Review | Enemy Feminisms

Kate Bradley reviews Sophie Lewis’ new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen & Girlbosses Against Liberation, a ‘mini-encyclopedia’ of some of the most odious feminist ideologues in history.

Sophie Lewis’ Enemy Feminisms is a book that needed to be written. I grew up in an era of uncomfortable and confusing mainstream feminism – the liberal 90s and 2000s feminism of authors like Naomi Wolf, stars like Beyoncé, politicians like Hilary Clinton and ‘Blair’s babes’ (!). I then entered political consciousness during the intersectional feminist turn in Britain in the 2010s, where the relationships between different structures of oppression – racism, sexism, ableism etc – were foregrounded, and the argument for a holistic feminism that takes into account all unaccountable hierarchies was cemented. I moved later into a socialist/Marxist feminist consciousness inspired by my peers, working class women’s struggles and writers such as Angela Davis and Tithi Bhattacharya. This is the feminism in which I feel most comfortable today. For the last six years, I’ve worked in advice services for debtors, homeless people and tenants, and I’m interested in feminism that sees winning the battles of the working class women I work with (and that I often share) as central to the feminist project.

Throughout the journey, there were people calling themselves feminists whose ideas I strongly disagreed with: women advocating capitalist domination in the name of female empowerment, people who argued for the exclusion of trans women from feminist spaces, those who wished to control and punish sex workers, those whose analyses ignored class or condemned socialism as inherently patriarchal. I veered between defending or trying to make excuses for feminists I disagreed with, and arguing that these kinds of feminism devalue and damage the movement for real, liberatory change. I had contradictory ideas myself, and at times held positions I would no longer stand by because I had heard them argued as ‘feminist’.

Conflicting strands of feminism

By looking at the conflicting stands of feminism that make up the history of feminist social movements, Enemy Feminisms has helped me to make sense of the complicated lineages of feminist thought that give rise to modern currents within feminism. Lewis’ book takes aim at a huge range of feminist thinkers and activists, moving broadly chronologically through eras. She starts with racist feminists of the 18th and 19th century – female slave owners and imperialist shills – and moves on to prohibitionists, fascists, authoritarians who love the police, anti-porn feminists, girlbosses, nationalists, pro-life feminists and transphobes. Lewis mostly focuses on the feminisms of the anglophone West, though the book spans almost three centuries.

You may feel like you know your enemy, but trust me, you’ll meet people you don’t know in this book. You may be familiar with Emmeline Pankhurst and Germaine Greer (the latter described aptly as a ‘macho feminist edgelord’), but have you heard of ‘White Queen’ May French-Sheldon, sex work prohibitionist Josephine Butler, or the Latina CIA agent ‘Mija’? I imagine that writing a single chapter of this book would have taken as much time as an airport bestseller, so dense is its research into its odious pantheon of characters. 

‘Pioneer of the women’s police’

An example: in the chapter ‘The Policewoman’, Lewis introduces us to an eccentric British feminist called Mary Allen. She writes: ‘If I told you that one of Emmeline Pankhurst’s core terrorism campaign coordinators went on to invent “women’s policing” and made it go global, would you believe me?’ . Mary Allen was this woman, a lesbian who is ‘hailed internationally as a pioneer of the women’s police’ as she moved from being a suffragette in the early 20th century to adopting fascist beliefs and setting herself up as a vigilante cop, complete with a new (feminised) police uniform. Despite the state’s initial objections, she was eventually allowed to start policing formally to crack down on prostitution, work for which she received an OBE. Lewis traces a direct line between Allen, passionate in her belief that women deserved to stand alongside men in arresting and imprisoning working-class people and political dissidents of all kinds, and modern girlboss police women like Cressida Dick. 

Another example: Isabella Somerset, or Lady Henry, was a 19th century feminist blandly described on Wikipedia as ‘a British philanthropist, temperance leader and campaigner for women’s rights’ and as someone who ‘occupied herself with charity work’. But Lewis has a less sanitised take: 

Isabella was a feminist aristocrat who dedicated her life to the cause of temperance, as well as a self-described socialist and major English slumlord. In 1895, she was said to have one hundred thousand tenants, of whom most lived, despite her reputation as a benevolent reformer, in her vast slum properties in East London. Like any good philanthrocapitalist, the landlady founded a ‘home for inebriate women’ in Surrey that same year. She started paying Bible-reading visits to a selection of her tenants, while giving instructional classes on eugenic motherhood at her castle in Hertfordshire to local women of the lower orders. 

Whilst I’m not quite sure what Lewis means by ‘eugenic motherhood’ (and it isn’t explained), I found this passage eye-opening. It’s hard not to think of bell hooks, who lionised becoming a landlord in pseudo-feminist terms (‘I have bought a lot of real estate ‘cause I believe we gotta get our money straight. Girl get your money straight’).

Are these women feminists?

You may be thinking: given their role in perpetuating systems of domination like policing and landlordism, can we really call these historical figures feminists? One message repeated throughout the book is that it is misguided to claim that racist, transphobic, authoritarian and centrist strands of feminism aren’t, in fact, feminism. Like many movements for political change, feminism has a messy history, full of mistakes and active harms, competing ideas and individuals with a will to power who abandon principles along the way. And yet, many of these feminists are defined as such because they did their work in women’s name, claiming – and often believing – they were doing so to improve women’s lot and further equality between men and women, or even to liberate women from patriarchal fetters. 

The suffragettes are a classic example, thoroughly covered in this book. They fought tirelessly for the vote for women (or at least some women), and so they are at least partly to thank for why women get a say in what happens to our bodies and our rights today. And yet many of the suffragettes became fascists and blackshirts in the lead-up to World War Two, and held strongly antisemitic and racist views. Enemy Feminisms urges us not to shy away from these contradictions, and instead to view them as part of the complex history of feminism. We can sharpen our arguments against these contradictions to avoid being lured in by feminist ideas that end with collusion with the state, patriarchal ideology and violence.

Not an attempt to persuade you

Enemy Feminisms is not an contemplative attempt to persuade you that the types of feminism Lewis identifies are bad. Lewis herself describes it as a ‘mini-encyclopedia’ of types of feminism that can be viewed as having unified characteristics or themes across the ages. Sure, the nastiness of the book’s lead characters might put you off their brands of feminism, but overall, this is not a book for a general audience – it’s aimed at feminists who would agree that these chapters are broadly defined as ‘enemies’ who want to swot up on, and understand, their opponents – or avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Nor is Enemy Feminisms a positive articulation of the feminism Lewis thinks you should aspire to. It only attempts to articulate a positive vision in glimmers here and there, such as in the last few pages. Lewis takes it for granted that you, the reader, will think racial hierarchies are bad; that you will oppose Islamophobia as ‘clash-of-civilizations nonsense’ and believe in trans rights. Lewis does become more visionary and analytical in places – for example, when she is discussing the pro-life movement and abortion in chapter eleven, a subject on which she has written before. However, readers looking to be furnished with neat, reasoned arguments against feminist tropes they don’t like may be frustrated. Personally, I think the omission is fine: one book can’t do everything.

Lewis’ prose is rollicking, snide, and often playful. She invents new words, and skips from high theory to speech-like exclamations, from academic quotes to sardonic callbacks. This can make Enemy Feminisms a challenging read at times, forcing you to slow down over code-switching sentences, especially in a context where you’re also meeting Lewis’ cast of ghoulish historical figures one after another for 260 pages. 

To her credit, Lewis regularly drops in quotes from contemporary critics to give us some heroes in amongst the villains, something which feels especially valuable in the otherwise difficult chapters on racism and transphobia. It feels right to end this review where Lewis ends the chapter on ‘The Adult Human Female’:

And as the twenty-first century descends to new depths of anti-trans horror, knowing how to draw lines that say, this feminist is our enemy, is increasingly indispensable. Yet as Bryn [Kelly] reminds us, ‘Figuring out how to live together is hard. To exist in community with people who constantly piss you off is exhausting, but ultimately: worth it.’

Despite everything, I left the book feeling positive about the power of a more liberatory feminism to persist through history, and inspired to keep fighting for a better world.