‘White’ Feminism

[Sociallydistancedcocktails]

I was recently on a thread which got me thinking about this.

Do you think ‘white’ feminism exists?

And your thoughts on the article below. I am quoting an excerpt

“White feminism is a term that has been on the tip of everyone's tongue since actor Emma Watson addressed past criticisms of her feminism in statement to her book club about the topic in early January. Though it's difficult to find an exact definition for "white feminism," it has come to describe a not-quite-feminist mindset that doesn't take into account the ways the women of color experience sexism, and how it differs from the way white women experience it. Simply put, white feminism is for white women who don't want to examine their white privilege. The term "intersectional feminism," which stands in opposition to white feminism, was coined by civil rights advocate and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to help describe the experiences of Black women who not only face sexism, but systemic racism.

Understanding the ways race, gender, and other factors (such as disability, class, or sexuality) intersect is crucial to making our feminism more effective and impactful”

www.bustle.com/p/what-is-white-feminism-here-are-7-sneaky-ways-it-shows-up-into-your-life-7921450

I’ve been there, but haven’t couched my own successes in terms of “wins” for women. That would be a bit deluded and cynical
Can you give some examples of women in business doing this and how you associate it with 'white feminism' and what the importance of this issue is to women in general? I often hear of women breaking the glass ceiling, but don't associate this with being white specifically. Lots of people claim Cardi B rapping about her pussy is 'empowering' for women and this feels equally irrelevant to me as would a white businesswoman getting a promotion. More representation of women in politics is important, but of course only if those women aren't dick panderers.

"women are not one homogeneous group and that women can and do contribute to patriarchy within their normal day to day lives, depending on their level of access and privilege" I don't think anyone here is denying that, so what's the issue? I don't get the impression you've spent much time on these boards at all.

cakedays

Men actually haven't been historically paid for their labour, though. Work for pay is a relatively modern thing, at least on a regular basis, and you don't see it much in primitive societies.

Particularly with some of the more marginal ones, even today though only a few are left now, reproductive labour was absolutely essential for the survival of the group as a whole, and it could be all consuming for women. Populations were in constant danger of falling below replacement rates if women didn't birth as many children as possible, because survival rates were not good. And if it did, that was the end of your people. I don't really see how that wasn't bad for women or only benefited men to avoid.

So what does it really tell us other than in primitive societies, the goods produced by work, in the home, on the land, biological work, craftsmanship - went to support the family and the group? You eat the food grown or caught, milk the cow, wear the shoes, hope the kids will care for you in your old age.

That just seems completely out of line with the theory that's been proposed as some sort of capture of women for the benefit of men. And I think that ideals based on theories that aren't grounded in some reality tend to go wrong.

Some of the intersectional issues I've seen in women I've worked with have included: in the British Asian community - domestic violence, alcoholism, refugee status, criminality, arranged marriage, illiteracy, racist harassment, shame brought about by the end of a marriage, access to social services and healthcare, the taboos of dating outside one's culture, religious observance interfering with ability to access certain services at certain times, mixed sex services when single sex were preferred, not wishing to mix socially from those outside their culture for fear of bad reputation, wearing hijab or burka, husbands not wishing their wives to have more advanced careers than them - I could go on. I don't think anyone here is unaware of the issues of intersectionality. You're pointing the finger at Mumsnet as the ultimate in this 'white feminism', without much to back it up. To be honest, you sound racist yourself.

@cakedays

Just to extend that model further because I'm enjoying myself and I'll shut up now -- but if feminism is like the union movement for women, arguing about different forms of feminism is a bit like Len McCluskey arguing with Neil Kinnock about the way forward for the workers, when everyone should instead be focused on getting rid of Margaret Thatcher

How’s that intersectionality? That’s just a list of issues

Intersectionality in identity means complex and often conflicting interests because of a vector of social positions. Being disadvantaged and privileged, being oppressed and an oppressor at the same time. And being aware of these

Now I read that intersectional meant intersection between multiple axes of oppression, not your relative oppression rating across all axis

So being female and disabled makes the problem that doctors don't listen to women much more accute

Or the likelyhood of being in poverty with all its problems being higher if you are from some ethnic backgrounds

The problem with AIbcrime systems focussing on the race and not the real relationship between poverty and crime

... and BTW if you want to discuss any of the issues I've just mentioned I would be happy to do so. It's not my own culture, but I'd be happy to listen and share my experiences working with this community. I knew when working with this community that the other women I worked with who were also from that community had more experience and knowledge than me to support these women, and that's fine, but I did what I could and referred them to specialist services where necessary. Although I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I've never known any white American businesswomen who've been promoted and then harped on about how it's good for all women, so I'm not sure I have much to add to that conversation, especially as you're not giving any examples or details. You sound like you just want to call a bunch of women you know nothing about racist though, tbh, and to make all sorts of assumptions about our life experiences, class and level of knowledge. It's a very unnecessarily divisive way to go about having this conversation.

I think if you accept the paradigm, logically it would mean both of those things.

@Sociallydistancedcocktails

How’s that intersectionality? That’s just a list of issues

Intersectionality in identity means complex and often conflicting interests because of a vector of social positions. Being disadvantaged and privileged, being oppressed and an oppressor at the same time. And being aware of these

How is what you've drawn to our attention any more about 'intersectionality'?

I think if you accept the paradigm, logically it would mean both of those things.

I agree.

@SmokedDuck

cakedays

Men actually haven't been historically paid for their labour, though. Work for pay is a relatively modern thing, at least on a regular basis, and you don't see it much in primitive societies.

Particularly with some of the more marginal ones, even today though only a few are left now, reproductive labour was absolutely essential for the survival of the group as a whole, and it could be all consuming for women. Populations were in constant danger of falling below replacement rates if women didn't birth as many children as possible, because survival rates were not good. And if it did, that was the end of your people. I don't really see how that wasn't bad for women or only benefited men to avoid.

So what does it really tell us other than in primitive societies, the goods produced by work, in the home, on the land, biological work, craftsmanship - went to support the family and the group? You eat the food grown or caught, milk the cow, wear the shoes, hope the kids will care for you in your old age.

That just seems completely out of line with the theory that's been proposed as some sort of capture of women for the benefit of men. And I think that ideals based on theories that aren't grounded in some reality tend to go wrong.

Well, we have religious and legal/administrative writings, and oral traditions of folk and religious myths dating back a reasonable amount of time which suggest that women (like slaves), were the property of men; and (especially in religious texts) subject to violence and social control. One thing that we might be suspicious of is the tendency to romanticise a pre-economic culture as a more idyllic society (something that, in fact, has been used throughout history to justify keeping women in a specific social role).

If we want to believe that things were once different, then at some point between hunter-gatherer societies, and the earliest writings we have, there must have been a social upheaval so profound that it cancelled all of this out -- because we know without a doubt that by the writings of the 'ancient' worlds (India, Greece, Egypt, and so on), men owned women as property, beat them if they were disobedient, took multiple wives, and owned their children as property too.

In fact some of the earliest recorded writing we have is administrative - recording wages paid to male labourers, and business transactions including the buying and selling of slaves and women (for example in Egypt and in Mesopotamia). It's really telling that these are some of the first things recorded in human history - records of property and labour including the transactions of humans owned by others. Ancient Egypt and Rome both basically maintained massive empires by developing huge legal and administrative records for enforcing the paying of wages and the ownership of property.

“Business transactions including the buying and selling of slaves and women (for example in Egypt and in Mesopotamia).”

Slaves were men and women. Slave owners were also men and women.
Women owned female and male slaves. That is part of historic intersectionality.
It has never has been as simple as women oppressed, men oppressor

It has never has been as simple as women oppressed, men oppressor

Have we been taken over by MRAs? Who is doing the oppressing of everyone? Who is running everything while even wealthy women are given away as gifts in arranged marriages? Who gets to speak at the forum and lay down the laws?

I am not an expert on black history but this account was thought provoking. Perhaps someone with a better understanding might have some thoughts? It gets to some of the points on historic intersectionality (and apologies, it is American)
www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/8/19/20807633/slavery-white-women-stephanie-jones-rogers-1619

Quoting from the interview
“ There is a certain kind of power that comes with wealth. Enslaved people were wealth, their bodies held value on a real market, within a capitalist market. White women understood it.

But in order to sustain this system, white men realize that white women must be a part of that system. They must support it, they must see the value in it for themselves, not simply for their husbands or their children. They need to understand that this system benefits them personally and directly. The only way they can do that is to allow for them to invest in the system and to participate in the system.

And they are, in fact, invested in this system; they participate in the system. They benefit from this system, in every single way that white men do. And that is key to the longevity of, the perpetuation of the system”

And then they draw parallels to capitalism.

And substitute white for whatever might have been the dominant socio- economic class in other countries with slavery. The point is that both men and women benefit from privilege and oppression. And that just because the dominant group of women are disadvantaged in certain aspects, it does not mean they do not have privilege. And nor can we ignore that they may advance their interests and those of their social group in a way that can be detrimental to other women

Records already take you to cities and developed economies, they don't take you to marx's description of the fundamental relation between men and women.

Slavery has been endemic in pretty much every society throughout history up until recently, and included men and women.

It's also not true that women as a group have always been considered property, they haven't, there has been a fair bit of variation around this.

I don't think it's romantic to say that if you look at what we know about hunter-gatherer groups, fundamentally women and men were completely tied together for survival at the most basic level. We know there was and is variety in the status of women relative to men in these societies, for sure, but they did not overall have opposed interests in any of them. Both require the other for survival.

Nor is it romantic to want economic theories (especially marx!) to be based in material reality. Not some sort of mythology about original states. Marx tends that way though a little, and I suppose it has a pretty good pedigree in terms of philosophy really but only if its true myth. False myths lead to bad philosophy.

This may be a bit of an aside, but I think it's really interesting that it's only under capitalism that wage labour becomes dominant, and that first means wage labour for men. Which meant that much of the value of that labour could be taken and accumulated by capitalists whereas the value of domestic labour remained in the family. It did not take log for the capitalist era to get as many women as possible into the workforce and to commoditise things like childcare and housework, so they also could contribute a share to capitalists.

I've always thought it interesting that feminism should be so much involved in promoting that change.

I'm confused - are you saying every system? Which systems? We know that men's superior physical strength keeps everything in place as well as economic power (which they hold). In her excellent article - The mythology of Karen - Helen Lewis acknowledges that the history of race relations in the US is hugely complex and there are many tensions, but has the following passage about the case of Emmett Till:

"The tension is even more obvious in another infamous case. In August 1955, Carolyn Bryant Donham was 21 years old, and working in a store she owned with her husband, Roy Bryant, in the Mississippi Delta. A Black teenage boy walked into the store, and then—well, no one knows, exactly. Bryant Donham’s initial story was that he wolf-whistled at her. In court, later, she said he grabbed her, insulted her, and told her he’d been with white women before. Decades later, she said that she had made it all up, and couldn’t remember exactly what had happenedd_.

None of that made any difference to the boy, who was hunted down by Roy Bryant and killed. His body was found days later, so mutilated that his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, which would force the world to witness what had been done to him. His name was Emmett Till.
That story is vital to understanding America’s Karen mythology. A white woman’s complaint led white male authority to enact violence on a Black person, and neither she nor they suffered any consequences. Roy Bryant and his half brother were put on trial for Till’s murder, but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Within a racist, patriarchal system, Bryant Donham’s fragility—her white femininity—was not a weakness, but a weapon, because she could always call on white men to protect her. (Yet even that case is more morally complex than it once seemed. In 2017, the Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, who was researching a book on the case, discovered that Roy Bryant was physically abusive to his wife. “The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” he told The New York Timess_. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow.”)"

www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/08/karen-meme-coronavirus/615355/

@Sociallydistancedcocktails

“Business transactions including the buying and selling of slaves and women (for example in Egypt and in Mesopotamia).”

Slaves were men and women. Slave owners were also men and women.
Women owned female and male slaves. That is part of historic intersectionality.
It has never has been as simple as women oppressed, men oppressor

Historically women rarely if ever owned property, including slaves. they might have been the wives of slaveowners, but in slaveowning societies the legal systems rarely accorded any legal ownership to women (occasionally widows had legal ownership in Abrahamic societies, such as early Christian Europe, but rarely).

There were some exceptions in terms of female ownership and property inheritance in some early societies, but they mostly tend not to be in societies with slave ownership more generally. Even most US Southern states did not grant property ownership to women until right before the Civil War.

You are aware of course OP that even in the UK, married women could not legally own any property at all until 1881, a long time after any forms of legal slavery existed in the UK?

This is all a complete distraction from contemporary feminism. Women have never experienced at any time in recorded history some mythical society where they were equal legal and economic agents with men.

@Sociallydistancedcocktails

I am not an expert on black history but this account was thought provoking. Perhaps someone with a better understanding might have some thoughts? It gets to some of the points on historic intersectionality (and apologies, it is American) www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/8/19/20807633/slavery-white-women-stephanie-jones-rogers-1619

Quoting from the interview
“ There is a certain kind of power that comes with wealth. Enslaved people were wealth, their bodies held value on a real market, within a capitalist market. White women understood it.

But in order to sustain this system, white men realize that white women must be a part of that system. They must support it, they must see the value in it for themselves, not simply for their husbands or their children. They need to understand that this system benefits them personally and directly. The only way they can do that is to allow for them to invest in the system and to participate in the system.

And they are, in fact, invested in this system; they participate in the system. They benefit from this system, in every single way that white men do. And that is key to the longevity of, the perpetuation of the system”

And then they draw parallels to capitalism.

I find this kind of thing very weird, because it seems like women do't have any agency. Why do white men need to convince white women that a system that is good for white men would also be good for white women? I think they are probably in a position in most cases to realise it themselves. We are not talking about some sort of reversal of Adam and Eve where men need to convince women to do what is to their class advantage.

I also always find it weird that this kind of thing is only seen in terms of whiteness, it's not like slave systems have generally been defined in that way and yet the same kind of power and economic differentials, and psychology, were involved. But that is par for the course in American articles.

It's also not true that women as a group have always been considered property, they haven't, there has been a fair bit of variation around this.

The history of the dowry and the bride price tell a different story and it's a consistent one across continents. Indeed dowry related violence is very much a live issue in South Asian communities:

"[T]he ongoing reality of dowry-related violence is an example of what can happen when women are treated as property. Brides unable to pay the high "price" to marry are punished by violence and often death at the hands of their in-laws or their own husbands." - According to the Declaration on the elimination of violence against women.

"Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family, including battering, sexual abuse of female children in the household, dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women, non- spousal violence and violence related to exploitation."

Prostitution is in and of itself the buying and selling of (mostly) women.

It has never has been as simple as women oppressed, men oppressor

OP, some black people sold other black people into slavery to Western European slave traders. Yet I wouldn't deny the impact of the transatlantic slave trade, or try to suggest that Western European people weren't responsible for the structural oppression of black and indigenous people by white people.

Would you? Is that an intersectional issue?

I've always thought it interesting that feminism should be so much involved in promoting that change.

@smokedduck lots of the second wave were very against this, in fact, and much more interested in how we might reorganise society to prioritise the domestic and family relations over paid work (take a look at the hooks book I linked to above). The whole 'compete on terms with men in the workplace' is a position I personally think became more dominant in 90s feminism - though there was still plenty of pushback against it, though.

I'm surprised that ecological activism isn't more akin to second wave feminism in reprioritising the domestic and interconnectedness - there is a small ecofeminist movement in cultural history, but in practice environmental movements seem more male-led and more allied to political anarchist movements than feminist ones. It's a shame.

@Sociallydistancedcocktails
Enslaved people were wealth, their bodies held value on a real market, within a capitalist market.

Not just capitalist market but in all markets and economic systems. It is propaganda that slavery and capitalism are specially linked.

The bride price which is still very common in some countries was also a common theme across continents. You find it in the story of Jacob and Rebecca, you find it in Africa still where traditionally women and girls were exchanged for cattle, you find it in ancient and modern China. Meanwhile... let's not even get started on all the attendant customs of societies which viewed women as property - honorary mention fordroit du seigneu.