 Mwynweil. Thank you everyone, thank you for coming. Welcome everyone to this talk on feminism, neoliberal tool or fuel for the 99% and we're very very happy to have Hester Eisenstein here from Cuny the City University in New York. Hester is a professor of sociology in women's and gender studies at Queen's College and The Graduate London and the State University of New York in Buffalo. She served as a Fema pract in the Rand-Laber government of New South Wales in Australia. She has a lot of political experience and she has written about it, and she will share with you some of these ideas. We also have Sarah Stavano currently at King's College. She will be starting at SAWA in the economics department as a lecturer in January. Fy sleeping is feminist political economies specializing in a study of work, wellbeing, households and development. She is currently a research associate at the Department of European International Studies at King's, and her research explores how gender class and race relations shape the organisation of paid and unpaid work, particularly observing households and everyday practices. She works at the intersections between political economy, Science, Economics and Anthropology, and she takes an interdisciplinary approach to these theories and methods. So she's going to be discussant for Hester and Hester's going to start with, yeah, around 45 minutes and then, of course, we'll open it up to the floor. Does this work, can you hear me? I think I should use the mic because it's a big room. Okay, well thank you so much. Hello to everybody and thanks so much to Faizi. I'm very grateful for the invitation and to so as for the opportunity to speak to you today. As you know my topic for today is feminism, neoliberal tool or fuel for the 99%. So this is a bit of a provocation and I hope we can have time for a lot of discussion at the end of my talk. So before I begin I want to mention two names. One is Julian Assange. I'm hoping that the increasing mobilization around his release will be successful. He's in prison right here in your country in Belmarch and I think it's a scandal and I hope you are aware of it and are willing to be active about it. And I know that recently Labour leader Corbyn has called for him not to be extradited to the United States. I don't know if you heard that. The other name is Eva Morales. I only know what I read online but this sounds to me like a successful right wing coup with the assistance of my country. Another tragic set of events so I hope that can be reversed. So here's an outline of what I want to do today. I'm going to walk you through the argument of my book, Feminism Seduced. I was very touched when a few months ago I received a Facebook message from my comrade and friend Sarah Raimondo whose headquarters is in the Philippines but who is a world figure in my view. She's an activist, she's a scholar, a feminist and a communist. I think she would agree. And she kindly pointed out something that I didn't realize which was the tenth anniversary of the publication of my book and she mentioned how much it had meant to her when she first read it. So this started me thinking about the trajectory of the book and so I'm going to start with a summary of my argument because that's going to frame the rest of what I want to talk about. So just bear with me, I'm going to just walk you through what the book for those of you who haven't read it. So the argument I have made in this book is that in the 1970s a counter-revolution against the gains of the 1960s in both the developed world and the third world was successfully undertaken and that this counter-revolution is still going on. If we accept the idea of a global class war then the winners to date have been the elites, the managers of the global economy across the globe and the losers have been both the middle class and the poor. The poorest of the poor in every country are the women and the children. So in chapter one I detail the elements of this counter-revolution which has involved a complex series of political and economic changes or restructurings as major corporations and their national government's jockey position in an increasingly competitive world market. The developed powers simultaneously compete with one another while uniting to preserve their competitive advantage against third world countries. Those powers use the ideology of neoliberalism and the mechanisms of the international financial institutions to preserve their privileges in trade and their access to cheap labour. This competition by the United States, Europe and Japan and England I should say against the rising economic powers of east and southeast Asia especially China is currently being carried on in the context of a war on terrorism. This war is directed by the United States with the enthusiastic assistance of Great Britain and with greater or lesser participation by other world powers. If, as Carl von Klaesowitz famously said, war is the continuation of politics by other means then the war on terror is the continuation of the counter-revolution against the middle class and the poor in the first world and against most of the population in the third world. My aim in this book has been to take the achievements and the aspirations of feminism as a world movement and to place them in the context of this larger struggle. I've tried to show those arenas in which mainstream feminist ideologies have been taken up and used by governments, corporations and NGOs. And I've also demonstrated the ways in which the use of women's labour has been a crucial part of this counter-revolution. So I'll just briefly walk you through the argument. I talk in chapter two about the development of the women's movement in the United States and the creation of what I call hegemonic or mainstream feminism which basically took the enormous agenda that was laid out by the women's movement when it exploded on the scene in the late 60s and 70s and narrowed it down to one thing, which was paid work for women. That's how feminism has been defined. So all the other aspirations of the feminist movement which I would argue if we had taken them on board we would have had a very different world those were narrowed away and paired away. So now if I say feminism you think oh yes women working for wages. Then I talk in chapter three about the fault lines of race in class I won't go into that but I can come back to that if you want. And I talk about the restructuring of the US economy as this notion of paid work for women coincides with corporations saying oh goodie we're going to hire women instead of men they're cheaper they're more docile they have nimble fingers we'll come back to the nimble fingers later. Whenever you see that phrase nimble fingers reach for your revolver. Figuratively, figuratively that's a metaphor. So I trace the restructuring of the US economy with the rise of the low-waged unorganized service sector so think about this. The main prototypical US corporation in the 50s and 60s was General Motors. What is the prototypical corporation now? Walmart. That just encapsulates the change to a service economy. And of course manufacturing jobs which was another strategy that was used by corporations moved steadily overseas and again massive incorporation of women into the labour force. And an unrelenting battle against the power of unions which drove down union membership to its lowest point in history. Corporations could now substitute female labour for male labour without the constraints of protective legislation or the family wage ideology because that was another thing that was taken care of in the 60s. I know that a male breadwinner could support a family which now everybody turns up there knows that but I think a lot of people would go for it if it came back. And then one outcome of the economic restructuring was the consolidation of a serious class divide among women because breaking down all those barriers to women's entry creates a new class divide which wasn't there before because X number of women can in fact take advantage including moi, you know, can go into the academy and into medicine and into law and into all these places where there was no room for women before. And then the low wage economy draws the majority of women into these terrible jobs so you have a real split between the women, the high flying women and the women who are barely making ends meet. So in Chapter 5 I talk about structural adjustment programmes which have been used to restructure the economies of countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and in Eastern Europe which ended up placing greater and greater burdens on women. We saw too that, and several scholars have pointed this out, they talk about conditionalities when the World Bank comes in and says you have to restructure your economy, you're spending too much on education, too much on housing too much on health care, all the money should go into exports, that's what you should be doing. Exports bringing in money to pay us back because you owe us. So it's the use of debt as a lever to restructure these economies and one of my sources talks about so these agreements with the banks, they're called conditionalities, they come in and say okay these are the conditionalities, this, this and this before you receive our loans. So it's been noted that the unpaid labour of women is an unstated conditionality that undergirds all the rest of these changes because with the defunding of public services from education to hospitals to water, other utilities, who picks up the slack women's labour? So the possible options for women are working in export processing zones, accepting microcredit, migrating overseas, choosing sex work and meanwhile we see an increase in preventable diseases, increases in infant and maternal mortality and the ideology that undergirds all this this is what I'm going to mostly talk about is that the new key to economic development is what? The empowerment of women. This is the mantra, empowerment of women. Empower women and you will solve all these problems and so I'm going to address that in some detail. So finally in chapter 6 I talk about the war on terror and the use everybody knows this but the use of women's rights as an excuse for American war mongering from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria. You know the story. Okay, so that's the framework of the book. So one of the main points I tried to make in the book is that a certain form of feminism, namely the opportunity for paid work for women as a path to liberation was substituted for and seen as the path to economic development. As the international financial institutions and the rich powers systematically undermined state led development in the poor countries of the south and increasingly in the north, in the case of Greece for example, we were presented with the alternative of developing individual women. Over recent decades NGOs proceeded to invest in thousands of separate projects including microcredit encouraging individual women entrepreneurs provided women with a goat or perhaps two goats. On the theory that developing the talents and resources of individual women would create the conditions for increased prosperity in the poor countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa. This message that to develop individual women is the key to economic development for the entire country is echoed in the propaganda of charities. You see it all the time on billboards and mailings that you get. Heifer International buy a woman a goat and she will have baby goats and live happily ever after. By the way I definitely send her money but I'm making a larger political point which is as I said to develop individual women is the key to economic development. This is echoed in the propaganda of charities, NGOs, the World Bank, you name it. And a number of books have presented this perspective. Most notably that by Nicholas Christoff who writes for the New York Times and his wife Cheryl Wood, John Ho's Chinese. In their 2010 book Half the Sky turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. By the way do you recognize Half the Sky? That was a slogan of the Maoist Revolution in China. He doesn't acknowledge that in the book. He just says this is a Chinese slogan. Women hold up half the sky. Okay so in their book they list case study after case study of successful women escaping from poverty as though these individual cases of redemption could pave the way for a worldwide revolution in women's rights. In presenting this paradigm writers like Christoff and Moudin essentially ignore or perhaps more accurately obscure the reality that economic development for an entire country was never a project that preceded person by person one by one. On the country as you know the literature indicates that economic development within a capitalist framework as achieved by the United States and Great Britain in the 19th century and Japan and South Korea not to mention China in the 20th century has been a project led by the government in conjunction with capitalist entrepreneurs. That's why it's called state led development. This has involved directed investment, large scale creation of infrastructure and nationwide systems from law to education to banking and on and on. I don't have to elaborate on this point in this particular so as audience. It's precisely the policy of preventing state led development in favor of structural adjustment policies which weaken the state that leaves countries open to unpredictable ebbs and flows of external capital and that has induced much of the extreme poverty we see around the world. So this is one of the meanings of when I say feminism seduced. Writers like Christoff and Moudin ignore this history and seek to persuade the world that rescuing individual women will somehow magically reverse the deliberate indebtedness and underdevelopment that has been imposed on poor countries and indeed on the poor of developed countries as well. So now, you ready? The most recent avatar of the women of the key to development mantra is none other than Melinda Gates wife of Bill Gates of Microsoft. It has taken me days to get through this book because I found it so infuriating. Gates does not mention capitalism as a system in passing but indicates that she and Bill are concerned with their various charities to pick up the slack where, as she puts it, both governments and corporations seem to fail. The thread that connects her various tales of deep suffering and oppression is the notion of empowerment. Via judicious and sensitive interventions by the angels, as she calls them, that she has met and worked with around the world, evils attending women's lives around the world are mitigated by interventions to end, among other things, child marriage, female genital cutting, rape and unprotected sex among sex workers, inadequate access to agricultural information and supplies such as seeds and on and on and on. I use the term angels advisedly. Melinda tells us that she was raised a Catholic although she is broken with the church over contraception and good for her. For Melinda Gates, so I'll just read you the title. Are you ready? The moment of lift, how empowering women changes the world. From Melinda Gates, what is needed is more love at an individual level. Well, we can't disagree with that. More empathy and more realisation that it is women who will eventually end the ills of this world. Her notion is one of lift. I'll come back to that in a second. As women around the world are provided with education, healthcare, reproductive choice and opportunities for rewarding work, that world will eventually be healed. I will come back in a second to the moment of lift but I just have to read you, I just have to read you a little sample. Okay, so this is about a young woman who does, who's a Catholic who goes to work in a very, very, very poor part of north, sorry, northeast India, among a group that are called the Musahar. These are untouchables and in fact the translation is rat eaters. These are people with low self-esteem says Melinda. So this young woman goes into this society, sets up a school, works for more than 20 years to improve the lives of these women facing scorn because she lived with untouchables and received death threats for her efforts to bring rape cases to trial. What she does is open a free boarding school for these girls. And she says, all they have known and heard and seen is you are like dirt. I've internalized this, this is my lot. When they get here they're just looking at the ground all the time to get their eyes lifted is something. So the girls that she made Melinda years later are respectful, curious, bright-eyed, confident, even a bit cheeky. One girl heard I was married to Bill Gates and asked me how much money I had on me. I turned my empty pockets inside out. Anyhow, the point I want to emphasize, I mean I'm not making fun of this. This is God's work. I don't mean to trash the intentions or the achievements, but you have to check this out. She makes the girls learn karate because they're targeted to sexual violence. And they work so hard and their progress was so impressive that their karate teacher suggested that they send a team to India's national karate competition. And they won gold and silver in nearly every event they entered. The chief minister of Bihar asked to meet them and offered to pay their way to the world championships in Japan. And they get passports and travel opportunities and they come home with seven trophies. So I mean at the level of these young women it's fabulous. But that's micro, micro-improvement, right? So the book is filled with incidents like this, starting with tragedy and moving to triumph via the individual intervention of dedicated angels. So I want to come back to this notion of lift. And I'm just going to read you one more quote. Her image, she starts the book talking about a procedure or a kind of a habit or a custom that she had with her children. She has three children and she was to travel around the world with them. And when they're waiting for take-off she goes like this. This is a quote. When the kids were little and we were on a plane ready to take off, I'd say to them, wheels, wheels, wheels. And the moment the plane got off the ground, I'd say wings. Get it? Wheels, wheels, wheels, wings. When the kids were a bit older, we set it together for years and so on and so on. So then she goes on to talk about this as an image for the moment of lift and that's her title. How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings? And I had an eerie kind of echo when I was reading this from the classic notion that you guys have studied development. You remember WW Rosto, the moment of take-off. Do you remember that whole concept of how a country takes off? So the take-off that Melinda Gates is talking about is a take-off led by individual women. All right, I'll stop being so sarcastic. I mean she's obviously doing God's work. But the ideology, I want to point to the ideology behind it. Not trashing good stuff she's doing with her money and her time and so forth. Melinda Gates is clearly a representative of 1% feminism along with Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagarde. You know Christine Lagarde, former finance minister in France, head of the IMF, now heading up the European Central Bank. So she is the femocrat par excellence and she's the model of what 1% feminism can do for you. And all those other women who've been lifted up by the international capitalist system and pointed to as role models for the rest of us. In sharp contrast is a book recently published by Titi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser, and Shinsya Arusa entitled Feminism for the 99%. I don't know if you've seen it. This is the Manuset Festo that encapsulates the philosophy of the women's strikes that have been taking place on March 8, International Women's Day, around the world from Argentina to Spain to Iceland to many other countries. The argument is that a feminism of the 99% is a feminism for the international working class of women. The writers are sharply critical of mainstream feminism with this appeal to a small percentage of women who have been able in the past decades to take advantage of the lowered barriers to women's participation in senior ranks of academia, corporate life, and government. In contrast, a feminism for the 99% would make a very different set of claims for decent pay and working conditions, for education, for housing, for open borders, for universal healthcare, for safe reproductive conditions, for the end to any restrictions on sexual choice, an end to poverty. In short, what pretty much looks like, although they don't say this, it pretty much looks like a socialist or communist agenda for all women and therefore for all men and all children. In conjunction with the concept of feminism for the 99%, feminist scholars have recently turned to a discussion of what's being called social reproduction theory. And my colleague Titi Bhattacharya has edited a volume for a very so called that, social reproduction theory. And I'm drawing a lot on her analysis in the rest of this lecture. So taking off from works by Lisa Vogel and others, SRT draws on the concept that the one commodity capitalism is unable to produce for itself, as Marx famously pointed out, is labour. The narrow meaning of SRT is the process of reproducing labour power via childbirth and socialization within the family. But theorists like Titi interpret social reproduction as the entire series of institutions and processes that ensure that capitalist society continues uninterrupted. In welfare states this refers to healthcare, education, infrastructure, housing, all the elements that ensure that workers will show up to work fed, clothed, disciplined and ready to produce value for the employer. The argument is that this set of institutions is under severe threat from neoliberal austerity and that women in particular are reacting politically to these attacks. In the United States has been a remarkable series of teacher strikes recently, most notably in West Virginia where it's totally illegal to strike. It's illegal, they went out anyhow and they won. And in Chicago and elsewhere where teachers have won not only pay increases but also put on the table a range of other demands, smaller class sizes, nurses and psychologists for the students, housing for the students and other not strictly monetary claims which Titi and other theorists would name social reproduction demands. Clearly outside the United States at this writing there are uprisings all over the world from the Sudan to Iraq to Chile to Lebanon to Haiti to Hong Kong not to mention the uprising in Puerto Rico which chased out the governor in a matter of days and I'm sure I'm leaving some out. But also we are seeing many attempted coups including in Venezuela so far resisted and in Bolivia tragically successful at this writing. I would not presume to have knowledge of the intricacies and the politics of these many varied situations and I would not assume that these various events are without the influence of the intelligence services of the rich countries. But it is plausible that in part these protests are a long overdue response to the economic violence that is neoliberal policy. The social reproduction of feminists whose work I am highlighting here suggested in the past few decades the imposition of austerity of structural adjustment policies have struck at the very ability of a society to reproduce itself. A key strategy over these decades has been an attack on public education, on healthcare, housing, nutrition, working conditions and reproduction itself. Now remember that the massive entry of women into the workforce around the world was a conscious strategy to reduce costs and therefore restore profitability. Remember those nimble fingers. But the conditions under which the poorest women of the world are working threaten actually to make social reproduction impossible. I have an extreme and shocking example from a paper presented by a colleague, Professor Parameda Chakrabati of the University of Mumbai at the recent historical materialism conference this week. She cited the case of a group of women's sugar cane cutters. These are migrant workers in the district of Bede in the state of Maharashtra, a part of India where there have been thousands and thousands and thousands of sterilizations of the cane cutters. The company requires you or urges you to become sterilized to take one of these jobs and they will forward the money to you and then you pay it back from your tiny salary over time. Recent Indian government reports indicate that many thousands of women who migrate to become cane cutters have elected to have hysterectomies and then of course many of them are suffering terrible health effects from going back to the fields after such an operation. This is women's work without complications for the employer who no longer wants to be bothered not just with pregnancy but with monthly periods. That's a cost. So the social reproduction theorists are suggesting that these decades of austerity have produced what Nancy Fraser calls a crisis of care and what TT calls a crisis of social reproduction where people are struggling to survive. It makes sense that women would be in the vanguard of this struggle. Indeed, I will read you a recent description of politics in Argentina that characterizes the women's movement in the following terms. This is from an interview with Geoffrey R. Weber on the Verso blog. It's from 6 November. This is a feminism bringing together trade unions, student activism, informal workers and non-partisan activist collectives of innumerable variety. The resurgence feminist movement has made visible workers long absent from traditional worker's conceptions of the labouring class. Women from trans, queers, unpaid domestic workers, informal workers and racialized and feminized precarious workers. Now this is the sentence that caught my eye. With all of the alliances and networks embedded in its struggles the new Argentine feminism is the central connecting thread of class struggle in the country today. So the feminism of the 99% and the women's strike I would argue represents a real and growing phenomenon of potentially enormous significance. I don't know where it's going. I don't think anybody knows where it's going. But I'm going to close with a number of questions which are in no particular order. My first one is a little bit silly. But it's not silly. I can't think of the right way to... I came into my head and I don't know how to characterize it. I'm thinking of the Me Too movement, which has been very powerful in the States and around the world. So is the Me Too movement part of the crisis of social reproduction? Clearly it is not a survival issue in the sense of finding food and water. What does it mean that there has been this wave of public denunciations and rapid and significant punishment of figures like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and other men, I'm talking about the American case, here to foreweld wielding uncontested power in the areas of dominance from the media to the worlds of music, dance and other arenas. Is this related? Is the Me Too movement related to social reproduction, the crisis of social reproduction? I just throw that out. I have no idea. Okay, second. What about the role of political parties in the state? Feminist activism in the past 100 or so years has addressed itself to governments. From the right to abortion, to the right to property and marriage in the 19th century, it has been the tradition from suffragists to activists to seek redress through the law and through state power. The feminist literature on the welfare state in the 1970s took it for granted that it was from government that women would receive redress. Nearly every feminist campaign in the rich countries took on some aspect of the law from ending the impunity for rape and marriage in the United States, to establishing the right to birth control and abortion on demand. By the way, in passing, I just want to mention my colleague Ankika Khartich, I'm mangling her name, she's Croatian. In her paper at HM, she pointed out that in the former constitution of the Yugoslav Federation, abortion was enshrined as a right in the federal constitution. Did you know that? I never had heard that before. But take the example of the massive Argentine struggle for abortion rights. So I'm just raising this issue of using the state. Despite an unprecedented mobilisation, the organized women's movement, including the youngest activist girls, were not able to overcome the opposition of the right wing and the Roman Catholic Church. They were not able to make abortion legal, even though they filled the streets for months and months and months. So I'm just raising the question if we keep turning to the state, what does that mean? And then what about the issue of class? Are we looking at a cross-class alliance on the model of the 19th century working class women along with elite women reformers? You will recall that after the notorious triangle fire in New York City killing hundreds of immigrant garment workers, it was a cross-class alliance with elite rich and powerful women that began to win protective legislation in New York State in the early part of the 19th century. In the women's strike in Spain, which according to reports mobilized up to six million women on a single day, migrant women were able to bring their claims to the table and ask for equal airtime with what might be seen as more middle-class issues. So I'm raising the question of is this a cross-class alliance and where is it going? Fourth, what about race and ethnicity? Some extraordinary alliances are being formed. Do they have staying power? Historically, the women's movement in the West was dominated by leadership from white elite educated women and there are some dramatic examples of conflicts over the neglected interest of black women in the United States, which I document stretching from the 19th century to the present, to the 21st. Most recently, one of the giant women's marches that took place in opposition to the election of Donald Trump split over the issue of support for the Palestinians. So, and then finally, and this is the hardest part I think, I don't know if it's the hardest part, I made that up. Finally and most searingly, what about the role of male power? Titi raised the question at HM as to whether the feminist claim being made by the women's strike can come to be seen as a universal claim rather than a particularistic claim. In other words, instead of, oh it's just women over there, it's a claim for all humanity. Can women speak for men? Are men prepared to follow women politically? Are men in general prepared, no offence to the men, prepared to give up their age-old weapons against women of rape, domestic violence and psychological intimidation? And there's a longer list. This has not been the history of patriarchy for say the last 10 to 20,000 years. And finally, are we seeing a new configuration of struggle? And this is very speculative. Very different from the model of proletarian revolution envisaged by Marx and Engels, in which on the right we have, and I'm finishing with this, on the right we have the Bolsonaro's, the Orban's, the Trump's, fascist, racist, neo-imperialist elements burning up the Amazon, burning up California and anti-immigrant representing the ruling 1%. And on the left we have women, I'm saying on the left, we have women and their male allies in the 99%, the indigenous, the displaced and the migrants, along with the anti-capitalists who want to defend the planet. So I'll stop here and open the floor for discussion. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Esther, so we'll now hear from Mercer. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be here and to be given the possibility to engage with your talk and with your work. Thank you so much for providing a critical perspective on what feminism is, exposing the multiple faces of feminism. I think that probably many of us in this audience or perhaps even all of us are very sympathetic to your critique. But at the same time I think it is important to engage with the different ways in which feminism exists. And indeed the type of hegemonic feminism, as you call it, is considered to be the most presentable or acceptable phase of feminism by many across society. So I think it is very important to be reminded of these critical perspectives. So I do have many reflections and many questions, but I will keep it short and I will focus on three points connected to some questions that you can take up as you see fit. So I'm going to start with the notion of class and your question on cross-class alliance, which I think is very central. And you did talk about how some of the transformations in the women's movement and in feminist struggles have created class divisions among women. And I think the same can be said in terms of racial divisions, for example. So in these processes of co-optation that you described well in the book and that you mentioned also today, that I think continue to this day and to some extent have deepened over time, both in the so-called global north and in the global south particularly through development and social policy. And I think probably like one of the most vicious twists of these processes of co-optation is the use of the feminist language or a concern for gender equality and women's rights weaponized against migrants in Europe, for example. So I think that what you've written in the book published in 2009 continues to be very relevant today. But so going back to this issue of class and to seeing these divisions just a couple of weeks ago, Veronica Gago from Neunas Menos was talking here at SOA. So I don't know how many of you were at that talk. Nobody? OK. Well, a few. OK. And so she talked about the concept of class as one that needs to be reconceptualized in order to become more flexible and accommodate some of the racialized and class divisions and sexist divisions within it. And so I want to put it to you. So when we think about these cross class alliances and the feminist movements today, how do we make sense of those divisions? And also perhaps I can expand this with the question of intersectionality and whether you use the language of intersectionality and what your assessment of intersectionality is. So that's the first question. Then one question on something that is a bit more theoretical. And of course you mentioned that you draw on social reproduction theory. And this is a body of work that I have been looking at as well and I have been very much inspired by. And I think that the renewed interest in social reproduction debates and theory is a very promising one. However, there are also some debates around the conceptualization and the theorization of social reproduction that are sort of picking up. And if we take a global perspective, then we see that many of the contributions to social reproduction theory tend to be focused on the global north. And some of them look at capitalism in general, but they are less concerned with the centrality of work and the organization of work and how that may differ across different geographies. This is something that Alessandra Mazzadei, who's in development studies here, so as probably many of you know, has been writing about among others. So I wonder like what your take on these debates is and whether you can say a few words about that. And finally, like on a more personal level, in your book of feminism suggests you describe how you became a feminist and how the women's movement went through various transformations on which you reflect in the introduction also in relation to your experience as a feminist and as a teacher. So I would like to ask you whether you have any advice for young people who are interested in feminism and for young scholars, young feminist scholars particularly in managing the relationship between scholarship and activism. So thank you very much. Thanks, Sarah, for those excellent comments. OK. So I won't say a lot because I'm eager to hear it. But thank you for those very sharp, interesting comments. I think on the first point, let me see if I didn't write it down so I'll have to help me. But I think on class, I think it's a very important question because I think we, including me, we sort of just recite the word class, you know, class race and gender. And we're in an economy where people's class positions are being transformed and changed all the time because of the rapidity with which the capitalist system draws people in, you know, to different kinds of work and then makes them more and more precarious and then throws them out again, you know, to choose them up and spits them out. So I think it's a, I would definitely want to take that up and say what, how, I can't even imagine how to start, but to start interrogating how we use the word class in relation to how it was used in the 19th century, how it was used by Marx and Engels, and then how do we use it now in relation to all these different modes of production, you know, like the Uber drivers and the precarious work. And I think it's a really important point to start, to start focusing on that and start making some definitions. Is class only related to your workplace? Is it related to your level of education? Is it related? I mean, you could ask so many different questions, so I really think that's a very important, very important point. Now the second one was... Social reproduction theory. Yeah, social reproduction theory. Focused on the North. It is. It is focused on the North. Help. But it's only just starting. But it's true. I think there's a fair critique. I hadn't really focused on it, but I think it's true. And so I would think as it develops, because now that... I haven't even tracked this down, but I spoke to somebody at the HM conference. I have this impression that there's already several social reproduction theories circulating, you know, which don't actually agree with each other. So one thing would be to track what those different theories are, but the other thing would be to really challenge the people who are writing this stuff to say, well, what would it look like in the global south? Is it a different set of issues? Obviously it is, but I can't even... I think that would be a very important point of research to say, because I think in a way... I mean, I'm just making this up, but I mean, when you read SRT theory, it's almost like it's enveloped in a nostalgia for the welfare state. It's like, why can't we have back what we, meaning we in the rich north used to... the rich in the rich north of the middle class used to have that's really been stripped away now so brutally. So we're all now in the third world. So I think that would be a really interesting research project to say, how would you use this tool of analysis? In other words, the overall question, how does the particular society reproduce itself? I think that would still be a valid question, but then what are the elements in a very different society? I think that's a great, great research direction, actually, and I forgot what the other one was. Oh, advice, oh my God. Well, I think there's more room for you guys than there was for me to be a feminist and an activist and also be a scholar, but I don't want to exaggerate that because the path to academic success is much harder for your generation. I mean, if I tell you, I mean, you're going to hate me, but you know, when I graduate, when I finished my PhD, I had not one but two jobs being thrown at me. I mean, there were jobs all over the place. You can't even imagine that, right? Tenure track jobs. I mean, you can't, what is that tenure track? Nobody even knows what that is anymore. So, I think that you have a dangerous, I mean, on the one hand, I think it's paradoxical. On the one hand, there's quite a lot of legitimacy now to gender studies, you know, sexuality studies, related things. I don't think, whereas when I started out, there was no such thing, you know, it just wasn't, didn't exist. So, from that point of view, there are paths for you to take, but on the other hand, knowing academe as I do, be careful. Be careful. Make sure you have support. Make sure that you're surrounded by people who are not going to sabotage you, you know, because it's an extremely competitive, much fewer opportunities. And if you, I mean, I would never say don't pursue what you love if it happens to be gender studies or sexuality studies or queer studies. But just be aware that if you took a more traditional path like doing a PhD in development economics, you might have an easier time. I think that's probably fair to say. OK. Right. Questions. Contributions. Who wants to start? OK. Yeah. Sorry, just waiting for the mic. Hi. Thank you. I found the whole thing just so interesting. Do you want to tell us who you are? Yeah, so I'm a student at SOAS and I work in gender policy. So I suppose my question kind of comes from having those two hats. And I think it was really interesting, obviously, like how you kind of critique the micro and say we need to look at the macro. But in doing so, you kind of obviously mentioned, like, the 1% feminist and the leaders. So I suppose the question is, like, can you ever have a woman in a position of leadership without them being a 1% feminist? And what should, like, leaders of all genders do? I'm sorry. What was the second part? And what should leaders in those kind of roles of all genders do? And I suppose, yeah, I just kind of, I'll be at danger of holding women leaders to a higher standard than we are of men. Yes, that's true. Do you want to take a few? Yes. I've lost my bag, so thank you. OK. Let's take two or three more and then we can gather them up. Andrea. I really enjoyed your presentation. Thank you very much indeed. And I just struck about, I think, one of the paradoxes of the neoliberal model is that by inviting in the way in which it does, it is individual women to enter paid work. It also provides them with an opportunity to be together with other women and to begin to organise. And so the flip side of it is actually a lot of women going into the unorganised sector and in other kinds of forms of informal labour are starting to organise more. And that's raising all kinds of broader issues around social reproduction. So just, I'd love your comments on that, on the paradoxes and the possibilities and all of that. Great question. Hi, I am doing a Masters in Anthropology of Development here at Solace. And I was very struck also by this idea of empowering individual women. And I'm taking a course in African feminisms and they're this idea of who are the individual women that still need to be empowered with stress. So I was wondering if you had any reflections on that, especially in relation to Melinda Gates, who's obviously mainly active in the global south. So sort of getting back into these also racial relations and global north versus global south. Let's take one more. Hey, thank you so much. I really enjoyed your presentation. Listening to this and thinking about some of the ideas that have been presented, especially in Alasadra Mazadri's class on global commodity chains and other talks that we've had this year. Do we think then, given the way that social reproduction is based upon essentially the oppression of women within things like economic protectant zones for women in the global north? Can we have this feminist movement that's across classes without women of the global north actually giving up some prestige power and purchasing power? Can we have one without the other if we actually understand the way that feminism here is supported by extractive labour? Okay, that's a great question. On the issue of women in leadership positions, this is a very difficult thing to address because if you're the head of a corporation and your employees come to you and say, you know, we could really do this helpful thing for the community, you're not allowed to do that because you're in charge of profitability. So if you don't adhere to the bottom line and say, no, no, no, no silly projects like that, we have to produce this many widgets by September, you know, if you suddenly get soft, especially as a woman in authority, you're going to be out of there, you know, so that I think it's very important to see how these positions are shaped by the requirements of a capitalist profit-centered economy. And similarly, I mean, I don't, I guess I'm ambivalent on this question. I think there are some women that are located, for example, I mean, the notorious RBG, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg on our Supreme Court. Those are women who are in a position to actually hold the line on certain issues like the issue of abortion. If you have, so I would differentiate between being in different kinds of power positions. If you're in a corporate power position, I would be very skeptical that your being a woman is going to make the slightest difference. I mean, they might see you as more sensitive, your vague, meaning your border directors might say, well, let's appoint her, she's very sensitive, but you can't be too sensitive, or as I said, you're going to be out of there, you know, you're not meeting the bottom line. There are certain positions where I would say gender is almost irrelevant. There are other positions, judgeships, law positions, off the top of my head, I'm not sure, but I think, you know, I would look at what kind of positions of authority we're talking about, and certainly I would see the new wave of women in the U.S. House of Congress, you know, House of Representatives, who came in in the most recent election, particularly the squad, you know. They're wonderful. They are wonderful. They're speaking out. They're really using their position to make a difference. So I would differentiate between a kind of position where, as a woman representative, you actually can use your voice and change the debate, and other positions where you're really so, for instance, a head of a, I don't know, a head of a university, or the head of a, I'm trying to think of, I think there's like a range of positions, some of which you could use your feminist consciousness to intervene, and some of which you would be absolutely thrown out if you tried it. So that would be my answer to that first one. This very interesting point about women, the inadvertent solidarity of women in these terrible service jobs, this is something they didn't think of. I don't think they really, at least, thought about that. They were like, okay, let's just pull in the nimble fingers and we'll increase our profitability. Meanwhile, women talk to each other a lot. They're very good at it. It's one of our main talents. So it doesn't surprise me to hear that, in fact, this new solidarity is emerging in these, precisely these most oppressive jobs, and that gives women power, collective power. So that's a very hopeful, hopeful note. The third question, who are these women in the global south? You know, in the Melinda Gates book, these are these prototypical women like women working a small farm and they have to go hours and hours to get water and so forth and so forth. And the presupposition of the descriptions of these case studies is that, of course, these women would rather be going to Harvard. And that's a very colonialist position. They might, in fact, like being farmers, they might be very good at it. The majority of food in Africa is produced by women. So I think what's important would be for women in the north to be very attentive to the self-determination of women in the other parts of the world. You know, what are their values? What are they striving for? You know, rather than this classic imperialist move of coming in and saying, you must want the following, you know, not necessarily. So that would be my comment. And then, will northern women give up their privileges? Definitely not. That's not going to happen. Should that happen? That's another question. Yes, I can't even start to answer that, but it's a very profound question. It's really a profound question. It couldn't happen by itself. It would have to be part of a larger set of changes, I think. Thank you. Iris, I'm also a student here at SOAS. And I was wondering that, so feminism, we talk about it as it's a universal understood concept. To me it was always understood as it's the equality between men and women. And now it's sort of moved into the way of, like, it's a women's movement, which in a way it is. But I was wondering how the gender now is playing a role as we understand it today. Eike, what's the role of men also in feminism? Maybe if I could just expand on that question. Because towards the end of your lecture, you made a remark that perhaps the feminist issues of the 99%, the feminist issues and the issues of the 99% are the same. So whether men are willing to allow women to take lead in terms of championing some of these issues. I was just wondering whether with these somehow in a way depoliticising gender issues, would it lead to that kind of issues if it's basically a more generic issues rather than a female looking from a gender perspective? I'm sorry, could you clarify that a little bit? Yeah, to the end of your presentation just now, you mentioned that the issues, the feminist agenda, somehow also similar with the issues of the 99% of the world, the precarious labour. So if we were to look at it from that perspective then it depoliticising the gender issues. We can also have contributions from men as well. I really enjoyed your talk and I think I noticed a couple of times you referenced things that as we all know or as you know being at SOAS. Aside from enrolling large chunks of the population at SOAS, how can we kind of spread that understanding about the legacy of the real impacts of colonialism and structural inequalities? Because clearly they're not common sense to the large majority of people. Thank you. I was just wondering, I think thinking about the Melinda Gates book, the use of individual histories and troubles to triumph narratives of individuals and groups, specific groups may be useful I guess from an activist point of view and also to engage people who wouldn't normally be engaged with issues of gender discrimination into the discussion. But at the same time, where is the line of how can we manage to use these examples as an activist tool but at the same time not falling into the risk of forgetting the system underneath? And then we'll have one more round, so think of your questions. So the first one is gender still playing a role. Who was that first question? I forgot. There, hi. I think it's like history hasn't come to a halt. There's a temptation to think, if you've been in feminist studies your whole life, there's a temptation to think, everybody knows about this, we can move on. Not true, not true. And I keep repeating this. I've been teaching women's studies, I'm not going to tell you how many decades I've been teaching women's studies. And every semester I have, let's say, 15 young women and two boys, two guys. So, you know, at that ratio, there's generation after generation of generation of women's studies students who get it, who have learned about gender, have learned to question gender roles, have learned to be radical. And then there's a small number of men who've educated themselves. And I always say, these young women are going to have to marry these men. You know, it's tragic. But I mean, I just think that the women in general has been an enormous amount of education and struggle and questioning of gender roles and questioning of, you know, heterosexuality and questioning of social pressures on women. And then men, because women are entering the workforce and the public world, they have to know the stuff that I would argue. Because otherwise, you're going to just hit a wall, you know, things are going to happen to you and you're going to not have a framework for it. If you have a women's studies framework, you're like, okay, that's sexism, that's racism, you know, the guy, and I always tell my students, ask the guy at the next desk, what does he make, what's his salary, you know. So, and then the men don't have to, I would argue, we're still in a patriarchal world and the men can sail through, they're not going to hit that wall. And so there's much less pressure on them to figure out what is going on. And I think that's tragic, so I really think that education about how gender operates in our society, in other societies, is very fundamental. It's not the only thing you need to learn, but it's one of the things you need to learn. Women, I think it's a matter of survival. And I'm just hoping, I think that more and more young men are interested in this, but they can escape because they're not going to, you know, they could enter a patriarchal structure and live happily ever after. So unless they have a very, very patient life partner, they're never going to have to change. You know, that's something to think about. Now, I didn't quite get what you were saying about depoliticising the gender issues. Did you mean? If it's generalised, if the feminist movement is taking up these issues in a general way, is that kind of sort of undermining the feminist component within, I suppose. Is that what you meant? Yeah. So undermining the feminist agenda, if we were to generalise the feminist issues? If feminism becomes about everything. If feminism becomes, yeah, I don't think it's a danger. I think that the, I think when we talk about this kind of utopian idea that most people would embrace a feminist perspective, that would actually deepen the knowledge that people have about how gender operates. You know, because more people would contribute to it. You know, you would have men contributing from their point of view how a patriarchal world limits them, how they're not supposed to cry. You know, I always mention this, you know, boys don't cry. Anyone who's had a baby knows that all babies cry, but at a certain moment boys have to stop. Well, this is very crippling in my view. So I think that it's more a question of taking gender issues into a more broad arena to incorporate not just women's issues, but issues of sexuality, issues of gender, issues of pressure on people who are going to be the breadwinners when the breadwinners more and more might be women. You know? So I don't think that gender issues are going to disappear. But they'll be more universalized and they'll be more elaborated because I always quote, I don't know if you know the work of R.W. Connell from Australia, but there's a wonderful essay that he wrote and it's one of the first things I read. He's now, he is actually now a she, R.W. Connell. But this essay was about when he was growing up in Sydney, he was a cricket player and he was like six foot ten and he talks about the experience of power that he had walking down the street and seeing people get out of his way. In other words, embodying that male power. So that's the kind of inquiry I think we need much and much and much more of. What is the subjective experience that men have of gender? You know, how does it affect them? What are the pressures on them? I don't think this, I mean there's a whole, there is a whole thing masculinity studies and so forth, but I don't think it has gone nearly enough, far enough. Same thing with issues of race and gender. I didn't answer you on intersectionality. All right, let me just finish. Oh, the case studies, are they useful? Yes, I mean I think, I know I was being so horribly sarcastic about Melinda Gates, but I think the more we know the better we are, the more individual stories we hear, but it's just that I think it's a danger where you hear an individual story and you don't have it placed in the context of what is the local political economy. You know, it just becomes poor Sarah didn't have a goat and she got a goat, things got better. And you're like, well wait a minute, where is Sarah living? What is the political economy of her circumstances? And what kinds of changes are possible? And that's where you get into the notion of activism and then maybe there can be some cooperative help from the north that's in good faith rather than that's kind of tokenistic. So I don't know if that answers the question. Do you want to say something about intersectionality? Well you know there's a brand new book, did you see it? My colleague Ashley Borer on intersectionality and she's a philosopher. Intersectionality and Marxism. So I haven't finished reading it but she does a really really good history of where intersectionality comes from, what kinds of issues it was addressing and how she wants them to be friends. She wants Marxists and intersectional people to be friends. I have my own views. I think that the important part about intersectionality in the American context was that it was really the result of black academic feminists challenging white feminists. In the 80s there were all these conferences where black feminists and white feminists would get together and I remember I came back from Sydney. I missed this whole thing. I came back because I had been overseas. I asked this friend of mine and she said it was terrible. The black women were so angry at us and they accused us of racism and it was just terrible. And I said well what did you do? She said I just cried. I'm like oh really? So I think that the notion that feminism has had to change because of the contribution of black women. Going back decades by the way to Claudia Jones, the famous communist writer. So I think there has been an enormous sea change within women's studies which is great. But the notion of intersectionality as an image makes me crazy because it's like the original image is from Kimberly Crenshaw was the founder of this. She's a very prominent black legal scholar. I actually heard the first talk where she talked about this and she was talking about she comes from Los Angeles and so she talked about the Los Angeles freeway. And so the intersection she had an image of a highway with all these cars hurtling at each other. So it's been criticized by David McNally and others that it's quite a mechanical image. So what is it that's coming? What's the metaphor? So as a metaphor it makes me crazy but as an aspiration it's obviously fundamental. In other words that you can't do social critique if you don't pay attention to the differential experience of people coming from a different racial background, a different ethnic background etc. I mean it's almost common sense. And in fact the early 70s writings of American feminism were very white and were very universalist. I talk about the concept of false universalism. There were so many books that came out that said all women experienced blah blah blah blah. And it was the black women who came along and said well actually hi you know you actually when we had slavery your ancestors own slaves and we were slaves so that's actually a different experience you know. I mean it was embarrassing you know. My half formed question I think follows on really nicely from that which is what might we do about the sectarianism within feminism of the 99% and I'm thinking particularly of like Turfism and white feminism in the Ruby Hammond which if you've not read her white tears brown scars. It's amazing. Yeah what can we do about this in terms of building a coalition of different types of feminists that do think intersectionally to use the phrase. In order to effect change more broadly as activists and scholars. Good question. Thank you very much for your lecture. I have a very brief question which is what is the role of sexuality in social reproductive theory. Jumping or going beyond this essentialist sort of category of what is a women. Let's talk about empowerment always about women and children and in a way that we're essentializing women being vulnerable and weak as a child. Then from there so what is the role of sexuality in social reproductive theory. That kind of confused me for a very long time because of the unhappy marriage between Marxism and feminism. So how do you make sense of this. Thank you. Thanks I wanted to pick up on what you were saying about men walking into these jobs and the crying thing and to think about subalton men men at the bottom of society because I think it strikes me all the time in my own research that the one group that has no real representation at all is men at the bottom. And the men at the bottom don't walk easily through the world. The men at the bottom can't live up to what it means to be a man and it doesn't mean that they don't try and oppress their own women folk in order to at least get something. But I think that we have to think about what it is about the gender norms that push men into thinking they should behave in certain ways which are negative both for them and their women folk. And how we need to think about how to rethink gender or to get rid of gender perhaps in order to do something about it because I don't think it's so easy and it's not only the men at the very bottom that often struggle but from all kinds of ways men in other positions also struggle. So I think one of the things that I find most problematic in a lot of the research that's done into women's issues and on feminists and other issues is that it makes the world look as if it's only women that suffer and women suffer very very differently from men. I worked a lot in African villages for instance and when you get both men and women to separately talk about what problems they have and then talk to each other about them then suddenly the women say I can't imagine how I never thought that the men would have this almost identical problems to our problems. So I think there's a lot that feminism and the way we exclude men from our thinking makes women look much more victimised than women are. Not to say that there aren't a lot of things but it doesn't really give a good picture of the world I think and I don't know what you feel about that. This kind of relates to the point that was made I think just before that point and also earlier about if women in the 1% or even generalising to women in the global north would be willing to give up their privileges and obviously it doesn't seem like it. But how do we also mainstream the analysis of race into that understanding as well that if we're seeking something, if we're seeking emancipation that there needs to be an understanding for women who are taking part in this class solidarity that white women will have to give up things. This also just comes after realising that throughout this talk as well and it's been really incredible but also that races again come as a piece to the conversation about class. I feel like classes tend to be and I know billions of people have made this critique for me before me but class is easily integrated into the analysis but race can only come as a side instead of mainstreaming it. But yeah I think that's it. We have time for a couple of more questions I think. I'm just curious because we're talking about the 1% and the 99% and we're talking about empowerment and all of that and these are all kind of like capitalist economic productivity words and what about women that this is not their empowerment. It's not about how productive can I be for the machine and how accrative am I as part of this global capitalist structure. The structural inequalities that exist are outside of that and I think it would be very difficult to address without having an overhaul of Bretton Woods, without having an overhaul of everything else. So how do we, I'm not sure how you're really going to get so much improvement for women on women's basis for what they think is good for them and how to divorce that from just being economics. One last one if anyone has a burning question. So who asked me about sectarianism? I don't have an answer to this. I really don't. I mean I'm not an expert because I haven't really, the only activism that I really did was within the field of women's studies in the 70s and I look back on it now and that was fairly easy task. You know it's almost like the time was ripe and we didn't have a lot of splits to cope with. I think that the issue of splits and anger in politics is just profound. It's profound. And I don't know, I don't think we have good techniques I think maybe the time to start. I mean if you look at the terrible stuff that's happened you know socialist organizations that have collapsed because of sexual harassment. I just think we don't have the tools to work creatively together and to say okay I differ from you but I am not going to kill you. So all I can say is I think that's something that has to be worked on in small groups and that is very essential because otherwise you can't build any kind of political power if you're so angry at each other. But I think what happens, I mean this is just off the top of my head but I think that when you go into activism you go into it from a lot of anger at the situation and sometimes it's not easy to separate that anger at the world from the person in front of you who disagrees with you on a particular doctrine or a particular action that you're going to take. So I just think people have to really work on this and be very upfront about it and say you know many many projects have founded on this kind of sectarianism I'm right you're wrong rather than saying well you might be right on something. So I haven't got advice except that I think activist groups have to really work on techniques of listening to each other because otherwise it just ends in disaster and you waste all your energy but I don't have a magic formula for that. Now on intersectionality, who asked about intersectionality versus social reproduction theory? Did you want to know how they fit together? It makes sense but there's like 200 years of literature on this. I couldn't possibly try to tackle that. But I do recommend that Ashley Boro book to you. It's called intersectionality and Marxism or something. It just came out. It's hot off the press and she really, I haven't finished reading it but she's a philosopher so she's very precise so I really recommend that book and she really does tackle that question. In other words, are these two different views of the world or are these both radical visions that need to be reconciled? And she takes the view that they can be reconciled but it's very minute work. I mean she goes all the way back to 19th century authors and so forth. But I would definitely recommend that book to you because it's and it's very accessible. It's beautifully written so and she's been thinking about this I think a very long time. Okay, on the issue of men at the bottom, it's a very important point. But I guess what I'm trying to think, I mean my fantasy is that at all levels of society if we could get men to do the kind of intense psychological and sociological work that women have done, in this wave of the women's movement, we would be better off because in other words someone who is at the bottom, someone with a very terrible job and a very terrible life situation isn't going to have the wherewithal to think through why he's violent toward his wife. He's just going to be violent because there's some comfort in that. That's very hopeful. That's very hopeful. I mean I think it's the only way forward really. I know you can't do a micro, I mean that would take you 5000 years. But still it's a start. I do think, I mean this is a terrible generalization. But it is my experience that women are trained in terms of our socialization. We're really trained very thoroughly in emotions and self-knowledge. It's one of the things that girls get. And boys don't because they're not supposed to. Now there are many, many remarkable men who are perfectly capable of doing that same process but they're not encouraged to socially. It's seen as a weakness. The main thing to be a man in this society, I mean I'm generalizing hopelessly, is to be strong, to be powerful, to be invulnerable, and to be a breadwinner. And to bring home the bacon as we used to say. And so that there's not much value in psychological self-awareness, understanding the other, the stuff that women are very well trained to do. So that's something that has to change. But only men can do it themselves. You can't go around forcing them. I have an anecdote from a friend of mine who was a law professor at Buffalo and she, as a judge, asked her to serve on a panel with men who were in prison or under sentence for domestic violence. And she used to go to these sessions every week and she used to go home and have a double scotch because the experience was that the men would be challenged and they would say, well of course I beat her up. Dinner wasn't on the table. And this would go on for weeks and she would see no change. They had a sense of entitlement and they wouldn't. So I mean that's an extreme example. But if that's the case then you're not going to get any change. Now what was the question? There was a question about class and race. Whose question was that? Yes. Can you tell me again what you were trying to get at? I sort of didn't. It wasn't a global class struggle within women but also that is a racial thing as well. It's not just giving up economic privileges but obviously like your racial privilege within a society. And usually we're talking about white women here. So how do we make that expectation clear even though I know a lot of people won't be aware of it or be willing to engage with it? Yeah, I mean that's a really good question. Because even women, I think maybe it's fair to say that a lot of women who might be aware of their class privilege might not have done the work to think about their racial privilege. But unless we do, we're doomed. It's so important. And you know there's a lot of actually very good women's studies materials about that. My favorite is the, I've forgotten the name of the writer but it's a very well known article. I used to teach in women's studies where she would give you a series of things to think about. And one was the color of band-aids. I think your name is Macintosh. I can't remember. Anyhow, band-aids are for white people. So in other words the invisible markers of racial privilege that you go through in your daily life. And if you're white, honestly you don't have to confront this. And if you're black or perceived, even perceived as a person of color, you're hitting it at every turn in your life. Even if you are successful and even if you are able to rise out of poverty, the racism of everyday life is something that hits you in the face and as a white person you just glide past that. So I think that's just very important for us white women to acknowledge and to work on. Now the last one was about, I have here women in economic. What was that? Yes. Oh, you were saying about Bretton Woods and... Even the division between the 1% and the 99% within women's development and empowerment and everything, these are all kind of economic things. And we're talking about them in intersectionality, right, with class and race and this and that. But the economic side of it, I guess I don't know what studies or what has been put forth on what... First of all, who's deciding that that's empowerment for women? Second of all, when you have that as the backbone that it's economics, these are structures that are not going to be equalized. So how do we get to parity? Well I would argue that you can't get to parity in a capitalist structure. I mean it's a class system. So really we're talking very utopian change. But it may be that the system actually can't sustain itself. We'll have to see. I mean I take your point that everything is kind of organized in such a way as to keep some people at the top. And I think that this definition of the argument I was trying to make is that the impulse of the feminist movement in this century, as it was in the last century, was for women to be freed of patriarchy. And the powers that be have, that's the point of my whole book, is that the powers that be have reframed that to say, no, no, no, what you want is empowerment, what you want is equal opportunity, what you want is to compete on a level playing field with men for the goodies of this capitalist economy. So all of that utopian content about creating a society where people really are free is erased and empowerment just becomes another tool of city bank or all the corporations that are running things. So that's why I want to demystify that and say, no, no, that is not empowerment, that's incorporation into a very powerful economic international system that goes ahead willy nilly and decides who shall live and who shall die. So we're talking utopian change, I think. No, I just want to thank everybody for your excellent, excellent, thoughtful questions and thank you for listening.