What is oppression? Who is oppressed?

The other day I saw a tweet quoted comparing the oppression of Black Americans versus that of women, in the context of Rachel Dolezal, who disguised herself as Black and (among other things) gained leadership roles in the local NAACP before being exposed, and raising the question of why that is different from “a man’s decision to present and live as a woman” (referring to trans women). Someone quoted that and claimed that all the comments on an earlier tweet on the same subject had boiled down to “race was seen as real and female oppression wasn’t … race is real, gender is not”. Besides the obvious difference that Dolezal set out to deceive people and secure jobs she was not entitled to and involve herself in issues that were not hers on the basis that they were, rather than as an ally, two forms of oppression can both be real but in different ballparks in terms of both their nature and their severity.

Black Americans are oppressed. (So are other Black peoples in other western countries, but Black Americans have suffered in ways that other Black people in the western world, including descendants of slaves, have not: while racial discrimination existed, legally enforced segregation did not.) They were brought to the Americas to be oppressed, to be used as slave labour, to be raped and bred from like farm animals, to be bought and sold as chattels. After that system ended, states imposed new forms of oppression, though both laws that deprived them of the vote and the right to education and imposed segregation in all areas of life, to mob and terrorist violence. Black adults and children were murdered for breaching “racial etiquettes” and could be thrown in jail, or killed, for offending a white person, or because a white person coveted their property or their business. When this ended, other forms of discrimination and violence have persisted: discrimination in housing, police violence, voter suppression. This is all pretty obvious and nobody needs a master’s degree in philosophy to know that this is oppression; that a 12-year-old being shot dead by police for playing with a water pistol because a police officer does not bother to look closely at either the boy or the ‘weapon’ is a case of racial oppression. The examples of women’s oppression are often a lot more contentious and often based on ideology and philosophy; many of them do not affect all women equally, and some women are not affected by some of them at all.

Generally speaking, we associate the terms ‘oppressed’ or ‘oppressive’ with regimes: dictatorships, occupations, segregation or Apartheid type structures. People who are oppressed are suffering. The regime uses force to keep certain sections of the populace poor, powerless or both. Sometimes the oppressed people have their own spaces and a certain amount of leeway in running their own affairs, but the state is controlled by the oppressor and any encounter with that class or race is loaded with reminders of their power: they can, for example, be discourteous or rude, but the oppressed must not react similarly as it could result in violence or legal consequences. By contrast, the arguments for women being an oppressed class are often based on things that do not cause suffering at all, or on things that affect some women and girls much more than they do others, or on negative interpretations of things such as dress where there are trade-offs. All too often, the ‘evidence’ for women being generally oppressed consists of bald ideological statements and generalisations such as “women are a globally oppressed class” or “gender is a hierarchy” or “women are globally exploited for their reproductive labour” or (from the Spectator and Unherd columnist Tanya Gold) “all women live on a spectrum of misery”. A lot of those bandying the term around do not know what it means as they have never lived anywhere that is not a fairly orderly democratic country; the nearest they have ever come to experiencing an actual oppressive regime is holidaying in Egypt. Worse, I have come across women who call themselves oppressed but would say that Palestinians are asking for it because they do not meekly submit to their Israeli overlords.

But are women even a class? If by class, we just mean a type, then certainly, but they are not a stratum in the sense that, say, the working class is. Class just does not make sense when decoupled from factors like wealth and poverty and occupation. While it is true that women generally have experiences in common, these are heavily impacted by levels of development, culture, and wealth: it is ludicrous to suggest that a middle-class woman in a developed country, who went to a well-funded (or fee-paying) all-girls school staffed by well-trained teachers who invested time and energy in her and in her peers, who was able to choose her partner and who gave birth in a modern hospital with ready access to pain relief and prompt medical attention if things went wrong belongs in the same class as a woman in an underdeveloped country who could not attend school during her periods (or whose parents could not or would not pay for her education), who was subjected to FGM, whose partner was chosen for her, and/or who did not have access to competent medical attention while giving birth. The uncomplicated birth in wealthy Dorking will pass off much the same as one in a poor part of Delhi (the matter of pain relief excepted); the complicated one may well be traumatic for both but may mean the new mother in Dorking suffers no lasting injuries, while it may mean death or permanent disability for the Indian woman and her child.

There is a tendency for a certain type of feminist to generalise from the worst about female experiences or customs concerning women. This was posted on Twitter a few months ago by a trans-obsessed radical feminist, for example:

I accept that there are a lot of design flaws in women’s clothing that often makes it less practical than men’s; the lack of pockets (or shallower ones), the fragile zips with no button, the designs that change every season such that nothing ever becomes a staple. But the four examples given in that tweet are not the sum total of “female clothing”; there are skirts of different lengths, weights and cuts, huge variety in aesthetics from solid colours to geometric patterns and florals, some that stretch and some that don’t, some that show the figure to a greater or lesser extent than others. Some of it is designed to sexualise, true, but a lot isn’t. Some women actually do not want pockets, especially on skirts; they say it ruins the shape. Most women use handbags; the clothing is designed with this as a given. (Even clothes designed by women, such as a fashionable woman-owned brand of ‘unisex’ dungarees, often lack what men would consider suitable pockets; patch pockets sewn onto the front don’t cut it.) But having access to more than one dress format means you have double the chances of being physically comfortable in any given situation. It all adds up to an awful lot of expressive freedom; femininity is something that can be expressed in any number of ways and dialled up or down.

That there is inequality, that some women are oppressed some of the time and some are abused horribly nobody doubts. But that’s not what a whole group being oppressed means. It means everyone is suffering, even the most privileged. Oppression is not unfairness on its own, and isn’t suffering on its own; it is where a substantial level of injustice causes a substantial level of suffering. The white middle-class woman isn’t among the oppressed of the world. White women, particularly white middle-class women, are the second most powerful class of people in the world, especially the western world, enjoying proximity to the most powerful class. They are well-represented (even if not equally so) in the western world’s parliaments and have been ministers or secretaries in governments in most and leaders in many. Consider that, in a 2016 BBC poll, nine out of ten women said they were glad they were women; periodically, feminists fret and studies are commissioned about why so many women are not feminists, when the answer is staring them in the face, and it is not “internalised misogyny”: it is that life for most women on a day-to-day basis isn’t that bad. It is ludicrous and offensive to suggest that the inequality and disadvantage experienced by white women in any way compares to the long history of oppression of Black people in the western world, especially the USA.

Image source: Aaron Robert Kathman, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.