Why are people still scared of the word feminist?

FEMINISM
Unfinished Revolution: The Feminist Fightback
Virginia Haussegger
NewSouth, $36.99

Feminism, Defeated
Kate Phelan
Polity, $32.95

Why are people so scared of the label “feminist”? Why is feminism so aggressively and gleefully demonised? A majority of people in Western countries embrace fundamental concepts inherent to women’s rights, yet a roughly equal percentage decline to describe themselves as feminists – while the media and wider culture joyously decry the “failure of feminism”.

Two recent books – Unfinished Revolution: The Feminist Fightback by Virginia Haussegger, and Feminism, Defeated by Kate Phelan – tackle these questions in markedly different but nonetheless engaging and important ways, arriving at wholly different conclusions that ultimately both suggest that feminism is indeed far from dead; and still has much to strive for.

Traditional opponents of feminism have been successful in promoting the negative images associated with the movement. This is tied to the persistence of patriarchy and a backlash from those unsettled by the successes of feminism. The media are also quite complicit in the discrediting of feminism. Many print and broadcast features depict only the extremes of the movement, not its reasoned core.

Unfinished Revolution is a historical exploration of second-wave feminism in Australia from 1975 – the United Nations’ International Women’s Year and the year that then Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam hired a full-time women’s affairs advisor in Elizabeth Reid – until the present day. Haussegger tackles her subject from both critical and personal perspectives, writing about the evolution of the movement and her involvement in it, highlighting the stories of the individual women who were key players.

She does not shy away from admitting that in its formation, the movement alienated some potential supporters along lines of race, gender and social class – deep divisions that persist today. Various individuals and groups within the movement expended an inordinate amount of time and vitriolic energy battling each other. Aside from the internal wars, the feminist movement has also been hampered by a lack of cohesion, and in part due to its dominant political philosophy, an absence of hierarchical organisational structure.

With a pronounced focus on gender and power in politics and the media, Haussegger asks a number of important questions: how do women work together to mount a fightback against pervasive patriarchy? How have they done it in the past – back when second-wave feminists sent radical shockwaves through the nation, declared a war on sexism, picked a fight with the media and, as she puts it, “shook Australian misogynists by the balls”? How does that legacy influence and shape what we do today? How are women pushing back? Is sisterhood alive and flourishing? Importantly, she also asks how the movement moves forward in the face of what she rightly describes as “the biggest, ugliest, vilest and most vicious backlash against women sweeping the globe right now”. To that end, her analysis of the largest Australian women’s protest rally, the March4Justice in 2021, is particularly incisive, illuminating and noteworthy.

Unfinished Revolution also examines the historical failures of the movement. As happened in both the US and Britain, the Australian feminist revolution took hegemonic feminism as its defining theory and, although Indigenous women were involved, the dominant movement was (albeit unintentionally) white-led, marginalised the world views and activism of women of colour, and treated sexism as the ultimate oppression. As Indigenous academic and activist Jackie Huggins observes, “unfortunately, despite all the rhetoric about sisterhood and bonding, white women were not sincerely committed to bonding with black women to fight sexism”.

Points of inclusion and exclusion have long been both defining and problematic. It’s important to note that there arguably is not one definition of feminism unless that definition is intersectional and, in Haussegger’s estimation, “looks carefully at how an action will impact all women: the collective above the individual as it seeks to end all forms of discrimination”. The work of feminism, for her, is inclusive, far-reaching and far from done. What, then, would she make of feminist philosopher Phelan’s contention that feminism with politics at its core has, essentially, been defeated and gender-critical feminism usurped by its counterpart that emphasises the socially constructed nature of women?

In Feminism, Defeated, Phelan traces this depoliticisation, recovering the second-wave view of men and women as sex classes, enemies and political kinds, which she argues was more radical than the contemporary view of men and women as social constructs. From her perspective, if gender-critical feminism is to become a repoliticised feminism, it must follow radical feminism in conceiving of women as a sex class and “choosing women” as something more than “a discursive and unstable construct”.

Phelan contends that “like all revolutionaries, second-wave feminists spoke a language not yet invented, a language in which ‘woman’ is a class of ‘man’.” Haussegger and Phelan are united, it seems, in advocating for the continued liberation of women, but for them feminism looks very different. While Haussegger recognises the obvious benefits of inclusive feminism, for Phelan intersectionality represents not progression, but “the exchange of dreams – the dream of freedom – for false respect from men”.

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