Sometimes the quest to distance ourselves from oppression becomes truly creative. “I’m not racist,” says Lucas Joyner – ironically – in his viral track, My Sister’s Boyfriend’s Black. Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, was rightly ridiculed for attempting to prove his antiracism credentials by posting a collage of pictures of himself with black people – an absurd “wokeness by association” even if it were not obviously overridden by the fact that he advocates for an overtly racist president. Then there’s my personal favourite: “I’m not racist – I’m having a Motown-themed wedding.”

The 1910s: ‘We have sanitised our history of the suffragettes’ Read more

Sexism, like racism, is a system, and saying you’re against it is rarely enough. How many of us women realise the level of sexism we have internalised? It would be strange if we hadn’t. We are conditioned by, educated in, and live out our lives in a deeply sexist society. Our schools, universities and media organisations are neither run by feminists nor overtly committed to a feminist ideology – and, as became so obvious last year with James Damore’s infamous Google memo, the tech companies that control so much of our information are no different. When you consider how few of the means by which we access information are feminist, it is not surprising that most of us still don’t really know what feminism is.

Germaine Greer’s work on “horizontal hostility” – female factionalism – came to mind this week, when Meghan Markle’s sister Samantha launched a new round of slurs directed towards her prenuptial sibling, Meghan. The estranged Samantha, who seems unable to choose between wanting an invitation to the royal wedding on the one hand and seeking to promote her forthcoming book, The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister, on the other, denounced Meghan Markle’s humanitarian work as “exploitative”, and voiced her disapproval of “situations where celebrities visit a place which is poverty stricken and they’re wearing impeccable clothing – they themselves are wealthy”.

Ironically, it’s a critique I have some sympathy with, but that’s not the point. There’s no evidence that Afrocentric activism is Samantha Markle’s main concern. She has perfected the art of humiliating her sister – a service for which she has found insatiable demand in the media, apologising just enough to seem like a nice person, all the while devising her own plans to cash in on Meghan’s newfound mega-fame.

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I don’t really blame her. She has been set up, as have we all, to want to attack each other. It was Greer who first drew “horizontal hostility” – a feature of patriarchy in which women turn on each other, humiliating and discriminating against other women – to my attention. Greer sadly also somehow manages to simultaneously embody the hostility that she critiques. She has been complaining about contemporary feminists “bitching and whingeing” on blogs and in millennial-targeted books, or “spreading their legs” and then hashtagging #MeToo, all the while unwittingly proving the real-life validity of her own theoretical points.

Every single development that could help us as women to move forward is met by prominent women who want to hold us back. The positive feminist backlash sparked by Trump’s election was followed by the small but highly visible group of people, including women, demanding that the US #RepealThe19th – as in repeal the 19th amendment – that gave American women the right to vote. In the week that marks 100 years since the beginning of British women’s suffrage, the fact that a group of contemporary American women are trying to get rid of theirs is a cold, culture-war rain shower.

100 years since women first won the right to vote, it has finally become mainstream to celebrate the suffragettes

The #MeToo movement began, I thought, to provide a platform for women to share experiences of sexism and abuse they had previously felt too intimidated to declare openly, or justifiably concerned about the consequences of doing so. What’s most striking to me about the movement is how quickly it descended into a row between women. Not just any women, but some of the most prominent: Germaine Greer, one of my idols, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, the French actor Catherine Deneuve.

One of my personal low points came last week, in a TV debate about the Presidents Club – the all-men’s club that has now shut down after an undercover investigation revealed a pattern of abuse facing women who worked there as hostesses; men exposing themselves and groping women, women required to sign non-disclosure agreements to restrict their ability to speak out. In standing up for the right of women to operate in their workplace without harassment or assault, I was accused of being “against working-class women”. Middle-class women like me, the argument went, were looking for some high-and-mighty cause to pursue, and found it in removing jobs from working-class women who were happily earning a living being groped by men who were rich and powerful.

This is an inevitable consequence of the co-option of feminism by the mainstream that the writer bell hooks warned about more than 30 years ago, which has led to the struggle against sexism being depoliticised, and removed from its radical history in class struggle, socialism, antiracism and women’s solidarity. It’s too easy for women who don’t know what feminism is – for all the reasons I’ve outlined above – to assume it’s about BBC presenters wanting £300,000 instead of £150,000.

At the same time, so many of the grandees of female privilege seem to be rejecting feminism too. Julia Hartley-Brewer, whose revelation that Michael Fallon put his hand on her knee brought #MeToo to Westminster; Ann Leslie, who described Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn groping her crotch as the kind of “silly” situation women should be able to brush off; Melanie Phillips, who decided that the centenary of initial suffrage was a good opportunity to attack women again; and Shirley Williams on the Today programme, the same day, lamenting that women are not as tough as we used to be in the good old days, when a well-placed stiletto heel was all it took to disable an approaching male assailant in the House of Commons.

Which branch of feminism won women the vote? We all did | Rachel Holmes Read more

There are so many misunderstandings between us. Women like me do not feel the need to preface our feminism with reassuring words for men – it shouldn’t need to be said that men are key feminist allies – nor do we favour a witch-hunt. You can be a feminist and defend rape suspects, as I did, as a criminal defence lawyer. A justice system run by women would look very different, which is why it’s important to advocate relentlessly for more gender equality at its senior levels at the same time as doing the best we can for a fair process for perpetrators, who need to be convicted and punished properly.

One hundred years since women first won the right to vote, it has finally become mainstream to celebrate the suffragettes; Millicent Fawcett has been voted the last century’s most influential woman, and we are all quoting Emmeline Pankhurst. Mention the fact that Pankhurst was a staunch imperialist, blind to the colonial exploitation of African women, however, and you stray outside acceptable feminism. Such feminism is still seen as threatening – and it may well take another 100 years to change that.