Nixon’s double blade

In 1970, as he stepped up the war in Indochina, Nixon launched an ambitious social-engineering project that aimed to settle America’s ‘Negro question’ once and for all. The strategy was double-edged, involving both integration and coercion. It aimed at a substantial expansion of the African-American professional class—reducing unemployment and boosting what Nixon called ‘black capitalism’—with a concomitant crackdown on the rest. The integrationist project comprised a major programme of affirmative action, which set numerical targets for minority recruitment in employment as a condition for receiving Federal funds. It operated through the Department of Labor, building on the existing anti-discrimination machinery of the eeoc.footnote²³ Though affirmative action was framed by Federal officials with African-American men in mind, the Nixon Administration quickly expanded it to females of all skin tones when feminist protests hit the headlines. In December 1971 the Labor Department added the category of ‘women’ to those of ‘Negro, Oriental, American Indian and Spanish Surnamed Americans’ specified in its original order of February 1970.footnote²⁴ The emphasis was on process and ideological compliance: the Labor Department required firms to demonstrate their good faith by submitting reasonable targets, timetables and hiring goals for women and minorities, rather than concrete results. In 1972 Nixon signed into law another amendment, Title IX, outlawing sex discrimination in all federally funded educational activities. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (ocr)—a twin for the Department of Labor’s eeoc—was charged with issuing compliance manuals and overseeing Title IX’s enforcement.

Meanwhile, the repressive flank of Nixon’s social-engineering project took the rhetorical form of social ‘wars’—war on crime, war on drugs—under the banner of zero-tolerance. Operating through the Department of Justice, the courts, the ins, the prison system and the police, it introduced racially targeted crackdowns and imprisonment on a new scale. It involved the pathologization of those who failed to make it into the professional class: any blacks who didn’t take advantage of affirmative action had only themselves or their work-shy culture to blame. In gender terms, the coercive side of Nixon’s project—criminalization, incarceration—manifested itself in policies targeted at poor and marginal women, especially in communities of colour. Sterilization programmes were imposed on drug users, obligatory job-seeking on unemployed mothers. Campaigns against domestic and sexual violence were brought under the aegis of the criminal-justice system, reframing them as a behavioural problem of individual rogue males, to be dealt with by tougher sentences and more interventionist policing, rather than a social question. In communities already on guard against racist treatment by the police, mandatory arrest laws—and the possibility of deportation—made it harder for women to report violent men.footnote²⁵

Nixon’s expanded anti-discrimination paradigm retains an extraordinary hegemony in the us, comparable only to that of the Constitution itself. In racial terms, the effect of his double-edged policy was dramatic. Within a generation a new African-American elite had been consolidated, with a much-enlarged position in politics, business, the media and education; meanwhile over two million poorer blacks, mostly male, languished in prison.footnote²⁶ In gender terms, the peculiar origins of the anti-discrimination feminist model—spun off from a strategy devised to neutralize a rebellious national minority—distinguished it from women’s agendas elsewhere in the world. Notably, the new American paradigm differed from two main ‘state feminisms’ that had emerged by the early twentieth century as modernizing answers to the Woman Question.

The most influential of these was the social-democratic model, which arose from the mass parties of the early Second International. It foregrounded the collective provision of childcare, cooking, housing, education and health facilities, full female employment and generous maternity leave—in brief, socializing the domain of women’s ‘private’ domestic labour. In its vanguard forms, this strategy envisaged abolishing the heteronormative nuclear family altogether, in favour of communal living. This model informed the programmes implemented, to better or worse effect, in Scandinavia and the state-socialist countries, and thence exported in modified forms to the newly independent Third World countries and parties that looked to the Soviet Union for developmental ideas. It was also influential among women’s liberationists, especially in Europe. In contrast to this project of expanded social provision, the anti-discrimination model was almost cost-free to the state; lawyers’ fees were met by the appellant and her employer.

The other ‘state feminism’ was eugenicist—‘improve the woman, improve the race’. It arose from the competitive imperialist-modernization projects of the 1900s, and informed the work of early birth-control campaigns. From the 1950s this approach was given a new lease of life by us modernization theory, in conjunction with the pharmaceutical conglomerates and the Rockefeller-backed proselytizers of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, funded by a billion dollars of usaid. Cold War allies in Asia and Latin America were persuaded that falling fertility rates were a means to jump-start modernization, rather than a consequence of it. Their ‘all-out drive’ (Nehru’s phrase) ran directly counter to liberationist calls for a woman’s right to choose. Third World women were treated as baby-producing machines whose bodies needed to be switched off, cheaply and efficiently, through mass sterilization campaigns—often carried out in unsanitary conditions for a small cash reward—or the implantation of ‘permanent’ devices such as the Dalkon shield, an iud notorious for piercing the uterine wall (and bought in bulk by usaid, up till 1975). An iud had the advantage that ‘once the damn thing is in, the patient cannot change her mind’, as Planned Parenthood president Alan Guttmacher explained.footnote²⁷ Population control was complementary to anti-discrimination feminism—the one treating women as breeders, the other as employees—and would remain an important front for us overseas policy.

Academic credentials

The radical spirit of women’s liberation found a home in the universities, where institutionalization took a different course. From the mid-60s, women’s history courses began springing up spontaneously across the us, drawing on the experience of the civil-rights movement’s Black History studies and the radical pedagogy of the Mississippi summer schools. By 1971 the Feminist Press could list 600 of them, most still marginal and unaccredited.footnote³⁹ Again, the wealth of the philanthropic foundations played a crucial role. Applying the lessons of its work on Black Studies in the 1960s, Ford’s multi-million-dollar intervention aimed at a systematic professionalization of the field: grants for post-doctoral projects, followed by funds for Women’s Research Centres at top universities (Stanford, Berkeley, Wellesley, Brown, Duke, Arizona). In 1975 the Foundation organized the launch of Signs as an interdisciplinary feminist journal, and in 1977 helped found the National Women’s Studies Association and the National Centre for Research on Women, led by former Ford official Mariam Chamberlain.footnote⁴⁰ In the 1980s the Foundation switched to ‘mainstreaming’ feminism, as a component of the undergraduate core curriculum. By the early 90s, its priority was integrating research on minority women; its officials initiated a series of conferences that would prepare the ground for the take-up of intersectional theory.footnote⁴¹ A consultant’s report could justly note that Ford’s project for the field of gender studies had ‘actively influenced the direction it would take’.footnote⁴²

A second, more specialized form of campus-based institutionalization was the growth of well-funded student-support organizations for ‘equity, diversity and inclusion’, operating under the Title IX umbrella. They provided a continuity of leadership, resources, legal expertise and campaign experience—picketing, posters, T-shirts—that sustained the politics of anti-discrimination during periods of low student militancy. Together with core-curriculum requirements for gender studies, these peer-run mini-bureaucracies ensured the induction of new cohorts of students into a form of equal-opportunity gender politics that had become naturalized, ‘like fluoride in the water’footnote⁴³—an informal curriculum for a radicalism that operated within, and helped to reproduce, the limits of the anti-discrimination model. Professionally trained administrators—Title IX staffers, equity and inclusion officers, campus safety advisers—provided the cadre for a gender politics that sometimes had little to do with the teachings of faculty feminists.

At the same time, feminist thinking underwent a profound acculturation as it developed inside the habitus of the American academy. The bold claims and synthesizing ambitions of women’s liberation gave way to disciplinary differentiation and career-oriented choices of dissertation topic; academic credentials established a hierarchy alien to movement egalitarianism. In the ‘policy disciplines’—economics, social and political sciences—which would produce an impressive cadre of feminist experts, research tended to be compartmentalized within neo-classical or functionalist, quantitative or qualitative traditions. In the humanities, and above all the literature departments, where new generations of gender activists were generally schooled, the predominant influence remained Foucault.footnote⁴⁴ Within these limits, critical heterodox thinking was encouraged—and funded. Around 1990, Berkeley and ucla produced two major theoretical challenges to the hegemonic anti-discrimination model of feminist politics. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler launched a passionate assault on the binary categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ presupposed by mainstream feminism, and questioned its practice of making representational claims on women’s behalf; to do so was merely to extend the power-knowledge regime responsible for producing ‘male’ and ‘female’. A new feminist politics should contest the reifications of gender and identity, taking their variable construction as a methodological prerequisite and political goal.footnote⁴⁵ A few months earlier, Kimberlé Crenshaw had assailed anti-discrimination law from a Critical Legal Studies perspective for its single-axis approach, which treated race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience; as a basis for policy demands, the entire framework should be rethought and recast. Collective political action should put the marginalized at the centre, begin from the needs of the most disadvantaged, and thereby remake the world for the benefit of the rest.footnote⁴⁶

In a comparative framework, the main point to register is the sheer scale of us feminist production as a result of such munificent funding: an enormously impressive volume of scholarship—a women’s studies bibliography mentions nearly 4,000 titles—including work of the highest calibre.footnote⁴⁷ Just as Beltway feminism had constructed a body of political and legal expertise without parallel in the rest of the world—mastering the skills of lobbying, drafting, fundraising, presenting polished pitches or carefully calibrated proposals, along with the finer points of congressional or juridical procedure, while accumulating a roster of powerful contacts—so feminists within the American university system built up an unrivalled infrastructure for research: dedicated institutes and centres, hosting national or international seminars and conferences, undertaking large-scale empirical investigations, sophisticated theoretical elaborations, comparative studies and technical reports, supported by nearly four dozen specialist journals. No other country would lavish $36m on feminist scholarship, over and above some of the world’s most generous public funding. A recent survey counted some 540 gender and women’s studies courses in the us, compared to 44 in Canada, 35 in the uk and no more than twenty in any other country.footnote⁴⁸ Similar ratios apply for scholarly feminist journals: 43 in the us, eight in the uk, five in France and in Australia, four in Canada and fewer than that elsewhere.footnote⁴⁹ The field’s top-ranking titles are all based in the States: Signs, still the intellectual flagship of the movement, is flanked by Feminist Studies, Gender & Society, Feminist Economics, Hypatia and the Journal of Women’s History; the International Feminist Journal of Politics has a far-flung editorial team, but emerged from conversations at the us-based International Studies Association.footnote⁵⁰

The closest competitors were the other Anglophone states. Australia had a strong equal-opportunity framework, but a much more limited university system; Canada had a few centres of feminist intellectual production, strong in social theory and research, but this only put it on a par with the smaller us states—Wisconsin, say, or North Carolina. In the uk, ground-breaking Marxist-feminist work in the 60s and 70s emerged from the culture of the new left, largely outside the academy; later, national specializations were honed in feminist cultural studies and development economics, but British feminism’s political clout was relatively weak. In Germany, influential women’s ministries were established at regional level in the Länder during the 1980s, but the university system remained impermeable—as late as 1990, only 5 per cent of professors were female—and women’s studies was largely confined to community and adult-education centres; left, maternalist and eco-feminist theory flourished on the margins. In France—with the exception of enclaves like Vincennes—and Italy, both the universities and the machinery of government remained largely closed to feminist scholarship and policy making for another decade. Elsewhere—the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, India—gender research was largely funded by American foundation money.footnote⁵¹ In sum, mainstream American feminism enjoyed a combination of wealth, institutional heft and scholarly achievement to which no other women’s movement could compare.

Guerrilla legalism

If the energies of the early women’s liberation movement had been largely domesticated by Capitol Hill or acculturated within the academy, there was one strand of radical feminism that aimed instead to leverage its relation to the state. Because the anti-discrimination laws were never designed to cover the rights and wrongs of gender relations, feminist attorneys were confronted with the task of trying to make sure they did. This involved incessant litigant activism to extend the scope of the law—expanding ‘discrimination on grounds of sex’ to include sexual harassment and child-bearing—with foundation-funded attorneys bringing individual test cases to push the boundaries, one judgement at a time, in the twin domains of employment and education.footnote⁵² Since the 70s, court rulings, executive interventions, new regulations from the eeoc or orc, Supreme Court decisions and Congressional interventions have continually reinterpreted the meanings of sex discrimination and harassment, extending the liability of employers and universities, and increasing the damages that can be extracted from them. The result has been a legal field in a state of permanent agitation—unlike that in countries where expressly drafted statutes leave less room for manoeuvre and feminist activism is more likely to take extra-legal forms. The litigant-driven process made it, in the view of one young attorney, an exciting, thriving area of law—‘there’s always a court that might be willing to extend the definition of sexual harassment.’footnote⁵³

This inherent instability opened the way for one strand of radical-feminist jurisprudence to advance a more militant agenda. This was most fully formulated by Catharine MacKinnon, who scoured the Marxian tradition for clues on how to construct a similarly ‘epic theory’ for feminism—one that would grasp society’s laws of motion in their totality, enabling women to become a ‘group for itself’.footnote⁵⁴ She identified ‘work’ as the fundamental category of Marxism, and posited ‘sexuality’ as its feminist equivalent—the process through which ‘social relations of gender are created, organized, expressed and directed’. Sexuality, in this view, should not be confused with arousal, mutual pleasures or love-making. Its dynamic was hierarchical, involving a systematic division of social power, enforced to women’s detriment, in which ‘male’ and ‘female’ were created through the eroticization of dominance and submission, and women were taught to identify themselves as beings that exist for male sexual use. MacKinnon flatly rejected the understanding of sexuality as cultural-anthropological practices shaped by historically changing conditions of gender inequality, as well as the Freudian model of an innate drive repressed by the processes of socialization, which should be allowed greater expression. For her, ‘Sexuality is gender inequality: male excitement at the reduction of a person to a thing is its motive force.’ The proof of this was revealed by feminist consciousness-raising about women’s lived experience, exemplified in ‘rape, incest, battery, sexual harassment, abortion, prostitution and pornography.’footnote⁵⁵

The logical political corollary of this construction was feminist separatism and political lesbianism, minority traditions with their own history and integrity. Instead, MacKinnon espied in us anti-discrimination law ‘a crack in the wall’—‘a peculiar jurisprudential opportunity’ around the issue of sexual assault. The goal was to use the law to confront the reality of women’s position—that is: ‘sex-based destitution and enforced dependency and permanent relegation to disrespected and starvation-level work’, combined with pervasive rape, systematic battery and prostitution, ‘the fundamental condition of women’, of which the porn industry was a wing. The liberal state was ‘male’: it treated women as men do, enforcing the male viewpoint as law on society; the negative freedoms of the us Constitution merely ensured the freedoms of a male status quo. Equality required a new jurisprudence, embodying women’s point of view. It would be attacked as ‘special pleading’, as ‘not neutral’—but neither was existing law. The first steps would be to tilt the burden of proof in sexual-assault cases in women’s favour, to rule out the defence of male intentions or apparent female consent. Feminists should fight to have pornography banned under the sex-discrimination laws, and prostitution criminalized.footnote⁵⁶

This viewpoint has been roundly criticized by other feminists, then and since.footnote⁵⁷ Sociologically, MacKinnon’s portrayal of American women in the 1980s as sex slaves on starvation wages was unconvincing, her concept of sex as ‘male excitement at the reduction of a person to a thing’, culturally and anthropologically impoverished. Theoretically, MacKinnon’s starting point—as work is to Marxism, so sex is to feminism—involved a double error. For Marx, the determinant practice was not ‘work’ but the mode of producing what’s needed for daily subsistence—food, fuel, clothing, shelter—of which labour is one critical factor, along with nature, and the accumulated gains of technology, capital, language. The gender equivalent, if that’s what’s sought, would be the organization of human reproduction, of which sexuality is one crucial aspect, along with pregnancy, parturition, care of infants, socialization of children and the making of gendered selves. Its temporalities and divisions of labour are articulated with those of production. Against the radical-feminist view of male-female relations as a field polarized by the primary oppression of sexual violence, this conception offers possibilities for negotiated cooperation and joint projects. It recognizes antagonisms in which gender may be a secondary division, not the primary one, and can therefore address oppressive relations between women, both structural and personal, for which radical feminism provides no adequate explanation. A strength of Marxism as a social theory is its ability to hold positives and negatives, creation and destruction, within a single frame. If a feminist ‘epic theory’ is required, it will need to do the same—to encompass pleasures as well as dangers; the risky attractions of otherness, the manifold problems of love.

The political progress of radical-feminist jurisprudence would throw interesting light on the American way of dealing with the question of sex in a mass society: on the one hand, the market; on the other, much smaller, hand, ideologized regulation. Working with Andrea Dworkin, a more effective publicist, MacKinnon’s first big project, a push for state-level anti-porn ordinances, was defeated by the Supreme Court in 1986. (In Canada, where this policy met with more success, the first target for suppression was a journal of lesbian-feminist erotica, Bad Attitude.footnote⁵⁸) The porn industry went on to flourish online, its reified representations now reaching a far wider audience, on a more frequent basis, than top-shelf magazines and ‘adult’ sleaze shops had done, and providing the syllabus for early-teen sex education. Pornography was subject to the same forces that shaped the rest of the American economy: globalization, outsourcing, price deflation, niche marketing, personalization, feminization; though still largely a male spectator sport, a growing chunk of erotic material was aimed at women. On the supply side it remained a cut-price industry, la’s San Fernando Valley a fraction the size of Hollywood, beleaguered by piracy and by competition from pay-to-play online chatrooms, which the cam girls describe as a relatively safe form of sex work.

Defeated on the cultural front, radical-feminist jurisprudence secured a firmer niche on us campuses. Through the 1980s and 90s, litigant activism, incremental court decisions and executive intervention combined to widen Title IX definitions of harassment and assault, lighten the complainant’s burden of proof and increase the university’s liability.footnote⁵⁹ Legal activists like MacKinnon and Anne Simon proselytised the need to tilt the Title IX machinery in women’s favour.footnote⁶⁰ In the 90s, the leadership of campus anti-rape campaigns was taken up by their supporters, or by women—some quite conservative like Katie Koestner, the date-rape campaigner featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1991—radicalized by sexual coercion. Other feminist currents—post-structuralist, intersectional, queer, green, alter-globo—devolved to other issues, sniping at the ‘essentialism’ of the rad fems. Yet this tendency’s subversive-instrumentalist legal project was not matched by any redistributive political-economic programme; in that sense, it was loyal to the mainstream American paradigm.

A hundred flowers

As the un women’s decade unfolded, the non-official forums took on a life of their own. Rather like the alter-globo World Social Forums that emerged from Porto Alegre in the early 2000s, these were large, boisterous feminist gatherings that saw heated international debates, and helped forge lasting friendships and contact networks amid the organizational chaos.footnote⁶⁹ Eight thousand women attended the 1980 Copenhagen gathering. In 1985, over 13,000 thronged the University of Nairobi gardens, a majority from official African women’s organizations. Ten years later, an estimated 40,000 would stumble round the half-built conference centre at Huairou, on the outskirts of Beijing. These gatherings undoubtedly helped to catalyse the oppositional women’s movements that sprang up around the world in the late 70s and 80s, remarkable for their variety of forms and emphases. Feminist activism flourished in post-Emergency India, producing an extraordinary crop of initiatives—campaigns, street-theatre groups, magazines, state-level and national gatherings. In Brazil, Argentina and Chile, neighbourhood women’s groups organized against the dictatorships; feminist tendencies crystalized within student groups and left parties. The region-wide Latin American encuentrosfeministas held throughout the 1980s were marked by passionate debates about sexuality, race and class.footnote⁷⁰ In China, the democratic ferment of the 1980s included feminist currents and there was talk of de-bureaucratizing the All-China Women’s Federation, sidelined for bourgeois deviationism during the Cultural Revolution but resuscitated by Deng Xiaoping after 1978. Even in Japan, where an earlier women’s liberationist impulse, growing out of the revolutionary student movement and the art scene, had been stymied, the un decade stimulated feminist protests. These autonomous movements were often scathing about the official bodies set up to monitor women’s progress for the un conferences. Indian feminists condemned their National Women’s Commission as elitist and bureaucratic, a pawn in successive governments’ hands. In Nepal, Queen Aishwarya appointed herself head of the Women’s Services Coordination Council whose main task, according to a local feminist critic, was glorification of Her Majesty and control of foreign ngo funds. In Kenya, there were complaints that men were using their wives to set up front organizations to get government grants, as the number of groups registered by the Women’s Bureau rose six-fold across the decade.footnote⁷¹

Culturally, international feminist influence generally flowed from core to peripheries, but it was adapted, appropriated and sometimes bowdlerized along the way. The 1980s saw the global take-off of the American women’s liberation classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970), which had appeared in over twenty languages by the end of the century—usually missing its devastating critique of the medical industry’s treatment of women, as well as its chapters on self-examination and self-pleasure.footnote⁷² Flowing in the other direction, the Feminist Press, with Ford and Rockefeller backing, undertook two hugely ambitious literary projects, excavating and translating ‘lost’ women’s writings from India and Africa in multi-volume editions, and producing bi-lingual collections of Spanish, French, German, Italian, Flemish, Hebrew and Vietnamese feminist poetry, stretching from antiquity to the present, in the ‘Defiant Muse’ series.footnote⁷³

Structural adjustment with a female face

Reagan’s accession did little to alter the State Department’s ‘pro-feminist’ foreign policy, and First Daughter Maureen Reagan led the us diplomatic team at the 1985 un Women’s Conference in Nairobi.footnote⁷⁴ By now, international tides were running in America’s direction. The Third World debt crisis had brought many of the G-77 to their knees, the appeasement-oriented Shevardnadze had taken over from Gromyko at the Kremlin and the plo leadership was on the run. At the culmination of the un Decade for Women, the Reagan Administration at last managed to clinch a diplomatic outcome that was acceptable to the us. Ideologically, there was a broad continuity in the action plans affirmed by the three conferences between 1975 and 1985, though by the time of Nairobi’s ‘Forward-Looking Strategies’ the order of the three blocs’ themes had been silently reversed: anti-discrimination now came first, followed by development and peace.footnote⁷⁵ More strikingly, amid the morass of un verbiage and vacuous wish-lists, the few actually feasible measures, standing out for their steely quality, were all from the neoliberal anti-discrimination playbook: ‘improve women’s access to credit’, ‘promotion of women’s occupational mobility’, ‘flexible working hours for all’.footnote⁷⁶

Yet here, ‘women’s advance’ and neoliberal policy prescriptions seemed set for head-on collision. In many parts of the Third World, women’s social and economic position had worsened sharply during ‘their’ un decade. Volcker’s 20 per cent interest rates at the Federal Reserve sucked international capital back to the us, deepening a world recession and ratcheting up the cost of dollar-denominated Third World debt. By the late 80s, interest payments to Western banks were consuming 25 per cent of African and 40 per cent of Latin American export earnings; real wages fell by over 30 per cent across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.footnote⁷⁷ Both the debt crises and their ‘solution’, imf structural-adjustment programmes, were deeply gendered, wiping out the fragile gains of the 1970s. Women in the lower ranks of public-sector employment were fired first as state spending was slashed. Cuts in fuel and food subsidies meant that Third World women were putting in extra hours of cooking and caring to meet basic needs; their incomes were falling, their health and nutritional status deteriorating, their cultural subordination becoming further entrenched under imf ‘reforms’. The new machinery of global feminism was thus being constructed over the top of worsening conditions for women across much of the world.

Feminist developmental economists, commissioned to report on women’s progress at the 1985 un Conference, instead lambasted the outcomes of imf and World Bank structural adjustment. The critical approach propounded by the dawn group, in its workshops at Nairobi and in its pamphlet, Development, Crises and Alternative Visions, was a high-profile example. dawn was a collective of top-flight scholars, largely drawn from the Indian Subcontinent, the Caribbean and Latin America, who took ‘the experiences lived by poor women throughout the Third World’ as ‘the clearest lens for an understanding of development processes’, and their aspirations ‘for a future free of the multiple oppressions of gender, class, race and nation’ as the basis for new feminist strategies.footnote⁷⁸ Without naming capitalism as a system, dawn assailed the imf–World Bank assumption that free capital flows led to optimal allocation of resources. Instead, small enterprises had been snuffed out by competition with multinationals; export-oriented cash crops displaced domestic food production; the work offered by the growing informal sector was precarious; for the tiny proportion of women employed in assembly plants in the new Special Economic Zone, jobs were short-term and subject to tyrannical labour discipline. Meanwhile stepped-up militarization, led by the Reagan Administration, and the diversion of public funds to arms spending, had sharply gendered effects in terms of civilian casualties and refugees, while bolstering conservative ideologies of male machismo and ‘good’ or ‘bad’ women, housewives or whores.footnote⁷⁹

dawn’s founders were socialist or social-democratic feminists, Gandhian or marxisant, whose long-run proposals gestured towards land reform and greater control over multinationals. Nevertheless, their remarkably modest short-run demands offered some overlaps with the orthodox neoliberal agenda. dawn’s principal proposal—increasing the productivity of women in the informal sector by offering them greater access to credit—was music to the World Bank’s ears. By the early 90s, feminist economists were pushing at an open door: ‘growing out of debt’ and ‘adjustment with a human face’ had replaced the deflationary policies of the Volcker era. imf programmes had broken down barriers to Western goods and capital flows. Hernando de Soto’s ideas for informal-settlement property titling and Muhammad Yunus’s schemes for micro-credit were laying the basis for the financialization of the Global South. In this context, socialist-feminist calls for help with informal trading or small co-operatives could converge with neoliberal arguments that Third World women offered an untapped resource for credit-driven, private-sector growth. World Bank officials and overseas-aid bodies began to seek out projects that could count as ‘gender-oriented’ in appraisals of their own work. When donor funds began to flow in the aftermath of imf structural-adjustment programmes, women’s ngos were used to replace erstwhile state-run social services.

The World Bank’s ‘feminist turn’ was argued on purely neoliberal grounds: ‘women’s empowerment’ would boost economic growth and could help to reduce fertility rates.footnote⁸⁰ But global feminism could also play a compensatory or diversionary role. In response to critics who pointed to the ‘feminization of poverty’ under structural adjustment, or to Western creditors’ self-enrichment at the expense of impoverished African and Latin American countries, the World Bank could show that, in line with its mandate, it did care about poverty and inequality—gender inequality, at least. From the early 1990s, the Bank issued a series of policy guidelines instructing its functionaries that national programmes should aim to identify ‘gender-related barriers to growth’ and encourage women’s participation in the labour force, to overcome the ‘rigidities’, ‘inefficiencies’ and ‘lowered output’ created by the existing division of labour. It argued that micro-credit programmes had a proven record of ‘empowering’ women, who were more responsible than men in keeping up interest payments and more likely to spend extra income on their children.footnote⁸¹ Feminist economists, commissioned by the World Bank to explore how women were coping in poor communities, argued that policies should address the needs raised by women themselves: electricity, public safety, water, sanitation.footnote⁸² Without bothering to refute them, the Bank pocketed such reports and, under the rubric of ‘women’s empowerment’, ploughed on with its preferred private-sector programmes—micro-credit, land titling, conditional cash transfers, or ‘investment in human capital’, another of Becker’s ideas, which essentially meant encouraging girls’ education—funded by Western agencies and administered by selected ngos.footnote⁸³

A global programme

After Washington’s Cold War victory, a run of un conferences helped to win consent for a social-liberal agenda on the environment (Rio 1992), human rights (Vienna 1993), population (Cairo 1994) and gender (Beijing 1995). More experimentally, the us and its allies moved toward establishing an international criminal-justice system, building on the model of the post-war military tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo.footnote⁸⁴ A new stratum of global-feminist professionals found their voice at these un conclaves, where the deep pockets of the Washington women’s lobby and its experience in mastering conference arrangements gave it a leading edge. wedo, a caucus led by Bella Abzug and her colleagues, was one of the largest at the un. Applying tactics honed by the Congressional Women’s Caucus in dc, wedo mobilized a phalanx of international delegates, 1,500 strong, which became a semi-official entity at the un and played a key role in mobilizing votes for American formulations in the ‘world declarations’ adopted at Cairo and Beijing.footnote⁸⁵

By the time of the Beijing un Women’s Conference in 1995, America’s diplomatic triumph was complete. Russia, under Yeltsin, barely had a voice on the world stage; China, the conference host, was an eager pupil of the new international order. Symbolically, the figure of Hillary Clinton replaced that of Domitila Barrios as the conference heroine. Discursively, the anti-discrimination approach and ‘entry into the mainstream’ had vanquished proposals for women’s emancipation through a more egalitarian socio-economic order. In the Beijing Platform for Action, the world’s states endorsed ‘an agenda for women’s empowerment’ which underscored ‘the importance of trade liberalization and access to open dynamic markets’ and affirmed that ‘the family is the basic unit of society and as such it should be strengthened.’footnote⁸⁶ Becker and Friedman must have been proud. Within this framework, the twelve-point Platform identified strategic objectives and action proposals covering almost every sphere—economic (poverty, the environment, women in the economy), political (human rights, decision-making, armed conflict), social (education, the media, gender violence, health, the girl child)—with the notable exception of sex and reproduction. In time-honoured State Department fashion these were administered separately, with global guidelines agreed by the 1994 Cairo conference on population.

Once the verbiage was peeled away, the operative clauses of the Platform for Action followed a familiar anti-discrimination logic: women’s integration into the existing global-capitalist order, underpinned by coercion. Governments agreed to pay lip service to gender equality through a host of formal measures—equal access, on paper, to markets, resources, employment, pay, inheritance, credit, political decision-making and education; bringing a ‘gender perspective’ to bear on neoliberal economic programmes. This was backed up by a raft of affirmative-action suggestions for feminizing professional and managerial strata: positive measures to ensure a ‘critical mass’ (30 per cent) of women in government, media and judiciary; promoting women to advisory boards; a global media directory of female ‘experts’; leadership and self-esteem training for girls. Poorer women would be helped out by targeted micro-credit and self-employment schemes, plus incentives to raise school and college enrolment. Meanwhile, criminal-justice measures would be used to tackle violence against women: toughening penal sanctions, prosecuting offenders, criminalizing pornography and enforcing sexual harassment laws. Social provision—refuges for battered women, housing, sanitation, health care, schools, safe transport, clean water, food and fuel subsidies, obstetrics, nurseries—would only be improved ‘as appropriate’, code word for ‘subject to budgetary constraints’, which was as good as saying: not at all. Instead, ngos were enjoined to fill the gaps.footnote⁸⁷

The Platform for Action was softened by mildly positive cultural suggestions—training boys in household skills, non-discriminatory career counselling, diverse media portrayals, non-sexist textbooks—and topped off with agendas for further research: how to measure women’s unpaid labour, causes of gender violence, health policies, effects of toxic hazards, not least on indigenous women. The mechanism for advance on these many fronts came straight from the affirmative-action playbook: states were chivvied to set goals, to demonstrate their good faith, while global technicians devised metrics to help monitor progress towards them—a mode of data production that was also a measure of ideological commitment. (The latest global initiative, Agenda 2030, has 17 goals and 230 indicators for monitoring progress.)

The 1994 Cairo Programme for Action on women’s reproductive health followed the same strategic logic. Socialist feminists had arrived at the conference with a powerful critique of usaid-style population control and the ravages caused to health provision by structural adjustment. Their alternative integrated fertility issues—increased resources for maternal health, safe abortion and contraception on demand, an end to coerced sterilization and harmful trials—with broader social and ecological demands. But as one us feminist ruefully confessed, they found themselves spending disproportionate energy fighting religious conservatism and very little battling neoliberal macro-economics, effectively conceding ground on imf austerity programmes in exchange for us and eu support on sexual rights.footnote⁸⁸ The result was a un Declaration whose Preamble offered a blamelessly holistic view of health and sustainable development, regretting the deleterious effects of structural adjustment, while the operative clauses of its Programme for Action directed the bulk of funds towards long-acting contraception programmes, and urged governments to improve cost effectiveness, roll back regulatory restrictions and promote the private sector. No funds at all were earmarked for primary health care, child survival, emergency obstetrics, environmental or social services, as the Programme specifically noted.footnote⁸⁹ An integrative feminist politics of reproduction was reduced to decorative support for pharmaceutical companies and population controllers. Numerical targets for implants and sterilizations—the polar opposite of a woman’s right to choose—still drove policy on the ground.

Hardening crust

Though informed by mainstream us feminism, the global variety differed in several respects. First, there was no international equivalent to the court-backed civil-rights machinery of Title VII and Title IX; national attempts to copy it lacked the litigatory culture and historic legitimation that buoyed up the American original. Second, the neoliberal input has been much stronger: global-feminist programmes are often add-ons to capital-driven development policies—land titling, slum clearance, labour-force restructuring, credit expansion. To date, the lion’s share of resources have been directed to two projects dear to State Department and Wall Street hearts: population control and micro-finance, in public-private partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and banks. Third, there is an unavoidable element of foreignness: donors arrive from abroad—Norway, Sweden, Canada, usaid—to assess potential projects through cool outsider eyes; foundation-funded projects such as girls’ schools often stand out from the local environment. Despite talk of countries ‘owning’ programmes, the superiority of Western models is taken as given—trapping women in the Middle East and Africa between accusations of being ‘us stooges’, on the one hand, or conceding to local male dominance, on the other, and lending weight to patriarchal charges of ‘neo-imperialism’ against feminism as such.

By the turn of the century a thick carapace of global-feminist officialdom had been conjured into being. At world-summit level Beltway feminists, now thoroughly at home in the corridors of wealth and power, drafted the goals for ‘women’s empowerment’. The international financial institutions—World Bank, imf—expanded their gender-mainstreaming units to ensure that the globalization measures they imposed took a feminist agenda into account.footnote⁹⁰ They were backed up by an international layer of highly qualified, Western-educated feminist professionals, mediating between the development agencies, ‘the donors’—Scandinavian overseas-aid officials, foundations (Gates, Ford, Rockefeller), investment banks and corporations (Walmart, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs)—and a now much more homogenized hierarchy of international, regional and local bodies, employing hundreds of thousands of ngo full-timers, many deeply committed to the cause. These were the foot soldiers of global feminism, their numbers testifying to its growing presence. Below them came the women ‘on the ground’.

Mainstream feminism faced opposition from the right—the redoubts of theocratic patriarchal conservatism, led by the Vatican and Riyadh—but also from the left, as scholars and local activists defended a more radical social stance against ‘ngoization’.footnote⁹¹ But, as with mainstream feminism in America, the global brand had the advantage of deep philanthropic-foundation and foreign-aid purses and powerful institutional backing. As in the us, existing feminist groups were often gratified to be invited to apply for grants by intelligent and sympathetic foundation officers. Local scholars, carefully selected by foundation recruiters, were invited to all-expenses-paid international gatherings, taken to visit pilot projects in the region and encouraged to set up similar programmes, with ample funding.footnote⁹² Activists became minor officials themselves, with little time for the more radical projects they still dreamt of undertaking because they were so busy filing reports and complying with legal formalities for their donors. The hundreds of millions of dollars these donors dispensed each year to ngo networks in the name of gender equality was peanuts compared to the $44bn the un bureaucracy spent on itself, let alone the trillion-dollar annual budget for nato; but it far outweighed what dissident feminists might contribute from their own time and pockets.

Abroad, America’s substantial record of support for international gender equality helped burnish its badge as global sheriff. Washington’s numerous wars from the 1990s onward could be fought under the banner of women’s rights, while its enemies were re-denominated as opponents of feminism.footnote⁹³Time magazine depicted the invasion of Afghanistan as a joyous day for womankind—‘the greatest pageant of mass liberation since the fight for suffrage’. Reciprocity was expected. ‘Feminists, more than anyone else, should realize that the West is worth defending’, a us paper editorialized. The Ford Foundation required ngos in the region to sign up to its statement on terrorism.footnote⁹⁴ American feminists split over the invasion: the Congressional Women’s Caucus gave it almost unanimous support, and the Feminist Majority Foundation led a brigade of ngos into us-occupied Afghanistan. On the other hand, Code Pink and Women in Black were among the staunchest anti-war groups, Meridians curated a useful oppositional archive on the War on Terror and critical feminists produced an impressive flow of anti-militarist analysis.footnote⁹⁵ Morally, however, mainstream global feminism emerged tarnished from its place in the baggage train of nato forces.

Radical-feminist jurisprudence also found a place for itself in the imperial ménage, gaining a foothold in the international criminal-justice system that burgeoned under the New World Order. Established on the model of the post-war military courts at Nuremberg and Tokyo, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was vulnerable to the same criticisms: functioning as an international show trial, in which the great-power victors grant themselves impunity, scanting legal principles of established jurisdiction and ‘no punishment without law’; the court, in the absence of a legislature, minting crimes itself and applying them retrospectively. The upshot of such trials was not justice, but the ‘authoritative confirmation’ of a desired historical narrative.footnote⁹⁶ In the case of Yugoslavia, this involved casting the Allies as blameless defenders of peace, the wars of secession a product solely of ‘Serb aggression’. Comparable charges could be laid against the later ict for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction excludes the Western powers under the principle of ‘complementarity’ and whose legal categories—‘aggression’, ‘crimes against humanity’—were notoriously ill-defined.

But selective justice and pliable laws were an advantage for a certain tendency of radical-feminist legal activism—‘a historic opportunity’, as one attorney said of the Yugoslav wars.footnote⁹⁷ The tribunals and the icc could all the more easily be used to re-forge legal definitions of crimes against women, providing models for use elsewhere—as with the 1998 Akayesu case in Rwanda, where the Tribunal accepted a loosened definition of rape as ‘physical intrusion of a sexual nature under coercive conditions’, which no longer needed to entail forced intercourse. This was swiftly followed by moves in California (2003) and Illinois (2004) to incorporate the revised definition into state law. No matter if the goal of the Rwanda Tribunal as an international show trial was to establish a narrative scapegoating lower-level officials while shielding the Western powers, above all the Clinton Administration, which had for years turned a blind eye to the Habyarimana regime’s weapon-buying and militia training, with imf funds. Most culpably, Clinton blocked dispatch of the effective un security mission mandated by the Arusha Accords, despite repeated warnings from Gen. Dallaire, the mission commander, and indeed the cia, in the months before the massacres and rapes.footnote⁹⁸ No matter, if the outcome could be for radical-feminist attorneys to tweak American law in women’s favour.

Southern cone

The new Latin American feminisms lie to the left of the spectrum, despite—or even because of—the advent of rightist governments there. In Argentina, the popular mobilizations that erupted out of the 2001 economic crisis left their mark on the official women’s machinery, transforming the annual Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres, formerly a staid event linked to the un process, into a 12,000-strong assembly of students, workers and piqueteras. By 2014 it had become a regular rallying point for women across the region, a radical three-day gathering of 44,000. In Brazil, too, the Articulaçao de Mulheres Brasileiras, established as a national coordinating body for the 1995 Beijing conference, has evolved to the left, declaring itself anti-capitalist and anti-racist; it calls for redistributive economic policies, political democratization, sexual freedom, reproductive autonomy and an end to violence against women.footnote¹²³

Thematically, domestic violence and, especially, femicide have been the central issues in Argentina. In 2015, the dying months of Cristina Fernández’s government, press coverage of a young man’s gruesome murder of his pregnant teenage girlfriend sparked a social-media call for action by women journalists. Huge protests under the banner of #NiUnaMenos (‘not one less’) took place in cities across the country—250,000 marched in Buenos Aires—building on the piqueteras’ tradition of mass action. By 2016 the campaign had become a national movement, mobilizing demonstrations half a million strong; that November, a hundred thousand women attended the annual Encuentro. #NiUnaMenos expanded its programme to include reproductive rights in response to another shocking news story: a miscarrying woman, accused by a Church hospital of aborting her baby, sentenced to seven years in prison. Taking a stand against the new Pope, #NiUnaMenos joined the call by Polish feminists fighting a draconian abortion law for an international women’s strike on 8 March 2017. In Argentina, that action expanded into three days of mass strikes, as the new feminists joined (largely female) teachers, students and public-sector workers in protests against the Macri government’s austerity policies.footnote¹²⁴ Transmitted by Skype and social media, the influence of #NiUnaMenos has extended across the region—Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico—and lapped the southern shores of Europe in Portugal, Italy and Spain.

Brazil’s new feminisms emerged amid the political maelstrom that marked the right-wing overthrow of Dilma Rousseff’s presidency and the end of fourteen years of pt rule. What the press dubbed the #PrimaveraFeminista of 2015 contained distinct, if not necessarily differentiated, approaches and themes. Sociologically, some seemed closer to the upper-middle-class revolt against the pt, and provided a more attractive face for it than the new right that led the street demonstrations.footnote¹²⁵ Others were stung by the gross sexism of the attacks on Dilma—dubbed by the Brazilian press ‘the lying prostitute of the Planalto’, with imagery to match—and mobilized against the raft of reactionary laws pushed through by Temer and the Congressional right: criminalization of abortion for rape victims, constitutional sanctification of the family, privatizations, pension cuts. Black consciousness, socio-economic questions and mobilizations against militarized police operations in the favelas were joined together. Sexual violence was a key issue, even if mass mobilizations were not on the scale of Argentina’s. In June 2016, the gang rape of a teenage girl in Rio provoked protest rallies in fifty Brazilian cities, 30,000 strong in São Paulo, connecting with #NiUnaMenos marches across the region. Thematically, the new feminisms here are best characterized by their variety. A wealth of blogs—Blogueiras Feministas, Blogueiras Negras, Marcha das Vadias and more—interlink to each other across a wide range of issues: black identity, body politics, critique of institutions. ‘Anatomy of Pleasure’, Bloguieras Feministas’ piece on the female orgasm, has been the most popular of them all.footnote¹²⁶

Outcomes to date: if Brazil’s new feminists remain a marginal force in the country’s political life, #NiUnaMenos has had a national impact. In comparative terms, Argentina doesn’t have high femicide or homicide levels: the first is half the second, and both are lower than the us; grand guignol treatment of sex and violence by the Buenos Aires press is one reason why this has become a stand-out issue. Yet the campaign also taps a truth about violencia machista in a national imaginary premised on ethnic cleansing. At the same time, the Macri government has been trying to co-opt the high emotions at stake for a law-and-order platform, more popular than his economic measures; Macri himself has been photographed with a #NiUnaMenos placard. So far, the most significant outcomes have been harsher sentencing policies, with gestures towards improving hotline services for women at risk of domestic violence. On the movement’s other main theme, reproductive rights, the Argentine Congress may be moving—against Macri’s stated position—to legalize first-trimester abortion. The austerity programme remains in place.

Mediterranean

In Europe, the new movements emerged in the context of high youth unemployment and crushing eu austerity measures, with mainstream feminism enjoying untrammelled hegemony across the liberal media. Organizationally, there has been a variety of patterns. In Poland, the mass uprising that defeated a conservative abortion bill in 2016 left in place a nervous system of interlinked groups, ready to mobilize again. In London, the balance of forces was exemplified on International Women’s Day when an official march sponsored by care uk, itself backed by dfid, pwc, kpmg et al., ambled harmlessly from Parliament to Trafalgar Square, and it was left to a valiant band of sex workers and the anti-austerity Sisters Uncut to extend the protests to health-service closures and housing evictions. In Italy, by contrast, young feminists have pioneered entirely new forms. Picking up the call from Argentina, an alliance of ‘Io decido’ abortion activists, squatter collectives and women’s refuge workers summoned a #NonUnaDiMeno march in Rome in November 2016, a quarter of a million strong, against Renzi’s attacks on public health and the living conditions of precarious workers, as well as sexual violence. It was followed the next day by a participatory assembly that agreed to draft a feminist plan against gender violence, with nine working groups tackling different aspects. Over the next year, #NonUnaDiMeno assemblies met in more than a hundred cities across Italy to debate the issues, with a series of national gatherings to define the planks of the platform and agree tactics for strikes and demonstrations in its support.

Thematically, the #NonUnaDiMeno plan, Piano Femminista, broke decisively with the mainstream model. In place of a criminal-justice approach to sexual violence, it addressed its social contexts—work, the family, health and education systems; the sexist imaginary of the corporate media—and explicitly rejected strategies based on victimhood and dependence, rather than autonomy and self-determination. Its collective authors attempted to address the grammatical gendering of Italian, with some passages using @ in place of –a and –o adjectival endings, and welcomed the convergence the national debate had brought about between women, feminists, transfeminists, queer and lgbt*qia+ voices. The Piano Femminista called for a universal basic income as guarantee of economic independence, a roll-back of Renzi’s education laws and means-tested welfare reforms, the extension of parental leave to those in precarious employment, funding for women’s refuges and citizens’ rights for immigrants; it attacked the institutional racism inflicted on refugees by the eu’s Dublin system and the policing accords with Libya and Turkey.footnote¹²⁷ In Spain, too, the 5-million strong fiesta on International Women’s Day 2018—led by the left-feminist mayors of Barcelona and Madrid, but building on years of campaigning by the indignada networks, public-sector mareas, anti-eviction and feminist struggles—foregrounded the claim of self-determination. In Croatia the factiv collective, organizers of the Zagreb night marches against sexual violence, also fight against privatizations and attacks by the ruling-hdz on reproductive rights.footnote¹²⁸

The outcomes so far: #NonUnaDiMeno’s demonstrations were broadly welcomed by the Italian media and its Plan took a small step forward with the 2018 election—universal basic income is a central plank of the Five Star Movement, which got the largest vote. Against its implementation stands the institutional might of the Eurozone, a bulwark against the least infraction of austerity and major backer for official feminism. In Spain, the scale of the 2018 women’s strike could not have been lost on the governing pp, the only major party not to back the events. But attempts to recuperate its energies for the establishment’s agenda, in the context of the ongoing political crisis for the 1978 Constitution in Catalonia, were immediately underway. For El País, contrary to those who saw the Spanish democratic system as ‘withered and regressive’, 8-M could show it was ‘vibrant, conscious and plural’.footnote¹²⁹

Cheongsam feminism

In China, organizationally, the opposite conditions prevailed. In 2015 young feminist dissenters were arrested on the eve of International Women’s Day, though later released. For the past two years the main blogsite, Feminist Voices, run from the us by a former China Women’s News journalist, has been shut down for the month of March.footnote¹³⁰ The official body, the All-China Women’s Federation (acwf), has had the field to itself. This is an area in which Beijing has long felt confident of its ability to compete with the United States. Female emancipation was a founding principle of the People’s Republic; women were welcomed into production here at a time when the Truman Administration was insisting their place was in the home. The prc was a keen participant at the Mexico conference in 1975 and one of the first countries to ratify cedaw four years later; its 1990s sex-discrimination laws followed the ilo’s best practice on equal pay. Though gender inequality has widened since then, the advances of the revolutionary era were such that China still does well by world standards: more self-made female billionaires than the us, twice as many private-sector ceos, a better position in the media—44 per cent of journalists, 50 per cent of editors in the press and publishing—and in manufacturing, in addition to four months’ paid maternity leave.footnote¹³¹ On this basis, China took the lead after 1995 in organizing world gatherings to monitor progress on the Beijing Platform for Action. For the twentieth anniversary in 2015, the prc and the un co-hosted a ‘Global Leaders Meeting’ on gender equality, addressed by Xi Jinping himself, who reaffirmed China’s commitment to keep women’s rights ‘at the centre of the global agenda.’ At home, Xi vowed, the prc would continue to forge ‘a socialist advanced gender culture with Chinese characteristics.’footnote¹³² The All-China Women’s Federation would be at the heart of this process.

The acwf is unique in the annals of world feminism. Its organizational reach and social-reform mandates put now or the widf in the shade. Its pyramidal structure extends down from national to provincial, municipal, country, district, town and village level, throughout the land; its offices at each rank are staffed and financed by the equivalent Party organ—the acwf leadership supervises but does not appoint its own cadres. At national level it has an array of women’s research units and a stable of magazines, weeklies and dailies, which employ thousands of intellectuals, of whom quite a few are feminists. Its responsibilities include arguing for women’s interests within the bodies of the state and, more importantly, mobilizing women for labour, care of the environment and enforcement of national fertility policy. Women’s Federation cadres were answerable to their local Party officials for their efforts to organize abortions or sterilizations to meet the one-child policy—and, since 2016, to press mothers of one child to have another. Gender equality is part of their remit, but this isn’t reinforced by Party discipline in the way that reproductive targets are and tends to weaken at village and township levels.footnote¹³³

The strategic paradigm here is a form of eugenicist feminism that would have been familiar to the Fabians and Margaret Sanger, with roots in the modernization theories of the republican era.footnote¹³⁴ The two key themes are the project of improving Chinese women’s ‘quality’ and an emphasis on sexual difference. From the 1980s, the unisex egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution—‘Times have changed, men and women are the same!’—was sharply attacked for its denial of ‘natural’ characteristics. Gender equality was redefined in terms of male-female complementarity, the basis for a harmonious whole; femininity and masculinity were aligned with Confucian categories of nei and wai, inner and outer. Glossy magazines like the acwf’s City Lady gave a face to the new Chinese woman—modern, ultra-feminine, well-to-do—with a corresponding set of moral assets: dutiful daughter, attractive sweetheart, educated wife, enjoying a ‘suitable’ career (teaching, psychology, arts and letters) that allowed her to raise a child of good cultural and evolutionary quality. The acwf promotes a programme of the Four Selfs to raise female-quality levels: self-reliance, self-esteem, self-confidence and self-improvement.

Fifty years ago, a Chinese feminist slogan—‘Women hold up half the sky!’—resounded across the world. The international reach of ‘Four Self’ feminism remains to be seen, though it resonates with hindutva projects for upper-caste female purity in India, and arguably has affinities with Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In movement in the us.footnote¹³⁵ Yet the national remit of the acwf ensures it has a broader social base: a recent International Women’s Day programme featured ‘double identities’, the same women photographed during their day job, as construction workers in hard-hats, and as catwalk models in cheongsam gowns. Against this ideological barrage, courageous young feminists have tried to mobilize anti-discrimination themes with ngo backing: street performances and small-scale flash mobs raising issues like sexual harassment, discrimination in higher education, homophobia. These are easily squashed by the authorities, but one outside commentator following the movement argues that over the last few years, Chinese women have become a lot more vocal on social media about sexism.footnote¹³⁶ There was a howl of online protest when a China Daily story about Harvey Weinstein noted that the virtues of Chinese culture included a low incidence of sexual harassment. When the Feminist Voices blog asked its followers in March 2017 to list the sentences they couldn’t bear to hear, top of the list was ‘China has already achieved gender equality.’ Since the late 90s, when social services were severed from local work units and nurseries shut down, in preparation for wto entry, singleton daughters born under the one-child policy have been lumbered with a care burden far greater than in the West, with the expectation that they would look after both their own elderly parents and their in-laws, as well as any children, without other siblings to help out. It’s possible that the situation will be neutralized by a new class of domestic servants, as in the us. In their absence, the conditions may be brewing for new feminisms in China that could be genuinely sui generis.

United States

As in Europe, the broader historical context for the new feminist ferment in the us was set in place by the 2008 financial crisis, which gave the skewed outcomes of the neoliberal-feminist era a sharp generational twist. If working-class men had borne the brunt of restructuring in the 1980s, now it was the college-educated cohort that faced the sharpest contractions of opportunity, the most intensive ratcheting up of competitive tensions, as incorporation into the professional stratum became a bitter zero-sum struggle. This was the context in which other, more radical tendencies—queer and intersectional activists, anti-rape campaigners—would emerge from the campuses to provide new cadres for us feminism. Yet the pressures were contradictory. As in previous recessions, affirmative-action claims could provide a straw to cling to, offering a rare foothold for professional advance. Feminist cultural politics was already deeply imbued with the affirmative-action outlook: totting up credits and bylines, without regard for substance. To what extent have the new movements here succeeded in pushing beyond the limits of the anti-discrimination paradigm?

The provisional balance sheet is mixed. In the initial aftermath of the 2008 meltdown, an upsurge of political anger drove successive waves of revolt: student protests (2010), Occupy (2011), Black Lives Matter (2013–14), the Sanders campaign (2015–16). All were, to a greater or lesser extent, assaults on the established political model. The students’ fightback against austerity led to a broader critique of the university system and the precarious existence beyond it.footnote¹³⁷ Occupy took aim at Wall Street. Black Lives Matter, in many respects a women’s movement that built on years of community action around gun control, schools and housing, could be read as a national uprising against the ‘war on crime’, a permanent counter-insurgency operation against black men. Sanders, operating inside the system, was a self-declared socialist calling for single-payer health insurance. Nascent amid the student protests, new expressions of feminist consciousness were articulated within Occupy, took centre stage in Black Lives Matter and combated attacks by mainstream Clintonites on the flood of young women rallying to Sanders.

In contrast to this, and to the mass movements in Italy and Argentina, the impetus for the new protests around Title IX campaigns on campus came from the apex of government. In 2011, with negative personal-approval ratings and 15 million unemployed, Obama needed low-cost gestures towards ‘hope and change’ to galvanize supporters for his second-term election. Three issues were selected, after careful focus-group testing: gay marriage, immigrants’ children and sexual assault on campus. The latter took the form of a gesture towards the radical-feminist policy playlist—pro-woman jurisprudence, loosened legal definitions and expanded criminalization. On the day Obama formally announced his bid for 2012, his Department of Education dispatched a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to university administrators detailing new Title IX regulations that incorporated much of this agenda. The standard of proof for complainants was lowered and due process for the accused subordinated to the need for speedy resolution of cases. The Supreme Court’s 1986 insistence on ‘severity’, ‘pervasiveness’ and ‘detrimental impact’, in the eyes of a reasonable third party, was effectively dropped as grounds for actionable sexual harassment, leaving its unwantedness by the complainant as the sole criterion.footnote¹³⁸

Greeted with some bemusement at first by college administrators, the 2011 Dear Colleague letter was followed by a spate of initiatives, generating positive headlines at a time when police killings of black men were becoming an embarrassment for Obama. In 2014 a White House Task Force stepped up the pressure, expanding the scope of ‘sexual violence’ to include remarks about physical appearance, while the Education Department’s ocr officials launched scores of campus-wide investigations into compliance with its new ‘Dear Colleague’ rules. In 2015, Vice-President Biden toured the universities, speaking of a student-rape ‘epidemic’, in terms that echoed the Nixon and Reagan talk of wars on drugs and crime, and bandying the headline figure of ‘one in five’.footnote¹³⁹ Following the Administration’s lead, corporate donations poured into the coffers of student anti-harassment campaigns. Know Your IX (kyix), founded in 2013, was a spin-off from the dc-based Advocates for Youth, originally set up to counter teen pregnancy, which benefited from an annual $6 million in corporate donations and government grants. End Rape on Campus (eroc), also set up in 2013 and led by three student rape survivors, was funded by the Kering Foundation and Gucci. In 2014, photospreads in the Manhattan media helped to make these new campaigners household names.

In contrast to the broad-based campaigns taking off in Latin America and Europe, mobilizing precarious workers and the unemployed, the energies of eroc and kyix were restricted to the university system. Their tactics were pre-determined by the legal parameters of Title IX, whose logic demanded that universities be targeted for failing in their ‘duty to protect’ female students—the opposite of the stress in Rome and Buenos Aires on autonomous collective action. Le strade sicure le fanno le donne che le attraversano was #NonUnaDiMeno’s chant—it’s women’s presence that makes streets safe. While Italian feminists undertook a year-long debate to formulate their manifesto, the direction of the us campus campaign was largely set from above by executive fiat, over-riding longstanding differences among feminists about the politics of sexual violence, not least the relative priorities of material, public and personal forms of self-defence as against post-factum criminal process. The back-and-white legalist logic of the us Title IX campaigns had no place for the multi-hued cultural politics of the Brazilian movement, which retained a central place for sexual pleasure. The experimentation with queer and gender-fluid modes of being, widespread on us campuses, was often deliberately airbrushed from campaigners’ presentations to the media; while #NonUnaDiMeno went out of their way to block any media attempt to racialize their campaign against sexual violence, some of the eroc activists were prepared to flirt with that, for the good of the cause. As one explained to a sympathetic reporter:

‘If you make people uncomfortable about not helping the white ladies who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, if you talk about predators who we can get behind and hate, if we get rid of them with harsh penalties and punitive actions that Americans love . . . ’ She trails off, but I get the gist—there are gains to be had.footnote¹⁴⁰

The political culture of the new survivor-led anti-rape campaigns differed in important respects from the older radical feminism. Ideas of personal trauma replaced structural notions of male dominance and female subordination; the subject was no longer ‘women as a class’ but ‘me’. Mattress protests claimed a greater theoretical sophistication than the whistle-blowing, punk-era marches to Reclaim the Night. Yet both approaches were highly legalist, foregrounding punitive regulation and tending to dismiss the alternative feminist project of strengthening women’s solidarity networks, and their cultural and psychological capacity to defend their own bodily integrity, as ‘blaming the victim’. Like the Chicago neoliberals, the radical-feminist attorneys offered a clear list of policies, a transitional programme of small, simple steps towards a revised jurisprudence, expanding the sphere of criminalization through looser legal definitions and lowered evidential standards.footnote¹⁴¹ That agenda now supplied the hegemonic programme for campus activists.

Meanwhile, the concrete outcomes of the us campus campaigns were overdetermined by the universities’ institutional interests. Informed that they risked being held legally liable for sexual assault if they couldn’t prove they had taken steps to prevent it, university bureaucrats responded with craven over-compliance. Oberlin administrators emailed the entire campus to report that police had removed a person for ‘unwanted touching and grinding’ at 11 pm on a Friday night in a student bar. En bloc, colleges implemented the affirmative-consent package touted by the sector’s risk consultants and supported by many student groups.footnote¹⁴² The University of Wyoming was one of many warning its students: ‘Anything less than voluntary, sober, enthusiastic, verbal, uncoerced, continual, active and honest consent is Sexual Assault.’ Body language could be misinterpreted; consent required ‘a verbal “Yes”. Or even, “Yes, Yes, Oh! Yes!”’ At Georgia Southern University, legal sex required ‘imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual, honest and verbal agreement.’ At Elon University, ‘only a comprehensible, unambiguous, positive and enthusiastic communication of consent for each sexual act’ could avoid the risk of being charged with sexual assault.footnote¹⁴³ In 2015, state legislatures in California and New York passed their own affirmative-consent laws, requiring schools to treat any sexual behaviour that didn’t have explicit verbal permission as assault.

Between the campus sexual-assault campaigns and #MeToo came the election of Trump and the response to it by Democratic voters: panic, shock and grief. There were bitter recriminations against those who hadn’t voted for Clinton—all feminists must unite. This imperative drove the million-strong women’s demonstration in Washington in January 2017 and the consolidation of the mainstream feminist lobby behind the Women’s March, a national network led by former Obama and Clinton staffers, so politically conformist that it could not even bring itself to support a single-payer healthcare system. Meanwhile, with the Democrats in disarray, it fell to the Manhattan media to lead the opposition. In this atmosphere of heightened outrage, an inveterate molester like Harvey Weinstein, though an impeccable Democrat, became a sort of surrogate for Trump. For the nyt and New Yorker, tales of his depredations combined ritzy settings, celebrity gossip, prurient details and Schadenfreude at the downfall of mighty men, all wrapped in impeccably feminist sentiments. One of the most striking contrasts between the us movement against sexual harassment and the Euro-Latinoamericana campaigns was the social status of their leading figures: in place of Italian women’s-refuge workers, or unemployed Argentine nurses, here it was the Hollywood–Manhattan axis that dominated events. Demonstrations took place not on the streets but on the red carpet at the Oscars or the Golden Globes. The invitation to followers to tweet about their own sexual harassment, using the hashtag #MeToo—taken up by over half a million us Twitter users—was issued by a former star of Melrose Place and Wet Hot American Summer.footnote¹⁴⁴

Hollywood provenance shouldn’t detract from the flood of testimonials that followed. In the initial outpouring of October 2017, a large proportion of the women posting recalled being groped in their early teens—‘my stepfather’, ‘my uncle’, ‘my dad’s friend’—or in their first months at work, where middle-aged men treated young female employees as a perk of the job. There were chilling accounts of retribution exacted by men whose advances had been rebuffed. As a moment of collective consciousness-raising, it was both therapeutic—breaking the oppressive silence, the nightmarish inability to scream, that many young women experience as part and parcel of male molestation—and evidential: an indication of the scale of sexual aggression as a social fact. For the most part, as with Tarana Burke’s original Me Too initiative, or ThinkOlga in Brazil, the focus was on the women themselves, rarely naming names or calling for retribution.footnote¹⁴⁵ It catalysed innumerable face-to-face conversations between women, about their own range of experiences and those of their friends, on a scale probably not seen since the 1970s. It drew in men, as sympathizers, in a way that would have been unimaginable back then.

Thematically, however, this was the narrowest of the movements. Unlike ThinkOlga and Burke’s ngo, Hollywood’s #MeToo has so far offered no material or psychological support to those who’d suffered abuse, beyond a new anti-discrimination legal-defence charity, Time’s Up. Nor was there any attempt to develop a broader social agenda around violence, as in Argentina and Italy, or alternative cultural projects, as in Brazil. Instead, the paradigm within which #MeToo operated, and which gave political form to this powerful but inchoate upsurge of sexual discontent, was largely limited to a variation of the radical-feminist, anti-discrimination, criminal-justice approach that had been naturalized by the campus sexual-assault campaigns: the acceptance of any accusation as de facto bona fide; the focus on the post factum penalization of men, and spectacular punishment of some as a deterrent to all, to the exclusion of preventive strategies that foregrounded practical, cultural and material support for women’s self-determination.

Within that framing, presumption of guilt and disproportionate punishment for minor misdemeanours could be positive features, in having a greater deterrent effect. To this was added the new practice of trial by social media, which abandoned any notion of fair hearing.footnote¹⁴⁶ The upshot was that the tentative online female solidarity of the #MeToo testimonials was often shouldered aside by retributive campaigns against individual men, pressing into action the campus norm of ‘guilty if accused’. ‘Woke’ men often shouted the loudest in these denunciations, perhaps calculating that attack was the best form of defence. In the most grotesque cases, reminiscent of the days of huac, zealots set about extirpating works from the canon on the basis of anonymous and unsubstantiatable third-party accounts.

Need it be said that the fight for a fair hearing for accusers, in adjudicatory systems historically skewed against women and people of colour, should not preclude a fair hearing for the accused? Beyond this, an effective feminist politics on harassment needs to recognize its differentiated landscape, varying horizontally, along the course of the life cycle, and vertically, in different social, class and racial situations—as the Italian Plan sets out to do. Hopefully, the us movements will learn from these more radical, broadly based campaigns in southern Europe and Latin America; hopefully too, the net effect of #MeToo will be to enable more median-income women to speak out, and deter more men from exacting retribution if rebuffed. But so far, the movement around #MeToo has been the most conservative of the new crop. It seems to have done little to address an agenda that would tackle the enabling conditions for sexual harassment—including precarious work, racialized gender stereotypes and criminalized migrant status—and for escaping intimate-partner violence, much of which takes place in the home. As part of the post-Trump re-consolidation of mainstream us feminism, it risks affirming, rather than challenging, the socio-economic status quo. The Weinstein business provided the opportunity for a root-and-branch attack on the culture industry. Instead, Hollywood has been pink-washed by the parade of feminist activists across the red carpet, wiping away the stain on its reputation. Having removed a few ‘bad apples’, #MeToo risks leaving the wider system as it is. Ironically, it could end up as a reaffirmation of the type of feminism whose failings helped put Trump in power.

The American model naturally has greater international reach than Chinese, Italian, Spanish or Argentinian versions. Yet while sexual violence remains a leading theme across the world, #MeToo’s social media impact has been uneven. Compared to 500,000 Twitter posts in the us, the highest figures were France (100,000), the uk (74,000) and Canada (43,000), with numbers in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and India ranging from 13,000 to 24,000. Elsewhere—in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia—the absence of mainstream-press support and thinner social-media coverage saw posts down to four digits or below.footnote¹⁴⁷ Indeed, #MeToo showed signs of petering out in the us once the Manhattan media decided it had all gone far enough.

So far Sweden has been the only country actively to adopt #MeToo as its own, with public rallies, professional-sector petitions protesting at harassment in their field, backing from the Crown for high-level policy discussions. Elsewhere—and again, unlike the other movements discussed—its impact has been most visible at the level of government, us allies reacting with a rash of harsher penalties and repressive laws. In France, Macron announced fifty measures on sexual harassment—including street fines and expanded criminalization of teenage sex—along with further deregulation of labour. The Australian government imposed sexual abstinence on itself.footnote¹⁴⁸ In the uk, the Deputy Prime Minister was sacked for browsing pornography and the ‘fleeting’ touch of a journalist’s knee, while the Health Secretary presided over a winter crisis that saw patients dying in hospital corridors, yet remains in place.

Nevertheless, a survey that covers only the most salient features of the most prominent movements will inevitably miss many of the more interesting things that are going on. Beneath the radar, there are numerous signs of young people in the us linking up gender and socio-economic issues, as in Brazil and southern Europe, in more imaginative and hopeful modes. It will take time for new thinking to be articulated in more durable, complex and extended forms than posts and tweets can offer.

Future studies in this series will examine the widely varied geo-cultural and economic starting points of gender regimes around the world, and the uneven impact of the global-feminist programme upon them. Gender developments in China over the past thirty years have little in common with those in India; within the Middle East, dynamics in Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran are quite distinct, and differ in turn from those of the devastated ‘arc of war’, stretching from Mali to Afghanistan. Latin America’s decade of left governments saw social inequality falling somewhat, against the trends elsewhere. Patterns of work, sex and reproduction vary in surprising ways across Europe’s regions and Southeast Asia’s cultures; us developments differ again. Against these backgrounds, the journal hopes to explore the resources that feminist theory and cultural practice might offer for the new movements.

For now: what do the trajectories of these new movements suggest about the relationship between gender equality and social inequality, at a global level? Two powerful official feminisms, American and Chinese, promote strategies that would meld the former with the latter: gender equality within each social stratum, each layered ethnic group. The most salient radical alternatives in southern Europe and the Southern Cone would reduce social inequality in the process of promoting gender equality, and vice versa; but they are beleaguered in their national contexts by the balance of political-economic forces, which strongly favours capital, and by the international order, under American hegemony. Then there are the regions where class rule and patriarchal power form a single order. The scene is fascinating—though not, for a coherent egalitarianism, especially hopeful. But it moves.