isn’t always visible, and, as my friend pointed out, visible diversity is by no means enough, but it does matter. Groucho Marx famously sent a telegram to a Hollywood club: ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.’ Most people aren’t by instinct Marxists. They care to belong only to clubs that appear to accept them.
Women aren’t just excluded from politics by a lack of time and money. Many are put off by the way it looks and sounds because they cannot see or hear themselves in its monotone braying. In launching a political party that took as one of its core objectives the equal representation of women – that itched to throw open the doors of public institutions and of private enterprises not just to more women but to a wider range of women – we needed to ensure we didn’t replicate the deficiencies of the existing system. This couldn’t be just a party for friends and friends of friends, for like-minded people who felt comfortable together. We had to incorporate visible and invisible diversity, to attract the widest possible engagement, and to engage as an organisation with all of those perspectives.
One form of diversity you can’t see is that of political allegiance. By having people of divergent political persuasions around the table and opening our membership to members of all other democratic parties, we intended to identify the tracts of common ground between those parties on gender equality, and either work with them or, by winning votes away from them, spark them into copying our policies.
It wouldn’t be enough to be a broad church – and we were anyway unlikely to become one – if we failed adequately to address the issues that divide the women’s movement within itself and from other movements. ‘When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose,’ wrote American academic and civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1992.1 She had coined a term, ‘intersectionality’, to describe the ways in which disadvantages such as race, gender, class, religion and age intersect and intensify, and she also proposed frameworks to enable collaborative and mutually beneficial advocacy among disadvantaged groups. Her observation was both true and prophetic, in good ways and bad. America’s 2016 elections highlighted deep splits among female voters, and the sharpest related to race. Ninety-four per cent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton; 53 per cent of white women voted for Donald Trump.6 Black women needed no coaching to understand the dangers a Trump presidency represented to them. Large numbers of white women succumbed to a cocktail of ingrained misconceptions and prejudices. They – we – are taught throughout our lives that white men have a grip on power and wealth and that the easiest way to share in those benefits is to align with them. We are inculcated with the lie that equality is like a cake: if you take a piece, there is less for me. We also absorb the propaganda that calls into question the abilities of our own sex to lead, just as we will all have picked up racist attitudes.
No wonder feminism divides along these lines – and how urgent it is that white women learn, fast, to recognise where our true interest lies, in building a world that works better for all women and, indeed, for all genders. Kimberlé Crenshaw created an essential framework for thinking about how we should do this. The most effective organisations combatting misogyny and racism take an intersectional approach, but women of colour are apt to recoil from the embrace of white feminists who presume to speak for them rather than giving them the floor.
Long before white women helped put Trump in the White House, anger at clumsy patronage, and at the allied phenomenon of wealthy women presuming to understand the priorities of the poor, had become so intense in corners of feminism that the phrase ‘white, middle-class feminist’ emerged as a potent insult. In 1983, the novelist Alice Walker coined the term ‘womanist’ as an alternative to white feminism. ‘How can you claim the label of those who would oppress you to see their goals realised, even when commonality exists in some areas?’ asked the blogger Renee Martin three decades later, in an essay explaining why she, as a black woman, rejects the term ‘feminism’.2 Commonalities are not enough to stop movements that can only succeed through cohesion and volume from splintering.
Sandi and I – undeniably white, irretrievably middle class and irrevocably feminist – of course drew fire. The criticism helped us to focus on the issues underpinning it. Just as men lack a visceral understanding of the female condition, so women leading reasonably comfortable lives may not automatically grasp what it is to suffer multiple oppressions. How could we as activists in our own flurry of activity avoid taking up space that others, less privileged struggle to claim? Were we entitled to found a party or was this action proof of entitlement, in the negative sense of the word?
The answer – or at least one answer – is that it depends what the party does and achieves. Another is that the appropriate response to critics of white, middle-class feminism cannot be for every white, middle-class feminist to down tools. That would be to fall into a similar trap as the white, middle-class anti-feminists who deny the evident and urgent need for greater gender equality at home because there are more acute examples of misogyny elsewhere. Nimco Ali, one of the first members of the steering committee, was attacked in some quarters for joining the Women’s Equality Party, and later subjected to particularly vitriolic abuse during her 2017 general election candidacy for us. She points out that the black, Asian and minority-ethnic population of the UK stands at less than 12 per cent. This means, she says, that ‘there are going to be women at the forefront who are white, but it’s how they use their privilege and platform to have that conversation.’3 To acknowledge that some women need less help than others is not to deny that all women need help. The question is how to be helpful.
I got to put that question to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw herself in May 2016. She had come to the UK as a guest lecturer at the London School of Economics, on furlough from an extraordinary range of jobs and commitments: her law professorships at UCLA and Columbia, and the recently formed Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls, as well as from her executive directorship of the organisation she co-founded, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), and from #SayHerName, the campaign she and the AAPF had started the previous year with other organisations to draw attention to the black women killed by police and overlooked by the Black Lives Matter movement. She’d arrived in London just two days before but managed to lead me to one of the few good, tourist-free bars in Covent Garden.
She laughed at my question, then sighed. ‘Well, you have your work cut out for you,’ she said. ‘I think there has to be a lot of work on all sides and that’s the work of coalition and that’s hard.’ She gave generous, practical advice about how to do the work, and much encouragement, but also slipped in a warning. ‘I’m suspicious of privileged women who just go: “Yes, you’re absolutely right.” And have nothing to say beyond that. You have to engage deeply. I want people to ask and question if they don’t feel it, so that you can have the fight, you can try to resolve it. So, it’s kind of about having to find some agreement among those of us who feel Othered and are Othered: What is it that we want to see? What is it that we want to find agreement on? What is it that shapes our agenda?’4
It took an effort of will not to respond ‘you’re absolutely right’, for the sake of the gag and because she absolutely was. It would never have been possible to build an effective organisation from my kitchen table. We had to go out and reach out, involve an ever wider demographic and, crucially, find ways to create an internal democracy that gave full weight to each of those voices without slowing momentum or losing sight of the reasons for starting the party in the first place.
We’ve made progress but nowhere near enough. Pushing for diversity isn’t the same as achieving it – an obvious point but one that bears repeating because of the frequency with which organisations quote their diversity policies as supposed evidence of diversity. The process can be long and is littered with obstacles that I have come to understand much better
Right at the beginning, perhaps two days after proposing the party, I called
