In 1979, in her closing address at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Lawrence, Kansas, the feminist Barbara Smith tried to persuade a room full of white women that racism was a roadblock to “making feminism real.” In her six years in the movement as “an avowed Black feminist,” Smith said, she had seen some promising developments. Feminists had formed study groups dedicated to the problem of racism; women of color were appearing more frequently in movement journals. But despite early signs of “real and equal coalitions” between white women and women of color, white women still seemed to think that taking responsibility for their racism was something they did as a favor to someone else, “solely to benefit Third World women.” Smith insisted this was not the case. “Racism is a feminist issue,” she said, and anyone in the audience who doubted it (“ ‘Oh no,’ I can hear some of you groaning inwardly. ‘Not that again’ ”) need look no further than “the inherent definition of feminism”:
Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women — as well as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement .
Smith followed this memorable line by naming another roadblock to feminist victory: third-world women’s antifeminism, which was “fueled by a history of justified distrust.” In her appeal to women of color not to reject feminism wholesale, Smith refined her definition:
To me, racist white women cannot be said to be actually feminist, at least not in the way I think and feel about the word. Feminism in and of itself would be fine. The problems arise with the mortals who practice it . As Third World women, we must define a responsible and radical feminism for ourselves and not assume that bourgeois female self-aggrandizement is all that feminism is.
With this rousing cri de coeur, Smith surfaced an important contradiction: “bourgeois female self-aggrandizement” is categorically not feminism, but it is also “not all that feminism is” — in other words, it’s a feminism, perhaps even the dominant feminism, just not the one Smith supported. The contradiction still vexes forty-seven years later. Which statement was more true, the first or the second? Can a nonfeminism so overwhelm the mainstream that it supplants the real thing?
That feminism aims to “free all women” — “half of the human species,” as Mary Wollstonecraft put it in 1792 — has been one of Western feminism’s most enduring claims. But you don’t need qualifiers like “to me” or “in the way I think and feel about the word” when defining a term whose inherent qualities are self-evident. As Smith knew, feminism in practice is not a unitary movement that advocates equally on behalf of all women. It is an umbrella term for the disparate, often conflicting movements whose main shared feature — sometimes only shared feature — is their rejection of the hierarchical construction of gender known as male supremacy. As a cofounder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which published movement classics like Home Girls and This Bridge Called My Back, Smith tended the efflorescence of feminisms plural that defined a huge part of what we call the third wave. At the same time, her famous line that “anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement” has become a maxim among those who maintain that a single, true, “actually feminist” position exists.
When people invoke Smith’s words today, they often do so to assert that feminism is intrinsically good. Since the 2010s, it’s been common for left-wing feminists to dismiss as “not feminist” any movement whose bigoted or blinkered views violate feminism as it ought to be. In the eyes of these feminists — among whose ranks, to be clear, I often count myself — there is no such thing as a “pro-life” feminist, a white supremacist feminist, a carceral feminist, or a capitalist feminist. Anyone who self-identifies as such is at best deluding themselves, at worst an opportunist using the trappings of feminism to peddle dubious projects. The high-water mark of this tendency in the United States — I’ll call it “strategic idealism” — was probably the Women’s March of 2017, when Flavia Dzodan’s viral slogan my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit appeared on countless neon poster boards flooding the streets of DC. In the manic days of Trump’s first term, strategic-idealist language so saturated the discourse that women whose political commitments were markedly not intersectional began to grumble about what feminism had come to. “Does Feminism Have Room for Zionists?” asked one op-ed headline in the New York Times in March 2017 — the suggestion being that any failure to make room would be a betrayal of feminism’s big-tent promise to embrace all women, pro-apartheid women included.
What do we call our political enemies whose feminist bona fides aren’t really up for debate in the eyes of the public?
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The strategic idealists’ gambit was, again, strategic. Trump’s election had inspired the biggest feminist mass mobilization in decades, and if veteran organizers could channel this wave of newly engaged feminists toward an existing left-feminist platform, they could funnel possibly hundreds of thousands of people into meaningful campaigns that were feminist but tended to be dismissed as otherwise by bourgeois liberals. Their rhetorical move here, much like Barbara Smith’s, was to assert that to be a feminist in 2017 meant to be de facto anticapitalist, anticarceral, antiracist, and decolonial; pro–disability rights, pro–trans rights, pro-decriminalization, and environmentalist. Did the women who wrote the official platform of the Women’s March really believe that, to quote the Zionist columnist, “a proud and outspoken feminist who champions reproductive rights, equal pay, increased female representation in all levels of government, and policies to combat violence against women” wasn’t really a feminist if she didn’t support Fight for $15, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, or the decolonization of Palestine? I doubt it. But the organizers’ actions weren’t a cynical ploy to “hijack” feminism for a presumably nonfeminist left, either. As it was for Smith, feminism for these women was a struggle to free society’s most oppressed women — something that is only achieved by organizing simultaneously along multiple axes of concern. They weren’t using feminism to push unrelated political causes; those political causes were central to their feminism.
For the most part, the strategic-idealist gambit to expel “bad” feminisms from the category to better demarcate a left position has been for the good. White, cis, able-bodied, and middle-class women in the West — whose ability to move through the world as racially “unmarked” has made us more vulnerable to the seductions of universalism — often come to feminism with a long road of political education ahead of us. It can be deflating to learn that we are not, in fact, the revolutionary subject of history, and, needless to say, it is tedious for everyone else to watch us learn it. The effort to make intersectional feminism mainstream has shortened the length of that path, making the literature of left feminisms more accessible to neophytes. The strategic-idealist approach has also allowed left feminists to push the concerns of marginalized women to the center, asserting, à la Smith, that solidarity with sex workers and trans people is essential to any feminism worth the name. Though transphobia and whorephobia still pervade mainstream feminist spaces, the vocal insistence that trans and sex workers’ rights are women’s rights has helped young feminists learn that the feminism of their SWERF and TERF foremothers isn’t the only game in town.1
At the same time, the gambit has produced some confusion. If feminism is only ever “true” in its ideal form — which is to say, our ideal form, as antifascist, antiracist, socialist feminists — what do we call our political enemies whose feminist bona fides aren’t really up for debate in the eyes of the public? Can we really say that Hillary Clinton isn’t a feminist because she is an imperialist war hawk? That Germaine Greer isn’t a feminist because she is a transphobe? That Sheryl Sandberg isn’t a feminist because she’s a C-suite capitalist? That Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn’t a feminist because she’s an Islamophobe? We can, of course, and many people have. But what insights might we be denying ourselves — about our enemies and about the shape of this thing we call feminism — when we do?
Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, published by Haymarket in February 2025, offers a path out of the discursive trap laid by strategic idealism. Surveying the past two hundred years of anglophone feminism, Lewis argues that the tradition has always been divided, with some feminisms locked in active antagonism with others. Radical utopian feminisms have jostled with fearful, conservative ones; libertarian, cosmopolitan feminisms have railed against carceral, xenophobic ones. Communist feminisms have battled not only liberal capitalist feminisms but straight-up fascist ones. Given this history of intrafeminist conflict, Lewis suggests, it’s time we gave up the comforting myth that feminism is always and everywhere a force for good. “Let’s be brave and swallow our bitter medicine,” she writes; let’s call these ugly tendencies what they are. Yes, fascist feminisms are enemy feminisms, but they’re still, unfortunately, feminisms. “Asking ‘which side are you on?’ is the most elemental level of political physics,” she adds. “ ‘The side of women’ doesn’t exist. It never existed.”
Lewis is a lifelong feminist, antifascist, self-described utopian, and queer independent scholar best known for her work on family abolition. (She is also a contributor to this magazine.) Her first two books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family (2019) and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), are radical, accessible, and — contra their polemical titles — deeply reasonable and reassuring texts that argue for allowing more varied and resilient configurations of care to supersede the nuclear family. Though animated by the same utopian spirit, Enemy Feminisms is a very different project for Lewis; for the time being, she has turned her gaze from the beautiful potential future toward the ugly, repressed past. As if to preempt any misunderstandings, she opens the book by announcing she comes in peace. “Not long ago, I might have reacted violently, too, if I thought someone was calling feminism itself bad or counterrevolutionary,” Lewis writes, anticipating backlash. “A leftist said to me in an elevator in 2012 that feminism was a bourgeois enterprise — I almost shoved him.” By her own account, Lewis spent more than a decade “equating feminism with ‘good’ politics in a world that reflected anything but.” Whenever she encountered “reactionaries calling themselves feminist (something that happened disconcertingly often),” she’d say, “That’s not real feminism. . . . Whatever they may think, these people aren’t feminists.”
But the position became untenable. The closer you look, the harder it is to deny that “these people” includes some of feminism’s founding figures. As Lewis goes on to observe (and as other feminist historians have noted), Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman leaned heavily on imperialist, moralizing, and misogynist arguments. Despite her time in the abolitionist movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a vocal racist, and Carrie Chapman Catt, the 1917 president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, once hoped to prove that “white supremacy will be strengthened not weakened by woman suffrage.” Some might try to pass these episodes off as forgivable missteps — she was a product of her time — but as Lewis shows, we’re looking at more than a few stray remarks here. The reactionary ethos of our forebears is less extricable from their feminism than we’d like, and traces of it persist into the present. Disowning our feminist foremothers won’t purge us of their biases, faulty logic, or political errors, Lewis argues; on the contrary, the more we ignore them, the more likely we are to replicate their mistakes. Only by “claiming bad kin,” Lewis writes, borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Alexis Shotwell, “can feminism become accountable to itself, mutate and split accordingly, and thrive.”
To aid us in that process, Lewis has compiled “a bestiary of enemy feminisms.” In loose chronological order, she offers twelve archetypes. First is the “Enslaved” Englishwoman Abroad: the late-18th- and early-19th-century imperialist feminist who compared bourgeois white women’s subjugation to chattel slavery and encouraged spirited ladies to emigrate to the colonies, where they could run freely through the bush and improve the natives with their moral influence. Next up is the Anti-Antiracist Abolitionist: the American suffragette of the late 19th and early 20th century who opposed slavery but not white supremacy. (Stanton and Catt are representative here.) Then comes the Civilizer, the white “explorer” whose African expeditions made her a feminist celebrity in turn-of-the-century America; and the Prohibitionist, the Progressive Era vice buster whose attempts to protect poor and “fallen” women from the sexual predation of drunk men turned feminism into a Christian respectability mission. Things take a turn for the even worse with the KKK Feminist — the 20th century’s proto-girlboss and spiritual descendant of the suffragist slaver — and, across the pond, the Blackshirt, the suffragist terrorist turned card-carrying fascist. Rounding out the bestiary’s first half is the Policewoman: the volunteer lady cop of 1910s and ’20s England who went from agitating for women’s freedom via suffrage to relishing in its curtailment. “Ugly things happen in cults,” Lewis writes, reflecting on the influence of Alma Bridwell White, the US’s first female bishop, whose pro-woman, anti-Black politics helped swell the ranks of the KKK with white feminists. “And yet more ugly things happen when cult leaders betray their followers.” When the leader of the British suffragist group the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Emmeline Pankhurst, abruptly told her acolytes to stop pouring acid into postboxes and planting bombs in politicians’ houses so they could pitch in with the war effort instead, at least a few of them balked and threw in with the cops and the Nazis.
From here, Lewis jumps ahead to 1970s New York, where we meet the Pornophobe: the fear-driven cultural feminist whose campaign against male sexual violence ballooned into a blanket proscription against pornography, including butch-femme erotica by lesbian kinksters. (Representative figures here include Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller, and the group Women Against Pornography.) Moving into the 2000s we greet our contemporaries: the Girlboss, whose womanly nature purportedly softens the hard edges of capitalism (she may be the CEO of Lockheed Martin, but at least she’s not a man!); the Femonationalist, the “daughter of Enlightenment” who spouts Islamophobic tirades under the banner of women’s equality; the Pro-Life Feminist, who argues that abortion and contraception are actually antifeminist because they take “the wombless male body as normative,” in one pro-lifer’s words; and the Adult Human Female, the trans-exclusionary radical feminist who stubbornly maintains that transfemininity is an insidious misogynist plot.
We could try to disown the Civilizer, but she still has a hold on us.
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Each chapter explores an archetype’s key features through the lives of one to five women. Some of them were real characters. Take the aforementioned KKK Feminist, Bishop Alma Bridwell White, whose Pillar of Fire church was the only American religious group to endorse both the Equal Rights Amendment “from its inception” and the KKK “during its roaring 1920s revival.” In addition to founding a church, a publishing house, a magazine, a radio station, and a temple named after herself (Alma Temple), White established a model community in New Jersey called Zarephath, where members surrendered all their money, wore strange uniforms, and “accepted Alma’s total authority on all matters including bathing, exercise, diet (vegetarian), praying, choice of spouse, sex, shoe care, and personal journaling.”
Or take Mary Sophia Allen, a former WSPU suffragist and volunteer policewoman who sported a men’s haircut and asked patrolwomen to call her sir. (Lewis uses she/her pronouns for Allen out of deference to her insistently titled autobiographies: The Pioneer Policewoman, Woman at the Cross Roads, and Lady in Blue.) In the early 1920s, Allen was taken to court for refusing to stop patrolling in uniform even though an official women’s police force — to which she had not been hired — had been formed, thereby confusing the public. In the ’30s, she became an ardent fan of Hitler, attending the Nazi Olympics, befriending Hitler’s sister, praising Hitler in print, and according to one tourist who encountered her on a trip to Switzerland, yapping about the Führer constantly. (“She stated on many occasions that she was a personal friend of Hitler’s” and “discussed Hitler at dinnertime every evening.”)
Lewis’s mordant style and camp appreciation for her characters’ grandiosity helps the bitter medicine of our entanglement with them go down. Who could forget the Civilizer, May French Sheldon? An American suffragist and banker’s wife who styled herself as an “English Traveller,” Sheldon spent the spring of 1891 leading “a caravan expedition through Kenya and Tanzania,” Lewis writes, “ostensibly to collect ethnographic impressions for the advancement of science, but also simply to prove that a woman could do it.” Described by the press as traveling “alone and unescorted,” Sheldon in fact was escorted by 150 hired Africans for what she called her White Queen expedition. At “key moments along her route,” Lewis writes, Sheldon busted out a deranged costume of “a spun-silver sequined ball gown, a ceremonial sword inlaid with jewels, a tiara, a set of dangling chains and brooches, and a blond wig.” On her return to the US, she was lauded for her bravery and her ability to extract information about African women’s lives that no male ethnographer had managed. She went on to become an apologist for the genocide in the Belgian Congo.
When it’s time to come down on these women, however, Lewis is unstinting. She reports that Sheldon “flogged her porters” and took home any piece of jewelry she liked from her travels, even if it meant having to cut it from a living person’s skin. (“At one point she amputates the legs of a female corpse so as to obtain the anklets that adorn them,” Lewis writes.) On her patrols of the garrison town of Grantham, Allen happily enforced a 6 PM to 7 AM curfew just for women, took “illegitimate” babies from their mothers, and even spied on women on behalf of their husbands. White, in addition to being a cult leader, published three separate books in praise of the Klan, concurring with cross burners that “slavery was good, the Fifteenth Amendment must be repealed, and that the ‘Sons of Ham’ (Black people) weren’t capable of suffering much anyway, being happiest living as servants of the ‘Sons of Japheth’ (whites) as God intended.”
A reader might ask on what grounds Lewis calls these women feminists. As a thinker committed to “impurity” in politics — a feature of her antifascism as well as her fondness for early Donna Haraway — Lewis is an unlikely person to put forward a prescriptive definition of feminism. Yet Enemy Feminisms is the kind of exercise that demands one. Lewis’s workaround is to suggest a definition obliquely: “All of this was feminism,” she writes, “not liberatory feminism, but feminism in the sense that it contested a patriarchal constraint placed upon a certain group of women, no matter how few.” That’s as good a working definition of feminism as any, from which one can extrapolate a few principles. Female pro-woman antifeminism does not count. Nor does feminist complaint for the benefit of one. To count as feminist, a movement or person must agitate against male supremacy on behalf of a group. They do not, however, have to be democratic or left-wing.2
Over the course of Enemy Feminisms, a few other criteria emerge. A person might be reasonably called feminist if she is associated with a bona fide feminist institution; if she is widely accepted as feminist in the mainstream press; if she demonstrates fluency in feminist philosophy; or if her legacy exerts considerable influence on subsequent generations of feminists. Lewis does not name these criteria as definitive, but she does summon them as evidentiary when justifying an archetype’s inclusion. Sheldon, for instance, presents a classic edge case. The White Queen seems to be looking out for number one; was she really agitating on behalf of a larger class of women? It’s unclear, but Sheldon did appear on the speaking circuit at women’s colleges and was one of our country’s first feminist celebrities. If that doesn’t justify her inclusion, consider the enduring influence of her type. Contemporary feminism is still filled with white saviors, feminist celebrities, paeans to “badass” women who shatter the glass ceilings of dubious enterprises, and genocide apologists. We could try to disown the Civilizer, but she still has a hold on us.
Line up the arguments of Lewis’s enemy feminisms and you’ll notice that they tend to fall into two camps: those who make fascist arguments for feminism and those who make feminist arguments for fascism.3 Those who make fascist arguments for feminism claim that women deserve freedom, equality, opportunity, and access to public life because it is good for a fascist cause: for settler colonialism, for white supremacy, for Christian hegemony, for capitalism. They tend to direct their appeals to men and to position feminism as a boon to the dominant order (and antifeminism as harmful to its long-term health). They say that suppressing women is unenlightened and bad for empire (the “Enslaved” Englishwoman Abroad); that the white race cannot “develop properly” if woman is denied equal rights (the KKK Feminist); that women are the natural defenders of morality (the Prohibitionist); and that women’s natural risk aversion makes them better corporate leaders (the Girlboss).
As Lewis assiduously documents, weird slavery analogies crop up all over the history of feminism.
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On the other side, those who make feminist arguments for fascism speak to all when they argue that it behooves women to embrace fascist methods or causes. It is because these women are feminist that they support antitrans bills, antiporn ordinances, the carceral state, xenophobic immigration restrictions, and the criminalization of sex work. In their eyes, only the state can ensure women’s freedom by locking up sexual predators (the Policewoman), abolishing vice on a meaningful scale (the Prohibitionist, the Pornophobe), enforcing a literacy requirement for voting (the Anti-Antiracist Abolitionist), and protecting the “Enlightened” Western states against backward, antifeminist Muslim men (the Femonationalist). It is in this spirit that enemy feminists say things like, “Fascism alone will complete the work begun by the militant women from 1906 to 1914,” as Norah Elam, a former secretary of the WSPU, said in 1935; or “women have always been the greater sufferers under violation of the law; and those who stand for law enforcement are the espousers of woman’s cause,” as Bishop Alma White said in defense of lynching.
This difference in orientation notwithstanding, the two camps have a lot in common. What are the red flags of enemy feminism? For starters, fear: an emphasis on danger over pleasure; a preoccupation with purity; technophobia; congealed opinion; resistance to surprise or novelty; and the desire for strong borders, be they between male and female, Black and white, synthetic and natural, corrupt and pure, or foreign and native. Anticommunism is recurrent, as is Christian maternalism: the elevation of so-called family values and valorization of the home as a woman’s safe space. Essentialism is big, emphasizing women’s inborn compassion, gentleness, and morality; as is its subsidiary, “sex realism”: the “understanding of gender as an immutable biological matter,” as Lewis puts it, which usually expresses itself in the vilification of male sexual desire and the proposal of separatist solutions. Social purity, weaponized innocence, a savior complex, and the habit of policing other women are common red flags of enemy feminism. So are cultishness, delusions of grandeur, hero worship, strict hierarchies, self-mythologizing, and a belief in the ennobling quality of uniforms.
But by far the most common feature of enemy feminism is racism. So pervasive is racism across Lewis’s bestiary that it’s worth enumerating a few subgenera, each of which raises its own shade of red flag. Under the banner of eugenics, for instance, we find opposition to interracial sex and procreation, rhetoric about perfecting the race, and fear of racial contamination. Under nationalism and xenophobia, we find talk of “national regeneration,” collaboration with the state, eagerness for war, and the argument that inequality is a “foreign” concept that corrupts “pure” national values. Under white supremacy — which touches virtually every form of enemy feminism indexed by Lewis — we find a default hierarchy of white women over nonwhite men, the consistent erasure of women of color, and a hysterical protectiveness of white women’s sexual integrity. Last but not least, we have weird slavery analogies: instances of likening the oppression of affluent white women to that of enslaved Black people.
As Lewis assiduously documents, weird slavery analogies crop up all over the history of feminism. Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman refers more than seventy times to the (metaphorical) enslavement of her sex. Josephine Butler, the pioneering reformer who opposed the state regulation of sex work in 19th-century England, “referred to all laws regulating prostitutes’ lives as ‘slave codes,’ ” Lewis writes, and accused governments that regulated or sponsored sex work during wartime “of conspiring to ‘reduce women to a slavery more complete than any which the earth has ever seen.’ ” James Mann, the American congressman who introduced one of the first antitrafficking laws in the US, argued that the traffic in women “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery” was “much more horrible than any black-slave traffic ever was in the history of the world.” In 1933, Mary Sophia Allen described nudism, inexplicably, as “a new form of slavery.” In 1976, Andrea Dworkin argued that the slavery of Africans was modeled on the age-old slavery of (white) wives: “The whip, used to cut the backs of white women to ribbons, was now wielded against Black flesh as well.” Robin Morgan, radical feminist and arch-transphobe, extended the analogy when she said, “We know what’s at work when whites wear blackface; the same thing is at work when men wear drag.” In 1980, the feminist poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “Pornography is about slavery. . . . And the enslavement of women as women has traditionally gone almost unrecognized.”
The point of all this cataloging — which is less schematic in Lewis’s presentation than my summary suggests — is to help us recognize traces of enemy feminism when we encounter them in the present. And we will encounter them, Lewis argues, because they’re everywhere. They’re in the “red-brown rhetoric” of Tucker Carlson when he lambastes the average workplace for barely tolerating pregnancy; in Vice President Kamala Harris’s promise to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”; in copaganda TV shows and T-shirts declaring the future is female (a phrase coined, it turns out, by the pornophobe Sally Miller Gearhart, who argued the male population should be culled to 10 percent of the human total). They’re in news articles praising the female soldiers of the IDF as “lionesses in the desert”; in the passive racism of “nice” white women; in the separatism of some ecofeminisms; in the feminist endorsement of laws like SESTA/FOSTA that push sex workers further underground. They’re in the pro-gun feminist adage “God made men and women, but Sam Colt made them equal” and in the feminist demand by MAGA congresswomen to release the Epstein files on behalf of his survivors.
The legacy of enemy feminism can also be found in the things we say unwittingly — in the “scripts,” as Lewis puts it, that we’ve inherited from the likes of Wollstonecraft. After reading Enemy Feminisms, a feminist may think twice before making an essentialist argument on behalf of a feminist cause. That’s not to say she won’t do it anyway, finding claims about women’s natural generosity or social attunement too expedient not to instrumentalize in certain contexts. But at least she might do so aware of the bargain she’s making.
Can enemy feminists become comrades? The question occasionally crossed my mind as I read Lewis’s book, especially in the moments when she gives us glimpses of her journey from clueless 19-year-old picketing a strip club to the kind of feminist she is today — a feminist “against cisness,” in Emma Heaney’s coinage, who believes in a revolutionary feminism that “abolishes gender qua differential, while remaking genders qua lush, interesting, and pleasurable difference.” Without saying so overtly, Lewis proposes that there may be a telos to feminist consciousness: a path of political enlightenment that progresses past binaries and certainty toward permissiveness, openness, and utopian imagination. As she writes in her introduction, Lewis almost called the book The Feminism of Fools, drawing on August Bebel’s famous line that “antisemitism is the socialism of fools.” What made Bebel’s line so powerful (beyond its pithiness — what better way to explain the misconception that “capitalism is finance is the Jews”?) is that “it highlights a tragedy,” as Lewis puts it. In another world, this antisemite might have been an anticapitalist instead. The feminists in Lewis’s bestiary likewise “began with a radical impulse”:
In each case, women said to themselves, Something is deeply wrong in gendered life, something that humanism as we know it cannot solve. (True.) Instead of then persisting, though, toward an understanding of gender itself as unnatural all the way down — which certainly can feel vertiginous — they cop out .
“Copping out,” to Lewis, means finding a more graspable foe: “prostitution, femme-ness, transfemininity, contract pregnancy, oriental patriarchy, intimate partner violence, sexed access bars to education, the pay gap, stigma on abortion, or even an imagined lack of stigma on abortion.” To land here permanently, for Lewis, is the intellectual equivalent of getting off the bus too early. What that intriguingly suggests is that some people — especially young people, who maybe got off at the wrong stop due to bad directions from a well-meaning elder — might be lured back on, brought into the fold.
The idea of conversion reminded me of a chart I first encountered in Jonathan Smucker’s 2017 book Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. Drawn as a half-circle, it maps “the spectrum of allies” from left to right: active allies, passive allies, neutral, passive opposition, and active opposition. “The good news,” Smucker writes, is that “to win politically, you don’t have to win over your most ardent opponents.” If you can activate your passive allies, you can dramatically extend your reach and begin to pull the entire spectrum toward you: Neutrals become passive allies, passive enemies become neutrals, active enemies become passive enemies, and before long what once struck many people as outlandish — the decriminalization of sex work, for instance, or the right to an abortion, or allowing children access to gender-affirming medical care — comes to look like common sense.
I thought of Smucker’s chart because I wondered where along its curve I might place various enemy feminisms. Some are beyond redemption — their fascism does not need ferreting out, as it sits proudly on the surface — but some fall closer to the middle. Perhaps presented with the legible, persuasive, and thoroughly researched case Lewis makes in Enemy Feminisms, they might be pulled our way? One can hope. But the wisdom of Lewis’s intervention is the reminder not to work too hard to win over active opponents within feminism’s ranks just because they’re feminists. There are plenty of allies to be found outside feminism’s familiar borders, and that’s a good thing; it means there are more of us than we think. To admit as much is not to concede feminism’s irrelevance or defeat, but to embrace the liberatory potential of what feminism can be. Mutate, split, thrive — why not? We have no time to lose.
SWERF and TERF stand for “sex worker–exclusionary radical feminist” and “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” ↩
The historian Corey Robin’s definition of conservatism may prove helpful here. In The Reactionary Mind, Robin writes that the “animating purpose” of conservatism is “the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere. . . . The conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated . . . will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.” Conservative feminism is insurgent in its challenge to women’s subordination to men, but it is conservative in its defense of other private hierarchies: rich over poor, white over Black, chaste over coarse, Christian over heathen, learned over unschooled, straight over gay, cis over trans, and so on. ↩
At the risk of wading into the fascism debate, I defer to the definition that Lewis proposes in her interview with the scholar Asa Seresin in Transgender Studies Quarterly: fascism as “a fundamentally colonial matrix of domination, whose cults seek to impose, among other things, right reproduction upon human populations via both positive and negative eugenics.” Whether capitalism can be fairly described as fascism on these terms I leave to the historians. ↩
