Dare To Be A Feminist

Putting unsung heroines on the map.

On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique de Montréal and shot 14 women, whom he'd identified as feminists, to death before killing himself.

Laura Agustin debunks lies told about her and the history of a whole social movement in favour of sex worker rights by a fundamentalist Swedish feminist.

Sex, or fear of it, has been almost as important in the construction of this nightmare state as racism. Just as the legal gains of the civil rights movement were blunted by LBJ’s Safe Streets Act and the incipient “war on drugs,” the sexual revolution and women’s liberation were short-circuited by serial sex panics, police power in loco mariti, Victims’ Rights as a mask for vengeance and the conception of the Sex Offender as a new, utterly damnable category of human being. It’s significant that the police state’s expansion in the late 1960s–70s coincided not only with the blowing winds of freedom and conservative backlash but with the falling rate of profit. Twenty years on, with the welfare state exhausted, the punishment state found its greatest champion in Bill Clinton, whose neoliberal down escalator for the working class required a vast reserve army of unemployed. Capitalism needed the penitentiary. It always has. Old fears in new skins helped oil the machinery.

Clinton gave his violence program a twist of identity politics—enhanced penalties for violence against women, hate as an actionable emotion, child protection as a blanket for censorship and repression—but those who backed him were not simply gulled. For years before—and each side for its own reasons—some liberals had made common cause with some conservatives on policing sex. “Carceral feminists,” the subject of a fair amount of recent talk and scholarship on the roots of anti-trafficking campaigns, is an unlovely phrase, but it usefully denotes a social force that elided personal power with state power, eschewed the project of liberation—the goal of a radically different set of power relations—and took as its armor the victim’s mantle.

The workplace is largely unequal, but gender equality in the workplace is the best it's ever been.

Many criticisms of feminist analysis involve the complaint that questions were asked that never got answered - or a damning indictment was exposed, with little in the way of remedial action suggested. The Female Eunuch cannot be accused of this. ...

Emily Wilding Davison’s actions made her one of the most famous suffragettes of her time.   A century of speculation about her death has focused on her possessions at that time.  In particular, the return railway ticket in her purse has led many historians to suggest she had no intention of committing suicide that day.  However, Elizabeth Crawford’s latest research strongly suggests that ‘special offer’ return tickets were the only ones available on Derby Day, and so this piece of evidence can be discounted.  However, other recent research into her death has largely favoured the view that she did not commit suicide on that day, but was instead aware of the possible consequences of her actions and was ready to face them: this being arrest, injury or death.   Like FEMEN protesters a century later, she was using her body as a means of protest.

Whatever her motivation, Davison’s death remains one of the most iconic moments of the militant suffragette movement, caught on camera, in the years immediately before the First World War.  Thousands of women, and some men, took part in the women’s suffrage campaign in these years, with hundreds of them being arrested as their demonstrations became more imaginative. The 1911 census boycott, for example, saw many thousands of women physically absenting themselves from being  ‘at home’ on census night by taking part in all-night roller-skating, midnight picnicking in parks, and camping out in caravans. Davison herself hid in a broom cupboard in the House of Commons, thus enabling her to put this exclusive address down as her place of residence.  After the failure of successive governments to pursue the women’s suffrage agenda, the campaign became more militant.  Mostly, the actions were aimed at property, such as setting fire to post boxes (a crime for which Davison was imprisoned), breaking windows and burning bastions of patriarchy such as cricket pavilions.

The State dealt with these actions, not by engaging in dialogue, but by throwing the women into prison.  The more militant suffragettes appealed to be made First Division prisoners, the category afforded to political prisoners rather than common criminals.  When this was denied, they started hunger strikes...