Feature: The New Journal’s Pavan Amara describes how she inadvertently stirred up a national debate with her recent online article exploring class and feminism
Published: 29 March, 2012
by PAVAN AMARA
Early in the New Year, I went to visit family and friends on the north London estate where I grew up.
Sweeping over the usual topics of conversation, I dropped in a new-found interest in feminism.
The room went stone cold.
Quizzical looks were thrown from one set of eyes to another and there were desperate attempts to move the conversation on to anything else.
It emerged no one knew quite what I was talking about, from the neighbour – a survivor of domestic violence for over a decade – to the woman on the top floor who’d raised her children alone on a salary below the London Living Wage.
I wondered why, and how widespread, this response to the “F-word” was.
So, partly out of curiosity, I decided to interview women from across the country – 38 in all – who identified themselves as working-class and had at some point involved themselves with feminism.
All considered “women’s issues” important to them but, surprisingly, all agreed with the statement that “working class women’s voices were not adequately heard within mainstream feminism.” Some called themselves “feminists”, some refused to – partly because of classism they’d experienced within the movement.
Problems that emerged included alienation around terminiology used, a high emphasis on academia in the movement, difficulty accessing meetings in the centre of cities, not being able to afford the travel to and tickets to conferences, and feeling, in one woman’s words, like “fish out of water”.
I wrote the feature “Feminism: still excluding working-class women?” for website The F-Word, and was overwhelmed by the response.
Comments were enthusiastic, with some readers saying they were “overjoyed” that something had been written on the subject.
It was unexpected, to say the least, that the voices of working-class women – when heard – kickstarted an entire debate on the website.
In the days that followed I was inundated with emails, and had strangers sending me messages via social networking sites about the feature.
BBC Woman’s Hour contacted me, saying they wanted to pick up on the idea and be put in contact with women I’d interviewed.
For their radio show they wanted one working-class woman who considered herself a feminist and one who didn’t.
Many women I’d interviewed thought this was setting up an adverserial angle, while some thought it was simplistic and failed to really engage with the issue. Others refused to be interviewed by Woman’s Hour because they felt the show itself was “more exclusionary than feminism”.
In the end, Woman’s Hour settled for a debate entitled “Working-class feminism”, where they interviewed an author, a television screen writer, and an academic.
Ironically, no women currently living in an area of deprivation were interviewed – despite the original debate being about why feminism was not exerting itself in areas of deprivation.
One commenter noted there was a difference between those who identify themselves as being from “working-class tradition” and those who identified themselves as working-class because they grew up experiencing deprivation.
Another felt that academic language used in movements that were meant to be socially inclusive, such as feminism, was “just another way of keeping up with the Joneses.”
Though there were some comments that expressed classist and sexist ideas below the F-Word article and a blog I wrote for the New Statesman on the subject, most were bewilderingly positive.
I choose the word “bewildering” because it’s rare commenters are so rosy about anything journalists do.
To me, that highlighted the subject needed to be talked about.
It also showed how important it is to spotlight the voices of those not usually heard. Too often we read about celebrities and politicians, but less frequently about the people without PRs, who know what the decisions made at the top actually mean.