A little bit more on ‘White’ Feminism

[ATieLikeRichardGere]

Hope we can continue what has been overall an interesting discussion.

I suggest it would be good if we could think more about the UK, because it has been under discussed so far.

The reason I'm very wary of white women is two fold. And yes I hate to go back to it but alas - the Amy Coopers of the world. The otherwise seemingly centrist if not leftist, aware, progressive white women who abhor racism and discrimination but will still ultimately cry 'white tears' when it suits them. The whole having to dance around white women so that they don't see me as 'aggressive'. And secondly having to constantly explain myself. The most educated, most erudite and supportive people I have ever come across were white women but yet they were still the reason I was reprimanded at work for asking them not to touch my hair. Of course white women aren't a monolith, nor are black women, nor like myself mixed women - but drawing the lines in the sand I consider myself a black woman.

@LibertyMole Interestingly what makes you see yourself as English, because much like yourself I have grown up here but I am certainly not English.

@SuperLoudPoppingAction I've ordered this. I actually like reading about this despite 'the rage'

@Ineedaneasteregg

Yes. Agree. Women just didn’t have the agency that we take for granted today. Even the very rich, noble women were in gilded cages and had to follow very strict rules and were always under the authority of a father, husband or son or other male relative.

I see myself as English because I moved around quite a bit growing up so haven’t had the opportunity to develop a regional identity in the way most English people do.

I love the English landscape, as well as English writers, music, art, architecture, dialects etc. It is what I have grown up with.

@LibertyMole Are you white? But wouldn't you say most English people don't feel 'proud' to be English in the way that Scots, Welsh do? I remember wasn't it Emily someone who ruined her career by posting a picture of a house basically covered in St Georges flags with some sarcastic comment. The English are one of the few nations even internationally who can get away with a nationalistic sentiment.

I mean who can't get away with it.

@VladmirsPoutine
Someone on the last thread said they'd rather face misogyny than racism and I agreed with her.

I think that is more a reflection of how we women are socialised and conditioned to accept/endure abuse due to our sex. Misogyny isn’t even a hate crime, it is the only equality characteristic left out of hate crime laws. But when it comes to race, that’s viewed as horrible and criminal and I think that is because racism affects men. As do the other equality characteristics....sexuality- affects men. Gender identity- affects men. Religion- affects men. Nationality- affects men.

But abusive speech or violence based on sex? Doesn’t affect men. So it’s not a priority.

Obviously racism and etc affects women too, but what I’m saying is that because it affects men as well, it’s looked at as worse than misogyny.

I am white. English people are less likely to participate in civic nationalism in the way the Scottish and the Welsh do. But the English have just as much cultural pride, although it often based more on regionalism.

In my experience people who describe themselves as ethnically British are mostly from one the following groups (or a combination of them):

Northern Irish Protestant.
Ancestry from the wider commonwealth.
A bit posh.
Privately educated.

I am none of those things.

My issue with misogyny is that it leaves so many women unsafe in their own homes and intimate relationships.

That is far less common in other forms of discrimination.

It has actually been mentioned as a form of white feminism, because many minority ethnic groups have some additional benefits from the home because it is often a place where they safer from racism (if they are not in a mixed race family). The same is true though for working class families.

Perhaps that is a form of white feminism for me, because I would see being a Pakistani woman with racist white family members as a particularly chilling form of racism, because my understanding of really chilling misogyny is violence and control within the home.

I should make clear that I am talking about within the U.K.

Globally it is not that uncommon for racism to be hugely within the home, due to forced marriage, servitude and slavery.

I didn't read much of the previous threads, but seem to have dipped into this one at the right moment.

I'm currently transcribing C18th & C19th wills of rich Edinburghers (including women, who owned moveable wealth and also could and did own and bequeath property, although not to the same extent as men) and reading newspapers of 1760–1820.

Based on that, I can say that without a shadow of a doubt the working class poor of Edinburgh, male and female, benefitted from slavery and colonial wealth generally.

The city's institutions included the Infirmary, the Dispensary, the Orphan Hospital and of course the churches which provided schools and alms (the Kirk Sessions frequently paid for childbirth expenses, for example, before trying to recoup these from recalcitrant fathers).

These institutions were funded to some extent by taxes on the city's wealthy or traders and were also the frequent beneficiaries of legacies in the wills, and of collections subscribed to by the great and good of the city (and indeed by many of the less elevated folk, eg "soldiers of the 73rd Regt" or "staff at the Customs House".) There were also frequent subscriptions taken up for specific causes, eg "for the relief of operative weavers" or "for the widow and children of the stonemason killed during the late collapse of the building in Wotsit Wynd". The situation will doubtless have been the same in other Scottish cities.

The money given to these collections and taken in taxes originated from, amongst others, families who traded to India, Trinidad, Jamaica, Australia, South Africa, China... They often had a branch of the family settled there for convenience. The documents I've read in the last couple of weeks alone have members of families spread from Demerara to New Zealand.

Beyond the merchant families and slave-owners, Empire wealth was dispersed in Scotland through routes such as employment provided in processing and selling the goods acquired through Empire: cotton, sugar, tobacco, indigo spring to mind. All four of those crops used either slave labour or (IIRC in the case of indigo) coerced labour. The Empire also provided a market for the finished goods: a lot of Dundee jute products, for example, went to the Americas and Caribbean. IIRC, Dundee even wove a specific type of cloth used primarily for clothing for enslaved people. Both handloom weaving, and powerloom weaving in factories, were jobs done by both women and men.

The Empire also provided direct employment for the less well-heeled: sailors and those servicing the Royal Navy, Hon East India Company and merchant navy generally. The army posted a huge number of working class soldiers around the world, some of whom settled and invited other family members out or once again used the "foot in each country" as a business opportunity. Then many went out to the colonies just as very small traders, artisans or settlers, and went as whole families. There were many, many active schemes for settlement. The "ten pound Poms" of the C20th was just a recent incarnation of what had been going on for over a century. Women were very much part of these settlements.

Women may have typically had less agency than men, but I absolutely wouldn't describe them as uniformly without agency. One can't spend any time reading women's wills, letters or newspaper items about them without their agency becoming obvious.

@PlanDeRaccordement

But what I meant by that is there's always going to be a point at which whiteness trumps woman-ness (if that makes sense). In that - whiteness will always hold structural power and those with proximity to it will be better off than those without.

I don’t think that is true. I think it’s the opposite way around. Sex trumps race. Both in U.K. or US.
It’s no accident than nonwhite men got the vote and equal rights in law well before women did.
It’s no accident that the US had a black president ..and wait never had a woman president ever. The U.K. has had 2 female PMs but both were/are reviled and hated.
It’s no accident that nonwhite men still out earn all women, white or not. Along those lines, it’s no accident that women are disportionately living in poverty.

Can you show the report that proves non-white men out earn white women? The 2 female PM’s are not universally hated although I do agree TM was almost set up to be hated. It’s not just women that disproportionately live in poverty but also some ethnicities disproportionately live in poverty.

It would be interesting to see if there are more white women in positions of power (holding board level positions) then people of other ethnicities. As there are currently 65 MPs of ethnic minorities and 220 female MPs I think it is likely that whiteness does outstrip gender/sex.

To assess which is the most powerful in terms of sex or race one would need to look at expected percentages based on population numbers and not just straight numbers.

In relation to politicians the impact of all female shortlists for different parties would also be worth looking at.

@Ineedaneasteregg

To assess which is the most powerful in terms of sex or race one would need to look at expected percentages based on population numbers and not just straight numbers.

In relation to politicians the impact of all female shortlists for different parties would also be worth looking at.

I agree with you that you need to look further than my quickly found stats on MPs. In any case you’d expect 15% of MPs to be of an ethnic minority and it would also be useful to look at if all minorities are represented ‘fairly’. I’m pretty sure there are no MPs that have gypsy or Irish traveller heritage (but happy to be corrected if I am wrong). I used MPs as it was easy to gain the stats but it would be interesting to look at board level appointments and comparisons. I imagine some ethnic minorities are underrepresented anyway and women from those groups would be further underrepresented.

@TressiliansStone that sounds like a very interesting project, I seem to recall David Olusoga going through the names of people who received payments for their holdings of slaves abroad and there were many ‘normal’ people and women who owned slaves abroad.

@ATieLikeRichardGere

Yes I mean I think it’s true that by dna you can be fairly specific about different local communities in Britain, and you can also make links to some ancient dna samples. Of course the same is true everywhere else.

But like race, I don’t think the legal definition of ethnicity has anything to do with dna, nor could it, or should it. It has to do with an identification that people share in common, via culture etc.

It’s just interesting to me because I would be amongst this officially recognised “minority” but I would never have actually considered myself to be part of a minority in that way.

I don't think this is true, at least not without some really advanced genetic analysis, and only for some remote areas in the british isles. If you're white british or white irish or scottish you're about as likely to have the same mix of celtic, germanic and nordic etc ancestory due to thousands of years of drift and mixing. The differences are mostly cultural/political.

I am grouping these things together, rather than in different posts, though they touch on a few different comments:

• I really think the current focus on whether or not a group of people had benefits from various types of economic exploitation and wars, is misguided and unhelpful. All human beings exist because we have benefited from the deaths and work of those who were run over in the race to survive. If you want to look at it collectively, fine, you will find that virtually the peoples of the world have exploited others and engaged in often bloody and brutal warfare, with a deep conviction that their own people are the real people and outsiders are worthy of little or no consideration. Anyone who delves into what these conflicts looked like will find some bloodcurdling things.

I just cannot see where this gets us in terms of assigning some sort of culpability or... what? What is this for?

• Amy Cooper - an awful person, and white. I am not convinced that she is an example of "white" anything though. I think that personality type is found among all people, and will use whatever power they have in a situation to try and hurt other people. I''ve certainly seen non-white women use being white against someone they hoped to intimidate or bully as well, and I think it is equally cold and calculating. This seems to me to be a psychological phenomena.

• This business about the English not being able to celebrate their Englishness in the same way as, say, the Scots can celebrate their Scottishness. I think that's true, less true perhaps of the English who are not in the UK, but it seems like reactions against it are being more and more extreme and sometimes even hysterical - the way some LP factions have reacted against even minor attempts to appeal to patriotism has been kind of odd, for example.

This has got to be one of the worst ideas though to actually combat nationalism or racism, , talk about an efficient way to turn a kind of affection and solidarity for ones home that is natural and good into something that is much more us against them, and create a push back against attempts to erase their sense of ethnic identity. Along with this desire to show the English up as somehow uniquely bad, I can only think that someone has a nefarious plan to try and stoke English nationalism - the bad kind.

Women may have typically had less agency than men, but I absolutely wouldn't describe them as uniformly without agency. One can't spend any time reading women's wills, letters or newspaper items about them without their agency becoming obvious.

Yes, I sometimes find the depiction of women here at FWR a little one sided, because there is plenty of evidence of women who had pretty significant power and respect in their communities in all kinds of documents and in literature. (Mitred abbesses are one instance I find quite interesting, for example. ) I have wondered if part of the reason is we don't always recognise how agency worked in very different social milieus.

@SmokedDuck

This is what people are talking about when they say that the current approach to antiracism is a kind of neomarxism.

Marxism looked at class hierarchies, and sorted people into oppressed and oppressor classes.

We often accept that almost automatically, but that's because we've been so influenced by that way of thinking. It could also be possible that you could have different classes that were equal, for example legally or economically, even though they had different social roles.

Anyway, in this more modern neomarxism (not a great name but there isn't a good one) they take that idea that you have groups but instead of class, it is these identity distinctions. Mostly things like race or gender that are socially constructed, though it can also be done with things like sex, which aren't. And the assumption is that the relationship between these groups is always hierarchical and it's all based on which group is oppressed by some other group.

When a group ceases to be either oppressed or oppress others, it ceases to be distinct.

This is very true.

Also, when you start with an assumption of class antagonism, then the issue of whether or not it's actually rooted in reality, and if so, what kind of reality ranges from the "never discussed" to the completely heretical. This goes for all sorts of classes, whether economic, political or "identitarian".

It might be because we view progress as linear. Eg we don't think about women owning businesses like breweries in the middle ages because we think about how wealth was distributed in the Victorian period. Or we don't think about how women have mostly worked because we think about how the ideal in the 1950s was for women not to work outside the home.

(Was to smoked duck)

One of the things I'm very grateful for is Patricia Hill Collins' scholarship on Black Feminist Thought. The first several chapters of her book of the same name are full of expansive histories of Black women intellectuals. I know so much about Ida B Wells Barnett mainly due to her.

Has there been anything similar for the UK? I know there is a recent biography about Sophia Duleep Singh.

I also know there was a project in Birmingham looking at the activism of people of colour back through time because I heard Shahida Chowdry talking about it.

The reason I mention it is because researching those women PHC mentions is one way I could find out about racist things said by White feminists. Eg Frances Willard. 'The coloured race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt.' I know about that because Ida B Wells Barnett criticised it at the time.

@TenaciousOnePointOne
Yes, I understood this Fact sheet from IWPR to be saying that

“Women of all major racial and ethnic groups earn less than men of the same group, and also earn less than White men, as illustrated by Table 1. The earnings gap, both within each group and compared with White men, widened for all groups with the exception of Asian women. Hispanic workers have lower median weekly earnings than White, Black, and Asian women workers. Hispanic women’s median weekly earnings in 2019 were $642 per week of full-time work, only 56.0 percent of White non-Hispanic men’s median weekly earnings, but 85.9 percent of the median weekly earnings of Hispanic men (because Hispanic men also have low earnings). The median weekly earnings of Black women were $704, only 61.4 percent of White men’s earnings, but 91.5 percent of Black men’s median weekly earnings (Table 1). Primarily because of higher rates of educational attainment for both genders, Asian workers have higher median weekly earnings than White, Black, or Hispanic workers (the highest of any group shown in Table 1). Asian women's earnings are 89.4 percent of White men's earnings, but only 76.7 percent of Asian men's earnings. White women earn 78.4 percent of what White men earn, closer to the ratio for all women to all men, because White workers remain the largest group in the labor force.”

@SmokedDuck
women who had pretty significant power and respect in their communities in all kinds of documents and in literature. (Mitred abbesses are one instance I find quite interesting, for example.)

Correct me if I’m wrong but an Abbess was in charge of an all-female community of nuns. So, I don’t think power over other women really counts? In addition, all Abbess’ were under the authority of the local male bishop or if a joint male/female community, the Abbot next door. Often the bishop wouldn’t even manage an Abbess but appoint a priest in his household to manage the Abbess and convent. So an Abbess only had agency over other women.....and she in turn was not fully independent within the church as her male counterparts, Abbots were.

we don't think about women owning businesses like breweries in the middle ages

Sadly these women were rare exceptions and most often their ownership was temporary until they remarried or a son or nephew took over the business. They could not join any professional guilds for example and so operated on the fringes of society. I think that the feminist movement to research and publish about these rare exceptions and these being now the majority of books dedicated to a specific woman in city X in years Y, younger women reading them are now starting to get the impression that such a thing was relatively accepted and normal. But it really wasn’t.

Women may have typically had less agency than men, but I absolutely wouldn't describe them as uniformly without agency. One can't spend any time reading women's wills, letters or newspaper items about them without their agency becoming obvious.

Yes I agree and that’s what I meant by “didn’t have the agency they have today”. Far less agency. And those who had some agency were upper class women. Even by reading wills, letters, news articles that is sampling only what higher class women did, not the majority of women. Because for most of European history, the average woman was kept illiterate.