A woman’s place

Susanna Rustin, a journalist at the Guardian for more than twenty years, is a keen observer of the debate between “gender critical” or sex-based rights feminists and those who advocate the rights of trans people. In a timely book aimed at the general reader, Sexed: A history of British feminism, she explores this issue by taking the long view of feminist struggles and achievements, from the late eighteenth century up to the present day.

Rustin’s view is that sex-based rights are “fundamental to feminism”. Girls and women, she points out, are more likely than boys and men to be victims of sexual violence, online abuse and pornography; women have experiences that are biologically based, such as giving birth and gynaecological cancers; and women are typically poorer than men, Black, Asian and ethnic minority women being among the poorest in British society. Women’s lower status and wealth, it is argued, cannot be tackled without taking their sex into account.

This once uncontroversial view is now being challenged by trans rights activists who argue that it is gender identity, rather than biological, sex that makes a man or a woman. Gender-critical feminists reject such a view, claiming that biological sex is immutable. In the UK the Gender Recognition Act 2004 enabled adults to alter a birth certificate to their acquired gender if it was signed off by a panel comprising doctors and lawyers, and the Equality Act 2010 embraced gender reassignment as a protected characteristic, together with sex, race, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief, pregnancy or maternity, and marriage. However, some argue that the Gender Recognition Act does not go far enough, and that self-identification rather than medical evidence should be the basis for gender reassignment. Linked to this, states Rustin, is the aim of making self-declaration a “new social norm” so that individuals can decide whether they participate in women’s or men’s sports, or are placed in a men’s or women’s prison or a refuge for women escaping domestic abuse.

Although these issues have arisen internationally, it is in Britain that the debate has been particularly angry. Labelled “terfs” (“trans-exclusionary radical feminists”), gender-critical feminists who defend their views have faced severe consequences: Kathleen Stock resigned from her job as professor of philosophy at Sussex University after strong student protest, while Selina Todd was cancelled as a speaker at an event in Oxford to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the National Women’s Liberation Conference. Rustin pays close attention to the case of Maya Forstater, a researcher who appealed successfully against the loss of her job at the Centre for Global Development. The employment tribunal, which ruled in her favour, established that gender-critical views are protected as a belief under the Equality Act 2010, although it was also stated that the judgment did not permit misgendering transgender people with impunity. It is to understand why the “pushback” against the emphasis on gender identity rather than sex has been so pronounced that Rustin has written this book.

She begins her story with Mary Wollstonecraft, who, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argued that in order for women to claim their right as rational creatures, they had first to “obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex”. This would involve challenging the false notion that women would be “unsexed by acquiring strength of body and mind”. Some thirty years later, early socialists such as the Irish-born Anna Wheeler, who left her heavy-drinking and violent husband, echoed some of these views. Wheeler believed that a more equal reordering of society would necessitate an end to the sexual hierarchy in which men were dominant within family life. Rustin places her at “the centre” of the first efforts to conceive of an autonomous women’s movement.

The aristocrat Caroline Norton, a successful poet and novelist, also experienced domestic abuse in her marriage and left her husband, George Norton, a barrister and MP for Guildford. Beautiful and witty, she was involved in one of the most scandalous family law cases in the nineteenth century when her estranged husband bought a suit against the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, alleging adulteryNorton lost the case, but Caroline’s reputation was damaged, and she became a determined advocate for legal reforms for mothers and wives. She won increased parental rights for mothers and took up the cause of married women’s property rights – under the doctrine of “coverture”, the legal personhood of a wife was subsumed under that of her husband, so he owned any money, property or wealth that she brought to the marriage or subsequently acquired.

However, as Rustin discusses, it was particularly from the 1850s that progress was made, with the emergence of organized feminism such as the Langham Place Group, led by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Bodichon, with like-minded friends, campaigned for an end to coverture, which was as unjust as child custody and divorce laws, and for women’s education, employment and suffrage. Together with Emily Davies she co-founded a college to prepare women for entry into higher education, which in 1873 became Girton College, Cambridge. Davies was of the view that Girton students must follow exactly the same syllabus as men, otherwise they would be judged inferior. Anne Clough, on the other hand, who became mistress of Newnham, another Cambridge women’s college, considered a separate curriculum a necessity, as her students were intellectually ill prepared to study the same subjects as men. Despite academic successes, it was not until 1948 that the University of Cambridge finally awarded women degrees on the same terms as men.

The double sexual standard had long been a concern in the Victorian women’s movement, and matters came to a head with the introduction in the 1860s of the Contagious Disease Acts, which gave the authorities power to carry out genital examinations of women suspected of being prostitutes – but not of the men who visited them. The campaign to repeal the acts, finally achieved in 1886, was led by Josephine Butler, a committed Anglican. Yet not all women’s rights campaigners shared Butler’s outlook. As Rustin explains, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, one of the early female doctors with an interest in public health, opposed the repeal campaign. Nonetheless, despite such differences of view, there was a powerful ethos of female solidarity among the activists.

For Rustin the most dramatic episode in the history of the women’s movement was the struggle to win the parliamentary franchise. The denial of the vote was the “greatest obstacle” to women’s full participation in society and the “clearest sign of their subordinate status”. It did not matter if you were a duchess or a maidservant – no woman, because of her sex, was allowed to vote. There were two main wings of the movement. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which included men as well as women, was led by Millicent Fawcett, who insisted that the suffragists should engage in peaceful, law-abiding campaigning. She was critical of the more confrontational “militant” tactics of the suffragettes of the separatist, single-sex Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903 and led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter, Christabel. Yet it was “militancy” that made the issue known throughout the land and embodied a rebellion against the submissive and inferior position of women who were expected to politely ask for their democratic right rather than demand it. Success came in 1918, when certain categories of women aged thirty and over were granted the vote, then 1928, when women won equal enfranchisement with men.

Rustin suggests that the women’s movement was largely moribund in the later twentieth century until the arrival of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, which, with the slogan “The personal is political”, set out a list of demands including equal pay, equal educational and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free 24-hour nurseries. There were tensions between separatist radical feminists and socialist feminists about whether patriarchy was the big problem for women or capitalism, while Black, Asian and lesbian feminists raised questions about racism and sexuality. Despite such differences, much was achieved. In Rustin’s words, “women’s liberationists changed Britain”. Yet by the 1990s the women’s movement was more fragmented, with the word “gender” rather than “women” seen as a more progressive lens than sexual politics for challenging inequalities.

Rustin gives a spirited defence of sex-based women’s rights activism, exploring the differing tactics adopted as well as the internecine quarrels. Inevitably, in the broad sweep of history covered here, some chapters are stronger than others. Nor is there any reference to the abuse and hate crimes that trans people have suffered. (I think of the brutal murder in 2023 of the transgender schoolgirl Brianna Ghey). Nonetheless, Sexed: A history of British feminism reminds us vividly that so many of the women’s rights we take for granted today are the result of sex-based activism that our foremothers bravely fought for, usually in the face of strong male opposition.

The power imbalance between men and women still exists today, especially in the rising tide of violence against girls and women. Susanna Rustin concludes that she is certain “an accommodation” can to be found between “feminists (and gay men and lesbian women), who want their sex-based rights to be upheld, and transgender people, who want their gender identities to be respected”. Surely in Britain’s mature democracy we can embrace such diversity and end the fierce exchange of views between all involved parties?

June Purvis is Professor Emeritus of Women’s and Gender History at the University of Portsmouth

The post A woman’s place appeared first on TLS.