Women and politics: What kind of feminism can win?

November 26, 1997
Issue 

Title

By Lisa Macdonald

Pick up any newspaper in any city on pretty much any day of the week, and there'll be at least one article quoting one or another politician, so-called expert or social commentator on how "society" is paying a price for feminism.

After two decades of marginalisation, the reactionary politics of scapegoating is on the rise again. Women, who "take men's jobs", "neglect their children", "get rich on their ex-husband's alimony payments" and "kill their unborn children", are in the firing line, along with indigenous people, migrants and young people.

The backlash against feminism is aimed at convincing us that the family, not government, is best placed to meet people's needs. Thus the way is smoothed for women's quality of life and choices to be sacrificed on the altar of a "balanced budget".

In less than two years, the Howard government has slashed millions of dollars from child-care, refuge, rape crisis centre and family planning services funding.

While it's not just women who are the victims of Australian capitalism's austerity drive, the anti-people, pro-profit policies of the Coalition government (and Labor before it) are impacting particularly severely on women. Taking the axe to education, health, aged care and welfare services is driving millions of women — already disadvantaged in their access to decent jobs and social services — into greater poverty and exhaustion as they struggle to cope with the re-privatised care of children, the aged and the sick.

Rolling back the widespread consciousness that remains from the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and '70s — that women have the right to equal education, employment and personal opportunities — and convincing us that women's most important roles are in family life, is necessary if capitalism is to create a more "flexible" work force and cut the social wage without paying too high a political price. Women's expectations of the state must be lowered.

Despite the rapidity with which so many hard-won women's rights and services are being eroded, resistance to the attacks has been noticeably weak.

It's not that most women aren't aware of the implications of the attacks, or aren't angry about them. Opinion polls and the presence of women, especially young women, in campaigns around various other issues tell us that. But, reflecting the demobilisation, fragmentation and conservatisation of the women's liberation movement over the last 20 years, there have been very few public mobilisations against attacks on women's rights in the '90s.

Liberal feminism

This is a direct result of the 1983-1996 Labor government's success at coopting the leadership of the movement.

During the 1980s, much of the women's movement leadership was bought off with higher posts in government bureaucracies and academia (some of them newly created to address feminist concerns), and with many-strings-attached government funding.

While some legal reforms were won, the granting of costless, and often toothless, concessions to the movement (such as the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984 and the Affirmative Action Act in 1986) was used by these feminists to deflect criticism of and bolster support for the ALP. This is despite the fact that it introduced numerous policies which adversely affected women, refused to take a party position on abortion and did virtually nothing to close the gap between men's and women's wages.

A small minority of individual women did "make it" in the process. While women are still a tiny minority in the boardrooms and executive offices of the big corporations, there are now more women with "management" careers in parliament, the bureaucracy, academia and the media than ever before.

As well, many of the feminist activists who were the militant edge of the early movement became entrapped in government-funded welfare work and often politically compromised by the fear of having funding withdrawn.

In these ways, the political independence of the women's liberation movement was held in check and undermined. Liberal feminism — the perspective that women's oppression is simply a form of discrimination that can be resolved within the capitalist status quo through winning formal equality — strengthened, strangling the radical potential of the movement.

This occurred directly via the femocrats and women politicians who actively demobilised campaigns that threatened the electoral strength of the Labor Party (their source of funds and career paths). It occurred indirectly through the lobbying methods and reformist perspective encouraged by these feminists, who worked hard to prevent any radical break from Labor.

However, liberal feminism didn't dominate the movement just because its perspective and methods were fundamentally in harmony with the Labor government. Liberalism's grip was strengthened by the weakness of most of the socialist wing of the movement, which, shaped by Stalinism (primarily through the influence of the Communist Party of Australia), could present no alternative, democratic path.

Today, while many of those women who made it under the ALP still talk volubly about equal rights and the need for feminist organisations, they have deserted the project of building a women's movement that aims and acts to improve the conditions of all women. In practice, they support feminist campaigning only in so far as it does not challenge their own interests, which flow from the privileged positions they now occupy.

Despite this, over the last decade "feminism" has come to be publicly defined by and as liberal feminism.

Liberal feminists have much greater access to money, media and public policy decision-makers than working-class women or the left.

And the establishment media and political parties are only too eager to promote the transformation of "feminism". From a broadly based, militant movement against women's oppression and for the collective transformation of society, it is changed into one of individual rights, individual achievements and individual solutions which, bit by bit, without challenging the fundamental structures or the ruling elites, will enable some more women to increase their role in reforming (rather than changing) the status quo.

Liberal feminists may have publicly claimed the word feminism as their own, but theirs is not a feminism that the majority of women will benefit from or can identify with: seats in parliament, consultancies, lectureships and academic publications are a far cry from the reality of most women's lives. Picture

It is no surprise that survey after survey shows that while this generation of young women still support and expect equal rights, they frequently do not identify as "feminists".

Postmodernism

The weakening of the women's liberation movement occurred in the context of a broader retreat of the left. This manifested itself in the rise of postmodernism, the form in which liberalism found a new lease of life in the advanced capitalist countries from the late 1980s.

In place of the early movement's focus on women's common experience of oppression, postmodernist feminism emphasised "diversity": the differences between men and women, and between women themselves, whether based on race, class, religion, ethnicity or psychology.

The politics of difference asserts that because those who have spoken in the name of science and progress in this society have silenced and exploited marginal or less powerful groups (including women), then science and progress and all that it is based on must be rejected.

Counterposing itself to the "universalising" of knowledge and experience, postmodernist feminism argues that everyone perceives, understands and responds to things differently.

In practice this means that everyone should do their own thing, believe in and value the individuality of their experiences and ideas, and (supposedly) respect everyone else's individuality. The economic and psychological oppression shared by all women is theorised out of existence.

This individualisation of feminist politics is a body blow to women's confidence and ability to organise and carry out collective struggles for reforms (let alone their full liberation). In the desire not to speak for anyone else, in the desire not to marginalise or "oppress" other women, the point is reached where you can no longer see the commonalities between your own and others' experiences — the things that unite you against an oppressor, that would make you have solidarity.

As a strategy for liberation, the idea that "we are all individuals" is founded on the illusion that it is possible to change society profoundly, to eradicate women's oppression on a piecemeal basis, sector by sector, or one by one, without the need for alliances and common struggle.

But even a cursory study of history reveals that every significant step towards greater freedom has been won by large numbers of people banding together in struggle. That has been as true for the women's movement as any other.

Do-it-yourself feminism

"Do-it-yourself" (DIY) feminism, the so-called "third wave" of feminism and the latest manifestation of liberal feminism, arose as a direct response to the betrayal of the leaders of the '70s movement. These women are rightly seen by a new generation to have defined feminism according to their own image — patronising, exclusive, bureaucratised and consciously aligned with the establishment.

As Kathy Bail put it in her 1996 book DIY Feminism: "For young women, rather than one feminism there are a plethora of feminisms mostly going under new and more exciting tags".

Despite rejecting the constrictions and conservatism of the "professional" liberal feminists, however, DIY feminism has not escaped its clutches. It continues the middle-class individualistic outlook of the femocratic feminism it purports to reject.

"Riot grrrls", "guerilla girls", "net chicks", "geekgirls", "cyber chix": DIY feminism makes examples of and encourages women to "go for it/go for themselves" and be successful. This is fine and good except that it assumes that the institutionalised barriers (including sexist language) to women's equal participation in all spheres of society no longer exist.

Implicitly, if not explicitly, DIY feminism thereby dismisses, even condemns, women who have not "done it for themselves", or who dare to "complain" that sexism is a barrier. The fact that women's choices of careers, hobbies interests and so on are not made freely, but are shaped and limited by sexism (and racism, and their class position), is not even considered.

DIY feminism is a step further backwards for women's liberation in so far as it is based on a more conscious rejection of those aspects of the second wave that made it strong enough to win even a few reforms for women — collectivity and organisation.

Where to now?

While liberal feminism in all its forms abandons the project of achieving fundamental and permanent social change for the pursuit of individual solutions, women are still being systematically raped, exploited, starved, denied land rights and murdered. Clearly, a different strategy is needed.

If we are serious about winning full equality, justice and freedom for all women, we need to learn from history, from the victories of the women's movement over a century.

The key lesson is that we need a movement that is inclusive and democratic, active and uncompromising in its pursuit of the needs and aspirations of the majority of women, rather than a privileged few.

It must be inclusive because the only movement that can successfully defend and extend women's rights, let alone fully liberate women, is a mass movement: one that has the support (if not the active participation) of the majority of women, regardless of their age, skin colour, nationality, sexuality or employment status. Such a movement will be a working-class movement.

It must be democratic because without the fullest democracy in discussion and decision-making about the way to proceed, the knowledge, commitment, diversity of ideas and energy of large numbers of women will be stifled or squandered, and these are the movement's main weapons against such a powerful system of oppression.

Finally, it must be active and politically uncompromising in its pursuit of justice for all people because, even organised as a mass movement, women cannot bring about the sort of monumental change needed to eradicate sexism — an end to capitalism — without the support of other oppressed groups fighting the same system.

While always retaining its independence and putting the needs and aspirations of women first, feminism must learn better how to support and build alliances with others in struggle.

In the process of educating each other about our different experiences of oppression, the links which unite us to fight for the creation of a society in which everyone has the same life choices and opportunities — irrespective of sex, race or class — will be strengthened, and we can win.

You need Green Left, and we need you!

Green Left is funded by contributions from readers and supporters. Help us reach our funding target.

Make a One-off Donation or choose from one of our Monthly Donation options.

Become a supporter to get the digital edition for $5 per month or the print edition for $10 per month. One-time payment options are available.

You can also call 1800 634 206 to make a donation or to become a supporter. Thank you.