In this article activist-academic Camilla Fitzsimons, analyses two different approaches to the fight against wonen’s oppression. She argues that neoliberal feminism is a dead-end, with an anti-capitalist feminism providing a superior, alternative route.
In early 2022, the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) announced that the focus of their International Women’s Day rally would be to demand political action in addressing ongoing and endemic levels of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence. When they announced their speaker list for this ‘No Woman Left Behind’ rally, they immediately came under fire from some quarters.
Who Speaks
This was because no women from Ireland’s coalition government of centre-right parties had been invited to speak. The Minister for Justice Helen McEntee called the decision ‘regrettable’. Senator Regina Doherty, who was also from the party in government, lambasted the NWCI during a radio debate describing the decision as ‘juvenile, absolutely counterproductive and divisive.’ She challenged their absence of sisterhood claiming ‘women are not the competition for other women … it’s men around the table that are our competition.’ Doherty then threatened future funding for the NWCI because of their intolerence towards some women’s opinions. ‘This isn’t the first time that I have felt that the NWCI don’t represent my views’ she lamented continuing ‘they don’t want to hear my views.’
In response to this threat to funding, Brid Smith, a socialist and an elected member of the Dáil (Irish parliament)described it as ‘deeply sinister that Regina repeatedly mentions how the NWCI is funded’ explaining, ‘other groups have had their funding cut in the past, because they organised protests against government policy.’ Smith then reminded Doherty that it was her party that have ‘cut to the bone the services that are out in our society’ continuing ‘and this is a big part of the protest and I don’t think it is approprate for people who belong to parties who have implemented these austerity measures, and sat over them, and allowed them to continue … to speak at this rally.’
Smith was right. Just two months before this radio debate, the CEO of an umbrella organisation that links domestic violence services told a cross-party govement committee that up to nine families each day were being turned away from emergency accommodation and that nine counties in Ireland didn’t even have a domestic violence refuge. The CEO described current services as ‘Dickensian’ and admonished the state for ‘placing women, and children, at very real risk of grievous trauma, injury or fatality.’
Neoliberal Feminism
I open with this exchange because it perfectly captures a fundamental divergence at the heart of feminism. On one side there are feminists who, like Doherty, have synchronised their ambitions for women with the neoliberal capitalist project. Their end goal is to ensure women get to take their rightful place at the tables of power in an otherwise largely unchanged world. The pathway to gender equality is solidarity through sisterhood, the right frame of mind, and some policy tweaks here and there. Together these factors will enable women to break through the glass ceiling of unwritten rules and unspoken biases that prevent them from progressing in public life despite their best efforts. Eventually, our sheer strength in numbers will even eradicate sexism by creating workplaces and other social spaces that are more responsive and civilised environments for women to inhabit. Shortages in funding for domestic violence services like the ones Smith raised are regrettable, but they are because of wider more complicated budget constraints that are beyond our control.
Economic Inequality
On the other side of the feminist divide there are those, like Brid Smith, who take a very different view. Certainly culturally upheld sexism is bad everywhere including in the boardrooms of power, but if we are to truly liberate women, we must liberate everyone from the fundamentally unequal system of neoliberal capitalism, where the world’s richest ten percent take home 52 percent of all income, whilst the poorest half earns just 8.5 percent.
Sometimes people miss the fact that this accumulation of wealth for the few is only possible because women and girls continue pick up the bulk of unpaid domestic and care labour. In 2021, the charity Oxfam asserted that if women’s unpaid work was to be costed at the minimum wage, it would be worth globally US$10.8 trillion per year.
Liberals don’t deny that women do more housework than men. They blame this on patriarchy which, simply defined, means the economic, social, and cultural oppression of women by men. Patriarchy is also presented as the root cause of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence which, as the NWCI were keen to point out, remains at endemic levels even after the global #Metoo movement normalised the regular shaming of certain behaviours.
Violence and the Patriarchy
According to the World Health Organisation, one-in-three women have at some point in their lives been denied safety, security, financial and psychological independence, mostly by men that they know. Men that are violent sometimes don’t necessarily think of themselves in that way and might feel that their actions are entirely justified and authorised by the ideology of male supremacy. Conversely, patriarchy’s feminine coding valorises women for being good mothers, attentive partners, and employees who don’t make a fuss when they meet sexism in the workplace. When women do step out of these parameters, the structures of capitalist-patriarchy pushes back in the form of misogyny, something Kate Manne describes as a structural pattern of behaviour that controls and punishes women and girls when they challenge the patriarchal status quo.
Anti-Capitalist Feminists
Mostly, ‘radical’, ‘critical’ and ‘Marxist’ feminists (hereafter anti-capitalist feminists) agree on this definition of patriarchy and agree on its negative impacts including that some men, across all walks of life, resist equality with women because of the many benefits bestowed on them including occupational rewards, freedom from much unpaid labour, the right to be in charge and the prestige of simply being male. Nevertheless, sexism cannot be separated out from other forms of structural oppression including classism, racism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, our relationship with borders, and our proximity to the catastrophic impacts of our climate disaster none of which are mutually exclusive.
Police and Courts
Anti-capitalist feminists also agree that addressing male violence against women is an urgent task. But they are much less inclined to put their faith in the criminal justice system as the main defensive and preventative tool. To do so ignores that most victims never report their assaults to the police, a figure that, in Ireland, is has high as 80 percent. It also ignores how different population groups have very different experiences of policing, and dismissive attitudes within police forces – an occupation within which there are higher than average numbers of perpetrators.
Even if policing is adequate and equal and a case goes to court, liberal feminists rarely insist on the radical overhaul of the courts system that would be needed to end their ongoing victim blaming. By way of example, courtrooms continue to entertain misogynistic myths about the nature of rape (i.e., that a ‘real rape’ involves a stranger), that there must be evidence of physical assault, and that there is an ‘ideal victim’ (i.e., a certain way a person should behave before, during and after an assault). In the case of violent gang rapes, the grotesque idea that someone actually consents are still commonly presented as a legitimate point of view.
Instead of sufficiently highlighting these problems, liberal feminists prop-up, and sometimes even lead, neoliberal governments that ineffectively address domestic, sexual and gender-based violence. One reason for this is because seeking to expose the root causes of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence means examining the preferential cultural and economic treatment given to the heteronormative family – a social structure within which it is perfectly normal to present a healthy family dynamic to the world and reserve a very different often unhealthy dynamic for behind closed doors. This allows for the normalisation of various forms of violence that would be completely unacceptable in any other situation.
A Violent System
But what about the violence of capitalism itself, a system that knowingly puts people in harms way, be this through its policy driven shortage of social and preventable housing, or inadequate healthcare where prolonged waiting lists and unequal access to healthcare professionals enact violence on certain population groups, again by failing to prevent harm. And this is before any mention of intersections with the denial of bodily autonomy in sexual and reproductive health care. On a global scale the violence of capitalism includes the environmental degradation that is triggered by our constant drilling for raw materials and our expansive clearing of land for industrial farming is causing irreparable damage to our ecosystem. This destruction of habitat causes significant structural violence for the communities that live close by especially those living in the worst housing and with the lowest incomes.
And what about capitalism’s burgeoning military industrial complex and imperialist drive for expansion which creates perpetual wars that often target civilian populations. In research published in the Lancet, women and children were shown to bear extensive morbidity and mortality because of armed conflicts through direct violence and because of indirect health effects including malnutrition, infectious diseases, poor mental health, and poor sexual and reproductive health.
Liberal feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s included a strong anti-war perspective; today’s neoliberal feminists are more likely to not only support imperialist incursions, into mostly Muslim and often oil rich countries, but to justify these incursions as in the best interests of women. Rafia Zakariauses the expression ‘feminist wars’ to describe where imperialist actions disingenuously claim to be motivated by a desire to free women from sexism but with no supports for women in the invaded country to self-determine. This is because to do so would quickly expose how most indigenous feminists would prioritise ending repeated, violent imperialist occupations before anything else and abhor their own weaponization against their fathers, brothers, and sons.
Tackling the System
If feminism is truly about ending violence, it cannot selectively focus on weeding out individual men and ignoring the social relations within which we live. Instead, we must take an expansive view that includes protecting women from individual perpetrators.
As the political scientist Françoise Vergès puts it, feminism cannot conceivably separate “violence against women” or against minorities from a global state of violence: the children who commit suicide [sic] in refugee camps, the police and military’s massive recourse to rape in armed conflict, systemic racism, the exile of million of people due to the multiplication of war zones of living uninhabitable, femicide, and the relentless increase in precarity. Can we imagine addressing only part of this violence without considering the rest?
Feminism also cannot universalise the experience of mostly white, middle-class western women as to do so turns a blind to how many of the lifestyle choices we make are only possible because of the low-paid, precarious workforce behind them. This includes how the fast-fashion industry operates and also the reality of ever expanding global care chains where privileged women ‘lean on’ the millions of working class and migrant women who work in the worst and most badly paid feminised roles and who pick up the slack of privileged women’s care loads and domestic responsibilities.
Shared sisterhood isn’t real. It is a harmful illusion that benefits privileged women, or as bell hooks writes, it is ‘a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women’s varied and complex social reality.’
I want everyone to be feminist.
But only if this means accepting that the ambitions of economic, social and cultural equality; freedom from violence and even reproductive liberation cannot be realised by some women ascending to positions of power within a system that, to its core, depends on women’s subordination. One of the biggest failures of liberal feminism is to deny that this is what has happened and that the very important advances feminists have won like access to education, contraception and more workplace protections will never be evenly spread.
