Me First

The Liberal Democrats are running this election campaign as if Jo Swinson was Hillary Clinton, forgetting that a) Hillary lost, and b) Jo is not Hillary. Indeed, Swinson is so paradigmatic of contemporary “Me First” feminism as to be parodic. Swinson treats the democratic site of politics as if it were merely an extension of the boardroom, applying Sheryl Sandberg’s logic of representation as if there were no difference between the two. 

Representation — in the workplace and in parliament — is usually taken to have two clear benefits for women. The first of these is that women seeing women doing a typically male activity allows them to see themselves in that role. The second is that women make different, and in some cases better, decisions as a result of their specific experiences and temperaments.

It’s not that there’s nothing at all to this. Let’s put aside the troublesome questions of “what kind of activities are these path-breaking women actually doing?”, “what kind of decisions are they actually making?”, and “why are we assuming that gendered experience or a mystical feminine temperament leads neatly to a given politics?” It might genuinely be the case that having more women involved means important gendered issues are raised. However, in its Swinsonian form, representation becomes a good in itself, and the lack of representation a moral failure.

The solutions to these problems, however, are not determined by representation but by politics, by power, through organising, motivated by actual ideas. While there might be benefits from representation, what really matters is that women have power over their own lives, and, in the case of parliamentary politics, the decisions that might either reduce or enhance their autonomy. 

Shielding the Powerful

This representational politics — a distortion of a distortion — becomes a political weapon in the hands of a decaying centrist regime. Jo Swinson not being invited onto TV debates becomes an alleged sign of rank misogyny. Any criticism of women who tout themselves as figureheads of representation — not just Swinson but Jess Philips, Laura Kuenssberg, Hillary Clinton, even Theresa May — is thereby rendered unutterable. Criticising women is not acceptable. Running against women in elections is not acceptable. 

This is even — indeed, especially — the case when the policies those women advocate are directly damaging to women. Take Swinson’s record: she make a big deal about the difficult conditions pregnant MPs face, but was in a government that abolished the Health in Pregnancy Grant. She might complain about how unfairly gendered distributions of housework prevent women from taking part in political life, but her government forced more and women to act as unpaid carers through cuts to social care and benefits. 

In “Me First” feminism, sexism becomes nothing more than a problem of individual attitude, with those bad attitudes directed primarily at powerful women. This version of feminism has nothing to say to the vast majority of women. It also has very little to say about politics as a whole – for example, why working-class women bore the brunt of the austerity measures supported by Swinson in government. While women in politics receive gallingly misogynistic treatment, this sort of feminism hides the ways in which the heightened scrutiny women face does not apply evenly to all women. 

Indeed, the suggestion that only women face scrutiny on their demeanour, their personal lives, and their clothing choices doesn’t seem to track the endless attacks on any left-wing politician of recent years, regardless of their gender. Before Swinson tried, over-eagerly, to reclaim “girly swot”, Ed Milliband was called a “North London geek”.

Their Feminism and Ours

Swinson’s presidential pitch has seen the Liberal Democrats plummet in the polls. She is particularly unpopular with women: only 11 percent of women view her positively, compared to 15 percent of men. The perfume of corporate feminism isn’t enough to clean the hands bloodied by austerity, no matter how many Beyonce gifs they tweet. 

Women can see through this hollow politics of representation. They know that what they need is not any woman in charge, but changes to the fundamental power relations in our society. Women don’t want Swinson’s statues for Thatcher. They know that selling off public assets with one face, but telling women they can aspire with another, is violently duplicitous. 

This election is a choice between their feminism and ours. The choice is clear. A vote for Labour is a vote for the full decriminalisation of abortion, for enhanced protections against harassment and violence, whether in the workplace or in our homes. It is a vote for a feminism that goes beyond mere representation. It is a vote against a “feminism” that destroys women’s lives and for a feminism that lets women rebuild them.