‘Brainwashed by a homicidal policy” is how the man just elected president of Argentina described supporters of women’s abortion rights. The far-right libertarian Javier Milei has pledged to hold a referendum to ban abortion, just three years after Argentina became the largest Latin American country to legalise it, and the country’s feminists are gearing up for a big fight to protect their reproductive rights.
This development is part of a depressing global picture. The UN has said the world is failing women and girls, and is “way off track” to meet targets to improve women’s lives. One in five girls is married before she turns 18, it is lawful to discriminate against women in more than half the countries in the world, and almost 250 million women experience physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner each year. In Afghanistan and Iran, the slide backwards from the relatively liberal 1970s, when women thronged the universities and cafes of Kabul and Tehran, has been absolute.
Iranian women cannot leave the home without wearing a hijab on pain of up to 10 years’ imprisonment, and need their husband’s permission to hold certain jobs or to get a passport; the Taliban has reimposed similar restrictions on Afghan women and in 2021 banned girls from attending secondary school. To be on what feels like a steady, if slow, march towards equality only to have it abruptly ripped away by male fundamentalists is an exquisite cruelty; no starker reminder that social progress can never be banked or taken for granted.
For those who may see countries like Iran and Argentina as exceptions irrelevant to the UK, there are more prosaic indications that the moral arc of history doesn’t always bend towards justice. As I wandered last week around Women in Revolt! – a Tate Britain exhibition of feminist art and activism from 1970-1990 – I wondered what the second-wave feminists at the national women’s liberation conferences of the 1970s depicted on the exhibition’s walls would make of it if they were told then how the world in 2023 would measure up against their demands: equal pay, free contraception and abortion, free 24-hour nurseries to cater for all shift patterns, wages for housework.
I can’t help but feel it would be puzzlement that progress has stalled so much. Yes, some things are a lot better: British women are far more economically empowered. But there remains a stubborn and significant pay gap, women are much more likely to be in low-paid work than men, the counterpoint of the motherhood pay penalty is a fatherhood pay bonus, and the UK has some of the most expensive childcare in Europe. There remains an epidemic of male physical and sexual violence against women and children: a woman is killed by a man every 2.6 days on average; two-thirds of women in prison are domestic abuse survivors; and by denying some migrant women access to the welfare safety net, the state is complicit in their abuse.
The Sun’s Page 3 may have been phased out following decades of campaigning, but violent porn is freely accessible online, “incel” ideology flourishes in dark corners of the internet easily accessed by teenage boys, and pernicious sex stereotypes have never been more alive and well in children’s books and toys. So things are not great. And women’s rights face a number of threats. Of course from the right, and not just from those who explicitly advocate a rollback of the advances made. The challenge also comes from those who frame women’s rights as a zero–sum equation with men’s issues such as male suicide; from ethnonationalists who use “protecting women” as a cloak for anti-immigration agendas; and from economic hawks whose cuts to nursery provision, public services and welfare support always disproportionately impact women.
But misogyny thrives on the left too. The cause of women’s rights comes way down the pecking order for some progressives, below more fashionable issues like race and gender identity. How else to explain the left’s tendency to ignore or sideline Asian women inconveniently flagging sexism within their own communities; or that some people see it as a “progressive” cause to get women who think sex cannot be replaced by gender identity the sack?
In fact, at the extremes, people on the left are just as capable of weaponising race in service of misogyny as elements of the right. Blunt critiques of ‘‘white feminism” are sexist in holding women to a different standard than men in order to blame white women over men for societal racism; in doing so they end up discrediting the asks of all women. Of course there was racism in second-wave feminism, but there was also solidarity between women of different colours; I thought it a shame that Women in Revolt! mostly consigned black and brown feminists to their own two rooms and so avoided the chance to explore these successes as well as failures.
And there is also the threat of the internalised misogyny that lives in all women, the biggest driver of which is the profound intersectionality between sex and age, explored by Victoria Smith in her book Hags. Too often, railing against “white feminists” is code for “older feminists with the wrong views”. Society translates age in men as wisdom and experience, in women as the opposite of desire. Where the device to shut down inconvenient women was once “witch”, today it is terms like “Karen” and “white women’s tears”, centred around the idea of uppity women using their “privilege” to punch down. All women suffer, because all women can be written off as Karens regardless of their race. This intergenerational dynamic is at least as important as class divisions in explaining why it doesn’t make sense to talk of feminism as a cohesive movement.
As Susanna Rustin argues in Sexed, a forthcoming book on the history of British feminism, there is cause for optimism in the UK’s reinvigorated grassroots women’s movement – the charity Filia hosts Europe’s largest annual gathering of feminists – that echoes the radical energy of the liberation conferences of the second wave. But as I make my own transition to hagdom, any optimism I feel is tempered by the exhausting realisation that women will always have to fight just to stand still, and fight even harder to move forwards.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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