In January 2019, three radical feminists and a detransitioner (a person who previously identified as transgender) spoke on a panel titled “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left.” Some British feminists flew to the United States to attend the event and support the speakers.
Both the speakers and the British women were subsequently denounced for “allying with the right.” Why? Because the venue for the event was the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. Never mind that the event was initiated by Katherine Cave, founder of the non-partisan organization The Kelsey Coalition, or that Cave had been searching for speakers and a venue for four years. As Julia Beck, one of the panelists, said in an interview with Meghan Murphy for Feminist Current:
Cave spent four years searching for anyone willing to speak publicly about how “gender identity” impacts children and their parents. She asked every left-leaning think tank she could find, but they either flatly refused with accusations of “transphobia”, or simply did not reply. Eventually, Cave and WoLF worked together to plan a panel of left-leaning people to speak at The Heritage Foundation. …
At the beginning of 2019, no other platform with half as much political influence as Heritage even dared to challenge the status quo, and that remains the case today.
Beck’s description suggests that The Heritage Foundation was a last-resort venue for women desperate to start a conversation about a topic they considered politically urgent. The backlash against those women suggests it would have been better for them to not have the event at all, if they could not find a left-wing venue to host it. Even now, six years later, the backlash continues. Beck was denied participation in the 2025 FiLia conference on the basis of her involvement in the event.
The general claim that tends to be made during these flare-ups is that feminists should not work with the right (ally with the right, get in bed with the right, etc.). That the left owns minority groups—in the sense that the left, exclusively, champions the interests of minorities and is for that reason owed the allegiance of minorities—appears to be an unquestioned assumption of our current political life. This, in turn, gives rise to the sense of dissonance created by individuals who are both members of minority groups and have right-wing views: the Black social conservative; the gay ultra-nationalist; the female libertarian; the impoverished enthusiast for capitalism. This same dissonance exists for women and feminism, creating a default assumption that a feminist is a left-wing woman. We don’t make a distinction between left-wing feminists and feminists; it is assumed that we don’t need to.
It is long past time for this assumption to be challenged. Once we get a grip on what it means to be a feminist, it is easy to see that there is just as much of a question of whether feminists should work with the left as with the right.
Who Can Be a Feminist?
Feminism is work for women.
It is not work for people, some of whom happen to be women. Advocating for more social housing or a Universal Basic Income or more lenient prison sentencing doesn’t make you a feminist. These projects might all be good for everyone, but that something is good for everyone doesn’t make it feminist. Team-left activism isn’t feminism, because team-left activism (like team-right activism) is for everyone, and feminism isn’t. This is not to slip from a broad and intentionally pluralistic definition of feminism into defense of a specific type of feminism. Rather, it is to define feminism in a way that makes sense of the built-in reference to women. My efforts to define feminism have landed here:
Feminist:a person who works for women’s equality (whether of outcome or of opportunity), women’s individual self-determination, women’s liberation, or women’s interests (as the person understands them, whether or not that is also as they are); or who works against male dominance.
The socialist feminist is not excluded by this definition, because the socialist feminist (if she really is one) works for women’s interests. The socialist (whether she calls herself a feminist or not) might be excluded, if she only works on projects that are good for everyone. We can work for women and prioritize the worst-off women, without slipping into working for people and prioritizing the worst-off people but calling that “feminism.” That’s not to say people should not work on the “everyone” projects, but it is to say they’re being misleading when they present that as feminist work.
Women have a “common plight.” We are a class. That class contains women from across the political spectrum. It makes absolutely no sense to say that a movement in the interests of all women can be fought only by team left-women on team-left women’s terms. That would be like the black liberationists saying that the movement for black liberation could be fought only by black Christians on black Christians’ terms. Or that the fight for lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights could only be fought by college-educated gays on college-educated gays’ terms.
If minority groups do not owe each other adherence to a particular viewpoint, then minority group liberation projects cannot be controlled by those with a particular viewpoint—no matter how frequently they are. If team-left feminists care more about team-left than about women, that is their prerogative: they should make that clear to other feminists by calling themselves existing terms like “socialist feminists” or “Marxist feminists,” or adopting a new term like “left-prioritizing feminist,” “Labour feminist,” “Green feminist,” etc. They should give women-prioritizing feminists every opportunity to avoid working with them, given their different and potentially conflicting priorities.
Once we acknowledge that women from anywhere on the political spectrum can be feminists, and that making a moral/political distinction reveals there to be far fewer women we must not work with than previously imagined, the question of strategic alliances becomes much clearer. When should any of us work with someone whose priority is not women (as women)? What if we know that a woman works both for women and for a political team, but she puts her team first?
For all the loud proclamations that feminists should not work with the right, there is a real question of whether feminists should work with the left, in the specific form of left-prioritizing feminists, because when there is a tension between what is good for women and what is good for team left, the left-prioritizing woman will choose team left. (And similarly, right-prioritizing feminists will choose team-right). Many cases will not be this clear-cut; maybe someone’s priorities are not fully clear even to themselves, or they think that different projects are fully compatible when they are not, because they have not yet faced a hard choice between them.
A Return to Primitive Feminism
Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist who understood early on that feminism was not a left/right issue. In her paper “Woman-Hating Right and Left,” presented at a conference in 1987 and published in the 1990 edited collection The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, she wrote, “I think as feminists we have a way of looking at problems that other people appear not to understand. To name names, the right and the left appear not to understand what it is that feminists are trying to do.” The left at the time admitted the problem but denied its importance; the right denied the problem. Feminists “try to understand how we are going to fight male power,” and both the left and the right uphold male power in different ways:
The right wing will promise you a husband whom—yes, it’s true, you have to obey him, but then he has to love you for doing it, for obeying him. Now, there are circumstances—like the ones we live under—in which for a lot of women that’s not a bad offer. Because you cut down the number of men you have to listen to by several million.
And the left says—and they think this is a good deal—they say… to us—“Well, what we’ll do is that we will allow you to have an abortion right as long as you remain sexually accessible to us. And if you withdraw that accessibility and start talking this crap about an autonomous women’s movement, we will collapse any support that we have ever given you: monetary, political, social, anything we have ever given you for the right to abortion. Because if your abortion right is not going to mean sexual accessibility for us, girls, you can’t have it.” And that’s what they’ve been doing to us for the last fifteen years.
Feminism targets male supremacy, and men from across the political spectrum believed in male supremacy, they just differed as to its source: “God or nature.” As Dworkin put it, “God is the right; nature is the left.” Left-wing men will talk about evolution and innate sex differences; right-wing men will talk about God’s creation of men and women as different and complementary.
Resisting male power requires bringing women into feminism, including “women you have nothing in common with. It means active, proselytizing dialogue with women of many different political viewpoints because their lives are worth what your life is worth. That’s why. We have to go past the conventional political barriers, the lines that the men have drawn for us.” Dworkin says that it suits men to segregate women by politics, because “if the girls on either side talked to the girls on the other side, they might just find out that they’re being screwed the same way by the same kinds of men.”
One of her examples in the paper is of men from both left and right working “to keep women subordinated through… pornography.” The right used obscenity laws to “keep pornography a secret from women but to keep it available to men.” Obscenity laws told pornographers what not to do so that their porn would remain available. Left-wing men provided “socially redeeming material” that met the standards set by the right-wing men. And so:
you have this extraordinary social agreement between the right and the left—who act as if they’re fighting all the time—that in fact they can put any amount of woman-hating exploitation, torture, viciousness, or savagery in their magazines, just so they wrap it in a piece of writing that will meet the standard the Supreme Court set. That’s all they have to do. They barely have to be literate to meet that standard. And they do this together. And if you let them distract you by the public cockfight they’re always having, you miss the fact that when it comes to producing the social product called pornography, they agree.
Left-wing men also, Dworkin says, talk a big game about “the free market of ideas,” and mean, in the end, women. “They mean women being objectified in pornography, being used in pornography, being exploited in pornography. That’s the ‘free market of ideas.’ And the ideas look strangely like us. We’re the ideas, and they’ve got a free market in us, folks. And they do have a free market in us.” Both the right and the left want women to accept the status quo. She concludes:
I would like to see in this movement a return to what I call primitive feminism. It’s very simple. It means that when something hurts women, feminists are against it. The hatred of women hurts women. Pornography is the hatred of women. Pornography hurts women. Feminists are against it, not for it.
Dworkin’s point could be made for more than pornography. When something hurts women, feminists are against it. They’re not against it only if it fits into team-left politics. (The same goes for team right-politics). They’re not against it only if team-left women are hurt by it. (The same goes for team-right women.)
Feminism is not political tribe first, women of the political tribe second. It is women first.
Excerpted from Feminism Beyond Left and Right, by Holly Lawford-Smith, published by Polity. © Holly Lawford-Smith, 2025. Reproduced by arrangement with Polity.
