where next for 'sisterhood'?

Alison Wolf's article in this month's Prospect magazine entitled 'The End of Sisterhood' has received a fair bit of attention (well a double pager in The Observer, anyway) which amongst other things gives this quality mag some much needed exposure.

The article has spawned a massive surge of responses in The Observer's blog section, all of which I haven't had time to read (although it's great that this issue excites such interest).

While I thought it was a great piece, primarily because I felt it brought attention to the gradual erosion of shared values that a free market encourages, my girlfriend was less positive. She felt that it was a rather sly stab at feminism that offered no alternative or solution to the contradiction facing 21st century women.

The response by 'Arianna' that "what feminism is failing in today is the fact that it fails to engage women from all straits of society"is a very good point and this is what I took out of Wolf's article: that a movement that could potentially unite half the world under a set of shared values has been undermined by those who have benefitted from the equality it fought for in the first place.

This is not a new story. I'm reading Citizenship, Identity and Social History (edited by Chrles Tilly) in which the first essay studies the changing language of citizenship used by 19th century silk weavers. Marc Steinberg explains how with the breakdown of reforms that upheld the rights of the silk weavers of Spitalfields the language the workers adopted was that of 'possessive individualism' whose inalienable rights were the same as those espoused by the free marketeers who wished to take them away. In doing so women and families were excluded from the conversation as they had no official presence in such a system. The outcome of this was a class movemnet that could oppose legislation that could impact negatively on the employment opportunities of its members but at the cost of re-casting women as irrational and slovenly.

Movements by their very nature seem to rest on contradictions because they are often forced to adopt a language (or discourse if you like) of the hegemony they struggle against - likewise equality for women.

The solution is not feminism's alone however, as many of the blog responses argue, altruism and civil society should be a goal for all and men and the institutions they embody need to acknowledge this as much as women do.

The Ideology Phoenix

This month the POWER Commission released their inquiry into the state of democracy in the UK. It's a very interesting document and very readable. Their conclusion is that far from being politically apathetic the people of Britain are just as interested and involved as ever, the problem is that the two party system is failing them because it's based on an outdated class/ideology system.

What they propose in its stead is an atomization of the political process, whereby the power of the Executive is decreased and the balance of power is re-established at a much more local level.
I don't disagree with the method of re-balancing power, but I do feel that it does nothing to compensate for effect this will have on individualisation. For example how will this dovetail with the growth of citizenship and national identity the government plan to bring in?

I'm very much of the view that ideology needs to be re-born not abandoned. And I'm not alone. In Terror & Liberalism (a book I thoroughly recommend) Paul Berman makes the same point as does this discussion of Geoff Mulgan's new organisation Involve. The problem with ideology is not that it doesn't exist, rather that it has lost its coherency and its mass appeal, there is no set of guidelines or objectives under which people of all interests can collect. This was always the strength of a secular ideology and the weakness of the cultural relativism that emerged in the 70s and 80s.

In my opinion the POWER inquiry is glossing over the real issue here. Certainly reduce the power the government has to bypass contested legislation and increase the role that the public play in this context, but this needs to be combined with a set of positive values taught to everybody regardless of their particular interest or social background.