five candidates in England and one apiece in Scotland and Wales, on a radical and innovative platform that understood social care not as an unfortunate expense but the potential motor of the economy, and proposed fully costed universal childcare. Large chunks of our original policy document resurfaced in the manifestos of other parties. In the Yorkshire constituency of Shipley, Sophie Walker stood with the backing of the Green Party, in a progressive alliance. The joint WE–Green target was the Conservative incumbent, Philip Davies, a prominent antifeminist. We hoped Labour might join us – they had largely abandoned hope of the seat after serial defeats – but instead they chose to run and directed more of their energy against us than Davies. This reflected both Labour’s belief that it owns feminism and an overheated partisan culture that rejected all opportunities for electoral pacts across the UK.
Labour, like the Conservatives, continues to back the first-past-the-post electoral system even though it has been shown globally to exclude women and minority perspectives. Both Labour and Tories presented the election as a binary contest. Our candidates heard the same message from the left and the right: stand aside, women. In the final days of the campaign, our offices received hundreds of abusive phone calls and a death threat to Nimco Ali, our candidate in the London constituency of Hornsey and Wood Green. The letter, scrawled in capital letters and larded with Islamophobia, was signed ‘Jo Cox’. During Jo’s first and only year serving as a Labour MP, she had made a significant impact not least in advocacy for women before her brutal murder in June 2016. Nimco knew her as did I. This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to silence Nimco, who arrived in the UK as a child refugee from Somalia, survived FGM and co-founded Daughters of Eve, a non-profit organisation campaigning against it. The next day she and I went out canvassing together. I watched her, decked out in WE colours, utterly recognisable, meeting as many people as possible. She and our other candidates didn’t win seats, but they were all winners.
This book isn’t intended as a history of the party. These are still early days for us – and could be the end of days too. The challenges to the survival of our upstart initiative remain acute in a political system designed, like zombie Johansson’s breasts, to smother movement in the lower tiers. These challenges are also shifting and shape-changing with unprecedented speed since the UK began disentangling itself from the European Union and tangling instead with the demons the process is unleashing. The Referendum was conceived to reconcile internal strains within the Conservative Party, but did no such thing. Labour’s fault lines are at least as deep; things fell apart, the centrists could not hold on. As Labour’s left, resurgent under Jeremy Corbyn, battled for control of the party, fugitives sought a haven in the Women’s Equality Party. Some of them dreamed of repositioning us. ‘What I’d like is for the Women’s Equality Party to remake itself as the Equality Party,’ wrote the novelist Jeanette Winterson in the Guardian. ‘It’s a relevant name, a powerful name, and naming matters. I’d like to drop Labour and New Labour as words that don’t mean anything anymore. If you still needed proof of that after the last election, Brexit just gave it to you.’17
We did consider changing the name but most of us opposed the idea of dropping ‘women’ from our brand – that would mean becoming like all other parties and relegating women’s interests. And Brexit posed a danger to women as the process of decoupling raised questions over rights and protections anchored in Europe and guaranteed by Europe. When Parliament began considering legislation to trigger the Brexit process, an amendment we devised with the Greens drew the widest cross-party support of all such initiatives. Our vision was more relevant than ever. Whenever we shared it, we won new support, new members. Our first problem was, and remains, how to get our message out on meagre resources, in a media culture pre-programmed to diminish the importance of that message. The second problem is how to raise the money to keep going.
So a monograph on the Women’s Equality Party would be premature. I will, however, share insights from the process of starting the party. Journalists often suffer from the delusion of being intimately acquainted with the world. Work had taken me to six continents, war zones and pleasure domes, to interviews with dictators and democrats. It’s quite a lot like being married to a rock musician. You enjoy Access All Areas: ringside seats, freedom to roam backstage. These experiences foster understanding, but they don’t make you part of the band. As a journalist, I imagined I understood politics. As a journalist-politician-whatever, I now understand how imperfect that understanding was.
But my primary aim in writing Attack of the 50 Ft. Women is not just to mine lessons from the recent past and present, but to think about Equalia. What can today’s world tell us about the way to this promised land and what we might find when we get there?
In The Female Eunuch, the text that woke me and many others to feminism, Germaine Greer quoted Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay, Women – the Longest Revolution: ‘Circumstantial accounts of the future are idealistic and, worse, static.’ This is both right and wrong.
No such account makes sufficient allowance for the impact of quakes, natural or of human origin, or the intended consequences that flow even from planned events. Technology is shaking up our lives in ways no seer foresaw (though science fiction writers came close to predicting whole chunks of it). How, for example, can we talk about gender in the future workplace if the workplace – if work itself – might disappear?
The answer cannot be to avoid such discussions, but to recognise the limits of our knowledge and imaginations and to try to expand both. Politics is all about shaping the future, yet political movements succumb too easily to the Happily Ever After syndrome. Gender equality advocates are no exception, focusing on the big, fat, equal wedding of genders, the moment equality is reached, and not what lies beyond. Confetti drifts and then the picture fades.
Knocking on doors for the Women’s Equality Party has proved revealing on that issue and, on occasion, literally. A resident of a Southwark tower block responded cautiously to my knock: ‘Who is it?’ ‘I’m here about the elections.’ ‘Electricity?’ In evident alarm, perhaps fearing I had come to cut his energy supply, he threw open the door, naked.
Campaigning also uncovered a generational split in male attitudes. Men in their fifties, finding WE canvassers on the doorstep, often respond ‘I’ll fetch the wife’. Younger men engage directly. We don’t need to explain this is a party for them, pushing a platform that will also benefit them.
That is encouraging; so too is the enthusiasm we encountered. People have told us they had literally danced when they heard about WE. But from the start they also asked difficult questions that we were already grappling with, both personally and as a party. Would gender equality encourage other kinds of equality? Did we want an improved version of our current society – gender equality within existing structures – or something more radical? How much change might be achieved through nudging? In what circumstances might prohibition or coercive legislation be necessary?
You can see why people would shy away from Equalia if they imagine it to be a brave new world that, like Aldous Huxley’s addled dystopia, requires a sublimation of the individual to a supposed greater good. You can see why they might lack enthusiasm for building Equalia if they sense that it will simply enshrine old injustices within a new pecking order. Would the new race of 50-foot women create a fairer system or form a new elite?
If only we could poke around Equalian homes and businesses, check what’s on the telly and in the news, find out how people are having sex and if anyone is selling it, taste the air to verify that it’s cleaner, and confirm that the shadows of conflict have receded. If only we could find out who does the dishes or the low-paid work in Equalia and whether such work is more highly valued. Will a society that allows everyone to take up as much space as they like produce giants, or might the absence of adversity diminish creativity, or obviate the need for ingenuity? We don’t even know what gender would mean in a society freed from gender programming. So how do we begin to answer questions so fundamental, not just to the Women’s Equality Party, but to everyone affected by the global imbalance between the sexes? And that’s
