Feminism and/in the Left: Beyond the 'Unhappy Marriage’

Heidi Hartmann’s (1979) characterisation of the relationship between feminism and the Left as an ‘unhappy marriage’ remains influential. In the context of current efforts across Europe to reconfigure left party politics in response to the rise of the populist right, and high profile instances of sexual violence and gendered discrimination in many sites left-wing politics, we think it timely to revisit and update Hartmann’s analysis. Our paper is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we develop a critique of Hartmann’s concept of the unhappy marriage and its two associated models of the eternally happy fusion of distinct actors or their permanent separation and divorce. We advocate instead a more polyamorous metaphor of multiple, multidimensional and complex relationships between feminists and potential allies on the political ground of the Left. In the second part, we apply this modified conceptual lens to three very diverse sites of left politics in contemporary Scotland: the Occupy protest camps of 2011, the Radical Independence Campaign in 2014, and the Scottish National Party in 2015. Drawing on interview and archival research, we show that the position of feminism within the Left in contemporary Scotland remains highly variable, depending on material, ideological and strategic factors. We conclude that the relationship between feminists and their allies on the Left should be neither romanticised nor demonised. Rather, each case needs to be approached anew, with feminism-left relation understood both as inescapable and as continually open to negotiation and contestation.