On the broader Left today there appears to be a perception that the women’s movement attained its goals and that women’s issues have somehow been resolved. Virtually all progressive activist groups incorporate anti-oppression politics into their basis of unity. There is also an unspoken assumption that activists cannot, by definition, be sexist. I want to dispel that myth, focus on the consequences that it has for current organizing, and try to present a way forward.

Even liberal standards of inequality recognize that women are a disadvantaged group in today’s world. Women make up the majority of the poorest populations, in terms of both economic and social resources. Women are subjected to violence in both the public and private spheres. Most women do not have access to proper education, medical care, housing, reproductive choices, or political decision making. While women experience these forms of marginalization in different ways, partly dictated by class and race, it is clear that women the world over are disadvantaged in comparison to men. How then, do left-wing activists committed to social change and anti-oppression politics address the obvious fact of women’s oppression in their organizing?

The Silence on the Left

Unfortunately, the active Left in Toronto (and more broadly in Canada I suspect) has been very bad at incorporating feminist politics into their organizing. This is true both in internal organizational dynamics and externally when reaching out to communities we work with.

The failure to take up feminist politics in our organizing cannot continue. If we as organizers have the responsibility of leading the struggle in a healthy and fruitful direction then we must address women’s issues both in terms of how we organize ourselves, and the kinds of work that we do. This is not to say that there is a clear line of division between internal organizational politics and the work of external organizing. One spills over into the other, which is all the more reason that a feminist understanding has to be present in both.

More specifically this means recognizing and addressing the sexist culture that exists within our organizing spaces. It also requires us to recognize that a feminist analysis is necessary when attempting to organize with any community or group of people.

But our organization is not sexist!

Bullcrap. We live in a sexist world. We have been socialized in sexist institutions and through sexist relations. This socialization is reinforced on a daily basis, even in our activism. If as a man you are accustomed to having authority over women, then you are naturally going to demand that authority in your activist spaces as well. If as a woman you’ve never been given a chance to speak or to lead then you may simply not know how to do these things. And you’ll certainly have trouble learning if you’re in an organizing space with that man who does not question his right to speak, or lead, or take up as much space as he wants.

The more serious problem is that the sexism that takes place in activist organizing does not get recognized and treated as such. When women do recognize that they have been treated in a sexist way and they are courageous enough to bring it forward to the organization, they are often dismissed and the problem consequently continues on unaddressed. Sexist behavior may be explained away as merely an expression of personal or political differences between the two individuals involved, or dismissed altogether on the basis that the woman is exaggerating and does not know what she is talking about.

Part of the problem is that there currently isn’t (and there hasn’t been for a long time) an active women’s movement. As a result, many young women who are active today have little experience in working collectively to fight sexist behaviour. I didn’t know what sexism really was – and certainly not how it manifested itself – until becoming involved in an active women’s caucus, which included a number of veterans from the women’s movement.

And if you’re still unconvinced that sexism is alive and well on the Left, then let me pose a few questions based on some of my experiences with sexism in my short year and a half of activism. Have you ever seen “the boys club” – you know that group of university boys standing around in a circle and arguing heatedly while throwing out Chomsky quotes about the Contras? I’ve seen them numerous times and never has a woman been involved in the discussion for longer than three sentences, all of which manage to get ignored. Yet when I see them separately there is always at least one adoring female at their side. Have you ever gone to a speaking event and had a male corner and talk to you for 20 minutes even though you were clearly not interested? Have you ever been frustrated with a man because the two of you were supposed to be making decisions together and he made them himself and merely informed you after the fact? Have you then told that same man that you’re supposed to be making these decisions together but he kept on doing it anyway, saying that the right decision had been made so what’s the big deal? Have you ever been propositioned by someone you are supposed to be working with but that you hardly even know, and without having shown any interest in him? Have you ever said something in a meeting and it seemed like you had not even spoken? Have you seen a man make himself an unelected representative of a group/coalition to outside groups? Have you then heard from a third party about him having said something on behalf of the group/coalition, rather than him having reported that information back to the group/coalition himself? Have you seen men take up so much space in a meeting, coalition, demonstration that women end up feeling like they are not part of what is going on?

If you have never noticed any of these things then maybe it’s because activists rarely talk about what sexism actually is and how it manifests itself on the Left. If you have seen them and recognized them as sexism, did you feel like you could bring them up and have them addressed, and eventually stopped?

I suspect that many women who come around the Left and subsequently drop out do so because they do not feel it’s an environment where they can comfortably participate and play an active role. Furthermore, I would suspect that many women probably do not identify the issue as being that of a sexist culture, but rather feel that it is their own personal qualities that prevent them from fitting in or feeling comfortable.

How we build

I recently chaired a discussion panel where all four speakers were women. The discussion was entitled “Fight Back 2004” and was intended as an update from different areas of struggle with the goal of collectively strategizing about how to organize in 2004. Speakers addressed the need to build a student movement, anti-poverty organizing, discussed a recent strike, and strategized around how to reach out to immigrant and refugee communities. Only the last speaker focused on how we, as women, should be including a gender analysis in all of our different areas of work. We know that women are effected differently, we know that women always get hit the hardest, and yet we only rarely make this explicit in our analysis.

I am currently doing work with migrant communities who are in detention because of status issues. Numerically speaking, more men are incarcerated than women, but migrant women face much different issues. For example, women are often in jail with their children, which means that they are not only worried about their own well being but also about the well-being of their dependants. In addition, women more often lack the support networks that men have, and as a result it is more difficult for them to get out of the detention centre and subsequently settle into the community. In terms of resources, migrant women have less money then men because they earn less, and they often do not speak English. Also refugee women have often experienced persecution that is connected to their gender, making it more difficult to go through a refugee application system that lacks sensitivity to gender persecution.

Thus migrant women are faced with numerous and unique barriers. Practically, this means that their struggle is different and more difficult, because they have issues to deal with on top of those that men have. As organizers we must talk about these barriers, strategize around how to address them, and create spaces where women feel comfortable working on these issues. If we fail to meet these challenges, then migrant women will never be equal participants in the struggle.