The return of “wait your turn”

“The history of feminism,” writes Helen Lewis in Difficult Women, “is a history of women being assured their cause is valid — but told to wait their turn.” This is true up to a point. At times — perhaps particularly in recent times — it’s been a history of women being assured their cause is selfish, exclusionary, fascism-adjacent, and ordered to shut the hell up. 

Both these examples, you might have noticed, do not come from “the right” — or whatever one wishes to call the side of the political spectrum traditionally associated (by the left, at least) with sexism. As feminists have long known, the battle for women’s liberation has to be fought on several fronts. There are those who don’t want it at all; those who do, but think other battles matter more; and those who have managed to reshape it around their own priorities to such an extent that actual feminism — the kind that might take away your “right” to porn, sex and babies, and deny you your all-important self-validation — can be cast as antithetical to creating a better world. 

The anti-feminism of the left might be said to oscillate between “wait your turn” and “silence, bigots” responses. Accusations of privilege — the suggestion that women who focus on women’s issues don’t understand the bigger cause, and that their feminism ignores or even hurts the most marginalised — often provide a bridge between the two. This is not to say that privilege cannot play a part in how some women picture (and seek to enact) the liberation of women as a class. Nonetheless, this argument frequently offers an alibi to those who wish to wrest feminism from the hands of actual feminists, recasting the assertion of boundaries as “exclusion’”and the withdrawal of services as “being unkind”. 

In Emily Callaci’s newly published history of the Wages for Housework movement, the author describes an Italian cartoon from the seventies, in which a man looms over a rag-doll woman, declaring that “until there is a revolution, and, consequently, the abolition of class, the liberation of women is not possible”. “This,” writes Callaci, “was the maddening refrain of so many leftist men the world over, whenever their female comrades brought up the subject of their own liberation.” It combined with a tendency to treat the sexual harassment of said comrades as “simply part of the struggle — to complain about it was to impose bourgeois ideals of respectability on the working class”. 

Half a century later, it can sometimes feel difficult to argue that much has changed. Freeing women from taking on an unfair proportion of unpaid labour — let alone changing how we understand and value this labour — is still not seen as a major priority (as I point out in my book Unkind, “progressive” men such as Alistair Campbell feel very comfortable joking about not doing their fair share, in ways they would never do so about “more important” social justice issues). Women might have a point — but it’s not a very important point, even if, as the sociologist Kathleen Lynch observes, leftist men who refuse to get too involved in housework or care work are choosing to be complicit in “upholding a capitalist system from which there are net beneficiaries relative to women of their class”. 

Because not doing the dishes, or changing a nappy, can be cast as trivial, it’s easy to shove it into the ‘wait your turn’ category. Easy, too, to cast any woman who protests as a whiny, privileged Karen who’s too busy whinging about the laundry to want to tackle real injustices. One of the problems women face, I think, comes from the way in which small, petty, selfish decisions on the part of some men — not to help with the housework, not to stop using sexist language, not to stop expecting service and compliance — lead to women’s responses being cast as equally small, petty and selfish. It all becomes a small, petty, selfish issue, not worth wasting anyone’s time — at least, not until after the revolution. 

As with housework, so, I fear, with sex-based rights. With this issue, thanks to the persistence of ordinary women, we are at least starting to see some retreat from the “silence, bigots” anti-feminism of recent years. What worries me, though, is the way in which this whole issue — which, like housework, has an enormous impact on women’s everyday lives —– may end up being repackaged as a ridiculous one, one where feminists sort-of have a point but not one that’s really worth fussing over. Such a position has been foreshadowed by years of referring to it as part of “the culture wars”, as if expecting a single-sex space in which to undress or a consistent word for “woman” were really a niche matter or a distraction as opposed to something absolutely fundamental. 

A recent Guardian review of Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar’s forthcoming book, presents the thesis that “the lower orders have abandoned class war for the culture wars”: “Accordingly, more and more of them spend their weekends not on the barricades but behind computer screens, fuming over small boats and gender ideology”. I get the somewhat patronising point. A minority of the powerful maintain their power by redirecting the resentments of those who might challenge them onto less powerful minorities. But is this a fair summation?

It will take years to undo the damage done by the institutional capture achieved by trans activists

“Fuming over gender ideology” implies something silly, misguided, an imaginary, abstract concern. That much of this “fuming” has been related to the very real consequences of pretending sex is changeable — seen, for instance, in the Cass Review, the Edinburgh Rape Crisis scandal and the current employment tribunal of nurse Sandie Peggie — is overlooked. Because the demands of trans activists are, like the behaviour of the man who won’t do housework, in many ways laughable — by not letting me use your changing room, you’re denying me the right to exist — the “trans debate” can be recast as not very serious at all. This offers a neat way of backtracking for those who, like Sarkar, have spent years suggesting that women who defend sex-based rights are bigots. Maybe they’re not bigots after all … but anyhow, why are we even discussing this while the richer are getting richer? 

It will take years to undo the damage done by the institutional capture achieved by trans activists. It would be foolish for any feminists who got caught in the crossfire to expect an apology. It matters, though, that this is not written off as just a silly episode when too many people got obsessed with something utterly unimportant. Some on the left will want to save face — and perhaps we must give them the space to do so — but seemingly small things (pronouns, the dirty dishes) lead to yawning gaps when it comes to sex equality. Already, “this is bad, but it’s not the main thing” — doesn’t it matter more that women’s sports and rape crisis centres are properly funded? Can’t saying “no” to men wait until later? — is being offered as a supposed compromise. But why should women wait at all?

“Wait your turn” is better than “silence, bigots”. Even so, it remains a way of telling women that their concerns are unimportant, if not selfish when there is real work to be done. The return of this tactic is something we need to look out for in the coming years. Come the revolution — or the apocalypse — everyone will know what a woman is. It remains to be seen whether she’s moved any further up the queue.