An Introduction to Feminism

In the chapters so far, I've had more to say about now-unfashionable political and philosophical traditions, and about movements (such as anarcho-syndicalism) which might now appear to be dead or dormant, than about the situation of feminists in the twenty-first century. The decision to focus on these things was deliberate, since my view is that we have much more to learn from anarchist and socialist ideas and practice or even from Suffragette militancy than we do from anything that contemporary liberal political philosophy has to offer – and yet these themes are almost entirely absent from mainstream introductions to feminist thought. In this last main chapter, however, I want to turn to consider the current state of things, what feminism means today, and some of the main obstacles it faces. Obviously, what is up-to-date very quickly becomes out-of-date, but my aim here is to look at some contemporary themes with the aid of concepts that are of more enduring significance. In fact, although my examples are current, the main phenomenon under consideration here is far from new. This is the phenomenon of ‘co-option’. To ask about the co-option of feminism, as we'll see, is to ask about the ways in which feminist theory and practice is absorbed, hijacked, twisted and betrayed by the world it seeks to change.

The first thing to say about the question of ‘where feminism stands now’ is that, yes, it is still relevant – for the reasons I listed at the close of Chapter 2, and more: it is still a response to something real, i.e. the fact of patriarchy. But of course patriarchy takes vastly different forms across different times and across cultures. The sort of patriarchy feminists are confronting now is obviously not the same as that confronted by feminists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example – and it is not adequate to express this just by saying that things are less bad than they used to be (‘we've come a long way…’). It is certainly true that formal legal inequalities between men and women have dramatically diminished, in some cases as a result of feminist struggle.