguing that capitalism depends on women’s
subordination for its existence.

As Davis argued in an essay published in 1977, written while she was in prison, the emergence
of capitalism created a new domestic form of subordination for women. That it was women
who were subordinated in this way wasn’t an accident, but a function of an earlier, pre-
capitalist history of gendered labour, in which women, while making an essential
contribution to social production, were ‘socially tied to their reproductive role’ in the
particular tasks they performed. Davis is wary of rigidly deterministic accounts of gender
relations. Nevertheless, she goes beyond the observation that capitalism inherits and exploits
a gendered division of labour in a way that perpetuates patriarchy, arguing that the inherent
contradictions of capitalism systemically generate and sustain women’s subordination.
Capitalism, although in principle indifferent to gender (it treats human beings alike chiefly as
‘abstract labour power’), depends on the hierarchical family, in which the worker is able to
assert his authority, for ‘the maintenance of the worker as individual’; the family serves to
fulfil the ‘irrepressible needs of working human beings’ which the capitalist mode of
production otherwise neglects and denies.
While this account is useful as an explanation of why patriarchy is so persistent under
capitalism, it arguably still falls short of demonstrating that capitalism strictly entails
patriarchy. It certainly does entail class exploitation, and it may be that further forms of
oppression and division will always be required to make sustainable the privations that
capitalism imposes on human beings. But it doesn’t follow that it is impossible for a form of
capitalism to develop that exploits both (or all) genders equally, and hence that it is
impossible for capitalism to survive the end of patriarchy. Wages for housework – albeit in a
form far from the intentions of its original advocates – could conceivably play a part in such a
scenario. The important question is not whether a truly gender-blind capitalism is possible,
but whether that would be an equality worth fighting for.

It remains difficult to relate feminism to other forms of social criticism and resistance in a
way that doesn’t seem contrived or reductionist. Even the statement ‘Austerity is a feminist
issue’ can sound like an addendum to a pre-existing critique. Those who take up that slogan
invariably regard austerity as bad for everyone – just especially so for women. We would
continue to oppose austerity even if it somehow turned out – or came to pass – that austerity
was gender-neutral in its effects. There is a faint echo here of the kind of leftism rightly
criticised by feminists of the second wave: the kind that promises women’s liberation will be
delivered in due course as a by-product of socialism, and that dismisses specifically feminist
demands as redundant or secondary – matters that can wait until after the revolution.
Whether what is at issue is the overthrow of capitalism or the more modest goal of ending
austerity, it can sometimes look as if feminism has been relegated to an auxiliary role, adding
little besides a bit of extra motivation.

By contrast, a brand of feminism that stands aloof from other forms of political critique is
able to present itself as feminism in its pure and undiluted state. But feminism is about
opposing patriarchy, and patriarchy always takes a socially and historically specific form. In
our present context, it is not exclusively concentrated in the person of Donald Trump; it is
there in the structures that make up our societies, and which keep men and, especially,
women down. For that reason, our feminism, too, must be diffused throughout the rest of our
politics – not held apart from it – if it is to be capable of advocating for more than a tiny
minority of women. Its task is to look with a feminist eye – sensitive to the changing
manifestations of women’s subordination to men – at a world that not only feminists have
reason to change.

Vol. 41 No. 13 · 4 July 2019 » Lorna Finlayson » Travelling in the Wrong Direction
pages 7-10 | 3998 words

Letters
Vol. 41 No. 15 · 1 August 2019
Lorna Finlayson agrees with some of the central claims in our book, Feminism for the
99 Per Cent: A Manifesto: that the dominant feminism of the recent past took a wrong
turn by defining gender issues in ways that excluded the processes that have made the
lives of the vast majority of women worse; that by reducing women’s emancipation to
the attempts of professional-managerial women to climb the corporate ladder, this
iteration of feminism discredited our movement in the eyes of many victims of
neoliberalisation, some of whom now support right-wing strongmen; that feminists
need to change course now by rejoining the broader fight for social justice (LRB, 4
July). But Finlayson doubts that this requires challenging capitalism. We hold, by
contrast, that sexism is deeply entrenched in capitalist society, which separates ‘people
making’ from ‘profit making’, while assigning the first job to women and subordinating
it to the second. A feminism that fights for ‘the 99 per cent’ must reverse that perverse
priority and put things right side up – for the sake of women and of everyone else.

The task is pressing. We face an acute crisis of social reproduction, as investors demand
both reduced public services and more of women’s time for low-paid work. This is the
context in which to appreciate the significance, that Finlayson misses, of the recent
wave of feminist strikes, which turned 8 March into a massive global platform for
defending social reproduction and opposing austerity – aims that are also driving the
worldwide strikes of teachers and nurses. The result is an emerging alliance of feminists
with labour unions, migrants, radical environmentalists, anti-militarists, anti-
imperialists and opponents of racial oppression. No mere laundry list of ‘identities’,
such an alliance is the sine qua non for envisioning and achieving a new post-capitalist
society. And that is the only way to wrest the chance for liveable, even joyous, lives from
a social system that is hurtling towards the abyss. Finlayson may be right that a non-
patriarchal capitalism is possible in principle, but that merely hypothetical possibility
will not save us now.

Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser; Tithi Bhattacharya

The New School for Social Research, New York; Purdue University, West Lafayette,
Indiana

Lorna Finlayson writes: Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser read
me as denying the need for feminists to challenge capitalism. In fact, I share their view
that ‘sexism is deeply entrenched in capitalist society’, and that this entrenchment
manifests itself not least in the subordination of those forms of labour, such as care
work, disproportionately performed by women. I also believe that capitalism is
generally bad for humans and for the rest of life on the planet. I therefore oppose it not
only as a feminist, but as a human being and living creature.

What seems to have given rise to the misunderstanding is the passage in which I argued
that the analysis of the role of women’s ‘reproductive’ labour in capitalist society by
socialist and Marxist feminists of the 1970s does not ground, and probably was not
intended to ground, the conclusion that capitalism and gender equality are strongly
incompatible, in the way that capitalism is incompatible with the overcoming of class
exploitation, for example. In retrospect, I think I dwelled too long on this point, and
may have created the impression that I look to the possibility of a non-patriarchal
capitalism for salvation. In fact, I agree with Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser that this
possibility is at present largely hypothetical. And to the question I raise in the essay, of
whether a gender-equal form of capitalism would be worth fighting for, my own answer
would in any case be ‘No’. My point was that this is the really important question, and
not the question of whether capitalism could or could not eventually be purged of
patriarchy.

In so far as the view I advanced differs from the one taken by Arruzza, Bhattacharya
and Fraser in their book, it is perhaps only in our relative measures of optimism and
pessimism about the present and future. I did have some pangs of guilt over my
seemingly rather dismissive treatment of the Women’s Strikes. I did not mean to
indicate that I don’t support and participate in them – I do – but merely that I have less
confidence than some in their prospects, their cohesiveness and strength; naturally, I
hope I am wrong about this.