There is more to gender equality than making money. Four writers talk feminism, race, capitalism, and the appeal of some good, sexy class analysis.
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Forty years before Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, there was Sheila Rowbotham's Woman's Consciousness, Man's World.
Hailed by Simone de Beauvoir as one of the most interesting feminist thinkers of her era, Rowbotham didn't always think of herself as a feminist. Growing up in 1950s England, she associated the word with "frightening people in tweed suits with stern buns," but she was always countercultural, drawn first to the bohemia of the Beat movement, and later to the moral certainty of Marxism.
Within these movements, Rowbotham began to think critically about her experience as a woman. She reeled at the socialist men who "solemnly told everyone that drugs and drink and women were a capitalist plot to seduce the workers from Marxism," and the passivity of the ideal Beatnik "chick," who was "serene and spiritual … with a baby on her breast and her tarot cards on her knee." But she also felt a sense of solidarity with the women she encountered, from girls "with no academic protections" who earned their financial independence by dancing in clubs, to Beat women who organized "co-operative sewing schemes" for artists. "They weren't like me," she writes in Woman's Consciousness, Man's World. "But they were enough like me in a different way for me to respect what they were doing."
By the end of the 1960s, the both the U.S. and British Left were in a state of fractious expansion, as the burgeoning black power and women's liberation movements demanded a new politics that took into account identity and difference. Rowbotham was at the forefront, co-organizing the landmark National Women's Liberation Conference, held at Oxford in 1970.
Courtesy Verso Books.
In Woman's Consciousness, Man's World, first published in 1973 and re-released by Verso books last month, Rowbotham brings her feminism and socialism together, arguing that capitalism shapes and upholds the gender divide: Men's earning power depends on having someone, typically a woman, do a whole lot of unpaid work in the home. (In recent decades, that housework and child care is increasingly done by immigrant women and women of color for low wages.)
Rowbotham's critique of capitalism is scathing, but she also acknowledges that capitalism provided the conditions for second wave feminism to emerge. Liberating technologies like the Pill — and the capitalist philosophy of the self-actualized individual — enabled women and children to be seen as people with their own rights and desires beyond the family unit.
In an age of #GirlBosses chasing a vision of success defined by men who relied on the support of stay-at-home wives, Rowbotham's arguments feel both provocative and immediate, calling into question some of the sacred cows of 21st-century pop feminism. So I called three of my favorite young feminist writers, Laurie Penny, Reni Eddo-Lodge, and Jacob Tobia, to talk about what we might learn from Rowbotham's work today — from the new wave of feminist consciousness raised (sometimes painfully) over social media, to the problem with measuring gender equality in the bank account balances of America's richest women.
—Rachel Hills
