Feminism in crisis

Feminism stands at a crossroads. In 2010, women face a choice between completing the social revolution that our foremothers began in the last century or bowing to the demands of the conservative right.

Over the past five years, the internet has driven an exhilarating new interest in real female empowerment, particularly among young women, many of whom grew up, as I did, suspecting that we were the only ones who believed there was more to equality than Spice Girls knapsacks and sexy dancing.

Books such as Cath Redfern and Kristin Aune's recent Reclaiming The F Word chart the rebirth of feminist activism after the perky corporate passivity of 1990s "girl power." However, arguments over issues such as the role of sex workers and trans women have fragmented the new feminist movement into specific campaigns.

While worthy in themselves, groups that campaign solely to ban lapdancing clubs do not address the basis of women's oppression today - the encoding of ancient patriarchal assumptions into the economic and social structure of imperial capitalism.

Imperial capitalism is built on the docile bodies of women - as unpaid carers and low-status labourers performing 66 per cent of the world's work, as consumers, making over 75 per cent of spending decisions while controlling only a small proportion of global wealth, as victims of sexual violence and aggression at individual, local and international levels, and as reproductive labourers whose physical and sexual autonomy is relentlessly policed.

Since feminism demanded that women be freed from the economic obligation to marry, be paid equally for all of their labour, be protected from individual and state abuse and be in control of the means of reproduction, patriarchal resistance to feminist revolution is riveted into the mechanisms of late capitalism.

And the "backlash" that Susan Faludi identified in her 1991 book of the same name is ongoing.

Recent years have seen a strikeback from the the markets-and-morals brigade on both sides of the Atlantic, cracking down on the most fundamental victories won by second-wave feminists.

Women's reclamation of the means of reproduction is under particular threat - in 2008, Christian and Conservative lobby groups in Britain attempted to outlaw termination of pregnancy at 20 to 24 weeks, and in the US, state governments compete to think up ever more cruel and unusual ways to punish women for sexual self-determination.

Utah recently ratifed a law whereby a woman who behaves "recklessly" while a fetus is gestating inside her can be charged with homicide.

The British Conservative Party has made it clear that it believes traditionally repressive gender roles are best for society.

In his recent book The Pinch, Tory shadow minister David Willetts makes a sweeping case for how feminism - by encouraging women to enter the workplace and divorce their husbands - has upset the balance of a society based on private property and small, atomised economic family units.

Feminists have taken all the jobs and destroyed social security, says Willetts, declaring that "a welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men."

Willletts advocates a return to marriage, like the rest of his party, which plans to reward married women for staying at home.

In one respect, Willetts and his ilk are right - the partial emancipation of women really has broken society.

That was the point. That was what it was designed to do.

Feminism was not supposed to be about the occasional drive to get prostitutes off the streets combined with as much chocolate, shopping and low-paid public-sector work as we could stomach.

Feminism was meant to be about a total overhaul of society's rules about work, family, sex, money and power.

That's what 10 generations of women marched, sacrificed, protested, eulogised, fought and died for. It wasn't because they'd heard there was a really excellent shoe sale on. They wanted to break society, and that's what they set out to do.

Somewhere in the last 25 years, that revolutionary energy was compromised. The old feminist demands of equal work at home, equal pay at work, dignity in the streets, reproductive freedom and protection from abuse began to be hedged as early as the 1980s.

Faced with overwhelming resistance, the fight for the emancipation of women of all races and classes was downgraded to a politer request for middle-class, white women to be allowed to enter the workplace - as long as we continue to smile, look pretty and accept lower pay - to have sex outside marriage as long as we bow to ruthless corporate objectification, and to to divorce our husbands, as long as we continue to do all the gruntwork of domestic cleaning and caring for children and the elderly, entirely for free.

Feminism is an incomplete revolution. As today's activists squabble over ideological intricacies, the global right stands poised to roll back the advances women have made, speaking of "fixing society" when they wish to fix the bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control.

Feminism may be back on the agenda, but we have to think big. We have a huge fight on our hands.