Rebecca Felton doesn’t get much attention these days, which some might find curious. She was the first woman to serve as a US senator, and a life-long political activist. That would usually make her worthy of celebration as a pioneer.
Trouble was, the political cause she was most passionate about was not women’s suffrage for which she fought for decades, but the lynching of black men. She was in favour of it. A fanatical white supremacist, she argued that giving black men the vote would flood society with vicious savages. Should the state fail to act against this menace, she urged Southerners to: “…lynch a thousand black men a week if necessary to protect women’s dearest possession.”
You can’t help but think of Felton when you observe the progress of imperial feminism in the West — a distinct phenomenon in which a simple model of liberation purveyed by liberal feminism is fused to notions of Western supremacy and firepower.
That’s not a new thing. Felton wasn’t the only first wave feminist/racist. Heroines like Virginia Woolf, Beatrice Webb and Marie Stopes were all racialists and eugenicists, identifying non-white men as a particular threat.
Second wave feminism, allied with civil rights and class struggles, pretty much got rid of that. Now one strand of third-wave feminism, detached from any larger notion of human liberation, has recrudesced.
The most recent example has been Virginia Haussegger’s contribution to the IQ squared debate ‘Has feminism failed?’ — a stupid topic, generating bad debate, since there is clearly no one single thing called ‘feminism’ anymore. Haussegger used her time to give a summary of global violence towards women, before ringing the bell with a couple of favourite clichés:
“Traditional, cultural practices that assert male authority will always disadvantage women. So why do we kow-tow to them? Why are we so ready to adopt a lazy, cultural-relativist position?
“…for a growing number of the world’s women, their freedoms are at serious risk. And feminism remains deathly silent.”
Ah yes, those damned cultural relativists, so omnipresent they don’t need to be quoted. And feckless first-world feminists, writing about shoes.
To deal with the second matter first. When imperial feminists say that feminists ignore non-Western women’s oppression, they usually mean that they don’t write it or act on it in the way they’d like.
There’s an obvious wealth of work going on — for one example, off the top of my head, take a look at Zed Books ‘gender’ catalogue, which features around 30 books on the topic, most of them connected to activist campaigns. Why ignore them? Laziness or deceit on the part of commentators who suggest that there’s no engagement — and a difficulty with the fact that such books don’t advocate wars and burqa bannings as easy solutions.
The cultural relativism stuff is more interesting. One culture Haussegger doesn’t touch on in assessing violence against women is ours: once again murder and assault of partners and others by white Western men is seen (or not seen at all) as a bunch of characterless crimes, when they are clearly motivated by warped beliefs in male right. But another one is Aboriginal Australia, where violence against women is sky-high. Vanuatu gets an extended treatment, homegrown violence passed over in silence.
In answering why this might be, we can touch on that rare beast, actual cultural relativism. After all, Haussegger has previously called former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson “breathtakingly insensitive” for mentioning “images of Aboriginal rapes and little girls being drowned and petrol-sniffing teenage criminals and drunken Aboriginal men s-xually abusing babies were flung out at the audience” during Rudd’s apology speech in 2008. Insensitive? Sounds a bit PC, but who would come out against Aborigines? Here’s another example:
“Instead, the Middle Way has always been about ensuring Tibetans maintain a connection to their culture: to their language, traditions, beliefs and their Buddhist heritage. And it is clearly Tibetan Buddhism that confounds the Chinese the most.
“Since invading Tibet back in 1951, China has tried desperately to shake, squeeze and smash the spirituality out of the people…”
Yes, Tibetan Buddhism inevitably gets a free pass in the cultural relativism stakes. Despite the fact that it regards women as inferior, — by TB doctrine Lamas are never reincarnated as women — practices female infanticide, and female house slavery, TB is spiritual. Haussegger’s attack on the under-education of women doesn’t find space to praise China’s efforts, which have seen education levels rise towards gender parity, most particularly in areas where Lama dominance is weakest.
So it goes on. The specific exclusions are all Western — a discussion of rising childbirth death rates fails to mention the Bush government’s refusal of aid to NGOs who give abortion advice as part of their services — the obsessive focus people we can bomb (the Middle East) or control (the Pacific).
Haussegger’s work isn’t an isolated instance, as I’ve shown before. By exclusion and silence, it not only makes its main achievement the legitimating of war, it renders invisible the systemic nature of Anglo/Caucasian/non-Islamic violence against women.
It is actively and utterly complicit in normalising it, and helping it disappear into the background — and the failure of a number of female commentators to make this basic link is appalling. Is feminism failing? Imperial feminism is — the house ideology of an unreflective Western elite, lost among the power and the prayer-bells.
A complex and difficult discussion. This is a huge issue…. with so many strands that need to be teased out. The dilemma of not being a hypocrite when discussing this or any complex issue, is real.
Why did Nicole Kidman have to apologise for trying to blow into a didgeridoo? Isn’t it sexist to not allow women to use that instrument? But isn’t it culturally insensitive to the traditional indigenous, to have a woman do that?
Why do we (or why don’t we) speak up for women in other cultures in our own nation, who suffer oppression under the hands of their men? Some “defenders” of such women are actually quite racist and using the women as a way to have a dig at a whole people group. And some who are silent are unsure how to be culturally sensitive and still speak up for women’s rights at the same time.
And as Guy says: why do some avoid talking about what white Anglos do to their women?
If we really believe in equality, does that lead us to ignore concerns for cultural identity? How do we get other cultural groups to embrace full equality between the genders in practice? (A journey the white Aussie is still on, we should note).
If we don’t work on getting everyone on board with full equality in all ways, despite culture or ethnicity, … isn’t it demonstrating some kind of racial tiering, when we decide to leave some women out of the discussion under the excuse of allowing cultural diversity?
I find this discussion impossibe to resolve. I wonder of others will have insights worth hearing?
Almost all feminists recognise and reject all religious beliefs and organisations which all discriminate against women. Roman catholics, protestant churches which are constantly lobbied by activists such as Muriel Porter, jewish religious customs which discriminate against women, the muslim religion and discriminating customs, all aboriginal religions and cultural practices such as not letting women blow the didgeree do whereas women blow lots of musical instruments.
Women in Australia successfully lobbied the Rudd Government to provide aid to overseas family clinics overturning the so-called Harradine restriction. The Obama administration has also removed restrictions against giving contraceptive advice.
The Gillard government via Foreign Minister Rudd has promised aid to try to lower the appallingly maternal death rate in third world countries. Female circumcision is illegal in this country and condemned by feminists everywhere.
Feminism hasn’t failed but there are still huge areas of concern which we are facing and fighting. Thousands of years of male domination takes time to change.
Amending the Corporations Act to ensure that all public companies have at least 40% of women directors is another step towards equality in the workplace.
We hope that men will start to listen and learn to change.
A little confused as to the core message of this article.
If the essential message is that we should be equally condemning domestic violence in Australia and honour killings overseas, for example, since they are both pressing gender issues, I completely agree.
But drawing a link between Virginia Hausegger, some third-wave feminists and white supremacists seems to send out another message, namely that there are some feminists that are racist imperialists. For me, this actually overreaches and detracts from the importance of the first message.
Thanks for the article Guy. In response to Akane’s comment I think it is the first idea, but as often happens Guy blasts off in other directions. Why do some Western feminists feel it is a quasi-religious duty to save the women of the world? some of them are doing it for themselves and in their own way. Reading the titles of some recent Iranian feminist writings made me wish I could read farsi.
Returning to Australia soon I am once again thinking of a dominant paradigm in our own culture, that of booze-fuelled random violence by young men. And that’s just the obvious one.
This (whatever it is) IS a big topic, needs a big canvas with some smaller pictures carefully drawn.
As for the hyper-real tragedy in our world: the abuse of children – sex and slavery to snuff movies, that’s another canvas entirely.
Ahane
Well, clearly some current feminists are imperialists – the late Pamela Bone, Julia Gillard and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were and are fervent supporters of the war in Afghanistan (and some of the war in Iraq) which were unquestionably imperialist. Furthermore, using – as they and others such as Tony Abbott do – the oppression of women to justify the war, yokes those two together.
No, I’m not accusing them of racialism, or even racism. But when you do a global survey of violence against women, and leave out white western society, the emphasis can’t help but shiftonto the race, rather than the gender, of the perpetators.