Growing up as a 90's kid, the 'liberal feminism' of the Spice Girls era was a dirty word. Cultural conservatives, who dominated the airwaves then as they do now, lambasted the perceived decadence of Gen X and millennial women. But the opinion of the radical feminists who taught me political and social science at university wasn't much better - they lamented then, as they do now, the superficiality of many modern day feminists who take the victories of the past for granted. Paradoxically, the version of woman-centric politics embraced by the vast majority of both women and men was treated by most commentators as politically irrelevant, and beneath serious notice.
Liberal feminism gets a bum rap. It's lack of a political edge is precisely why it’s so ubiquitous in culture. I suspect, though I can't prove, that the anti-feminist politics of the 2000s stems in part from the relative invisibility of liberal feminism, in a way that both prefigured and reflected the broader populist backlash against the neoliberal assumptions of the era. But as with modern liberalism as a whole, liberal feminism is a richer intellectual tradition than it's often given credit for and offers a coherent - if perhaps insufficient - response to the problems facing women as individuals under capitalism.
It’s not all bad
Liberal feminism shares all the same features, faults, history and values of liberalism as a whole. It would be incorrect to simply stereotype ‘libfems’ as a superficial modern gloss on an older, more radical tradition - an inferior copy, branded and corporatised. Liberal feminists including Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill (yes, that JS Mill) long preceded the twentieth century, but fought for the fundamental rights of women using arguments and tactics that were considered extreme for the time. For all its contemporary blandness, liberalism was once a radical tradition – indeed, THE radical tradition. We may have reservations about the extremism of Lenin and friends - but the bolsheviks learnt how to be revolutionaries from liberals, sometimes literally.
Liberal feminism, like many ideologies that grew up in and around the current Western cultural and ideological context, is fundamentally oriented around answering the central paradox of that ontology: if all people are in some sense supposed to be equal, how is it that some are more equal than others? At its best, egalitarian feminism argues that sex and gender are arbitrary social categories and that social rules, norms and structures should be set up in such a way that these categories play no role in outcomes for individuals. Wherever there is evidence that individuals and groups do not experience broadly equitable outcomes, laws and social programs should be put in place to rectify the disparity. So far, so Rawlsian.
But liberalism is a broad church. Many mainstream feminists, particularly of the white, upper/middle-class variety, are centrally focused on equality of opportunity and concern themselves with more equitable representation at the highest levels of government, corporate and cultural power. Rather than quotas and viewpoint diversity being a necessary remedy for structural inequality, they become an end in themselves. But this blindspot is shared by all liberals, for whom an open and broadly representative ruling class is more important than questioning the existence of ruling class in the first place. Like all liberals, libfems can be shockingly dismissive of or tokenise the concerns of poor women of colour and ignore entirely the issues facing women in developing economies.
At its more conservative leaning end, we even find 'classical liberal' or self-described 'equity' feminists – such as Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers – who focus on freedom solely in the negative sense: so long as legal, state discrimination is impossible (a battle won, they claim, by the suffragettes), then everyone is responsible for their own fate in life. Whether naivete or willful blindess, the effect is the same. And, similarly, a shallow, libertarian emphasis on personal choice can produce a feminism that is consumerist and marketed as a lifestyle ‘girlpower’ brand while reinforcing existing gender relations.
Radicals and Liberals
Radical feminists, including myself, who operate within universalist traditions claim that the social position of women cannot be understood solely as a deviation from the liberal universal ideal - an error, soon to be fixed. Rather, patriarchy – a social hierarchy of subordination based on sex and gender – is universal to the human experience and exists outside of capitalism – it significantly pre-dates bourgeois economics and has been seamlessly incorporated into it. This gendered social structure has to be critiqued in order to understand the social roles of men and women: it’s a feature, not a bug. Of course, radicals disagree – often vehemently – as to whether the patriarchy is orthogonal and unrelated to other economic and political structures, whether it strictly co-evolves with them (as socialist feminists and social reproduction theorists hold), or whether those structured interact in complex and multifaceted ways (i.e. intersectionality, the broadest conceptual approach). But all agree that liberalism can't – or won't – deal with this more fundamental inequality. on its own.
Excluded from this typology are the anti-liberal feminists - the sex essentialists and difference feminists - who believe that there are intrinsic differences between men and women, and that the goal of feminist politics is not to eliminate or alleviate those differences, but to organise politically on the basis of sex in order to obtain power for women as a group. This is a shallower and more pessimistic form of identity politics, which shares significant similarities with both reactionary understandings of gender, and other supremacist formations who seek defence against, dominance over or separation from other groups. There's a reason beyond just their common enemies why TERFS/gender critical feminists, conservatives and lesbian separatists often work together – it's because they share common beliefs about the essential nature of sex and the incommensurability of gender categories. But individual men do not oppress individual women: rather, men and women (but mostly women) are both defined by and oppressed by a social structured (‘patriarchy’) that is created and enforced by both men and women (but mostly men).
Feminist politics and ideology is complex, and often seems like a labrinthine minefield to those, such as myself, on the outside looking in. It may be that this attempt to understand its various currents through the lens of other philosophical traditions is reductionist and incomplete. But for me, at least, it’s been helpful to understand how feminism relates to the broader struggle.