Manifesto for a Radical Materialist Feminism
Origninally published at the Root & Spark Substack in 2022
The CLAIMS
Women deserve health, well-being, good nutrition, physical integrity and robust social infrastructure that supports human thriving.
Women deserve serious and effective judicial approaches to violent crimes against women and children: from incest to rape, to partner abuse, to FGM, child marriage to honour killing, trafficking and prostitution, to the air-like ubiquity of pornography, to disappearances and femicides (including forced sex-selective abortion).
Women deserve for these crimes to be clearly defined in law and to be addressed with funding, policing, and judiciary practices equal to the trauma inflicted by these crimes.
Women deserve international action to enforce civic and corporate commitment to the preservation and strengthening of the planet’s ecological systems.
Women deserve ecological stability, sustainability, restoration and restitution as and where needed or helpful to our communities.
Women deserve for the infinite, wondrous, complex, and even flawed variety of our personalities to have free expression without pathologizing them as medical disorders or ‘genders’.
Women deserve a complete education in our history in all areas and in our pre-history including our foundational roles in creating the earliest human civilizations and inventions.
Girls (and boys) deserve freedom from sexualization and freedom to develop comfort and confidence inhabiting their own bodies.
Adolescent girls (and boys) deserve informed networks from family to civic institutions to support them in the often disorienting transformations of body and self during their teen years.
Women deserve dignity and safety during pregnancy and in maternity wards.
Women deserve to survive childbirth and to be supported by family and civic community in early maternity in good physical and mental health.
Women deserve spaces for our own time, privacy, culture, loves, friendships, experiences in the daily activities of life and for the unfolding of our being and dreaming on our own and the world’s behalf.
Women deserve everything we have ever demanded politically and we are going to get it.
The CREDOS
This feminism stands in a long looping lineage, threaded together from the indigenous and black feminisms of the 19th century to the suffragists and suffragettes, to the radical, socialist, black and womanist, ecological, lesbian, chicana, and post-colonial feminisms that bring us to the current moment. We believe that each strand of feminism evolves in relation to the others and directly addresses the various elements of patriarchal dominance. We value knowledge and application of these traditions for their power and insight, with an eye for their oversights and errors. We acknowledge that no one feminism is sufficient for all women as our various oppressions shape our experience of patriarchy differently. We aim to work across these feminist traditions and among these communities more wisely and with hindsight as our guide.
This feminism affirms that patriarchy is the original dominance hierarchy and its misogyny is the model from which other oppressions are elaborated. Further, this 8000-year-old patriarchal order is neither the only nor the longest-standing social order humans have used to organize ourselves and meet our needs. Therefore, patriarchy, no matter how couched in consumerism, is not the only possibility for the future.
We hold that the ubiquity of emotional, physical, and sexual violence by men – at their hands and in various pornographic media – against women and girls is not a bug in the social system. It is a feature of patriarchy, a global program of subjugation operated in the home and in public. It is the surest sign that human beings must mature beyond male supremacy in order for humanity to thrive.
We hold that male violence is a key feature of all male supremacist societies, experienced by women and children as random, particular, and personal. As such it is a constant presence in the life of every woman and child. From sexual assault and domestic violence, to street harassment/violence, to purchasing of women and children for sexual use, and the threats of these used as coercion, this ambient violence serves to maintain male supremacy across societies. We hold that an essential step in overcoming patriarchy is that men’s crimes against women must be firmly confronted at all levels of law enforcement and never left to the discretion of individual men to address or prosecute.
Women who uphold this feminism affirm all women in the full expression of our abilities, talents, and personalities.
Women who advocate this feminism affirm that all women and girls must have opportunities to participate in education of both body and mind that prepares them to secure personal income and experience robust agency in their own lives.
Women who uphold this feminism are opposed to dominance hierarchies that disrupt the generational transmission of our lineages. Women who uphold this feminism resist the mechanisms of domination, the structural oppressions, that exploit and divide women on the basis of sexuality, age, ability, class, race, and global region.
We are, therefore, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-militarist, and anti-imperialist whether overt, covert, economic, or cultural. That is, as we find women in all nations and communities of the world, we affirm the self-determination and interdependence of all nations and peoples.
We see the present historical phase of patriarchy as one that presses women on two sides with varying intensity across nations. On one side is the left/liberal adoption of gender identity politics, and its collaboration with neoliberal economic interests, that erases women as a social and political class and disenfranchises us economically. On the other side is the right/conservative push for a return to (or maintenance of) patriarchal ‘family values’, the male-led traditional family, a rollback of reproductive rights, a shredding of social safety nets that protect mostly women and our children, and attacks on the rights of same-sex couples across racialized groups. This regressive impulse is often combined with the politics of purity of national identity, sometimes coupled with white supremacy and anti-semitism, and an even more robust embrace of neoliberal economics. Both are forms of gender conservatism and have the effect of impinging on women’s sense of self and our agency, lessening our safety in the private and civic spheres.
We affirm romantic, and sexual attraction is natural, innate, and good whether to people of the same sex, opposite sex, or both.
We affirm that women deserve the full embodiment of our strength and pleasure.
We affirm that compulsory heterosexuality is oppressive and its institutional manifestation in the patriarchal family unit and is not the only good and healthful form of intimate and familial relations. Women have the right to same sex-attraction without interference of law or social discrimination. Women have the right to refuse relations with men, platonic or economic or sexual, at our discretion and without fear of reprisal.
We affirm the value and necessity of developing and nourishing of lesbian and women’s spaces for community, culture, and privacy both in their uniqueness and commonality.
We affirm that women’s friendships, affections, desires, and loves are to be respected and supported.
We affirm all support for a liveable and thriving ecology in which to make our lives, families, and communities. Without a thriving planetary ecology, social and cultural projects will be deeply hampered if not impossible.
We believe that the gender system is a hierarchy of power, created within patriarchal societies, and layered over the sexed bodies of people to instill entitlement in men and subservience in women. We affirm that the gender system is a mechanism to enable men’s expropriation of women's bodies and labour as a resource. We believe that the gender system prescribes human potential, personality, and expression of talent in ways that are pathological and traumatic. Thus, we affirm gender non-conformity in our sexed being as a natural and vital practice in the weakening and removal of the gender hierarchy and the violence that defends it.
We affirm women’s autonomy over whether and how to support, to give our time, energy, blood and body to any other living being.
We believe that women’s sex-specific health care and complete reproductive autonomy are necessary to both women’s well-being and the health of our communities.
We affirm that women’s unpaid labour is an exploited resource that benefits the state, private industry, and individual men living in the same households as women and should be remunerated. The UN estimates women’s unpaid labor to account for between 10 and 39% of GDP across nations. This unpaid labor consists largely of care work from which both the state and industry directly and indirectly profit. In some countries, this unpaid labor includes enslavement for domestic work and sexual use by men. Care work is both skilled and demanding. Unpaid, it constitutes a natural resource reaped for free by the world economy.
We affirm that women’s paid labor must be equitably remunerated, and working conditions must be physically safe and free of sexual or other harassment. All women have a right to employment that garners them economic independence from coercion or control of family or familiar. Professions dominated by women must be elevated in their social stature equal to the training and expertise required to perform them.
Women working in both legal and illegal markets of the sex industries (pornography, prostitution, stripping, surrogacy) must be fully supported as to the health, family, work, or educational marginalizing pressures that move them into these risky/debilitating sectors. It is only by solving the problems surrounding trafficking and prostitution, such as economic despair and male entitlement, that societies can eliminate these abuses by making them obsolete.
Most incarcerated women are imprisoned for low-level crimes of economic survival or women’s forms of self-defense. Such self-defense or non-violent crimes should be eligible for restorative community adjudication, not punished with sentences that make a return to work or full citizenship impossible for already marginalized women. Women must not and shall not be incarcerated with men no matter how those men identify.
We believe that the human self and identity are created in relation with other people. Most ideas of self or subject are of isolated, autonomous, rugged individuals (the “traditional masculine”) in competition with its equals and projecting its desires/fears onto its others. This model serves patriarchal social and neoliberal economic projects. The family and its extended community can be a model of social connection and human thriving ordered on terms of cooperation, mutual and reciprocal support, and respect for difference and variation. The mother-child and sibling interrelationships offer a more robust model than the classical and enlightenment models for how humans create each other over time through our interactions.
The patriarchal family remains, in many social practices and in some law, a little feudal estate with the father in the role of ‘lord’ around whom the mother and children’s lives are centered. In some incarnations of the patriarchal family, a man offers some time and effort to care for the home and emotional well-being of his children and wife, though in no country do men match the investments or sacrifices of women. Meanwhile, in its less loving forms, this family model is the root of much of the trauma women and children suffer and that often becomes generational familial abuse. Such a family order is susceptible to male domination because it is based on the idea that the man is human and the woman and children are not-quite human.
A feminist family is a conscious micro-community dedicated not to traditional hierarchies but to the emotional, intellectual, and physical thriving of all its members and the harmony of its relationships. Rather than an ethic of duty, the ethic of the feminist family is care, individuation, and mutual support. Such a form of family would acknowledge how mothering (and parenting) is integral to our communities and would prevent much of the social and economic isolation women currently experience in some societies.
We affirm respect and support for women as the source of all human life and as the first models of the social and cultural world for all children.
We affirm that all life is interdependent and that difference and mutuality, from the cellular to the social, is the engine of all life and creativity. We believe that humans are embodied beings, formed in constant interaction with the natural and social world around us, and our embodied experiences affect our perceptions and personality. We affirm not only women’s full and inalienable participation in all institutions but also the necessity for women’s most ambitious dreaming.
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The term ‘radical materialist feminism’ was coined by Jane Clare Jones in Issue 3 of THE RADICAL NOTION, Woman as Resource. It’s available in summary form as a free sample from the magazine: theradicalnotion.org/woman-as-resource-towards-a-radical-materialist-feminism. Highly recommend.