Long before white women helped put Trump in the White House, anger at clumsy patronage, and at the allied phenomenon of wealthy women presuming to understand the priorities of the poor, had become so intense in corners of feminism that the phrase ‘white, middle-class feminist’ emerged as a potent insult. In 1983, the novelist Alice Walker coined the term ‘womanist’ as an alternative to white feminism. ‘How can you claim the label of those who would oppress you to see their goals realised, even when commonality exists in some areas?’ asked the blogger Renee Martin three decades later, in an essay explaining why she, as a black woman, rejects the term ‘feminism’.2 Commonalities are not enough to stop movements that can only succeed through cohesion and volume from splintering.
Sandi and I – undeniably white, irretrievably middle class and irrevocably feminist – of course drew fire. The criticism helped us to focus on the issues underpinning it. Just as men lack a visceral understanding of the female condition, so women leading reasonably comfortable lives may not automatically grasp what it is to suffer multiple oppressions. How could we as activists in our own flurry of activity avoid taking up space that others, less privileged struggle to claim? Were we entitled to found a party or was this action proof of entitlement, in the negative sense of the word?
The answer – or at least one answer – is that it depends what the party does and achieves. Another is that the appropriate response to critics of white, middle-class feminism cannot be for every white, middle-class feminist to down tools. That would be to fall into a similar trap as the white, middle-class anti-feminists who deny the evident and urgent need for greater gender equality at home because there are more acute examples of misogyny elsewhere. Nimco Ali, one of the first members of the steering committee, was attacked in some quarters for joining the Women’s Equality Party, and later subjected to particularly vitriolic abuse during her 2017 general election candidacy for us. She points out that the black, Asian and minority-ethnic population of the UK stands at less than 12 per cent. This means, she says, that ‘there are going to be women at the forefront who are white, but it’s how they use their privilege and platform to have that conversation.’3 To acknowledge that some women need less help than others is not to deny that all women need help. The question is how to be helpful.
I got to put that question to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw herself in May 2016. She had come to the UK as a guest lecturer at the London School of Economics, on furlough from an extraordinary range of jobs and commitments: her law professorships at UCLA and Columbia, and the recently formed Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls, as well as from her executive directorship of the organisation she co-founded, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), and from #SayHerName, the campaign she and the AAPF had started the previous year with other organisations to draw attention to the black women killed by police and overlooked by the Black Lives Matter movement. She’d arrived in London just two days before but managed to lead me to one of the few good, tourist-free bars in Covent Garden.
She laughed at my question, then sighed. ‘Well, you have your work cut out for you,’ she said. ‘I think there has to be a lot of work on all sides and that’s the work of coalition and that’s hard.’ She gave generous, practical advice about how to do the work, and much encouragement, but also slipped in a warning. ‘I’m suspicious of privileged women who just go: “Yes, you’re absolutely right.” And have nothing to say beyond that. You have to engage deeply. I want people to ask and question if they don’t feel it, so that you can have the fight, you can try to resolve it. So, it’s kind of about having to find some agreement among those of us who feel Othered and are Othered: What is it that we want to see? What is it that we want to find agreement on? What is it that shapes our agenda?’4
It took an effort of will not to respond ‘you’re absolutely right’, for the sake of the gag and because she absolutely was. It would never have been possible to build an effective organisation from my kitchen table. We had to go out and reach out, involve an ever wider demographic and, crucially, find ways to create an internal democracy that gave full weight to each of those voices without slowing momentum or losing sight of the reasons for starting the party in the first place.
We’ve made progress but nowhere near enough. Pushing for diversity isn’t the same as achieving it – an obvious point but one that bears repeating because of the frequency with which organisations quote their diversity policies as supposed evidence of diversity. The process can be long and is littered with obstacles that I have come to understand much better
Right at the beginning, perhaps two days after proposing the party, I called a friend and fellow journalist, Hannah Azieb Pool, and attempted to persuade her that she should lead it. My thinking was simple – to the point of naivety. I asked myself ‘would I vote for her?’ and the answer was a resounding yes. Would she appeal to voters of all genders, classes and ethnicities? I thought so. Eritrean-born, adopted by a white family in Manchester, she was in a position to speak to the universalities of female experience and to the specifics of intersectionality – the ways in which that experience is changed or impacted by other factors.
Hannah thanked me, and said she’d ponder. A few days later she declined, with expressions of regret. She had too much going on, too many commitments. Straining to hear her as I stood in a noisy airport, phone clasped to ear, I tuned out the background hum of things unsaid. It was only recently that I summoned up the courage to ask her if she had spared me a more brutal response. She explained that the reasons she gave were genuine but that the deciding factor had been risk – and the risks would always be greater for black women. The animus she’d attract from trolls and anti-feminists would comingle with racism, while some strands of black activism would inevitably label her a sell-out.
WE represented a leap in the dark and, while she trusted Sandi and me, she couldn’t be sure how the party would evolve around us. After working at the Guardian, she knew that organisations sometimes mistake good intentions for good practice. I also hadn’t factored in the economic hit she’d take in spending time party-building. If we asked her now, she might be more inclined to say yes, she added kindly.
There were other barriers to overcome. Some people who came on board kept their support quiet because they were members of parties less enlightened about collaborative politics. Even so, every day brought a fresh crop of outrageous talents to my kitchen table. This, we realised, is what politics might be if it weren’t such a narrow club. All the candidates WE has fielded so far are new to politics, extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily different to each other. The steering committee crackled with ideas and energy.
Even in this crowd, Sophie Walker was an obvious standout. I had invited her to speak on equal parenting at our first ever public meeting. She held the attention of the room in a way that only natural communicators can do. In April 2015 the steering committee elected Sophie leader. The vote was unanimous and unanimously enthusiastic. In August, on the day she came to work at the party full time, leaving a job at Reuters to do so, she and Sandi and I lined up for a joint portrait in the King’s Cross offices of the Guardian.
We might have been re-enacting the ‘Class Sketch’. First performed in 1966 on David Frost’s satirical TV show, The Frost Report, the skit featured tall, gaunt John Cleese peering down his nose at the shorter, stockier comedian Ronnie Barker. ‘I look down on him, because I am upper class,’ Cleese says. Barker returns his gaze: ‘I look up to him, because he is upper class. But …’ He swivels to stare at five-foot-nothing Ronnie Corbett. ‘I look down on him because he is lower class. I am middle class.’ ‘I know my place,’ deadpans Corbett.
Sophie, at well over six foot and skinny, is Cleese to my Barker and Sandi’s Corbett. Stand us next to each other, and the effect is pretty funny. Some of our critics laughed at us, rather than with us. They depicted the Women’s Equality Party as a joke and the joke was that we were all middle class. ‘Sandi Toksvig’s Women’s Equality Party is a middle-class ladies’ campaign group doomed to fail,’ read one headline.
That neatly summarised