Sexed

British feminism is being reinvented, and what this means is fiercely contested. For advocates of more rights based on gender identity, the renewed emphasis on sex-based rights is an alarming regression. For those who believe that recognising sex differences is crucial in efforts to improve women’s lives, the challenge is to explain why.

This book argues that feminism without sex makes no sense. It uncovers the history of the present conflict, and explains why champions of women’s rights and freedoms have been arguing about femaleness for centuries. Mary Wollstonecraft warned of the lie that women would be “unsexed by acquiring strength of body and mind”. Feminists ever since have struggled to cast off the subordinate status assigned to womanhood while simultaneously insisting on their value as women. This book shows how successive generations have confronted this riddle.

Starting in the 1790s and ending with the sex-based rights movement of today, it encompasses 1830s radicals who demanded “LIBERTY FOR EVER!”, Victorian petitioners who knew they would be dead before women won the vote, and rival camps of suffragists who embraced and rejected violence.It explores formal politics, from the first women MPs to the New Labour feminists who pushed through the Equality Act days before their party lost power. And the role of social movements is considered, including the Greenham peace activists and the black and Asian women’s groups of the 1970s and 1980s.

Susanna Rustin fills gaps, makes links, and shows that feminism in Britain has always been more complicated than the popular image of a series of waves suggests. And she concludes that while gender is a useful concept, women cannot be supported by a politics that forgets that they, like men, are sexed.