How can feminism in the UK be more inclusive? Striving for equality for all women

[isequalityamyth]

I have spent 40 plus years pushing, fighting, scrapping at times for equality, fair pay, calling out sexism, even the every day minor crap...if you call me girl I’ll call you kid all day long (apparently that is really annoying). & no I’m not sitting on your lap or taking a ride in your "fuck mobile".

The reality is though that I’ve been fighting from a very white privileged middle class standpoint. I had the privilege of having a feminist father who encouraged my education, encouraged my promotion.

When I went for entry jobs post graduating I was met with a phew by the male interviewers. My name and hobbies are not necessarily reflective of how I look. I got told once in an interview they were relieved I wasn’t a heffer, I looked and sounded english (seriously yes this was stated). This was the normal.

Yes I’ve fought my way up through the glass ceiling, but I was given a ladder.

I'm not demeaning my own battle nor those of others, I am just conscious that I had help, I had a tool set, I had support, I had the right skin colour, I had privilege.

How does one take a different perspective, not all women are the same, we all have different experiences. We are not starting from the same position, as a white Middle class woman I definitely had a head start in the equality stakes.

So my long winded question - how do we make feminism more inclusive? Not so white MC centric. As surely feminism needs to be more inclusive and it doesn't feel that way right now.

@BabyBee93

But women have to fix other peoples oxygen masks before they can put their own on

Hilarious! You've bleated so much that you've outed yourself as a racist all by yourself

The "other people" you refer to are in fact....women. Divide and conquer is it?

Who are you quoting? The poster who originally said that or me who cut that same part you have used, to make the same point that you have?

Quoting the original message to you!

Sorry, I did actually miss that paragraph.
Yes, you did. Despite being asked to read what I'd written carefully.
It seems you miss a lot of the substance in your haste to be a good ally.

@continuallyconflating

Sorry, I did actually miss that paragraph. Yes, you did. Despite being asked to read what I'd written carefully. It seems you miss a lot of the substance in your haste to be a good ally.

Sorry, is trying to be a good ally a bad thing? Do tell me why. I'm intrigued.

And nope, I didn't miss it because of that. It was Because I nipped for a wee part way through reading it actually. TMI there Sorry though. I know it's tough for all women up there

@continuallyconflating

Sorry, I did actually miss that paragraph. Yes, you did. Despite being asked to read what I'd written carefully. It seems you miss a lot of the substance in your haste to be a good ally.

I am also really not following you. You seem to be saying that Scottish women on schemes are separate from black women facing patriarchal challenges.

I dont get you....women on those schemes will be from a whole host of different ethnic backgrounds. So how it is doing any of them down to point out that the black women among them will be the ones most adversely affected by patriarchal constraints?

Or am I missing yet another detail somewhere? Do you believe those women on schemes don't include black women or something?

@BabyBee93

Quoting the original message to you!

Not following you. Sorry. It was a shit comment for someone to say which implied black and other AME women were "other" and somehow got included in the banner of women. I pointed that out. That's it.

*not, not got!

I’m Jewish and i participate in a number of specific Jewish feminist groups e.g which are about giving women equality in leading religious services etc. But I still participate in main stream feminism too. I don’t usually feel “excluded” by my race but I suppose there are some feminists who rail against religion and by extension religious people. That can make Jewish women feel excluded. But we shouldn’t stop calling out sexism because it might may some women uncomfortable. But I think you can criticize sexism without alienating women.

I was subjected to some fairly horrible posts on m&s “modest” line of clothing. When I said that for more religious women in my family and community that would be a selling point and that the word we use in Judaism for such clothes is “modest” there was a nasty pile on. I’m no less a committed feminist because of things like that but I can see how others can be alienated by that type of thing.

But we definitely must have free speech and feel free to debate and even criticize. And also it is right that feminism calls out sexism even where that might be uncomfortable for some women because of their race, age, etc. Feminism is about women’s rights not Jewish people’s rights.

I think there is also an issue that society sees sexism as less serious than racism. Sexism is often seen as cultural or harmless when racism would not be. Women matter and we are important. We have as much right as any other to claim our civil rights.

That’s really interesting Cayrol. I hadn’t really considered much around the different cultural perspectives on modest clothing.

OP, I think 'corporate feminism' is what you're talking about? If we can look at the structures rather than the identities of the participants... (Because tbqh, white middle-class feminists of a certain age are the most likely to be demanding 'intersectionality'.) That idea that 'equality' looks like equal participation in boardrooms or at CEO level, rather than questioning the boardroom - when the latter is what we should be doing.

"How does one take a different perspective, not all women are the same, we all have different experiences." It's the similar experiences - or the potential for similar experiences - that unite us. E.g. domestic violence, sexual assault, pregnancy, childcare, discrimination in the workplace, lower rates of pay, less-informed medical treatment - these are common issues. It's about paying attention to the risks we have been able to minimise in our own lives, and recognising not all women can - e.g. the commentary on Davina McCall's silly 'women going out after dark' messaging (plenty of women need to walk home at unsociable hours). And not judging other women for their choices - e.g. that job interview with the 'phew' sounds awful, but it's also not always financially viable for someone to walk away from a terrible employer if that's the only place that will employ them at a particular point in time.

Sometimes it's useful to pick one issue and make sure you're tackling everything that goes with it. E.g. if you're looking at how women's pain is treated by doctors, that will be informed by race and class and the healthcare system of the country they're in. If you're looking at how psychiatry labels so many female assault victims as experiencing a personality disorder, that will be informed by psychiatry as a Western male-dominated system. Being aware of the whole range of potential female experiences informs your advocacy and activism.

Also I don’t think it’s helpful from a feminist perspective to say “black women are most affected by the patriarchy” as some pp have with no explanation. If they are, that’s not really about feminism rather intersectionality between racism and feminism.

Some women are definitely more affected by the patriarchy than others of course. But it’s certainly not the case that’s exclusively due to race - that’s not sexism, it’s racism.

For example, I would say that some religious women in my community are more affected by the patriarchy than me as they live in a family and section of the community that is less tolerant of women’s freedom. But even then, some religious women have supportive families that have no problem with feminism within the boundaries of Judaism. So every person has different circumstances and we should not generalise.

@CayrolBaaaskin it is a really tough one because the term 'modesty' is so gendered - there are tenets in every mainstream religion that are sexist and this is a potential conflict between feminist beliefs and religious ones. But a conflict to be discussed rather than shut down, as you rightly say!

(took too long typing - my last post was a response to your earlier one, Cayrol!)

Do you believe those women on schemes don't include black women or something?

Are you aware how white Scotland is outside Glasgow and Edinburgh?
Perhaps not.
Or how well integrated and affluent both the Scottish Pakistani and Chinese communities are?
And how truly fucked some Scottish towns and villages are in the Central belt?

Scottish working class women carry the generational legacy of their communities being used by the British Empire to provide coal, steel, ships and men for the Empire
These scars are still there.
These are living breathing woman who as a class have the worst health outcomes, the worse social indicators and the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe
And they're white
Please, please stop trying to erase them in the name of some fictional suffering other

really good post, @continuallyconflating, spot on

@HopeClearwater has the right of it but the feminism here will always struggle to be properly inclusive with so many are obsessed with the idea that trans women are somehow infiltrating them or appropriating their womanhood in some kind of pseudo-great replacement... rather than just being other women.

The fact that they can say "the trans question" without a hint of irony or realization of how they sound to anyone outside of their weird little bubble is honestly baffling.

I say this as a cis woman who is quite obviously a trans ally.
What comes next I say as a mixed race, able-bodied woman:

With regard to BAME or Disabled people... there's definitely a a white MC bias at play and definitely a comfortably entrenched right-wing presence (who are always quick to rush to the defence of right wing policy or populist figures) which is always going to make a good chunk of BAME/Disabled women leery -- if you don't know why right wing sympathies make disabled people antsy, check out the Atos/Capita contracts shitshow from the past few years.

Seeing threads praising Julie Burchill the day after she settled libel payments for racially abusing Ash Sarkar really don't help much either.

I wish there was a way to report posts that are not engaging with reality.

With regard to BAME or Disabled people... there's definitely a a white MC bias at play and definitely a comfortably entrenched right-wing presence (who are always quick to rush to the defence of right wing policy or populist figures) which is always going to make a good chunk of BAME/Disabled women leery -- if you don't know why right wing sympathies make disabled people antsy, check out the Atos/Capita contracts shitshow from the past few years.

BAME person here. Give over with the lies. This board is overwhelmingly constituted by left wing posters, though we are not so bigoted as to not be able listen to other political viewpoints and discuss them. What counts as left wing amongst a lot of younger people today is not left wing as most of us would understand it - it’s individualist, liberal identity politics that happily throws class analysis and working-class people under the bus (just look at the abuse that was hurled on Twitter at the thick northerners after the 2019 general election). I think the problem is partly that a lot of our political discourse is now coming from the US, which has never had a tradition or understanding of left-wing politics or of class analysis, and can only comprehend the world through the lens of extreme individualism. That, and the fact that the Labour Party has been hijacked by middle class students and graduates who frankly enjoy the kind of performative hand-wringing that we see in the OP and use it to further entrench their own privileged status.

Labour Party has been hijacked by middle class students and graduates

I'd say it got hijacked by centrists, looking at the current leadership.

To be fair to both of our positions: It's hard to see where the left is when the current government are proto-fascists.

Surely discussing feminism and race is not creating a division, it’s trying to heal a rift that’s already happening. There are definitely topics that affect women based on race and those experiences need to be shared and respected.

For example, white-centric beauty standards that sideline dark-skinned women, and the framing of modest clothing as oppressive, without having asked the women who choose to wear it for their opinion. Conversely, women being judged twice as harsh for wearing a headscarf but western clothing.

The disproportionate deaths of black women in childbirth is symptomatic of a wider problem in the NHS. I have definitely experienced worse healthcare as a woman because of my race and white feminists wouldn’t have these experiences so unless we talk about it in terms of race, we cannot tackle this. This is not inner division, it is a division between women’s experiences caused by external factors already.

The double stress of not being white and not being male in the workplace. Some fields have such a dwindling amount of black women that it can feel isolating to breaking point. I know of a black women’s network that was criticised for being exclusive to black women but they felt it was so rare for them to be in a room together professionally (tiny minority) that they needed this breathing space, just once, without people judging them for it.

Anyway, I could go on and on but that is not the point of this thread. We need to debate these issues as feminists and the first step to that is accepting that they exist, and that white women are not the experts on these topics, but can read up on them and raise awareness of them.

how do we make feminism more inclusive? Not so white MC centric.

Accept that transwomen are women? Or is that the wrong kind of inclusivity?

One thing that many seem to forget is that there are cultures and religions that forbid women and girls from any contact with males.

The trans issue seems to be mostly a white middle class "thing" but it affects all women, especially those minorities.

When maternity services are making a visible fuss about pronouns, gender neutral language and being inclusive and diverse, are they for one second making the same fuss about these women?

Are they making the same inclusive diversity fuss about black women, disabled women, women with autism? Their translation services for any woman with EAL?

So that's that issue.

Visit this thread. Listen to the WH episode and the mother's experience of racism regarding breastfeeding. Those things are more about racism imo, but it's only going to affect women.

Regarding diverting from making feminism a "thing for white middle classes", we must simply be talking about and sharing and learning about how women from all corners of our society need support for a wide range of reasons. And in my personal experience, Teaching in northern towns, many white women cope alone in poverty with young children and also often aren't involved in 'feminist debates.'

Grassroots organisations know and do this. Find and support those grass roots orgs.

Argument fizzling out as I've been toddler summoned.

Sorry thread

Black Mothers Matter: Non profit supporting black women during pregnancy www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4193378-Black-Mothers-Matter-Non-profit-supporting-black-women-during-pregnancy

Thanks for starting this thread OP. It's been on my mind since reading another thread this week.

I have a bit of a weird background so basically I look like a white mc woman but it's a lot more complicated than that. This I have experience of some other groups as a member, not an outsider (and you get different info from those two positions).

I think there are certain things like not allowing men in women's spaces that impact everybody - that you'd think we can unite over! 🙄 But then there are ways of discussing topics that completely blocks other women. Discussions about Islam and women are almost guaranteed to do that. The problem is often due to basically a smidgeon of information and then a lot of unknown unknowns and opinions about people formed based on that. I'm embarrassed about a lot of the "discussion" about Islam and women by western feminists.

There are definitely issues to be discussed but the complexities of it - and there are many - are completely ignored, the voices of Muslim women nullified. As a result the discussion is always the same. With the same result. It doesn't evolve. According to this discussion there are basically two types of Muslim women: the oppressed and the more oppressed. It's insulting and not true. It's equivalent to the idea from some quarters of the Muslim world that white western women are all "whores".

And I personally HATE "BAME". It's totally useless in most contexts. It's often - very often - used in a "white people talking about others". It's othering in and of itself. There is a massive difference between British people with a Caribbean background or a Nigerian background or Roma background or a Bangladeshi background. Lumping hugely diverse groups of people together like that is rarely helpful in achieving any type of inclusion or cohesion.

It seems to me that the biggest problem is that some people are so keen to show themselves as allies that they are happy to ignorantly assume that all white people are basically sorted.

Just like @Sirching happily writing off @continuallyconflating excellent posts because they don't fit with the agenda.