Feminism Has Become a Derelict House

On women, identity and the conflict within feminism

My book on our relationship with identity in a world unhealthily obsessed with it — Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By — is out now.

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Photo by Andrew Amistad on Unsplash

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Being oppressed means the absence of choices.

-bell hooks, Feminist Theory From Margin to Center, 1984

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“I think that my gender is the least interesting thing about me”. The statement appears to move through the room like something physical. I watch its impact reflected on the faces of the women in the small crowd. They’ve come to watch a panel discussion on women in journalism. I’m on the panel, despite having politely notified the people who invited me that I may not hold the views they’d standardly expect of a woman in media who looks like me.

Some of the faces angled toward me smile as though I’ve articulated a forbidden truth, or said something refreshingly unexpected. One young woman near the front looks offended, as though I’ve taken it upon myself to fart luxuriantly, shamelessly into the serenity of a civilised gathering. A second wave feminist who is one of the other people sitting on the panel grimaces gently near me. It’s a flinch, as though I’ve reached out unprovoked and brought a flat palm down on her wrist at speed. I feel the movement next to me. The woman’s face rearranges momentarily. I’ll spend days after the panel considering that flinch, and how I should think about it but as usual I’m comforted by this clear proof that women, like any group of human beings, are not a monolith. Many of the challenges to which we are subject emerge from the patronising presumption that we are.

Perhaps naively, I hadn’t considered that this might be a controversial or divisive thing to say — to express this disinterest I feel toward my own gender or the insistence with which other people may see me through its lens. I’m aware of the irony of having accepted the invitation but in my experience these events are generally subject to repeated fluffy media feminism talking points which largely go unquestioned. I thought I might be able to share a different perspective.

There had been the usual comments we are all accustomed to at events where women talk amongst themselves about career and womanhood. Comments which would be controversial if we thought about them for a moment but are so ubiquitous that we barely even notice. Comments about motherhood constituting the most emotionally enriching and profound element of womanhood. Comments implying that the highest value of which womanhood is capable is only expressed once it has produced a life beyond itself.

Such ideas could emerge from a conservative male natalist with the same ease and complacency with which they often seem to emerge from some utterly well-meaning liberally inclined professional women. Yet it is my comment on being largely uninterested in my own gender which seems to have rattled the room. I feel bad that my words have landed on the woman next to me with such negative force.

Many here are card carrying feminists. There are fourth wavers like the young woman in the front who looks very suspicious of my disinterest in gender — her suspicion likely emerges from the fact that fourth wave feminism is a dissonant choir, locked in internal conflict over what what song it is singing. There is no widespread agreement on anything — from what feminism is to what constitutes a woman — apart from a belief that gender is the single most important concept in existence regardless of where and how it is being applied. Fourth wave feminism reflects the fractured and factionalised digital landscape of ideas in which we must all now think and live.

There are third wavers in the crowd, whose focus from the 1990s to the mid 2000s reoriented the feminist movement to the dual concerns of individual agency and collective identity. They embraced intersectionality and the possibility of diverse feminist choices, bringing class and race into a conversation that had never adequately included them because it recognised that women are, like men, individuals who vary and have different experiences.

Here also are the second wavers who preceded these women, whose major achievements stretched from the 1960s to the 1980s, and whose feminism extended beyond suffrage and legal rights (the focus of the first wave) to challenge the ways in which female biology was weaponised both socially and under the law. They concentrated on concepts like bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, violence against women and sexual objectification and exploitation. Building on the achievements of feminism’s first wave, they were successful in shifting the movement from focusing on legislative barriers to encompass a push for social and cultural freedoms for women.

The fourth wavers don’t agree with one another or the third wavers, and the third wavers don’t agree with the second wavers for their rejection of certain choices — like sex work — as unfeminist. The second wavers don’t agree with anyone apart from one another, generally, but even then, not always. Each wave has distinct integral beliefs (arguably with the exception of the present one, which is too busy eating itself to nail down key maxims). Each wave holds its own conception of what it means to be a feminist, and a conception of who does or does not merit the word.

As Margaret Atwood (who is famously ambivalent about the feminist label) told historian Mary Beard in 2019, “There isn’t one feminism, you know this. You go online, you will find seventy-five different kinds, some of which you would not wish to subscribe to, and this is what happens to things when they become successful. They develop factions and camps.”

Then of course there are the softcore or casual feminists who are horrified that any woman (like me) would not identify as a feminist despite the fact that nobody can actually provide a satisfactory definition of what one is without revoking the label from everyone else claiming it with whom they don’t agree. To declare oneself not to be a feminist is standardly seen as shorthand for ignorance about the movement and its theory and history. I recently read a Gen Z Substack writer whose work I admire and think is excellent comment that she could not understand why any woman would not identify as a feminist. But this position — an assumption that we should all be feminists — reveals ignorance of the theory and history of feminism.

Many women who consider feminism merely to be synonymous with being a good person will often say ‘feminism is: just ‘being kind’ (I dry retch at this reproduction of the same burdensome misogynistic tropes of fluffy, self annihilating, inherently emotionally clairvoyant and hypersensitised females that previous generations of feminists worked so hard to foist off women’s backs); ‘caring about gender equality’ (no it isn’t - sit in on a conversation between different feminist factions and you’ll discover quickly that they have radically differing conceptions of equality and the best route there, some more equal than others); ‘prioritising women’s issues’ (well… that one’s tricky too because which women are you talking about? Invariably, there will be disagreement) and on and on.

Feminism is a spectrum of ideological affiliations emerging from an evolving movement stretching back perhaps to Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman but arguably earlier still. To say feminism is ‘just thinking women and men have equal value’ or ‘only believing that patriarchy exists’ is a deep insult to the intellectual and political evolution of its rich tradition. It is a failure to take it seriously — like declaring socialism to be ‘just believing that sharing is good’ or that libertarianism is ‘only believing that sharing is bad’.

These are inaccurate, ungenerous and insultingly dim depictions of a complex and theory-dense belief system with a long history, impact and context. When applied to feminism, this thinking denigrates women who threw themselves under horses and died in non-consensual childbirth and marched on the streets while blinking through tear gas. They did not do this so that we could tell one another that managing the feelings of other people masquerading as kindness is enlightened, or to give semantic tools to middle class women with doctorates agreeing that they’re dreadfully oppressed over flat whites made by an immigrant woman on minimum wage.

Neither, you might argue, did feminists make such powerful sacrifices so that some prick like me can sit cosily on a dais in a temperately air conditioned room and say ‘I think that my gender is the least interesting thing about me.’ However, I would argue that while these uses of the freedoms they fought for are not in themselves ‘feminist’, they are only made possible by feminists who came before.

It may have seemed like a strange statement to make on a panel at an event on women in journalism, but I meant it. I think it. I mean it, and that is the thing — this statement is evidence of the desired outcome for many feminists, particularly the second wavers whose efforts were explicitly designed to change collective conceptions of what women are entitled to and capable of. They aimed to unshackle women from the limitations of a biology weaponised by overt structural sexism and create a reality where womanhood didn’t always have to present an obstacle to progress in a world run entirely — and then almost entirely, because - Thatcher (though she’s a very tricky one for feminists to parse)— by men.

The second wave feminist on the panel didn’t like it when I said that I consider my gender to be the least interesting thing about me even though this attitude is what she ultimately fought for, and I have been thinking about it ever since. Because I sympathise deeply with her reaction. It is entirely understandable. While she might have understood it as a profession of ignorance about what her generation underwent and sacrificed, I understand it as a logical and necessary consequence of the same. It is not a statement of ingratitude to suggest that gender is (or should, or could be) less important now than it was in her youth. It is an articulation of her generation’s profound success, for which I feel deep gratitude and admiration.

She has helped to create a world in which my gender can be the least interesting thing about me. In which a lack of unscalable legal and structural barriers to my freedom allows me to begin one step or more ahead of many of the women of her generation. She helped create space that my generation and the one following us can stretch in. This is the gap between those who had to fight for basic autonomy and those who exercise it with such entitlement that they can say what I said. This gap is not just an ideological but an emotional one. It has to hurt to know by experience that the cost of kicking in doors is that you may not be the one who gets to walk through them.

I can understand how my comment may have landed on this woman and felt like ingratitude, ignorance or erasure. I can also understand how it might generate an impulse toward resentment to see any younger woman wear lightly what was made to feel so heavy, for so many, for so long. How the success of the movement might create discomfort for people who experienced some of the most intense elements of the struggle. How the feelings that arise are complicated. Feelings about legacy and a sense of conflict about what other women might choose to do with the freedoms you helped generate for them.

When significant progress is made, the identity should become lighter to wear, though goodness knows it still has its challenges. That lightness is what the struggle of prior generations of women was for. To secure the liberty (to some degree, as opposed to the prior no degree at all) to determine our relationship with what it is to be a girl or woman, or at least our attitude towards it. We need ways to acknowledge and honour the struggle of the people who came before us without being beholden to their terms. This is what I took from the flinch.

It’s clear that my position does not appear to be the standard — from the reaction to my comment in that room, not to mention the fact almost every woman I know seems to consider herself a feminist, even and especially where they have wildly divergent and directly conflicting ideas about what the word means — and it’s also clear that there is work yet to be done. However, acknowledging all the progress made does not undermine that, though my colleague’s grimace may have emerged from a feeling that it does. We live in the confused, infighting aftermath of a revolution that — ultimately, on the key issues in the context of the West — worked. When you place your generation’s achievements into the palms of those born later and say ‘go forth and exercise the freedom we fought to give you’, the handover hurts. Of course it does.

I want to live in a world where my gender is the least interesting thing about me. My hope is that we’ll get there. We’re a lot closer than we were a hundred, fifty, or even twenty years ago. Without any robust, cohesive feminist movement in my time, I cannot be part of a unified collective effort to create that reality, but I can believe it of myself. I can see other people through a lens which does not make their gender the most important element of their personhood. I have the freedom to do that, thanks to people like my second wave colleague. So that is what I’ll do — on my own terms, since that is what it means to be a free woman.