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Indian suffragettes in the Women's Coronation Procession, London, on June 17, 1911 [Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images]

100 years ago, British women won the right to vote, after decades of resistance.

The Representation of the People Act 1918 granted women older than 30 and with property the right to cast the ballot.

But as Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett were lionised as leaders, the contribution of working-class women and women of colour was barely acknowledged.

South Asian women, for instance, played a seminal role.

Al Jazeera spoke to Sumita Mukherjee, an historian of the British Empire and Indian subcontinent, on the contribution of women of Indian descent to British women's suffrage movement.
Al Jazeera: How important was the role of Sophia Duleep Singh?
She was the most prominent woman of Indian heritage in the British suffragette movement.

She was the daughter of an exiled Indian Prince, Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was a favourite of Queen Victoria. She herself was the goddaughter of Queen Victoria.

Sophia became involved in the women's Tax Resistance League, an association that refused to pay their taxes, arguing as women didn't have the vote, they shouldn't have to pay their taxes. Their rallying cry was: "No taxation without representation."

In Sophia's case, bailiffs came on a number of occasions to her property and impounded her goods, which they would then sell off at auction.

The women's Tax Resistance League members would go to those auctions and buy back her property, which gave publicity to their campaign slogans and the general campaign for women's votes.

Sophia also led one of the big suffrage demonstrations in 1910, known as Black Friday, with Emmeline Pankhurst, along with some other demonstrations.

Her older sister, Catherine, also had suffragette sympathies. She was involved with the peaceful suffrage campaigners, but she lived in Germany so she was not as heavily involved.
Al Jazeera: Did she face any barriers?
Mukherjee: Sophia was an exception in a lot of ways. Because of her aristocratic, royal background, she was very privileged. She was wealthy, so she was able to refuse to pay taxes.

Because of her royal background, we know she was treated quite well by the police and other authorities, which was true for most middle-class suffragists at the time. Her class and her wealth almost trumped her race.
Al Jazeera: How did imperialism influence the British suffrage movement, and how did this impact the intersection of class and race?
There were very few women of colour who were involved with the movement, and that is primarily because British suffrage campaigners did not think about including women of colour into conversations and debates around citizenship, and the right to participate in the democratic structures of the nation.

A lot of this is rooted in ideas of empire and colonialism.

Considering the history of imperialism and colonialism, I think it is really important to be cautious about how we think about Indian women involved in the British suffragette movement.

Sophia Duleep Singh was someone who had a voice. But the other Indian women who were involved, they did not have a voice.

In June 1911, for example, there was a suffrage coronation procession through London where some Indian women were invited to take part, and encouraged to wear their national dress, saris.

These women were objectified by British women who wanted to throw in a bit of colour to the campaign and draw attention to tokenistic attempts of being diverse.
Al Jazeera: How would you describe the portrayal of women of colour associated with the movement, according to evidence?
This relates to a lot of work by the historian Antoinette Burton, who looked at British suffrage newspapers and periodicals.

[When] Indian women are discussed, the narrative is usually centred on depicting them as victims in need of reform.

Rather than giving any agency or a voice to Indian women, it was very much about British imperial intervention into Indian women's lives.

The issue with race was that British women, up until 1918 and even beyond, were campaigning for a vote in an imperial parliament that would give them a say over what happened in the Empire.

They argued that by securing the domestic vote, women would have an influence on issues like education, healthcare and women's issues, and that's why that "feminine voice" was required in politics.

Rather than giving any agency or a voice to Indian women, it was very much about British imperial intervention into Indian women's lives.

India was, after all, the crowning jewel of the Empire which captured the imagination of British campaigners, and so this paternalistic idea emerged that British women would "uplift" Indian women.
Al Jazeera: How did women's suffrage embed itself into anticolonial struggles around the world?
In other parts of the Empire, women were campaigning for greater economic rights, the right to own property, the right to have a voice within these limited democratic institutions.

But that's not to say that the demands for the vote were not also being pushed for, at the same time as anticolonial struggles.

In India, there were women doing both, women who took that so-called peaceful, democratic route fighting for the vote, but at the same time, were also caught in the unrest around the nationalist struggle for emancipation from imperial powers.

Indian women were campaigning for the vote from 1917 onwards, because they fundamentally disagreed that women should be excluded from the limited democratic right to vote, that was given to some Indian men under colonial rule.

Sarojini Naidu's legacy, alongside that of other, Indian women, are a powerful corrective to the idea that the fight for female suffrage was a purely Western phenomenon.

Sarojini Naidu, a prominent Indian poet, female activist and close political ally of Mahatma Ghandi, campaigned for women's rights and engaged in anticolonial struggles.

She was arrested a number of times for her role in nationalist activities, and was at the forefront of the suffrage movement in India, petitioning the Indian government, meeting with politicians and demanding that women get the vote.

Her legacy, alongside that of other Indian women, are a powerful corrective to the idea that the fight for female suffrage was a purely Western phenomenon.

Why not draw inspiration from women in India campaigning for the right to vote? From women in South Africa? We don't necessarily have to always be Anglocentric. Whatever our backgrounds are, we can find role models and inspiring figures in other parts of the world.

Sophia Duleep Singh, too, visited India on a number of occasions, lending her support to the anticolonial struggle and the Indian women's suffrage movement.

Sophia identified as British, but she also identified with her Indian heritage, especially because of the royal links her family had on her father's side.

She encouraged Indian women to campaign for their rights in India and take up the mantle of the suffrage campaign there as well.
Al Jazeera: Why is it important to bring this dimension of the suffrage movement to light?
I t's important to think about whether some of those who are British today feel excluded from these conversations and this commemoration.

There aren't very many women of African origin at all in the movement, for instance, so we need to think not only about questions around why that is, but also to broaden our search.

Why not draw inspiration from women in India campaigning for the right to vote? From women in South Africa? We don't necessarily have to always be Anglocentric. Whatever our backgrounds are, we can find role models and inspiring figures in other parts of the world.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

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How Indian women contributed to the suffrage movement

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100 years ago, British women won the right to vote, after decades of resistance. The Representation of the People Act 1918 granted women older than 30 and with property the right to cast the ballot. But as Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett were lionised as leaders, the contribution of working-class women and women of colour was barely acknowledged.

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100 years since the first women go the vote

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It is inspiring in this centenary year to hear about the formidable work of the Suffragette and Suffragist movements, securing for women the right to vote and stand for election - it's part of the basic history of our "island story" that is seldom told.

Much has been achieved as a result of this change but the evidence shows full equality for women is still not a reality. The basic democratic deficit that women faced in 1918 may have been addressed in law but inequality for women still blights Britain. This centenary year of celebration is a time to look forward and to consider how we continue to fight for women's equality in the next 100 years.

It's important to acknowledge that Britain does have some of the best equality laws in the world; women are achieving better than men at every level of education; more women than men achieve the best degrees from our best universities and have done for two decades; and there are record numbers of women in work.

Yet, for too many women that positive change has not translated into real life equality - far from it: women are disproportionately more likely to be in low pay, low skilled work with little or no prospect of progression; they are increasingly likely to experience unlawful discrimination or even lose their job because they are pregnant; and the gender pay gap for women over 35 is more entrenched than ever.

When it comes to those in positions of power, while we may have our second female Prime Minister, there are just seven women chief executives leading FTSE 100 companies and just one in three members of the House of Commons is female.

The Women and Equalities Select Committee, which I chair, itself only established less than three years ago under the incoming Cameron Conservative Government, has collected a catalogue of evidence that clearly points to the need for a radically different approach when it comes to women's equality.

Sexual harassment at work and pay discrimination have been hitting the headlines in the past months - both are already against the law. But these are laws that lack teeth and lack enforcement, putting them low on the agenda of many employers.

Giving existing law more teeth and making sure those with enforcement powers use them is a good start but if our country is to be at its very best we need to complete a long-overdue modernisation of the workplace. And here is where millennial men will play their part in women's equality too. Work life balance, particularly flexible working, is high on the agenda of the under 35s.

British business is on notice to modernise and embrace Prime Minister Theresa May's calls for all jobs to be "flexible" from day one. As we leave the EU our country can't afford not to be using all of the talent in our ranks. As we celebrate 100 years of having the right to vote we must quicken the pace towards broader equality in more women's day-to-day lives too.
Maria Miller is MP for Basingstoke, a Conservative politician and chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee
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It might be 100 years since women got the vote - but our society is still sexist

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It is inspiring in this centenary year to hear about the formidable work of the Suffragette and Suffragist movements, securing for women the right to vote and stand for election - it's part of the basic history of our "island story" that is seldom told.

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MP Harriet Harman: the first Alice Bacon talk 'From Pioneers to Parity? 100 Years of Female Suffrage

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The achievements of a pioneering Yorkshire MP Alice Bacon were commemorated with a public lecture by senior MP Harriet Harman. Alice Bacon was elected to represent Leeds North East in 1945 and served her city constituents continuously until her retirement a quarter of a century later (she transferred to Leeds South East when constituency boundaries were revised in 1955).

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Leeds sociologists reflect on 100 years since the vote

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by Rosemary Lucy Hill, Acting Director, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

When I was a lass I used to go and stay at my grandma's house and read the books from when my mum was a little girl. One of those books was the Girl annual from about 1956. The annual included the story of the suffragettes. I was astounded by the pictures of women changed to railings and smashing windows, and I was horrified by the force-feeding. This was my first encounter with the campaign for women's right to vote.

As I grew up the injustice that women could not take part in the electoral system became more obvious to me. Now, as a grown woman and a lecturer in gender studies, I think about these women's bravery and how they were prepared not only to go to prison for the right to vote, but also die - and I am thoroughly inspired, indebted, and in awe of their determination.

Today the 6th of February 2018, marks 100 years since the Representation of the People Act when 8.4 million women in Britain first gained the right to vote. The same act enfranchised 5.6 million working class men who had previously not been able to vote. Not all women gained the vote: only those over 30, with property or a university degree or a member/married to a member of the Local Government Register were eligible. It wasn't until 1928 that women had the right to vote on the same grounds as men. Nevertheless the act marks an incredible move forward for the recognition of women as human beings, as people who could make their own decisions about their lives. There is still work to be done to fully realise this ambition (for example, taking abortion out of criminal law to enable women to have a say about their own healthcare), but 1918 marks a significant moment.

At the time not everybody agreed that women should have the vote, and I'm not just talking about some Conservative men here. Anarchist women did not feel that the vote was worth fighting for when it would only provide access to an already broken system. However it strikes me that it still necessary to take part in the existing political system even if it does not fully represent the world that we would like to see. How can we change things for the better if we cannot participate in the decisions that are made?

Louise Thompson, Student Education Services Assistant

Now we take the vote as a right, which is as it should be. We tend to forget all the heartache and hard work that women prior to us had to put in to get that right. And this was in only very recent times. I always vote. To me if you don't vote then you've no right to complain about the way the country is run. It's something we should all do.

Joanne Greenhalgh, Associate Professor

The vote means I can exercise my right to have a say in who gets to lead the country I live in. It sends a signal that I am being treated equally as a citizen when everyone has the same right to vote. I used to be a bit disinterested in voting in my early twenties- but I remember in my first job, I shared an office with the female PA of the head of school. She was outraged that I was considering not voting and explained that other women had died so that I had a right to vote. She personally drove me to the polling station. I loved her for this, for making me realise that my right to vote had been hard won, and I have always exercised my right to vote ever since.

Amanda Gannon, Student Placement Officer

The vote was a massive move forward at that time. It still wasn't equality because of all the conditions of age and class. So it was massive, but still a long way to go. It wasn't just equality of women, it was equality of classes that still needed significant change. But there is a difference between being able to choose not to vote and not having the right to vote.

Anne Mansfield, Student Support Officer

It's about having the opportunity to shape things within your community and society as a whole. As a woman you're potentially giving voice to other women and their struggles, or other groups that are considered disadvantaged by current powers and structures. It's a good to look back now at advances in society and ask are we pulling everybody up? Because only certain women originally got the vote so if we're being critical about that we need to be considering what we are doing to ensure that doesn't happen again. Women from ethnic minority backgrounds or trans-women or migrant women don't have the same rights as middle-class women.

Julia Bahner, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I think the centenary is a bit ambiguous because it didn't include all women. I am a migrant woman in the UK: I can't vote. I'm from Sweden where women got the vote in 1919. Well, all women except intellectually disabled people, who didn't get the vote until 1985. There is still a problem that information to enable people to make informed decisions about who to vote for is lacking and this significantly affects intellectually disabled people.

Julia Swallow, Research Fellow

I vote because people fought for us to vote. But it's also about recognising that women have a long way to go. We need to think about who has the capital to vote and remember that policies don't always affect women positively. We are still only making slow progress, but I think it's important that I as an individual voice my opinion... but I don't think the vote does this well. Is positioned as a mark of women's equality, but I don't think it does that, especially for lots of women who I can't vote or feel about it doesn't extend to meaningful change for them.

Choon Key Chekar, Research Fellow

It's a surprise how recently the right to vote was granted: in South Korea women didn't get the vote until 1948.

Kate Hall, Student Education Officer

I'm grateful that I have a chance to vote and my voice is heard. I always exercise my right to vote. I never miss a vote.

Karen Throsby, Associate Professor, Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

I love going to vote - always in person whenever I can and as early in the day as possible. I like the physicality of marking and folding the paper and sliding it into the ballot box; a moment to be visible, to be heard. And while I'm doing it, I remember the incredible courage of those who fought so that I can vote, and those who are still fighting around the world for that same right.

Anne Kerr, Professor of Sociology

When I vote and see other women voting it's a powerful reminder of the victories in women's long battle for equality and a source of inspiration to me to continue to try to challenge sexism and discrimination. I asked my daughters about this and their answers give me a lot of hope for the future. They said women and men should have equal rights and women winning the right to vote was a big step forward, but there's lots more still to do.

Sharon Elley, Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy

The vote to me means recognising how much women, who I will never personally know and only read about, sacrificed to make it possible for me to vote. It means rejoicing in our achievements and reflecting on the battles still to be won. When I post my vote, I think - smash patriarchy and be counted.

Leslie Hart, Cleaner

I think it's important to vote. In some foreign countries people die or queue for days in order to vote, so we should vote. I'm not too sure if it makes a difference or not. Hopefully it does. Politicians all seem to be the same, all the parties seem to be the same.

Kim Allen, University Academic Fellow - Urban Sociology (Youth and Inequality)

For me the vote symbolises a recognition of my agency and right as a political actor to speak for myself rather than be ignored or spoken on behalf of by men. As a woman I feel it is my right and responsibility to vote - however frustrated or despondent I might feel at times with the political system (and after 8 years of a Conservative-led government it's hard not to be). Using my vote is a responsibility to past generations of women whose actions and sacrifices meant that I can go to the polling booth, put a cross in one of those boxes, and for this cross to count. But I also feel a sense of duty to women of today and to future generations of women because the decisions made by those in power affect women's lives differently - and in most cases adversely. We've seen this with the Conservative government's austerity policies which have disproportionately impacted upon women, especially BME, working-class and refugee women. Foregrounding women's needs and demands in the decisions we make about who we elect is one way in which we can support women's rights. There are many things that are flawed with electoral politics and I have some empathy for those who feel that it is better to put your energies into other forms of grassroots political activism. I believe that it's vital that we engage in both. Electoral politics is not perfect and it's certainly not the only way to change things but it's also a privilege that many women still do not have.

Besides, my hero Leslie Knope would be very disappointed if I didn't use my right to vote.

Amina Easat-Daas, 'Counter-Islamophobia Kit' Project Officer

I actually looked at Muslim women's political participation in France and Belgium for my PhD - so this is something I am quite passionate about. As a young, ethnic minority, visibly Muslim woman I would say that women's right to vote is hugely important, as it contributes towards underlining the presence of women as an active part of society and the political process. Nonetheless, the right to vote is not the end point, rather going forward there should be greater emphasis on the meaningful political representation of women and involvement in the political decision making process.

So today we remember, thank and celebrate the women who campaigned at great personal cost for our right to vote here in the UK and around the world.

There are many events taking place this year to celebrate the centenary - see https://www.vote100.uk for more information.

For more on the campaign for the vote in the UK, our own Jill Liddington's books are a great read. Jill also gives talks and walking tours. See http://www.jliddington.org.uk/index.html for more information.

For more on Amina's work on Muslim women's political participation see https://leeds.academia.edu/AminaEasatDaas

I want to thank all my colleagues who gave me their time to think about what the vote means to them.

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Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

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by Rosemary Lucy Hill, Acting Director, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies When I was a lass I used to go and stay at my grandma's house and read the books from when my mum was a little girl. One of [...]

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"it is not enough to be personally empowered or to be personally successful within the oppressive framework of the current system, even if an individual woman can make patriarchy work for her its still a losing game for the rest of the women on the planet.. the fact of the matter is some of our choices have ramifications beyond ourselves and reinforce harmful patriarchy ideas about women... and because of how systems of oppression intersect... it is women of colour, indigenous women, women living in the global south, queer women and trans women who bare the brunt of these ramifications"

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Faiza Tayyab researcher in the department

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Rosemary Hill
By Faiza Tayyab, PhD candidate, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds. @fwaseem
The situation for women in Pakistan with regards to domestic violence is bleak, this in spite of the fact that laws are enacted to protect them in the domestic sphere. Women are socialised in such a way that many women justify domestic violence against them. My recent article (Tayyab et al., 2017) highlights this fact quite aptly as the findings show that more women justified wife beating as an acceptable act compared to men. We need to know why, but we need also to take into account the diversity of women's experiences in Pakistan. Treating all Pakistani women as a single category is inadequate as there is significant diversity in the statuses of women across the country due to the intersections of regions, urban/rural division, class, age, and education. Moreover, there are other important categories that are based on ethnicity and religious identity of women. About 3.6% of the population of Pakistan consists of religious minorities, with Christians being one of the largest. Minority status also carries discrimination and victimisation due to certain discriminatory laws. Minority women are said to face double jeopardy both as women in a patriarchal society and as Christians in a majority Muslim country. The existing literature on domestic violence in Pakistan does not sufficiently consider the minority status of women and how this positions them in their domestic relations in the local context.

My research, therefore, investigates the issue of domestic violence from the standpoint of those Christian minority women at risk, alongside Muslim majority women. I will be speaking to Christian and Muslim women from urban and rural localities to examine their perceptions of domestic violence. I will also consider how gender intersects with other oppressions and social locations in constituting the realities of women with regards gender relations and in developing their perceptions of domestic violence.
Reference
If we want to see a change in future then understanding the perceptions of domestic violence from an intersectional perspective is crucial. If we investigate where the problem lies then we will be in a better place to do more than impose laws that are not grounded in the realities of women's lives. This study will be able to suggest the need basis initiatives to overcome domestic violence instead of a single solution for all segments of women. This research will also provide the baseline for further research with minority women.

Tayyab, F., Kamal, N., Akbar, T. and Zakar, R. 2017. Men and women's perceptions of justifications of wife beating: Evidence from Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2012-13. Journal of Family Violence. 32(7), pp.721-730. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10896-017-9910-y

This entry was posted in Blog, News.

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Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

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By Faiza Tayyab, PhD candidate, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds. @fwaseem The situation for women in Pakistan with regards to domestic violence is bleak, this in spite of the fact that laws are enacted to protect [...]

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Author:

I was invited to speak on several panels about feminism and the impacts of online harassment at the 2015 All About Women conference taking place annually at the Sydney Opera House. Here is a video excerpt of my short opening speech on the panel, "How to be a feminist".

The full panel with Clementine Ford, Roxane Gay, Germaine Greer, Celeste Liddle, and Tara Moss is available here.

You can also see my speech on the "What I Couldn't Say" panel.

I was invited to speak on several panels about feminism and the impacts of online harassment at the 2015 All About Women conference taking place annually at the Sydney Opera House. Here is a video excerpt of my short opening speech on the panel, "How to be a feminist".

The full panel with Clementine Ford, Roxane Gay, Germaine Greer, Celeste Liddle, and Tara Moss is available here.

You can also see my speech on the "What I Couldn't Say" panel.

Transcript

I had to learn how to be a feminist. Throughout high-school and college I was involved with clubs organizing against wars in the Middle East, raising awareness about climate change, and demanding gay and lesbian rights - so I was heavily involved with social justice causes but I still didn't call myself a feminist, at the time, I may have even uttered the dreaded phrase, "I believe in equal rights but I'm not a feminist".

Like most people who grew up immersed in the neoliberal ideology of the West, I saw the world largely as a series of individuals making their own personal individual choices. And here I was, a young woman making my own personal choices about what to wear, what to buy, what to study and what I wanted to do every day. Within that narrow individualist framework feminism seemed like a relic of the distant past. Back then, I thought sexism basically boil down to a few bad apples with misguided personal beliefs born out of ignorance or overt hatred.

It wasn't until I was in my early to mid 20s that I began to realize my impression of feminism had been completely wrong. With the help of some amazing mentors and by reading a lot of feminist writing, especially the words of women of color and queer women from around the world, I learned to see through a sociological lens and understand the world as it really exists, as a series of intersecting social systems. Once you have a systemic and institutional framework, you see how oppression manifests in many subtle ways under the systems of what bell hooks calls "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy".

So not only did I have to learn how to be a feminist, I also had to learn how to be a feminist who understands systems. I had to learn how systems of oppression are maintained by our participation in them, but are also self-perpetuating via paths of least resistance. And as such systems are larger than any one person's choices.

Ok, so here is the part where I say things that may ruffle some feathers, but I think it's a critical discussion to have. Over the past few years I have become increasingly worried about the direction mainstream internet feminism appears to be heading in the west.

Unfortunately many contemporary discourses in and around feminism tend to emphasize a form of hyper individualism (informed by the neoliberal worldview). More and more, I hear variations on this idea that anything that any woman personally chooses to do is a feminist act, this attitude is often referred to as "choice feminism". Choice feminism posits that each individual woman determines what is empowering for herself, which might sound good on the surface but this concept risks obscuring the bigger picture and larger, fundamental goals of the movement by focusing on individual women and a very narrow, individual notion of "empowerment". It erases the reality that some choices that women make have an enormous negative impact on other women's lives.

It is not enough to feel personally empowered or be personally successful within the oppressive framework of the current system. Even if an individual woman can make patriarchy work for her, it's still a losing game for the rest of the women on this planet. The fact of the matter is that some choices have ramifications beyond ourselves and reinforce harmful patriarchal ideas about women as a group and about women's bodies in our wider shared culture.

And because of how systems of oppression intersect and compound one another, it's women of color, indigenous women, women living in the global south, women with disabilities, queer women, and transwomen who bare the brunt of those ramifications.

"Choice feminism" also obscures the fact that women don't have a real choice. We have a very narrow set of predetermined choices within patriarchy. Women can choose from a pre-approved palette, but we cannot meaningfully choose liberation, we cannot choose a way out from our constraints, at least not without ending those oppressive systems that limit our options. So when we talk about free choice in today's world, we're really talking about a very narrow spectrum of choices that are amenable to patriarchy.

So when we talk about how to be a feminist, for me that means being committed to something much larger than ourselves. It's understanding what role you play in our collective movements for liberation. It's reexamining our desires and interests and understanding how those are often shaped by capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. It's understanding our own intersections of privilege and oppression and how that will fundamentally change our behaviours and attitudes and values. It's realizing that being a feminist is a life long learning endeavour and that we will make some mistakes on the way and we should be compassionate to ourselves when that happens. It's realizing that others will make mistakes and we should extend that compassion to them as well. Feminism is not about striving for perfection, its about striving for justice.

We are all connected, we are bond together under the oppression of patriarchy and as such our personal actions or inactions do have a harmful effect on other women, especially those from the most marginalized communities. I realize this is not a popular thing to say, but "feel good personal empowerment" is not how to be a feminist.

In order to be a feminist we have a responsibility beyond ourselves, we have a responsibility to each other, and we have a responsibility to work for the collective liberation of all women.

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'How to be a Feminist' Panel at All About Women

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Share this article: Author: I was invited to speak on several panels about feminism and the impacts of online harassment at the 2015 All About Women conference taking place annually at the Sydney Opera House. Here is a video excerpt of my short opening speech on the panel, "How to be a feminist".

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Feminist consciousness raising

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Imagine numerous groups of women meeting weekly, across the United States.

In groups of 8 to 12, they met to discuss the daily hustle and bustle of being a woman in the late 60s.

But this wasn't some knitting or scrapbooking club. No, this was much more serious.

These discussions sparked the beginning of modern day Feminism, specifically 2nd Wave Feminism.

Now, If you're not familiar with the different waves of Feminism, you can easily distinguish them by the type of equality they promote; legal vs social equality.

First wave Feminists fought for equal rights under the law. Voting and property rights were just a few of the causes furthered by them.

Second wave Feminists dealt with social issues, like the workplace, family, sexuality, reproduction, domestic violence, etc.

Now, back to the non-knitting club feminist get-together.

These regular meetings of women grew up alongside the emergence of the radical left on college campuses. Ultimately, the women's movement branched off from the radical left movement.

Why?

Well because the radical left routinely refused to acknowledge the plight of women.

In both the SDCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) the emergent women's movement was derided and ignored.

Apparently, even the SDS thought women were only good for making coffee at meetings.

But hey! No one's perfect, not even socialistic militant leftists who's movement grew out of the Civil Rights Movement (hashtag awkward).

Regardless, the women's movement eventually pulled apart from the radical left. They began to create their own meetings, affectionately called "rap sessions" and "bitch sessions."

These "sessions" were the beginning of what was to be called CR (Consciousness Raising) groups.

The first major introduction of CR groups was Thanksgiving Day of 1968, with 200 women from thirty-seven states and Canada meeting in Chicago.

This was where Consciousness Raising took off. However, not all feminists were thrilled about it, and in 1969, the Women's Movement split on the issue. This eventually lead to the Redstockings, a group that would be primarily known as an advocate of Consciousness Raising.

Soon thousands of women all over the nation would be involved in a CR group. But where it gets interesting is in looking closer at what CR was meant to accomplish, and how 2nd wave Feminists used it to great effect.

"Our chief task at present is to develop female class consciousness through sharing experience and publicly exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions." - The Redstockings Manifesto, 1969, New York

Consciousness Raising was an interesting Feminist tactic that had an exceptional effect on the women who participated in it.

CR was based on the idea that women weren't aware of the institutions of oppression that were present in their daily lives. If you could bring women together and get them to discuss issues such as sexuality, family, and the workplace you could make them aware of these oppressive institutions.

Institutions created by a patriarchal society, mind you.

From the beginning, one of the main tenets of CR was that the personal is political.

CR was meant to connect the dots of individual experiences. It was meant to show women that they weren't alone, and that many of these experiences were shared by others.

By acknowledging and bringing together each woman's experiences it was believed that it would bring to light the political nature of their problems.

It would "raise their consciousness."

And it did just that.

CR groups were normally small, consisting of no more than 15 women, who would meet regularly and discuss specific female focused issues. In many cases there were formal questions that the group followed.

Questions ranged from "what were your childhood experiences?" to "what did you think being a woman was going to be?" all the way to heavier topics like sex, marriage, and work.

Most CR groups would have a formal list of topics from which to pick from.

Then, the group would go around the room, letting each woman talk about her particular experiences in relation to the topic. Each woman was given as much time as she needed to talk, without interruption.

Generalizations, stereotypes, theories, and abstractions were discouraged. CR was an inherently personal thing. And the creators of CR didn't want the overall goal of CR to be affected (or morphed into a therapy session).

CR also wasn't a brainstorming session about why women were treated this or that way. It was a focus on the personal experiences of each woman.

"The first requirement for raising class consciousness is honesty, in private and in public, with ourselves and other women." - Redstockings Manifesto

Alongside these rules, women weren't allowed to question, judge, praise, or advise each other's testimony.

This was the big difference between Consciousness Raising and therapy sessions.

As the Redstockings Manifesto pointed out...

"Consciousness-raising is not "therapy," which implies the existence of individual solutions and falsely assumes that the male-female relationship is purely personal, but the only method by which we can ensure that our program for liberation is based on the concrete realities of our lives."

The National Organization for Women (by 1972, CR had come under their umbrella) further elaborated that Consciousness Raising was meant to develop pride in their gender by breaking down barriers through open and honest communication.

This was political awareness, not some touchy feely psychology session.

The irony was that by fertilizing the seeds of awareness, CR sowed its own downfall.

By 1973, over 100,000 women were in a CR group, all across the nation, in almost every major US city.

But by the mid-70s, CR groups had started to disband.

And it was all thanks to the very aims of the Feminist movement: more women in the workforce, taking control of their lives and careers.

As women took more and more responsibility for their career advancement, they had less and less time for CR groups.

CR had effectively elevated women's consciousness to the point of making itself obsolete.

This change is pointed out by Anita Shreve, who interviewed dozens of women after their involvement in CR groups.

"Consciousness-raising was petering out, victim of a changing political climate, of expanding career opportunities for women, of shifting priorities on the part of the Women's Movement, and of a subsequent lack of a sponsor. As the country became more conservative, the quest for self-knowledge gave way to the pursuit of self-fulfillment. As jobs opened up for white middle-class women, and as they tried to combine careers with family life, the sheer struggle to succeed at mothering and working left little or no time for meeting with, or even thinking about, other women.

The Women's Movement, having accomplished a preliminary stage of widespread education, moved reluctantly into a period of latency, shifting its attention from CR on a massive scale to activist issues on a smaller one...A personalized form of Feminism, stemming from a basic training gained in CR, has invaded the home and the workplace.

The women who participated in consciousness-raising say they received an invaluable basic training. They developed a fluency about themselves and about women's issues-rather like the fluency a person who has been in therapy develops. They gained a certain kind of clarity about who they were and what they wanted and what the obstacles were to getting it.

But most of all, they had respect and trust and love for women that great out of that cauldron of shared experiences. Stripping away their preconceptions, they learned to have enormous regard for the struggles of other women, even as they were learning to respect themselves." - Women Together, Women Alone, by Anita Shreve: page 30-31

In the subsequent years after these CR groups disbanded, most women who were asked about their time in CR were grateful for the experience.

A feeling of enthusiasm for CR was still present in many of the women Anita Shreve interviewed for her book, "Women Together, Women Alone."

But a feeling of isolation was also present.

CR gave women a new sense of confidence in their abilities, and their ability to take charge of their lives (you know, "fight the patriarchy" kind of stuff).

CR helped solve problems for women, but by giving them this confidence to go out into the world, it also gave them a whole host of new problems.

Not to compare women to children (because I'm not a misogynist, or a douche-canoe), but it's like moving out of your parents' house. You've grown up, you're responsible and ready to make a life for yourself.

You're no longer a child, with no awareness of the outside world or the responsibilities you'll have to take on. You've become an adult.

But this new found independence creates more problems. Yes, you only answer to yourself, but you have to figure out all the issues of being an adult that used to be overseen by your parents.

This is what many of those formally in CR felt like. They had accomplished so much, but felt isolated, due in part to their family and career successes.

For more on Feminism, I encourage you to read 1970s Feminists & Their Issues With Motherhood, and The Feminist Movement is Doomed to Fail. In one, you'll get a deeper understanding of why Feminists are sometimes at odds with motherhood. The other provides a rundown the aspects of the movement that will lead to its destruction.

"In the Old Left, they used to say that the workers don't know they're oppressed, so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, 'Would everybody please give me an example from their own life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it to raise my own consciousness.' Kathie was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising." - Anne Forer, quoted by Susan Brownmiller in In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, page 21

There's a reason why it's called "Consciousness Raising." It's meant to raise your conscious awareness of how oppressed you are in society.

"The personal is political" is what makes consciousness raising so powerful. An early Feminist advocate of CR, Carol Hanisch, wrote in 1969 that what's important in CR is getting rid of "self-blame."

This is what differentiates CR from therapy, and what makes it so powerful. By stating that "the personal is political" you switch the blame from you to outside forces. The blame then rests on institutions, men, society, social norms, etc.

"The personal is political" is a realization that the problems facing you aren't of your own making. They're part of a bigger political problem. A problem that affects all women.

Now, this worldview can lead to unhealthy places.

Not all issues are political. And making every issue a political one can make the problem worse.

No one likes the politically obsessive pundits who see a political issue in every pop music video.

After a while you just shut down and yell "who gives a shit!?!?"

But this worldview still holds water, even today.

It's visible in the Feminist movement (characterized best by the Feminist outcry over how men position their legs in subway trains, known as " manspreading "). But I think it's also a facet of libertarianism's talking points.

Not to mention, it can be an effective tool for us, liberty lovers.

Here's what I mean.

The government affects almost every aspect of society, right?

This is easy to see in the realm of marriage, religion, and other personal choices.

The responsibility that each individual has over their own life is constantly intervened in by the government.

This makes your life quite obnoxious to live sometimes.

Now, add all the economic hampers that the government places on you indirectly. Think of inflation, rising food prices, barriers to entry, sucky cable companies, government monopolies, safety regulations that don't protect you, etc.

In a lot of ways, your personal issues are political.

This blurred line between the personal and political is all thanks to a burgeoning bureaucracy.

And if we can tap into this blurred line, we can help our friends, neighbors, and family to realize that it's not "their fault."

It's the government's.

This is not to say that the responsibility is lifted off their shoulders. No, it's still your job to change things.

But it helps to realize that if it wasn't for the Federal government, our phone companies would be a heck of a lot better.

What proved effective for the Feminist movement in the 60s can be used effectively for our movement.

The great thing is, we already utilize this form of activism.

We do it by discussing the effects of government regulations and policies. We do it by pointing out how government has screwed with American's marriages, how they drive the cost up of certain goods by imposing tariffs, and how they keep Comcast in business...

Yeah, that last one really does suck.

Regardless of how you feel about 2 nd wave Feminism, there's something to be said about connecting the personal to the political.

As Carol Hanisch notes toward the end of her paper, The Personal is the Political ...

"It's true we all need to learn how to better draw conclusions from the experiences and feelings we talk about and how to draw all kinds of connections. Some of us haven't done a very good job of communicating them to others."

In this day and age, one of the best ways to convince someone that the smaller the government is, the better, is to raise their consciousness.

By raising their awareness of how the government intrudes, and messes with their life, you plant a seed in their mind.

A seed of critique.

A seed that continues to remind them that they're not to blame.

Oftentimes, when it comes to the issues that permeate daily life, intrusive politicians and bureaucrats are to blame.
So what do you think about consciousness raising? Do you think it's an effective tool that can be used to open people's minds to the intrusiveness of government? Also, have you seen this type of activism being used? Please comment below!

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The Personal Is Political (Feminism, Consciousness Raising, & Spreading Awareness of The Political Issues That Affect Our Lives)

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Imagine numerous groups of women meeting weekly, across the United States. In groups of 8 to 12, they met to discuss the daily hustle and bustle of being a woman in the late 60s. But this wasn't some knitting or scrapbooking club. No, this was much more serious.

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Celebrating the second wave

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Anthony Calvacca/New York Post Archives via Getty Images

Twenty years ago, if you asked young women what was wrong with feminism, you wouldn't have had to specify which wave you were talking about-although Rebecca Walker proposed the term "third-wave feminism" in the early 1990s, it only came into widespread use in the 2000s. Second-wave feminism was feminism in the average American's eyes a generation ago, and its problem was that it was too radical, too intent on capsizing everything mainstream America and common sense held dear. Feminism was for crop-haired, man-hating separatists who believed all heterosexual intercourse was rape or else it was for ball-busting career women who regarded marriage and childbearing as forms of patriarchal oppression that needed to be overthrown.

In 2010, Susan Faludi wrote for Harper's about how generations of feminists were fighting amongst themselves, as feminists have a dispiriting tendency to do. At that time, the line as Faludi saw it was drawn between puritanical "old bags" from the 1970s, who drove off younger women by preaching about the distant glory days of their grassroots activism, and bloggers who wanted to celebrate how "wearing a Wonderbra is a statement of empowerment." These characterizations of the dispute contained some truth and a lot of stereotyping on both sides, but the fracas was always cast as a mother-daughter clash. In a 2008 interview for the Daily Mail, Walker called her own mother, the second-wave novelist and poet Alice Walker, "a rabid feminist" and "revolutionary" whose indoctrination nearly convinced Walker to forgo the joys of motherhood herself. (Walker complained that the Daily Mail transformed the interview into a "tabloid piece" but later told NPR that "95 percent" of it matched what she said.)

Today, the case against second-wave feminists has done a 180, and they're condemned as insufficiently intersectional compared with their present-day counterparts. Suddenly, '70s feminism isn't radical enough. In a smart, considered piece for Catapult about popular feminism's blind spot with regard to class, the writer Kashana Cauley acknowledges second-wave feminism's "success in passing Title IX, providing women access to a broader variety of jobs, liberalizing divorce laws, and establishing women's studies programs in universities," but describes it as "focused predominantly on middle-to-upper class white housewives who wanted to do more fulfilling work than cooking and cleaning." This made me bite my lip because Cauley is a writer I admire and because I agree wholeheartedly with her larger point that feminism should pay more attention to economic inequality and reproductive rights and less to glitzy symbolism. I just don't agree that second-wave feminism's track record is so meagre.

Friedan's approach to feminism has been conflated with all of the second wave, which is fantastically inaccurate.

I was too young to participate in the second wave's activism, but I'm old enough to remember what life was like before it came along, when you opened the newspaper to classified sections segregated into "Help Wanted-Female" and "Help Wanted-Male." Second-wave feminism had plenty of flaws, without a doubt, but it was an impressively diverse movement. The assertion, too often made casually, that its leaders and participants were entirely white isn't just incorrect; it also serves to erase such courageous and inspiring feminists as Flo Kennedy, Aileen Hernandez, Doris Wright, Michele Wallace, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Shirley Chisholm, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Barbara Smith and the other members of the Combahee River Collective, and too many more to name here. The feminism of the 1960s and '70s belonged as much to them as to anyone else.

It's true that white women were second-wave feminism's most visible spokeswomen, and some of those women-particularly Betty Friedan-strove to keep the movement's image as mainstream and middle-class as possible; Friedan's aversion to showing any association with lesbians was a notorious flashpoint.In her famous1984 denunciation of Freidan's The Feminine Mystique, Bell Hooks wrote:

She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women.

All true, but Friedan did not and does not define the feminist thinking and activism of her time.Somehow, in the intervening years, Friedan's approach has been conflated with all of second-wave feminism, which is fantastically inaccurate.

In a pre-cable, pre-internet era of only three national TV networks, when large media conglomerates had a stranglehold on mass communication, feminists didn't have many avenues for controlling the way their message was framed. The press loved pretty white Gloria Steinem, but she fought tenaciously to diversify the movement's face long before intersectionality became a feminist mantra. During the 1970s, Steinem insisted that any speaking engagement she agreed to also included Kennedy (lawyer, activist, and founder of both the Feminist Party and the Women's Political Caucus), Sloan-Hunter (civil rights organizer, educator, and first chairwoman of the National Black Feminist Organization), or Dorothy Pitman Hughes (co-founder of Ms. magazine, child-welfare advocate, and founder of the first domestic violence shelter in New York City). And there was a lot more to feminism than just Steinem and her circle. We all know how to critique the way today's media covers women's concerns, from rape culture to body image, but when it comes to the far less extensive and diverse media of the past, suddenly we believe everything dished out to us and assume that we're being shown all there was to see.

Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Ms. Foundation for Women

A great corrective for this myopia is the fascinating anthology Dear Sisters: Dispatches From the Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, a collection of broadsides, cartoons, manifestos, and other documents written, mimeographed, and published in the thick of things. The contents range from hot denunciations of sexism in various leftist political movements to foundational papers on feminist approaches to work, education, economics, politics, health, family, sexuality, reproductive rights, and gendered violence. It's an eye-opener. The women who wrote these documents considered themselves revolutionaries and were far more likely to call for "the disarming of and community control of the police" and "free, humane competent medical care" than to urge other women to lean in. Feminism in the '60s and '70s was a lot more than just the National Organization for Women.

Second-wave feminism was very far from perfect, and many radicals from other parts of the '70s left leveled legitimate criticism at its failings. But much of what the second wave accomplished or helped to accomplish now seems as if it has always existed. It hasn't. Much of it was the work of scrappy, selfless rebels whose names we've forgotten, women determined to create feminist alternatives inside a monolithically misogynistic society and in the face of fairly constant ridicule and hostility. Among the things that we all owe to the second wave are:

Every domestic violence shelter

Every rape crisis center and hotline

Every women's health clinic

Every legal abortion

Every contraceptive prescription a doctor writes for a single woman

Every credit card or bank loan a woman gets without a male relative co-signing

Every shred of sexual harassment legislation or regulation

Most of these things would not exist at all if not for the feminists of the 1970s, and they don't benefit middle-class women alone. Some have offered lifelines to women from many backgrounds when they needed it most. That second-wave feminism accomplished all this, despite its shortcomings and divisions, ought to be seen as an encouraging sign. We're not perfect, either, and there's still a lot left to do.

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Second-Wave Feminism Gets a Bum Rap. Let's Amend the Record.

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Twenty years ago, if you asked young women what was wrong with feminism, you wouldn't have had to specify which wave you were talking about-although Rebecca Walker proposed the term "third-wave feminism" in the early 1990s, it only came into widespread use in the 2000s.

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Looking back to the second wave

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Kira Cochrane

s this all?" That was the question that echoed around a generation of US housewives in the early 1960s. Theirs was the problem with no name, wrote Betty Friedan in her 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, and the symptoms were legion. They included creeping fatigue, tranquiliser and alcohol abuse, bleeding blisters that appeared suddenly on their arms, which doctors attributed not to the cleaning fluids they used constantly, but a deeper malaise. In the years since the war, women had grown smaller (department store buyers reported they had shrunk three or four dress sizes), more feminine (30% of women dyed their hair blond), and apparently much sadder.

That icon of femininity, Marilyn Monroe, had died of an overdose the year before, and Sylvia Plath - just as outwardly feminine, but with a hidden, crackling rage - killed herself in London in 1963. Her death came not long after she published her novel, The Bell Jar. It was the story of Esther Greenwood, who goes to New York to take up an internship at a women's magazine, as Plath once had, before finding she can never quite match her inner life to the perfect face she has to present.

A desperate, exaggerated femininity was being held up as an ideal for all women. In January 1963, Gloria Steinem, then a freelance journalist, packed her leotard in a hat box and auditioned to become a Playboy Bunny in an undercover assignment for Show magazine. Steinem exposed the low pay, sexual harassment and racism - black women were sniggeringly referred to as "chocolate bunnies" - and later, when she had become a feminist leader, wrote that all women were treated as bunnies.

A US debate that had started tentatively with President John F Kennedy's 1961 commission on the status of women blew up with Friedan's book, and continued, in 1966, with the creation of the National Organisation for Women, which Friedan initially led. These ideas began floating over to the UK - the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham has said she began hearing arguments for women's liberation from the US and Germany around 1967. It was an age of early marriage in Britain, and larger families. The average age of first marriage for women in 1961 was 23.3, compared with 30 today; the average woman in 1964 had 2.95 children in her lifetime, while now she has 1.95.

The contraceptive pill arrived in the UK in 1961, but was mainly prescribed to married women - it wasn't until 1974 that it became widely, freely available. In her memoir, Promise of a Dream, Rowbotham writes that as a student in the early 1960s, "not only were we all ignorant about contraception, but we had no idea who we could ask for advice ... Abortion, an inconceivable horror of gin and screams, was still illegal." That changed in 1967, with the passing of the Abortion Act.

Women were yoked to men economically, not just because they earned much less - in 1970, for instance, women's earnings as a proportion of men's earnings were 54.8% - but because they often needed a signature from their father or husband to gain credit or buy bigger items. The economic debate sharpened suddenly in 1968, when women at the Ford plant in Dagenham went on strike for equal pay. That same year, the Observer reported on an official study that showed "a massive wastage of women's abilities and qualifications" and "at least four million women used virtually as slave labour". Half of Britain's working women were earning less than five shillings an hour. The Dagenham strike led to the Equal Pay Act in 1970, followed by the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. But with only 4.6% of MPs being women in 1964, much of the action to change women's lives naturally took place at the grassroots. (The proportion of female MPs actually came in below 4.6% in every subsequent election until 1987, when it rose to a paltry 6.3%.)

In 1970, women organised a protest at the annual Miss World contest in London; that same year, the first National Women's Liberation Conference formulated demands for equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand. The following years brought the first national women's liberation march, the magazine Spare Rib, the publishing house Virago, the first women's refuge, Rape Crisis centres across the country, and campaigning groups including Southall Black Sisters. A body of feminist literature followed The Feminine Mystique, including Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman, novels by Angela Carter, Marilyn French, Alice Walker, memoirs and poems by Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.

The world had opened up for women, but like the suffrage movement half a century earlier, the triumph was brilliant but partial. Fifty years on, the pay gap is smaller, but persists, parents are still stymied by the dearth of affordable childcare, it's estimated that 69,000 women are raped in England and Wales each year, two a week are killed as a result of domestic violence, and the paucity of women in public life continues: just over 22% of MPs are women; and only 17.4% of the cabinet. 1963 changed a lot, but the next 50 years starts now.
Topics

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1963: the beginning of the feminist movement

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Kira Cochrane s this all?" That was the question that echoed around a generation of US housewives in the early 1960s. Theirs was the problem with no name, wrote Betty Friedan in her 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, and the symptoms were legion.

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Akwugo Emejulu discusses austerity and the impact on British WOC

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Crisis Politics and the Challenge of Intersectional Solidarity [Audio] by LSE Podcasts

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Speaker(s): Professor Akwugo Emejulu | How might we transform the ways in which we think about 'crisis', 'activism' and 'solidarity'? Drawing on her new co-authored book, Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain, Akwugo Emejulu's talk will explore the asymmetrical impacts of austerity measures on women of colour and their strategies for resistance in Scotland, England and France.

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British timeline of landmarks in women's rights.

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British timeline of landmarks in women's rights.

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Thinking through some of Angela Davis' work.

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Transnational solidarity among feminists has often been a difficult goal to achieve because of the continued dominance of Western feminism, the lack of self-reflexivity on the part of feminists, and the lack of an approach that addresses both the complexities and nuances of lived gender experiences as well as the ways in which imperialism continues to structure the lives of millions around the world. In this article I want to address the points of convergence between intersectionality and decolonial theory and suggest that combining these two approaches can help in developing a non-exclusionary transnational solidarity.

Angela Davis' essay on her trip to Egypt in 1985[1] is a seminal work on the subject of transnational feminist solidarity. The essay contains reflections on the different visits and experiences she had on the short trip, and includes a wealth of emotional responses to the feminists she met. Two things are notable about this text: 1) the ways that Davis approached the question of feminism in Egypt, and the multiple moments during her trip where she forced herself to question her own assumptions rather than rely on stereotypical narratives (prevalent especially in American media and academia) about the realities of the women and men she was meeting, is of utmost importance. This humbleness and self-reflexivity suggests that a transnational feminist solidarity is possible, albeit not easy. The second thing that is notable is the location of Davis as a Western woman in Egypt, despite her being African-American. This brought to light the complexity of subjectivities within the global feminist movement, as well as questions of solidarity and understanding. While within the U.S. she was clearly part of a marginal group, in Egypt this positionality was a privileged one, as she represented the U.S., a country implicated in Egypt's "underdevelopment." Thus, her positionality changed from one location to another, emphasizing the importance of positioning oneself within structures of power in specific locations. Her experience allows us to unpack the question of positionality, particularly in relation to the question of feminist solidarity.

As a movement, Western feminism continues to largely exist in a tense power relationship with other forms of feminism, largely because the movement continues to be based on liberal assumptions that simply cannot be used in feminist praxis in other contexts. In the words of Audre Lorde, "the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house." For women outside of privileged locations in the West where neoliberal imperialism continues to play a large role in producing and reproducing patriarchy, concepts that have their history in imperial centres are seen as unlikely to act as tools for meaningful change. This is why an intersectional approach needs to be combined with a decolonial framework.[2]

The question, then, is: how can a strong transnational feminist movement be created, and how can it avoid the mistakes made by Western feminists in articulating what feminism is and how patriarchy can be dismantled? What would a decolonial and intersectionality-based transnational feminism look like? While it is true that one can speak of a global feminist movement, it becomes clear upon close examination that this is largely an institutionalized movement comprised of members of civil society. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a detailed critique of civil society and the institutionalization of gender by civil society organizations, suffice it to say that in many postcolonial settings civil society tends to be elitist, detached from grassroots activism, and merely functions as a vessel of neoliberalism.[3] A transnational feminist movement that is separate from civil society and based on grassroots activism is therefore still to be realized, although there are many regional networks.[4]

How to overcome this? Intersectionality is certainly one solution: applied as both theory and praxis, intersectionality could prove useful in bringing to light power dynamics, even if unable to transform them in the short term. It is useful to question, however, whether intersectionality goes deep enough in challenging the Western bias of many feminists across the postcolonial world today. It is not a coincidence that in many postcolonial settings it is feminists who hold liberal and Western conceptions of gender relations that receive the most publicity and funding. This is a way of maintaining hegemony in a 'post-colonial' world and thus ensuring that the 'post' never materializes. While intersectionality may convince feminists of the need to de-centre their assumptions and look at multiple structures and experiences, I believe it needs to be coupled with a decolonial approach to truly transform the liberal Western underpinnings of much feminism activism today.

A decolonial approach would necessitate moving past the individualistic liberal ontology underpinning much of feminism today, including some strands of intersectionality. This entails problematizing the assumption that the subject is always erased from the analysis, thus producing a myth about universal and objective knowledge. Instead, "critical border thinking" can be employed, which is a form of subaltern epistemology that does not hide the epistemic positionality of the subject speaking.[5] This allows for decolonial interpretative communities to be produced that challenge Western notions of universality, neutrality and linear evolution. By critically deconstructing Western concepts and structures that have been normalized, the first step towards dismantling them has been taken.[6]

One example of such an approach would be to conceptualize feminism as a project that views patriarchy as a system that constructs both women and men in harmful ways. Rather than view gender justice as an individualistic goal to be attained by every woman - a view that sometimes views men as "the enemy" -alternative visions in which patriarchy is conceptualized as a system that oppresses everyone can be more useful. This is not to say that men do not benefit from patriarchy - all men do. Rather it is to complicate ideas of masculinity by showing that not all men benefit equally. Work on masculinities has shown that men who fit the ideal type are in a power relation not only with women but also with men who are outside of what is considered "masculine." Pushing this conceptualization further, it is also more applicable to societies in which individualism is not the norm. For many women in postcolonial societies, the aim is not to challenge men, but rather to challenge the system and structures that allow men to become dominant. There can be no feminism without anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and so on, because patriarchy does not exist in isolation from imperialism, capitalism and other structures.

Another way to employ an intersectional decolonial approach is by deeply interrogating the categories and notions of oppression we use. Rather than assume that we know what harms women, we should let the intersectional categories emerge from the cases and contexts themselves, bearing in mind global structures of inequality. To think of an obvious example, in the case of Arab women it is almost always assumed that "culture" (already a problematic homogenous designation) is somehow implicated in the oppression of women. Not only does this essentialize "culture," it also isolates it as something problematic that needs to be fixed. This ignores the possibility of Arab women using cultured notions as a means of fighting oppression. It also fixates on culture at the expense of other relations or structures such as class. Constructing "culture" as a barrier to women's personal freedom reveals a liberal conception of the human subject, where liberty - at a personal, individual level - is framed as especially important and as the direct result of the elimination of cultural practices, without taking into account the political, economic and social factors that are affected by both local and global factors.

A final example relates to praxis. Allowing the context to determine the categories[7] we use in gender analysis through an employment of critical border thinking will also impact the ways in which we practice feminism. Once the 'problems' are framed differently, it becomes clear that forms of feminist praxis are needed. For example, moving away from an individualistic liberal framing will show that taken-for-granted solutions to gender inequality such as education or employment at the micro-level are not value-free. A decolonial approach would press us to question what we mean by education, which types of knowledges this understanding privileges, and how providing education and employment to women in the Global South also has multiple structural effects that often remain understudied, most notably that it ties them into a global capitalist economy of production and consumption in which they face a new set of oppressive relations. As Lila Abu Lughod has cautioned, not all employment is "good for women."[8] Intersectionality as an approach may help us understand that employment does not necessarily ensure a woman's well-being, but a decolonial approach would explain why that is and how specific structures are implicated in the production of particular ways of knowing and surviving in the global economy today.

Returning to Angela Davis - her reflections on her trip to Egypt serve as a reminder of how difficult any kind of transnational solidarity is. Her discussions also show, however, that self-reflexivity is essential to solidarity, and that engaging in a constant process of self-questioning as well as positioning oneself within structures is necessary if one is to bridge contexts without imposing one's own location and subjectivity. For feminism to undergo the process Davis underwent, adopting a decolonial approach that de-centres Eurocentric ideas about feminism and favors multiple processes of knowledge production seems to be the most promising way forward at this juncture. Until intersectionality as an approach employs decolonial assumptions, the risk of the continued privileging of western assumptions is high. This is particularly the case when intersectionality becomes a means of reifying identity politics rather than a tool that destabilizes categories. This in turn means that feminist activism and praxis will continue to be fraught with contradictions between a western universal project and the complex nature of contextual particularities. A decolonial approach that is intersectional and unapologetically subaltern will allow use to approach the intersections of categories that emerge from the given context and that are defined by those who experience the realities of those intersections. This may mean that categories such as class, race, sexuality, and even gender don't mean what intersectionality theorists think they mean, or don't intersect in the ways previously assumed, and this is precisely where self-reflexivity comes in. In other words, we should all, as feminists committed to knowledge production, have our Angela Davis moments and ask whether we have really decolonized our own knowledge and whether our interventions are impositions rather than attempts to create transnational solidarity.

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Sara Salem is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands. Her work focuses on historical and institutional perspectives on political economy, and centers specifically on the recent wave of uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa. Her interests include decolonial theory, third world feminism, critical political economy, and theories of post-development. She has lived in Zambia, Egypt, and the Netherlands, and is especially interested in Southern Africa and the Middle East, and formulating new forms of knowledges through decolonizing discourses that were naturalized through colonial processes. She has worked at numerous NGOs in Cairo, mainly on issues of political participation and gender. Follow her on twitter @saramsalem

Selected published material

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Decolonial Intersectionality and a Transnational Feminist Movement - The Feminist Wire

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"A decolonial approach that is intersectional and unapologetically subaltern will allow use to approach the intersections of categories that emerge from the given context and that are defined by those who experience the realities of those intersections.

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Lecture on cultural context of feminism

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Dr. Christina Scharff, King's College London

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Starting the debate: framing contemporary engagements with feminism As the first lecture in the series, Christina will attempt to frame contemporary engagements with feminism. Taking a step back and looking at the wider cultural context, her lecture will discuss a range of contemporary cultural currents and the ways they intersect with feminist protest cultures.

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Black British Feminism

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Feminist Review Black British Feminisms - Introduction and Keynote

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The Feminist Review annual panel, co-hosted with the Centre for Feminist Research (Goldsmiths College), supported the launch of the issue 'Black British Feminisms' (11 December 2014), edited by Joan Anim-Addo, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Scafe Welcome to the launch by Sara Ahmed (Goldsmiths), with introduction and chairing Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University).

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Poetry

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Audre Lorde "A Woman Speaks" - Reading at Amerika Haus Berlin 1984

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Discussion on defining feminism

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bell hooks - How Do We Define Feminist Liberation? | Eugene Lang College

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The New School (http://www.newschool.edu) presents a conversation with bell hooks, scholar-in-residence at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts (http://www.newschool.edu/lang) with R&B singer Lisa Fischer (20 Feet from Stardom) and actress Kim Sykes (Pariah) about celebrating black female power.

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Lecture on the imperialist feminist portrayals of women of colour

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Imperialist Feminism: A Historical Overview

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In this talk at UC, Berkeley (March, 2013), Dr. Kumar argues that the West has often used the liberation of brown women as an excuse for empire. She debunks this rescue narrative starting with the Afghan war and then going back to 19th century colonial narratives in regard to Muslim women.

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Reading of her 1851 speech on Black Women's exclusion from womanhood

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Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman": Nkechi at TEDxFiDiWomen

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Nkechi (pronounced nnn-KAY-chee) is an actress, singer-songwriter, philanthropist and painter who has worked in theater, television and film. She received her Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and attended American Conservatory Theater's 2012 Summer Training Congress. Recent feature film credits include IFC's "About Cherry".

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Exhibition 'A Woman’s Place' opens at Kirkstall’s Abbey House Museum

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Exhibition 'A Woman’s Place' opens at Kirkstall’s Abbey House Museum

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She's Beautiful When She's Angry Documentary on Netflix

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She's Beautiful When She's Angry Documentary on Netflix

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1960s Second Wave