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Title: Anarchism and Feminism
Author: Ruth Kinna
Date: 2017
Language: en
Topics: anarcha-feminism
Source: Retrieved on 8th November 2021 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320858354_Anarchism_and_Feminism
Notes: Published version in Nathan Jun (ed.) Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy. Thanks to Raffaella Bianchi, Kathy Ferguson and Bice Maiguashca for enormously helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Ruth Kinna

Anarchism and Feminism

Introduction

The conjunction of anarchism and feminism can be understood in multiple

ways and in anarchist movement politics the intended meaning is neither

fixed nor always specified. Anarchist feminists might be anarchists

sympathetic to feminism or feminists for whom anarchism is a necessary

corollary of their politics. They might equally regard anarchism as a

vehicle for feminism or reject feminism as antithetical to anarchism, a

commitment to the “first women’s bank in New York, and a lot of things

within the system.”[1]Some anarchist feminists argue that anarchist

feminism is only one of a multitude of anarchisms with adjectives.

Unusually, however, the prefix takes a number of different

forms—anarcho-feminist, anarcha-feminist, anarchafeminist. Questions of

meaning are further complicated by the association of anarchist feminism

with other descriptors. The introduction on the anarchalibrary site

argues that the “emphasis is on gender,” adding that anarcha-feminism

“is not a sect of anarchism like anarcho-syndicalism of

anarcho-primitivism, for an anarchafeminist can have affinity with these

and other sects.”[2]

It is sometimes argued that the meaning of anarchism is grasped

instinctively—”you know it when you see it,” Uri Gordon says.[3]

Anarchist feminists often work in a similarly intuitive way, linking

anarchist feminism to the commitments of those who self-identify and/or

to individual practice perhaps more than is usual, even in the case in

anarchism, where sub-divisional tagging is customary.[4] One response to

the “what is” question is:

That’s a good fucking question, and one I’m not sure how to answer

exactly. All I can tell you is what it means to me. Anarcha-feminism is

diy, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, sex-positive,

anti-homophobic, trans-positive, queer, anti-ageist, pro-woman, pro-kid,

powerful, anti-police, anti-prison, revolutionary, transformative, lots

of cake, lots of fun, direct action, confrontational, personal,

political, collective, zine-loving, free, grass-roots.[5]

The advantage of this approach is that avoids representative claims and

the attribution of labels. An activist interviewed by Judy Greenway in

the 1970s expressed the thrust towards anti-representational practice as

“an equal right to express herself but no one else can speak for

them.”[6] In the same vein, the eighties Montreal magazine BOA ( Bevy of

Anarchafeminists) removed the tag from its cover in order to avoid

co-opting “the women who contributed to the magazine by attaching a

label to them that they didn’t choose for themselves.”[7] Intuitive

understandings also defend practice over theory-based approaches to

politics. Lynne Farrow’s “disinterest in theoretical speculation”[8]

reflects a deep-seated anarchist suspicion of elitism and the rejection

of policy-focused or programmatic approaches to social change. Writing

in the 1970s, Farrow packaged a three-pronged rejection of Juliet

Mitchell’s “totalizing” Marxism, the aspiration to construct a women’s

liberation movement and the effort to apply social theory to the

analysis of oppression as markers of anarchist feminism. Denying that

the lack of “comprehensive theory” reduced anarchist feminism to the

venting of “a lot of little gripes,” Farrow argued that anarchist

feminism was linked to a new way of theorizing that was distinctively

“individualist” and “situationist”: rooted in the situations from which

perceived problems stemmed.[9] Elaine Leeder later pressed this critique

to question the nature of theoretical reasoning and advocate processes

which balanced conventional linear reasoning with experimental mosaic

patterning.[10]

The disadvantage of the intuitive approach is that it does not quite

capture the range of influences active on anarchist feminism.

Practice-based activism has exercised a profound influence on anarchist

feminism, but academic feminism has also played a significant role in

shaping contemporary anarchist feminist politics and, particularly,

anarchaqueer thought.[11] The identification of anarchist feminism with

movement norms also risks exaggerating the extent to which anarchist

practice reinforces feminist commitments. Sandra Jeppesen’s and Holly

Nazar observe that “the majority of anarchist men are (pro)feminist,

anti-heteronormative, perhaps queer or trans men themselves”.[12] Yet

the negative experiences of anarchist movement organizing suggest that a

greater number of anarchists misunderstand anarchism’s pro-feminist

politics and/or that anarchist principles lack clear articulation.

Anarchist literatures abound with accounts of manarchism. This describes

everything from a self-obsessed reflection on the burdens of anarchist

commitment[13] to the adoption of aggressively cis-gendered male

predatory behaviors, uninvited protectionism premised on norms of

dependency, sexual violence and the casual dismissal of gender

politics.[14] Bob Black’s “Anarchy: A Fable” captures manarchism’s nasty

spirit.[15] Even if activists disagree in their diagnoses of the causes

of anti-feminist anarchism and the complicity of women in oppression,

the widespread existence of domineering, violent and misogynist

practices in anarchist movements is widely acknowledged.[16] Indeed, the

claim that anarchist feminism is a tautology has become an important

point of departure for anarchist feminist critics of anarchism.

Unconvinced by this claim, Pendleton Vandiver explains the logic:

“[s]ince anarchy is opposed to all forms of domination, anarchy without

feminism is not anarchy at all. Since anarchy declares itself opposed to

all archy, all rulership, true anarchy is by definition opposed to

patriarchy, i.e. it is, by definition, feminist.”[17]

The recognition of anarchism’s shortcomings have stimulated a number of

important reflections about the nature of anarchist feminism. Flick

Ruby’s response to the solipsistic reasoning that Vandiver outlines was

to call for the adoption of a solid feminist consciousness to disrupt

the “comforting cushion” that anarchist men reached for when advancing

their well-rehearsed critiques of patriarchy and capitalism. Anarchist

feminism described a gendered behavioral program which encouraged men to

“take responsibility for the masculinity of the future” and required

women to rise above the oppressions of the past.[18] In 1980 Kytha Kurin

also argued for the absorption of feminist sensibilities in anarchism

but called for struggle against the structural causes of women’s

oppression, linked anarchist feminism to anarchist-communism and

anarcho-syndicalism.[19] A third view has prioritized organizational

practice and linked anarchist feminism to the creation of separate

spaces. Writing in Open Road in 1979, Elaine Leeder observed that mixed

groups of anarchist men and women lacked the “unique flavor and style”

of women-only feminist groups and that the principles espoused in

anarchist politics were profoundly compromised by the anti-feminist

behaviors of men who professed them.[20] A fourth response, centering on

failure of anarchist principles, encourages theoretical revision.

Discomforted by the suggestion that anarchism is somehow auto-feminist,

Emily Gaarder argues for the injection of feminist ideas into anarchism,

links anarchist failures to address the practical concerns of women to

the under-theorization of gender and patriarchy.[21] Stacy/sallydarity

similarly looks to Judith Butler, Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig, and

Collette Guillaumin to center gender theory in anarchist studies and

fill out anarchism’s anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical spirit.[22]

Acknowledging anarchism’s principled opposition to “all hierarchy and

oppression,” she sets out a “newer woman question” to fill the gaps in

anarchism’s default rejection of sexism by the adoption of “principles

specific to its emphasis on feminism” and by the drawing attention to

the “still necessary” task of making “gendered concerns... central.”[23]

These critiques of anarchism highlight some important tensions in

anarchist feminist thinking. Gaader’s proposal to theorize anarchism

through feminism is particularly controversial because it appears to

play down the concerns that some anarchists have expressed about the

value of “the intellectual arts,” to use Farrow’s term. This chapter

probes these tensions to examine anarchist feminism as a politics that

has emerged through critical engagements with both anarchism and

non-anarchist feminisms. As a current within anarchism, anarchist

feminism is rightly linked to the writing of leading anarchist women,

typically neglected in anarchist canons.[24] In different historical

moments anarchist feminism has also emerged simultaneously as a critique

of feminism and as a feminist-inspired revision of anarchism.

The argument presented here is that contemporary anarchist feminism is

contextualized by a powerful historical narrative which has both

marginalized anarchism within feminism and described feminism’s

intersection with anarchism as a transformative moment. These narratives

are described by wave theory. The first section gives an account of

feminist wave theory, to show how the boundaries of feminism have been

constructed in ways that are neglectful of, if not antithetical to,

anarchism. It then sketches two anarchist responses to wave theory,

showing how activists have sought to find tools within anarchism to

develop anarchist feminism or, alternatively, turned to feminism for

anarchism’s re-invention as an anarchist feminist politics. The final

two sections examine the impact of wave narratives on contemporary

anarchist feminisms and consider what the writings of prominent

anarchist women contribute to anarchist feminist thinking.

Feminism: Wave Theory and the Exclusion of Anarchism

In 1971 Sheila Rowbotham described the “rediscovery of our own history”

as an essential task of the British women’s liberation movement.[25] The

neglect of history was symptomatic of the disregard of women’s “specific

interests” and its rediscovery and retelling was an important part of

women’s empowerment, contributing to the advancement of those interests.

More recently Clare Hemmings has re-defined the task. The challenge she

sets is not to recover a lost history, as if it is possible to “tell a

full story about the past”[26] but to reflect on the ways in which

western feminists have accounted for feminism’s past.

Hemmings’ analysis is focused on feminism’s three, sometimes four phases

or waves. Waves are often located in time and place and described in

terms of their political character. Accordingly, first wave feminism is

usually said to have its roots in eighteenth century radicalism; in

America linked to rights discourses, fueled by abolitionist campaigns,

and in Britain, to demands for women’s education and employment and for

the liberalization of marriage laws. Both movements provided a platform

and rhetoric for women’s emancipation which galvanized the turn of the

century suffrage campaigns.[27] Sally Scholz’s introduction to feminism

dates the emergence of the second wave “somewhere between 1948 and 1960”

and the peak of the movement “from 1960 until the early 1990s.” Second

wave feminism is an American and European movement which shifted “the

scope of analysis to include aspects of women’s physical existence or

experience” and “sought solidarity among all women in the experience of

oppression.” Its watch word was “sisterhood.” Scholz treats each

subsequent wave as a generational shift:

By the late 1960s—spurred by civil rights activism as well as union and

student uprisings—feminist activity burgeoned in new directions and with

heightened vigor. Feminists seeing these developments as a “next

generation” of activism, called it the “second wave”. On this generation

model, “third wave” is generally understood to begin in the 1990s.[28]

While Scholz’s description assumes an identity of generational change

and activism, such that the public manifestation of women’s activism

indicates the surfacing of a new wave, the distinctive feature of

third-wave feminism is that it is associated with a theory-led break

with the past. In Scholz’s account the third wave is “characterized by a

rejection of the project of sisterhood in favor of diversity not only in

identity but in subjectivity and thought itself’. Equally, in the third

wave feminists jettisoned the attempt to apply “traditional political

theory” to women and instead worked on the elaboration of

“women-centered political theory.”[29]

Fourth wave feminism appears to be the most difficult to pin down.

Scholz labels it “postfeminism,” and defines it by an awareness of, and

resistance to, women’s objectification in global media and markets.[30]

In Kira Cochrane’s potted wave history fourth wave feminism is linked to

virtual networking.

This movement follows the first-wave campaign for votes for women, which

reached its height 100 years ago, the second wave women’s liberation

movement that blazed through the 1970s and 80s, and the third wave

declared by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter, and others, in the

early 1990s. That shift from second to third wave took many important

forms, but often felt broadly generational, with women defining their

work as distinct from their mothers’. What’s happening now feels like

something new again. It’s defined by technology: tools that are allowing

women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online.[31]

Wave theory is, of course, a convenient shorthand for a complex history

and it captures major changes in the complexion of feminism. But it is

not just that. It has also become a dominant frame for feminist

thinking, importantly structuring feminist theoretical debate. Nancy

Fraser’s account of feminisms waves shows how. Feminist theory, Fraser

argues, “tends to follow the zeitgeist.” In its second wave, feminism

emerged from the New Left and “reflected the still-potent influence of

Marxism.” It located “gender relations on the terrain of political

economy, reproduction, and sexuality.” There followed a move towards

identity and sexual difference. By the 1990s, “the New Left was only a

memory” and “most feminists theorists took ‘the cultural turn.’” No

longer focused on “labor and violence,” feminist theory was increasingly

taken up with issues of identity and representation. Choosing to ignore

the explicitly anti-neoliberal activism of feminist

anti-globalizers,[32] Fraser argues that social struggles were

subordinated to cultural struggles: “the politics of redistribution”

gave way to the “politics of recognition.” As a result, feminism fell

“prey to the zeitgeist” defined by neoliberalism.[33] Wave theory is

integral to Fraser’s efforts to revive “the sort of socialist-feminist

theorizing” that she links with the second wave.

For Hemmings these narratives of change are “motivated accounts” which

reflect the interests and investments of the writers.[34] By relating

the story of feminism in discrete waves, feminist histories have divided

the past “into clear decades to provide a narrative of relentless

progress or loss, proliferation or homogenization.”[35] Focusing on the

representation of theoretical currents within feminist thought, Hemmings

notes that western feminism

tells its own story as a developmental narrative, where we move from a

preoccupation with unity and sameness, through identity and diversity,

and on to difference and fragmentation. These shifts are broadly

conceived of as corresponding to the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and

1990s respectively, and to a move from liberal, socialist and radical

feminist thought to post-modern gender theory.[36]

The theoretical divisions that Hemmings highlights are precisely those

that Scholz and Fraser formalize, descriptively in Scholz’s case,

normatively in Fraser’s. Seeking to challenge their dichotomous

approach, Hemmings notes that the change from the 70s is treated either

as a shift from “naïve” essentialism, “through the black feminist

critiques and ‘sex wars’ of the eighties to ‘difference’ in the nineties

and beyond,” or as a regression “from the politicized, unified early

second wave.” Feminists in this latter camp (which might include Fraser)

plot the history of western feminism as a “loss of commitment to social

and political change” marked by “an entry into the academy in the

eighties, and thence a fragmentation into multiple feminisms and

individual careers.”[37]

Hemmings is interested in exposing the distorting effects of wave theory

and in showing how political theories are made rigid and how their

authors emerge as representatives of particular wave transformations. In

the realm of political theory, the effect of wave theory is to promote

the invention of what Kathy Ferguson refers to as taxonomies of

positions which fix the boundaries between schools of thought, ignoring

their continuities and intersections and the dynamic, creative tension

that emerges from the alternative strategies that feminists have adopted

in argument. From this perspective, the problem of wave theory is not

that it simplifies histories or ideas by their reduction since, as

Ferguson argues, reduction can be used to aid reflection and analysis.

Instead it introduces “stubborn and persistent” oppositions into

“thinking, writing, and acting.”[38]

Hemmings’ misgivings about the characterisation of post second wave

feminist political theory raise broader questions about the ways in

which these oppositions have operated in movement histories and in

accounts of women’s activism. Perhaps inevitably, given Hemmings’

caution about the possibilities of historical reconstruction, wave

theory bundles ideas, movements and practices together to produce

short-hand descriptors of “feminism” which are oppositional because they

are also exclusionary. Activists self-consiously riding the crest of

each new wave emphasize the novelty of their politics by locating

themselves in a history in which the memory of earlier radical campaigns

has been sunk. In 1978, reflecting on second wave feminism, Eva Figes

wrote, “we knew our message was radically different in style and content

from anything that had gone before — that women’s liberation would mean

men’s liberation and a whole new set of social and cultural values.”[39]

The possibility of finding any continuity with earlier feminist visions

was flatly denied.

While Hemmings warns against treating the discussion of waves (in

academic feminist theory journals) as evidence of their reality, it

seems that the political and conceptual debates that wave theory

historicizes have contributed to the writing of feminist histories, just

as they have contributed to the framing of feminist theory. According to

Laura Lee Downs, feminist historians active in the period of the second

wave embarked on the process of historical recovery by using frameworks

and approaches inspired by it. “Moved by and often engaged in

contemporary struggles around equal pay or abortion,” she argues,

activist scholars writing in the 1960s and 70s “searched the past in

those fields that seemed the most immediately relevant: the struggle for

the vote and for access to higher education, the history of women’s

industrial and agricultural labor, women’s struggle to attain control

over their own bodies and sexuality, the history of prostitution.”[40]

The politics of the second wave was similarly historicized. The two

dominant approaches to feminist history, Downs notes, were socialist and

radical. Socialist-feminists placed “understanding the articulation of

class and gender” at the forefront of analysis, “adapting terms and

categories of Marxist analysis—‘sex-class,’ ‘sex struggle,’ and

‘patriarchal mode of production.’”[41] Radical feminist historians

“foregrounded patriarchy” and argued that “all human societies divide

social space into dichotomous and gendered realms of public and

private.”[42] This approach, which Downs believes dominated in the U.S.,

“imported into ... research the fundamental political premise of

second-wave feminism, namely, that ‘gender is the primary source of

oppression in society and ... the model for all other forms of

oppression,’” including race and class.[43]

Jeska Rees’s research into the British Women’s Liberation Movement

reinforces Downs point: the construction of feminist history, Rees

argues, reflects the dominance of trends active within movements.

Whereas Downs identifies the imprint of a political division within the

feminist second wave between American and British feminist scholars,

Rees focuses on the battle for the soul of the British women’s movement.

Her contention is that “socialist feminism” has been “privileged” and

“radical/revolutionary feminisms denied feminist currency.” For Rees the

“trajectory of this historiography mirrors that of academic women’s

history as it has developed in Britain since the 1970s” and that this

“has been heavily influenced by socialist theory” and “produced a skewed

historiography in which radical and revolutionary feminists are not

represented in their own words, and where their ideas and practices are

often dismissed.”[44]

Echoing Hemmings’ concerns about the oppositions that wave theory

encourages in feminist theory Sally Haslanger and Nancy Tuana argue that

the exclusions associated with feminist wave histories are distorting.

Minority streams active within designated periods of waves are sidelined

in subsequent histories. In the U.S. case, they note, “the emphasis on

‘First’ and ‘Second’ Wave feminism ignores the ongoing resistance to

male domination between the 1920s and 1960s and the resistance outside

mainstream politics, particularly by women of color and working class

women.” The representative status given to movements that dominated in

the UK and U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shores up a

conception of feminism that is deeply Anglocentric. The identification

of waves “eclipses the fact that there has been resistance to male

domination that should be considered ‘feminist’ throughout history and

across cultures: i.e., feminism is not confined to a few (White) women

in the West over the past century or so.”[45] Failing to recognize the

cultural biases implicit in the modeling of feminism, wave theory

simultaneously underplays the international aspect of women’s activism,

the biases of the movements it privileges and, not least, the degree to

which “Western women and their organizations were embedded in colonial

and imperial projects.”[46] The analysis of Chinese feminism provides

another example of the problems that Haslanger and Tuana bring to light.

Important currents within Chinese feminist movements—pioneered by women,

some of whom identified as anarchist—were lost in histories that

searched for movements that followed the Western pattern.[47] The

association of first wave feminism with liberalism not only resulted in

the capricious dating of Chinese feminism’s origins but also in the

misattribution of its “systematic textual articulation” to the two male

translators of J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer.[48]

The purpose of setting out the problems of wave theory is not to argue

that waves have no foundation in social movement history. It would be

difficult to argue that suffragettes did not capture the political

ground in at the turn of the twentieth century and that feminists

critical of the suffrage campaigns did not recognize this. The

indifference of socialist party leaders to women’s movement activism,

Alexandra Kollontai observed, was derived from a dubious assumption that

the denial of rights meant that women were deemed far less valuable than

men as potential propagandists of proletarian liberation. She added that

the “success of the Suffragettes among women workers” was instrumental

in feeding this prejudice.[49] Nor would it be easy to deny that the

struggle for the vote in the late nineteenth century created divisions

within women’s movements that would have lasting effects on feminist

politics and the ways in which feminism was subsequently articulated. In

the late nineteenth century, bell hooks observes, the advantages that

some white women won in the course of suffrage campaigns shaped the

politics of feminism in the U.S. in significant ways. Black women in

America were caught in “a double bind.” The choice was either to

“support women’s suffrage ... allying themselves with white women

activists who had publicly revealed their racism” or to “support only

black male suffrage” and thereby “endorse a patriarchal social order

that would grant them no political voice.”[50]

However, in wave theory shifts in movement activism generate reductive

approaches to feminism that are not illuminating. Used as a frame to

tell a story about feminism’s history, wave theory not only elicits an

account of theoretical oppositions, constructed in ways that reflect the

interests and positions of authors, as Hemmings observes, but also

historicizes feminism in ways that elevate particular currents within

movements as definitive.

Anarchism is not the only casualty of wave theory. Conventional accounts

of first wave feminism typically airbrush Marxist feminisms from

debates, too, along with the extensive debates about androgyny, sex

slavery, varietism, and class-priority that the “woman question”

provoked in socialist circles in the 1880s and beyond.[51] But the

exclusion of anarchism from wave histories of feminism has left a mark

on anarchist feminist thinking. The impact of wave theory on the

emergence of anarchist feminism, as a contested politics within

anarchism, is evident both in the apparent neglect of anarchism during

the period of feminism’s second wave and by the convergence of feminist

wave theory with a corresponding second wave of anarchism. The result of

this convergence is that the politics of anarchist feminism pulls in

opposite directions, replicating major cleavages encapsulated by the

shift from second to third wave feminisms.

Anarchism, Wave Theory and the Emergence of Anarchist Feminism

The impact of wave theory on anarchist feminism is detectable in two

very different approaches to the conceptualization of anarchist

feminism. The first calls for the re-discovery of anarchism for feminism

and the second uses feminism as a lens for anarchist critique.

For many activists involved in campaigns organized during the period of

feminism’s second wave, the issue of anarchism’s exclusion from

narratives of feminism was not just about the narrowness of feminism’s

construction, but also about the eclipse of anarchism in socialism and

the drift of socialists towards forms of Marxism which anarchists

understood to be at odds with their own politics. In 1971, the same year

that Rowbotham counseled socialist feminists to interrogate feminism’s

past, a Chicago anarcho-feminist group vented its frustration with the

post-Soviet era domination of Marxism in socialist circles. The problem

of anarchism’s exclusion in feminism, the group argued, reflected the

general narrowing of socialism and the removal of anarchism from

accounts of its history. The group’s view, later articulated by

Melbourne anarchist feminists, was that “libertarian ideology” was alone

“capable of embracing a feminist world view.”[52] The Chicago manifesto

called for the rediscovery of anarchist histories to support the

necessary anarchizing of feminism:

There is another entire radical tradition which has run counter to

Marxist-Leninist theory and practice through all of modern radical

history—from Bakunin to Kropotkin to Sophie Perovskaya to Emma Goldman

to Errico Malatesta to Murray Bookchin—and that is anarchism. It is a

tradition less familiar to most radicals because it has consistently

been distorted and misrepresented by the more highly organized State

organization and Marxist-Leninist organization.[53]

During the same period, Peggy Kornegger similarly argued that the

disregard and distortion of anarchist politics explained anarchism’s

exclusion from feminism. The starting point for her celebrated essay,

reprinted in the seminal anarcha-feminist anthology Quiet Rumors, was

the realization that a “whole chunk of the past (and thus possibilities

for the future) had been kept from me.” Anarchism was not a ready-made

politics for feminists, but Kornegger observed an instinctive anarchism

in the grass roots associations, consciousness-raising and affinity

groups, workshops and networks[54] that anarchist feminists championed

and argued that feminists had something to gain from the conscious

awareness of feminism’s “connections” with a politics that “has been so

maligned and misinterpreted.”[55] Carol Ehrlich made a similar case.

Noting that “anarchism has veered between a bad press and none at all,”

she reiterated Kornegger’s point about anarchism’s general invisibility,

and used the subdivision of feminism into radical and socialist wings to

situate anarchist feminist as a horizontal, anti-authoritarian

alternative. “Unlike some radical feminists” anarchist feminists “do not

believe that power in the hands of women could possibly lead to a

non-coercive society” and “unlike most socialist feminists, they do not

believe that anything good can come out of a mass movement with a

leadership elite.”[56]

A second approach to anarchist feminism questioned the premises on which

this project was based. This current within anarchism has looked to

feminism rather than anarchism to conceptualize an anarchist feminist

politics. The deployment of a wave history of anarchism, corresponding

to feminist wave theory, significantly shaped this conceptualization.

In this current of ideas anarchism’s waves correspond to feminism’s

waves but they are described in particular ways. Specifically, whereas

feminist wave theory narrates a series of disruptions and political

revisions driven by feminist critique, the equivalent history in

anarchism tells a story of death and rebirth explained by political

failure. In contrast to the triumphant end of first wave feminism,

symbolized by the introduction of voting rights in Britain and America,

first wave anarchism finishes disastrously, eclipsed by the Bolshevik

revolution and subsequent dominance of Marxism, and defeated in

revolutions in Germany and Spain. The crushing of the Spanish anarchists

in 1939 not only signals anarchism’s first wave crash but also the

collapse of an ideology that was outworn. The highs and lows of

anarchism are tied tightly to the fortunes of western movements, just as

they are in feminism, and the theoretical shifts are presented as

starkly as they are in feminist histories. But the movements within

anarchism describe fundamental transformations. Above all, the rebirth

of anarchism in the late 1960s is explained by the revitalizing power of

external forces and not by the development of oppositional critique, as

is the case in feminism’s waves.

In this convergence the emergence of second wave feminism is a defining

moment for contemporary anarchism. For Cindy Milstein, 60s activism

“increasingly broadened” anarchism’s “lens of critique.” First wave

“classical anarchists” were “concerned with phenomena besides capitalism

and the state, whether that was militarism, sexuality, or organized

religion.” They also introduced analytical “categories such as

hierarchy” used widely in contemporary anarchist politics. But “such

articulations were still generally subservient to a focus on capitalism

and the state—much as Marxists made, and often still do, all phenomena

subservient (or ‘superstuctural’) to the economy (‘base’).”[57] Milstein

identifies Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom as the exemplary expression of

“a more all-encompassing horizontal libertarianism.” Published in 1982,

at the peak of the second wave by Scholz’s assessment, Bookchin’s

“re-thinking of anarchism” points to the uniform entrenchment of the

principle of class-priority across socialist doctrines. While Milstein

attributes the change in anarchism to the influence of the

“counterculture, New Left and autonomist movements of the long 1960s,”

not especially to feminism, she credits these movements with bringing

“ecology and technology... alienation and cultural production... sex,

sexuality, gender and kinship... white supremacy and antiracism...

ableism and ageism... physical and mental health” to the “matrix of

anarchism’s critique.”[58] The story Milstein tells is that anarchists

were unable to fully embrace feminism because they were as hamstrung by

their commitment to class and consequently unable to account adequately

for non-class oppressions.

Other observers are less generous in their assessment of first wave

anarchism than Milstein. Indeed, a strong current of post second-wave

analysis suggests that twentieth-century anarchist feminists would find

very little to help them develop a pro-feminist anarchist politics in

historical anarchism, because first wave anarchism was defined by an

anti-feminist malestream. The essence of the argument is that prior to

the attention that second-wave pro-feminists devoted to it, anarchism

was an anti-feminist doctrine.

This is Peter Marshall’s view. His standard reference on anarchism

acknowledges that the anarchist movement attracted some important women

activists[59] but argues that anarchist intolerance of feminism

undermined their influence. The impact of the ideas of the radical women

within the movement—Emma Goldman, Louise Michel, Charlotte Wilson and

Voltairine de Cleyre—was belatedly felt; second wave archaeology was

responsible for the transformation of anarchism.[60] Goldman might now

be the most celebrated historical activist, rivaled only by de Cleyre,

but not even she found an audience during her lifetime. At the end of

her career, Marshall argues, Goldman knew that she was “hopelessly out

of tune with her contemporaries.”[61]

Sharif Gemie’s criticism of anarchism’s anti-feminism similarly

spotlights the anti-feminism of historical anarchism, focusing on the

shortcomings of the anarchist canon. In an influential analysis of

anarchism and feminism he argues, “of the four best known political

theorists” of anarchism, “only one addressed questions of sexual

politics at any length.”[62] This was P.-J. Proudhon, a notorious

anti-feminist and misogynist. However, anarchism’s failure to consider

explicitly the oppression of women is not derived from the power of

Proudhon’s venomous pen, or indeed, the apparent insensitivity of

anarchism’s other canonical thinkers to questions of sexual politics and

interpersonal relations. Gemie pinpoints anarchism’s weakness in the

failure to articulate a full-bloodied or distinctive feminist politics

and the vacillating support given to women’s struggles, made conditional

on the reinforcement of “the counter-community’s potential.”[63]

Anarchists endorsed feminism for as long as women anarchists did not

seek to disrupt the patriarchal relations that structured oppressions in

those communities.

The extent to which nineteenth century anarchist movements were

resistant to feminist perspectives is a matter of debate. Gemie’s

critique is based on a textual analysis of nineteenth-century anarchist

writing, but his findings have been challenged.[64] However, the

significance of his feminist critique of anarchism does not rest on an

argument about the proper characterization of historical anarchist

movements. Its force lies instead in his identification of a gap between

nineteenth-century anarchist practice and second wave feminist theory:

anarchists, Gemie argues, might have been expected to push their

critique of bureaucracy and defense of community to espouse “the type of

re-evaluation of private and public worlds that feminists such as [Jean

Bethke] Elshtain have evoked.”[65] The inability or unwillingness of

leading anarchists to do so was indicative of a pervasive belief that

feminism occupied a place “outside of the normal concerns of the

anarchist movement.”[66]

Contemporary anarchist feminism has been molded by both these

approaches, rightly linked to the formative writing of leading women and

fleshed out through an account of wave development that emphasizes the

apparently restorative role that second wave activism had on

anarchism.[67] But these approaches have not had the same sway,

nothwitstanding the publication of important histories since the 1970s

that support the kinds of anarchizing projects that Kornegger and

Ehrlich advocated. The next section considers how these narratives of

anarchism and feminism continue to resonate in contemporary anarchist

feminisms.

Theorizing Contemporary Anarchist Feminisms

As means of understanding the dynamics of contemporary anarchist

feminist movements, Caroline Kalterfleiter contends, wave theory is a

faulty guide. It blunts the analysis of movement activism and the

dynamic contexts in which activists operate and is ill-equipped to

imagine the histories which inform activism and the extent to which

“ongoing initiatives ... may actually be rooted in a conflation of

experiences of days, months, years, or even a decade ago.”[68]

Nevertheless, wave theory continues to serve as a touchstone for

anarchist feminist thinking and important divisions in contemporary

anarchist feminism can be explained with reference to it. Arguments

about class and gender, rehearsed in discussions about organizing and

strategy and replicating cleavages within non-anarchist feminisms,

underpin these divisions.

The discussion of waves in contemporary anarchist feminism is frequently

tied to the description of movement activism and these often assume a

particular complexion, linked to local anarchist politics. However, one

of the strong currents in anarchist feminism is the idea that anarchist

feminism has tended to follow the trajectory plotted by the waves

described by other feminisms since anarchism’s second wave feminist

revitalization.

Describing adjustments in Slovene movements, Ida Hiršenfelder connects

second wave activism with the “aggressive ... and very violent”

militancy epitomized by Valerie Solanas’s Scum Manifesto, not the

ecological, plural anti-oppression movements that Milstein depicts.

Third wave feminism, Hiršenfelder contends, started from “the need to

reflect” on second wave ideas, and led to the incorporation of identity

politics into activism. The third wave revisions were made in the light

of queer theory.[69] Jeppesen and Nazar tie third wave anarchist

feminism to movements within anarchism, notably anarchapunk/Riot Grrrl,

to changes in global politics, especially the emergence of the

transnational protest movements in the late 1990s and, beyond anarchism,

to the theoretical foregrounding of “the intersectionality of identities

and issues.”[70] This alignment also structures Richard Day’s narrative

of feminism. Invoking a novel distinction in feminism’s second wave,

between anti-capitalist socialist feminism and anti-state

anarcha-feminism, he maps the third and fourth waves to changes in

feminist theory: the third wave to black and postcolonial feminisms and

the fourth to postmodern feminisms.[71] A similar theoretical dynamic is

embedded in the grass roots activism of the Romanian anarcha-feminist

project, the LoveKills Collective, which defines its aims as a rejection

of second wave feminism, as “something that reinforces the gender binary

and domination.”[72]

This reading of convergence has not dented the radical edge of anarchist

feminism or caused it to become bland or featureless. One of the

concepts central to anarchist feminist praxis—intersectionalism—is

adapted from mainstream feminism, but it assumes a particular spirit

when used as a tool for self-organizing. Uri Gordon deploys it to

describe processes of movement building and the generation of theory

from below.[73] Sandra Jeppesen uses intersectionalist critique to

stimulate the adoption and development of pro-feminist ethics. These

ethics, which are not specifically anti-capitalist, describe the

meta-principles of anarchist feminist organizing. They supplement the

anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchical practices that Jo Freeman

described pejoratively as structureless,[74] with a prefigurative

commitment to non-oppression politics and social transformation.

Pro-feminist ethics favor “cooperation over competition, listening over

speaking, gift or barter economics over profit, and linguistic

inclusivity.” Norms include the outlawing of dominating behaviors that

exhibit

sexism, racism, heterosexism, colonialism, ableims or other forms of

oppression; taking turns and being respectful when others are speaking,

raising one’s hand to the on a speakers list which prioritizes

marginalized and first-time speakers, twinkling or making jazz hands

rather than interrupting when one likes what someone is saying;

self-facilitating by being aware of how much space one is taking up and

limiting interventions if speaking too often; and doing go-around

check-ins where everyone in a workshop introduces themselves, says what

pronoun they go by, and speaks about how they are feeling, their

organizing work, and/or what they expect from the meeting or workshop;

and explicitly processes for addressing dominating behaviors.[75]

To the extent that the conceptual tools used by some anarchist feminists

in contemporary activism and critique are rooted in a narrative about

anarchism’s waves, they also serve as sites for the same kind of

oppositional thinking that besets feminist theorizing. Not

un-coincidentally, one of the principal splits in contemporary anarchist

feminist politics runs along one of feminism’s major fault lines. This

is the dispute between those who defend class analysis and those who

understand class approaches as reductive. This division is central to

anarchist feminist critique of first wave anarchism, of post-second wave

analysis of second wave feminism and implicit in the anarchist feminist

embrace of third wave identity politics. Responding to Traci Harris’s

call to radical feminists to “recognize the system of domination as

white, capitalist and masculine,”[76] Red Sonja argues, defensively,

against the characterization of class-politics associated with the

thesis of post-second wave convergence:

There is a triple oppression and we cannot view patriarchy and white

supremacy as mere contradictions, or secondary afterthought to the class

analysis. They do function as “divisive mechanisms of capital” yet are

independent of that. Nor are white supremacy, colonialism, and racism

footnotes to women’s oppression. We have to consistently challenge this

creeping idea among white leftists or run the played out mistake of a

doomed revolutionary analysis. But to discard the class lens with which

we view these oppressions is to imitate multicultural liberalism which

does no one any favors.[77]

This tension within anarchist feminism plays out in treatments of

privilege and domination, where disputants alternatively explain

oppression as unearned privilege accruing to all members of socially

advantaged groups or as the result of inequalities rooted in uneven

property ownership and wealth. It is also evident in arguments about

safer spaces policies, which might be defended as instruments that

combat domination or criticized as ineffective and politically divisive.

And it can be found in the analysis of intersectionalism, which is

represented both as a practice compatible with labor-oriented

organization and as a corrective to the assumptions about the

universalizing capability of the white, male working class.[78] It is

also felt in arguments about the status of theory and practice, in

debates about the character of anarchist feminist theorizing, the

construction of the anarchist canon and the nature of hierarchical

knowledge-production.[79]

The existence of tensions within movements might be seen as an indicator

of their vitality. Yet there is also a danger that parties to the

debates become locked in oppositional positions. To adapt Kathy

Ferguson’s analysis of the role that metatheoretical questions play in

shaping political arguments, protagonists to debate operate “within a

certain frame” and the “frame makes claims upon our questioning that we

have trouble hearing.” Reading the same wave narrative in different

ways, disputants to anarchist feminist debates risk becoming enframed,

“seeing only the battles each practice names as worthy and missing the

ways in which contending interpretations or rival deconstructions

cooperate... to articulate some possibilities and silence others.”[80]

Noticing that debates about intersectionalism are couched in terms of a

choice, either class or identity politics, bell hooks argues for an

approach that “allows us to focus on what is most important at a given

point in time”:

if we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every

day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race,

gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what

gets foregrounded? I think it’s crazy for us to think that people don’t

understand what’s being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in

time. Like right now, for many Amercians, class is being foregrounded

like never before because of the economic situation. It doesn’t mean

that race doesn’t matter, or gender doesn’t matter, but it means that...

people are losing their jobs, insurance.[81]

This appeal speaks to the entrenchment of oppositional thinking, even

while it proposing a way of addressing it. How would the generation of

women active in the period of feminism’s first wave attempted to analyze

women’s oppression as anarchists? In the final section, I sketch an

approach to anarchist feminism that was not predicated on the existence

of waves and outline a critique that focuses on three concepts: slavery,

rights, and power.

Slavery, Rights and Power

The critique of slavery was neither original to anarchism nor developed

exclusively by anarchists. It emerged from republican discourses and it

was taken up widely by a variety of socialists in the late

nineteenth-century in order to emphasize the moral bankruptcy of regimes

based on class exploitation.[82] The critique of slavery, Selma James

argues, was integral to Marx’s theory of exploitation.[83] In anarchist

writing slavery was not just deployed as a rhetorical device to demonize

capitalism or expose the dependencies of workers on the masters who

employed them. Anarchists used slavery as an analytical tool to dissect

state oppression and they pressed arguments about the transformation of

chattel to wage slavery following the formal abolition of serfdom in

Russia and slavery in America, in order to investigate the different

ways that domination affected groups within states.

The massive appropriation of land from rural workers and the crushing

tenancy arrangements that followed the 1861 Emancipation Act helped

convince Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy that exploitation and

oppression were best thought of as systems of slavery, driven by

capitalism and maintained by state violence. Elisée Reclus took a

similar lesson from his observations of American abolition. After the

so-called “emancipation,” Reclus described the exploitation of the

“freed labor power of former slaves” as “‘slavery, minus the obligation

to care for the children and the elderly.’” The continued existence of

supremacist cultures meant that ex-slaves were not merely exploited as

workers, but in special ways as black workers through the operation of

segregation policies and the differential rights that freed slaves were

accorded as citizens.[84]

The language of enslavement was also used to explore women’s oppression

and to probe the particular ways that women were oppressed and exploited

in capitalism and the state. In this context, too, anarchists borrowed

from earlier generations of feminists. As Eugenia Delamotte argues,

Voltairine de Cleyre was profoundly influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft.

Disrupting the liberal feminist narrative that binds Wollstonecraft

narrowly to liberal feminism and first wave suffrage campaigns, de

Cleyre borrowed her “core analogy between political tyranny and men’s

domination of women”[85] to link slavery to authority and exploitation

without suggesting that it was synonymous with either. Authority,

particularly vested in the Church, and exploitation, rooted in property

ownership, structured the unequal power relations and systems of

organization that controlled and oppressed women as subjects and

workers; slavery described the condition that undermined women’s ability

to disobey or resist.

Authority and exploitation shaped the spheres of women’s actions,

regulating women’s relationships with those who claimed authority and/or

with property owners. And these political and economic relationships

were infused by a complex set of cultural norms and philosophical

traditions that patterned women’s relationships with men and sealed

women’s dependent status as slaves. Charlotte Wilson advanced a similar

view. Women were enslaved by laws governing property ownership and

labor, but also by social practices that reduced them to pliant

subjection. Thus while she called for the abolition of class rule and an

end to individual monopoly of the means of production, she also

advocated a minimal program of remedial change that included the

introduction of “special training for girls in independence of thought,

and courage in action and in acts of self-defense, to counteract the

cowardice and weakness engendered in women by ages of suppression and

slavery.”[86] Victor Yarros used the same framework to explain women’s

enslavement. Acknowledging that the “yoke of capitalism” fell upon women

“with more crushing effect” than it did on men, women were “slaves of

capital” in precisely the same way. And for both men and women, slavery

was regulated by law and enforced by the state. In addition, women were

also “subjected to the misery of being the property, tool and plaything

of man, and have neither power to protest against the use, nor remedies

against the abuse, of their persons by their male masters.” This form of

slavery, he argued, “is sanctioned by custom, prejudice, tradition, and

prevailing notions of morality and purity.”[87]

De Cleyre’s critique of slavery was underpinned what Susan Brown refers

to as anarchist feminism’s voluntarism and commitment to individual

autonomy.[88] This translated into a particular understanding of

liberty. Rhetorically, de Cleyre described liberty as the remedy for

slavery.[89] Strategically, she argued for the extension of freedom by

the struggle for rights. For de Cleyre, rights were powers: claims or

demands advanced by direct action and decoupled from law or what she

called “the vagaries of license.”[90] The essence of de Cleyre’s idea

was captured in the distinction Dora Marsden drew between a “bondwoman”

and a “freewoman.” Bondwomen sought permission for their freedom. They

“cry that a woman is an individual, and that because she is an

individual she must be set free.” The freewoman, in contrast was an

individual: “she is free, and will act like those who are free.”[91] De

Cleyre’s version of this concept was: ‘“They have rights who dare

maintain them.’”[92] Women were told that they lacked the capacity to

enjoy freedom: her response was that women “are not worth it, until we

take it.”[93]

Rights could be realized proactively, or reactively. The suffrage

campaign was an example a of proactive rights struggle. While anarchists

bemoaned as futile the aims of campaigners, they applauded their direct

actions. Rebecca Edelshohn expressed a widely held view when she wrote

in Mother Earth of her admiration for the English suffragettes and

endorsed their “methods of warfare.”[94] Freedom similarly set aside its

skepticism about the value of the vote to congratulate the women who

struggled for it. Their tactics demonstrated that “nothing is squeezed

out of the politician unless you have a vigorous and uncompromising

agitation outside Parliament.”[95] Reactive rights campaigns targeted

individuals or groups responsible for repression, typically by violence.

For de Cleyre, Sophia Petrovskaya, the assassin of Tsar Alexander II,

modeled the kind of skill and dexterity that women possessed—and needed

to cultivate— to protest the systematic and serious denial of their

rights.[96] In current activism, a similar spirit animates

insurrectionist anarchist feminist resistance to male violence. One

group call on women to “Kick the shit out of your rapists ... become an

autonomous force that will destroy everything in its wake.”[97]

The struggle against slavery placed enormous burdens on women as

deliverers of their own freedom. But it also opened up a broad field for

action, which extended from involvement in global anti-colonial

campaigns to micro-political actions that challenged everyday sexism. It

also included extra-legal campaigning for legal reforms. Resisting

slavery meant fighting for changes outside the framework of the

legislative system, sometimes in order to bring changes in the law but

on terms that the state and capitalism would struggle to accommodate. By

asserting their rights, women might secure custody of their children and

exclusive decision-making power to determine arrangements for their

upbringing; full access to education and employment to release them from

the servitude of domestic labor; changes in work patterns that enabled

women to support themselves independently; control of their bodies, to

determine their reproduction and, for Sarah Holmes, the latitude to

undertake sex work. Many of these demands were advanced equally by

non-anarchist women. The distinctively anarchist feature of this program

was that women pressed rights as part of a commitment to continuous

political change or as de Cleyre put it, borrowing Proudhon’s language,

a progressive struggle for justice: I insist on this point of the

progressiveness of justice, first because I do not wish you to think me

a metaphysical dreamer, holding to the exploded theory that “rights” are

positive, unalterable, indefinite somethings passed down from one

generation to another after the fashion of an entailed estate, and come

into existence in some mysterious manner at the exact moment that

humanity emerges from apedom. It would be quite too difficult a matter

to settle on the emerging point.

I insist on the progressiveness of justice, because, however fierce my

denunciation of present injustice may be, I none the less recognize it

to have been the justice of the past, the highest possible condition so

long as the aspiration of the general mind rose no farther… I need the

admission of the progressiveness of justice in order to ... prove my

assertion that, however necessary the slavery of woman might have been,

it is no longer in accord with the ideals of our present

civilization.[98]

De Cleyre recognized that this kind of activism was centered on

practices, even at one point decrying the “clouds of theory” that formed

when “conditions made it impossible” to act. Nevertheless, her

conception of rights pointed to a comprehensive anarchist ideal. Her

critique of the “theory-rotted” who refused to think about “what can be

accomplished now” was a rejection of “theory-spinning about future

society,” [99] not a critique of utopianism. Indeed, her call to

activism was directed towards the construction of alternative futures.

Depicting a world populated by groups of zombie-like guardians of order

and living souls determined on its subversion, de Cleyre argued:

For these are dead who walk about with vengeance ... and scorn for

things dark and lowly, in the odor of self-righteousness, with

self-vaunting wisdom in their souls, and pride of race, and iron-shod

order, and the preservation of Things that Are; walking stones are

these, that cannot hear. But the living are those who seek to know, who

wot not of things lowly or things high, but only of things wonderful;

and who turn sorrowfully from Things that Are, hoping for Things that

Maybe. If these should hear the Chain Gang chorus, seize it, make all

the living hear it, see it![100]

The analysis of slavery explained why women’s oppression extended so

comprehensively in manners, dress codes, or what de Cleyre called

fashion-slavery,[101] and was still felt so imperfectly. It also

explained why women were subject to oppression as keenly in socialist

circles as they were in bourgeois society at large. Even while calling

for world revolution, de Cleyre noted, anarchist men told their

womenfolk to “[s]tay at home ... Be patient, obedient, submissive! Darn

our socks, mend our shirts, wash our dishes, get our meals, wait on us

and mind the children!” As Gemie notes, anarchist men were no better in

applying their principles than other socialists and radicals. Indeed,

the theoretical tools were sometimes used to close down feminist

critique. In his debates with Sarah Holmes in the anarchist periodical

Liberty, Yarros was quite open about the limits of the theory: women

lacked the capacity to overcome their enslavement, even with the benefit

of the sort of education Charlotte Wilson outlined. While he regarded

Proudhon’s refusal to exclude domestic relationships from anarchist

analysis as “arbitrary, illogical, and contradictory of his whole

philosophy,” Yarros combined free love principles with Stirnerism to

argued that women necessarily entered into dependant relationships with

men in order to fulfill themselves sexually. Responsibility for

childcare was the price women paid for this voluntary

subordination.[102] Domestic enslavement followed.

What was the proper response to Yarros and his ilk? Rather than ignore

or ditch the theory, de Cleyre opted to read it through feminist eyes

and even dared invoke Proudhon, the arch-misogynist, to inspire her

radicalism.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored wave theories of feminism and anarchism to

show how contemporary anarchist feminism has been influenced by activist

concerns to find tools within anarchism to develop anarchist feminism

or, alternatively, apply feminist theory to address serious shortcomings

in anarchist politics. The analysis explains why anarchist feminism is

so hard to define and why it is at least partially fractured by debates

about class and identity. The critique of slavery, developed by

anarchists active during the period of feminism’s first wave and

marginalized in historical narratives about feminism and anarchism,

offers a different way of theorizing anarchist feminism, of diagnosing

the causes of women’s oppression and the range of actions that might be

taken to combat it. This approach resonates with contemporary anarchist

feminism, but theorizes practice in ways that some contemporary

activists are reluctant to do. Moreover, it provides an outline idea of

domination as a systematic structural hindrance which affects all social

groups, while advantaging or disadvantaging members of particular groups

in different ways. This conception differs from class analysis. It also

diverges from intersectional approaches which treat domination more

narrowly as a social power accruing from group membership and which seek

to combat it by the development of non-dominating behaviors within

particular organizational frameworks. Anti-slavery doctrines are

compatible with intersectional approaches, but extend the repertoires of

action in novel ways.

[1] Greenway and Alderson, “Anarchism and Feminism.”

[2] sallydarity, “What is Anarcha-Feminism?,” available online at

anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

[3]

U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to

Theory (London: Pluto, 2008), 3.

[4] sallydarity, “What is Anarcha-Feminism?”

[5] London anarcha-feminist kolektiv, What the Fuck is Anarcha-feminism

Anyway? (London, 2009), available online at

anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

[6]

J. Greenway and L. Alderson, “Anarchism and Feminism: Voices from the

Seventies,” available online at

=> http://www.judygreenway.org.uk/wp/anarchist-feminist-interviews/ www.judygreenway.org.uk

[7]

K. Jackson, “BOA,” in Only a Beginning, An Anarchist Anthology, ed. A.

Antliff (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), 22–24: 22.

[8]

L. Farrow, “Feminism as Anarchism,” in Dark Star, Quiet Rumors, 19–24:

23.

[9] Ibid., 21.

[10]

E. Leeder, “Feminism as an Anarchist Process: The Practice of

Anarcha-Feminism” (c. 1978?), available online at

=> http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/feminism-as-anarchist-process-1978.html anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

[11]

S. Jeppsen and H. Nazar, “Genders and Sexualities in Anarchist

Movements,” in Continuum Companion to Anarchism, ed. R. Kinna, (New

York: Continuum, 2012), 162–191: 172

[12] Jeppesen and Nazar, “Genders and Sexualities in Anarchist

Movements,” 167.

[13] For an introduction see “Shit MANarchists Say,” available online at

www.anarcha.org

[14] See, for example, Down There Health Collective, Let’s Talk About

Consent, Baby (Down There Health Collective, n.d.); Queering Protest

Sites (n.d.); M. Kolàrová, Gender in Czech Anarchist Movement (Prague:

Subverze, 2004); Widezma, Anarchism Meets Feminism: The Importance of

Putting Theory into Practice, (2007), available online at

anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

; Why She Doesn’t Give a Fuck About Your Insurrection (New York, 2009),

available online at

www.scribd.com

; Sisters of Resistance, “A Letter to Male Activists,” in Affinity

(Black Iris Press, n.d.), 49–52, available online at

network23.org

[15]

B. Black, “ Anarchy: A Fable,” in Friendly Fire (New York: Autonomedia,

1992), 151–153.

[16] Claudia, Love Lies Bleeding (London: Class Whore, n.d.).

[17]

P. Vandiver, “Feminism: A Male Anarchist’s Perspective,” available

online at

=> http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pendleton-vandiver-feminism-a-male-anarchist-s-perspective theanarchistlibrary.org

[18] Flick Ruby, Anarcha-Feminism, available online at

www.spunk.org

[19]

K. Kurin, “Anarcha-feminism: Why the hyphen,” in Antliff, Only a

Beginning, 257–263: 261.

[20]

E. Leeder, “Anarcha-Feminism: Moving Together,” in Antliff, Only a

Beginning, 255–256: 255.

[21]

E. Gaarder, “Addressing Violence Against Women,” in Contemporary

Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the

Academy, ed. R. Amster, et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2009),

46–56: 46.

[22] Stacy/sallydarity, “Anarcha-Feminism and the Newer ‘Woman

Question,’” in Quiet Rumors. An AnarchaFeminist Reader, ed. Dark Star

Collective. 3^(rd) edition (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012), 37–42: 38.

[23] Ibid., 37.

[24] CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, “Anarcha-Feminism, Part I:

Introduction and Herstory” (podcast), available online at

www.crimethinc.com

. Kathy Ferguson’s “Emma Goldman’s Women,” an online archive of

neglected feminists, is one of the historical projects referred to. See

www.political

science.hawaii.edu/emmagoldman/index.html.

[25]

S. Rowbotham, Introduction to A. Kollontai , Women Workers Struggle for

their Rights, trans. C. Britton (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1971),

ix.

[26]

C. Hemmings, “What is a Feminist Theorist Responsible For? Response to

Rachel Torr,” Feminist Theory 8 (2007), 69–76: 72.

[27] M.Walters, Feminism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005).

[28] S.J. Scholz, Feminism: A Beginner’s Guide, (Oxford: Oneworld,

2010), 5.

[29] Ibid., 7.

[30] Ibid.

[31]

K. Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Meet the Rebel Women,” The

Guardian (December 10, 2013), available online at

=> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women www.theguardian.com

[32]

C. Eschle and B. Maiguashca, “Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-opted and

Progressive Politics in a Neoliberal Age,” Political Studies 62

(2013), 634–651.

[33]

N. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to

Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), 159–60.

[34] Hemmings, “What is a Feminist Theorist Responsible For?,” 72.

[35]

C. Hemmings, “Telling Feminist Stories,” Feminist Theory 6 (2005),

115–139: 116.

[36] Ibid., 116.

[37] Ibid.

[38]

K. Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in the Feminist

Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 9.

[39]

E. Figes, “Why the Euphoria Had to Stop,” in Women of the Revolution:

Forty Years of Feminism, ed. K. Cochran (London: guardianbooks,

2012), 55–58: 57.

[40]

L. Downs, Writing Gender History, 2^(nd) edition (London: Bloomsbury,

2013), 21–22.

[41] Ibid., 33.

[42] Ibid., 24.

[43] Ibid., 44.

[44]

J. Rees, “A Look Back at Anger: the Women’s Liberation Movement in

1978,” Women’s History Review 19 (2010), 337–356: 338.

[45]

S. Haslanger and N. Tuana, “Introduction to Feminism,” in The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2002), available online at

=> http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/papers/femintro.html#2.1 www.mit.edu

[46]

F. de Haan et al., eds., Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives From the

1890s to the Present (London: Routledge, 2013), 3.

[47] L.H. Liu, et al., eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential

Texts in Transnational Theory (New York: Columbia University Press,

2013), 7.

[48] Ibid., 39.

[49] Kollontai, Women Workers Struggle for their Rights, 31.

[50] bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, (London:

Pluto, 1982), 3.

[51]

L. Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality (London:

Tauris, 2002); S. Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who

Invented the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2010).

[52] “Anarchism and Feminism,” Victoria Pre-conference Statement, 1974,

available online at

anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

[53] Chicago Anarcho-Feminists, “An Anarcho-Feminist Manifesto,” in Dark

Star, Quiet Rumors, 15–17.

[54] bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (London:

Pluto, 2000), 7–8; M. Acklesberg, Resisting Citizenship: Feminist Essays

on Politics, Community, and Democracy (New York: Continuum, 2010),

13–25.

[55]

P. Kornegger, “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” in Dark Star, Quiet

Rumors, 25–36: 25, 26, 30.

[56]

C. Ehrlich, “Socialism, Anarchism and Feminism,” in ibid., 55–56:

57–58.

[57]

C. Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, (Oakland, CA: AK Press,

2010), 37.

[58] Ibid., 38–9.

[59]

M. Marsh, Anarchist Women 1870–1920 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple

University Press, 1981).

[60]

P. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, (London:

Harpercollins, 1992), 556.

[61] Ibid., 408.

[62]

S. Gemie, “Anarchism and Feminism: A Historical Survey,” Women’s

History Review 5 (1996), 417–444: 422.

[63] Ibid., 435.

[64]

R. Cleminson, “Anarchism and Feminism,” Women’s History Review 7

(1998), 135–38. See also K. Shaeffer, Anarchism and Countercultural

Politics in Early Twentieth Century Cuba (Gainsville, FL.:

University Press of Florida, 2005); and K. Shaeffer, Black Flag

Boriculas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto

Rico, 1897–1921 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013),

chapter 6.

[65] Gemie, “Anarchism and Feminism,” 422.

[66] Ibid., 432.

[67] CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, “Anarcha-Feminism, Part I:

Introduction and Herstory” (podcast); Ferguson, “Emma Goldman’s Women.”

[68]

C. Kaltefleiter, “Anarchy Girl Style Now: Riot Grrrl Actions and

Practices,” in Amster, et al., Contemporary Anarchist Studies,

224–235: 233.

[69]

T. Hvala, “An Interview with Ida Hiršenfelder, Editor of Sektor Ž,

Feminist Radio Show on Radio Študent, Ljubliana, Slovenia” (2011),

available online at

=> http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/an-interview-with-ida-hirsenfelder.html anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

[70] Jeppsen and Nazar, “Genders and Sexualities in Anarchist

Movements,” 170.

[71]

R. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social

Movements (London: Pluto, 2005), 87.

[72]

R. Chidgey and E. Zobl, “‘Love is a Perverted Feeling…’ An Email

Interview with the Anarcha-Feminist LoveKills Collective, From

Romania” (2009), available online at

=> http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/love-is-perverted-feeling-email.html anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

[73]

U. Gordon, “Utopia in Contemporary Anarchism,” in Anarchism and

Utopianism, ed. L. Davis and R. Kinna (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2009), 260–275: 262.

[74]

J. Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” in Dark Star, Quiet

Rumors, 68–75.

[75]

S. Jeppesen, et al., “The Anarchist Commons,” Ephemera: Theory and

Politics in Organization 14 (2014), 879–900: 880, 884.

[76]

T. Harris, “Redefining Radical Feminism,” Northeastern Anarchist 4

(2002); T. Harris, “Radical Feminist Politics and the Ruckus,”

available online at

=> http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/20 www.bringtheruckus.org

[77] Red Sonja, “The Precarious Union of Anarchism and Feminism”,

available online at

theanarchistlibrary.org

[78] Dysophia, “Anarchist Debates on Privilege,” Dysophia 4 (2013).

[79]

J. Greenway, “The Gender Politics of Anarchist History: re/membering

women, re/minding men” (2010), available online at

=> http://www.judygreenway.org.uk/wp/the-gender-politics-of-anarchist-history-remembering-women-reminding-men/ www.judygreenway.org.uk

; Jeppesen and Nazar, “Genders and Sexualities in Anarchist

Movements,” 165–166. For a contrary view, see M. Campbell,

“Voltairine de Cleyre and the Anarchist Canon,” in Blasting the

Canon, ed. S. Evren and R. Kinna (New York: Punctum Books, 2013),

64–81.

[80] Ferguson, The Man Question, 7.

[81]

R. Lowens, “How Do You Practice Intersectionalism? An Interview with

bell hooks,” available online at

=> http://commonstruggle.org/bellhooks commonstruggle.org

[82]

S. Clark, Living Without Domination: The Possibility of an Anarchist

Utopia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 106.

[83]

S. James, Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection

of Writings, 1952–2011 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012),, 143–60.

[84]

J. Clark and C. Martin, eds., Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected

Writings of Elisée Reclus, (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 89–90.

[85]

E. Delamotte, Gates of Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution

of the Mind. With Selections from Her Writing (Ann Arbor, MI:

University of Michigan Press, 2007), 212.

[86] Charlotte Wilson, “The Criminal Law Amendment Act” [1885], in

Charlotte Wilson: Anarchist Essays, ed. N. Walter (London: Freedom,

2000), 31–36: 36.

[87] Victor Yarros, “The Exchange (Partial) Between Victor and Zelm on

‘The Woman Question’” [1888], in Individualist Feminism of the

Nineteenth Century. Collected Writings and Biographical Profiles, ed. W.

McElroy, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001), 143–146: 144.

[88]

L. Susan Brown, The Politics of Individualism. Liberalism, Liberal

Feminism, Anarchism (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993), 107. For a

reading of de Cleyre’s concept of autonomy, see S. Presley, “No

Authority But Oneself: The Anarchist Feminist Philosophy of Autonomy

and Freedom,” Social Anarchism 27 (2000), available online at

=> http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SA/en/display/338 library.nothingness.org

[89] Voltairine de Cleyre, “Sex Slavery” [1890], Delamotte, Gates of

Freedom, 222–234: 232.

[90] Voltairine de Cleyre, “New and Strange Ideas: Letter to Her Mother,

December 18, 1887,” in ibid., 165–167: 165.

[91] Dora Marsden, “Bondwomen,” The Freewoman 1 (November 23, 1911),

available online at

i-studies.com

[92] Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Gates of Freedom” [1891], in Delamotte,

Gates of Freedom, 235–250: 235.

[93] Ibid., 249.

[94]

R. Edelsohn, “Hunger Striking in America,” Mother Earth 9:7 (September

1914).

[95] “A Victory for Women,” Freedom (March 1908).

[96] Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Gates of Freedom,” in Delamotte, Gates

of Freedom, 246.

[97] “A Modest Proposal From Some Crazy Bitches” (2010), available

online at

anarchalibrary.blogspot.co.uk

[98] Ibid., 240–1.

[99] Voltairine de Cleyre, “Report of the Work of the Chicago Mexican

Defense League” [1912], in Delamotte, Gates of Freedom, 189–191: 191.

[100] Volairine de Cleyre, “The Chain Gang” [1907], in ibid., 201–204:

204.

[101] Voltairine de Cleyre, “Sex Slavery,” in ibid., 230.

[102] McElroy, Individualist Feminism of the Nineteenth Century, 137.