Suella Braverman, formerly home secretary, was fired in a cabinet reshuffle yesterday, but while commenters and feminists on the left rejoiced, I felt a sense of doom.
Why do we keep seeing female representation in the highest levels of politics create the same hellish plot-line of callous and painful policies that feel like something straight out of a TV political thriller? She’s patriarchy in heels, and her tenure was a looping nightmare.
In my work, I've sat on feminist panels, attended discussions and events about women in business, been on consultations in parliament and enjoyed dinner with powerful female figures who are running fashion houses, media companies and social platforms.
I was privileged to be in these spaces, and that makes sense because that’s what they have always been: spaces of privilege, populated by mostly white women like me, often also from middle-class or upper-class backgrounds (unlike me). These events take part in industries that often have a way of retaining certain women and squeezing out others. There is inequality in these industries and an imbalance in who is at the table.
At so many of these dinners, events and discussions, a sentence offered as a solution has come up again and again, and I have meditated on it each time; “we just need more women in politics!”. It recognises, correctly, that political spaces are populated by way too many men, but it also infers that the colossal social issues of our time stem from a gender imbalance in powerful spaces and that addressing this imbalance would be a way to solve those issues.
In my first few years attending these events, I would passionately agree, nodding along, and that was because I was imagining women I knew going into politics: smart, compassionate, and awake to injustice. I remember looking across the table at one particular event where Munroe Bergdorf was sitting and thinking, “We need someone like you.”
You see, my perception of “more women in politics” was skewed by who I wanted navigating the halls of power, and my hypothetical scenario was one in which the potential candidates’ politics were not just any women. They were basically radical leftists whose beliefs were based in social justice.
In reality, those are not the women occupying the most powerful positions in our country; they aren’t the ones gaining access to rooms of power. Yes, women like Diane Abbot, Zarah Sultana, Caroline Lucas, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Nadia Whittome have shown us that female leadership with humanity at its core is possible, and these big green flags are important for us to see in order to know what’s possible, but we have to face the fact that women have been at the forefront of politics and some of the most detrimental, inhumane and painful politics we have seen in recent years.
Conservatives with deeply harmful agendas; Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman. But this impact stretches back far deeper, especially when it comes to white powerful women, who have been at the forefront of marginalised people’s pain for centuries – assimilating to white supremacy, imperialism and patriarchy, asserting power and dominion over others in order to retain their power and place on class and racial hierarchies as while they came second to men on the gender hierarchy.
Suella Braverman highlights exactly why representation politics continues to fail us. Appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state for exiting the EU in 2018 – by, you guessed it, another woman-in-politics, Theresa May, Suella has become the Disney villain of policies. Standing firmly on the right of the Conservative Party, Suella describes herself as a “child of the British empire”, which she believes was a “force for good”; she thinks schools shouldn’t accommodate gender-diverse students' needs, says immigration “threatens the country’s character” – despite both her parents having immigrated to the UK in the '60s – and called people seeking refuge crossing the channel in small boats “an invasion” before spearheaded the policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, which the Supreme Court ruled as unlawful.
In what world is anything of this good for women? If this is “more women in politics, " then I really don’t want it.
I understand why we say, “We just need more women in politics!” the gender imbalance should be addressed regardless, and young girls seeing themselves reflected in powerful positions is important, but seeing it as a catch-all solution is an issue as it leaves out something a tad important: their politics.
Women are not, by definition, more mature, compassionate and awake to inequality, especially if they are privileged, which is the case for most of the women who make it into formal politics, and even more so if they also believe assimilating into the imperialist male environment will make them more valuable or successful – a much higher-stakes version of “I’m not like other girls”.
White feminism, the most visible form of feminism in powerful spaces, is a way to reproduce power, as it is mostly about self-ascension, so it makes sense that “more women in politics will solve it!” has become a white feminist trope.
Gender representation politics offers us so little meaningful evidence to grasp onto; it papers over the cracks of our problems, satiating our need to see ourselves without the kind of politics that would allow us to free ourselves in real and material ways. We need balanced gender representation that mirrors our society, but framing it as a way out of our biggest challenges does nothing but offer us a mirage of hope that distracts us from a complex reality: We must challenge culture and uproot the power systems that politics works to uphold. We will continue to get misogynistic female politicians in a misogynistic society. Our society will continue to produce bigoted female politicians because our society is based in bigoted systems and culture. Women coming into politics won’t save us just by dint of their gender.
Next time, instead of saying we want more women in politics, let’s go deeper: what type of women? Or better still, what type of policies and beliefs? In fact, what type of politician do you want?
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