The left and feminism
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Early feminists and advocates of women’s rights were closely connected to positions that were politically radical and of the left in their time. Feminist pioneers like Mary Wollstonecraft were influenced by and in turn influences on politically radical thinkers like Thomas Paine and John Stewart Mill. A divide between this radical, leftist current of feminism and a more right-wing current can be traced to the relationship between feminism and the Abolitionist movement. In 1840, at the World Anti-Slavery Conference, feminists spoke about the connection between women’s rights and slavery. Other, more right-wing, white feminists, however, rejected this connection.
Similarly, in Britain, there was a divide between feminists on the left who connected the struggle for female suffrage with the struggle for the civil rights of working class men and for universal male suffrage, and those in the suffragette movement who wanted to restrict voting rights to middle class women. The divide between left and right feminists can be illustrated by the split of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Women's Suffrage Federation (WSF, later Workers Socialist Federation from Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). While the WSF called for the extension of civil rights to working class men and women, and fiercely opposed World War I, the WSPU was essentially a bourgeois organisation which took a patriotic line during the war and called a truce in its campaign.
Many important leftists have also been feminists. Examples include Marxists Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai and anarchist Emma Goldman. Some important feminists have also been active on the left. Examples include Helen Keller, a Communist, and Annie Besant who was involved in various socialist groups.
When contemporary feminism emerged, with the Women's Liberation Movement, it was closely connected to the New Left and other new social movements (e.g. the black power movement) that challenged the orthodoxies of the Old Left but shared key values with the left as a whole. As this movement split into different currents, some were closer to the left than others.
- ’’Socialist feminism’’ (e.g. the Beyond the Fragments group) and ‘’Marxist feminism’’ (e.g. Selma James, see also materialist feminism) saw themselves as very much within the left, even though they challenged its male-dominated and sexist structures.
- ’’Liberal feminism’’ is closely related to left-liberalism, the left-wing side of mainstream politics. (Example: the National Organization of Women, which has supported liberal politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton.)
- ’’Radical feminism’’ (e.g. Mary Daly) is harder to place on a left-right spectrum; it has more in common with currents like deep ecology which reject this axis.
The left, on the whole, has supported women's rights. Anarchists, Communists, and socialists have been strong supporters of the idea that men and women were equal, and should be treated the same in the workplace. Left of centre governments have often introduced legislation to remove gender inequalities in work.
