Thanks a lot, Putin (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.
It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today, and I spent the afternoon — grey, rainy, cold — moderating a panel of Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish and Muslim women activists talking about how to find hope through the horrors of the Israel/Palestine crisis. After so many months of violence, hurt and hoplessness, there was something very positive about simply having this conversation, even though we didn’t solve anything. The panel ended with a suggestion from Laura Marks, the co-founder of the Nisa Nashim Jewish-Muslim women’s network. Ramadan starts tonight, Passover soon, and Easter, she said. Go out and meet someone of a different faith, make friends with them, build relationships across communal lines. I liked that idea.
And now to the reads….
1) The Russian president’s message for International Women’s Day
Alongside granting clemency to dozens of women in Russian prisons and lauding Russian women engaged in combat in Ukraine, in an address on 8th March President Vladimir Putin put women in their place:
"You, dear women, are capable of changing the world with your beauty, wisdom, and generosity of spirit, but mostly thanks to your greatest gift the nature gave you -- giving birth to children. Motherhood is an amazing preordination of women.”
Part of the context for these words is the Russian government’s attempt to boost a declining birthrate, including by trying to limit abortion access. As Radio Free Europe’s report explains:
Russian officials have focused on the demographic situation for years, with the birthrate falling since 2014 -- it currently sits at its lowest level since 1999 -- often raising the decrease at government sessions and during parliamentary debate. Many lawmakers have tried to initiate laws restricting abortions and access to contraceptives to spur population growth.
2) “Lunch with Judith Butler is much easier than lunch with ‘Judith Butler’”
With her new book Who’s Afraid of Gender? out this month, the world’s most famous gender theorist Judith Butler had lunch with the Financial Times’ Henry Mance. The result is a fairly awkward interview, where Mance makes much of being fearful of saying the wrong thing. They cover “gender ideology”, feminist backlash and the sex/gender wars in Britain. They don’t discuss how to bridge the feminist impasse or deal with the damage that the internet has done to discourse on feminism, women and trans rights. Here is a snippet:
In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak taunts the opposition Labour party by claiming that it doesn’t know what a woman is. “He’s imagining that they look ridiculous . . . In fact, the history of feminism dating back to the 19th century always posed the question: what is a woman, and why do we assume that women should be defined just by their reproductive capacities?”
What is a woman? “I don’t answer that question, but I point out that that question is looking for a kind of certainty, and in that way it’s trying to stop history, or it fails to recognise the category of women has gone through many changes and hopefully will go through some more.”
How exactly has the category of women changed? Butler refers to the emergence of muscular female tennis players starting with Martina Navratilova. “There was a time when, if you were a woman playing tennis, you didn’t look like that.”
I can’t quite work out if Butler has shifted the goalposts of the question. What I do know is that Butler’s take on biological differences doesn’t just provoke intolerant rightwingers. It infuriates many feminists, including Navratilova herself, who see women’s bodies as objectively different.
3) Abortion is now a constitutional right in France
While other countries roll back abortion access, France this week enshrined the “guaranteed freedom” to abort in its constitution. According to the various media reports, France, where abortion was first legalised in 1975, is the first country to “explicitly state [in its constitution] that an abortion will be guaranteed”. It is not the first, however, to include abortion rights in its constitution. For Balkan Insights, Tanja Ignjatovic writes that Yugoslavia did so in 1974, and Serbia held on to this in its 2006 constitution.
P.s. Apropos of France and abortion, have you read Happening by Annie Ernaux, a novel/memoir about terminating a pregnancy in France before abortion was legalised? It’s a beautiful, dark and visceral book.
4) Is the Taliban becoming normalised?
Writing for Ms Magazine, Dr Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s former deputy president and minister of women’s affairs, argues that the world is starting to normalise the Taliban regime (which returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, twenty years after being removed by American forces) despite its “re-establishment of gender apartheid”. She writes:
Recently, The Washington Post ran an article titled “Taliban vowed to change Kabul. The city may be starting to change the Taliban,” which described a Taliban enthralled with shopping, learning English and studying abroad. A photo of Taliban enjoying a picnic accompanies the article, but neglects to mention that women are now forbidden from going to the park or anywhere else. Taliban revels in its male-dominated society, while women languish under house arrest or in jail for daring to defy Taliban decrees.
This normalization of the Taliban is devastating to the women and girls of Afghanistan, and portends danger to the rest of the world where attacks on women’s rights have intensified.
The Taliban that now rules Afghanistan is the same extremist entity that revoked the basic human rights of Afghanistan’s women and girls and minorities when they were last in power in the 1990s. And now, they have done it again. I didn’t think that I would see history repeat itself in my country twice within my lifetime, but it has.
5) What would Clara Zetkin think of International Women’s Day?
If you’ve had enough of the sudden uptick in women-related events and social media posts this week, you might not be a fan of Clara Zetkin, the German Communist who helped found International Women’s Day. The first International Working Women’s Day took place in 1911, following a proposal by Zetkin. A National Women’s Day had already existed in the US since 1909. But Zetkin, a radical, would not be a fan of what this annual honouring of women’s rights and achievements has become, writes Angela Saini in the Guardian:
We can only guess at what Zetkin might have made of how pitifully watered-down International Women’s Day has become. For all its revolutionary beginnings, today it’s more about empowerment brunches in corporate meeting rooms, or women on minimum wage serving pink cupcakes to women in expensive suits outraged at why the Barbie movie didn’t win more awards. It’s mainstream. So mainstream that the Conservative party, while it calculates how to fly vulnerable refugees, many of them women, to Rwanda, wishes women everywhere a happy International Women’s Day. Even the Labour party has sacrificed bold idealism for a don’t-rock-the-boat centre ground in which nothing really changes except for the tone.
As the cupcake icing melts in our mouths, we forget that women like Zetkin once believed that wholesale change was possible.
Bonus: Even more data on Gen Z men’s love of Andrew Tate | Why Labour’s positive male influencer policy won’t stop online misogyny
Thank you so much for reading. See you next week.