Lucy Delap - Feminisms

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First published by Penguin Books in 2020

Text copyright Lucy Delap, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Book design by Matthew Young

ISBN: 978-0-141-98599-2

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Alexandra Kollontai, Peoples Commissar for Social Welfare, with homeless children, c. 1917 (Alamy).

Tokyo members of Seitsha, 1911.

Maida Springer Kemp, 1936 (Kheel Center, Cornell University).

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (Alamy).

Anne Knight ( Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain; courtesy of the Library of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain, Friends House, Euston Rd, London).

Equality Brand Tea trademark, 1910 (Courtesy of the Secretary of State Records, California State Archives).

Front cover of Sister, the newspaper of the Los Angeles Womens Center, July 1973 (Feminist Library, London).

Dun Emer press room, c. 1903 (Trinity College Dublin Library; TCD MS 11535).

Womens Liberation badges (Ville de Paris/Bibliothque Marguerite Durand (BMD) and Joelle Patient).

Official portrait of Trinidad Fernandez Legarda, Queen of the Manila Carnival, 1924.

The Bloomer Costume, lithograph published by N. Currier, New York, 1851 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-06193).

Mori dress reformers, c. 1906 (Image from Christchurch City Libraries. CCL-PhotoCD11-IMG0096).

Lady Constance Lytton in disguise, c. 1914 ( March of the Women Collective/Mary Evans Picture Library).

Woman wearing saya and manto, Lima, c. 1860-80.

Meena Keshwar Kamal, 1982.

Three participants in the Lavender Menace action at the second Congress to Unite Women, New York, 1970 (Diana Davis, New York Public Library).

The 1975 International Womens Year Tribune, Mexico City (Bettye Lane, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University).

Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClellan outside 10 Downing Street, February 1909 (LSE Library).

Julieta Lanteri voting in Buenos Aires, 1911 (Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nacin Argentina AGN_DDF/ Caja 2124, Inv: 115542).

Rosalie Bognor and Merle Thornton chain themselves to a bar, 1965 (Bruce Postle, Newsphotos).

Anna Julia Cooper (Photo Courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives).

Composer Ethel Smyth, 1912 (LSE Library).

A protestor in Parliament Square, 1982 (Edward Barber).

BUGA-UP: Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions

CEDAW: Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

CLIT: Collective Lesbian International Terrors

DCWLM: District of Columbia Womens Liberation Movement

ERA: Equal Rights Amendment

FEN: Feminist Economic Network

FFCU: Feminist Federal Credit Union

ICW: International Council of Women

IWSA: International Woman Suffrage Alliance

NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

NGO: Non-Governmental Organization

NOW: National Organization for Women

NUSEC: National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship

NUWSS: National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies

NWRO: National Welfare Rights Organization

oob: off our backs

RAWA: Revolutionary Association for the Women of Afghanistan

SPEW: Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women

WCTU: Womens Christian Temperance Union

WIDF: Womens International Democratic Federation

WIN: Women in Nigeria

WSPU: Womens Social and Political Union

WTUL: Womens Trade Union League

UN: United Nations

YWCA: Young Womens Christian Association

In January 1886, a woman in the British-ruled Gold Coast (now Ghana) took up a pen to write an incendiary letter to the Western Echo, a local newspaper founded the previous year.

We Ladies of Africa in general are not only sadly misrepresented but are made the foot-ball of every white seal that comes to our Coast We have been sadly abused by people of such description, and because we have said nothing they continue to abuse us with impunity Although we have not white or angelic faces we are capable of as high a degree of culture as any white lady.

The letter speaks eloquently of her feelings of being kicked around by European colonists, of lack of respect for her culture, and the abuse and impunity of colonial governance as it impacted upon women. The writer was not just angry she also offered some satirical wordplay, terming white male power Just Ass rather than Justice. Her name does not survive, yet her willingness to speak for we Ladies of Africa draws our attention to her imagined community of African womanhood. Her forthrightness and breadth of vision were helped by local factors the long-standing African-owned press in the Gold Coast as well as the global reach of the womens movements of her day.

1886 was a moment of intense colonial expansion. Some of the major European powers were annexing African and Asian territory at speed, giving rise to a violent world order in which racial hierarchies and norms of sexuality became more strongly policed, and which radicals, nationalists and anti-colonialists would contest over the coming century. It was also a moment when womens education was flourishing throughout the globe, their access to (or coercion into) paid employment was growing, and the spread of the bicycle was inaugurating new mobilities and anxieties that would be epitomized in the bloomer-wearing new woman cyclist. It offers a way into a larger story of the profound transformations of how women thought about and inhabited their bodies and lives. Our story ranges both back and forward from 1886, to encompass 250 years of attempts to politicize the injustices of gender.

All who challenge the wrongs faced by women have approached it in ways deeply shaped by their own historical moment. Their ability to name themselves as feminists, women, ladies or sisters is always provisional. Their politics have been organized around divides of class, caste, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, nationality and age. No naming of an individual as feminist can be taken for granted. Nor can we impose feminism as a label onto the activism of women and men who would not have recognized it, or who actively rejected it.