There are few categories of women more despised in Gender Critical circles than LibFems. Widely applied to feminists who centre men, or allow their feminism to intersect with trans identified men’s wishes, the label LibFem is seen as a politer insult than handmaiden or dick-panderer, though only just. But this derogatory sense attached to the appellation is misplaced. I put it to you that, if you are reading this, you are probably - to some extent - a libfem too. In turn, this may help persuade you that genuinely radical feminism is needed.
To understand this, we need to understand what Liberalism means. First, a bit of background history.
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Historically, most of Western Europe began the second millennium with some form of feudalism: economic power centred around land ownership, distributed to landowners by a monarch in return for service. The monarch’s own absolute political power was claimed from God. In England this is often referred to as ‘The Divine Right of Kings’.
As wealth production began to shift away from agriculture and towards mercantile systems and capitalism, a problem arose. Broadly the period around the sixteenth to eighteenth century saw a new distribution of wealth, and in particular a new class emerged of non-landowning men, not mere artisans but very wealthy traders.
These traders did not want to contribute financially to a system from which they got no real return. Their accumulating wealth also tended to diminish the relative wealth of landowners and monarchs, so the king - or state - wanted their money. The traders wanted political power in return for supporting the monarch in running the state. In Britain, to give one example, the King’s refusal to allow Parliament to control taxes led to the very bloody English Civil War, the death of the King and ultimately to parliamentary supremacy. Incidentally the two factions with their distinct interests continued to compete in England for centuries; the landowners, who wanted to maintain the status quo, became the Tories (and later the Conservative Party) while the merchants, seeking rights, became the Whigs (and later the Liberal Party).
A similar redistribution of power took place in most western nations and was part of what is now called “The Enlightenment”. Much of the Enlightenment had to do with man’s mastery over the world, the development of scientific thought, and the rebirth of philosophy. Rational thinking and science came to be our way of relating to the world (and of course, unless you’re into queer theory, it still is). Ancient Greek philosophers - misogynists pretty much to a man - were studied anew. Humanity even defined itself by its ability to think: I think, therefore I am. Rationality and sentience were key to being worthy of existence, one of mankind.
During the Enlightenment, therefore, some political power began to be devolved away from monarchs with their divine rights, and instead accorded to individuals under a new system which gave rights to humans - those who think. This can be seen in Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), following hot on the heels of the English Civil War, and later the work of Thomas Locke. The English Bill of Rights, the American Declaration of Independence, the US Bill of Rights and even modern declarations of human rights are all founded on the same principle. Liberal values all derive from this.
The idea of a social contract under which individuals have rights by virtue of their existence as humans is so pervasive that it’s hard for us to imagine a different system, but ultimately I will ask you to consider it.
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So what has this to do with feminism, and why did I insult you by calling you a libfem? To understand that, you need to go back to patriarchy, and to re-examine gender roles. In particular, note that under patriarchy rationality is deemed a masculine virtue while emotionality is feminine. Men think, women feel. I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I have rights. Therefore in the granting of rights, men ARE, and women ARE NOT. Put another way, liberal feminism is about being asked to be seen as men’s equal, and therefore equally entitled to rights.
(Picture: The Radical Notion
It is for this reason that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she asserts that the reason men had outstripped women in rationality was that women were denied the right to education. If they were educated, she argued, they’d be rational and therefore entitled to rights - like men. Elizabeth Bennett, Austen’s great protagonist in Pride & Prejudice, begs not to be thought of ‘as an elegant female… but as a rational creature’. They both hinge their rights on becoming ‘rational’, conforming to a male standard. Liberal rights are not innate, they are earned by being rational and meeting a standard set by those with power to grant rights.
The other aspect of liberalism that must be remembered, is that it affects public life. Rights such as freedom of speech, freedom from unjust punishment and so on are given to you by the state, or another superior body. A fundamental tenet of liberal politics, however, is that the state does not interfere with personal property, or your private life.
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Therefore, liberal feminism seeks rights for women but leaves in place patriarchal structures in the home, such as heterosexual marriage and the patriarchal structures of family, which continually work to prevent women gaining the equality they would need in order to be seen as fully human.
Liberal feminism seeks rights for women because it asserts they are equal - but equal by patriarchal standards, as good as a man. A woman accorded such rights gets them - under rules set by the patriarchy. Women are men’s equals, is the libfem credo, and therefore entitled to the same rights. This argument makes it very difficult to defend women’s special protections, such as sex-based rights, because those depend on our not being equal to men in, for example, physicality, capacity for violence, or qualities like assertiveness.
But we (almost) all do fall into this way of thinking sometimes. For example, every time you ask a patriarchal system to grant women rights, you are framing your feminism in liberal terms, contingent on that system seeing you as men’s equal. Anyone who has seen the way in which women’s ‘rights’ ebb away when they allow males to have control of them will be able to see how this story ends.
Women’s sport is an excellent example; in sport after sport, women began organising themselves, then allowed the management of their sports to be subsumed into larger governing bodies. Thereafter, those women’s sports were sidelined, not promoted, with women’s sport still seen as lesser, and less well paid. When women fought back, trans identifying men were allowed to compete so that they were no longer even women’s sports. It has taken a huge argument, and enormous amounts of time and money too, to get men to exercise their goodwill and return the bare minimum of fairness to sportswomen. Women’s rights rest on obtaining male goodwill under patriarchy. That is why every single right becomes a matter of negotiation. That is why we have to re-justify our claims over and over again.
I’m sure you can fill in other examples from elsewhere - refuges, charities, advocacy groups, and clubs all come to mind. So, if you ask men to grant you women’s rights because you are a woman and have rights to fair treatment, that’s liberal feminism in action.
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Seeking rights under patriarchy is at best a stopgap solution: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Equally, it makes sense to argue for such rights, if you are obliged to live within patriarchy, to ameliorate its effects. But it is better to do so with a view to working towards something beyond patriarchy, through consciousness of the impact of negotiating. This is what second wave feminism sought to do. (I will look at the wave model, and why it isn’t helpful, next week).
It is particularly important to avoid offering to strengthen patriarchy’s hold over women, or accidentally doing so, by trading the rights of others - this is the criticism often levelled by gender critical women at progressive (third wave) LibFems over trans rights, and also levelled by radical feminists at some conservative gender critical activists over issues such as abortion and domestic emancipation.
So much for rights based feminism. What is the unthinkable alternative? Well, suppose that the right to fair treatment wasn’t contingent on a superior granting rights to those deemed rational enough to be deserving of them. This is what radical feminism is about - unpicking patriarchal power to grant women rights and creating a system which isn’t hierarchical, one where women are not exploited as the engine of economic growth, and one where we are not seeking favours from those who exploit us.
Such a system would also be able to value even things that didn’t have sentience - shouldn’t trees and rivers have rights beyond what is required to make them useful to humans? Both demographic and ecological pressures make finding such a system more likely and more pressing.