Back to feminism, and this is a more controversial thing to pose but what damage has been done by middle-class feminists to the feminism movement?
For the past 20 years probably there have been meaningless (or outright vile) 'feminist' efforts by middle-class feminists. Feminist Julie Burchill's Diana published in 1998, feminist Bea Campbell's Diana Princess of Wales the blistering analysis "The Diana dialectic had arrived: she was both empowered and endangered." and stuff along the lines of: "By telling her story Diana joined the 'constituency of the rejected' - the survivors of harm and horror, from the holocaust, from the world wars and pogroms, from Vietnam and the civil wars of South America and South Africa, from torture and child abuse."
Natasha Walter's The New Feminism in 1997 welcomed a survey of teenage girls naming Elizabeth II and
Thatcher as their heroines. She says Thatcher "normalised female success" and hence is "the great unsung heroine of British feminism" who "allowed British women to celebrate their ability not just to be nurturing or caring or life-affirming but also to be deeply unpleasant, to be cruel, to be death-dealing, to be egotistic". A lot of feminism was on this basis 'we need all-women listings and quotas to drive through an increase to 50-50 in the ratio at the management level down to the bottom level. From the Fawcett Society to dozens of charities working on women's issues (probably the heart of feminism more than any political organisation) - that was the broad thrust.
By 2006 feminist Prof Alison Wolf attacked this sort of 'obsession' with women securing equality with men in all fields of social life, on (misplaced) different feminist grounds:
"For Walter, it is so obvious that equality should be measured in terms of whether men and women are equally represented at all levels of every occupation that she sees no need to spell it out. One could interpret today’s feminist assumptions as reflecting the appetite of global capitalism for all talent, female and male, at the expense of the family. Certainly our current economic arrangements offer precious little support to family formation. On the contrary, they erect major barriers in its way. We all know by now that in most developed countries, birth rates are well below replacement level. Less recognised is the massive change in incentives to have children. In the past, adults had no tax-financed welfare state to depend on. Their families were their social insurance policies: children paid. Today, they expect the state to take care of their financial and health needs when ill or retired, regardless of whether they have six children or none.
The benefits we get are completely unrelated to whether or not we contribute a future productive member to the economy. [There is] the virtual disappearance of home-based, educated women (at least below the age of 60) has had an effect. A path once followed by able women across the developed world led to university, teaching and then motherhood, homemaking and voluntary work. Such women are now too busy. The average amount of time that today’s British citizen, male or female, devotes to volunteer activities is four minutes a day. The old unpaid female labour force is now otherwise engaged. Ask the Girl Guides if you doubt this. Scouting and guiding are themselves redolent of that vanished past. Yet Robert Baden-Powell understood exactly what excites and interests children, and the movement has them queuing, often vainly, at the door. What it lacks are adult leaders.
There is a chasm between the moral purpose voiced by female pioneers and the iconic female advertising slogan of today—”Because I’m worth it.” We could, I suppose, write off the beliefs of the former group as the opium of the educated female classes, developed to reconcile them to unequal lives. But then we should see our own obsession with female occupational success as an ideology too. As late as the 1940s and 1950s, education white papers were still imbued with the language of morality and idealism."
The 2 most recent feminist books are Guardian journalist feminist Ellie Levenson's The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism and Times journalist Caitlin Moran's How to be a woman.
Ellie Levenson talks about a new generation of "femininisn't"s, people who no longer really need feminism as a political force and so it is acceptable to count them as feminists, even though they explicitly reject calling themselves or being called feminists. Her non-ironic approach is summed up by her statement "Sometimes I walk past a building site and am annoyed if there are no wolf whistles".
Caitlin Moran's How to be a woman which I started recently is slightly more intelligent, she is correctly angry that people are still wolf-whistled, but it is clearly from a very specific middle-class female journalist perspective. It doesn't mention the structural failure of the capitalist economy to allow equality, it suggests the first step in overcoming sexism in Muslim majority countries is removing the veil, it has a moment where it says casual anti-foreigner statements are much less acceptable than casual sexist comments, it is in favour of burlesque nudity but not strip club nudity, it is in favour of body modification of any sort, including trimming of underarm hair except the trimming of pubic hair is bad, and basically encourages an individualistic go-get-em approach coupled with certain lifestyle approaches. It also has a disturbing tendency to want to make things need to be 'hot' - although this might be humour.
So where the conception of feminism when presented in a positive light has been like this for the past 20 years; I feel it's unsurprising that the media's negative emphasis on it will turn away many.
I don't have faith in Uk Femenista, the only sane one out of the 3in the Observer article, because who does it invite into its "The Feminist Lobby of Parliament takes place on Wednesday 24 October"?
It tells us
The order of the day is as follows:
Rally: 11:00-12:30, Church House, 27 Great Smith Street, Westminster, London, SW1P 3AZ. Featuring talks by Yvette Cooper MP, Caroline Lucas MP and Amber Rudd MP, as well as a performance by the Olympic Suffragettes.
Photo-call: 13:00-13:30, Parliament Square, City of Westminster, London. SW1P. Present at the photo-call will be Helen Pankhurst, the ‘Olympic Suffragettes’, supporting MPs and lobby participants.
1. Yvette Cooper's New Labour began a programme of cuts to ESOL well before official austerity, dismantles childcare provision in workplaces to replace with an inadequate Sure Start system, ends final salary pensions crucial for women, criminalises the Paulsgrove women, forces through parenting classes, fails to extend reproductive health into the 6 counties of northern Ireland, puts more women on No Access to Public Funds visas than ever before etc etc.
2. Caroline Lucas, despite the airy talk, from a Green Party able to endorse housing association control of housing in Sussex, slowly getting sucked into the system, and from a Green Party international, whose German wing seems on a mission to out-chauvinist its rightwing opponents by demanding all Muslim circumcisions of boys be made illegal. (Let's forget its cheerleading for NATO in Libya, or NATO over Yugoslavia for that matter - but that's the only path it can head towards as it grows on current trends).
3. Amber Rudd, a new 'Cameroonian' 'compassionate conservative' Tory MP, part of the most destructive assault on public spending, designed by their plans to last for another 8 years.
4. 'Olympic Suffragettes' sounds like an attempt to make the entirety of the suffragette experience national and British national at that - excluding the Inghinidhe na Eireann and Cumann na mBan.
5. Helen Pankhurst seems to be the major guest speaker simply because she is Emmeline Pankhurst's great-granddaughter and a successful professional academic.
If this is what feminism means - no wonder even those who hate the idea of going back to the 1960s - don't really see themselves as feminists.
