Feminism is an anti-Working Class Movement
Britain should be celebrating the centenary of a democratic victory in which the majority of British citizens gained the right to vote. Despite this being an important historical event that is worth commemorating, the event has so far been entirely about the enfranchisement of middle class women. The media and those institutions marking the Representation of the People Act seem uninterested in the fact that 40% of men (including most soldiers) could also not vote until 1918. Once again another area of people’s history has been hijacked by elite feminism pushing its own narrative. Contemporary feminists are claiming that the extension of the voting franchise was a victory for feminism which is still being portrayed as a radical, anti-establishment ideology. However the history of the suffragette movement only proves that feminism has always been dominated by upper class women and the movement was as intertwined with the establishment and far removed from the working class as it is today.
This not to say that there are no working class feminists or that the women’s movement did not do positive things for working class women. But the role of working class women in feminism has been obscured by the upper and middle classes that dominate the movement and have always used in to further their causes which largely do not represent or benefit the working class. The current third wave that is obsessed with identity politics, intersectionality and a brand of vicious, paranoid, misandry could only have been created by radical academics, activists and journalists who are completely removed from the working class. Moreover, this ideology does not even represent women, is does not represent the working class and certainly does not represent anyone outside of the over represented movement which is now being driven by social media.
Life for working class women was quite different from that of women in higher classes, unlike these women the women of the lower classes had always belonged to the work force and mostly shared the same life experiences as the men around them. For these reason working class women never developed the resentments and need for competition with their male counterparts. The upper and middle class women who dominated the leadership of the suffragette movements in the early twentieth century were hardly motivated by class oppression, but by resentment towards the privileged men of their class. The long held feminist obsession with capturing the positions of power and prestige enjoyed by a minority of men can be directly traced back to this. Of all the women in the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union only Annie Kenney (1879–1953), was from a poor, working class background. It was this organisation that had gone from being radical and anti-establishment and then adopted a jingoistic, pro-war position during WWI.
It was the First World War where the marriage of interests between the state and the nascent feminist movement really began. Christabel Pankhurst, the daughter of the socialist lawyer Richard Pankhurst and leading suffragette Emmeline was one the most militant and ruthless in this cause. A supporter of militant action and forced to live in exile to avoid arrest, Christabel was the most radical of all the Pankhurst family and her background made her an unlikely belligerent jingoist. Like the radical feminist heirs who would succeed her, Christabel had no interest in working class women and regarded any focus on their issues as a hindrance to the women's’ movement that she correctly believed would be better served by appealing to the influential women of the upper and middle classes. In 1907 Christabel who ran the WSPU as autocratic tyranny — severed ties with new Labour Party after it adopted support for universal suffrage. The WSPU favoured the exclusionary, property owning qualification that middle class men had and wanted it extended to women. This prompted a split with the left-leaning and pacifist Women’s Freedom League being established as a counterweight to Christabel, though it is now less known.
At the start of First World War Christabel Pankhurst turned the faction of the suffragette movement she represented into a propaganda wing of the British war effort. At her public speaking events she was the voice of full blown war mongering, jingoistic fanaticism. As well as extreme anti-German propaganda she demanded the internment of all enemies including women and children, the complete military conscription of all young men, the blockading of even neutral nations and demanded the dismissal of ministers she considered too moderate. Such was her extremism that even the government became alarmed and tried to rein her in. Her most successful action was the white feather campaign (a symbol of cowardice within the British military tradition) to publicly shame young men in civilian clothes. It was these upper class women who served the interest of the state’s war effort to recruit more men about whose deaths they cared nothing. Emmeline Pankhurst even travelled to Russia in 1917 in a government supported effort to keep Russia in the war despite the horrific casualties on the eastern front where the male peasantry were being sent into battle with little more than sticks or even without boots.
Not only did the suffragettes not represent working class women, the issue of universal male suffrage has been written out of the carefully constructed myth of feminist history. One could be forgiven for believing that all men always enjoyed the right vote, but the male franchise that had been extended in stages throughout the nineteenth century, was only universally achieved in 1918, the same year women won the right. The majority of men who served in the First World War would not have qualified to vote and the majority of those who died in action died without ever being able to vote in an election. By the 1920s Emmeline and Christabel had completely renounced their socialist backgrounds, being pro-war and pro-empire they became supporters of the aristocracy and the Tory party. By contrast Sylvia Pankhurst who had opposed the war and wanted to include working class people in the women’s movement was denounced and expelled from the WSPU.
Forty years later the Marxist influenced, second wave, feminism that has influenced most contemporary feminists still persists though it has evolved into an even more radical yet oddly reactionary faze. Media feminists focus on the positive achievements such as the Equal Pay Act and broadening of women’s employment opportunities while downplaying the infiltration of the movement by the extreme far-left. Despite all of this it was not working class women who benefited from second wave feminism. It was the move away from agriculture and manufacturing to a services based economy that brought middle class women into the workforce for the first time. It was when these women entered the workforce en masse that the demands for ever more secure, comfortable and prestigious jobs for women were made. This was the beginning of equality of outcome, gender quotas and affirmative action. Again this was designed to benefit the women of the upper classes and to be highly selective in what fields of employment women’s ‘equality’ was to be achieved.
Another underlying prejudice against the working classes is the deeply middle class neurosis over sexuality with a particular fear and hatred of male sexuality. Here one can see how the feminist distaste for the sexual culture of the working class is re-packaged as what is supposedly wrong with male sexuality in general.
The attitudes of feminist activists such as Kate Smurthwaite, who react with characteristic humourless and prudish dismay at working class behaviour, demonstrate this perfectly. Men out on a stag party are described as being ‘terrifying’. Middle class women having to see groups of rowdy, young, working class men, engaging in vulgar banter is ‘traumatic’. In feminist speak this obviously just translates into the men are “trivialising sexual violence”. The only way to deal with it — she advises, is to avoid eye contact and to try and not to attract their attention as if they were threatening dogs off their leashes. Then there is Lily Allen who is now more famous as a leftist twitter activist, who tweets about the need to ban sports and also approvingly retweeted an absurd statement from professional race-baiter Lee Jasper, that Pakistani grooming gangs learned their crimes of sexual abuse from white working class men. The loathing of the working class by elite feminist, media personalities could hardly be more obvious.
It is not just stag parties that are the target of feminist scorn, football, lad’s mags, pick-up artists and ‘online misogyny’ are all rolled into one great big spectre that is called ‘toxic masculinity’. But underneath all this is the underlying issue, which is that elite, middle class feminists can barely hide their contempt and loathing for the working class and white working class men in particular. Everything identified as ‘toxic’ in ‘toxic masculinity’ is just behaviour associated with the culture of the working classes. Branding it toxic masculinity just avoids having to call it “toxic working class behaviour”. In doing so feminists and their allies on the left can continue to claim that feminism is a grass roots, peoples cause. The reality is that it is an elitist movement dominated by the upper classes having not just the ear of the establishment but having its full unwavering support.
The gang of academics, students, journalists, and women’s advocates demanding ever more perks, privileges and selective equality of outcome for women hardly represents all women. It is a deliberate tactic to benefit women of the upper and middle classes while paying lip service to the values of equality and claiming to represent all women. Feminism is not a movement for and by the oppressed and the marginalised; it is an elite ideology to benefit women of the upper classes. The power that feminism has in most western societies is because it is the voice of elite and influential women. This is not to romanticise the working class or pretend that aspects of working class culture are beyond criticism, however if feminism truly was a movement inclusive of the working class or genuinely challenged the establishment the upper classes would likely not want anything to do with it.
