There have always been divisions between women who are apparently working towards shared liberation. Divisions between suffragists and suffragettes, between colonisers and the colonised, between working-class and middle-class women, between those against and those in favour of pornography. But recently divisions among women have become bitterly depleting and many have confided in me how exhausting they find this. One Black woman in her 60s who co-founded an organisation for migrant female survivors of violence said to me recently about the women’s movement in Britain: “We’ve lost our way. There used to be a vision that brought women together. It wasn’t just about personal advancement or separate communities. I don’t know if that still exists.”
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Social media takes so much of the blame for these widening divisions. It’s true that feminists, just like everyone else, find that anger is rewarded online. Intransigence results in more attention, more clicks, more followers. Debates around the place of transgender women in feminism became particularly wounding and destructive due to the outrage spiral of social media. And once women have sparred in that polarised online world, it becomes harder and harder to come together to campaign, even for the most important goals.
But while divisions online are obvious, offline, women are still building alliances, brick by brick. These alliances may not be as immediately visible to outside observers, but I believe that they are quietly growing.
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This work to improve ordinary women’s lives has taken on new urgency due to the rise of the far right, which is capitalising on women’s sense of insecurity to drive forward ever more divisive politics. In Belfast, Elaine Crory at the Women’s Resource and Development Agency has been working for many years to support women in the face of male violence. She now sees the rise of the far right as the “single biggest issue making things worse for women. It is distracting people from fighting the patriarchy and making the situation less safe for women.”