Faces of feminism – from the 90s to tomorrow

Lynne Segal

Movements are never static, and there have been many shifts in feminist thought and action over the past 30 years. The 1980s were already a watershed in which earlier forms of left militancy were in retreat after Margaret Thatcher’s third electoral victory, extending her neoliberal agenda of shrinking and outsourcing welfare, along with aggressively confronting union militancy, exemplified in defeating British miners in 1985- 85. Unsurprisingly, with a weakened left, feminism too was no longer the confident liberation movement that had marched onto the political stage at the close of the 1960s.

As Sheila Rowbotham exemplified in her early books, feminism sought to introduce new ways of seeing into the left, while working on all fronts for social transformation – not just in terms of wages or state power but encouraging democratic engagement in how we live and care for each other. From the start, Rowbotham here, like Barbara Ehrenreich in the USA, knew that feminism needed to be challenged by the insights of black and third world feminisms. It quickly was, and the 1980s and 90s saw the flourishing of black and third world feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, confronting the limitations of white western feminism.

However, the 1990s saw the rise of a rather contradictory ‘third wave feminism’. There was a new emphasis on subjectivity and difference in scholarly writing, alongside ‘girl power’ and sex positivity in the popular feminism favoured by the mainstream media – exemplified by the Spice Girls or Missy Elliott, self-assertive rather than oppositional. Meanwhile, feminist militancy was publicly dismissed or trashed, as described by Susan Faludi.

New forms of aspirational feminism, congruent with neoliberal individualism, were now evident in government and media celebration of women’s personal triumphs. Such attempts to defuse feminist militancy were never wholly successful, as diverse women’s collectives continued fighting for women’s interests on many fronts. It was these struggles that would be reported by Red Pepper, aiming to help the left recover from the defeats of the previous decade and restore and enrich a socialist vision: one informed by progressive feminist, green and third world struggles. This was evident in its articles on continued feminist engagements, including Cynthia Cockburn on women opposing military conflict, Angela McRobbie critiquing consumer culture, or Melissa Benn on declining family welfare.

Lola Olufemi

I’m less convinced that the core demands established by dissenting feminist organisations in the UK – like the Brixton Black Women’s Group, or the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (AWAZ), for example – have changed. A ‘new generation’ still desires the destruction of capitalism, neo-imperialism and a new organisation of social life, perhaps more fervently expressed through an analysis and resistance to planetary destruction. They continue the legacy of forms of direct action that demand this.

There is a tempting tendency to assign so-called ‘fourth wave’ feminist concerns that are merely ‘cultural’ (read: intersectional analysis of media and forms of representation, discourses of empowerment) but nothing could be further from the truth. Fifteen years of austerity combined with a limp and lifeless parliamentary politics has radicalised a generation – sharp and necessary analysis of the feminist political economy, the family, workers’ movements and international solidarity are returning.

The onset of the internet provides new challenges that contemporary cyber-feminists are aptly addressing: how do we pass information across cities and borders while avoiding surveillance online? Sisters Uncut’s recent involvement in the A15, a globally coordinated economic blockade to Free Palestine, is one such example.

One of the most pressing and under-theorised ways the landscape has changed, especially in the UK, is the effect of austerity on feminist organising infrastructures. Where it was once possible to squat a building and create a rape crisis centre, women’s centre or radical black bookshop in an environment where education was free, young people subsidised their living on state welfare, wages had not yet begun to stagnate, housing was affordable, one had time to dedicate their entire life to feminist organising or writing. Those features, which provided a fertile and permissible Robin Christian environment for demand-making, protest, civil disobedience, riot and rebellion have all but disappeared.

The landscape in the last 30 years has no doubt been shaped by the onset of rabid neoliberalism and financialisation. One effect has been to reshape how, when and why social reproduction occurs. This remains a key theoretical battleground that the Covid pandemic has shown us is crucial in any attempt to strategise liberatory gender relations.

Nancy Fraser argues that in Euro-America, divestment from forms of state-managed social welfare have pushed the ‘life-affirming activities’ necessary to sustain existence back onto individuals and communities – the greater burden of which is shouldered by women. Precarious wages mean that even ‘two-earner households’ can’t perform this social reproduction. The state consistently diminishes their capacity by turning care into a commodity. The rich outsource this labour to racialised working-class women, maintaining cycles of oppression.

Fraser’s theorisation continues to ring in my head. Social reproduction is a key battleground because it is akin to asking: how should we live? Contemporary feminist movements have to find a coherent answer.

Lola Olufemi

Our public theorisation of feminism(s) must loudly return to its militant and materialist roots. This is the only way to deal with the frightening convergence between anti-trans feminist movements and fascists, which I think is one of the most present and defining struggles for feminists in the contemporary moment. Many of these anti-trans movements do not name themselves ‘feminist’ but they rely on rudimentary, essentialist and violent understandings of gender which it is our job as feminists to correct.

Isn’t our project to free ourselves from the ‘innate’ gendered qualities that they are so desperate to reinscribe? For many of us, we have always understood feminism as a methodological tool to consider, critique and resist the production of unfreedom. There has been a concerted effort by liberalism in the past ten years to evacuate the feminist canon of its robust critiques of capitalism, gendered labour, the nuclear family and so on, especially the way these violent processes shape our lives. It is only by fighting for and redefining an understanding of feminism premised on the possibility of material freedom – from the state’s racialised violence, from domestic and gendered abuse, from exploitation caused by borders and criminalisation – that we have a chance of repositioning feminism as a viable tool to help us consider what is to be done.

That redefinition happens and will continue to happen on the streets, in grassroots formations, in burgeoning feminist movements in Latin America, the Kurdish women’s movement. It is actively practiced by those feminists who stood alongside their anti-fascist comrades in support of ‘Drag Time Story Hour’ in Honor Oak, south London, in 2023, or by those who stand in solidarity with Palestinian feminist movements, echoing their demands for international resistance to an ongoing genocide.

I’d separate the struggle for feminism’s future in the UK into two camps: the struggle over feminism as a public discourse and a set of affects; and the struggle to bolster and sustain the grassroots feminist formations that have re-emerged in the past two decades, whose concerns – austerity, climate crisis, housing, international solidarity, raids and deportations, prison and police abolition – show that present-day feminist movements continue to have Marxist and/or materialist analysis at their centre. In an age of creeping fascism expressed through reaction and moral panic, we should never concede ground to anti-intellectual conservative forces that seek to regulate us back into the family, monogamy, oppressive heterosexuality, all through attacks on transness, queerness and critical thought.

Lastly, I’ll say that feminists inside the imperial core have also got to begin thinking on a planetary scale – demanding divestment, standing in solidarity with those defending land from oil and gas companies, working in spite of the borders to ‘connect the dots’. These practices of solidarity are how feminist movements remain strong and how our analysis remains critical enough to resist a death-machine world.

Lynne Segal

Times are harder for so many in this grim world of the 21st century, with inequality soaring after the Tory-led government’s austerity policies of 2010. Deepening welfare cuts and shrinking community resources have further entrenched poverty, resulting in a comprehensive crisis of care. Failure to meet the needs of the poor, sick or vulnerable, alongside insecurity and worsening employment conditions, are manifest in surging rates of depression, violence, racism, all distinctly impacting on women. Military violence is now widespread, alongside continued lethal neglect of asylum seekers in need of shelter, accompanying environmental gloom. This underpins the rise of the far-right globally, with its distinct anti-woman, racist, anti-immigrant agenda.

A feminism able to confront these predicaments must fight to rebuild our welfare and community resources as the only way to tackle inequality. Feminism has always stressed these issues, but some of its most significant recent thought and action raises the urgency of this goal for maintaining any genuinely democratic society. We see this in the work of the Women’s Budget Group, as well as in the Care Manifesto and my own work on radical care, arguing that we must begin from an understanding of our mutual interdependence, placing care at the core of our politics. Practically, it also means encouraging recent trade union struggles for higher pay and better working conditions, especially in the care sector, along with supporting existing grassroots campaigns against austerity, for better housing and community renewal overall.

Always internationalist in outlook, feminist activists continue to oppose militarism, like those of Women in Black still holding weekly vigils against all forms of violence, or those of us routinely marching to end Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza and create peace and justice for Palestinians. More generally, the rise of the right globally requires a militant feminism, evident in much movement activism now determined to defend women’s reproductive rights and freedom from men’s violence, along with resistance to the racism behind our brutal treatment of refugees.

It’s true that we have also seen the rise of a media-promoted individualistic, aspirational feminism over recent decades, totally detached from any oppositional collective current. However, there is much to celebrate and support in the feminist activism of recent years, eager to unite across our differences to develop as an inclusive, militant feminism that prioritises building the broadest possible coalitions to assist women in the struggle for a better world everywhere.

It aligns with the battle to preserve our planet against the destructiveness of fossil fuel corporations and related ecological harms. Here, indigenous populations, often led by women, have been crucial in trying to oppose corporate plunder of their land, now supported by western feminists promoting green politics, with Naomi Klein and Anne Pettifor merely two of the best-known voices. Creating such inclusive, militant alliances renders the outlook of trans-exclusive feminists merely a depressing sideline, barely worth addressing. Instead, a renewed feminist activism must continue to prioritise replacing the obscene inequality of this capitalist order with a vision that places care for each other, along with protecting the environment, at the very heart of its politics.