Gender-Critical Feminism by Holly Lawford-Smith;

Author:Holly Lawford-Smith; [Lawford-Smith, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192609359
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

7.2 Political Movement for Whole Persons

In a 1980 interview, black radical feminist Margo Jefferson made the following comment:

I was worn out, I was exhausted, I seemed to have lost energy and interest in something called the black movement, in politics that means. And I began doing feminist theory and I said oh, it is possible for me to use every part of myself, and still be political. I don’t have to say, well, that part of me is…is female and that’s not important we don’t have to talk about that. This part, as the exclusively black part, is fine; or this part, as the leftist part, you know and not the black part, is fine if I’m at a white leftist meeting. All of a sudden it was possible for me not to have to deny huge portions of myself to be politically active. And when I say ‘me’ you know I speak for—I suspect—most black women who encountered feminism.29

Jefferson’s saying that feminism allowed her to be a ‘whole person’: she didn’t have to separate the parts of herself into those that were relevant to these sorts of politics, and those that weren’t; or to ‘deny huge portions of’ herself. Imagine how frustrating it would be, to be a black woman in the 1980s going to meetings of the black movement and being told that ‘women’s issues’ weren’t relevant, and going to meetings of the women’s movement and being told that ‘black issues’ weren’t relevant. It would be a relief to find a movement that accommodated both aspects of your experience.

This gives us a tempting reason to accept intersectional feminism, understood as a movement for women as ‘whole persons’. This doesn’t have to mean feminism is for everyone, it can still be for women, but it has to be for women in all their parts, not just women in some particular capacity, say as women, asking them to leave their race, their class, their disability, their religion, etc., at the door. On this view, feminism is a movement to make women’s lives better. But there are lots of things that make women’s lives go badly—not just women’s issues, but all sorts of other issues too. So feminism is about much more than just women’s issues in the narrow sense.

The problem with this is how it might change the scope of feminist activism. In Chapter 6 (Section 6.2), I made the distinction between the relations between women within feminist activism and the focus of feminist activism in terms of its goals, priorities, and projects. Certainly if most of the feminists in a particular activist group were middle-class and classist, this would create an obstacle to solidarity with working-class women in the group, and undermine effective working relationships between those sub-groups of women. But what if they weren’t, or at least, everyone did the best they could and were receptive to criticism. Do feminists have reason to resist incorporating the goals, priorities, and projects of additional social groups that some of their

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