Abstract
The year 2025 will mark 50 years since the prohibition of gender discrimination in employment in Europe. Feminist narratives of this time have often been ones of progress, despite Black feminist critique of how such legislation effaced racially minoritised women’s experiences. Why was gender equality legislation designed to mainly benefit white privileged women? What discourses were involved? Meanwhile, while the term ‘white feminism’ has recently been popularised, there has been relatively little investigation of what it comprises in politics in Europe. Drawing on cross-disciplinary empirical research on UK gender equality legislation involving analysis of parliamentary debate, archival research and oral history, this article contributes to theorisation of the tenets of white feminism, namely, as a political ideology wherein gender is constructed as the most important marker of social inequality and, specifically, as being more important than racial inequality. Ultimately, such specification aims to make white feminism in politics impossible to render neutral.
Key messages
White feminist political ideology constructs gender inequality as a more important social problem than racial inequality.
‘White feminism’ has been under-theorised in political scholarship.
White feminist political discourse developed through discussion of gender equality legislation.
Introduction
The year 2025 will mark half a century since the first European directives prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of gender, which necessitated legislation in prospective member states, including the UK. Such legislation has been subject to analysis by feminists in the UK and wider Europe, but rarely has an antiracist perspective been incorporated. This article explores the development of UK gender equality legislation on employment, with an explicit focus on the intersection of race and gender. In the UK, legislation concerning race preceded legislation concerning gender and, in turn, influenced approaches to race equality at the European level and beyond (Meer, 2017). Yet, legislation on race and ‘sex’1 inequality developed in siloed (either/or) ways, in which these social structures have tended to be addressed by not only isolated laws but also movements, organisations, policies, institutions and funding programmes. Similarly to the US (Crenshaw, 1989), this siloing of race and gender worked to efface the existence and experiences of racially minoritised women, as well as, importantly, to obscure the ways that white women are also racialised. However, the racialisation of white women has received relatively little attention in feminist political scholarship. In the UK, the early siloing of race and gender has had long-term effects and institutional consequences, producing path-dependent obstacles to taking an intersectional approach in spite of subsequent legislative change (Solanke, 2011).
Exploration of the early years of equality legislation provides insight into how and why equality silos developed, and with what effects for thinking about intersectionality – a theory derived from Black women’s activism concerning experiences of gendered racism and racialised sexism (Collins and Bilge, 2016). In the UK, particularly from the 1970s onwards, Black women and coalitions of Black women and women of colour articulated the role of race as a key structure shaping social life in the UK and its imperialist projects elsewhere, as well as issues of racism and imperialism within the British ‘women’s liberation’ movement (Amos et al, 1984; Bryan et al, 2018 [1985]). Intersectionality makes visible the need to rethink and transform the siloed way that gender and race inequalities have been addressed, which has mainly benefitted white and otherwise relatively privileged women. While (particular interpretations of) intersectionality had some influence on the eventual amalgamation of disparate UK equality legislation into one Equality Act in 2010 (Squires, 2009; Parken, 2010), its prior iterations by racially minoritised women in the UK were largely excluded from earlier debates among powerful actors and in dominant discourses.
This article seeks to shed light on the following questions: what specific mechanisms worked to silence racially minoritised women’s perspectives in the ‘official transcripts’ (Scott, 1990)? Whose interests did this serve? Why was gender equality legislation designed in such a way that it mainly benefitted white and otherwise relatively privileged women? Given that UK anti-discrimination legislation initially addressed race, how did gender, which came later, achieve the primacy perceived by many working in equalities decades later (Christoffersen, 2022a)? And what discourses were at work in these processes?
UK legislation on gender equality is comprised of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Equal Pay Act 1970, Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order 1976 and their successor for Great Britain the Equality Act 2010. Drawing on analysis of parliamentary records and papers, I demonstrate how although race and gender were frequently discussed together in the years leading up to and proceeding the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) (1964–75) among powerful actors, they were almost invariably discussed in ways that constructed them as being mutually exclusive, and I show how this was accomplished. I highlight the agency and significant role of white women parliamentarians, who were often keen that gender and race discrimination be legislated for separately and, alongside men, made arguments that promoted the idea that race and gender were mutually exclusive. Moreover, in discourses that may now be read as white feminist, one specific contribution of female parliamentarians was to construct gender inequality as being more important than racial inequality.
In this time period, while the categories employed associated with race were often implicitly constructed as male through employment of gender-neutral categories in debate and legislation, I argue that the category of ‘women’ was more explicitly constructed as exclusively white (Spillers, 1987; Lewis, 2017). This construction bears long-lasting implications. In spite of the legislation and the changes to it that have taken place since the passage of the SDA in 1975, racially minoritised women experience considerable inequalities in employment as compared with white women nearly 50 years on – as seen in, for example, pay gaps (Khan, 2022). Thus, UK gender equality legislation was enacted in such a way that it mainly benefitted white and otherwise relatively privileged women. A singular, white construction of gender was extended and developed through to the present day, influenced by, and echoed in, policy developments at the European level. While it is less tenable today to explicitly argue that these categories are mutually exclusive or that ‘sex’ is more important than race, I trace the lasting effects of these constructions in oral history interviews with elite actors of the gender equality architecture.
I consider the implications of this analysis for the ongoing construction of the category ‘woman’ (Lewis, 2017) and the social structure of gender as always-already white, as well as what can be learned from this about white feminism in politics today. I identify and define white feminism in this political, institutional context as an ideology wherein gender is considered as the most important marker of social inequality, such that other inequalities can only be considered additively – meaning instead of being viewed as mutually constitutive and indivisible, other inequalities are ‘added onto’ (and subtracted from) gender. More specifically, I show how white feminist ideology in political debate constructs gender inequality as being more important than racial inequality.
In what follows, I first review the feminist literature on the SDA and its implementation, finding that the ways in which race was both omitted and constructed in and through ‘sex’ has been largely ignored. I also briefly explore the growing literature on white feminism. Next, I share the methodology of this research. I then present empirical findings. First, I examine discussions of both race and sex equality legislation in parliamentary records and papers. Second, I examine the contributions of white feminists and the development of white feminist ideology in these debates. Third, I discuss some of this ideology’s lasting effects, drawing on oral history interviews. I show: (1) that race and gender were constructed as separate through reference to biological difference and, on the specific part of white feminists, through the construction of the category ‘women’ as white; and (2) how white feminists resisted the combining of race and gender equality architecture through positing the superior importance of ‘sex’ discrimination over race discrimination.
The SDA: reserved (white) feminist critique
The SDA was landmark UK gender equality legislation, prohibiting discrimination (with important exceptions) in employment, education and the provision of goods and services. It aimed to ‘render unlawful certain kinds of sex discrimination and discrimination on the ground of marriage, and establish a Commission with the function of working towards the elimination of such discrimination and promoting equality of opportunity between men and women generally’.2 It was a result of considerable efforts both inside and outside of Parliament, though the ultimate product, which was amended in 1986, fell short of the original demands of many (Homans, 2015). Although the SDA has been subject to investigation, a historical approach has rarely been taken to understanding its creation, in what contexts and with what consequences, or its continuity and change across time. This investigation is important because the SDA reflects limitations of both contemporary UK legislation and similar legislation also influenced by European policy.
The SDA was preceded by the Race Relations Acts 1965 and 1968 (RRA). The latter was extended to cover employment and aimed to ‘prohibit discrimination on racial grounds … [and] to penalise incitement to racial hatred’.3 The SDA in turn influenced the RRA amendment in 1976. The research presented here reveals a complex relationship between these acts. These laws emerged within gendered (Krook and Mackay, 2011) and racialised institutions, and in turn they had both gendering and racialising effects (on parliaments as racialised institutions, see Hawkesworth, 2003; Kantola et al, 2022). The acts established arms-length enforcement bodies whose roles evolved over time: the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) and the Race Relations Board/Community Relations Commission (CRC), later the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE).
Feminist narratives of the past 50 years are often ones of progress. Regarding the UK, while many scholars have drawn attention to the limitations of gender equality legislation, much existing literature portrays an overall positive story of the development of equality legislation, albeit with reservations. In the earlier years that are the focus of this article (1960s–1970s), the laws proposed and passed were in the framework of anti-discrimination rather than taking positive proactive steps to promote equality (Dickens, 2007). In this framework, discrimination was largely individualised rather than being understood and addressed as a structural problem: institutions were not required to take proactive measures, and relating to employment, it was largely beholden on individuals, perhaps supported by trade unions, to take cases of discrimination through industrial procedures. If successful, remedies were awarded only to the affected individual, though, in this way, case law and institutional change were progressed. Nevertheless, for Dickens (2007: 486), for example, ‘for all its limitations, it is clear that the anti-discrimination legislation has had positive impacts’.
Others have looked specifically at the SDA (see, for example, Atkins, 1986; Homans, 2015). While a 1986 Feminist Review survey of the law ten years on claimed, ‘the history of the [SDA] is now well documented’, including the ‘hopes and fears’ of those who campaigned for it (Atkins, 1986), in fact, the story of how it was largely produced by and for a white feminist political project remains largely untold. Critics of the SDA at this time, rather, commented upon: its narrow scope (for example, the exclusion of pensions, social security and taxation); its not having had as much impact as had been hoped (in fact, occupational segregation increased in the early period [Atkins, 1986]); and the procedures for bringing cases contained within it, drawing attention to the low numbers of cases taken – though together with equal pay claims, their considerably higher success rate as compared with race discrimination cases (while still low) is notable.4
More recent specific examinations of the SDA include those of Homans (2015), who argued that one effect was a shift from the dominance of a discourse of the female ‘housewife’ and male ‘breadwinner’ to a neoliberal one where women are constructed as more gender-neutral ‘citizen-workers’. Underexplored in Homans’ account is how both of these constructions of femininity (and masculinity) were racialised. Research that has examined parliamentary papers from this time period (for example, Homans, 2015) has not specifically examined how gender and race were discussed together and thus constructed in and through one another. In sum, existing literature on gender equality legislation has rarely substantively engaged with race equality legislation, seldom critiqued the absence of intersecting race/gender considerations in the legislation, nor considered the outcomes in terms of privileging whiteness.
UK white feminism
In the US context, journalist Koa Beck (2021) traced the birth of white feminism to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, defining it as the pursuit of white women’s equality to white men through shared power over systems of education, property and voting. Beck (2021) examines white feminism primarily as a popular phenomenon. In the UK, the development of white feminism has been intimately connected with a broad imperialist project conducted over a long period, centrally involving constructions of white femininity in relation to differently racialised others. In 1992, Vron Ware (2015 [1992]) provided an account of varying constructions of white womanhood in the 19th century intimately connected with the development of UK white feminism in order to shed light on ‘ideologies that surround and influence us now’ (Ware, 2015: 11). Ware (2015 [1992]: 148) traced how constructions of femininity have been racialised and employed to highlight white superiority: ‘different kinds of femininity can articulate racial and cultural difference, and in doing so help to secure domination by gender, race and class’. A certain construction of white femininity, built in contrast with racialised others, has been used as both evidence for white superiority and a reason for racial violence and genocide. As Ware (2015 [1992]: 148) wrote, ‘White middle-class women are frequently seen in the dominant culture as representing a “normal” type of femininity – although the boundaries of normality shift constantly – at the expense of other types of women.’ This white middle-class experience was often universalised by feminist actors in political discourse informing gender equality legislation. Ware highlighted the roles of both racism and a lack of antiracist analysis in the failure of much white feminism to adequately theorise the social world or to develop sustainable social movements (see also Thomlinson, 2016). As such, in the UK, Black feminist critique of white feminism is well established. In their now-classic essay ‘Challenging imperial feminism’, Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar (1984: 4) argued: ‘white, mainstream feminist theory, be it from the socialist feminist or radical feminist perspective, does not speak to the experiences of Black women and where it attempts to do so it is often from a racist perspective’.
the implicit assumptions of the [women’s liberation movement] were ‘white’, and sometimes imbued with colonialist assumptions about ethnic others. Even when some white feminists engaged in anti-racist efforts in the late 1970s and 1980s, it was difficult for them to break out of these older paradigms into more racially egalitarian ones, or for them to divest themselves of the white privilege that had accrued to them over the years…. Black women did not merely ask white feminists to be more inclusive, but fundamentally challenged the ideological basis of white feminism by arguing that it should expand its remit to include the effects of racial discrimination and poverty.
Specific examination of white feminism’s operation in political institutions remains important, particularly since most involved in the more radical and grass-roots women’s liberation movement largely elected not to directly engage in the development of the SDA (Homans, 2015) given their ambivalence about parliamentary politics and reformist responses to gender inequality.
More recently, Alison Phipps (2021) has argued that modern UK ‘mainstream feminism’ is characterised by ‘political whiteness’ (HoSang, 2010), a political and policy agenda presented as race-neutral but designed to further the interests of dominant groups and the racial discourse of whiteness. For Phipps (2020: 5), ‘mainstream’ or public feminism ‘is not a cohesive and unified movement, but it has clear directions and effects’. In this context, political whiteness is ‘the systematic privileging of bourgeois white women’s wounds at the expense of others’ (Phipps, 2020: 80). This article builds on this work by focusing in on a particular time period of what Phipps terms ‘institutional’ and ‘policy’ mainstream feminism, and examining an important aspect of white feminist ideology in this context: the construction of gender as the most important marker of inequality and, specifically, as more important than racial inequality. In other words, institutional, political feminism is the subject of what follows.
Methodology: a historical political intersectional approach
This research was conducted as part of a multidisciplinary (legal and gender history, politics, and industrial relations) project aiming to understand the creation of UK legislation concerning gender equality in work and employment, in what contexts it occurred and with what consequences, and continuity and change across time.5
This article draws primarily on analysis of all official documents (House of Commons and House of Lords daily records and papers) that discuss sex discrimination in relation to work or employment during the period 1964–75. Surprisingly, given the siloed nature of the legislation, I found that a majority of these documents, 64 per cent (103 of 162) also discuss race. I explore how race and gender were talked about together. Specifically, following experimentation to enable identification of where race and sex were discussed in relation to one another, I examined where ‘race’ and ‘sex’ were discussed within 150 words of each other (233 occurrences), and inductively coded these in NVivo. Examination of parliamentary debate combines focus on both the formal (official documents like laws and rules) and the informal (unscripted conversation between members of Parliament and the House of Lords). I provide further detail on document selection and analysis in Appendix 1.
A multi-method approach enabled examination of: (1) the multidimensionality (Mason, 2006) of how ‘sex’ was constructed in and through race; (2) perspectives on these constructions from ‘hidden’ transcripts (Scott, 1990), as well as official ones; and (3) the effects of these earlier constructions at later periods and in the present day. I draw on archival research that I conducted at the Black Cultural Archives (BCA) in London of collections concerning campaigning about work and equality legislation, as well as oral history interviews. A total of 26 interviews for deposit in the British Library were conducted by the project team with lawyers, litigants, campaigners, trade unionists, policymakers and equality commissioners, selected because they were identified as key actors concerning gender equality at work, to retrieve the history of the law in action, as agency and as personal experience, and to represent diverse nations and perspectives. In this article, I quote from four interviews that engage substantially with the themes discussed (listed in Appendix 2 with greater detail on this method). I include perspectives from key actors in the gender equality architecture: former directors of the EOC in England and Scotland, one of whom became a parliamentarian, and a former Commissioner of the EOC in Northern Ireland; and Black feminist campaigners concerned with work. Oral history interviews retrieve the narratives and perspectives of those who may have been occluded from formal accounts, used or worked to change the law, or experienced its limitations. Interviews were analysed using oral history theory, acknowledging the dialogic relationship between interviewee and interviewer (Abrams, 2016). I conducted interviews as a white woman with Black women and women of colour, as well as white women. I have reflected on this positionality in depth in relation to previous projects (Christoffersen, 2018). While I have noted that white positionality has some benefits for the study of whiteness (that is, white people say things that they are unlikely to say to people of colour), in this project, this effect was mediated by participants’ knowledge of my prior research concerning intersectionality – most, across race, raised the term ‘intersectionality’ without my asking about it. Thus, discussions were inevitably specific to the particular participants, time and place. These data were all analysed using discourse-analysis techniques, and sources are cited in detail in footnotes.
Constructing siloed ‘sex’
Legislation on race and sex developed in siloed (either/or) ways, which worked to efface the existence and experiences of racially minoritised women, as well as the ways that white women are racialised. Nevertheless, among official documents that discuss sex discrimination in relation to work from this period, a majority also make reference to race. However, this is not an indication that political actors recognised that race and sex overlap, as some did in the lead-up to the Equality Act 2010. Notably, although they were frequently discussed together, there was very little mention of the ways that sex and race discrimination intersect.
Race and sex discrimination were discussed together in terms of contrasting aims: to achieve legal parity between them favouring separate legislation or, alternatively and to a lesser extent, to amalgamate their legal protections against discrimination into one law and/or architecture. Following discussion of possible routes, a white paper of the newly elected Labour government in 1974 entitled ‘Equality for women’6 set out the government’s intention to ‘harmonise’ race and sex legislation while retaining them as separate with separate enforcement bodies. Importantly, in both of these lines of debate, they were constructed as being mutually exclusive. I show how race and gender were constructed as mutually exclusive, and how sex was constructed with reference to race in this section, before moving on to examine the specific contributions of white feminist parliamentarians to these debates. Given their vast over-representation among legislators at the time, many of the speeches concerning equality legislation were made by white men (see also Ayada, forthcoming). Favouring separate legislation, members of the houses expressed views like the following from Conservative MP and then Home Secretary Robert Carr: ‘My opinion is that on balance it is more practical and more effective to keep [sex and race] separate, but others may take a different view. Whether they may all come together at some future time may be another question.’7
Stating that it is more ‘practical’ and ‘effective’ to keep sex and race separate accomplishes several discursive moves: they are constructed as being mutually exclusive; engaging with how they overlap and mutually constitute one another is foreclosed upon; while the possibility of doing so is constructed as being not only impractical but also ineffective. It is ineffective because the intention of both laws was to address a singular disadvantage: men of colour (the ‘him’ as often used in official publications on racial discrimination)8 and white women.
In discussions favouring separate legislation, differences between race and sex were also constructed, for instance: ‘Racial segregation … is inherently degrading, even where both groups are treated equally. The Race Relations Act 1968 therefore provides that segregating a person from others on racial grounds is unlawful. But separate provision for men and women is not always unjustifiable.’9 In other words, sex was constructed by contrast to race, and vice versa. Specifically, the general discourse was a liberal one favouring formal rather than substantive equality, encapsulated in the following by then Liberal Democrat Lord Beaumont of Whitley: ‘we should declare in law that discrimination should not take place on grounds of sex, because that is one of those things which a person cannot help; we should enforce as much as possible that there should be no discrimination on grounds of race, for exactly the same reason’.10 However, sex was also at times constructed as a biological difference warranting differential treatment, while differential treatment on grounds of race was viewed as being never justifiable.11
Amid these dominant discourses, in the first organised Black women’s groups, a distinctive Black12 female analysis was being articulated from at least the time of the latter period under study (1973 onwards13).14 This analysis viewed race, class and gender as interlocking: ‘We are exploited because we are poor, Black and women. We are poor because the wealth of our countries was seized by White Western Imperialists while, in Britain, because we are Black and women we are also exploited by racism and sexism.’15 While these discourses, directly challenging the construction of race and gender as mutually exclusive, were present in the wider political environment (Black women’s organisations), they were invisible to, or explicitly ignored by, legislators interested in race and gender equality legislation, including self-described feminists active in white women’s civil society organisations (as I explore later).
In the early years of legislation, discussion of sameness and differences between race and sex served to construct them as being mutually exclusive, thereby effacing the ways that they intersect and thus both the existence and particular experiences of racially minoritised women. Among the occurrences of race and gender being discussed together in parliamentary debate concerning the SDA and its key target of discrimination in employment in the period under study, there are none that speak ‘on behalf of’, that is, substantively represent (Siow, 2023a), racially minoritised women.
I should like to see a Human Equality Bill applying equal rights to all human beings of whatever sex, race, or colour…. There might be some conflict (which I have experienced) from those who are most concerned about sex discrimination and those who are most concerned about racial discrimination; but I should have thought that it would be possible to bring all discrimination together within one measure as something of which we must rid our society.17
It is notable that Brockway observed resistance from both the ‘silos’ of sex and race to such amalgamation – which, as with the later Equality Act, might have provided opportunities to consider the interaction of inequalities, as I discuss later.18
Now that sex discrimination and race discrimination are to be dealt with in broadly similar laws, and methods of enforcement, it is interesting to see the study of women approached in a journal whose province ordinarily is race relations. The combination of the two perspectives makes for some significant insights into the nature of both kinds of discrimination, and is a welcome step towards the understanding of Britain’s new community.19
The extent to which this was reflected in the sex equality architecture at the time, however, is questionable. The EOC released its first research report into the work, employment and education of minority ethnic women nearly 20 years later (EOC, 1994). In other words, the race equality architecture (that is, the CRC) was considering the intersection of race and sex as early as 1976, while the sex equality architecture (that is, the EOC) was not.
Author:‘What was your perception of the extent to which the [EOC] was really engaging with race before you joined the organisation?’Baroness Amos:‘Very little, really, and this is what happens when you have a statutory organisation that has, as its framework, a particular piece of legislation. So, the perception was that the [EOC] dealt with gender and the [CRE] dealt with race. It was only by the coming together of these issues, in the context of the Equality and Human Rights Commission [in 2007] and the Equality Act [in 2006 and 2010] that we actually saw, at a legislative level, an attempt to bring all of those different dimensions together, so that you could … really think about the complexity of day-to-day life for different groups of people. As I kept saying, as a Black woman, you didn’t say, “Well, today I’m being treated badly because I’m Black”, and tomorrow, “I’m treated badly because I’m a woman.” It is the totality of your experience and your identity. So, the legislation, as it were, followed that reality quite late.’20
Contemporary researchers interested in intersectionality’s policy applications have taken a particular interest in the UK because of the Equality Act 2010 (see, for example, Parken, 2010). The Equality Act and its enforcement counterpart, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), are together unique internationally for amalgamating separate pieces of anti-discrimination legislation and including many different inequalities (nine in total) within their scope. This amalgamation creates opportunities (and challenges [Solanke, 2011]) for considering how inequalities shape one another and overlap. Not long before the act became law, some were hopeful about the possibilities it presented to finally make the experiences of those at the intersections visible and thus remediable (however, its limited provisions on ‘dual discrimination’ have not been enacted). Less known, and underexplored in existing accounts (Homans, 2015), is that the idea of amalgamation of equality legislation was not new to the election of New Labour in 1997, following which Tony Blair’s government instituted a wide-ranging review of equalities legislation in which intersectional perspectives were voiced. A historical approach shows that amalgamation was discussed as early as the 1960s, before there was any legislation on gender inequalities, though not for the same reasons. At this time, in discussions favouring amalgamation, race and sex continued to be constructed as mutually exclusive, serving to efface racially minoritised women. Some actors (for example, then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins) favoured amalgamation of sex and race legislation in order to better achieve parity of powers and procedures,21 not because they intersect to create qualitatively different experiences.
However, while male members of both houses and across political parties expressed similar views as evidenced earlier for and against separate or amalgamated legislation,22 often white women parliamentarians passionate about ‘women’s’ rights argued against amalgamation and for keeping sex and race separate. Where arguments for parity (separate legislation) were made by both women and men, and arguments for amalgamation were made primarily by men in parliamentary debate, arguments against amalgamation resting upon the primacy of gender as compared with race were made only by women parliamentarians, whose contributions I examine separately in the next section.
Generally unconcerned with race or with achieving parity between race and sex (in spite of alternative antiracist discourses in the institution, such as that of Lord Brockway), their concern was rather to assert the primacy of sex, that is, its difference, though not a difference related to biology but one related to whiteness. While some thought the eventual amalgamation of legislation in 2010 would lead naturally to greater intersectional thinking (see, for example, Dickens, 2007), thus far, this has not necessarily proved to be the case (Christoffersen, 2021). Elsewhere, I have suggested that a key reason for this is enduring white feminist ideology (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023). In the next section, I examine the development of this ideology during 1964–75 parliamentary debate, before discussing its lasting effects.
White feminist ideology
Within debates concerning whether gender equality should be legislated for separately or amalgamated with race legislation, which served to construct race and ‘sex’ as being mutually exclusive, sit the specific contributions of white women parliamentarians. The question of whether and to what extent these white women parliamentarians were ‘feminist’ at this particular time is a complex one given the distancing from ‘women’s lib’, much denigrated in the UK media, that many women’s rights campaigners undertook (Homans, 2015) and given varying definitions of what counts as ‘feminist’ (Freedman, 2001). However, several explicitly identified as such (for example, Baroness Stocks, who stated in the House of Lords: ‘I have been an active feminist since I was 18 when I marched in the first Women’s Suffrage procession’23), and all were concerned to further (white) women’s civil and political rights.
Similar to the perspectives presented earlier, arguing that there should be sex discrimination legislation and against views that held it would be ‘complex’, and in the context of already-existing race equality legislation, Shirley Williams MP (then Labour) also constructed race and sex as being mutually exclusive: ‘It is surely no more difficult to judge discrimination on the grounds of sex than discrimination on the grounds of race.’24
One argument within the debates favouring separate legislation was that sex discrimination is more important than race discrimination. This argument was made only by women, who, in doing so, also constructed the category of ‘women’ as white. Contributions were made by women of different political parties, consistent with other findings that women politicians tend to speak about matters of equality more often (for a review, see Mackay, 2004).
White women created and participated in a discourse that if ‘they’ (othered people of colour) had anti-discrimination legislation, then surely women (constructed as exclusively white and British) should too because women ‘deserved’ it even more. In the words of Dame Patricia Hornsby-Smith (Conservative): ‘pressure for this [Sex Discrimination] Bill has been given added impetus by a perfectly justifiable annoyance on the part of women that the Race Relations Act makes it possible for a [woman of colour] to protest if she is discriminated against because of her colour’.25 Here, ‘women’ clearly means only white women, and the annoyance is not that women of colour could not protest because of their sex and race but that they could protest at all, while white women could not.
‘Black women appeared in the Caribbean and in this country – in Europe in general – because we were seen as potential workers rather than as women. If you think about the history of slavery, women were valued far more for their working capacity than for their breeding potential, up until abolition, really.’26
In discourses that may now be read as white feminist, sex was also constructed as being more important than race. While in the quote from Dame Patricia Hornsby-Smith, this was accomplished through a thinly veiled belief in white superiority, others did so through early and now-familiar arguments that women (constructed as white) are a ‘majority’, arguments that discursively rely on a comparison to ‘minorities’, constructed as being less important.
the nature of discrimination on grounds of sex was in many ways different from discrimination on grounds of race; that the scale and location of the two problems were different since immigrants are a very small proportion of the total population and are concentrated in a few areas only, while women are the majority of the population and are spread over the whole country.28
Here, again, women are constructed as exclusively white, while the problem of racial discrimination is clearly minimised in importance with reference to a ‘very small proportion of the total population’ (emphasis added) and with reference to where in the UK they lived, foreshadowing the racialised ‘inner city’ of the 1980s (Ware, 2015 [1992]). The argument that racial discrimination ‘only’ affects a ‘small’ community was also made elsewhere by Margherita Rendel, at the time, academic, member of the Labour Party Study Group on Discrimination against Women and heavily involved ‘behind the scenes’ in parliamentary committees developing the SDA (Rendel, 1978: 898–9). Although census data on ethnicity were not collected until 1991, this statement is also not in keeping with the evidence available.29
Baroness Wootton of Abinger, among several others, also constructed women as a majority and people of colour as a less relevant minority: ‘The first difference is that [people of colour] are a minority, and, unhappily, all minorities are in a vulnerable position. We are the majority sex, though nobody would think it.’30 Here, ‘minorities’ are also constructed as being inherently in a vulnerable position, thus, to an extent, relieving the state of culpability for protecting them against discrimination.
White feminist parliamentarians made arguments that sex was more important than race not only through reference to women being a majority but also through arguing that sex discrimination is worse than, or a more intractable problem than, race discrimination in common statements such as the following example from Baroness Summerskill: ‘I believe it is harder to remove sex discrimination than it is to remove race discrimination.’31 Similarly, later in the same speech quoted earlier, Baroness Wootton of Abinger said: ‘The second difference between us and [people of colour] is that it is still possible to speak about women in terms in which it is no longer possible to speak about discrimination about our [friends of colour].’32 In the latter statement, racial inequality is constructed as a problem solved, while gender inequality is constructed as therefore more pressing. ‘Women’ are constructed as mutually exclusive to people of colour, that is, as white, through the use of the word ‘us’.33 Baroness Mary Stocks (then Labour), a long-time women’s rights campaigner and suffragist, argued that sex discrimination is a more important and intractable issue than race discrimination because it was an ‘older’ problem: ‘Race discrimination is a comparatively modern problem. It has become a problem owing to the extreme mobility of the 20th century world. Sex discrimination is age old; it is as old as recorded time. Therefore I think it is more difficult to legislate against.’34
Racially minoritised women, contemporarily discussed primarily in terms of limiting their immigration amid surging racist discourses informing changes to immigration law, were mostly made invisible in conversations about anti-discrimination legislation, which is ultimately unsurprising given their lack of representation in government. This exclusion from representation was also reflected in the equality architecture (EOC records show that as late as 1993, minority ethnic staff comprised just 2.9 per cent of staff).
‘I think we all agreed that legislation that outlawed discrimination of any kind was a move in the right direction. I think most of us also felt that that legislation hadn’t really had the impact on our lives and our working chances as one would have hoped…. You’ve only got to look at the pay gap now to see how ineffective the Equal Pay Act was. I think the same applies to race relations. Racism continued to operate in the workplace…. I think legislation was a little bit out there for us. We were dealing with grass-roots community issues and concerns of ordinary women on the street in our communities. So, I don’t recall us campaigning around legislation, no. I think, possibly, around the way the legislation was interpreted and delivered, but it wasn’t seen as a campaign to improve the law; it was about a campaign to improve people’s lives.’36
‘In terms of legislation, I don’t think that the Sex Discrimination Act, the Equal Pay Act, really featured very much. Obviously, in terms of the Race Relations Act, the fact of having the [CRE], for example, some of the campaigns at a local level, which were around employment rights, equity in housing, the campaigns against the ways in which the police were treating Black people … all of these were initially being mediated through the lens of race. So, the Race Relations Act, and the shortcomings of … the … act, featured much more than the other two.’37
Nevertheless, these voices and perspectives have been excluded from official records and published accounts, including many feminist ones (see, for example, Atkins, 1986).
Meanwhile, the first racially minoritised woman to enter parliament (Diane Abbott, Labour) did so 12 years following the parliamentary debates discussed here, in 1987, while through to the present, growing numbers of women parliamentarians continue to be overwhelmingly white (Siow, 2023b). In other words, during this period, the only women within the institution of Parliament were white, and there is no evidence to suggest that they engaged with organised minoritised women outside of it.
Lasting effects
Among elite white actors concerned with gender equality, it is now less credible to deny the intersection of race and gender, to oppose work in this area, and to explicitly argue that gender is more important than race (though similar constructions of women as a majority and of gender discrimination as a worse problem than race discrimination continue to circulate). However, the construction of gender as the most important marker of inequality in equality policy, institutions and organisations has had lasting effects in both the UK and Europe. For example, a close analysis of contemporary additive invocations of ‘intersectionality’ in European gender equality policy debates reveals that the main concern continues to be a reassertion of the primary importance of gender (Christoffersen, 2022b). In the UK, meanwhile, a dominant applied meaning given to ‘intersectionality’ in equality policy and women’s organisations is an additive one that asserts the primary importance of gender, serving to uphold white supremacy and other structural inequalities (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023).
‘I mean there had been, for a number of years, always in the atmosphere, discussions about were single [amalgamated] organisations the best way to do this? With, well, the [2006 and] 2010 legislation [Equality Acts], I think some of that was crystallised…. Yes, there wasn’t a backlash, I wouldn’t say a backlash, but there was concern and certainly in terms of sex discrimination and equal pay issues … my personal commitment had been strongly on sex equality, and I was concerned, and people I had worked with and people I associated with were concerned, that we would lose the focus that we had. I think to a certain extent, that was true.’39
‘I think Section 75 made people think more about the intersectionality…. I think the issue that is only being tackled now is the participation issue, like, people themselves participate. Those [minoritised] groups are becoming more active now and organising themselves.… I think we’re way behind, and I think that’s partly the conflict, but I think people are reaching out. I think Section 75, as I said, made us think. When you were talking recently about concepts and books and things, I think the whole discussion of intersectionality and all of that has impinged in people’s heads in thinking, “Look, we really have to do something about that.”’40
Similarly, Siow (2023b) found in 1997–2017 UK parliamentary debate that minoritised women themselves were far more likely to mention minoritised women than minoritised men, white women and (especially) white men; however, their under-representation overall meant that most mentions were from white and/or male MPs (Siow, 2023b).
One lasting effect of the construction of gender inequality as more important than racial inequality and the construction of ‘women’ as white is that it continues to be viewed as legitimate for white women exclusively to represent ‘women’ and gender equality. Even their ‘speaking for’ racially minoritised women, which has been theorised as epistemic violence (Alcoff, 1992), is too often viewed, as it was among some interviewees, as going above and beyond what is necessary.
A further enduring effect of this ideology that constructs gender as always the most important marker of inequality is seen in the ongoing primacy of gender in UK equality policy, driven by both politicians and white women’s organisations, though race was legislated for first and though the legislation is now amalgamated. Yet, in a context of insufficient resourcing of equalities generally, some interviewees working in gender equality conversely perceived race as having primacy. Uprisings of racially minoritised people against discrimination and violence have prompted (problematic) focus on, and resources dedicated to, race at various points over the period since 1964, and recognition of institutional racism in the police following the murder of Stephen Lawrence prompted Great Britain’s first positive duty on equality in 2001. However, focused work on racial inequality has been deliberately targeted through ‘cohesion’ policy (Cantle, 2001) and further diluted since the Equality Act 2010 (Christoffersen, 2022a). Today, official sources deny that race inequality exists (Meer, 2022), while work on whitened (cis)gender inequality would seem to be more palatable to recent UK governments. Moreover, privileging of gender can be observed in the creation of government units and ministries (the latter is still named ‘Women and Equalities’), mainstreaming strategies (Squires, 2007), and pay-gap reporting, which is mandatory only for gender, to name a few examples. Gender equality legislation mainly benefitted white and otherwise privileged women, and thus far, this has largely continued in spite of the amalgamation of equality legislation into one act. Meanwhile, the category of women continues to be constructed as white (Lewis, 2017): ‘what is common about the experiences of women of color is an unspoken assumption that we always lack a defining feature of womanhood that white women have by default’ (Hamad, 2020: 15).
Conclusions
Some 50 years on from legislation concerning gender discrimination in employment, inequalities persist, especially for racially minoritised women. Progress narratives that generalise to ‘women’ and/or ‘gender’ and/or feminism serve to obscure these enduring inequities. The influence of the racial discourse of whiteness (Leonardo, 2002) on such legislation and its effects has received little attention in European feminist political scholarship. Meanwhile, while the term ‘white feminism’ has recently been popularised, there has been relatively little theoretical or empirical investigation of what it comprises or its development in contemporary history. A historical approach enables analysis of how white feminist political discourse informed and was developed in and through institutional discussion of gender equality legislation. I have shown that in these debates, race and gender were constructed as separate – on the part of white feminists, through construction of the category ‘women’ as white and how white feminists resisted the combining of race and gender equality architecture through positing the superior importance of ‘sex’ discrimination over race discrimination. While similar dynamics have been identified in earlier periods in the US (see, for example, Newman, 1999), they have been largely unconnected to the term ‘white feminism’, which has been under-theorised in political scholarship, and how they operate in politics in Europe remains underexplored. While ‘white feminists’ and ‘white feminism’ are often conflated, I have argued that white feminist political ideology can be understood as comprising not only the construction of gender as the most important marker of inequality but also the specific construction of gender inequality as being a more pressing and intractable social problem than racial inequality. Siloed approaches in Europe, reflected in the contemporary equality architecture of many countries (Atrey, 2019), have served to construct ‘gender’ and ‘race’ as being mutually exclusive social structures and to exclude racially minoritised women from the category ‘women’ (Spillers, 1987; Lewis, 2017; Hamad, 2020; Emejulu, 2022), revealing the imperative for substantial policy change.
In gendered and racialised institutions, white feminist actors were able to emerge and thrive within institutional constraints, including male-dominated institutions, in ways that partly depended upon their arguments for the primacy of sex discrimination. As Phipps (2020) notes, the enactment of political whiteness by mainstream feminism involves a will to power, often achieved through performances of powerlessness – here enacted through claims that the oppression of (white) women is more important than, and worse than, other forms of discrimination, namely, racial discrimination. Moreover, ‘privileged white women also sacrifice more marginalised people to achieve their aims, or even define them as enemies when they get in the way’ (Phipps, 2020: 3). Given the over-representation of white men in Parliament, it is them that white feminist parliamentarians were often aiming to appeal to in the hopes of furthering sex discrimination legislation. They did this through appealing to the ‘wounds’ of white women experiencing sex discrimination (Phipps, 2020), as well as through constructing shared whiteness, or shared racial interests. This strategy was earlier effective for white feminists in the US, for example, when suffragists argued granting citizenship rights to white women would protect the country against racialised ‘immigrants’ (Kraditor, 1965).
This article has discussed the development of white feminist ideology among powerful political actors within political institutions, that is, the UK parliaments, an important aspect of which is, I argue, the idea that gender is always the most important marker of inequality. This has in turn propelled the development of critical intersectional discourse (see, for example, Solanke, 2011; 2020), attributed to the Black women’s movement (Thomlinson, 2016), which has enhanced contemporary understanding of how siloed gender equality policy perpetuates inequalities among women and is largely ineffective at improving outcomes for women experiencing intersecting inequalities.
In spite of decades of Black and women of colour feminist critique, white feminism is too often still uninterrogated in both academic and popular feminist spaces in Europe, where white scholars often evade antiracist perspectives (Lewis, 2013). Specification of what it is, both theoretically and empirically, aims to make white feminism impossible to render neutral.
Notes
UK legislation concerned ‘sex’ rather than gender, which was subject to feminist criticism from the 1980s (Atkins, 1986). The latter is interesting given current transphobic, ‘feminist’ discourse about supposed threats to ‘sex-based rights’ represented by ‘gender ideology’ (see Pearce et al, 2020).
SDA 1975, para 1.
RRA 1968, para 1.
‘End bias says TUC’ (1994) Black Cultural Archives (BCA) RC/RF/9/02.
Parliamentary Papers (PP), ‘Equality for women’ (1974), Cmnd 5724.
PP, Hansard (House of Commons [HC]), 24 January 1974, col 1882, Mr Robert Carr.
PP, ‘Racial discrimination’ (1975), Cmnd 6234.
PP, ‘Equality for women’ (1974), Cmnd 5724, p 9.
PP, Hansard (House of Lords [HL]), 14 July 1975, col 1069, Lord Beaumont of Whitley.
PP, ‘Equality for women’ (1974), Cmnd 5724.
This term was often deployed as a political identity category encompassing Black, Asian and at times other minoritised ethnic groups.
While the first Black women’s organisation in the UK likely formed in 1959, what is often credited as the first autonomous ‘Black women’s movement organisation’, the Brixton Black Women’s Group, formed in 1973. See https://www.bl.uk/womens-rights/articles/black-women-activists-in-britain.
For example, ‘National Black Women’s Conference: organised by OWAAD, 1979, Agenda’, BCA McKenley1/1.
‘Black women in employment’, BCA McKenley1/5.
PP, Hansard (HL), 25 July 1968, col 1273, Lord Brockway.
PP, Hansard (HL), 4 April 1974, col 1077, Lord Brockway.
Notably, some key race equality actors, including at times the CRE, which viewed legislation on race as being comparatively strong following the 2001 amendment to the RRA, did not necessarily support the amalgamation represented by the creation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) (The Guardian, 2004) and passing of the Equality Act either. Moreover, interviews I conducted with key actors in the Black women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s reveal differing perspectives as to whether the eventual amalgamation of commissions and legislation was positive or negative – the latter due to viewing differing ontologies of race and gender inequalities, necessitating distinct responses.
CRC press release (1976), BCA PR/27/76.
Baroness Valerie Amos, interviewed by the author in 2022. Interviews cited here are part of the ‘Gender Equalities at Work’ collection, catalogued under the reference number C2025 at the British Library. Baroness Amos was in cabinet during key years (2003–07) of the development of the Equality Act (2006; superseded 2010).
PP, Hansard (HC), 23 July 1974, Secretary of State for the Home Department Mr Roy Jenkins.
While amalgamation was a stated desire of the home secretary, supported by close advisers, this was not ultimately pursued at the time for political reasons, as key advisers remember: amalgamation was opposed by both ‘women’ (including parliamentarians) and ‘ethnic minorities’, while the passing of the more palatable, to Parliament, SDA strategically enabled subsequent strengthening of the RRA (Sooben, 1990).
PP, Hansard (HL), 14 November 1973, cols 719–20, Baroness Stocks.
PP, Hansard (HC), 28 January 1972, Shirley Williams MP.
PP, Hansard (HC), 28 January 1972, Dame Patricia Hornsby-Smith.
Stella Dadzie, interviewed by the author in 2022.
Baroness Edith Summerskill is the subject of a recent celebratory feminist narrative of progress (Honeyball, 2022).
PP, ‘Second special report from the Select Committee on the Anti-Discrimination Bill’ (HL) (1972–73).
Racially minoritised people were estimated in 1971 at 1,486,000 people or 2.75 per cent of the usual resident population of Great Britain by the Immigrant Statistics Unit (1975) ‘Country of birth and colour 1971–74’, Population Trends, 2.
PP, Hansard (HL), 14 March 1972, col 397, Baroness Wootton of Abinger.
PP, Hansard (HL), 4 November 1971, col 167, Baroness Summerskill.
PP, Hansard (HL), 14 March 1972, col 398, Baroness Wootton of Abinger (emphasis added).
Similar arguments were made in later years in existing archived oral histories with female parliamentarians of the time, for example, Joyce Butler, a key actor who had first proposed a sex discrimination act as a private member’s bill and member of the Parliamentary All Party Equal Rights Group, Fawcett Collection, c468/10/FL466-9/P.20.
PP, Hansard (HL), 14 November 1973, col 720, Baroness Stocks.
For example, ‘National Black Women’s Conference’, BCA McKenley1/1.
Stella Dadzie, interviewed by the author in 2022.
Baroness Valerie Amos, interviewed by the author in 2022.
The (white) women’s movement in England and the EOC were broadly supportive of the creation of the EHRC and the Equality Acts, perhaps partly because in England and particularly London, antiracist and autonomous organising by and for racially minoritised women compelled conversations about racism and its intersections with sexism among white feminists from the 1980s, leading some to see the potential benefits of an intersectional approach represented by these changes. However, the EOC and women’s organisations were also placated by the introduction of a gender equality duty in 2006 modelled on that introduced for race in 2001 (Squires, 2007). These duties were amalgamated into a broader public sector equality duty in 2011.
Morag Alexander, interviewed by the author in 2022.
Bronagh Hinds, interviewed by the author in 2022.
Funding
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/V001175/1, ‘Gender Equalities at Work – An Interdisciplinary History of 50 Years of Legislation’.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the research participants, as well as Louise Jackson, Fiona Mackay, Orly Siow, Sophia Ayada, Hazel Conley, Frances C. Galt, Colm O’Cinneide, Tanya Rhodes, the anonymous reviewers and the editors, particularly Khursheed Wadia, for helpful comments.
Author biography
Ashlee Christoffersen is Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at York University and Honorary Fellow at University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author of The Politics of Intersectional Practice: Representation, Coalition and Solidarity in UK NGOs (Bristol University Press, forthcoming), and ‘The politics of intersectional practice: competing concepts of intersectionality’, Policy & Politics (Christoffersen, 2021).
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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