The building I live in in Paris has a plaque outside. In the 1700s, it was the residence of Olympe de Gouges, France’s first feminist – author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, and a staunch abolitionist at a time when slave trade was still perfectly legal in the French colonies. For these revolutionary beliefs, she was imprisoned and subsequently guillotined.
Olympe de Gouges’ writing and thoughts were radical then – and, unfortunately, they continue to be. De Gouges understood feminism as solidarity with the disenfranchised against the insatiable appetites of the ruling class. It was never meant to be a gated community for biological females only, but a broader demand for equal rights and equal dignity, regardless of gender identity, sexuality, race, class, or ethnicity.
Civil rights for all as part of feminism
With its roots entrenched in decolonisation and civil rights movements, feminism is today again under attack with the rise of authoritarian, anti-democratic forces that seek to trade human rights for profit margins. These movements seek to fracture the feminist agenda, isolating women’s rights from those of queer and transpeople, separating them from racial, ethnic, or religious justice. Pitting identities against one another, shrinking solidarity into something small and tidy, scapegoating one minority group against the other, is a classic manoeuvre to render these movements politically harmless. It’s counterinsurgency with branding and better marketing.
Identity – or inequality?
In tethering feminism to only some women, we’ve managed the remarkable feat of making it smaller precisely when minority rights are under escalating attack. If more energy goes into defining who must be excluded than into dismantling the toxic machinery that exploits everyone, feminism doesn’t defeat inequality – it succumbs to it.
We are only as strong as the weakest rung
When I lived in New York some years ago, I worked for a feminist lobby group defending minority rights. Our purpose was simple: lift those lowest on the ladder and everyone rises. Yet, unfailingly, a small but persistent chorus would ask why a feminist organisation concerned itself with racism or modern iterations of colonial extraction and occupation. The answer was always the same: we are only as strong as the weakest rung. Olympe de Gouges understood that. A few hundred years later, we’re still catching up.
The role of feminism in the context of the Epstein files
The role of feminism today should be about leaving behind vocabulary and definitions of who should and who should not be protected by this cause, and focusing on delivering results on the causes that Olympe de Gouges stood for – of which many, shamefully, are still not resolved.
The exploitation of bodies continues, irrespective of their gender or their colour. The dehumanisation of entire populations, callous disregard for their lives, and for international law, define the leaders of today. The Epstein files show us nothing is sacred – not women’s bodies, nor even children’s.
And our institutions have a curious instinct for shielding abusers and doubting victims – even when evidence is captured on video, on texts, and comes with timestamps. Categorisation of populations into those one can fight for only serves the interests of those who seek to exploit them. That age-old policy of divide and rule remains brutally efficient.
Rethinking feminism
For feminism to succeed, it must transcend gender and race. It cannot be about a segment cut off from a larger body of all the less fortunate. At the risk of irritating purists, yes, this includes men.
The manosphere industry, pushed by cowardly grifters and business or political leaders posturing as superheroes, poses a real danger to all those whom it considers lesser humans. But it also trains men and boys to amputate their humanity as a sign of weakness and liability. Supportive sisterhoods exist because there is a shared vulnerability; in contrast, when a group of boys or men get together it is often to share ‘locker-room talk’, crushing the other, to feel stronger. When vulnerability becomes taboo, cruelty masquerades as strength.
Learning from history
Feminism should be about upholding what we call feminine values: restraint, compassion, empathy, solidarity, and real justice, equal for all, and more than retribution. A body cannot survive by irrigating only select organs. When one part grows with impunity, unchecked, and devours the rest, medicine has a word for it: cancer.
Saving the tumour alone will not protect it; the host will be destroyed and the tumour with it. There is no liberation that protects only a fraction and expects the whole to endure. Olympe de Gouges, a woman of modest birth from the French provinces in the 18th century, taught us this. There is no excuse for us not learning it.
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