Surely if we successfully dismantle the patriarchy, the biggest structural injustice of all, other structural injustices must also begin to crumble. Surely a more gender-equal world will be a more equal world in other ways too.
Yet from the start of WE, easy assumptions frayed. Our first steering committee meeting took place at my central London flat, in my kitchen. We sat around an extendable table owned by my family since 1933, when my widowed great-grandmother started dealing antiques from her front room in a Chicago suburb during the city’s Century of Progress International Exposition (a World’s Fair with the motto ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Adapts’). The table tells a story not just of female entrepreneurship, but of comfort. My middle-class family, émigrés to the US, not refugees, lived in homes large enough for such a table.
There were ten of us at the first steering committee meeting. Not every woman (and neither of the men who joined us) had been born to the same level of advantage, and none of us had problem-free lives. Between us we wrestled with disability, physical and mental health issues, had experienced racism, homophobia, ageism and abuse. Still, we all enjoyed the luxury of political activism. Entry to the steering committee rested on two qualifications: an enthusiasm for the idea of the party and a commitment to getting it started. Many women are too busy with low-paid work or unpaid caregiving to spend time trying to fix the problems of women in low-paid work or unpaid caregiving. Our participation in the committee defined us as an elite, and we knew that to build a representative party we needed to be a representative party at the core. It would take us longer to appreciate the scale and complexity of that task.
As the committee recruited additional members, and culinary contributions became more elaborate, we had to look for other venues. The size of my table wasn’t the issue. Mandy Colleran, an actor and activist, used a motorised wheelchair that could not navigate the narrow doorway to my flat. Other members volunteered to host, but every alternative venue revealed structural impediments that able-bodied residents hadn’t appreciated. A lift in one apartment block proved too small. Another disabled committee member offered her flat but its front steps defeated Mandy’s chair. There are degrees of disability as there are degrees of inequality. Many impediments are visible only to those whose path they block.
Mandy is a coruscating speaker, painfully and often hilariously direct in her opinions. She spoke up at our first public meeting and again at the second, held at Conway Hall, since 1929 the home of the Ethical Society and a fulcrum of liberal activism. Its CEO, Jim Walsh, had quickly decided to support the nascent Women’s Equality Party by making the auditorium available to us for events at low rates with deferred payment. Unfortunately, Conway Hall’s precarious income and listed building status meant that, although it is fully accessible for audience members in wheelchairs, there is no ramp to the stage. We decided against using the stage for that event and anyone who wanted to speak did so from the floor. Sometimes equality is about finding a level that works for everyone. A lot of the time, it’s more complicated than that.
At first we plundered our own address books to grow the party but our London base risked a London bias. It has been exciting to watch the idea spread to other parts of England and to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and in each context to define different sets of priorities within our unified commitment to change. Committee members’ combined circles encompassed a wide range of professions and experiences, even if they were a little heavy on entertainment, media and politics. My friends and contacts came in all shapes, sizes and flavours. If asked, I might well have described them as diverse.
That’s because it’s easy to misunderstand diversity. One friend, a senior figure in the media, explains it well. He is hugely talented, but knows that the fact he ticks some ‘diversity boxes’ made the companies that employed him look good without actually challenging their culture. He speaks and acts like a member of the establishment club despite a mixed-race heritage and comprehensive-school background. He learned to minimise differences, to put people, including people like me, at ease. ‘Frankly, as one black friend who has risen a long way in politics put it to me, we don’t frighten the horses,’ he says. The point he is making is that for organisations to benefit from diversity, be they corporations or political parties, they must accept and value the discomfort of difference. It’s pleasant when your colleagues agree. It’s often more productive when they challenge.
Diversity isn’t always visible, and, as my friend pointed out, visible diversity is by no means enough, but it does matter. Groucho Marx famously sent a telegram to a Hollywood club: ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.’ Most people aren’t by instinct Marxists. They care to belong only to clubs that appear to accept them.
Women aren’t just excluded from politics by a lack of time and money. Many are put off by the way it looks and sounds because they cannot see or hear themselves in its monotone braying. In launching a political party that took as one of its core objectives the equal representation of women – that itched to throw open the doors of public institutions and of private enterprises not just to more women but to a wider range of women – we needed to ensure we didn’t replicate the deficiencies of the existing system. This couldn’t be just a party for friends and friends of friends, for like-minded people who felt comfortable together. We had to incorporate visible and invisible diversity, to attract the widest possible engagement, and to engage as an organisation with all of those perspectives.
One form of diversity you can’t see is that of political allegiance. By having people of divergent political persuasions around the table and opening our membership to members of all other democratic parties, we intended to identify the tracts of common ground between those parties on gender equality, and either work with them or, by winning votes away from them, spark them into copying our policies.
It wouldn’t be enough to be a broad church – and we were anyway unlikely to become one – if we failed adequately to address the issues that divide the women’s movement within itself and from other movements. ‘When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose,’ wrote American academic and civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1992.1 She had coined a term, ‘intersectionality’, to describe the ways in which disadvantages such as race, gender, class, religion and age intersect and intensify, and she also proposed frameworks to enable collaborative and mutually beneficial advocacy among disadvantaged groups. Her observation was both true and prophetic, in good ways and bad. America’s 2016 elections highlighted deep splits among female voters, and the sharpest related to race. Ninety-four per cent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton; 53 per cent of white women voted for Donald Trump.6 Black women needed no coaching to understand the dangers a Trump presidency represented to them. Large numbers of white women succumbed to a cocktail of ingrained misconceptions and prejudices. They – we – are taught throughout our lives that white men have a grip on power and wealth and that the easiest way to share in those benefits is to align with them. We are inculcated with the lie that equality is like a cake: if you take a piece, there is less for me. We also absorb the propaganda that calls into question the abilities of our own sex to lead, just as we will all have picked up racist attitudes.
No wonder feminism divides along these lines – and how urgent it is that white women learn, fast, to recognise where our true interest lies, in building a world that