#139 Spinning and Weaving: An Anthology Pushing Back Against Misogynist Backlash
In this episode, FiLiA Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sanchez speaks with Elizabeth Miller, the editor of new anthology Spinning and Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century.
Spinning and Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century seeks to raise up the voices of women around the world writing or creating from a radical feminist perspective, including scholars, journalists, political activists and organizers, bloggers, writers, poets, artists, and independent thinkers.
Listen Here (transcript below):
This anthology especially seeks to amplify the voices of Women of Colour, who are most likely to be silenced, marginalized, or ignored, and their experience denied or minimized. Relevant to contemporary radical feminism, this collection explores themes around the intersection of sex, race, and other axes of oppression; violence against women and girls; sex trafficking and the sex industry; pornography; sexuality; lesbian feminism; the environment; political activism; feminist organizing; women-only spaces and events; liberal versus radical feminism; transgenderism; and many other topics of interest and import to radical feminist theory and practice.
Elizabeth is a radical feminist activist who runs the Chicago Feminist Salon and co-organized the Women in Media Conference, a radical feminist conference held in Chicago in 2018. In recent years, she worked on the successful campaigns to get the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment ratified in Illinois and to enact Illinois House Bill 40, which ensured that abortion will remain legal in Illinois even if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
Among other projects, she is currently working with the U.S. radical feminist organization Feminists in Struggle to lobby Congress to pass legislation protecting women’s sex-based rights and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and gender non-conforming people, organizing two other radical feminist conferences in the United States, and running several large radical feminist social media pages and groups.
Please read the Table of Content and the list of Authors for Spinning and Weaving on the project’s new website. Listen to the song called ‘Dross into Gold’ written by singer and songwriter Thistle Pettersen, about feminist collaboration, in celebration of the publication of Spinning and Weaving. You can read the essay Intersectionality Hijack published by FiLiA here.
The book can be ordered from UK independent bookstores News from Nowhere, @newsfromnowhere, and Irish Feminist Bookshop, @IrishFemBooks. For a full list of where you can purchase the book, visit the available platforms.
You can learn more about Tidal Time Publishing and the US women’s rights organisation Feminists in Struggle on their website. Follow Elizabeth Miller’s feminist activities on social media at @Rad_Feminista.
Transcript:
Raquel Rosario Sanchez from FiLiA in conversation with Elizabeth Miller
Raquel: Welcome to the FiLiA podcast. My name is Raquel Rosario Sanchez, and I am the spokeswoman from FiLiA. So we're speaking with Elizabeth Miller. She is the editor of an anthology called Spinning and Weaving which features the voices of more than 35 radical feminist authors around the world. It has over 40 chapters of analysis and fiction on topics like sisterhood, intersectionality, lesbian feminism, eco-feminism, sexual exploitation, gender ideology and technology.
Spinning and Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century seeks to raise up the voices of women around the world, writing or creating from a radical feminist perspective, including scholars, journalists, political activists, and organisers, bloggers, writers, poets, artists, and independent thinkers. It especially seeks to amplify the voices of women of colour who are most likely to be silenced, marginalised or ignored and their experience to be denied or minimised.
Relevant to contemporary radical feminism, the anthology explores themes around the intersection of sex, race, and other oppressions like violence against women and girls, sex trafficking in the sex industry, pornography, sexuality, lesbian feminism, the environment, political activism, feminist organising, women-only spaces and events, liberal versus radical feminism, transgenderism and many, many other topics of interest and important to radical feminist theory and practice.
The contributing editor, Elizabeth Miller is a radical feminist activist who runs the Chicago feminist salon and co-organised the Women in Media Conference, a radical feminist conference held in Chicago in 2008. In recent years, she worked on the successful campaigns to get the US Equal Rights Amendment ratified in Illinois, and to enact Illinois House Bill 40, which ensured that abortion will remain legal in Illinois, even if the US Supreme court overturns Roe vs Wade.
Other projects she is currently working with the US radical feminist organisations, Feminists in Struggle to lobby Congress to pass legislation, protecting women's sex-based rights and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and gender nonconforming people. She's organising two other radical feminist conferences in the US and is running several large radical feminist social media pages and groups.
Welcome Elizabeth, how are you?
Elizabeth: I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.
Raquel: So let's start right at the very beginning. How did you get involved in the women's rights movement?
Elizabeth: Well, you know, it was gradual. I mean, that's such an interesting question I think for so many women, because I've been a feminist since I was a child, I was raised by a feminist mother. My parents were divorced when I was very young, so my dad wasn't really around. I think it depends so much on the time and place that you grew up. Like what you see as being the need for feminism. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, which was a good time for feminism and almost everyone around me was a feminist.
My mother was very politically involved. Back then, children were really gender non-conforming, like girls didn't wear dresses, especially where I grew up in Chicago, it was pretty liberal, we didn't wear dresses, we didn't wear makeup. The girls and boys wore the same thing. The girls and boys played together doing the same games and things.
And so we really didn't think about things like gender roles very much at all. Most of the women I knew were like lawyers and professors. So I grew up in maybe sort of an odd time. And so, although I was a feminist, I didn't really realise, as a young person, how terrible things were for women in many parts of the world.
I probably was always a radical feminist in the sense that I understood that women have always been oppressed on the basis of our sex, but I think when I was younger, I thought that things had gotten better and I think they had gotten better in my world. And so it's more recent that I've gotten involved in radical feminist activism as I've seen the things that are going on in the world. So that's probably the last, maybe seven years or so that I've kind of gotten very heavily into like political activism and talking to people about feminist theory and things like that.
Raquel: Yes. And you've been very involved, not only in political campaigning, but also in the disseminating the work of feminism specifically radical feminism. So my next question for you is could you explain to our audience, what is radical feminism? Because a lot of people are going to say, well, why not just call it feminism?
Elizabeth: Well, we probably should just call it feminism because in my opinion, what we call radical feminism is really the only feminism. And what gets popularly called feminism in the Western world is what I would call liberal feminism, which really isn't very feminist at all. So this is what happens to you when you're a real feminist, is that you realise that the terminology for everything these days is kind of upside down and backwards. A lot of things are the opposite of the label that they're given.
Radical feminism is called that because radical means root. So radical feminism is the feminism that goes to the root of women's experience. And the root of women's experience is patriarchy. And the fact that women are a sex class that is oppressed because of our biological sex.
So radical feminism is class analysis. It's a political analysis based on class. And it's a structural analysis about the structure of the world that the world for the last several thousand years has been set up based on a patriarchal model with male people at the top and female people at the bottom and male people oppressing female people and exploiting us and using us because of our biological sex.
Whereas liberal feminism is, you could call it equality feminism, which means that liberal feminism accepts the current structure of society, but just wants it to be more equal. So radical feminism wants to deconstruct and destroy the whole patriarchal system. Whereas liberal feminism just wants women to be ‘equal’ with men within that patriarchal system.
So liberal feminism says, hey, as long as women can be in Congress and women can run for President and women can have the vote, everything's just fine and we can keep the system. But that ignores all the ways that the system continues to harm women and girls all over the world. And so radical feminism isn't satisfied with equality.
We think that equality is sort of a good stop gap measure, but ultimately we don't want to be equal in an oppressive system. We want to dismantle the oppressive system.
Raquel: That's really interesting because for a long time, I have
noticed the messaging of a very prominent non-profit organisation devoted to women, and they always use the hashtag generation equality promote media.
And I've thought about it for a long time. And I wonder is this related to the Equality Act that they have in the US and how the Equality Act in the US is about enshrining gender identity into legislation, which would undermine sex based rights. So that's the analysis that I'm making.
But now that you think about it, then I wonder is it very much about promoting a certain view of feminism that tries to make it appealing particularly to young women, that our goal should be equality, in the sense of, the system is harmful, but as long as we're equal within that system, that things are fine. Is it about sort of like drawing them into the point of view of feminism instead of having them shy away from a more radical political understanding of the movement?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Yes. Although I think it's actually even worse because for example, the Equality Act would not even provide equality for women. It would dismantle equality for women because it would redefine sex, which has been the basis for women's sex based rights, such as Title VII and Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It would get rid of sex and redefine sex as gender identity, meaning there is no sex. There's just whatever you identify as. So that would make all of our sex-based rights go away. So it's not even equality, the Equality Act.
Although, I do want to say there are many aspects of the Equality Act that radical feminists are very much in favour of such as creating equal rights for people based on sexual orientation. So the good thing about the Equality Act is that it would make it illegal to discriminate against people in housing and employment and other areas covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It would be illegal to discriminate against them on the basis of sexual orientation.
So that part of it is excellent and radical feminist support that. What radical feminists are against is enshrining this false idea of gender identity into law in a way that replaces sex with gender identity. So that's the problem with the Equality Act.
But I do think you're right about what you said before that liberal feminism tries to sell a very watered down and defamed version of feminism to young women and what it does, it makes young women, it encourages young women to accept kind of crumbs at the master's table. It encourages young women to be satisfied with very little in the hope that they will not become more radical in their demands and ideas about what women's place in the world should be.
Raquel: Yes. And I'm so sorry. I feel like I've just jumped through like five questions.
Elizabeth: We just went straight ahead. It's going to like circle around. I mean, all of these things are so connected. It's almost impossible to talk about one without talking about all of the others at this time.
Raquel: We will get to the book, we want to promote the book, but now that you mentioned it, I think that that's so insidious because it means that people who are advocating for this piece of legislation in the United States, the Equality Act, it means that those people don't have to say, we want to get rid of laws protecting women from sex discrimination. They don't have to say, we want to undermine sex discrimination legislation. What they can say is no, no, it's just a matter of definition. But by changing the definition, you are undermining all of those protections that women and girls have already obtained. I just find it so insidious and, and it is so insidious.
Elizabeth: Let me just read you the definition of sex in the Equality Act. Okay. So this is literally the definition of sex that the Equality Act provides.
It says: the term sex includes a) a sex stereotype b) pregnancy, childbirth or related medical condition c) sexual orientation or gender identity and d) sex characteristics, including intersex traits.
So, I mean, it literally defined sex as a sex stereotype or gender identity and it gets even better.
Gender identity is defined as: ‘gender identity means the gender related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individuals designated sex at birth’.
So, first of all, that definition doesn't mean anything. It literally says the term gender identity means gender related identity. Okay. So it's completely circular, which means it's a useless definition in the law. That's not how the law defines things. You don't define things by using the same word and secondly, it's saying gender identity means mannerisms and appearance and identity. Like whatever you say your identity is, and then it defines sex as that, as gender identity. you can't create a definition.
Raquel: You can't create a definition for a word that includes that same word that you're defining.
Elizabeth: Right. An elephant is defined as an elephant. Yes. That doesn't help. And that's not how a good law is written.
Raquel: And what does it mean sex stereotypes? You know, I thought that we were fighting against that.
Elizabeth: Right. Well, and I think that the people who wrote this incoherent law thought that they might be doing something good by saying sex includes sex stereotypes, because that could be used to say that sex stereotyping is against the law.
But the problem is that when you include a sex stereotype in the term ‘sex’ It means that you can't use ‘sex’ in the rest of the law to provide any rights to women based on sex or to men based on sex for that matter, because if sex includes a sex stereotype, that means that anybody who performs a sex stereotype can say that they are that sex.
Raquel: Yes. So of course, well, there's so much to unpack there, but you know, from your point of view, you are a campaigner, you have spent decades as a feminist campaigner in the US.
What do you make of this development? Here we are in 2021, the Democrats have just got elected to the office. You have your first woman Vice President. It feels that there's such a momentum to get the ball rolling on this piece of legislation. So, so what are your thoughts on it?
Elizabeth: Well, I think we're having a very liberal feminist moment in the United States. Like, yeah, we have a female Vice President, but she believes that men are women, trans women are women. And I've also heard that she's in favour of decriminalising prostitution.
Raquel: Before this whole election cycle, I had read that her record was actually the opposite of that, that she understood the problem with allowing male prisoners into women's prisoners. And that she had either as a California governor or as the California senator, that she had made some political steps to acknowledge. There was a difference in our problem for women's rights and that before this whole election cycle, that she was an abolitionist when it comes to prostitution. So that's why this whole change has been surprising for some.
Elizabeth: I have also heard that as well. It's very hard to tell what she believes, but under my imperfect understanding is that she has now moved toward the sort of liberal feminist understanding of these issues you know, because that's the Democratic Party platform and she originally wanted to be President and then she wanted to be Vice President.
Raquel: Exactly. It's like, well, well, what does it matter that six years ago, you voted to protect female prisoners from having males in their prisons. If now that you are in a position of power, you have decided to turn around and about those female prisoners.
Elizabeth: Exactly, exactly. And I mean, it's even more ironic that she's a woman of colour because many of these issues, these radical feminist issues, impact women of colour and poor women the most. So men in women's prisons men in women's shelters, men taking away sports scholarships from women, all of those things and many other issues will impact women of colour and poor women the most.
Raquel: Is that the concession that is contained within liberal feminism, you can achieve positions of power as long as you sell women like you down the river.
Elizabeth: Yes. I mean, yes, that's certainly what it looks like to me.
Raquel: Let's talk about your book on radical feminism.
So I just wanted to bring it back to the book. So tell us a little bit. I think it's great that we had this brief conversation about the equality act, because it's like in that context, you create this anthology, which has 40 chapters and over 35 authors. So tell us about, when did this idea came about? Why write a book about radical feminism?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Well, thank you for asking that.
I may have been a little bit crazy to do this, but the book is almost ready to be published. So maybe my craziness paid off, but for one person to do a book this big and it's 710 pages and 45 chapters, it was a lot of work and it might've been a little nutty, but I felt like it was something I needed to do because it's so important that radical feminist voices be out there. And I think books are very important. I'm a book person.
One of the things that inspired me is seeing on social media, talking to young women and young feminists, seeing how, when they find second wave, radical feminist literature, they're so inspired by it, you know, and it's like a coming home to them and it's this huge relief to them to read these books, you know, that are 50 years old, some of them.
Because they're the first thing where they've been able to read the truth, as opposed to being sold a bunch of sexist, nonsense, like, oh, it's empowering, to engage in BDSM, it's empowering to be prostituted. And they've been sold that bill of goods, all their lives and something in their gut has always made them really uncomfortable with it. But that's all that's been available to them is that message. And when they read radical feminism, it's like coming home to them.
And so that was one of the things that inspired me and also just the brilliance of women's voices inspired me. So I spend a lot of time on the internet talking to other radical feminists all over the world.
I run some radical feminist groups online and I'm in many others. And I kept seeing women saying these incredibly brilliant things that really read to me like radical feminist theory. And the thing about radical feminist theory is that it's always been a grassroots thing. It's always been from the ground up.
Radical Feminist theory was not written by and handed down from on high, by the academy. It came from the bottom. It came from just women having consciousness raising groups, and talking to each other and building theory from our actual lived experience.
And I saw that happening online. I would see a woman put up a post and then other women comment on it. And the comments were like these small, radical feminist essays, you know, but if it's in a Facebook comment, it's here today and you read it and you're like, that's brilliant. And then the next day, no one ever sees it again, because Facebook scrolls by, and that's true with Twitter or anything else that stuff scrolls by.
So I started thinking, there's this brilliant theory being developed by these hundreds of different women all over the world and we need to collect it somewhere so that it can be shared with other women in a more permanent way. And so that's really why I decided to do a book.
I wrote emails or online messages to like over a hundred women and I just kind of reached out to everybody that I knew online. I didn't know most of them in person. I knew a few of them in person, but I reached out to all these women online and just said, I'm going to write this book, would you be willing to write something for it? And about 50 of them said that they would, and then about, I think about 37 or 38 found the time and opportunity to actually write chapters that they gave me.
And some of these things are things that have been published elsewhere and are being reprinted. And then a lot of the pieces were written as original pieces for the book. And a lot of them were written by women who never had anything published before. So it's a combination of some really well-known radical feminists in the book, and then there are a lot of other women who've never written anything before, or at least never had anything published before.
Raquel: And what was the process of selecting those women? How did you decide who you wanted to feature in your book?
Elizabeth: There were sort of two main motivations. One was just anyone I saw who I had consistently seen over some months or years just saying really smart things online, you know, just saying things that, like I said, they would make comments and I would think to myself, well, that's a radical feminist essay that that person just wrote.
So it was primarily just who I thought was saying things that were really valuable and that other women should be able to hear and have access to in a more permanent way. And then the other motivation was, I wanted the book to be as truly intersectional and diverse as possible in the true meaning of those words.
So I wanted to have diversity of race and ethnicity, even though I don't actually believe in the concept of race, but that's a whole other conversation, but so ‘race’ in quotation marks. A diversity of age, a diversity of sexual orientation, a diversity of geography and language. I wanted to try to include as many different types of women from all over the world, as I could reach out to and convince to contribute.
Now, of course the limitation was, well, this didn't have to be a limitation. Like I said, that I would get things translated. So I invited women to write in other languages and said that I would get things translated, but no one took me up on that. I think one of the problems with the fact that we speak different languages is that people who don't speak English, and people who do, often aren't in the same spaces online.
So all of the pieces were originally written in English, even though many of them were written by women for whom English is not their first language, but they were people who felt comfortable writing in English. So no one took me up on my invitation to get something translated. And I think that's probably just because, unfortunately, I'm not in the same groups as women who don't speak English because we wouldn't be able to communicate with each other. And that's a real problem. I think we really need like a United Nations for radical feminism where we have those little buds in our ears where with simultaneous translation.
Raquel: Yeah. And that's a real shame, you know, because you could get a perspective on things that would expand on what’s already featured in the book. So, I wanted to ask you:
When do you think the book will be published and what stage is it at?
Elizabeth: So there was the writing stage. So we've gone through the writing stage, the editing stage. I did all the editing myself. And then the book design stage, where I hired a book design company to format it as a book. And that took a long time, just cleaning up all sorts of inconsistencies in things that seem really dumb, like just how dashes are typed and things like that. It took a surprisingly long time to clean up all that formatting. And now I have just transferred it to the company that's going to print it and distribute it.
And so I'm hoping that it's going to be available for sale sometime in April of 2021. So this month, hopefully. If all goes well.
Raquel: So you have a chapter within your book on lesbian rights. And I wanted to ask you because it will seem like a paradox to people that every time we have Pride month and in the UK feels like pride summer, or like happy it's Pride. But you know, it's everywhere, all of these corporations, like massive institutions who are all about Pride yet at the same time, lesbian rights appear to be undermined from all sides but particularly by this concept that is now trying to be enshrined US legislation. And they tried to enshrine it in the UK too as well as many countries around the world. But this concept of gender identity that says that people people's gender is sort of an innate essence of them and akin to us all, that obviously undermines same attraction and sexual orientation.
So my question in particular is why is it that instead of celebrating same sex attraction of women, it seems that they are the particular target of this sort of onslaught against LGBT rights.
Elizabeth: We could write many books about just that question. It's such a huge question. As you were asking the question I had about six different avenues of answers, all of which are true.
It kind of hearkens back to a bunch of the themes that I saw in all of the chapters of the book. And by the way, I didn't tell anybody what to write, people would say, what would you like me to write about. And I just gave them a very, very general list of which I think you read at the beginning of the interview of just very general themes, but I really left it up to people very much to write about what was important to them. I really didn't try to shape their message at all.
And yet, even though people wrote about very diverse topics, they all, I think hearkened back to several things. One is that radical feminism is the collective liberation of all women. And a lot of the current movements like transgenderism and liberal feminism ignore that. Those movements are not about the collective liberation of all women at all.
Liberal feminism is so focused on white first world concerns and transgenderism of course, is focused on men. It's focused on the demands of men, not the needs or concerns of women. And another theme is that women's concerns are always pushed aside for men's desires and demands in every left and right movement.
Another theme is that everything is backwards and opposite, you know, so what's called ‘sex positive’ is actually sex negative. What's called empowering for women is actually exploitative. So everything is kind of upside down and backwards and in liberal feminism land and transgender land. And that is very true with lesbian rights.
So, you know, lesbians are women who have sole sexual orientation toward other people of their own sex. And yet the transgender movement is trying to redefine lesbian as meaning anybody who feels like a woman who's attracted to other people who either feel like women or present as women or dress as women, whatever that even means, since women dress and present in many different ways.
So, the transgender movement is trying to destroy the entire idea of sex existing biological sex. And of course, if there's no biological sex, there can't be any sexual orientation, there can't be homosexuality. And there also can't be heterosexuality because if there's no sex, then homosexuality and heterosexuality have no meaning.
If you can just identify into a gender, then those terms lose any meaning. If they don't have any meaning, then there are no rights that arise and therefore there are no rights that need to be protected. So I think that the destruction of lesbians rights is like a heightened version of the destruction of all women's rights.
I could go on, but I think that's sort of the core of it.
Raquel: Yes. And I think the perfect example of how women's rights are being set aside is what's happening in the legislation in the US because if you think about it the Equal Rights Amendment itself has not been ratified. It has been such a painstaking process.
It has to be done state by state and you have to campaign. I know this from experience because when I was doing my Master's degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality studies in Oregon, I campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment and we successfully we passed it. That was excellent.
But then you have to wait for other states. And then once a number of states ratifies that then you can go to X or Y process. And there are like deadlines of how long, how much time you have to achieve that. And, and then you compare that to the sort of frenzy surrounding the proposed Equality Act in the US then you do wonder, it's like, well, why couldn't you just get this excited and this sort of hyperbolic about the Equal Rights Amendment. I mean, women have been fighting for that for decades, and it's been languishing and languishing and you rarely get, you know, the occasional celebrity reminding people that that is still pending. Meanwhile, this legislation cannot even, enter Congress.
And you had the Taylor Swift video encouraging people to support it. There's something that is so frenzied and sort of like frantic. You must support gender identity. You have to support it right now. So I hope you don't mind. If I say it seems to me as an outsider, it seems a little bit like a cult, like there's something about it that when it comes to gender identity policies, that it is akin to an article of faith and not only is it something that people have to believe, they have to sort of convert other people so that they believe it too.
And I wonder what must it be like to be in your head, Elizabeth, because you're a feminist campaigner and author for decades. What is it like to witness this cultural and political process in your own country first-hand?
Elizabeth: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent with what you said. I have felt for a long time that transgenderism is basically a religion and I find the transgender movement to be very similar to the Spanish inquisition, literally.
I mean, I've studied the Spanish inquisition, and it was literally a room I've seen the room I've been there, where they would bring people in and demand that they subscribed to certain articles of faith. For example, they would demand that Jews renounced Judaism and subscribed to Catholicism. And if they refuse, they would be tortured, killed, or forced to leave the country.
And honestly, you know, so far, feminists and people refusing to subscribe to gender identity aren't being tortured and killed, but we're being put to a social death. We're suffering social death, we're being fired. We're being de-platformed, we're being ‘cancelled’ We are getting death threats, many, many death threats and rape threats.
When J K Rowling refused to subscribe to the gender religion, she received hundreds of thousands of rape and death threats. And people were literally making videos of burning her books. So it's very much a cult. It's a very dangerous cult.
This hearkens back to what I said before that my life feels like I look at the world and it's like, Alice in Wonderland, everything is upside down and backwards. Words are used to mean the opposite of what they actually mean.
I also agree with you on the frenzied aspect of it. Biden came into office and within five hours of becoming president, he issued an executive order that was parallel to the Equality Act in Congress that directed all federal agencies to re-examine and redefine their practices in accordance with the religious tenet of gender identity replacing sex. That happened his first day in office.
And they're pushing the Equality Act very hard. And as I said before, I agree very much with certain aspects of the Equality Act, but the part that redefined sex as gender identity is absolutely devastating to women's and girls' rights. And yet just like you said, we can't get the damn ERA into the Constitution. We've been working on it since the 1970s.
So it was ratified by 35 States by the 1980s, then Phyllis Schlafly made it fall apart and it was dormant for decades. And then in the last like five years, the last three states ratified it. I worked on the campaign in Illinois to get Illinois to ratify it.
And so it has been ratified by the number of states that it needs to be ratified by, and now it just needs to be added to the Constitution. And Biden needs to issue an order that it be added to the Constitution.
Raquel: Where is the order? I mean, the first day in office, less than 24 hours, you're willing to sign an Executive Order mandating that federal public bodies have to abide by gender identity. But cannot sign an order for the Equal Rights Amendment that has been tumbling from state to state for years. since what is it? 1923.
I’m so angry about this, you know, it's like, why can't they just like step up and at least just do that for women.
Elizabeth: Yeah. And I mean the Equal Rights Amendment is one sentence. It literally just says you can't discriminate against people on the basis of sex. And the fact that that is not in our Constitution means that it is legal to discriminate against women on the basis of our sex. It has been legal to do that since the country was founded and it continues to be legal today.
So 51% of the population are not recognised as equal human beings in our constitution.
Raquel: The sentence is: equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Elizabeth: Yeah. And apparently our country cannot agree on that simple principle that women and girls should not be discriminated against on the basis of our sex.
Raquel: And that is something that has been advocated and campaign for since 1923 or before. Look at, for example, like the Bills that the Democrats are interested in, it's like, yes, we will support the Violence Against Women Act and we will support, the Equal Rights Amendment only as long as we can do it simultaneously to the Equality Act, which undermines those other two pieces of legislation.
My question to you would be, what would you say to those politicians who are engaging in these tactics?
Elizabeth: You know, it's hard to know what to say to politicians because participation in politics is such a weird and specific thing. You know, it's not really directly connected to people's rights.
Politics is self-perpetuating. Politics are done for their own sake and for the sake of power. And so I think the main motivation of people who are in politics is to remain in politics and to be powerful and to get attention, a lot of them are very narcissistic.
And so it's hard to know what to say to people like that, because most of them are not really in office to get rights for people they're in office to get power and to get control and to get social approval. So I often feel that whatever we would say to them wouldn't matter because they're not motivated by the same things that people who are in true social justice movements are motivated by. We're not really existing in the same plane of reality, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
And that really hearkens back to the theme of why liberal feminism is not the answer. Radical feminism says ‘we're never really going to get rights for women and end women's oppression by working within the existing system, we have to dismantle it’.
Women have to just act out of patriarchy, which you know, now that is truly a radical idea in the political sense of radical to stop participating in patriarchy, which is something that Sonia Johnson talked a lot about during the second wave. And by the way she started out as a massive ERA campaigner.
And then later when the ERA was temporarily defeated, she came to the idea that working within the existing system is not ultimately going to free women, that women have to free ourselves.
Raquel: But then again, you're a political campaigner. So sometimes you do have to talk to both of them.
Elizabeth: Yeah. As a participant, you have to go forward on both tracks at once. There’s the short-term track, which is the liberal feminist track and the long-term track, which is the radical feminist track.
Raquel: Where are the feminist leaders on this topic? If these policies are so harmful to women, then surely should be the leaders of the feminist movement who are advocating against it. But what we see is that on the contrary. Where is those historical feminist figures who are sort of giving their stamp of approval to his policies, for example, Gloria Steinem, who is a legendary US feminist campaigner and author recently on March 31st, she said, I am proud to sign a letter in favour of trans women and girls being into the female categories. She said, I am proud to sign this letter because we must all fight against the unnecessary barriers placed on trans women and trans girls by lawmakers, and those who call up the feminist label in the name of division and hatred. So my question for you would be:
Why are feminist leaders in the movement in the US either hesitant or opposed to supporting sex based rights?
Elizabeth: You really like to ask the huge question, so there's another book. I mean I think they are very much in the camp of mainstream Democrats, mainstream liberal feminists, they're all part of the same camp of this idea of equality, although now it's even worse because like I said, the Equality Act would actually dismantle women's equality. So it's not even as good as equality and equality isn't good enough. Ending patriarchy, women's liberation from patriarchy is what we actually need. So equality is a very pale substitute for that. And the idea of redefining sex as gender identity is an even paler substitute for equality. So now we've gone another massive step backwards.
But why people like Gloria Steinem are in that camp. I mean, she's always been just a liberal feminist. You know, she's always been in that camp of, well, as long as women can get abortions and birth control then that's good enough. That's enough for women, as long as we can be ‘equal’ within a patriarchal system. That's enough.
And honestly, liberal feminism is a very male centred and male pandering movement. And I think women like Steinem who pander to the transgender movement are part of that tradition of liberal feminism pandering to males.
I, of course, I'm in favour of women having abortion rights and access to birth control. But honestly, if we're honest about it, the reason that the left supported that and the democratic movement supported that is because women having access to abortion and birth control enables men's access to women sexually without any consequences.
So the only rights that men are willing for us to have are rights that help them. And so I think Gloria Steinem is very much in that tradition and always has been. I never particularly admired her. I always felt that she was in that camp of liberal feminists who want to convince women that here's some crumbs from the master's table. That's enough.
Raquel: Yes. Let's go back to the reproductive justice issue in a second, but you just said something, something very important about it, but I felt that she was a rare feminist figure, who was public in her support of an abolitionist model of prostitution, or am I getting that wrong?
Elizabeth: To be perfectly honest? I don't know what her position on prostitution is. It seems to me that most women who are sort of in the camp of the Democratic Party, liberal feminism, including Kamala Harris, speak out in favour of full decriminalisation of prostitution, which would mean that not only are the prostituted people decriminalised, but the pimps and Johns are also decriminalised.
So I don't actually know for sure whether what Gloria Steinem's position is on that, but my guess would be, I guess we just don't know with regard to her position on that is.
Raquel: Yes. And so you mentioned a very important point about abortion rights and how will the support that some men are providing for abortion rights and legislation, it goes to the fact that it benefits men to have women able to not carry a pregnancy that is unwanted, you know, it serves men's interest. You yourself are an advocate and a campaigner for reproductive justice in the US. Can you tell us about your efforts to make sure that women in Chicago have access to abortion, even if the Supreme court overturns Roe vs. Wade, is that something that started under Donald Trump, the effort to pass that in Chicago?
Elizabeth: No, that was passed in 2017, I believe. I guess it was associated with Trump becoming president somewhat because the fear was that if more conservative justices were appointed to the Supreme court, that they might overturn Roe V Wade and so women in Illinois worked to get a piece of legislation passed at the state level in Illinois that sets it up so that if Roe V Wade was ever overturned by the Supreme court.
So what Roe V Wade says is: it doesn't make abortion legal or illegal. It just says that states cannot restrict abortion past a certain level.
So if Roe V Wade were overturned, it would throw it back to the states and states would no longer be prevented from restricting abortion as basically as much as they want to. And so Illinois passed this law that if Roe V Wade was overturned, Illinois has kind of a stop gap, kind of a second layer of protection where Illinois would make abortion legal at the state level.
Raquel: Yes. And what was that like in Chicago? Was that difficult to pass?
Elizabeth: It wasn't that difficult because we have really good legislators right now, democratic legislators in the Illinois legislature. And what I think they needed was to know that there was enough strong grassroots citizen support for the bill that they felt safe speaking out for it.
So that goes back to the whole idea of like people wanting to maintain their political power and be re-elected, et cetera. So, Illinois has an interesting, I guess, method called witness slips where individuals can get on the Illinois legislatures website and fill out a form saying whether they support or oppose a specific bill that the legislature is considering.
And so you can fill out witness slips when the bill is at the committee level. And then if it gets voted past committee and goes to the full floor, you can then fill out another round of witness slips, showing your support or opposition at the full vote level. And so a lot of what we did was mobilise.
We had a big grassroots mobilisation to get thousands and thousands of people to fill out witness slips in support of the Bill and we also wrote letters and had meetings with the legislators basically to show them that they had our very strong support as citizens, a huge grassroots support and that therefore they could be safe voting for the bill. And so that's what happened.
Raquel: So if we were, for example, to compare campaigns, would it be safer to compare the sex-based rights to the system of male guardianship as opposed to comparing it to reproductive rights? Because if our productive rights are supported by men on the basis that it benefits them, then women getting sex-based rights do not benefit men, the same way that liberating women from a male guardianship system does not benefit men directly. So it's almost like I've heard in this debate all the time, comparisons to abortion. It's not like abortion at all. It's very, very different from that because it is so much about understanding women, female people, women, and girls, as distinct people, separate from men. And that's something that can get kind of model on the other debates.
What are your thoughts on that?
Elizabeth: Yeah, I agree with you, I'm not sure I a hundred percent understood the question part of that. I agree with what you said.
Raquel: I was kind of making a comment that I thought that it was very interesting that you mentioned that abortion.
Do you mind if I ask you a little bit about Feminists in Struggle, which is one of the campaigning groups that you're a part of?
Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. They're very involved with the Equality Act.
Raquel: Can you tell us about what is that organisation right in the US? Because, because a lot of women in the UK are asking well, where are the US feminists organisations aside from like the Feminist Majority or NOW organisation. Aside from those people, where are the actual grassroots, feminist organisations taking all these issues on?
Elizabeth: Yeah, well, that's definitely one of the very unfortunate things about living in the US is that the only feminist organisations that have money, power, visibility and that people know about are the liberal feminist organisations, like the National Organisation for Women which seemed to betray women more and more every day.
The radical feminist organisations are very grassroots. Basically anyone who's not a radical feminist, hasn't heard of them mostly. But Feminists in Struggle is a grassroots national radical feminist organisation that was formed in 2018. And actually I'm kind of proud because it was formed, kind of in response to, and kind of first organised at a conference that I organised, the Women in Media Conference in Chicago.
So one of the women who came to that wanted to start this organisation and she kind of wanted to see if there was enough grassroots support for a national radical feminist organisation. And so by going to the conference, I think she was kind of inspired and empowered to continue with organising Feminists in Struggle.
We're growing. We're a national radical feminist organisation that's working on various radical feminist campaigns. And we do things like have online forums about various radical feminist topics, we have a YouTube channel. We have a website Feministstruggle.org. And one of the big things that we've done is written feminist amendments to the Equality Act, the proposed Equality Act, and those can be read about on the Feminists in Struggle website. There's a lot of information there showing exactly how our amendments would change the Equality Act.
So, like I said radical feminists and Feminists in Struggle specifically are very much for parts of the Equality Act that protect people on the basis of their sexual orientation but we're against redefining sex as gender identity.
And so the feminist amendments rewrite the Equality Act to get rid of the idea of gender identity and to say people should be protected on the basis of three categories: 1) sex as defined in the actual way that it is defined biological sex. 2) sexual orientation, which is romantic and sexual interest in people based on their biological sex and 3) nonconformity to stereotypes about how people of each sex should behave. So instead of having an idea that you have some religious soul called gender identity, what we say is people should be protected when they don't conform to sex role stereotypes. So sexual stereotypes are how I would define gender. Gender is sexual stereotypes.
Raquel: Wouldn't that be covered under sex discrimination? So for example, a woman who does not conform to the stereotypes of femininity should not be discriminated because she's a woman who does not confirm to femininity.
Elizabeth: No, well sort of, for more clarity, the feminist amendments break that out into two different things. So we would say a woman should not be discriminated against based on her biological sex. So for example, you can't pay a woman less because she is a woman, because she has two X chromosomes, you can't refuse to hire a woman because of her biological sex. You can't fire a woman for being pregnant, things like that.
So those are based solely on biological sex. We're not even looking at the question of whether that woman conforms or doesn't conform to sex role stereotypes, it's just about her biological sex.
And a separate category is: you also can't discriminate against anyone, men or women based on their nonconformity to sexual stereotypes.
So if a man wants to wear a dress to work, you can't discriminate against him because he's a man who wants to wear a dress. I mean, there should be some exceptions for this. Like if somehow it were, and I don't know how this would be, but if, if there was some importance to wearing a certain thing on the job for safety reasons, or for some other really compelling reason, then perhaps that would be an exception, but in general, men should not be discriminated against because they have long hair or because they aren't sufficiently aggressive and women shouldn't be discriminated against because they have short hair or because they don't wear makeup or because they don't wear high heels or because they aren't sufficiently submissive and quiet and nurturing and delicate.
Those are all sex role stereotypes. They're all stereotypes about what social roles we should play due to our biology that society associates, certain social roles with our biology and what radical feminist say is that's nonsense. You your biology is your biology. Your personality is your personality, and you can be a loud aggressive person who is a biological woman like I am, or you can be a loud, aggressive person who is a biological man. You shouldn't be able to discriminate against people because they don't conform to these regressive 1950s stereotypes about what a woman should look like or act like or what a man should look like or act like.
Raquel: Yes. And its Feminists in Struggle.
website is feministstruggle.org
Elizabeth: It's feminist struggle.org. So they're not going to read it incorrectly. Yeah. It's just the word feminist, the word struggle next to each other .org
Raquel: Excellent. And is described as: a national female only radical feminist network, democratically run and composed of individuals born female, in affiliated female only feminist organisations. We are committed to organising a serious fight back against the attacks on our rights from multiple quarters.
Thank you so much for all the time that you have a dedicated to us today.
I have a final question to you. Besides asking you about the book a little bit more. We have this conversation about like leadership and the National Organisations and feminist organisations.
A part of me wonders some of these organisations, some of these women who we see as sort of the figureheads, some of them are in their seventies or their eighties, the ones that are still alive through spearheading those same organisations. I wonder if jumping on this bandwagon is a way of sort of like, saving their legacy? because if you're 70 years old, 75 years old, do you want to be fighting a younger generation of women who have just been. I don't want to say brainwashed, but who had gone through this sanitising process of liberal feminism? So I kind of wonder is that the motivation, you know, I understand that this is undermining women's rights, but am I going to die instead of have my whole legacy tarnish? Because the young women of today have been taught that advocating for sex based rights and sex against sex discrimination is passé. That's not what you advocate for these days.
Elizabeth: Yeah. That's a really good question. I hadn't thought about it in exactly that way, but I think that's probably an aspect of their thought process., and that really brings in age-ism too. So, you know, going back to intersectionality, there's all these bases of oppression and discrimination that intersect with each other and for women, one of the big points of intersection is age-ism right.
So women are only considered at all valuable if they're young. And, I don't want to use the F word, but, you know, blankable. Maybe this is a family program where I shouldn't use that word, but, women are considered ‘valuable’ to men when they're young and attractive and can produce babies and are sexually interesting to heterosexual men and that is their only value.
And when women are old, they have no value at all. One consequence of that is that older women often and honestly older anyone, but certainly older women feel that they have to - I think the idea of wisdom from age is very much denigrated in Western society. And it's just the opposite.
It's like, well, you had some ideas 50 years ago, but now those ideas are passé. They're not useful anymore because they're old and whatever the new ideas are, are inherently better because they're newer. And so I think that women like Gloria Steinem are sent the message by younger people that this idea that there's biological sex is really outdated. And nowadays we understand that there are 10,000 genders and that people are attracted to each other on the basis of gender and you better get with it, Gloria, if you don't want to be cancelled.
I think there's a lot of pressure on women, all women, but also especially older women to appear to be relevant in some way, but honestly, radical feminist ideas are always relevant.
I mean, Mary Wollstonecraft was developing these ideas several hundred years ago. And if I read her work today, I feel like I could sit down and have coffee with her and we'd have a ton in common. And then I have friends who are 18 years old, 20 years’ old who are radical feminist and I have a ton in common with them.
So this idea that age makes you become irrelevant or that ideas that are good ideas somehow cease to be good because some time has gone by is a really dangerous and discriminatory idea. And it's just, honestly, it's just another way of marginalising and silencing women.
Raquel: Yes, it’s misogynist at its core, because if you think about it, look, you still have young people wearing Marx t-shirts or t-shirts with Che Guevara on it.
Elizabeth: Why aren't they irrelevant?
Raquel: Exactly. But it's like you just saying, oh, well, Mary Wollstonecraft I could have coffee with her. It's like, that's such an anomaly because we've been taught that feminist analysis sort of expires every 40 years tops.
Elizabeth: As soon as you lose your sexual attractiveness to heterosexual men, your ideas become even less listenable to, than they were to begin with.
Raquel: And I was thinking about that because she tweeted that, Gloria Steinem did say that. But she received a lot of backlash from women. You know, a lot of women who were essentially calling her out on not supporting women's sex based rights. And I just wonder, well, what would it be like to be in that position? If she came out with a full like JK Rowling kind of statement, you know, that means goodbye to everything that you have spent the past 40 years of your life cultivating.
And, and now thanks to JK Rowling, a lot of women in those positions can see, well, if I go out and say, ‘women's sex based rights are important, biological sex is important,’ look at what's going to happen to me, which is why these persecutions and the bullying and the harassment, which is why they are enacting on women.
What would you say to young women who are witnessing everything that is happening, who know, who have this analysis that you and I have just made right now and are thinking, well, I don't want to face that backlash. I don't want to face that reaction from my friends and my circle and my peers, you know, younger people are so susceptible to peer pressure.
What would you say to those people who may even be hesitant by your book?
Elizabeth: The first thing I would say to them is I completely understand and sympathise with your feelings on that, because it's very true that women who don't conform and don't comply are punished but you know what women who conform and comply are punished too, just for being women, that is the nature of sex-based oppression.
so yes, it will create additional risk for you in your life, but it's worth doing, I mean, you know, Nelson Mandela was in jail for decades because he was doing something worth doing. I guess I feel like it's really, really valuable to me to do work that I know is incredibly needed and to know that I'm helping other women.
I'll just give you one example. I hate to keep coming back to transgenderism because feminism is so much broader than that, but this just crossed my mind when I was talking.
I have a friend from high school and she has a teenage daughter who's now about 20, I think. And her daughter was a ‘tomboy’ she didn't like girly stuff. She was very athletic and active. And so of course she was drawn into, at least flirting with, transgenderism and wanting to be a boy and wanting to change her name. And her mother was very worried. I hadn't actually talked to her mom in a couple of years and then her mom got in touch with me and said, I want you to know that my daughter has desisted from identifying as trans. She no longer identifies as trans. And I want to tell you that you were the only person that I could talk to about this, or got information from about this that was a feminist perspective. And that wasn't just, ‘oh yeah, that's so brave and beautiful. She should definitely get a double mastectomy.’ You know, that was the only message she was getting, except from me. And she said I would not have had the resources or the bravery to help my daughter resist this, if not for you.
And so that was huge for me and I've had a lot of other experiences like that with other feminist issues where something that I did helped a woman be brave, helped a woman fight something that was harmful to her or to women in general.
And I've had that experience too, where things that other women did helped me. And so I feel that the message to young women has to be:
‘it is hard and dangerous, but being a woman is hard and dangerous’ And the way out is for us to liberate ourselves, we each have to liberate ourselves individually and internally from buying into the lies of patriarchy.
And we each have to liberate other women as much as we can in our own lives and our own spheres. And that will look different for every woman. What you're able to do, who's in your sphere, what steps you can take, but women have to lift each other up. We all have to see each other as a global sisterhood that is linked by our common oppression. And we have to be brave and take all the steps we can and do everything that we can to help each other, find liberation, to help lift each other up, to support each other financially, to support each other by lifting up voices of other women, to stand behind them when they're attacked and defend them to give them friendship.
All of these things, we have to give each other because we're in a common struggle and, and we have to do whatever we can to support each other in that common struggle.
People are powerful people as a group are powerful and really the only movements in history that have ever achieved anything have been grassroots movements of people.
And they often start small and then they snowball as more and more people see those first brave people and they are inspired by them to do something. And then in turn, others are inspired by those people and that's how change happens. That's how liberation happens.
Raquel: Wow. That is so beautiful and inspired me.
It is impossible for me to say anything to add to it thank you so much. Elizabeth is just wonderful. Very beautiful.
Elizabeth: I loved talking to you. I'm inspired by you by many of the things that you've written and said, you know, that I've heard you say in interviews so it definitely goes both ways that inspire me.
Raquel: Tell our audience, where can we purchase the book. And is it going to be print and online or Kindle?
Elizabeth: Oh yes. Thank you for asking that, I keep forgetting, I'm supposed to be pushing a book.
So yes, it will be available in print. It was also be available in Kindle and other eBook formats. I'm working on exactly how it's going to be sold. It will be distributed through a distributor. So it will be available through bookstores and library if they decide to carry it. So one thing people can do is contact your local bookstore and library and ask them to stock it.
You can also ask them to do a special order for you to order it, you'll also be able to buy it on the website of the publisher, which is Tidal Time publishing, which is Ruth Barrett's publishing company. She published the magnificent Female Eraser anthology, which is one of the things that inspired me to do this book was her anthology.
There were a lot of radical feminist anthologies in the 1970s and 80s and 90s that also inspired me to do this book. So it will also be available to purchase there but it doesn't actually exist yet, but I’m hoping it's going to come into existence in the next couple of weeks. It's being processed right now.
And you can also go to the website for the book it's spinningandweaving.org And you can go to that website to read about the book. The table of contents is there and a little biographical sketch of each author is there and there's links to some other interviews that I've done there.
And also on that website, you can sign up to get updates and also when the book exists in print and electronic form, there will be links on that spinningandweaving.org website where you can click there to buy the book. So it's going to be available in a bunch of different ways.
Raquel: Yes. And we will be sure to put those links that you just mentioned on the FiLiA podcast page so women will have access to it through that as well. So thank you so much, Elizabeth, number one for putting this effort together, I mean, 700 pages. You must be exhausted.
Elizabeth: I'm tired. I, you know, I'm more annoyed than exhausted because the formatting part of it took longer than I wanted it to. I wanted it to be out a little bit earlier. but I'm also just excited and inspired for the book to get out into the world and be available for women to read. I can't wait for that.
Raquel: And it comes cross like is one of those books that is going to collect so many women's voices and so many interesting topics that you're just going to like share each that little book like a gem, so I'm very excited to get my copy.
So thank you for putting that together and thank you so much for speaking with us at FiLiA it's been such an enlightening conversation and I've learned so much, about politics as well.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much. I really, really love talking to you and I very much appreciate your doing the interview and helping publicise the book and just talking to me about feminism.