No Woman Left Behind? Comparing Feminisms in English Left Politics

This paper offers a comparative analysis of different articulations and manifestations of feminism in left-wing party politics in England and Wales. In so doing, it asks the following questions: in what ways is feminism expressed and articulated across different sites of left politics? How can we make sense of internal debates and disagreements within specific sites of politics? And what role do feminisms play in sustaining broader political divisions on the English left? We tackle these questions via 3 case studies – the Green Party, the Labour Party and Momentum (a movement aligned with Labour but which encompasses a variety of forms of left activism). All of these sites have seen determined efforts to articulate and enact various forms of left-wing feminist politics, but the precise manifestations of feminism across the three sites are rather different. The Green Party’s feminism is close in content and tone to the kinds of grassroots, often student-led, feminist activism that have emerged in recent years, stressing intersectionality, trans inclusion and supportive of decriminalisation for sex workers. The Labour Party’s feminism, by contrast, tends to focus more overtly “woman-focussed”, oriented toward improving descriptive representation of women in representative institutions and tackling violence against women, but more ambivalent about trans politics and intersectionality. Momentum, while organizationally closer to the Labour Party, articulates a vision of feminism closer to the Greens, sometimes with an added dose of more “traditional” socialist feminism interspersed. These competing visions of left feminism reflect, we argue, broader uncertainties and debates about what precisely a “left feminism” should look like, and how it fits in to broader understandings of left politics and activism. Finally, we argue that these divisions between different flavours of left feminism are often quite polarised, playing a key role in sustaining some activists sense of party/organizational loyalty.