Feminisms and the grounds of division

As a feminist myself, I’d like to think that feminism is for the flourishing of humanity. It’s for our ability to live sustainably in our natural environment. It’s for freedom from violence for all. But if we look back historically, we can see feminists addressing that question of “Who is feminism for?” in very different ways. It’s one of the ironies of the feminist movement that it asked for inclusion in many different ways but sometimes practised its own forms of exclusion. Not everyone felt safe or welcome in feminist movements.

If we want to think about that in a bit more detail, we might address the exclusions around sexuality, for example. Lesbian, bisexual, queer women often felt that they weren’t welcome in a movement that seemed to be oriented to the needs of straight women. That led to enormous debates that came out very sharply in the 1970s over the controversial phrase “lavender menace” that Betty Friedan, the US National Organization for Women feminist leader, talked about. By "lavender menace", she meant the problem of too many lesbian women becoming identified in the women’s movement and that leading to marginalisation of women’s voices. Lesbian and queer women in the movement felt extraordinarily hurt by that because the women’s movement was an important place in which ideas around women’s sexuality, women’s sexual pleasure, and lesbian and bisexual forms of sexual desire could be expressed and experienced.

Sexuality proved to be a very painful ground of division. We can also see profound divisions around race and class within the movement. Also, divisions between women of colour and white women have been very long-standing around the languages, practices and priorities of feminisms. Should racial justice be always addressed alongside gender justice, or are they different struggles that sometimes point in different directions? Those have been the dilemmas for many within the movement. In recent years, it has been very helpful to have the language of intersectionality to try to capture some of these tensions between different kinds of interests and agendas that feminists might have.

Intersectionality is the understanding of the way in which identities of race, class, sexuality, ability and age, amongst other factors, are intersecting to create very different kinds of experiences of oppression. This has been a real pushback against forms of feminism that try to universalise women’s experiences and speak for all women. Intersectionality was coined as a word and a concept by Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, and it’s been a very powerful tool for trying to work creatively around the questions of exclusion, inclusion, belonging and marginality that have always been present in feminisms and feminist movements.

The problem of universalism and trying to speak for all women within feminist movements has led to some rejecting the term. It hasn’t fitted their activism. They’ve looked for different terms, such as “womenism”, which was coined by novelist Alice Walker as a way of getting at an identity that Black women could feel more comfortable with. African-American women in the United States had felt extraordinarily excluded by the tin ear that a lot of white feminists had around their needs, the way in which the white women’s movement seemed to be framed around their priorities and didn’t recognise issues such as police violence or forms of racism encountered in relationships with the State, or schools that were very important to Black women activists. So there have been a variety of different kinds of terms which capture movements for gender justice, but we can also see that there are often common interests around women’s agency, women’s empowerment, freedom from violence and so on that can group together those struggles.

In other circumstances, not using the term “feminist” was a strategic choice: if we look to the way in which women were incorporated into forms of state power-holding in Australia, a country where there was significant involvement of women activists within the state, many chose not to call themselves feminist because it enabled them to gain power and to wield that power in women’s interests more easily. They didn’t use a term that was sometimes associated with sexual antagonism, extremism and stridency, and therefore wasn’t always particularly welcome in all circumstances. However, they often had quite clear feminist agendas, even though they might have avoided naming themselves in that kind of way. So there are both political and strategic reasons why the term "feminism· isn’t always used across all contexts.

When the term "feminism· was popularised in the late 19th century, one of the reasons why it was a useful term was because the previous term used – the women’s movement – did seem to exclude men. There had been an enormous number of powerful male allies of women’s rights, such as the Cuban nationalist José Martí, the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, the British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill or the Irish socialist William Thompson. These men were very important in supporting women’s demands and producing significant pieces of feminist writing.

Feminism was intended to be a term that would welcome them more fully into the fold, and that was given impetus by the involvement of many men’s leagues in the suffrage struggle. Some men were very vocal in calling for women’s inclusion as full citizens, but it hasn’t been particularly easy for them to always see themselves as feminists, in particular in the period of women’s liberation in the 1970s and 1980s. That was a period where there was a strong turn away from the inclusion of men. Men were part of early women’s liberation actions and conferences and marches, but women often found that they had quite critical things to say about men. The women’s liberation movement was encouraging women not just to talk about women’s rights, women’s inclusion and what women could do to join public life, but to centre in on questions of male violence and of the deep obstacles that women faced in having their voices heard. Ironically, it was men who saw themselves as allies of the women’s movement that were blocking women’s voices by talking over them in meetings and were not able to listen carefully to what women had to say.

Therefore, many women’s liberation activists chose to meet in women-only spaces, which seems to be a rich source of solidarity, of thinking about sisterhood, of creating safe spaces for women; spaces such as refuges, women’s centres, feminist bookshops, an enormous flowering of creativity around women’s liberation. It also meant, however, that men who wanted to be part of the women’s movement had to be creative at creating spaces for what they termed “anti-sexist men”, to talk about patriarchy, sexism and how they might be different as men.