07.09.1995

Radical feminists?

US mother of reaction adopted by feminism

THIS WEEK saw the formal opening of the fourth UN women’s conference at Beijing. The last such conference in Nairobi in 1985 set a target for equality between the sexes by the year 2000. As the new millennium rapidly approaches, this target now looks fantastically utopian.

The entire conference will be devoting itself to the struggle for ‘empowerment’, the feminist buzzword of the 1990s.

While this may well sound radical, the reality is somewhat different. In the hands of the assembled delegates, ‘empowerment’ turns out to mean forging an illusory “communality of interests between all women” and a striving for individual self-fulfilment. Any awareness of the need for collective mass struggle is absent.

The thoroughly hypo-critical nature of the conference was made clear by the enthusiastic support for Hillary Clinton’s intervention on Tuesday.

Hillary Clinton represents and supports American capitalism - a system which exploits the mass of its population ruthlessly and reduces the working class to poverty. The stark inequalities in American society fall heavily upon women, many of whom are denied even basic rights like abortion and childcare. US imperialism has viciously maintained its role as the world’s policeman, stunting the development of numerous ‘Third World’ nations. Clinton’s words are hollow and false. 

The key slogan at the ‘What women want’ conference back in London was “Doing It Herself” - you could even buy expensive sweatshirts with this uplifting message. One of the most prominent photographs was of a smiling African peasant woman, positively’ digging up a field with a pickaxe.

Suitably, pride of place was given to The Body Shop banner. One can only deduce that what women really want, and need, is to become successful entrepreneurs - and ‘liberation’ will automatically follow.              

It is painfully obvious that the UN women’s conference will not help bring about the emancipation of women, the bulk of whom are either peasants or semi-rural workers. Indeed, the conference only dramatically highlights the extraordinary extent to which feminism has been incorporated into mainstream bourgeois ideology. The same fate has afflicted ‘anti-racism’ as well.

Danny Hammill