British feminism needs a history lesson Labour politicians have exposed their amnesia

Here the human sex categories got all sticky with gender fluidity and began to melt in the heat, to be replaced by a more pleasingly non-binary configuration: always-lipstick, never-lipstick, and sometimes-lipstick. “Consent” became a magical substance, changing objectively awful behaviours into things that are actually fun and liberatory for women, and we all could live happily ever after — or we would have done, had the dark triad of the Pope, Vladimir Putin, and pesky gender-critical women on Rainy Fascist Terf Island not banded together to mess it all up.

Into this yawning intellectual chasm comes a new book by Susanna Rustin, Sexed: A History of British Feminism. In the introduction, Rustin — a social affairs leader writer for the Guardian — sets out her stall: to explain why defences of sex-realism and sex-based rights have been so “pronounced” in the UK, relative to other Anglophone countries, by placing them within a tradition of British feminism reaching back to the 18th century.

Though with some qualms about the branding, Rustin is herself sympathetic to the sex-realist, gender-critical cause. This fact alone would make Sexed a symbolically important book, irrespective of its quality: to find a writer apparently at the heart of the modern Establishment Left, yet who unambiguously rejects transactivist talking points and insists on the political importance of sex, is a rare thing indeed. Luckily though, the book is also impressive in its scope and erudition. The narrative zips along faster than the King’s horse heading for Emily Davison, and elegantly compresses a lot of detailed information about important figures, trends and themes into a relatively small space.

I read Rustin’s book with Roy’s injunction against taking the past as another branch of the present firmly in mind, and yet the book’s content made it hard not to draw parallels with the contemporary moment — and presumably, that is part of its point. Indeed, at times, I wondered what the second (or third, or fourth) wave of feminism had actually been for, exactly, since every possible position in feminist logical space seems to have already been occupied before 1940. From the 18th century onwards, as Rustin tells it, there was robust discussion among British women about whether minds as well as bodies had a sex; whether biological sex difference should be politically prioritised or ignored in advancing women’s interests; whether being in the domestic sphere was limiting or valuable for women; whether there was too much of a focus in feminism upon the preferences of child-free types, or conversely, upon those of mothers; and whether advancing women’s rights was in tension with wider class-based or race-based interests.

Almost as soon as Darwinism appeared on the scene, George Eliot noticed, well in advance of 20th-century feminist critics, that some aspects of its framing were latently sexist. Later Virginia Woolf — whose statue in Bloomsbury now comes with a QR code warning viewers of her objectionable opinions — would observe that sexist arguments generally were often accompanied by claims about the naturalisation of certain traits. And in 1932, nearly 60 years before Butler, Woolf’s biographer Winifred Holtby suggested we should replace talk of sex altogether with talk of “gender” since, as Rustin paraphrases her, “the former was too weighted down with the kinds of biological connotations that dragged women down”.

The many fascinating women who each get to shine for a few pages under Rustin’s scrutiny seem up to date in other ways too. In 1854, educationalist Barbara Bodichon records her love of wild swimming, writing that she had partaken with a friend in a lake “in the most utterly crazy Dianalike way with no Actaeon save a mountain mutton or two who came and stared and thought we were literally two very odd fishes’”. In the early 20th century, MP Eleanor Rathbone was, like many today, worried about “a legal fiction” — albeit one which gave husbands enhanced parental rights rather than potentially bestowing an official sex change upon them. And back when BBC Women’s Hour first started on the radio in 1946, it seems that it had men on — plus ça change. Meanwhile, in a cautionary tale for present members of Just Stop Oil, we are told that Mary Richardson — the suffragette who, in 1914, attacked Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver — “went on to hold a senior role in the British Union of Fascists”.

With the exception of Richardson perhaps, the toughness, cleverness, and collaborative pragmatism of British women fighting on behalf of other women throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, in deeply belittling and often abusive contexts, comes across as truly impressive — whether or not they called themselves “feminists” or agreed on background political frameworks (they often didn’t, on both counts). And in fact, although Rustin does not sanction such a heretical thought, by the time I arrived at her section on the Sixties and Seventies, things seemed to me to be going downhill.

Suddenly everyone was consciousness-raising like mad — treating the new craze imported from the US as if groups of women had never discussed their circumstances and feelings together before — and becoming subtly beholden to a more volatile sensibility in the process. Despite the undoubted political and legal gains of this period, there was a growing shift of emphasis that looks ominous in retrospect: a move towards internal feelings and “subjectivity”, and a fixation with how women were being culturally represented at the expense of other pressing concerns.

Not everybody liked it: Barbara Castle harrumphed that women in the Seventies “should find a cause bigger than themselves”. And although Rustin doesn’t really mention it, there was another unwelcome development during that period, also following the US: feminists tearing chunks out of one other, based on hierarchical perceptions of privilege plus whatever other personal resentments were bubbling under. In 1976, the American version of this was memorably documented in a piece by Jo Freeman in Ms. magazine, on feminist “trashing”.

At one point in her narrative, Rustin describes how, in the Seventies, “a series of meetings in Brighton was headed ‘How Do We Oppress Each Other?’ and aimed to explore the barriers between women in groupings such as mother/non-mother, lesbian/heterosexual, working class/middle class, young/old, black/white, intellectual/non-intellectual and quiet/vocal.” She seems to think this was a welcome development; to me it sounds quite unlikely to improve group morale or political efficiency. It’s difficult to imagine the lively, eccentric characters from earlier periods of British activism putting up with such elaborate requests for guilt-ridden self-flagellation, and they seem all the more refreshing for that fact.

Here in 2024, circular firing squads within what passes for feminism are now legion; and British gender-criticals are habitually hectored, insulted, screamed at, and worse, for the ways in which “cis women” are supposed to have power over that other, more testosterone-pumped kind of woman. In the approach to the election, various Labour politicians including Keir Starmer have exposed their own historical amnesia about how exactly things got this bad, insinuating that the threats and aggression have flowed equally from each side, and ignoring the fact that senior members of the party have played an instrumental role in getting us here.

But the last chapters of Rustin’s book, bringing British feminism into the recent present, tell a different story. We hear of one party member being physically shoved out of a room at party conference in which she had been peacefully handing out leaflets against self-ID; of the Labour conference fringe meeting in Brighton where fellow conference-goers blocked the entrance, threw water over participants, and kicked the windows throughout (I was there); and of a pledge signed by nearly all candidates for the Labour leadership and deputy leadership, describing gender-critical groups Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance as “hate groups”.

If anything, Rustin substantially underplays the extent to which the party has betrayed the thousands of gender-critical women that once were members or voted for them: leaving out, say, Starmer’s betrayal of his own MP Rosie Duffield, or his refusal to meet with veteran feminist author and campaigner Joan Smith to discuss single sex space. Olivier Roy may be right that we often erroneously treat historical figures as modern ones; still, sometimes even the most modern of figures seem like very convincing throwbacks.

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Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

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