MARCH 8

Marching and Manifestos

It’s International Women’s Day, a great day to write about that most treasured form of feminist radical writing: the manifesto.

Manifestos are political gems, laying it on the line and pointing in the direction of change. 

From the Italian word meaning “public declaration explaining past actions and announcing the motive for forthcoming ones”, manifestos have been around for at least half a millennium, in Europe dating back to the sixteenth century. Earlier versions were printed like pamphlets, distributed at demonstrations and mass meetings. Today they are as likely to be published online.

Manifestos have long been associated with radical democracy. More recently they’ve been watered down – in the UK, all major parties across the political spectrum publish manifestos, for example. And like everything else under capitalism they’ve been corporatised. But this mainstreaming and monetising can’t take away the kick-ass spirit of the best radical manifestos.

I like my manifestos snappy, short but not so sweet. Getting to the point signals an impatience with longwindedness (as if saying to the reader: There’s no time to waste! Read up and get onto the streets!). Manifestos call on people to work together to make change. That’s why – with apologetic nods to Misters Marx and Engels and Ms Solanas – they’re most powerful when they’re written and signed collectively.

Feminists have been coming together to create manifestos for centuries. A recent edited collection from around the world opens with the “Petition of the Gentlewomen and Tradeswomen’s Wives” (London, 1642), and includes the Cherokee Women’s Council’s “Petitions to the Cherokee Council” (Cherokee Lands, 1817), the First International Feminist Congress of Argentina’s “Conclusions” (Buenos Aires, 1910), the Women’s Suffrage League’s “Manifesto” and “Declaration” (Tokyo, 1924-25), the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” (Boston, 1977), and the “The Zapatista Women’s Revolutionary Law” (Chiapas, 1994). The volume’s table of contents reads like a chronological birds-eye view of the transnational women’s movement and its core issues. As the editor stresses, manifestos are assertions of agency that function to establish working groups, build community, and direct joint actions and relationships. They not only inspire political action but also are the outcome of or reflect feminist action.

It’s not just the group project of manifesto writing that brings people together. Reading or listening to a manifesto also creates community, not unlike the experience of being on a demonstration. This relationship between communal writing, community-forming and collective action is beautifully expressed in the online Feministo of the UK direct-action group Sisters Uncut. Founded around 2014, Sister Uncut’s mission is to protest government cuts to women’s services, especially those affecting services for women survivors of domestic and sexual violence, as part of the brutal austerity measures brought in by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. Sisters Uncut uses bold and creative tactics – like invading the red carpet of the premiere of the film Suffragettes yelling “Dead women can’t vote!” – to demand public attention and solutions to violence against women.

A year ago, in March 2021, I joined thousands of other women and people of other genders to respond to the call from Sisters Uncut to defy the police ban on the vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard by a London police officers in Clapham Common in March 2021. There had been no International Women’s Day marches that year because of Covid restrictions. The Clapham Common vigil was a raw event fuelled by rage, grief and solidarity in the face of further police violence against some of the women at the vigil. When I got home, angry but inspired, I read the Feministo:

We are Sisters Uncut. As women and gender-variant people who live under the threat of domestic violence, we fight alongside all those who experience domestic, sexual, gendered, and state violence in their daily lives. We are fighting for our right to live […] To secure safety for survivors, we must also fight the other forms of oppression that we face […] sexism, racism, anti-blackness, classism, disableism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, transmisogyny, whorephobia, fat-phobia, islamophobia, and antisemitism.

A lot of thought has gone into the Feministo. I sense the painstaking discussions around wording, the need to name the specifics alongside the general: gender-variant people; antiblackness, Islamophobia and antisemitism as well as racism more generally. The reference to whorephobia, the reclaiming of the word sisters as a defiantly gender-inclusive term. Far from a sign of empty “wokeness” or a checklist of token solidarities, these words position the Feministo in a specific time and place. I imagine feminist historians of the future digging it out and using it to map a history of feminist language and collective action.

While calling on those who understand the urgency of the struggle, like the best manifestos the Feministo also speaks truth to power:  our message is this: your cuts are violent, your cuts are dangerous, and you think that you can get away with them because you have targeted people who you perceive as powerless.

Manifestos make history and are products of history. And we come to them with our own histories and identities. I’m probably a bit older than Sister Uncut’s target audience. But the Feministo speaks my language, so you might well be thinking that this is just another example of radicals writing to an “in” crowd. Yes and no. It’s true that I was already sympathetic to the document’s main messages. But before reading the Feministo I had been involved in the sex workers’ rights movement for many years, and that experience had made me very wary of feminist groups that focus on violence against women. I had heard the line that that the only way to end violence against women was to criminalise prostitution once too often. So to see the words Rape Crisis Centres alongside the statement We fight for the safety of all of our siblings: we work in solidarity with the movements for trans liberation and sex worker rights was a much-needed reminder that it is possible to develop a practice of anti-violence feminism that embraces the rights of sex workers. The Feministo’s carefully worded statement of solidarity sparked in me a change of heart.

At a time when big ideas are so often represented as individual inventions, it’s important to remind ourselves that radical change is grounded in collective thinking and action. With their Feministo, Sisters Uncut write themselves into a longer history of feminist resistance to state violence, traditions of Black, Brown and Indigenous feminisms, anarchist and socialist feminisms. And today they’re part of a wider mass movement: Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name, Ni Una Menos in Latin America, Feminist Fightback and the Women’s Strike that will assemble in London’s Leicester Square today to demand that no more women are murdered: in our homes, on the streets, or in our jobs.

Like the marches that will take over the streets of many cities throughout the globe today, feminist manifestos highlight the role of women’s movement in naming issues and mobilising for change. As documents penned by many hands, they’re treasures of feminist history and promises for the future.

Reading Sisters Uncut’s Feministo a year ago ignited in me a much-needed sense of hope at a time of mourning.

What are your favourite manifestos?

Next Week: Words on the streets